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## Little Brown Baby Little brown baby wif spa'klin' eyes, Come to yo' pappy an' set on his knee. What you been doin', suh — makin' san' pies? Look at dat bib — you's es du'ty ez me. Look at dat mouf — dat's merlasses, I bet; Come hyeah, Maria, an' wipe off his han's. Bees gwine to ketch you an' eat you up yit, Bein' so sticky an sweet — goodness lan's! Little brown baby wif spa'klin' eyes, Who's pappy's darlin' an' who's pappy's chile? Who is it all de day nevah once tries Fu' to be cross, er once loses dat smile? Whah did you git dem teef? My, you's a scamp! Whah did dat dimple come f'om in yo' chin? Pappy do' know you — I b'lieves you's a tramp; Mammy, dis hyeah's some ol' straggler got in! Let's th'ow him outen de do' in de san', We do' want stragglers a-layin' 'roun' hyeah; Let's gin him 'way to de big buggah-man; I know he's hidin' erroun' hyeah right neah. Buggah-man, buggah-man, come in de do', Hyeah's a bad boy you kin have fu' to eat. Mammy an' pappy do' want him no mo', Swaller him down f'om his haid to his feet! Dah, now, I t'ought dat you'd hug me up close. Go back, ol' buggah, you sha'n't have dis boy. He ain't no tramp, ner no straggler, of co'se; He's pappy's pa'dner an' play-mate an' joy. Come to you' pallet now — go to yo' res'; Wisht you could allus know ease an' cleah skies; Wisht you could stay jes' a chile on my breas'— Little brown baby wif spa'klin' eyes! —Paul Laurence Dunbar ### __Rights & Access This poem is in the public domain.

My name is Afaa Michael Weaver, and I will be reading “Little Brown Baby” by Paul Laurence Dunbar. I am always inspired by Paul Laurence Dunbar’s work. He had such a struggle—he wrote under censorship and under the pressure of the popular tastes of the day—and when I think about the evolution of the identity of African Americans, I think about this poem in terms of the period in which it was written: the period of blackface minstrelsy, and how the American character was an imposition on the African American, but also in that interface between the two larger cultures. It was much more than that, much more diverse, but there are these central questions of self-representation. And in the need to write according to plantation dialect—things that were really popular in that day—in this particular poem, I find the treasure of the love of the father for the child, and I think of African American men and their evolution as men in the context of the racial history of this country. So it does, for me, deepen and complicate conventional notions of identity inasmuch as I’d say that we still have these issues happening. Is the struggle with English—American English, as African Americans writing poetry—and the struggle, in a very large way, with what we call hip hop culture and representation, self-representation? Mimicry from the larger society on to the African American, and in many ways exportation of African American culture? And the push and the drive for resilience that still comes from inside African American culture—when we look at hip hop, we look at the interface between Latino/Latina American culture and African American, which makes it much more complex. I relate to the speaker in the poem as an African American father and someone who comes from inside the poor working class structure inside African American culture (which is a very large piece of it historically), and what it means to represent myself to my son, and to my brother, and to also represent to my father and my relationship with him. This evolution around language—my family came from Virginia and North Carolina, and in my home, the ethos was Southern, and that is a complex issue and representation of poetry. I find inspiration in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s courage and his integrity. And so, he was a great poet, and I think we should revisit the pressures of the time and understand that some of those pressures are still very much with us: self-representation, the ability to tell one’s story in one’s own way, and what that means for the larger evolution of American culture. Thank you, Paul Laurence Dunbar.

## The New Colossus Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame, “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” —Emma Lazarus ### __Rights & Access This poem is in the public domain.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” proclaims the Mother of Exiles, in words that reverberate today as a definition of what America offers to the world. The poem was written by the American-Jewish poet Emma Lazarus, as a donation to an auction of art and literary works intended to raise money to build a pedestal for the colossal statue just given by France to the United States—“Of Liberty Enlightening the World,” as the Statue of Liberty was originally named. Initially Lazarus was not interested in contributing a poem, but a friend convinced her that the statue would be of great significance to immigrants sailing into the harbor. This was a crucial, new idea. The statue was originally intended as a monument to international republicanism and friendship between the United States and France. But Emma Lazarus, in the 1880s, was deeply engaged in advocating for the flood of destitute Jewish immigrants fleeing anti-Semitic violence in Russia and throughout Eastern Europe, and so she wrote a poem that succeeded, surely beyond her wildest dreams, in changing the meaning of the statue and the meaning of the United States of America. “The New Colossus” was the only entry read at the exhibits opening but was forgotten and played no role at the opening of the statue in 1886. Lazarus died young, in 1887, of cancer. But in 1903, a plaque bearing the text of the poem was mounted on the inner wall of the statue’s pedestal. You can read it there today. It is an amazing poem. It claims that we represent not war and conquest but freedom, enlightenment, and compassion. The brazen giant of Greek fame was the Colossus of Rhodes, once one of the Seven Wonders of the World. A monument to military might. Instead of warrior-like pride, here is a mighty woman whose torch is imprisoned lighting, a beautiful phrase implying technological innovation. I’m thinking of Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with electricity here. Naming this woman “Mother of Exiles,” calling her eyes “mild yet commanding,” and announcing that she stands for “worldwide welcome” is a stroke of radical insight into what America was and could become. And the words Lazarus has this figure cry “with silent lips” still bring tears to my own eyes, tears of admiration and gratitude. For me, this poem’s beauty cannot be separated from my family’s history. All my grandparents came to this country in the 1880s, at just the moment that inspired the poem. They were escaping poverty and pogroms. To them as Jews, America was the land of opportunity, of hope for the hopeless. None of them ever became rich, but they survived. For them the rejection of the old world of monarchy, aristocracy, tyranny, and the dream of a new world of freedom and safety, came true. I was taught this dream by my parents, taught that I should be proud of being American, not because we were “the greatest,” whatever that means, but because we were the melting pot. We were a democracy that gave hope to the little people. We were a land of refuge. We were the land where prejudice and hatred might one day be eliminated. Millions and millions of American families coming from every corner of the globe have experienced that hope. Of course, there exist Americans whose own families came here as immigrants and have reaped the benefit of that lamp lifted beside the golden door, who now wish to deny the chance of others to breathe free. But we do have a choice. We can keep the gates open. We can choose generosity, compassion, and openness to the strangers in our midst, rather than self-protection and fear. As an American poet, I’ve written about my immigrant grandparents and second generation parents and their struggles. I belong to a tradition of openness that includes Walt Whitman, who celebrated America’s variousness, and in my own time I have had the good fortune to be the countrywoman of William Carlos Williams, Muriel Rukeyser, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Silvia Plath, Galway Kinnell, Paul Muldoon, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Li- Young Lee, to name only a few. All deeply American. All immigrants or children of immigrants. I am proud that American poetry is becoming more open in our time to writers of every background and that American culture altogether is a hybrid phenomenon. For while we are remembering how much America has meant to its immigrants, let’s remember also what the talent of its immigrants, the talent and energy of its immigrants, has done for America. Our art, our music, our fiction, our movies, our science and technology, our leadership is a magnificent mix of ethnicities. Native-born and immigrants breathing free, bouncing off each other, making America the cultural wonder of the world. May we remain so. May the mean spirited among us slink back to their corners. May the Mother of Exiles prevail.

## WILD BEASTS In the front all the weapons were loaded. We sat there in the dark with not so much as a whisper. We could hear sounds outside—skirrs, rasps, the occasional yap, ting. We were alert, perhaps, too alert. Ready to shoot a fly for just being a fly. When you don’t sleep you start to hallucinate and that’s not good. One night this crazy notion started to possess me: I said, “Who are our enemies anyhow? We don’t have any enemies. What are we doing here? We should be with our families doing what families do. I’m laying down this gun and I’m leaving right now.” I knew there was a chance that one of them might shoot me. Instead they all laid down their guns and we walked right out into the moon- lit night, frightened, now, only of ourselves. —James Tate ### __Rights & Access “Wild Beasts” James Tate from _State of the Union: 50 Political Poems_. Wave Books, 2008. By permission of the author.

This is a poem by James Tate, entitled “Wild Beasts”. I found it in an anthology called _State of The Union: 50 Political Poems_ , which was published by Wave Books. The reader is Amy Gerstler. So that’s the poem. We’ve been asked to contribute a little commentary. I know this project is related to the fluctuating idea of an American identity. One of the many things that moves me about this poem is it does not limit the idea of American identity to being American. America is, as we were all taught in elementary school, a melting pot. There are no countries named in this poem, there are no religious groups named in this poem. The speaker is a kind of everyman, every-citizen, who’s suffering for being a soldier and eventually lays down his weapon, and—in a kind of domino effect—everyone lays down their weapons. He’s thinking about the value of individual life and about the different kinds of fears we have and how it’s scary enough to be a human and to try and live and survive and lead a decent life. We don’t need to construct the added fears of trying to kill each other. So that’s _my_ commentary. That’s the great James Tate poem “Wild Beasts.”

## Crossing Brooklyn Ferry 1 Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face; Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face. Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me! On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose; And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose. 2 The impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day; The simple, compact, well-join'd scheme—myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme: The similitudes of the past, and those of the future; The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings— on the walk in the street, and the passage over the river; The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away; The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them; The certainty of others—the life, love, sight, hearing of others. Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore; Others will watch the run of the flood-tide; Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east; Others will see the islands large and small; Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high; A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them, Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide. 3 It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not; I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence; I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is. Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt; Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd; Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh'd; Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried; Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem'd pipes of steamboats, I look'd. I too many and many a time cross'd the river, the sun half an hour high; I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls—I saw them high in the air, floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies, I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow, I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward the south. I too saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water, Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams, Look'd at the fine centrifugal spokes of light around the shape of my head in the sun-lit water, Look'd on the haze on the hills southward and southwestward, Look'd on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet, Look'd toward the lower bay to notice the arriving ships, Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me, Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops—saw the ships at anchor, The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars, The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants, The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses, The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels, The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sun-set, The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening, The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite store-houses by the docks, On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank'd on each side by the barges—the hay-boat, the belated lighter, On the neighboring shore, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night, Casting their flicker of black, contrasted with wild red and yellow light, over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets. —Walt Whitman ### __Rights & Access This poem is in the public domain.

Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” was published in 1856 as the “Sun- Down Poem” in the second edition of _Leaves of Grass_ and had its present title in 1860. The poem relates to the theme of migration but cannot be contained by it. In nine sections, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” enacts Whitman’s challenge to and unification with, the reader. Just as the ferry travels from Manhattan to Brooklyn and closes the gap, Whitman’s poem closes the gap between poet and reader. The poet’s speaker asserts his identity through physicality. I too received identity by my body and the crowd on the ferry soon becomes everyone who has ever traveled, anyone who has ever gone home, anyone who will ever go home. Walt Whitman is a quintessential American poet—but the speaker reaches out, not just to all Americans, but to all people across the globe as he observes the flags of all nations. And in ferrying across water, one inevitably thins of Kharon transporting souls across the river Styx after death. In the rocking motion of the lines which mimic, the flood tide and ebb tide, the speaker unites all people in their common experience of life. The speaker’s intimate yet insistent form of address for the reader dissolves boundaries and eventually individual parts dissolve into a whole. The simple, compact, well- joined esteem, myself disintegrated—everyone disintegrated, yet part of the scheme. In the eighth section, the speaker brings back the river and sunset and scalloped edge waves of flood tide, accomplishes his union with the reader, and the identities of “I” and “you” flow into “we”. Now that union is accomplished and the tensions of the poem, light and dark, speaker and reader, life and death, past and future, are resolved. The speaker, in the final section, in a catalogue of exuberant exhortations calls on time and life. “Flow on river,” he says and brings back, yet again the tide, waves, clouds, seagulls, and other key images as appearances envelope the soul. Walt Whitman’s poetry has been important to my evolution as a poet. In my late thirties, I reached a stage where I wanted to break apart the conception of a poem as a well-wrought urn, so that more of the world could enter into my poetry. I was interested in developing complex sequences where several narratives could be spun together. For awhile, juxtapositions could create dramatic tensions and also explore the relation between part and whole, where the poem’s unfolding, was not linear but involved succession and simultaneity, and where Asian as well as Western aesthetics could be forged into something new. In American Literature, I read and reread Whitman’s great sequences. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” was, and continues to be, a source of inspiration and these brief comments cannot do justice to the magnificence of this poem. It needs to be read again and again.

## Heaved from the Earth after the tornado, a dead moccasin nailed to the pole boards scattered across a pasture lying fierce crosses jagged in mud had flung itself nail and wood the square-head animal hurled also in air or as it raced in weeds water flowing, water falling impaled both the snake and timber went flying through with wind coiled, made a coil ( they do immediately from danger or when hurt and died in a coil bit itself in pain of its own defense the poison birds hurled into yard fences one with feet tangled gripping the open wire, a big Jay struggling from the water throwing its fanged head high at the lightning, silent in all that thunder to die by its own mouth pushing the fire thorns in —Besmilr Brigham ### __Rights & Access “Heaved from the Earth” Besmilr Brigham from _Run Through Rock: Selected Short Poems of Besmilr Brigham_. Lost Roads Press, 2000. Reprinted by permission of Heloise Brigham Wilson.

Besmilr Brigham was born in Mississippi in 1913 and died in New Mexico in 2000. She lived most of her life, when she was not roaming and camping, with her husband Roy and her daughter Heloise in Southwestern Arkansas, outside the small town of Horatio. Besmilr Brigham was a writer from childhood, and her writing is an idiosyncratic record of her life as an inevitable cause for singular expression. Her strongest affinity is with the creature-world. Her attention to the peopled-world is likewise profound, though with the tensions of a strong willed individual laid in and confined mostly to immediate family. Poems in series were a common part of her practice but the solitary poem was a way of tuning to her daily environment. She was an acquaintance and correspondent with other writers, including Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, John Gould Fletcher, and her son-in-law, Keith Wilson, but she was a confirmed loner. Though she received one of the early grants for the National Endowment for the Arts, published in premier commercial and literary magazines, and published a full-length collection with Random House, she remained an obscure poet, un- pin-down-able in every sense of the word. In fact, just to find her house, our small team working on the Lost Roads Project: A Walk-In Book of Arkansas, in 1994, had to meet the mail carrier at a filling station on a Sunday to be led to the Brigham’s homestead. Brigham was a fearless, unsentimental writer. This poem, in sentence fragments, and terse strophes, chronicles the aftermath of a tornado. She was the exact right person to testify to a moccasin suicide. Brigham insistently used a closing parenthesis with no opening parenthesis. She drives into her poem at an unexpected angle—exits without explanation. She gives the reader ample space to expand and elaborate on her intentions. This is stubborn, backcountry matter—predators and prey. The sky above and the ground into which the house is sinking, the black snake sleeping under the porch step, the books kept dry in a decommissioned freezer are enough to secure her place in the American rural South and her poems inscribed, each and every one, along their own edge, are enough to secure her increased and enduring visibility in the years to come.

## Sexton Texts Tituba from a Bird Conservatory — _for Margaret Walker and Molly Means_ Fri., July 2, 7:07 PM “Eat, the stones a poor man breaks,” Fri., July 2, 7:18 PM Still stale as they were when Memaw died Half-mad on working-class hunger; plumpness thinned to a chip of lamb’s bone, legs decayed, necrotic. Fri., July 2, 7:26 PM Running is a game for the young. Women of a certain age, root. Fri., July 2, 9:09 PM Some rot gashing cane with dull machetes. Sinking in clay around 10-foot stalks when all the while they could have been coal-eyed peacocks, lean deep-water ghosts, spunforce bladefeathers, fear itself. Fri., July 2, 9:11 PM Can you believe I still carry the knife my husband gave me? I gut, hollow and scrape soft spoil from cavities, but what’s dead is pretty well empty. Fri., July 2, 9:21 PM Good on you. Makes for easy work. My people are steel-clad nomads at the full-metal brink. None know what’s in the chamber, staring down our barrels. Fri., July 2, 9:32 PM There’s 2 ways to terrify men: tell them what’s coming, don’t tell them what’s next . . . Fri., July 2, 9:55 PM (2/2) deathbed—herons, black merlins, white-necked ravens, mute Cygnus, Impundulu— Fri., July 2, 9:54 PM (1/2) Pales lower as light approaches. Memaw felt all kinds of birds hovering near her Fri., July 2, 10:07 PM What did Impundulu want? Fri., July 2, 10:10 PM Wondered myself. She named ancestors and gods I’d never met— limbs of Osiris in Brooks Brothers, Isis in Fredrick’s of Hollywood, Jesus in torn polyester. Fri., July 2, 10:12 PM Ah, the birds wanted them then. Fri., July 2, 10:17 PM No. She said: _They waitin’ . . . for you._ Then she died, eyes wide, fixed on me. Fri., July 2, 10:28 PM Dinn, dinn, dinn— Dying’s last words mean nothing. What wants you dead would have your head. Fri., July 2, 10:29 PM LOL! But I’m not dead, huh? Fri., July 2, 11:21 PM I’m not dead, right? Sat., July 3, 3:00 AM Anne? I’m not, right? —Airea D. Matthews ### __Rights & Access “Sexton Texts Tituba from a Bird Conservatory” from _Simulacra_. © 2017 by Airea D. Matthews. Published by Yale University Press. Used by permission.

My name is Camille T. Dungy, and I am going to read a poem by Airea D. Matthews from her new book, _Simulacra_. The poem is called “Sexton Texts Tituba from a Bird Conservatory.” There’s so much about this poem that just delights and astounds me, and truly makes me believe in the possibility of what American poetry can be, and who an American poet can be. To begin with, I’m fascinated by the fact that Airea D. Matthews decided to set the poem as a text conversation, so that we’re moving back and forth between Anne Sexton and Tituba on separate columns, as they speak back and forth out of . . . _what_ world? And the poem speaks into the future in this way, using the text message form, which just seems like such an American thing to do, to kind of think forward into the future, but also into the past—speaking through Tituba, who happened to be the first person who died in the Salem Witch Trials. She was a West Indian woman who was accused of witchcraft, for her practice, her use of her own cultural practices in that very puritanical space. Tituba—this kind of first black American victim of intolerant violence, essentially—having a conversation with Anne Sexton, who, herself, as an American woman poet, suffered from a lack of understanding of who she was and what her potential could be. And in some ways, we could think that her potential as a poet was _clipped_ , in a sense, because it was too much about something that was not necessarily fully understood. Another thing that’s interesting to me about this poem is how compelling it is as a textual object, as something that you read on the page. And so looking at the poem on the page gives me layers of meaning and potential and possibility that are different than the layers of potential that just come sonically when I’m hearing the poem out loud, or speaking the poem out loud. So that’s another gift that the poem gives to me, is potential for extra layers of experience with it. And the line breaks: they’re amazing; there are these wonderful spaces; like, she named ancestors and gods I’d never met, so we just have these moments where the language of these two word-women _pops_ forward and becomes magical and full of multiple possibilities, also through time and space and potential, so that’s pretty great. And then, the poem doesn’t even stop there; it communicates with Margaret Walker, and her own characters out of the book that won Margaret Walker the Yale Younger Prize. Molly Means is the character who I’m speaking of. Margaret Walker is the only other black woman to have won the Yale Younger Prize for Poetry before Airea Matthews won it, and so that communication through time and over poetry . . . and we can’t forget the fact that the poem ties in multiple times Arthur Rimbaud who, writing out of a different country, has fed what American poetry can be. And so, the kind of multiplicity of identities within the poem, right, of bodies and people and voices and dreams and visions. . . . With humor, with joy, the birds that are mentioned, right, are birds in themselves, but all also carry with them these other potentials of thoughts and ideas; the Impundulu being a South African bird that has within all kinds of omens of death and future prognoses and things like this. The Cygnus, the swan, and all our ideas of what the swan could be in poetry, right? It’s just, the poem just keeps giving and giving, in just this kind of rich, exciting, fun, but haunting, (and haunted) way. I just can’t imagine a poem that could give me such a robust representation of multiplicity and possibility and potential. And so: yay for this poem, is what I have to say.

## I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing, All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches, Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green, And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself, But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not, And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss, And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room, It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends, (For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,) Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love; For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space, Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near, I know very well I could not. —Walt Whitman ### __Rights & Access This poem is in the public domain.

I chose that poem because of how striking it was for me, as a gay writer, to find that in the 19th century a poet like Walt Whitman was already celebrating, not only love and the need for it, but same-sex love in particular—what he calls manly love, which I think of as same-sex love, but also of camaraderie among men. And what I am particularly struck by is how, so early in our country’s history, he is making, or trying to make, a space for difference by showing how much we have in common, mainly, the need for love, the need for company and companionship, whoever we are. And by that image of twining the twig with the moss, taking that image of the natural world as a way of representing what he’s talking about, this manly love, Whitman seems to be suggesting that that kind of love is as instinctive and natural as what happens in the vegetal world and, if that’s the case, how can any of it be wrong?

## Rosebud There is a place in Montana where the grass stands up two feet, Yellow grass, white grass, the wind On it like locust wings & the same shine. Facing what I think was south, I could see a broad valley & river, miles into the valley, that looked black & then trees. To the west was more prairie, darker Than where we stood, because the clouds Covered it; a long shadow, like the edge of rain, racing towards us. We had been driving all day, & the day before through South Dakota Along the Rosebud, where the Sioux Are now farmers, & go to school, & look like everyone. In the reservation town there was a Sioux museum & 'trading post', some implements inside: a longbow Of shined wood that lay in its glass case, reflecting light. The walls were covered with framed photographs. The Oglala posed in fine dress in front of a few huts, Some horses nearby: a feeling, even in those photographs The size of a book, of spaciousness. I wanted to ask about a Sioux holy man, whose life I had recently read, & whose vision had gone on hopelessly Past its time: I believed then that only a great loss Could make us feel small enough to begin again. The woman behind the counter Talked endlessly on; there was no difference I could see Between us, so I never asked. The place in Montana Was the _Greasy Grass_ where Custer & the Seventh Cavalry fell, A last important victory for the tribes. We had been driving All day, hypnotized, & when we got out to enter The small, flat American tourist center we began to argue. And later, walking between the dry grass & reading plaques, My wife made an ironic comment: I believe it hurt the land, not Intentionally; it was only meant to hold us apart. Later I read of Benteen & Ross & those who escaped, But what I felt then was final: lying down, face Against the warm side of a horse & feeling the lulls endlessly, The silences just before death. The place might stand for death, Every loss rejoined in a wide place; Or it is rest, as it was after the long drive, Nothing for miles but grass, a long valley to the south & living in history. Or it is just a way of living Gone, like our own, every moment. Because what I have to do daily & what is done to me Are a number of small indignities, I have to trust that Many things we say to each other are not intentional, That every indirect word will accumulate Over the earth, & now, when we may be approaching Something final, it seems important not to hurt the land. —Jon Anderson ### __Rights & Access “Rosebud” from _In Sepia_ , by Jon Anderson. University of Pittsburgh Press. Copyright © 1974 by Jon Anderson. Used by permission of Bodi Orlen Anderson.

This is Carol Muske-Dukes reading “Rosebud” by Jon Anderson. The poem “Rosebud” by the late poet Jon Anderson seems both filled with hurt and despair at the same time as it seems wide in scope; a hymn to history. It seems he is speaking to the land: in this case, one place in Montana. But this is not just any place in Montana—this is the site of the Battle of Little Bighorn, where on June 26th, 1876 General Custer and the 7th Cavalry were outnumbered and vanquished by Sitting Bull and the Sioux warriors. This poem is about history and identity in that it is about, as Jon Anderson says, the “last important victory” of the tribes, for the tribes, and also about living in history. Or just about living, he says, how our own lives are gone, disappearing minute by minute. This poem lives in—as the poet says—two landscapes at once; or he implies that it is interior, the exterior, and he seeks to understand each one. He longs to enter what he calls the “difference”—all difference, but can find no evidence of such, as the Sioux now seem entirely assimilated. The speaker is a white man, but he wants to feel the identity of the Sioux warrior as well as Custer. But he’s—more than anything, he wants to grasp the intent of the land itself as a vision: the vision of the holy man, whose life he’d been reading as he traveled, a holy man whose vision went on hopelessly past its time. The holy man may be Sitting Bull, who saw two great visions prior to the victory at Greasy Grass, as the Sioux called Little Bighorn. Sitting Bull and the Native Americans honored the land and the sky; revered them as the embodiments of the Great Spirit. The speaker of the poem feels this is forever and still alive as he and his wife walk in the grass and read plaques outside the Flag American Tour Center. But she says something ironic to him, something that separates them in argument. And he says it hurts the land. The vision enters the poet again; he grasps at last that the Native American sense of oneness, of the holiness of the one, connects human nature to Earth, and is final as death. He does not dwell on his wife’s alienation from him, but rather imagines how each soldier and warrior died: their, in a sense, comforting last moments lying against the warm side of fallen horses as it breathes its last in the lulls, the silences before death. But the breathing before death, in a sense, is like our daily respiration. And the identity here is the history we share, and living together. Not an alienation. But thus, in his last lines, it now seems so important for us all not to hurt the land.

## II. _ _ from _Amelia_ Amelia was just fourteen and out of the orphan asylum; at her first job— in the bindery, and yes sir, yes ma’am, oh, so anxious to please. She stood at the table, her blonde hair hanging about her shoulders, “knocking up” for Mary and Sadie, the stitchers (“knocking up” is counting books and stacking them in piles to be taken away). There were twenty wire-stitching machines on the floor, worked by a shaft that ran under the table; as each stitcher put her work through the machine, she threw it on the table. The books were piling up fast and some slid to the floor (the forelady had said, Keep the work off the floor!); and Amelia stooped to pick up the books— three or four had fallen under the table between the boards nailed against the legs. She felt her hair caught gently; put her hand up and felt the shaft going round and round and her hair caught on it, wound and winding around it, until the scalp was jerked from her head, and the blood was coming down all over her face and waist. —Charles Reznikoff ### __Rights & Access “Amelia” from _The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 1918–1975_ , edited by Seamus Cooney Reprinted by permission of Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Copyright © 2005 by the Estate of Charles Reznikoff

Charles Reznikoff was born in New York City in 1894. He lived there all of his life and died in 1976. He’s often associated with the American Objectivist poets, including his friend from New York, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker. One of Reznikoff’s great works is called _Testimony_ , one of the great epic poems of the 1930s. It’s taken entirely from legal documents of the last part of the 19th century. He takes these legal documents and he turns them into short events and stories that put us in direct touch with the violence that is perhaps the essential fabric that holds Americans together. His attention to the disregarded and the overlooked, the dispossessed, those unprotected by labor laws, those subjected to capricious violence by authorities, by people in their community. This particular poem looks at a common factory, a scene with workers in a sweatshop, probably unprotected by labor laws. He took the legal story of Amelia, which no doubt went on for pages and pages and pages, and he eliminated anything that was not necessary to experience the event. One of the main stylistic and formal concerns of Reznikoff was to do away with symbolism, literary ornamentation, literary diction. He follows in this, Williams Carlos Williams. In some ways the poems seem almost anti-poetic, until you see how they transform the relation of you when you’re reading or hearing the poem to what it is that is being enacted. There’s a kind of next-ness or closeness as you hear Amelia’s story, in which you feel adjacent to the poem, next to the poem, so that when her hair gets caught into the machine, it almost feels as if your own body is being jerked and pulled through that sudden violence. Reznikoff would say that he wanted poems that had the same constraint that a witness in court had: that you would tell what happened but you wouldn’t comment or editorialize on it. So one of the most striking things about all the poems in _Testimony_ as well as this poem, “Amelia,” is that he doesn’t have a moral lesson, its not didactic. He doesn’t tell you what to think, he doesn’t condemn or praise, but rather lets you experience the stark, harsh fact of this event. The theme for these set of poems is labor and industry and labor and industry has always been a struggle in the United States. Reznikoff documents that struggle—not by giving policy advice, not by propagandizing, but by articulating the human circumstances of everyday people living through the forging of this great country. When you read Reznikoff’s work, you never forget the price that was paid and who paid that price. He charts a kind of poetry that’s quite different than the mainstream poetry—both on the left, with its moralizing, and traditional literary poetry, with its greater concern for images, ornamentation, traditional form. It’s also starkly different than contemporary post-war poetry that places its emphasis on personal storytelling, on lyric expression of the individual poet’s feeling, because this work of Reznikoff (as so many of his works) is entirely taken from found and received sources. But Reznikoff believed that by searching our history, looking at the documents of American history—especially the documents of violence against the people with the least power—that we would found ourselves and in this founding, we will find who we are as a people.

## El Zapato Not the wooden spoon, primordial source of sweetness and pain, flying across the kitchen— I barely bothered to duck. Not my father undoing his belt— I would be gone before he’d whack the tabletop in a sample _nalgada_ , but my mother’s shoe, El Zapato: its black leather soft as the mouth of an old, toothless dog, black laces crisscrossing its long tongue all the way up, heavy sole and thick square high heel. Shoe from a special old lady store, shoe from olden days, puritanical shoe, _bruja_ shoe, peasant shoe, Gypsy shoe, shoe for _zapateo_ on the grave of your enemy, shoe for dance the twisted, bent over dance of _los viejitos_. Not the pain, humiliating clunk of leather striking upside my head, but her aim, the way I knew that even if I ran out the kitchen door, down the back stairs and leapt the fence, when I glanced over my shoulder El Zapato, prototype of the smart bomb, would be there, its primitive but infallible radar honed in on my back. Not the shoe for suicidal anger of come out of hiding or I’ll throw myself out the window. Not the shoe for carpet-chewing Hitler anger—the throwing herself down, taking an edge of rug between her teeth anger. But the shoe for everyday justice she could unlace, whip off and throw faster than Paladin draws his gun, shoe that could hunt me down like the Texas Rangers, even if it took years, even if she died while she was throwing her shoe, even if she managed to throw it from the ramparts of heaven, the way she threw it from a third story window while I stood half a block away, laughing at her with my friends, thinking, it could never hit me from this far, until I stood suddenly alone, abandoned by my cowardly friends, alone in the frozen cross-eyed knowledge that El Zapato, black, smoking with righteousness, was slowly, inevitably spinning toward my forehead. —Richard Garcia ### __Rights & Access “El Zapato,” by Richard Garcia, _Rancho Notorious_. BOA Editions, Ltd., 2001. By permission of the author.

Richard Garcia’s “El Zapato” speaks eloquently about immigration into the US while never mentioning the subject, let alone the word. I love the casual way in which Garcia uses Spanish, as if—though he was born in San Francisco and grew up speaking English—it’s the most natural thing in the world. To him, of course, with a Mexican mother and Puerto Rican father, it is. With its _nalgada_ , _bruja_ , _zapateo_ , and dance of _los viajitos_ , “El Zapato” reminds me of how my own father echoed his parents’ working-class Yorkshire vernacular. When I was slovenly he would call me a buck-navvy; when I was dirty he’d command, “Draw that bath.” Yet, “El Zapato” never preens over its Latino-ness, it doesn’t divide the world into _us_ and _them_. It shows the speaker to be 100% human, 100% American, although his forbearers came—as even Native Americans did—from somewhere else. The poem invites me, and anyone of any ethnicity, to enter the world of the fearsome shoe. Just because my mother didn’t throw shoes at me—her weapon of choice was the hairbrush—and wouldn’t have called them _zapatos_ if she had, doesn’t mean I can’t relate. I love the comedy of this poem, a comedy that rises out of the mother’s very real, intense, and probably justified anger—not just at her son, and also out of the grim truth that conflict between generations and individuals seems an unavoidable part of the human condition. Yet I love, too, the child’s sense of his parents’ omnipotence. “How did she know?” I used to think when my own mother caught me in same kind of misbehavior I’d taken pains to hide. “El Zapato” makes me yearn for that time when I was watched over by seemingly all-powerful adults who punished but also could protect, and did both out of what I knew even then was their sense of duty, care, and love. “El Zapato” brims full of energy and humanity. It inspires me to mine my own cultural background for poems. It reinforces my belief in the effectiveness of narrative and humor in poetry, as well as my belief in the importance of a strong central image. Richard Garcia has made “El Zapato” live as vividly in my mind as if it had been hurled at me. I see it now, the black, old lady’s shoe, launched by my own inequity, spinning through the air unerringly, hunting me down.

## Bury Me in a Free Land Make me a grave where'er you will, In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill; Make it among earth's humblest graves, But not in a land where men are slaves. I could not rest if around my grave I heard the steps of a trembling slave; His shadow above my silent tomb Would make it a place of fearful gloom. I could not rest if I heard the tread Of a coffle gang to the shambles led, And the mother's shriek of wild despair Rise like a curse on the trembling air. I could not sleep if I saw the lash Drinking her blood at each fearful gash, And I saw her babes torn from her breast, Like trembling doves from their parent nest. I'd shudder and start if I heard the bay Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey, And I heard the captive plead in vain As they bound afresh his galling chain. If I saw young girls from their mother's arms Bartered and sold for their youthful charms, My eye would flash with a mournful flame, My death-paled cheek grow red with shame. I would sleep, dear friends, where bloated might Can rob no man of his dearest right; My rest shall be calm in any grave Where none can call his brother a slave. I ask no monument, proud and high, To arrest the gaze of the passers-by; All that my yearning spirit craves, Is bury me not in a land of slaves. —Frances E. W. Harper ### __Rights & Access This poem is in the public domain.

Hi. This is D. A. Powell. And this is The Poetry of America. Today is the 15th day of January, 2013, anniversary of the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., visionary American, spiritual leader, and civil rights advocate and organizer. If Dr. King had lived in continued good health he would be 84 years old today. His courageous campaign for political and social justice is part of the legacy of American identity—our continued journey toward liberty, equality, and freedom in all its noblest articulations. Not only did the United States have to win its independence from the British crown, but it has had to continue that fight internally and externally to protect the rights of all its citizens and to enact laws to preserve those ideals. Dr. King is perhaps the most notable example of moral courage in the face of adversity and the struggle to gain and defend those rights. In his speeches, King recalled the figure of Moses: “I just want to do God’s will,” King says, “and he has allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I have seen the Promised Land.” King wasn’t the first advocate of freedom and equality to invoke the leader who brought the slaved Israelites out of captivity in Egypt. The song “Go Down Moses” attributed to Nat Turner was in all likelihood composed by a black slave and its popularity among abolitionists and captives bound in servitude attest to the spiritual power of Moses’ story. Underground Railroad conductor Harriett Tubman was nicknamed Moses and the tale of Moses delivering his people from captivity appeared in numerous African American stories and poems. It is this emancipating Moses whose voice Frances E. W. Harper summons in her poem “Bury Me in a Free Land.” Born Frances Watkins, Frances was the child of free black parents living in Baltimore. Following the death of her mother, Harper lived with her maternal aunt and uncle. The uncle, a clergyman, ran a school for black children and it was there that Harper learned to read, write, and sew. But more importantly, she learned the importance of civil rights and she became a life-long advocate and worker for social reforms. After moving to Ohio, she became the first woman teacher at the Union Seminary and she joined the American Anti-Slavery Society for whom she became a popular orator. Frances Harper’s first book of poems was published at the age of 20, but it is her later poems on miscellaneous subjects that enjoyed wide-spread popularity, going through 20 printings, and included the popular poem “Bury Me in a Free Land.” After her death in 1911, Harper herself was buried in the Eden Cemetery in Collingdale, outside Philadelphia. The cemetery was originally a potters’ field, but it was converted to a burial place for African Americans who wanted a space where they could honor their dead with funerals that incorporated customs and traditions brought from Africa. A place where markers could be placed in respect of their generations who came here in chains and who fought for the rights and freedoms of their descendants, and indeed of all Americans. A tireless suffragist and abolitionist, Harper saw the transformation of this country from a land of inequality to a place of promise and hope. “Bury Me in a Free Land” reminds us that America includes many kinds of journeys out of oppression, captivity, exploitation, and tyranny. And that we still have so very far to go to protect our rights and freedoms for all.

## The Jewish Cemetery at Newport How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves, Close by the street of this fair seaport town, Silent beside the never-silent waves, At rest in all this moving up and down! The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath, While underneath these leafy tents they keep The long, mysterious Exodus of Death. And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown, That pave with level flags their burial-place, Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down And broken by Moses at the mountain's base. The very names recorded here are strange, Of foreign accent, and of different climes; Alvares and Rivera interchange With Abraham and Jacob of old times. “Blessed be God! for he created Death!” The mourners said, “and Death is rest and peace;” Then added, in the certainty of faith, “And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease.” Closed are the portals of their Synagogue, No Psalms of David now the silence break, No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue In the grand dialect the Prophets spake. Gone are the living, but the dead remain, And not neglected; for a hand unseen, Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain, Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green. How came they here? What burst of Christian hate, What persecution, merciless and blind, Drove o'er the sea—that desert desolate— These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind? They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure, Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire; Taught in the school of patience to endure The life of anguish and the death of fire. All their lives long, with the unleavened bread And bitter herbs of exile and its fears, The wasting famine of the heart they fed, And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears. Anathema maranatha! was the cry That rang from town to town, from street to street; At every gate the accursed Mordecai Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet. Pride and humiliation hand in hand Walked with them through the world where’er they went; Trampled and beaten were they as the sand, And yet unshaken as the continent. For in the background figures vague and vast Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime, And all the great traditions of the Past They saw reflected in the coming time. And thus forever with reverted look The mystic volume of the world they read, Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book, Till life became a Legend of the Dead. But ah! what once has been shall be no more! The groaning earth in travail and in pain Brings forth its races, but does not restore, And the dead nations never rise again. —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ### __Rights & Access This poem is in the public domain.

This is Dana Gioia. The poem I would like to read is “The Jewish Cemetery at New Port” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This is not a very well-known poem these days, but I consider it one of the great elegies in American literature and also one of the few great 19th century poems that’s really about the burden of immigration. This is, I think, an extraordinary poem. When Longfellow visited New Port, Rhode Island in 1852, the seaport town was already on its way to becoming a sort of fancy summer resort. But during this visit, he discovered an old Jewish cemetery that dated back to pre-revolutionary days for the city’s small, and already long vanished, Sephardic Jewish community. The cemetery was associated with the nearby Touro Synagogue, the oldest surviving Jewish synagogue in the United States—and, in fact, all of North America. Longfellow uses this experience of seeing the cemetery and seeing the gravestones for a long, historic elegy, a meditation on the history of the Jews. This is an unusual poem for Longfellow. The language is more dense than his typical poem. It is also studded with allusions to Jewish history and religion. The elegiac tone, though, is actually quite characteristic for Longfellow. It is the same tone we hear in many poems such as the gorgeous opening lines of “Evangeline”: “This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, / Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight.” It’s this kind of lyric sad music that he had a particular genius for. But in the Jewish cemetery at New Port, Longfellow uses this elegiac music to articulate a tragic vision of Jewish history: a history of persecution, expulsion, and Diaspora. Longfellow’s humane and sympathetic meditation on this Jewish cemetery—which is has been oddly preserved in a Protestant New England seaport, which no longer has a Jewish community—reflects a remarkably open and inclusive vision of America for the 19th century, full of compassion for the oppressed and marginalized. And this is at least one reason to admire this fine poem. You know, Longfellow uses these Sephardic family names on the tombstones—Avares, Rivera, names that reflect the Portuguese and Spanish origins of these Sephardic immigrants as a tiny gesture to suggest centuries of Jewish Diaspora as well as a history of persecution, expulsion, and immigration. And the sheer compassion of Longfellow’s vision suffuses the poem with an emotion, an emotional music that is quite powerful. And that is what makes this poem matter most to me personally: the strange beauty and evocative power of its language and its imagery that draw a special resonance from Jewish cultural history. Let me give you one example toward the end of the poem: Longfellow imagines the dead in their graves literally trapped in history, and he uses the fact that Hebrew, unlike English, is written from right to left and that Hebrew books advance from back to front as a metaphor for Jewish historical consciousness that never forgets its ancient Biblical origins: And thus forever with reverted look The mystic volume of the world they read, Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book, Till life became a Legend of the Dead. There is of course an irony in Longfellow’s powerful lines. It must have seemed impossible even to a progressive idealist such as Longfellow that the Jewish people would ever again have a homeland. That the very backward gaze on ancient history that he celebrates that categorizes race and its long Diaspora also proved to be the political passion that led to the recreation of Israel—a future that Longfellow could not foretell as one of the many dead nations that in modern history rose again.

## Autumn Ritual with Hate Turned Sideways —i pull the hate on a rope ladder to the resting zone… H H H pull the A on down. A A A Put that sick A to bed. Get well, A. Pinched fire. Bring the T down now T T T Roman cross before the Christian thing. Bump bump. Put that T to bed. Put that Garamond T to bed before we kill someone with it. Such as: Whack-whack. Weapon contractors in Virginia. Whack. Get well T. Won’t kill with you. Now. Being able to breathe for the E, breathe into the prongs. Slide on its back. E E E Put the E to bed. Get well, E. Weird shapes around campfires below the mind. Tiny fires with hurt earth spirits as in Aeschylus. Resting letters now so they can live— —Brenda Hillman ### __Rights & Access “Autumn Ritual with Hate Turned Sideways” from _Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire_ © 2013 by Brenda Hillman. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission.

Brenda Hillman is one of America’s crucial contemporary poets, a braider of diverse strands of the American literary tradition. Firstly, there is her fiery spiritual engagement, a trait we find initially in the passionate sermons of early American religious writers and then in the work of her fellow eccentric seeker Emily Dickinson. “Autumn Ritual with Hate Turned Sideways” also aligns with American Modernist E. E. Cummings, who winks behind “Autumn Ritual”’s exuberant typographical play. Indeed, such play is natural to a book called _Seasonal Work with Letters on Fire_ , from which “Autumn Ritual” comes. In this poem, Hillman draws on the linguistic mysticism of Kabbalah, from the mystic branch of Judaism, where letters and words have agency in and of themselves because they are made of God’s holy fire. In “Autumn Ritual with Hate Turned Sideways,” the letter-play is the thing, with Hillman dismantling the word “hate” and putting each letter, one by one, to bed. She sends each off with a heartfelt “Get well” and nudges them to get some rest “so they can live” beyond the hate they once composed. It is old spell-magic, to dismantle a word in order to dismantle the thing it conjures into being. Spell-magic requires a mind geared toward the hidden and fantastical, and in this regard “Autumn Ritual” recalls the seventeenth- century British Metaphysical poets John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and especially George Herbert, some of whose poems take the shape of altars and angel wings. Personification, as we can also see in “Autumn Ritual,” is a significant tool in Hillman’s hands—whether engaging letters of the alphabet as beings worthy of empathy and rest, or asserting (as she does elsewhere in _Seasonal Works_ ) that vowels, panicles, and California grasses “are made of fire,” is to argue for the inspiring spark in everything: Gaia sentience. Hillman, in addition to being one of America’s great spiritual poets, is one of our great writers about the Environment, particularly chronicling our passage through the Anthropocene era. In her hands, personification does important animating (even animistic) work for a book about a world going up in smoke. Brenda Hillman, as a poet-citizen of America’s “New World,” reminds us that one of the functions of art is to disturb: to startle us out of the ossified, inflexible forms of the routine and conventional. In this, she has a particularly American genius. She Barnums up the language, coaxing from it boggling feats. She tells tall tales about the alphabet and electrons and stars. She stanches our dark democracy-wound of Senate hearings and oil spills and drone strikes with eelgrass and original flame. Her generosity of spirit and capacious embrace of the things of this world make me think of American poet-fathers Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg: her work is large, and contains multitudes.

## 508 (I’m ceded – I’ve stopped being Theirs –) I’m ceded – I’ve stopped being Theirs – The name They dropped upon my face With water, in the country church Is finished using, now, And They can put it with my Dolls, My childhood, and the string of spools, I’ve finished threading – too – Baptized, before, without the choice, But this time, consciously, Of Grace – Unto supremest name – Called to my Full – The Crescent dropped – Existence’s whole Arc, filled up, With one – small Diadem. My second Rank – too small the first – Crowned – Crowing – on my Father’s breast – A half unconscious Queen – But this time – Adequate – Erect, With Will to choose, or to reject, And I choose, just a Crown – — Emily Dickinson ### __Rights & Access THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON: READING EDITION, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.

It’s said that many of Dickinson’s poems begin where most poems end, in the “white heat,” and that is the case here. Rather than finding her way to a radical lift-off at the poem’s conclusion, she _begins_ there—“I’m ceded—”—she declares—"I’ve stopped being Theirs—.” She is ceded, as land is ceded, as property is ceded. In this poem the question of who owns this speaker is suspended and then dramatically revealed in the final stanza. “I _am_ ceded”—the poem begins in that scorching present tense—and “I’ve stopped being Theirs.” _Who is this “They”?_ we wonder, and we are left to consider Them as we move into the body of the poem. “The name they dropped upon my face with water, in the country church, is finished using now,” she writes, and how nearly-violent, I think, to _drop_ a name upon a face, especially, one imagines, on an infant’s face, and how clever to set this baptism in a country church, an image of quaint innocence that will be supported later by the dolls and string of spools and the conventionally- gendered childhood she is also leaving behind. The name they dropped upon her face “Is finished using, now.” An odd syntactical move. Is she finished with the name or is it finished using her? Is she booting the name or is the name booting her? Is she ceded by them, or seceding from them? Resonant questions in 1862 when this poem arrived, as America itself was splitting in half, both ceding and seceding, and less than one hundred years from when the nation’s origins were imagined within the very act of shoving off from one reality in order to create another. To self-name, one must first peel oneself away from the given name and step, for a time, into an existential void. That process is what revolution is all about. In the middle stanza we learn that there has been a second baptism. The speaker had no choice in the matter the first time, but this time she is conscious; she chooses. This is not the last time she will reference consciousness in this short poem. She comes to her “supremest name” via choice, consciousness, and Grace— _that_ holy trinity. Her name is not dropped upon her face by Grace but is _of_ Grace. I take this to mean that Grace is its origin. “Called to my Full,” she writes—full name? Full identity? Yes and yes, and Dickinson uses the metaphor of the moon, that most female of cosmic bodies, rather than the sun to expose that fullness. “The crescent dropped” like a mask, a disguise of partiality lowered to reveal the wholeness that’s been there all along. Existence’s “whole arc” is filled with “one small diadem”—and here I experience Dickinson’s use of smallness as a kind of witticism. Here I am with my tiny diadem filling up the whole arc of Existence. I’m just a girl wearing just a crown. She completes stanza two with that double-edged smallness, and begins the final stanza with smallness’s other dimension: “My second Rank—too small the first,” she writes, using what was then the male realm of the military to describe her rejection of ascribed identity, itscorseting—dolls, spools, girlhood. In her first birth she was “crowned,” she “crowed” upon her Father’s breast, she was a queen, but “half unconscious.” I don’t put it past her to be playing with the double-meaning of “crowned”—the crowning of the infant in birth—who is crowing, only half-conscious, on her _Father’s_ breast. God the Father? Patriarchal power? The power to baptize and name? Where, in this birth, is Mother? The first birth seems akin to Athena’s, who emerges not from her mother’s body but from her father’s head. But this time, in this second birth, in this new Rank, post-doll, post-spool, having rejected baptism by _Them,_ our speaker is not only Adequate but _Erect—_ no girliness there _—_ a soldier of selfhood, with “Will to choose, or to reject.” Free Will. A very American notion of self-rule. And what does she choose? _“Just_ a crown,” she tells us. That’s all. This poem turns out to be more psychological and political than theological; baptism is metaphor rather than the poem’s ultimate subject. Sylvia Plath, a hundred years later, would write, similarly, in her poem “Stings” from her bee sequence, “I/Have a self to recover, a queen.” Both poets toss off patriarchal signifiers and land at a queendom of one, Plath from a cold, London flat, Dickinson from her father’s house in Amherst. There is no mention, in Dickinson, of the war that raged around her, nor of the human beings whose enslavement distorts and complicates any statement of American self-ownership. If those subjects enter her work, they do so through slanted inference only. There is much unspoken in Dickinson’s white space. Her poems, indeed, emerged from white spaces, from a small white woman wearing a white dress. If one could dissect those Dickinson dashes, what untouched subjects would we discover? Still, yet, for a woman writing from the middle of the 1800s, a woman who rarely ventured from her father’s house, the self-claiming in this and so many of her poems is extraordinary, and strikes me as quintessentially American, at least as Americans dream themselves to be. When I was a child I sought salvation at every turn. I was saved in a range of country churches at least seven times. Whatever salvation I was seeking never seemed to take. Unlike Dickinson’s speaker, but like Dickinson herself, I was never baptized. I was afraid to put my head underwater, and our churches demanded full immersion. Like Dickinson’s speaker, at some point I stepped away from that path, and tossed away my dolls, too. The queendom I finally came to was Poetry. That is the realm Emily found, too.

## We Are Not Responsible We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives. We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions. We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations. In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on. Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments. If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way. In the event of a loss, you’d better look out for yourself. Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and we are unable to find the key to your legal case. You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile. You are not presumed to be innocent if the police have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet. It’s not our fault you were born wearing a gang color. It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights. Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude. You have no rights we are bound to respect. Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible for what happens to you. —Harryette Mullen ### __Rights & Access Mullen, Harryette, “We Are Not Responsible,” _Sleeping with the Dictionary_. © 2002 by the Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press.

Hello there. This is Douglas Kearney, and I am reading Harryette Mullen’s “We Are Not Responsible.” Well, first of all, I love Harryette Mullen. Her work is oftentimes engaged in what I think of as like a super serious kind of play, whether she’s using tons of puns or a lot of signifying techniques. Harryette Mullen goes in and addresses language, as language is a tool for power, and because it’s a tool for power it can be a tool for oppression. So Harryette Mullen oftentimes engages language as a kind of a plaything, but is always aware that it’s volatile, like somebody juggling nitroglycerin. For me, one of the things that I really love about this poem is how it takes official language, or officious language—you know, the first line, “We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives,” riffs off of “We are not responsible for your lost or stolen items.” Which is, when you think about it as a sign that might be placed in a place of business, or a parking lot or something like that, is kind of an audacious thing to say: that even though you are here, under our auspices, it is not our responsibility if something bad happens to you. And there’s something about that that just strikes me, and it’s always stricken me as, well, a kind of passing on of the need to care for each other. “I am not responsible for what happens to you.” And, of course, Harryette Mullen amplifies that by overlapping that language that’s oftentimes about property—you know, your lost and stolen items—with humans. Relatives. Now, of course, the history of the United States of America includes several dark centuries in which a number of people’s relatives _were_ someone else’s items. And so, in that moment, we have this collision between these two languages: the language of a kind of passing off of responsibility and, subtly, a language that is pointing at responsibility in that same line. From there, the poem moves from a more kind of passed off hostility to these constant threats—“We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions” —all the way to “Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible for what happens to you.” It reminds me about what happens when, say, a person is shot by an officer, and that officer is not guilty of murder. It’s sort of like, well, apparently this person didn’t die, or wasn’t killed? Or something happened…because a kind of official language, a state language, protects itself. And because this is also the same language that creates laws and authorizes power, that protection is sort of self-circular, self-serving, or just a kind of a logic that is not airtight, but airless; it doesn’t allow for certain life to happen. And seeing that move between the kind of historical language to the language of “Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle your frightful claims,” really just demonstrates how this same speech in many ways is just extraordinarily banal; you know, it’s like this sort of dull bureaucratic language. But what happens when dull, airless language takes charge of blood and bone, flesh, and peoples’ lives? What happens when, you know, a kind of antipathy, or an unnatural attempt at neutrality, is there to weigh in on actual human suffering? So what the poem does, in my estimation, is sort of demonstrates how inhuman that language is, which—when you think about how oftentimes power dehumanizes those it oppresses—to think of that power as inhuman becomes, in that way, a reversal; a kind of radical reversal. And one of the ways that Harryette Mullen’s work influences me is in how it uses these different registers of language; how it can take language from supermarket advertising (in the case of collections like _S*PeRM**K*T_ , or even _Trimmings_ , or in a collection like _Muse and Drudge_ , where it can range from everything from TV theme song language to old folk songs), and blend them all together into this kind of volatile and oftentimes deeply pleasurable, even, when sometimes it becomes deeply disturbing sort of play with language. And in this way, I mean, in many ways it resembles, I guess we could say, the diversity of American expression. It’s not that the writing is subject to a kind of flow of pop culture that it’s not controlling; like, Harryette Mullen’s definitely holding the remote control and is definitely changing the channels and lingering here and sticking here. She’s turning the dial on her radio station, and occasionally listening to a jingle, and maybe occasionally listening to a verse from an old song. But that kind of volatile mix that doesn’t hold together necessarily—but still, through just this kind of force of personality of it holds together, strikes me in some ways as a very American way of working—a very _African_ American way of working—and, so, a very American way of working in that regard.

## To Elsie XVIII The pure products of America go crazy— mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf mutes, thieves old names and promiscuity between devil-may-care men who have taken to railroading out of sheer lust of adventure— and young slatterns, bathed in filth from Monday to Saturday to be tricked out that night with gauds from imaginations which have no peasant traditions to give them character but flutter and flaunt sheer rags—succumbing without emotion save numbed terror under some hedge of choke-cherry or viburnum— which they cannot express— Unless it be that marriage perhaps with a dash of Indian blood will throw up a girl so desolate so hemmed round with disease or murder that she’ll be rescued by an agent— reared by the state and sent out at fifteen to work in some hard-pressed house in the suburbs— some doctor’s family, some Elsie— voluptuous water expressing with broken brain the truth about us— her great ungainly hips and flopping breasts addressed to cheap jewelry and rich young men with fine eyes as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky and we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth while the imagination strains after deer going by fields of goldenrod in the stifling heat of September Somehow it seems to destroy us It is only in isolate flecks that something is given off No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car —William Carlos Williams ### __Rights & Access “To Elsie” by William Carlos Williams, from _THE COLLECTED POEMS: VOLUME I, 1909-1939_ , copyright ©1938 New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

My name is Edward Hirsch and I’m reading a poem by William Carlos Williams called “To Elsie”. This poem was untitled when William Carlos Williams first published it. It was “Poem Number 18” in _Spring and All_ , which he published in 1923. It was only until when he published a later _Collected Poems_ that he gave the poem the title “To Elsie”. In its relationship it’s about (or uses) Elsie Borden, who was a mentally handicapped nursemaid from the state orphanage who came to work for the Williams family. And the odd thing about the poem, or one of the odd things about the poem, is it’s called “To Elsie” but it doesn’t really . . .it’s not really addressed to Elsie, she isn’t spoken to. It’s really kind of toward Elsie. And Elsie becomes both a particular person and an embodiment, a representative of some kind of suffering in the culture. Because there is a moment in the poem—it’s about a third of the way through the poem, almost halfway—where she’s sent out. He’s describing her as someone who’s so desolate, hemmed out, the kind of family she grew up in so surrounded by disease and murder, that she was sent out to an agency at the age of fifteen and then farmed out to work for the Williamses, “some hard-pressed house in the suburbs;” the Williams family, “some doctor’s family,” which Williams Carlos Williams was a doctor; “some Elsie.” So it’s not . . . she’s both a person and she’s a representative who’s there to express the truth about us. And the poem becomes a kind of diagnosis of the American situation. And we’re a new country, in this diagnosis, but the people have lost contact with peasant traditions, with European traditions, with something that’s come before. And this lack of continuity with anything that’s come before, with any folk traditions from the old country, has left Americans lost. And it’s left them in some kind of situation, from the mountain folk of Kentucky or in Jersey, in New Jersey where William Carlos Williams lived, surrounded by these young guys who work and get drunk all of week and take out these girls who then are in danger of getting pregnant and passing on disease and so forth. And Williams doesn’t exactly give us the solution, but it seems to be the imagination needs contact with earth under our feet. And there’s a beautiful line in this poem: and we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth while the imagination strains after deer going by fields of goldenrod in the stifling heat of September Contact was an important word for Williams, and so in place of these ancient traditions what we have in America are people who need contact with the earth, with the natural world, with a new culture that we can create. And “To Elsie”—actually the whole book _Spring and All_ —is the about the difficult birth, of the difficulty of birth, the struggle it is to be born, and here to make a new culture. So Williams gives us a kind of diagnosis of a situation in America in 1923 (and America afterwards as well), and a kind of solution: we need contact with the earth.

## The Bridge That there are things that can never be the same about my face, the houses, or the sand, that I was born under the sign of the sheep, that like Abraham Lincoln I am serious but also lacking in courage, That from this yard I have been composing a great speech, that I write about myself, that it’s good to be a poet, that I look like the drawing of a house that was pencilled by a child, that curiously, I miss him and my mind is not upon the Pleaides, that I love the ocean and its foam against the sky, That I am sneezing like a lion in this garden that he knows the lilies of his Nile, distant image, breakfast, a flock of birds and sparrows from the sky, That I am not the husband of Cassiopeia, that I am not the southern fish, that I am not the last poet of civilization, that if I want to go out for a walk and then to find myself beneath a bank of trees, weary, that this is the life that I had, That curiously I miss the sound of the rain pounding on the roof and also all of Oakland, that I miss the sounds of sparrows dropping from the sky, that there are sparks behind my eyes, on the radio, and the distant sound of sand blasters, and breakfast, and every second of it, geometric, smoke from the chimney of the trees where I was small, That in January, I met him in a bar, we went home together, there was a lemon tree in the back yard, and a coffee house where we stood outside and kissed, That I have never been there, curiously, and that it never was the same, the whole of the island, or the paintings of the stars, fatherly, tied to sparrows as they drop down from the sky, O rattling frame where I am, I am where there are still these assignments in the night, to remember the texture of the leaves on the locust trees in August, under the moonlight, rounded, through a window in the hills, That if I stay beneath the pole star in this harmony of crickets that will sing, the bird sound on the screen, the wide eyes of the owl form of him still in the dark, blue, green, with shards of the Pacific, That I do not know the dreams from which I have come, sent into the world without the blessing of a kiss, behind the willow trees, beside the darkened pansies on the deck beside the ships, rocking, I have written this, across the back of the sky, wearing a small and yellow shirt, near the reptile house, mammalian, no bigger than the herd, That I wrote the history of the war waged between the Peloponnesians and the south, that I like to run through shopping malls, that I’ve also learned to draw, having been driven here, like the rain is driven into things, into the ground, beside the broken barns, by the railroad tracks, beside the sea, I, Thucydides, having written this, having grown up near the ocean. —Lisa Jarnot ### __Rights & Access Lisa Jarnot, "The Bridge" from _Ring of Fire_. Copyright © 2003 by Lisa Jarnot. Reprinted by permission of Salt Publishing.

I love this poem. I love its curiousness: the things that it finds curious and the fact that it moves with such curiosity through the world. It seems to me a deeply American poem in a lot of ways, though what Americanness is is not easy to say, and the instability of that meaning seems to me an important part of it. I think what’s American about the poem has to do with its stance, which includes an almost overwhelming ambition for greatness, and a profound humility and fear of not being up for the labors that the poet, like an ancient hero, has been called to do. It’s the way the poem inhabits its vulnerability and still goes on to reach for something beyond it. The way it wants to feel something both intimate and collective, to belong to something and someone and at the same time to maintain the clarity and authority of self-determination. All of this is happening in the context of these spectacularly commonplace points of contact: someone sneezing in a garden, two people kissing on the street, a flock of birds, the zoo, things that are broken or falling or trapped. It’s not an ideal world. But there’s an intimacy that’s shared with the reader, that opens onto something marvelous about the experience of being human. There’s an underlying imperative here to fulfill the immense potential of the poem. And the poet isn’t given the space to do this, she has to make the world of the poem, to say the thing that only she can say, to fulfill the assignment that she has been given in the night, as if her life depends on it, as I think it does. And that assignment seems to touch on every aspect of relation, of social and domestic life, of the history of poetry and the history of this country, which is still being written, and which like that of the Peloponnesians who appear at the end of the poem, is at war, with the world and with itself. The poem is considering what survives and what is momentary, what lasts and what the poem has the opportunity or responsibility to represent. There are relational patterns that survive, there is poetry that survives, but also a history of violence, which means, among other things, that the task of the poet, to create something counter to that history, is undiminished. The poem is looking at all these forms of relation, how we think of ourselves among others, or in relation to a significant other, within history, among other species, under the sky in which one person might see the kind of god that counts the sparrows and others the seven sisters of the Pleiades. I think this is a poem about being in the middle of a larger narrative account, including the fact that any understanding of our place comes from the accounts of others and that, in some sense, what we experience as reality is always being bridged in this way. It’s as if we’ve arrived in the middle of an argument or treatise with all those “that…” clauses—but those clauses deliver is completely personal and non-legalistic and slippery and true… that there are things that can never be the same. We begin in the middle of this human situation of living here in a body that’s time-bound among materials that are time bound, with the knowledge that everything, even our selves, our domestic and biological environment is constantly changing, mutable, unstable. And next to this is placed the fact that there are things that don’t change and that we are powerless over, including the circumstances of birth, the imperfect and unfinished scrawl of our lives, all our capacities as well as our limits. I love the way Lincoln appears unexpectedly in a way that undoes the oversimplified heroics of national history. What does it mean to look at the fear and failure that are obscured by mythology—and to do so without giving up on the concept of a social good? What does it mean to look at all of history past and present as part of the same erroneous and flawed composition? I think “The Bridge” is saying something about American identity and what it means to be an individual within a work in progress, which is what any nation or coalition or relationship is, and what it means to be an artist in this culture, fully alive to the complexities and disappointments and possibilities of what that might mean. The poet herself is a kind of bridge figure, mercurial, moving between visible and invisible realms, past and present, curious and elusive and alive, not the first or the last of her kind. She’s making a bridge of words that begins on one shore and ends on another, from Oakland to ancient Greece, writing and rewriting these layered histories in a declaration of love and of allegiance, to something that is both smaller and larger than the national.

## The Acts of Youth And with great fear I inhabit the middle of the night What wrecks of the mind await me, what drugs to dull the senses, what little I have left, what more can be taken away? The fear of travelling, of the future without hope or buoy. I must get away from this place and see that there is no fear without me: that it is within unless it be some sudden act or calamity to land me in the hospital, a total wreck, without memory again; or worse still, behind bars. If I could just get out of the country. Some place where one can eat the lotus in peace. For in this country it is terror, poverty awaits; or am I a marked man, my life to be a lesson or experience to those young who would trod the same path, without God unless he be one of justice, to wreak vengeance on the acts committed while young under un- due influence or circumstance. Oh I have always seen my life as drama, patterned after those who met with disaster or doom. Is my mind being taken away me. I have been over the abyss before. What is that ringing in my ears that tells me all is nigh, is naught but the roaring of the winter wind. Woe to those homeless who are out on this night. Woe to those crimes committed from which we can walk away unharmed. So I turn on the light And smoke rings rise in the air. Do not think of the future; there is none. But the formula all great art is made of. Pain and suffering. Give me the strength to bear it, to enter those places where the great animals are caged. And we can live at peace by their side. A bride to the burden that no god imposes but knows we have the means to sustain its force unto the end of our days. For that is what we are made for; for that we are created. Until the dark hours are done. And we rise again in the dawn. Infinite particles of the divine sun, now worshipped in the pitches of the night. —John Wieners ### __Rights & Access From _Selected Poems, 1958-1984_ by John Weiners, edited by Raymond Foye. Reprinted by permission of Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Copyright © 1986 by John Weiners.

I don’t think this poet would mind having a woman read his work aloud anymore than this woman would mind a man reading my poetry aloud. John Wieners’ poems are the means by which he rescues himself. The poems relieve his anguish as they offer rhythm in the ritual of writing that echoes a lyrical way of thinking. His lines carry contradictions and loops, which he lets stand. The poem is the answer to the questions it asks, but has no resting place. The poem is homeless. There’s no expectation of a sympathetic reader out there to nod with him or of a room full of inquiring poets or critics who will sigh. Wieners is entirely private, inward: a person whose loneliness amounts to the only presence he can recognize. To delineate the outlines of this loneliness is to see it as something embodied in darkness, as itself shedding bits of light. He lays himself bare in order to hear his own hearing clearly. What he hears is not just himself but those outside who are helpless and tossed. He speaks for the failures in this country, and out of a Catholic identity that’s mysterious to people who don’t understand its codes. Out of insomnia comes self-damnation and fear. What have I done to myself, and what will be done to me? Because of the acts of his youth, the poet is damaged, but will he also be punished for it? Will a hospital—or worse yet, prison—be his destination? As he writes: “For in this country its terror, poverty awaits; or / am I a marked man, my life to be a lesson / or experience to those young who would trod / the same path, without God.” These questions consistently lead him outward towards others, to the poor he prefers. “Woe to the homeless who are out on this night.” They are the ones who trigger the ontological questions he carries with him from poem to poem. In America there is such a thing as a middle class that lasts like a thick glass, but he isn’t of it. Wieners includes God in his poems as the knower, not the one who acts as judge, avenger, priest or helper. The knower is present and inactive, as is the figure of loneliness, who is taking notes on the sidelines. God and loneliness are one form and one force. “God . . . knows we have the means to sustain its force unto the end of our days.” This force is always suffering and is also, thanks to the peculiarity of his sentencing, “a bride to the burden.” A Catholic’s final identity is the one writing the Wieners poems. It’s an identity of mystics, accomplished through degradation and lowliness, and winding up as a “particle of the divine sun, now/ worshipped in the pitches of the night.” It is blindingly material.

## _from_ The Sri Lankan Loxodrome in this fundamental sense I am Mahayana & of Africa both Sri Lankan & non-Sri Lankan in that I am of a newly elected “Radial” width comprehending my projection of rays like faceless chromium at twilight an absence like “intergalactic hydrogen” perhaps a complex of gravitons & lightning I learned to speak when my solar journal first commenced then I was magnetized at the age of 12 to a psychic form of fatherhood & now I sail never eating for days consumed by scalar neutrinos I’ve been reported as expired at Jaffna & have been burned in effigy for interminable wanderings for the crime of emitting vertigo by movement for inflicting the human spirit with a parallel genetic engenderment comparable to a sun which erupts from the voice of the afterlife a wanderer in a zone of fluctuating kelvins breathing unknown dice within my schisms **** perhaps for me a Nubian catacomb in the nameless a concealed adventure in the tourmaline a powerful spectra of intangible chondrites maybe as darkened transition I’ll speak an aqua-Chinese or as an Afro-Gujarati I’ll have a voice in Batticaloa alive in Madagascar as a combusted lemur sage I develop moment after moment with intensity as aloofness allowing each destroyed symmetry each ulterior symbology to ignite its hazeless unicorns to unbury spells amidst “black widow pulsars” wafting between equilibria & equilibria aleatoric & unblemished like a moonless endurance within a “grazing occultation” & each fire that I build vanishes each clause of interregnums detractable amidst the rural dominations of “Istar Terra” & the “anomaly over Beta Regio” like a brimstone fire at the source of the instantaneous —Will Alexander ### __Rights & Access “The Sri Lankan Loxodrome” Will Alexander from _The Sri Lankan Loxodrome_. New Directions, 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Will Alexander’s “The Sri Lankan Loxodrome” imagines the journey of a Sri Lankan sailor across the Indian Ocean. The sailor, making contact with various transplanted African communities, is an immigrant from restrictive constructions of nationality and certainty. For him, migration is a mode and means of identification with others, and so, of self-discovery. At the same time, Alexander’s poem is about migration at a cellular level—the migration of cancer cells through a body. And it was written as the author struggled to survive his own life-threatening illness.

## The Tusks of Blood My chant must enclose hell And yet here leave behind Myself of touch and vow; My hour has come when gales— The brief song of Greek— Have found the inner teeth alone. Here listen, someone is calling— Why the ugly praise and fate? Shall I be a joiner to this And leave here the good hope? Not to prank the lucky star I’ll apologize, wait until The great way works for woe! Woe? never, you Parsifal; Never—and by the trait of love’s Light shell, sneering outpour. Not to blame—wait, a travel For an excuse; a good life lay In the real actions, the pomped Horn, and the pardons of a door. What interfering, cloaked love Rules my thoughts! Shall I write: O anger, hast thou Not treated thy refuging forbear? Perhaps I can walk a bit To my truthful veins and relate The sport of the steeds that trot The stirring muscles of an earthly Gait and my hearted glow. O worm, worm-heated soil, Peal sad mereing folds Where cometh a home afar; And again a slow fainting ghost Gliding over a path easily seen. . . God! some voices disturb me From the inner room; I catch the subject: Death! Death, what a careless value To such aged spirits. Again A sad remark. Life not valued By such retired souls, who Should be apart to believe Justice . . . Ah, man, not thy boast! He was a marked lad Who poorly helped himself. What should this mean? Fill your pockets—I’ll let You know the grass of a grave. O the pillars of silk and good tea, Confusion of women, the bare bust— Embarrassment, carnal filth Of its justice lacks environment; O creaking earth, necessity; hell, No more wise; then the next child— What can he give? You pallid stork, gazing— Who gazed before you, cooled The summer spray? Very bad for an apartment Jew to claim Everlasting renaissance. What a delivery was this, Sucked by secret gilded creatures Who slew gold for a membrane! O tear, sped into the basin Of sparkling night aghast in silence, And the pipes’ swift pain Of the boiling steam shocks uplifting You, endless wretch of silver! —Samuel Greenberg ### __Rights & Access This poem is in the public domain.

I’m going to read a poem today about a mostly unknown poet named Samuel Greenberg, who was born in Vienna in 1893 and died, twenty-three years later, in 1917. The poem—aside from being fascinating and brilliant, perhaps a great poem—is illustrative, also in its way, of the huge wave of immigration coming from southern and eastern Europe at the turn of the last century. And I’m using it as an illustration of that—particularly of Jewish immigration in the Lower East Side into America, but mostly Jews who settled in New York City in the Lower East Side, which of course by this time was well-known for movies and stories and so on. There, of course, were Italian immigrants and Russian and Polish and Lithuanian and Hungarian, and so on—immigrants as well, and their experiences are not to be ignored. And I suspect—I know, in some respects—almost identical to the Jewish experience. Between 1881 and 1910, over a million and a half Jews came from Poland, Russia, and other areas in eastern Europe, and they settled in their ghetto in the Lower East Side—it wasn’t defined by the government as a ghetto, but it was a self-imposed ghetto—coming mostly out of limited opportunities and poverty. There in the ghetto they worked in sweatshops—as we all know, pushcarts were in the street; as we all know, the streets themselves were swarming with people as we’ve seen in the movies. The flats they lived in have been somewhat romanticized because of very, very famous singers, actors, writers, artists of various types—grew up in that ghetto. The rooms themselves, the apartments, were dark, smelly coldwater flats, known by the famous name of “tenement.” Ironically, in the last fifteen years, the Lower East Side has been gentrified—even large buildings, small skyscrapers, are being built there. It’s ironic beyond belief. But Samuel Greenberg was a genius of sorts and, strangely odd in his way, he both painted and he wrote poetry. He would probably have died unknown, except that Hart Crane—the great Hart Crane, the great American poet, born in 1898—discovered his poetry somehow and was madly obsessed with it—by the language, the imagination, the irrational images of Greenberg. And he went so far as even to . . . well, I’ll use the word copy, I’ll use the word plagiarize, one poem from Greenberg. Greenberg’s poem is called “Conduct,” and Crane’s poem is called “Emblems of Conduct.” It is not a major poem of Hart Crane, and I’m not—how shall I say—putting him down or attacking him for this. He was overwhelmingly inspired by Greenberg. Of course, Crane’s inspiration extended beyond Samuel Greenberg, I must say. At any rate, to get back to him: he fell in love with America in his way, and he lived in poverty in his early youth. His father was an embroidery worker in gold and silver and made a decent living, but somehow one of the panics—one of the depressions or other—he lost everything, and so Samuel was on his own from the age of sixteen or seventeen on. He got a job in a leather factory. He may have gone to the seventh or eighth grade, I’m not sure exactly how long—fell in love with baseball. The family lived at the corner of Suffolk and Grand, a place then that was . . . he described in one of his prose memoirs as “an insult of poverty, an insult of life.” He developed, as many others did, tuberculosis at an early age; spent half of his life, really, in wards and tuberculosis sanatoriums. Indeed, his last two years he was helpless and died in such a sanatorium. As far as poetry is concerned, his chief influences were Keats, Shelley, and—more than anybody else—Emerson. He did have access to Palgrave’s _Golden Treasury_ and somehow, as it does to original, isolated poets—like Dickinson, like Blake, Chatterton—as they somehow get the information—mystically, magically—it’s theirs. And there is, in his poetry, a rush of sound and image. He filled seventeen notebooks with drawings and poems, mostly in pencil, and it took weeks and months, even years, to decipher some of these. Maybe twenty to thirty percent of the work has been published. And it was for the work—through the praise and discovery of him—by the well-known poet and critic Allen Tate, that Greenberg’s work became available. Tate said, among other things, that no history of the 20th century, of 20th century poetry, would be complete without reference to Greenberg. There are so many things to say about him, but I’m going to read one poem and then I’m going to say a few words about his strange and unique and beautiful autobiography that he wrote of about eighteen pages. I’m going to read a few words from that. So we go to the poem itself, “Tusks of Blood.” As far as I can decipher it, the poem, which is written in alternate three- and four- stressed lines, is an awareness—an experience—of a birth in one of those flats that I discovered next door. And the ending, “endless wretch of silver,” probably refers to the steam radiators, though it may refer to the silver—the child may have been emblematic—or it may have been the symbol of the child or the silver nitrate that was poured into his eyes, I don’t know. But I want to say that in the autobiography—I’m just sort of explaining it in his strange and innocent language—I’m going to read one or two short passages. > We often found our father laboring over a frame of gold, a real axel easily > remembered, some working maidens at his side, and perhaps even our mother > took part in the exquisite handling of thread and stitch. Some pure, Hebrew > atmosphere gathered between our doors, rabbi and priest, Negro and Greek, > such fathoms of character sprang up between the embroidery tasks. And then his mother’s death— > Life was now a spongy condition. Our mother gradually became ill. Ear > trouble, germ trouble, nose trouble, skull trouble, death trouble, resulted > and the family buried her, somewhere on Long Island, where a cemetery called > Washington was the grave for many poor victims, as our un-praised love was > settled. We returned to a café near the dune place, where gathered a party > of thirty or more, ate cheese and eggs, with a schooner of beer and coffee. > The rituals of the Jewish religion demand that one remain seated for seven > days upon the floor. Well, we sat on soft cushions. And finally, finally at the very end he says— > And it happened again that the old story of weakness [and he’s referring, > here, to tuberculosis] returned. I was taken to the hospital of descending > charity, where things became a careful selection through sanitation and > rest. Where was school? Oh, what I would give for the knowledge of > grammatical truth. But I saw that science is perfection, as long as the > world exists” And so, I’m going to end with that. Thank you. ****

## Swedenborg (from “Tradition”) Well he saw man created according to the motion of the elements. He located the soul: in the blood. Retired at last––to a house where he paid window-tax (for increasing the light!). Lived simply. Gardened. Saw visions. Nothing for supper but tea. Now he saw the soul from his “Pray, what is matter” leave for the touchy ––heavens!––blue rose kind of thing. Strange––he did grow a blue rose, you know. * I lost you to water, summer when the young girls swim, to the hot shore to little peet-tweet- pert girls. Now it’s cold your bright knock ––Orion’s with his dog after him–– at my door, boy on a winter wave ride. * I married in the world’s black night for warmth if not repose. At the close–– someone. I hid with him from the long range guns. We lay leg in the cupboard, head in closet. A slit of light at no bird dawn–– Untaught I thought he drank too much. I say I married and lived unburied. I thought–– * You see here the influence of inference Moon on rippled stream “Except as and unless” * Your erudition the elegant flower of which my blue chicory at scrub end of ditch illuminates * Alone a still state hard as sard then again whisper-talk preserved in chalk At last no (TV) gun no more coats than one no hair lightener Sweethearts of the whiter walls * Why can’t I be happy in my sorrow my drinking man today my quiet tomorrow * And what you liked or did–– no matter once the moon dipped down and fish rose from under * Cleaned all surfaces and behind all solids and righted leaning things Considered then, becurtained the metaphysics of flight from housecleanings * Young in Fall I said: the birds are at their highest thoughts of leaving Middle life said nothing–– grounded to a livelihood Old age––a high gabbling gathering before goodbye of all we know —Lorine Niedecker ### __Rights & Access Lorine Niedecker, “Swedenborg (from “Tradition”)” from Collected Works. Copyright © 2004 by Lorine Niedecker. University of California Press. Reprinted by permission of Bob Arnold, literary executor.

Lorine Niedecker was born on May 12, 1903, and died on December 31, 1970. She lived most of her life in a rural landscape on Black Hawk Island near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. It wouldn’t be out of line to say that she had two homes in her life: the one by water (“The Brontës had their moors, I have my marshes,” she once wrote), and the avant-garde poetry scene birthed in 1931 in the Objectivist issue of _Poetry_ magazine, which she read. Almost immediately thereafter Niedecker began a correspondence with Louis Zukofsky that was to last the rest of her life. At this point in her writing she veered away from earlier influences of the Imagists and Surrealists. She began sending her work to _Poetry_ , where it was accepted. Eventually she became a central member of the Objectivists, the only female poet in the group. Letters were a crucial companion, and no doubt sustaining to her art, and to the art of those she wrote. Among her epistolary friends were Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Cid Corman, and Clayton Eshelman. She wrote ground-breaking work, addressing subject matters of gender, work, sexual politics, social politics, marriage, and domesticity long before others. She developed a lyric that was both clear and complicated, ever-alive to eccentricities and shifts of American vernacular, sounding vowels and consonants alongside the intricate movements of the natural world. She never quite left Surrealism in that there was an ever-abiding interest in the subconscious. While her experimentation was cosmopolitan, and her range of reference global and century-spanning, her idiom was of the folk. I’ll read an excerpt from her poem “Tradition,” written in 1965. This section of the poem is subtitled “Swedenborg,” referring to the 18th century Swedish scientist, philosopher and mystic.

## Drum-Taps **Beat! Beat! Drums!** Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow! Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force, Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation, Into the school where the scholar is studying, Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride, Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain, So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow. Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow! Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets; Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep in those beds, No bargainers’ bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—would they continue? Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing? Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge? Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder blow. Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow! Make no parley—stop for no expostulation, Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer, Mind not the old man beseeching the young man, Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties, Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses, So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow. **Cavalry Crossing a Ford** A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands, They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun—hark to the musical clank, Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering stop to drink, Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a picture, the negligent rest on the saddles, Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering the ford—while, Scarlet and blue and snowy white, The guidon flags flutter gayly in the wind. **Bivouac on a Mountain Side** I see before me now a traveling army halting, Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards of summer, Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in places rising high, Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes dingily seen, The numerous camp-fires scatter'd near and far, some away up on the mountain, The shadowy forms of men and horses, looming, large-sized, flickering, And over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach, Studded, breaking out, the eternal stars. **Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field one Night** When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day, One look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look I shall never forget, One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground, Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle, Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way, Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,) Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the moderate night- wind, Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading, Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night, But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed, Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands, Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade—not a tear, not a word, Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier, As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole, Vigil final for you brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death, Faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I think we shall surely meet again,) Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear’d, My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form, Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet, And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude- dug grave I deposited, Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim, Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,) Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten’d, I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket, And buried him where he fell. **Look Down, Fair Moon** Look down, fair moon and bathe this scene, Pour softly down night's nimbus floods, on faces ghastly, swollen, purple; On the dead, on their backs, with their arms toss'd wide, Pour down your unstinted nimbus, sacred moon. —Walt Whitman ### __Rights & Access These poems are in the public domain.

This is J. D. McClatchy, and I’m recording this on June the 11th, 2012, in the midst of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. These four years the country is commemorating the terrible events of those days so long ago, and on June the 11th, 1862, the South was enjoying a series of stinging victories. And I have in front of me a copy of a letter that General Lee wrote to Stonewall Jackson saying, > General, your recent successes have been the cause of the liveliest joy in > this army as well as in the country. The admiration excited by your skill > and boldness has been constantly mingled with solicitude for your situation. > The practicality of reinforcing you has been the subject of earnest > consideration. It has been determined to do so at the expense of weakening > this army. And so on and so forth, as General Lee planned his great campaign. The Civil War remains the most cataclysmic and tragic event in our history. Behind the struggle, driving its purpose and passions, loomed the greatest of issues: the fate of a country and the rights of its people. Hateful decisions were at the heart of the conflict. A Northern sense of justice and a Southern sense of honor, moral principle and emotional pride, drove men to their deaths amid the terrors of war—the deafening noise, the blinding smoke, the ground slick with blood, the cries of the fallen. Over 620,000 soldiers died during those four years, nearly as many as in all of America’s other wars combined. Proud cities were put to the torch, civilian populations were brutalized, fertile countryside was reduced to wasteland, brother fought against brother, and there was not a household in the land that did not have a loss to mourn. The very names of the fearsome battles and valiant commanders ring in people’s memories with the force of myth. The grandeur and pathos of the two shredded armies never failed to thrill. In the end, slavery would be abolished, succession defeated, and a new nation born in fire, blood, and sorrow. And each side in the conflict would discover its tragic hero: for the South, Robert E. Lee, whom I just quoted—the model Virginia gentlemen who fought for the lost cause with audacious skill and relentless determination; for the North, Abraham Lincoln, the martyred redeemer president who spoke for American democracy with an eloquence unmatched in our history. It is such stuff as epics are made on. And yet, it seems strange that no one great sweeping poem, no American Iliad, ever emerged from this most momentous event in the lives and imaginations of Americans. Individual poets did write, of course, and we have as our substitute for an epic poem marvelous lyric takes and moral meditations by Herman Melville and, above all, Walt Whitman, whose collection in 1867 called _Drum Taps_ brought together the poems he had written, both in the field and back in Washington, about episodes in the Civil War, in which he worked tirelessly as a nurse in the field hospitals.

## The Other Side of the River Easter again, and a small rain falls On the mockingbird and the housefly, on the Chevrolet In its purple joy And the TV antennas huddled across the hillside— Easter again, and the palm trees hunch Deeper beneath their burden, The dark puddles take in Whatever is given them, And nothing rises more than halfway out of itself— Easter with all its little mouths open in the rain. _____________ There is no metaphor for the spring’s disgrace, No matter how much the rose leaves look like bronze dove hearts, No matter how much the plum trees preen in the wind. For weeks I’ve thought about the Savannah River, For no reason, and the winter fields around Garnett, South Carolina My brother and I used to hunt At Christmas, Princess and Buddy working the millet stands And the vine-lipped face of the pine woods In their languorous zig-zags, The quail, when they flushed, bursting like shrapnel points Between the trees and the leggy shrubs into the undergrowth, Everything else in motion as though under water, My brother and I, the guns, their reports tolling from far away Through the aqueous, limb-filtered light, December sun like a single tropical fish Uninterested anyway, Suspended and holding still In the coral stems of the pearl-dusked and distant trees . . . There is no metaphor for any of this, Or the meta-weather of April, The vinca blossoms like deep bruises among the green. _____________ It’s linkage I’m talking about, and harmonies and structures And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past. Something infinite behind everything appears, and then disappears. It’s all a matter of how you narrow the surfaces. It’s all a matter of how you fit in the sky. _____________ Often, at night, when the stars seem as close as they do now, and as full, And the trees balloon and subside in the way they do when the wind is right, As they do now after the rain, the sea way off with its false sheen, And the sky that slick black of wet rubber, I’m 15 again, and back on Mt. Anne in North Carolina Repairing the fire tower, Nobody else around but the horse I packed in with, and five days to finish the job. Those nights were the longest night I ever remember, The lake and pavilion 3,000 feet below as though modeled in tinfoil, And even more distant than that, The last fire out, the after-reflection of Lake Llewellyn Aluminum glare in the sponged dark, Lightning bugs everywhere, the plump stars Dangling and falling near on their black strings. These nights are like that, The silvery alphabet of the sea increasingly difficult to transcribe, And larger each year, everything farther away, and less clear, Than I want it to be, not enough time to do the job, And faint thunks in the earth, As though somewhere nearby a horse was nervously pawing the ground. I want to sit by the bank of the river, in the shade of the evergreen tree, And look in the face of whatever, the whatever that’s waiting for me. _____________ There comes a point when everything starts to dust away More quickly than it appears, when what we have to comfort the dark Is just that dust, and just its going away. 25 years I used to sit on this jut of rocks As the sun went down like an offering through the glaze And backfires of Monterey Bay, And anything I could think of was mine because it was there in front of me, numinously everywhere, Appearing and piling up . . . So to have come to this, remembering what I did do, and what I didn’t do, The gulls whimpering over the boathouse, the monarch butterflies Cruising the flower beds, And all the soft hairs of spring thrusting up through the wind, And the sun, as it always does, dropping into its slot without a click, Is a short life of trouble. —Charles Wright ### __Rights & Access “The Other Side of the River” Charles Wright from _The World of Ten Thousand Things: Poems, 1980-1990_. Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1991. Reprinted by permission of the author.

This is James Tate reading “The Other Side of the River” by Charles Wright. [Did this poem deepen or complicate conventional notions of American identity?] Well, I … I mean obviously I’m going to say yes, just because it has many elements throughout it, throughout the poem, that might sound familiar to most readers of American poetry—it’s its place and youth and specific memories, and so on. But then for him to arrive at the incredible last line in the poem, “Is a short life of trouble,” I mean, that’s pretty shocking and it jolts you to think back on the whole poem and wonder how you got there and so on. And the poem holds up to such scrutiny. [How do you relate to this, the speaker in this poem, or as Charles Wright?] I guess I’d like to go hunting with him, you know, hunting quail. There are such beautiful memories, and so on, of childhood in the South, in the fire tower, and hunting with his brother, and things like that. Yeah, he’s a familiar guy and somebody I feel I care about. [How has this poem informed your work, specifically in terms of identity?] It hasn’t. Well, I’ll speak about Charles Wright particularly. He spent most of his life detailing subjects centered, always, around him and his world and … I mean, there are no imaginary flights, supposedly, though of course there are in language—language is the great conveyor of both his subject and his poetics, you know? And so he seems like he’s locked into some very narrow thing, namely the self, but in truth, it gets very large and wide thanks to his great use of language, and his love of language, and the rhythm, and things of that sort.

## XIII (Dedications) I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean on a gray day of early spring, faint flakes driven across the plains' enormous spaces around you. I know you are reading this poem in a room where too much has happened for you to bear where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed and the open valise speaks of flight but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem As the underground train loses momentum and before running up the stairs toward a new kind of love your life has never allowed. I know you are reading this poem by the light of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide while you wait for the newscast from the intifada. I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers. I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out, count themselves out, at too early an age. I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious. I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand because life is short and you too are thirsty. I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language guessing at some words while others keep you reading and I want to know which words they are. I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse. I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read there where you have landed, stripped as you are. —Adrienne Rich ### __Rights & Access Part XIII “(Dedications)” from “An Atlas of the Difficult World”. Copyright © 2016 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 1991 by Adrienne Rich, from COLLECTED POEMS: 1950-2012 by Adrienne Rich. Used by Permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Audio recording use by permission of The Frances Goldin Literary Agency.

I'm Jane Hirshfield, reading “(Dedications),” by Adrienne Rich. “(Dedications)” is the final section of Adrienne Rich's thirteen-part “An Atlas of the Difficult World.” The full poem is a work of stocktaking, an inventory both personal and cultural. It was finished almost thirty years ago, in 1991: the year of the first Gulf War, of Rodney King's beating and Anita Hill's disregarded testimony, the year of the break-up of the Soviet Union, of CNN and the 24 hour news cycle, of the unstoppable, rising death toll of HIV- AIDS. Read decades after its writing, “An Atlas of the Difficult World” remains a startlingly relevant map of unsolved griefs. “(Dedications),” the poem's closing section, offers what also abides: its relevant solace. The poem is a litany of community-summoning and blessing. It holds an album of lives, and of longings, recognized and unrecognized both. The poem creates, too, in the way that art's outward looking makes almost always also a mirror, a self-portrait of its author. Rich's own longing, fears, and hope are here, and her fierce, lifelong, unrelenting desire to write words that might serve. Rich was a poet of political awareness, ecological awareness, social awareness, eros awareness, and language awareness. She wrote from and of the inseparability of these ways of seeing and feeling, and she wrote of shared lives and shared fates. One of this poem's central intentions and gifts is the way it enacts and expands our sense of what and who we might mean when we say the word “we.” She described poetry as “a liberative language, connecting us to others like and unlike ourselves.” The definition of liberation as connection—with not only the like but the unlike—was for Rich a foundational value. The same contract is at the core of any genuinely democratic self- governance, and at the core of a working literature, a working relationship, a working compassion. Rich sets into “(Dedications)” both our necessary solitudes and our necessary ties. Each person described here stands or sits inside one moment alone (inside the reader's necessary and focusing solitude, inside the inner life), and at the same time is in a world among and with others. The figures resemble those in the separate windows of a painting by Edward Hopper. Yet the central, great sleight of tongue in this poem is the way its shape-shifting, transformative second-person “you” makes of separate lives the felt experience of a communal whole. We see the lives in the windows and we step inside them, inside the continuous world we also live in. It's worth pausing to look more closely at the way this experience is made. The “you” addressed in each sentence is singular, local, specific—a person young or old, in love, in exhaustion, in grief or hope or desperation, each of them reaching back for these words from within their own distinct place in the difficult world. And yet each uttered “you” cannot help but also be heard by the person now reading the poem as himself, as herself. We read that simple, acknowledging phrase, “and you too are thirsty,” and, each time, “I am” comes as answer. To change one into many and many into one is one of the alchemical possibilities of the second-person pronoun in English. It's also, in a larger way, one of the alchemies of poetry itself: whatever comes into awareness while reading a poem becomes subjective. We read poems as we see: from the inside. And we read poems as we feel and understand anything: with the heart- mind’s unboundaried capacity for empathy. This poem is propelled by empathy. The poem is also propelled by its craft of music and structure. It moves on the twin devices of list and anaphora's parallel structure, the way each sentence begins with the same set of words. Any American poet reading “(Dedications)” cannot help but hear in it also some trace of the earlier voice of Walt Whitman, who set out to define a still-new country in part by his own many lists. Any poem with a list of a certain length signals “more”—that the list could go on without end. Whitman summoned our American awareness of a vast and shared country by naming its almost infinite parts and labors, its lives and places. He founded an understanding of American poetry as one that takes up (in some of its poems, by no means all) that larger task: the creation of a shared, unconfining definition of the country's nature, not by generalization but by an embrace of the actual topography of the real, in our lives and in the lives of others. Whitman set out to create and strengthen the warmly affectionate “we” of “ _E Pluribus Unum”_ — “from many one.” “(Dedications)” takes up that task in turn. Both Whitman and Rich wrote, too, in the grief of America's still- incompletion—grief that this great “we” remains fragile, in progress, imperiled. Both Rich and Whitman are poets unblinded to our profound imperfection, yet hopeful: they set out to make with their words the country they hoped might exist. Rich was a poet and an activist of inclusion. No one was abandoned by her gaze or by the rigor of her compassion even in judgment. Dignity and the fullness of being were for her both words' and life's measure. Rich knew well that her work was part of a longer historical arc. But her “wild patience”—the phrase comes from another book's title, _A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far_ —meant she could not simply wait and hope that the rest of the country would someday join her. “Poetry,” she said in one interview, “can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative.” She was in this work of possibility-addition for the long run. However dark her poems' vision could at times be, Rich meant to counter despair. She meant to increase our hunger for justice, for dignity, for a sane politics, sane relationships, and a sane ecological ethic. Her steady, life-saving envisioning of what she found present, what she saw missing, cut windows into the walls of our separation, doors into the silences of our ignorance, complacency, inattention. Reading Rich can feel as if each poem were the conjuring of a password into a life more awake, alert, and unguarded. That is my experience reading this poem, in which she imagines and summons her readers, her plural, singular, thirsty, companions: You _._ I. We.

## American Coma I believe in the burned field, the sailboat on the sill of a desert farmhouse. That stars on the undersides of our skulls can spell the way home even when the lights have gone out, the maps again erased. The fray of a rope. Chafe of my hands. Black horses broken loose over a trampled dawn—your body beneath the tin of a bent truck grating. Footprints at the edge of the earth where they found you. Magdalena I believe you became the clouds, the Sangre de Cristos’ pink rim of morning, the musk of your blood on my t-shirt as I drive away, all smoke and sooty desert in my rearview. It’s not the fantasy of a land that survives but its rocks, redwoods, ghosts, armadillos crushed in roadside gutters through Texas— I believe their blood can stay with you six hundred miles to the Mexican gulf, that you can use their remains to bind bear claws, cowrie shells, something to dance with. That when you awake you will not remember any of this: the sirens, sticky tubes they cocooned around you the way you looked at me from behind the in-patient door, eyes empty boats dozing on the edge and I on the rocks peering into waves piecing together fins out of crushed armadillos picked up from the roadsides I traveled to find you where Chevy appendages, cigarette-butts, the birdfood of petrified Wonderbread crusts are the songs of detached, mechanical wings. I believe when America awakes she will not remember any of this: you smashed over the precipice— a pipe dream hinged upon a dead saguaro root. Your pages flapping, tar-stained, blown into shadows of buttes. I gather you like kindling, set you on fire, the fugue of black horses drowning in the surf. —Jennifer Elise Foerster ### __Rights & Access "American Coma" Jennifer Elise Foerster from _Leaving Tulsa_. University of Arizona Press, 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.

This poem, “American Coma”, is from a book by young, Muskogee Creek poet Jennifer Elise Foerster called _Leaving Tulsa_. It’s a beautiful book, a new book of poems, and they really remind me of the urgent vision fueling Kerouac’s _On the Road_ and, for Muskogee people, we’ve been on the road for quite a while, from the Southeastern part of the United States and a long walk from there to Oklahoma. And the book is … and this poem is … I feel like this poem, it’s … the whole book is embedded in this poem, is a young Muskogee woman carrying that walk in her and leaving for other places in America, like the Southwest, like the Bay Area, and the road is demanding, you know, the road to becoming a human being, the road to acknowledging the story or the historical trauma that marks everyone in this country, every American, every American has to deal with the effects of colonization. And the outcome here of this, you know, is the damage inflicted, inflicted by America—America the person, America the being, America the hungry beast. She begins with “I believe in the burned field,” and that last stanza is startling: “I gather you like kindling,/ set you on fire, the fugue of black/ horses drowning in the surf.” Fire is the transformer. Fire makes ashes. Fire is spirit and it takes every … it transforms us to the most basic part of ourselves. And then, of course, the appearance of these black horses—these horses that represent, in so many of our poems, in indigenous writers and American writers, too, I believe, they represent, in a sense, that spirit, the spirit of the free America, the America of multicultural ideas and energy. So in this poem, she’s putting the story of a broken people back together; she’s making a road home, maybe even cleaning the road home for the people, for the person in this story who’s been broken, and for her own brokenness and the brokenness of a whole country. A coma suggests that the body is here, and the spirit is out roaming around and is unsettled and doesn’t really feel ready to come back and take on this particular life. But the poem is hopeful because, as Foerster says, “I believe/ when America awakes/ she will not remember any of this:/ you smashed over the precipice—/ a pipe dream hinged upon a dead saguaro root.” So Foerster in this poem and this book of poems is really … exemplifies the next generation of young indigenous poets who are overlapping my generation—a generation that came up through indigenous movements, indigenous rights movements. And I know, I’d been looking, many of us had been looking, to see who was out there and who was coming up, and here they are, and here is Jennifer with this very powerful voice.

## Making Peace A voice from the dark called out, ‘The poets must give us imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar imagination of disaster. Peace, not only the absence of war.’ But peace, like a poem, is not there ahead of itself, can’t be imagined before it is made, can’t be known except in the words of its making, grammar of justice, syntax of mutual aid. A feeling towards it, dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have until we begin to utter its metaphors, learning them as we speak. A line of peace might appear if we restructured the sentence our lives are making, revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power, questioned our needs, allowed long pauses . . . A cadence of peace might balance its weight on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence, an energy field more intense than war, might pulse then, stanza by stanza into the world, each act of living one of its words, each word a vibration of light—facets of the forming crystal. —Denise Levertov ### __Rights & Access Denise Levertov, “Making Peace” from _Breathing the Water_. Copyright © 1987 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Hello, this is Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States 2015 to 2017. I want to read you a poem by one of favorite poets, Denise Levertov. It is titled “Making Peace” from her book _Breathing the Water,_ published in 1997 by New Directions Press. So now we look at the poem a little bit. Think about it a little bit. I’ve always loved Denise Levertov, her writing, her position as a poet, her relentless giving of her poems to the people, to this thing we call “social reality” that many have struggled with, to deal with. _Is it real? Is it perception? Is it just atomic particles?_ Denise, maybe she includes all that in here. But really, she’s in _it._ Let me just say that. Even though she was called, her poetry was called sentimentalist, her poetry was called not poetry. But it was something like, the term “pamphleteering.” It’s a pamphlet, it’s a small broadside, it’s a piece of a newspaper. So she received a lot of criticism. Kind of literary bullying. But you know that’s what Denise is made of, she responds to a bigger picture. She continued talking about, writing about the Detroit riots, about Vietnam, about women’s position in society, writing essays, writing about poetry and writing about everything that’s in this poem. The indescribable. _What is that voice? What is that darkness? What is that absence of war? Do we know what that is?_ It sounds easy. Four words: the absence of war. I don’t think we need any ornamentalist layering and refiguring and emulsifying – that in itself is a key question that this poem offers. And she converts it to a poem. That piece like a poem is “not there ahead of itself,” she says. Ahead of itself. Peace is not ahead of itself. That’s another insight, that is another insight. You and I, the reader, has to deal with that. _What is this thing called that not be ahead of itself? Can we be not ahead of ourselves? Can our life be not ahead of itself?_ And when we are that, we are closer to peace. We are closer to the raw, full imagination of what peace is. If we are conjuring forward, it’s fantasy perhaps. It’s a plan perhaps. It’s an agenda perhaps. But it is not now where peace happens, can’t happen and most of all can be made. And I really enjoy how she speaks about the poem, its materials, its elements and how peace is like that. And most of all, how it’s all threaded and structured as, she says, in our lives, in our life, stuff. She talks about rhythm, she talks about restructuring “the sentence our lives are making,” she says, “Revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power.” That is something that we can do, that we must do in this poem called peace, in making this poem called peace making, “Making Peace” as she talks about loooong pauses, “until we begin to utter its metaphors, / learning them as we speak,” she says. And then later on, allowing the long pauses. And that’s another key in this poem – there is the making of things and then there is the long pause and pauses, inside and perhaps outside the making. And that is a paradox – making and not-making, being and not-being, being ahead and being here in the now and the cadence of it and the balance of it. And the energy of it. She says, “an energy field more intense than war,” the cadence of peace. You tell me if this is simplistic. You tell me if this is sentimentalist. And she goes on stanza by stanza into the world. As we make peace, as we make our lives in the present, outside profit and power, outside the “imagination of disaster,” as she says. We are in the act of living. And I think this was Denise Levertov, writing about Vietnam, writing about the Detroit riots, writing about women’s life in society and the power grid, writing about the inside and the outside. And herself being kind of an outsider, born in England and growing up becoming a bigger poet here in the United States. An outsider and an insider. She spoke in her essays _Light up the Cave,_ around the same decade or so when _Breathing the Water_ came out about the outscape and the inscape of the poem, writing about what’s out there and writing about our interiority and how they’re both related, interrelated. And in a way this poem does that too, talking about war and profit and power and talking about each act of living. And the ending of the poem, each word, she says, “a vibration of light—facets / of the forming crystal.” Here is this new universe and it begins with these crystals. And these crystals have facets and these facets are acts of living. I know this sounds like I’m reading these big pieces of thick wood or pasting them together and creating a statement about her writing, about this poem. That’s not really it. These are just the materials of this poem that you and I have to address and reflect on and find what being is, find what presence is, find what the absence of war is, find what making our lives is all about, and find what making peace is. So let us thank Denise Levertov for a wonderful life, for incredible poetry and for being concerned with the big questions, of war and peace, being, humanity, and how it can be made with our own life.

## Come to the Stone. . . The child saw the bombers skate like stones across the fields As he trudged down the ways the summer strewed With its reluctant foliage; how many giants Rose and peered down and vanished, by the road The ants had littered with their crumbs and dead. “That man is white and red like my clown doll,” He says to his mother, who has gone away. “I didn’t cry, I didn’t cry.” In the sky the planes are angry like the wind. The people are punishing the people—why? He answers easily, his foolish eyes Brightening at that long simile, the world. The angels sway about his story like balloons. A child makes everything—except his death—a child’s. _Come to the stone and tell me why I died._ —Randall Jarrell ### __Rights & Access "Come to the Stone..." by Randall Jarrell from _The Complete Poems_. Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1971. Used by permission of the publisher.

I locate the intense experience this poem offers me in the plain speech of the lines. “The people are punishing the people, why?” It’s such plain speech. The line isn’t in quotation marks. It’s the poem’s speaker or the poet who asks why, not the child, isn’t it? Still, the line is phrased like a child’s observation and question. It is a puzzle, a riddle, and a stark fact, like man’s inhumanity to man, like violence—especially against the innocent, which is unthinkable suffering that’s imposed by choice. The statements in question are either desperate or offhanded or both. To encounter it at the center of this little song is like hearing a human voice in a room in which you thought you were alone. Owen Barfield says in his book _Poetic Diction_ that the appreciation of a poem involves a felt change of consciousness. This is such a moment for me. In this line my own mind merges with that of the poet and that of the child in a terrible triangle containing a oneness. This isn’t the commonplace strategy of showing adults how silly their behavior is by showing it to us through the eyes of a child. This is merging of consciousnesses: “The people are punishing the people—why?” Robert Lowell called Randall Jarrell the most heartbreaking poet of our time. I would say that this is his most heartbreaking poem, and the line I cite the most heartbreaking of lines. “Come to the Stone . . . ” was first published in 1945 when no one would need to be told what was happening in the poem. That it could as easily be speaking to events in our decade is somehow more of a shock than it should be, given human history. Randall Jarrell despised power politics, the ants it makes of human beings. The death of this child, coming to him from the sky, is a horror of course. “’I didn’t cry, I didn’t cry.’” But, does the poem exist because the poet can’t let the mechanical distance of the bombers dehumanize the child? Does Jarrell attempt to get back the child’s voice to let him show us himself the thing we’ve done? The child answers our question with “his foolish eyes,” which are of course infinitely more knowledgeable than our own. The poet grants the child the last word here on death. When it comes to death, this child, the “long simile” of the world has killed, this child is now more knowing than any living adult can be. Jarrell, who was a pilot instructor during WWII, was implicated in the deaths of children from the sky. This poem pours out of that dark hole in his sky. In “Come to the Stone . . . ” the poet labors—vainly of course—to return the child’s voice to the world in the poem. He tries to show us that he himself is a human dealing in these deaths. It’s no good. No poem is ever worth a child. The poem means nothing to the child who has been killed, and in this line “The angels sway above his story like balloons” the poet acknowledges the useless and silly grandiose gift of a poem to a dead child. Still, thinking of Jarrell’s encounter here with the child he perhaps himself, helped to kill, I think about the poem a drone could never write. The guilted drone would never suffer. Does that matter? “Come to the stone and tell me why I died.” The child doesn’t ask this favor of us because it matters any longer to him.

## Poem out of Childhood I Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry : Not Angles, angels : and the magnificent past shot deep illuminations into high-school. I opened the door into the concert-hall and a rush of triumphant violins answered me while the syphilitic woman turned her mouldered face intruding upon Brahms. Suddenly, in an accident the girl’s brother was killed, but her father had just died : she stood against the wall, leaning her cheek, dumbly her arms fell, “What will become of me?” and I went into the corridor for a drink of water. These bandages of image wrap my head when I put my hand up I hardly feel the wounds. We sat on the steps of the unrented house raining blood down on Loeb and Leopold, creating again how they removed his glasses and philosophically slit his throat. They who manipulated and misused our youth, smearing those centuries upon our hands, trapping us in a welter of dead names, snuffing and shaking heads at patent truth . . . . We were ready to go the long descent with Virgil the bough’s gold shade advancing forever with us, entering the populated cold of drawing-rooms; Sappho, with her drowned hair trailing along Greek waters, weed binding it, a fillet of kelp enclosing the temples’ ardent fruit : Not Sappho, Sacco. Rebellion pioneered among our lives, viewing from far-off many-branching deltas, innumerable seas. II In adolescence I knew travellers speakers digressing from the ink-pocked rooms, bearing the unequivocal sunny word. Prinzip’s year bore us : see us turning at breast quietly while the air throbs over Sarajevo after the mechanic laugh of that bullet. How could they know what sinister knowledge finds its way among our brains’ wet palpitance, what words would nudge and giggle at our spine, what murders dance? These horrors have approached the growing child; now that the factory is sealed-up brick the kids throw stones, smashing the windows, membranes of uselessness in desolation. We grew older quickly, watching the father shave and the splatter of lather hardening on the glass, playing in sandboxes to escape paralysis, being victimized by fataller sly things. “Oh, and you,” he said, scraping his jaw, “what will you be?” “Maybe : something : like : Joan : of : Arc . . . .” Allies Advance, we see Six Miles South to Soissons. And we beat the drums. Watchsprings snap in the mind, uncoil, relax, the leafy years all somber with foreign war. How could we know what exposed guts resembled? A wave, shocked to motion, babbles margins from Asia to Far Rockaway spiralling among clocks in its four-dimensional circles. Disturbed by war we pedalled bicycles breakneck down the decline, until the treads conquered our speed and pulled our feet behind them, and pulled our heads. We never knew the war, standing so small looking at eye-level toward the puttees, searching the picture-books for sceptres, pennants for truth; see Galahad unaided by puberty. Ratat a drum uppon the armistice, Kodak As You Go : photo : they danced late, and we were a generation of grim children leaning over the bedroom sills, watching the music and the shoulders and how the war was over, laughing until the blow on the mouth broke night wide out from cover. The child’s curls blow in a forgotten wind, immortal ivy trembles on the wall: the sun has crystallized these scenes, and tall shadows remember time cannot rescind. III Organize the full results of that rich past open the windows : potent catalyst, harsh theory of knowledge, running down the aisles crying out in the classrooms, March ravening on the plain, inexorable sun and wind and natural thought. Dialectically our youth unfolds : the pale child walking to the river, passional in ignorance in loneliness demanding its habitation for the leaping dream, kissing quick air, the vibrations of transient light, not knowing substance or reserve, walking in valvular air, each person in the street conceived surrounded by his life and pain, fixed against time, subtly by these impaled : death and that shapeless war. Listening at dead doors, our youth assumes a thousand differing flesh summoning fact from abandoned machines of trade, knocking on the wall of the nailed-up power-plant, telephoning hello, the deserted factory, ready for the affirmative clap of truth ricochetting from thought to thought among the childhood, the gestures, the rigid travellers. —Muriel Rukeyser ### __Rights & Access “Poem Out of Childhood” by Muriel Rukeyser. Copyright © 2005 by Muriel Rukeyser. Reprinted by permission of ICM Partners.

My name is Linda Gregerson and I’m going to be reading “Poem Out of Childhood” by Muriel Rukeyser. In _The Life of Poetry_ , Muriel Rukeyser describes the “first public day” she remembers: crowds of people filling the streets of New York, confetti and crying, kissing and noise. Which prompted young Muriel to take out her drum and beat it. The day was April 28, 1918. False Armistice Day. “The war was not yet over.” “Poem Out of Childhood” is the very first poem in Rukeyser’s first book, _Theory of Flight_ , and it features, front and center, the political manifesto from which she would never depart. “Not Angles, angels,” “Not Sappho, Sacco.” Rukeyser had no patience for the artificial sequestrations of poetry and politics, private imagination and collective history. She was six months old when Gavrilo Prinzip shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo; she always considered herself to have been born under the sign of war. We are creatures of history, she believed; we take it in as we take in air and milk. And, although there is ignorance aplenty, some of it deadly, there is no such thing as perfect innocence, if to be innocent means to be untouched. Rukeyser was fierce in her insistence that the world was one: a tsunami born in Asia moves across the waters to North America; a shooting in Sarajevo means slaughtered millions from the Caucasus to France; the dividends paid to pensioners by Union Carbide are just a little larger because miners in West Virginia have been allowed to die of silicosis. “Not Angles, angels”: a musical logic, and one that appears on the surface to be choosing the life of the spirit. But the phrase derives from a famous story told by the Venerable Bede. When Pope Gregory, writes Bede, observed a consignment of fair-skinned, fair-haired slaves in the market in Rome one day, he asked his companion who they were. “Angles,” said his companion. “ _Non Angli, sed angeli_ ,” replied the Pope. Not Angles, angels. A story the English construed for centuries as a sign that they were a chosen people. The lovely, bell-like echoes of a pun are taken to reflect the stamp of heavenly favor, beneath which lies – just barely beneath – a double-sided story of enslavement and racial privilege. “Not Sappho, Sacco.” The notorious trials and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti played out for seven years of Rukeyser’s early life, calling into question the very foundations of justice and political tolerance in America, throwing a harsh light on class and ethnic divisions. So when the poet, fresh out of her privileged education at Vassar, claims a muse, she refuses to stay within the proper, decorous lyric boundaries. And yet. The “not” in Rukeyser’s alliterative formulations has to be taken with a grain of salt, I think: the wit and the music rely upon the yoking of terms, after all, not upon the occlusion of one by the other. “Not only” is how I hear it. Not only Sappho, but also Sacco. There is no such thing as a separate realm of the aesthetic. “See us turning at breast,” she writes, and the “throbbing” over Sarajevo keeps time with the milky rhythms of a nursing child. The brain’s “wet palpitance” is ripe for the insinuations of “sinister knowledge.” The tenors and textures of our era make us what we are. No “membrane” of innocence separates the home front from the battlefront: the factories are boarded up; the kids throw stones. Polio lurks outside the sandbox. Rukeyser was only twenty-one when _Theory of Flight_ won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, but her artistry was as fully formed as was her moral and political sensibility. Take, for example, the indented four stanzas that constitute the bulk of section two in “Poem Out of Childhood.” A flexible pentameter is repeatedly cut off at the knees in the seventh line of an eleven line stanza. The joyful alliterations of a child’s early lessons in reading harden into wartime headlines: Six Miles South to Soissons. The seductive unfoldings of image and phrase give way to intimations of in-the-wings or in- the-margins violence. A fugitive end rhyme (finds/spine, palpitance/dance, glass/paralysis) settles into something firmer (be/see, circles/bicycles, treads/heads, over/cover, wall/tall) and suggests a system of sinister concordances that history’s children cannot escape and time cannot “rescind.” The fourth of these stanzas begins with the regressive rhythms of tin drum and advertising jingle, then modulates into something so tempered with disillusionment (“a generation of grim children”) that the reader, or this reader in any case, comes to think she can trust the new, more comprehensive momentums (“the music and the shoulders and how the war was over”) until these too come up against the shock of new violence: “the blow on the mouth broke night / wide out from cover.” I don’t know to what extent that blow on the mouth is meant to suggest a “merely” domestic cruelty and to what extent it is meant as a reference to the crushing revelation that news of the armistice had been mistaken: its ability to resonate on both the larger and the smaller scale is surely part of its power. In the ordinary way of thinking, night is something that provides cover. But here it is the ghastly, underlying reality that hides under cover of the ordinary and is always about to break out. The child who “breathes-in experience” is born not merely into death, as all that lives is born into mortality, but also into the surfeit of death that human beings visit upon one another. Throughout the course of her poetic career, with passion and unflinching acuity, Rukeyser would document the infinite varieties this surfeit assumes: death-by-violence, death-by-poverty, death-by-indifference, death-by-greed. And precisely because she refuses to “edit out” the ghastliness and the systems that sustain it, she writes the most life-affirming poetry I know.

## Backwater Blues When it rains five days and the skies turn dark as night When it rains five days and the skies turn dark as night Then trouble's takin' place in the lowlands at night I woke up this mornin’, can’t even get out of my door I woke up this mornin’, can’t even get out of my door There's been enough trouble to make a poor girl wonder where she want to go Then they rowed a little boat about five miles ’cross the pond Then they rowed a little boat about five miles ’cross the pond I packed all my clothes, throwed them in and they rowed me along When it thunders and lightnin’ and when the wind begins to blow When it thunders and lightnin’ and the wind begins to blow There’s thousands of people ain’t got no place to go Then I went and stood upon some high old lonesome hill Then I went and stood upon some high old lonesome hill Then looked down on the house were I used to live Backwater blues done call me to pack my things and go Backwater blues done call me to pack my things and go ’Cause my house fell down and I can’t live there no more Mmm, I can’t move no more Mmm, I can’t move no more There ain’t no place for a poor old girl to go —Bessie Smith ### __Rights & Access This poem is in the pubic domain.

Bessie Smith recorded “Backwater Blues” in 1927, and it became an anthem for one of the most devastating national disasters in US history. The Mississippi River flood of 1927 was horrific. About a thousand people lost their lives. Almost half a million homes were destroyed. Almost a million people became homeless for a time. Entire black neighborhoods were wiped out. This incident gave birth to an important blues era, now known as the Delta Blues era. The blues artists who wrote and sang in this era there are famous names in this era such as Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Howling Wolf, and of course, Bessie Smith, who is one of my favorites. Bessie actually wrote “Backwater Blues” for the Cumberland River flood that hit Nashville on Christmas morning 1926. Nonetheless, when she recorded it in 1927 “Backwater Blues” became an anthem for the great Mississippi River Flood. The flood was a devastating ordeal. There were reports that officials behaved in a discriminatory fashion. They relocated the white folks in an expedient manner but corralled the black folks into abysmal camps. There was evidence of lynchings and unspeakable killings and terrible acts against the black community. Let’s look at this poem closely. I mean, first, it sets up a terrible storm when it rained five days and the skies turned dark as night, when it rained five days and the skies turned dark as night. But the second strophe, the second stanza, we turn inward, and it’s about personal disaster: I woke up this morning can’t even get out of my door, I woke up this morning can’t _even_ get out of my door. The poem moves to personal depression. I think in the best identity poems that the self represents something much larger than the self. The scene is set with the terrific storm by the female speaker, so depressed that she can’t even get out of the door. This personal depression by extension is about the depression of an entire people, marginalized in the back waters, stricken with poverty, homelessness, suffering social injustice, discrimination, and now hit with this catastrophic natural disaster. The despair is deep, is deeply personal, but it is also metaphorical and speaks to the despair of an entire community. Of course, we Americans have historical amnesia. Most of us don’t remember the great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, but when I read this poem a few years ago during a gathering on the behalf of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, the same issues resounded—neighborhoods destroyed, slow government response, the African American neighborhoods were hit the hardest. Terrible images came across the television screen and recently with global warming and continuous flooding and natural disasters this poem survives the test of time and can speak to a variety of incidents and international dislocated peoples. Let’s look at the blues poem as a form. The first two lines are of almost equal length. The first line sets the scene, the second line repeats the first for emphasis. The third line either comments or reverses the first two lines. There is one integral line throughout the stanza. The “a” rhyme glues the three-line stanza together. “Backwater blues done caused me to pack up my things and go, / Backwater blues done caused me to pack up my things and go, / 'Cause my house fell down and I can't live there no more.” This is a song poem. The best song poems, I believe, can live on the pages as well as in the ear. The blues poems remind us that the American poetic tradition can be traced to African American oral tradition; that great art, great poems come from deep suffering that is personal, historical, and political and could be read on the page as well as sung out loud. I can’t do justice to this poem, to “Backwater Blues,” by just reciting it myself. Please download this song, preferably the original 1927 recording by Bessie Smith, and listen to her amazing singing. There’s this rich toughness in her voice that tells us this girl and her people are going to get through this calamity. Her voice is subversive, defiant despite all odds against her. I love writing blues poems. As a poet who writes in English I know that every time I write a sonnet I pay homage to the high European tradition and to master poets like Shakespeare, Dunn, Keats, Petrarch. I see myself as an activist Chinese American poet, and I want to show the multiple sides of my literary inheritance. I make it a point to learn the African American poetic tradition. The blues poems was more here on American soil, and so I study the blues poems closely and write blues poems to pay homage to all those African American blues masters. Of course, I learn so much from the Bessie Smith’s blues poems. I have her strong voice in my ear at all times. Thank you

## A Cowboy’s Prayer _(Written for Mother)_ Oh Lord, I’ve never lived where churches grow. I love creation better as it stood That day You finished it so long ago And looked upon Your work and called it good. I know that others find You in the light That’s sifted down through tinted window panes, And yet I seem to feel You near tonight In this dim, quiet starlight on the plains. I thank You, Lord, that I am placed so well, That You have made my freedom so com- plete; That I’m no slave of whistle, clock or bell, Nor weak-eyed prisoner of wall and street. Just let me live my life as I’ve begun And give me work that’s open to the sky; Make me a pardner of the wind and sun, And I won’t ask a life that’s soft or high. Let me be easy on the man that’s down; Let me be square and generous with all. I’m careless sometimes, Lord, when I’m in town, But never let ‘em say I’m mean or small! Make me as big and open as the plains, As honest as the hawse between my knees, Clean as the wind that blows behind the rains, Free as the hawk that circles down the breeze! Forgive me, Lord, if sometimes I forget. You know about the reasons that are hid. You understand the things that gall and fret; You know me better than my mother did. Just keep an eye on all that’s done and said And right me, sometimes, when I turn aside, And guide me on the long, dim, trail ahead That stretches upward toward the Great Divide. —Badger Clark ### __Rights & Access This poem is in the public domain.

This is Marilyn Nelson, reading “A Cowboy’s Prayer” by Badger Clark. That was “A Cowboy’s Prayer” by Charles Badger Clark. This poem was first published in 1906, but it was published many times as anonymous. It had a life of its own without the name of its author. Badger Clark was so charmed by this that he had a collection of anonymous publications of his poems. He collected them—he had sixty copies of poems that had been—or, at times, that this poem had been published anonymously. Badger Clark’s dates are 1883 to 1957. He was, and is, one of the classic cowboy poets and made a major contribution to the literature of the west. He was the first poet laureate of South Dakota. He was named poet laureate in 1937 and served, I think, 20 years as poet laureate of South Dakota. He lived alone in a cabin with no electricity, running water, or telephone, on land that is now a state park. He travelled as a young man, however, and this poem, “A Cowboy’s Prayer,” was written during the time he was living in Arizona. I think you can hear the “Westernness” of this poem. Badger Clark wrote poems that were very popular during his lifetime. One of his poems was recorded by the singing cowboy star Tex Ritter. Another was set to music and recorded by the Fred Waring chorus. Bob Dylan recorded one of Badger Clark’s songs or poems as a song. And Johnny Cash recorded a version of this poem, “A Cowboy’s Prayer.” I think that to really appreciate this poem, we may have to set aside political correctness and ethnic sensitivity. This poem was published in 1906 during the ascendance of the American myth which, of course we know, refused to confront for many years America’s history of genocide. This was the myth of an America which is big, open, honest, clean, and free. I think this poem is related to Woody Guthrie’s song, which we all know and love, “This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land.” Like that song, this poem expresses a reverence which is evoked by the land. It’s an ecological poem, I suppose one might say . . . one might say it’s a green poem. It’s a poem about loving America as _a land_. As a landscape. I think it has something also in common with Emily Dickinson’s poem, 236, which begins “Some keep the Sabbath going to church / I keep it staying at home.” It is easy to think, because of Emily Dickinson’s life, that when she said “at home” she meant _indoors_ , but a close reading of the poems makes it clear that she meant _out of doors_. At home, she’s at home in an orchard. It’s a poem that takes place in an orchard with a bobolink as a preacher. So it’s a poem also about land reverence, nature reverence. Loving the land. Loving the landscape. I first encountered Badger Clark’s poem in a tourist gift shop, somewhere on a highway—probably Route 66. My family stopped at, somewhere out West, on one of several cross-country driving trips we made during the 1950s. I remember picking up the poem as a postcard in a postcard rack, and I believe it was identified as being anonymous. I remember reading this poem and being deeply moved by it. I must have been maybe nine. I begged my parents to buy it for me and for years I kept it in my box of childhood treasures. I liked then, and still like, the poet’s sense of reverence without dogma. The fact that this is not a poem that takes you to any particular religion. I liked its simple ethical values. Its hope to be clean and honest, sort of, Boy Scout values/Girl Scout values. And I also liked its humility. Its confession of failures, of faults. And I also loved—as a child, I loved the speaker of this poem as I loved all those painfully honest, tough but gentle, big, open, honest, clean and free movie and television cowboys, who populated America’s dream of herself when I was a child during that first half of this last century.

## Howl, Part III Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland where you’re madder than I am I’m with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange I’m with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother I’m with you in Rockland where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries I’m with you in Rockland where you laugh at this invisible humor I’m with you in Rockland where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter I’m with you in Rockland where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio I’m with you in Rockland where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses I'm with you in Rockland where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica I’m with you in Rockland where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx I’m with you in Rockland where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss I’m with you in Rockland where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse I’m with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void I’m with you in Rockland where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha I’m with you in Rockland where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb I’m with you in Rockland where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale I’m with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep I’m with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free I’m with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night —Allen Ginsberg ### __Rights & Access From "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg, from _Collected Poems: 1947-1997_ by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 1956, 2006 by Allen Ginsberg, LLC, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

It’s sometimes interesting to look at poetry through the lens of history. In 1955, the year 29-year-old Allen Ginsberg wrote the poem he titled “Howl,” Marian Anderson became the first African American singer to perform with the 71-year-old metropolitan opera company in New York City. That same year, 1955, rock ‘n’ roll debuted in a film called “Blackboard Jungle,” an adaptation of a novel by Evan Hunter about inner-city teaching. The movie featured the song “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley & His Comets. When the film was screened, teenage audiences began dancing in the aisles. Steve Jobs was born in 1955, the visionary entrepreneur who would introduce the personal computer and desktop publishing to the world, and set in motion a global, technical revolution. In November of 1955, America increased its military involvement in the conflict between North and South Vietnam. Having just won their struggle for independence from France, the two had decided to go to war against one another. It’s rare that a single event results in permanent social change, and more rare, yet, when that single event is the publication of a poem. “Howl” is one of those few poems. Dedicated to Carl Solomon, a man Ginsberg met when he was visiting his mother in a mental hospital, “Howl” famously begins, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked . . .” It goes on from there to become a sustained, high-energy complaint about social hypocrisy. The poem’s essential argument is that America in 1955 had so narrow an idea of what is considered “normal,” that there was no room for any diversity or creativity. For a man, “normal” in 1955 was someone with a nine-to-five job who intended to marry, or had already married, a woman who wore short-waist dresses and high heels. Homosexuals like Ginsberg risked not just social alienation, but imprisonment. In every state of the union, sex between consenting adults of the same sex was punishable by a jail or prison sentence. In “Howl,” Ginsberg celebrates all of those whose lives fell outside what was considered mainstream. He celebrates those who are marginalized because of their sexuality, or their race, or because their political ideas were considered radical, or because they were artists or musicians, or because they were drug addicts. He registers his objection to the fact of their social outcast status, and highlights the contradiction between a country that says it welcomes difference but then fails to protect the rights of those who are different. The poem, written in long lines, has four parts—the last of which is titled “Footnote for Howl.” The long-line free verse form was first used 100 years earlier by another American poet, Walt Whitman. In Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself,” those long lines celebrate Whitman’s individuality, and invite all readers to likewise celebrate theirs. Whitman’s argument is that we all belong in the same universe. Because both poems are written in long lines, the music of the two poems is in some way similar, and yet is also very different. Both poets use a poetic strategy called “anaphora,” where the poet creates a sound pattern based on repeating one or more words at the beginning of several consecutive lines. In Whitman’s poem, the use of anaphora gives the poem an expansive, oracular quality similar to Protestant sermons in the King James Bible. In Ginsberg’s poem, the use of anaphora also has echoes of a sermon, but the sound is more like a sermon delivered by a zealous, ecstatic, almost manic revival tent preacher. In spite of the tonal difference, both poets are widely inclusive, folding into the poem anything and everything American, and of their moment: Whitman’s vast pastoral landscape becomes Ginsberg’s mean-city streets. While Whitman slyly gestured toward both homosexual and heterosexual practices, Ginsberg’s sexual references are explicit, slang-based, and sometimes graphic. While both poems argue for freedom, and for belonging, Ginsberg’s poem is much more confrontational. There’s a persistent sense in “Howl” of an explosive charge about to be detonated, as if the narrow confines of 1955 were so narrow they were bound to give way. After the poem was published in 1956 by City Lights Books, the publisher, poet, and City Lights bookstore owner, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was arrested and charged with disseminating obscene literature. The “Howl” obscenity trial came down to the question of who has the right to speak, and who has a right to read that speech. Academics were called to the witness stand, with some speaking for, and others against, the poem’s literary merits. The deciding judge, Clayton Horne, found that the poem was not obscene. He wrote this in his decision: > The authors of the first amendment knew that novel and unconventional ideas > might disturb the complacent, but they chose to encourage a freedom which > they believed essential if vigorous enlightenment was ever to triumph over > slothful ignorance. He went on to say: > I do not believe that “Howl” is without redeeming social importance. The > first part of “Howl” presents a picture of a nightmare world; the second > part is an indictment of those elements in modern society destructive to the > best qualities of human nature—such elements are predominately identified as > materialism, conformity, and mechanization leading toward war; the third > part presents a picture of an individual who is a specific representation of > what the author conceives of as a general condition; “Footnote to Howl” > seems to be a declamation that everything in the world is holy, including > parts of the body by name—it ends in a plea for holy living. “Howl,” fueled by the publicity from the trial, became one of the most famous poems of the 20th century. It’s the artifact of a moment when the young poet Allen Ginsberg decided to take a stand to support and protect the freedom that democracy promises. There was no poem like “Howl.” He invented it out of his youthful desire to be rebellious, both in his life and in his poetry. Rebellion is part of the American identity, and “Howl” embodies rebellion. It calls into question limits on sexuality, and on art. By reprising Whitman’s long poetic line, Ginsberg linked his poem to existing poetic tradition, but he shifted the focus and revved the speed to make it better represent his own historical moment. In doing so, he ushered in a new music in poetry, just as the music of rock ‘n’ roll was being born, and racial barriers were coming down, and the contentious Vietnam War was beginning. The continual effort to reinvent the past for one’s own era is very American. We’re charmed by changes in fashion, cars, and architecture. We tell time by evolving styles. “Howl” defines a certain moment when the beat generation refused to behave, but its greatness lies in the fact that it is timeless in its concerns, and the way it takes its stand for lasting principles. That’s what makes it a great poem—and a great American poem.

## A Plain Song for Comadre Though the unseen may vanish, though insight fails And doubter and downcast saint Join in the same complaint, What holy things were ever frightened off By a fly's buzz, or itches, or a cough? Harder than nails They are, more warmly constant than the sun, At whose continual sign The dimly prompted vine Upbraids itself to a green excellence. What evening, when the slow and forced expense Of sweat is done, Does not the dark come flooding the straight furrow Or filling the well-made bowl? What night will not the whole Sky with its clear studs and steady spheres Turn on a sound chimney? It is seventeen years Come tomorrow That Bruna Sandoval has kept the church Of San Ysidro, sweeping And scrubbing the aisles, keeping The candlesticks and the plaster faces bright, And seen no visions but the thing done right From the clay porch To the white altar. For love and in all weathers This is what she has done. Sometimes the early sun Shines as she flings the scrubwater out, with a crash Of grimy rainbows, and the stained suds flash Like angel-feathers. —Richard Wilbur ### __Rights & Access "A Plain Song for Comadre" from THINGS OF THIS WORLD by Richard Wilbur. Copyright © 1956, renewed 1984 by Richard Wilbur. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Not his most famous poem, and neither short nor long, Richard Wilbur’s “A Plain Song for Comadre” has nonetheless haunted this reader since I first came upon it in the 1970s. The poem is partly about the years passing, so I’ll date it within the context of Wilbur’s life (he lived 96 years, dying in 2017) and my own life. The poem’s first journal appearance was in _Poetry_ in February 1954, half a year before I was born, and it was then collected in Wilbur’s third book, _Things of This World_ , in 1956. I don’t think a single year has gone by in the last forty when I haven’t read it at least two or three times, or discovered a few lines from it echoing in my head—particularly “It is seventeen years /Come tomorrow //That Bruna Sandoval has kept the church /Of San Ysidro…” Why this milestone achieved by Bruna Sandoval, a “comadre” (in Spanish, a neighbor or a friend or a godmother) who cleans a church in a small California town on the Mexican border, should so move me, born in Michigan to a wholly different life, is something of a mystery. Any solution may have to start with the tone of high importance Richard Wilbur so often brings (I’m going to use the present tense about him—his poetry lives) to the things of this world. What we do matters: writing or reading poems, scrubbing floors. And yet Wilbur’s reader must be careful not to say anything too neat and summary about his poems; this poet may have perfected simplicity, but he isn’t easy. Although the title’s “Plain Song” suggests both the unison singing of the earliest Christian church choristers and Wilbur’s own lyric, he starts on such a high philosophical plane that we have difficulty knowing what he means. “Though the unseen may vanish”—the very first phrase is a conundrum. Isn’t it the _seen_ that may vanish? The sentence goes on: “though insight fails /And doubter and downcast saint /Join in the same complaint…” Oh, now we “see.” The “insight” that fails us is the failure of faith; of thinking that “holy things” may have vanished merely because we don’t see them. The art of seeing has always been at least as essential to Wilbur’s enterprise (he was the son of a painter) as his Christian beliefs. Having established the metaphor of vision here, as in so many poems, Wilbur now enriches the scene by listing “holy things” (“a fly’s buzz, or itches, or a cough”) perceived only by senses other than the visual—of hearing and of touch. Wilbur’s fly, as many readers have noted, drifts in by way of his beloved Emily Dickinson. (“I heard a Fly buzz - when I died,” her poem begins; and its later phrase “With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz” is a little triumph of synesthesia that may also have inspired Wilbur’s sense-scumbling.) In any case, holy things are “harder than nails”—a homely cliché that is not a cliché, given that it may hint too at the Crucifixion; and perhaps it’s here, at the end of the first stanza, that we first take note of how liquidly Wilbur’s enjambments contradict the hard-as-nails edges of his lines. Although the rhyme scheme of the six-line stanza is securely hammered in place (each rhyme exact, and in the symmetrical sequence _abbcca_ ), the liquidity comes partly from a metrical scheme that contradicts that chosen symmetry. The number of stresses per line as the stanza progresses (that is, 5 stresses in the first line, followed by 3,3,5,5, and 2) makes its own asymmetrical pattern. That means that in the poem’s first line, for instance, a pentameter ending in “fails” will eventually rhyme perfectly with the stanza’s final line, “nails”—but that concluding line is uniquely, dramatically brief, with only two stresses. Although sense will spill into the second stanza, this sixth line of the first stanza catches you up short. The closest analogy in music might be counterpoint. If such a technique could be called plain song, Wilbur surely relishes being complicated about plainness. Another way to take conscious note of the poem’s liquidity is to look at the length of sentences. The first sentence ends with a question on line 5; the second with a period on line 10. But the poem, we remember, isn’t in five-line stanzas. Its six-line-per-stanza logic depends more on a sort of propulsive patience—on both poet and reader continuing to follow the stanza past the resounding cadence of a sentence. Wilbur’s delays—subjects and predicates preceded by dependent clauses (such as “Though the unseen may vanish”), or by adjectival phrases (as in “Harder than nails //They are”)—take their time in a way that compliments the reader: you can be patient too. The gorgeousness of the language itself makes you content to wait. Taking such firm but leisurely control, in long sentences, of what you will learn when, Wilbur resembles another of his beloved poets—John Milton, whose cosmology seems to be invoked too. Wilbur’s “whole / Sky with its clear studs and steady spheres” that “Turn on a sound chimney” is one whose musical spheres ring out from a long-gone era. But let’s not pass over another moment that precedes this image—in stanza two, where in response to the “sign” of the sun, “the dimly prompted vine / Upbraids itself to a fine excellence.” Richard Wilbur wrote a lot of light verse, most of it aimed at children, and no account of his seriousness should fail to note that he could be laugh-aloud funny. More often, though, his humor involves quiet wit like this. The vine is “dimly” prompted because it doesn’t get enough at first of the “warmly constant” sun; it’s also “dim” because it’s short on intelligence. And yet it has character—it “Upbraids itself,” it self- criticizes as it grows and entwines itself upward. (Note how the word “Upbraids” is placed at the beginning of the line, which by the rules of this poem means “U” must be capitalized—it’s a little taller already.) That self-castigating hard laborer, the vine, which becomes rhymingly “fine” in its excellence, might be seen as a symbol of Bruna Sandoval. But we haven’t met her yet! Among the seemingly casual architectural feats of this 30-line poem is that with the word “Turn” on line seventeen, Wilbur turns at last from general principles to one single human, Bruna Sandoval, and tells us of her seventeen years of work. From here on out, it is her poem. She has “kept” the church of San Ysidro—and with this verb the poet, who seems to enjoy a god- like omniscience about his unsung heroine, shows special attentiveness. He never says she “cleans” the church; instead, she keeps it. She keeps “the plaster faces bright” as well as the “clay porch”—there’s no immortal art in this church, no monumental marble. With his nod in the direction of humble materials, the great Richard Wilbur shows something of his own humility and why he is drawn to Bruna Sandoval’s. She is a person who “has seen no visions” (which recalls the first line’s reference to the “unseen”) and whose goal is “the thing done right.” The simple monosyllabic word “done” is repeated surprisingly soon, too—repeated when the sophisticated Wilbur might have chosen some loftier verb. “For love and in all weathers / This is what she has done.” Doing, over and over, is a form of prayer, he seems to say. The words “sweeping” and “scrubbing” appear _before_ “grimy” and “stained”—that is, the sweeping and scrubbing will be done again. Bruna Sandoval is familiar with this soiled world, and she has no idea she is being celebrated for what she does with it. What she knows is how to “fling the scrubwater out” and, matter- of-factly, to see rainbows and angel-feathers there.

## The Argonaut What made anyone think I was a Communist I don’t know. I never went to any of the Communist meetings. I didn’t know any other Communists. I didn’t believe in any of their tenets. It’s true, I hunted elk in the winter. I never actually shot any, but I followed them. And I laced my cranberry juice with vodka. But these things didn’t make me a Communist. I stood on the bridge and watched the boats go out to sea. I dreamed of going with them one day. I danced alone in my apartment. I hated my job with the government. I went to parties where I didn’t know anyone. I went to the zoo and talked to the animals. I dreamed I had an affair with a zebra and its stripes rubbed off on me. I met a woman I liked and called her on the phone. She said she liked phone sex and I didn’t know what she meant. I lay on the couch and counted my blessings. There were none, or so few they slipped through my fingers. I got up and looked out the window. A cloud of sparrows flew by. I made myself a can of soup. I thought of my relatives, all gone except for one. I called her on the phone. She didn’t remember me. I told her I was Edna’s son. She said, “I remember Edna. I never liked her. She cursed too much.” My mother never cursed, but I wasn’t about to argue. I went to the movies. I saw Hopalong Cassidy. I wished he didn’t wave so much. But I liked the popcorn. I walked about the city, feeding the pigeons. I bought a soda on the street. I sat down in a garden. A woman came along and sat down beside me. She said, “Nice day, isn’t it?” I said, “Yes, very, I like it.” “What do you do for a living?” she said. “I’m an accountant in the government,” I said. “That must be nice,” she said. “But most people I know think I’m a Communist,” I said. “That’s a joke, right?” she said. “To me it is,” I said. “To me, you look more like an Argonaut,” she said. “What’s an Argonaut?” I said. “It’s somebody who swims in the deep waters of the ocean in search of treasure,” she said. “I found a penny in my bathtub once when I was a kid,” I said. “Then you’re an Argonaut,” she said. —James Tate ### __Rights & Access James Tate, “The Argonaut” from _The Government Lake_. Copyright © 2019. Reprinted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins

James Tate died on July 8th, 2015, at the age of 71. This poem is from his final volume of poetry, _The Government Lake_. His life as a poet lasted nearly fifty years, since his first book, _The Lost Pilot_ , won the Yale Younger Poets award when Jim was 22. Jim was my teacher at the MFA program at UMass Amherst, and later became a friend. I loved him and his poems dearly, and learned so much from him and them, and still do. From his very earliest poems his voice was always completely present and appealing. It’s that thing great poets have, that you can’t exactly describe and can never imitate, not that you would want to. Jim was from the Midwest, and his poems have a straightforward, no bull, goofy, casually brilliant bemusement that is unmistakably American: a bit of Chaplin, or the hilarious victim Joseph Keaton, nicknamed Buster by Houdini when he fell down a flight of stairs at the age of three, along with some Will Rogers, the knowing vaudeville cowboy from Oologah, Oklahoma. There was always a storytelling impulse in Jim’s poems, even in the most wild and surreal. In his last several books, he fully embraced the possibilities of narrative, from shaggy dog stories to distracted stemwinders to ordinary rambles that turn sharply surreal. Most are written in the first person, and describe more or less ordinary situations that are constantly slipping into a dreamlike quasi-reality. You could almost add a paradox to a paradox and call them lineated prose poems. Often in Jim’s poems, beyond the antic hilarity, there is also a sense of undefined dread, a gradual unraveling of the conventions we depend on, and our assumptions. This double consciousness, that whatever is “normal” barely covers up something deeper, wilder, stranger, more anarchic, and beyond our ordinary ken, strikes me as characteristic of much of the best of American literature. As in “The Argonaut,” Jim’s poems often start with a premise, either mundane or absurd, as if the reader has wandered into an ongoing internal monologue. Here the speaker gently quarrels with the anachronistic accusation that he’s a communist. He examines his behaviors for signs, and makes a kind of haphazardly organized confession, at turns absurd and heartbreaking, not to being a communist, but something else. A confused lonely dreamer? It does seem a bit dangerous to be one of those these days. It’s a tired truism to say that poems take things that are ordinary, mundane, small, ignorable, and transform them, making them feel full of magic and importance. Yet that is exactly what they sometimes do. And when it happens, as it does here with this small childhood memory and moment of connection between strangers, it can feel thrilling, sad, full of regret and hope and possibility, a representation of how our lives can feel suddenly meaningful in undeniable, unparaphrasable, fathomless ways.

## Guidelines If they ask you what you are, say Arab. If they flinch, don't react, just remember your great-aunt's eyes. If they ask you where you come from, say Toledo. Detroit. Mission Viejo. Fall Springs. Topeka. If they seem confused, help them locate these places on a map, then inquire casually, Where are you from? Have you been here long? Do you like this country? If they ask you what you eat, don't dissemble. If garlic is your secret friend, admit it. Likewise, crab cakes. If they say you're not American, don't pull out your personal, wallet-sized flag. Instead, recall the Bill of Rights. Mention the Constitution. Wear democracy like a favorite garment: comfortable, intimate. If they wave newspapers in your face and shout, stay calm. Remember everything they never learned. Offer to take them to the library. If they ask you if you're white, say it depends. Say no. Say maybe. If appropriate, inquire, Have you always been white, or is it recent? If you take to the streets in protest, link hands with whomever is beside you. Keep your eyes on the colonizer's maps, geography's twisted strands, the many colors of struggle. No matter how far you've come, remember: the starting line is always closer than you think. If they ask how long you plan to stay, say forever. Console them if they seem upset. Say, don't worry, you'll get used to it. Say, we live here. How about you? —Lisa Suhair Majaj ### __Rights & Access “Guidelines” by Lisa Suhair Majaj from _Geographies of Light_. Web del Sol Association, 2009. Reprinted by permission of author.

This is Naomi Shihab Nye and I’m reading a poem by Lisa Suhair Majaj called “Guidelines.” “Keep your eyes on the colonizer’s maps”—“Guidelines” by Lisa Suhair Majaj, an Arab-American poet who currently lives in Cyprus with her husband and two children, is one of my favorite poems about identity. This poem is included in Lisa’s book _Geographies of Light_ published by Del Sol Press, Washington DC in 2009. Her title has bearing here too. Lisa’s poem sheds a clear, compelling light on the sometimes thorny terrain of immigration, identity and belonging, and it does this in an imaginative, comfortable tone which includes us all in the conversation. “Guidelines” functions through a series of simple, potent questions and comments: advice to the listener as it were, arranged in three- line stanzas. It’s friendly. It doesn’t get irritated even when pressed. It reminds me of the power of language to ease situations of potential conflict. Instead of backfiring with fury, the poem gently engages and expands. Its playfulness and nuanced possibility ending with that most gracious turnaround—“How about you?”—suggests the peculiar curiosity of this issue. Who does belong? Does everyone belong? Do we have to do something special to belong? Do people who look like you belong a little bit more? I like the openhearted tone of “Guidelines.” Nobody could say they don’t understand this poem. Yet it’s clever and surprising, as well as revealing and wise. Walking in Claremont, California the other day, I saw a handwritten sign on a wall: NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL. Because I live in a Texas city with a high majority of Latino residents and an ongoing conversation about citizenship and human rights, this sign caught me up. I had never seen the truth stated so simply before. It made me think of what Lisa’s poem “Guidelines” is saying. I think about the people who first lived on all our lands here in the United States and the indignities they have had to face being so often neglected in the presumptions of belonging. I think of my Palestinian refugee father and his lives in both countries—Palestine and the United States—always wanting to belong, always seeking connection. Lisa Suhair Majaj and I happen to share exactly the same heritage, Palestinian fathers and Midwestern German-American mothers, but this is not the reason I like her poem. Her poem speaks for all of us: for bullied middle schoolers and outsider teens, for anyone who ever feels marginalized, for oddballs and wallflowers and hermits and eccentrics and, well, maybe that person who lives right next door to you. How are they doing?

## For My People For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power; For my people lending their strength to the years, to the gone years and the now years and the maybe years, washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging along never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding; For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss Choomby and company; For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood; For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and play and drink their wine and religion and success, to marry their playmates and bear children and then die of consumption and anemia and lynching; For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy people filling the cabarets and taverns and other people's pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and land and money and something—something all our own; For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures who tower over us omnisciently and laugh; For my people blundering and groping and floundering in the dark of churches and schools and clubs and societies, associations and councils and committees and conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches, preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by false prophet and holy believer; For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations; Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control. —Margaret Walker ### __Rights & Access “For My People” Margaret Walker from _For My People_. Yale University Press, 1942. By permission of the University of Georgia Press.

If I could tell you how much I treasure Margaret Walker, if I could tell you how much I miss her presence, her courage, her strength, her non-compromising eyes and intellect, I would. But I all I can do is read what she wrote and left for us, as map, as guide. So that’s what I will do. This is Nikki Finney, and that was Margaret Walker. Margaret Walker’s epic, beautiful, stunning, ageless, “For my People,” which is the title poem from her collection, _For my People,_ that was published in 1942 and won the Yale Younger Poets award. And it’s a book, and a poem, and a poet that have always meant a great deal to me.

## my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell I hold my honey and I store my bread In little jars and cabinets of my will. I label clearly, and each latch and lid I bid, Be firm till I return from hell. I am very hungry. I am incomplete. And none can tell when I may dine again. No man can give me any word but Wait, The puny light. I keep eyes pointed in; Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt Drag out to their last dregs and I resume On such legs as are left me, in such heart As I can manage, remember to go home, My taste will not have turned insensitive To honey and bread old purity could love. —Gwendolyn Brooks ### __Rights & Access Gwendolyn Brooks, “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell” from _Selected Poems._ Copyright © 1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks. Reprinted By Consent of Brooks Permissions.

My name is Patricia Spears Jones. I will be reading Gwendolyn Brooks’ “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell.” Gwendolyn Brooks will be ever known as the first black American author to win a Pulitzer Prize, and she was a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Her time there served as a model for poet laureates to come. Brooks’ subjects were the life and times of black Americans, especially those who moved north during the Great Migration when millions of southern blacks moved to the states in the Midwest, the West, and the North. Since she was Chicago-raised (even if Kansas-born) her focus was on Chicago blacks, with whom she and her family shared trying social and economic times. She understood and deeply cared about the plight and aspirations of her fellow black citizens. “my dream, my work, must wait till after hell” is an excellent introduction to Brooks’ ability to express the very complicated lives of black Americans. Written as part of a series of poems dedicated to black American servicemen who were about to enter military service in World War II, these poems—all sonnets—captured their plight. Here were black men who were daily discriminated against going off to fight fascism. The patriotism was strong, and their willingness to fight and die for this nation showed that love of this difficult country. But, more importantly, Brooks’ speaker wants to live—to return, to gain the “bread and honey” that he will miss when he goes to war. Gwendolyn Brooks is one of my poetry foremothers, and she represents what American poets should continue to be like. She worked on her craft, she deeply cared about the ways in which the ideals of this nation rarely served its citizens, and her work demanded that we attend to those ideals and create the environment to make them real, so that the “bread and honey” would feed all of us. I am so pleased to have this fine poem—this exemplary sonnet—enter into the soundscape of the Library of Congress.

## February A chimney, breathing a little smoke. The sun, I can't see making a bit of pink I can't quite see in the blue. The pink of five tulips at five p.m. on the day before March first. The green of the tulip stems and leaves like something I can't remember, finding a jack-in-the-pulpit a long time ago and far away. Why it was December then and the sun was on the sea by the temples we'd gone to see. One green wave moved in the violet sea like the UN Building on big evenings, green and wet while the sky turns violet. A few almond trees had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes out of the blue looking pink in the light. A gray hush in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue into the sky. They're just going over the hill. The green leaves of the tulips on my desk like grass light on flesh, and a green-copper steeple and streaks of cloud beginning to glow. I can't get over how it all works in together like a woman who just came to her window and stands there filling it jogging her baby in her arms. She's so far off. Is it the light that makes the baby pink? I can see the little fists and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts. It's getting grayer and gold and chilly. Two dog-size lions face each other at the corners of a roof. It's the yellow dust inside the tulips. It's the shape of a tulip. It's the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in. It's a day like any other. —James Schuyler ### __Rights & Access James Schuyler, "February" from _Collected Poems_. Copyright © 1993 by James Schuyler. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

I love James Schuyler’s poetry—its effortlessness and grace, its sound, its thick (and at times gnarly) descriptions. A palpable sense of irreality is everywhere present in it; his poems combine the attention of an ethnographic account with the charm of a great dinner guest. Add to this a private reading of the physical world imprinted on his nervous system. In his hyper-real descriptions, colors shift. The words shimmer. The “violet sea” verges on the violent. There’s a deeper cold behind the “gold and chilly” weather as he chronicles a major American city from his window. We see beauty and power twinned, the UN building on big evenings, and the green leaves of the tulips on my desk like grass light on flesh. In one sense “February” is composed as a painstakingly specific catalog of discrete images. Each line is a surprise, delighting in the pleasures of coincidence, like “the pink of five tulips/ at five p.m.” Gradually we progress through the New York City day to the dust inside the tulip, to the shape of the tulip, the container the tulip is in (a glass), and the container the glass is in (this day). “February” is not a tranquil Romantic recollection; it is active observation that creates the effect of recollection. Schuyler exchanges a syntax of memory and judgment for a syntax of simultaneity. He uncouples his sentences so that the electric spark must jump from noun to noun, and from event to event, no matter how disparate or seemingly unrelated. The gaps between his lines give us the experience of the passage of time, a verbal time-lapse photography, kind of. Schuyler is a watcher. If you look out the window long enough you can actually “see” time pass as the light and colors of the world shift. John Ashbery wrote “Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is,” and one might say that in this poem, “February,” Schuyler does the work to disclose this invisible schedule, revealing the seemingly random syntax of the physical world. This world as he presents it is both reassuring and unstable. The “day before March 1st” is not always February 28th and by not naming it—but naming what is next to it—he draws attention to this hinge of seasonal, temporal change, this “leap.” The poem is partly about this passage, getting over the hump of winter, as the truck disappears over the hump of the hill, or the speaker “can’t get over” his latest observation. And in this simple gesture nature, commerce, and human reason are intertwined. It is this interconnectedness that makes Schuyler’s poems reassuring in spite of the instability of their surface. One has the sense of events and words being brought together out of necessity, to conduct a vision, giving the apparent randomness of living a sense of coherence and even inevitability.

## 9/11 The first person is an existentialist like trash in the groin of the sand dunes like a brown cardboard home beside a dam like seeing like things the same between Death Valley and the desert of Paran An earthquake a turret with arms and legs The second person is the beloved like winners taking the hit like looking down on Utah as if it was Saudi Arabia or Pakistan like war-planes out of Miramar like a split cult a jolt of coke New York like Mexico in its deep beige couplets like this, like that . . .like Call us all It Thou It. “Sky to Spirit! Call us all It!” The third person is a materialist. —Fanny Howe ### __Rights & Access “9/11” by Fanny Howe, _On the Ground_. Graywolf Press, 2004. By permission of the author.

I’m Rae Armantrout and I chose Fanny Howe’s poem, “9/11.” I chose this poem because it considers the long war we’ve been involved in well since the date of its title. So I’ll start by reading the poem. So “9/11” is a psychological, philosophical and political kaleidoscope. It shakes up our identification and recognitions through its relentless use of simile. Many poets are leery of simile now, and for good reason. Sylvia Plath’s dazzling use of the device spawned a generation of pallid imitators. For a while, in other words, some poets thought the dogged comparison was what poetry consisted of and then a newer generation looked back, to the modernist perhaps, and started avoiding similes. Of course, Fanny’s use of simile is nothing like that of the middle-of-the-road post-confessionalist. She is always a radical. She doubles and triples her similes here. And her similes link some very dissimilar things. So likening isn’t just a device in this poem, it might be said to be the real subject. What happens if we see the deserts of Utah as the same as the deserts of Iraq? We become they, I becomes you, and finally, in the most radical move of all, we all become it. How does that happen? For one thing the poem moves between two philosophical stanchions that diverge sharply in the 1960s: existentialism, which was fashionable back then, emphasizes the responsibility of the individual; individuals give meaning to things. The poem begins with the existentialist and ends with the materialist. I think Fanny uses materialist at least partly in the Marxist sense. Existentialist is for First World people who have choices and the time to think about them. You become a materialist when history happens to you. I don’t think Fanny is really eschewing one and supporting the other, though. I think she is pulled between these positions. The poem puts in the middle. But maybe I should go through it more slowly. In the first three lines, the existentialist first person seems isolated. Here she is like trash in the groin of a sand dune, and like a cardboard home beside a dam. The image of the desert gets introduced almost casually. But it turns out to be central. The fourth, fifth, and sixth lines first equate Death Valley with the desert of the Jewish exodus. And then locate a disaster there, an earthquake, a turret with arms and legs. The isolated existentialist figure then flips into second person, which is associated not with a philosophy, but naturally enough with the beloved. The second person sees Utah as if it were Saudi Arabia and imagines winners—Americans?—taking the hit. I just want to say that a line about winners taking the hit is a brave thing to write in a poem called “9/11.” It seems to suggest that it might do the winners some good to know what it feels like to be hit. And post 9/11 America doesn’t like to hear that. So now the hit is headed elsewhere, and war planes out of Miramar are like a jolt of coke. In the last three lines the poem acknowledges its own method. “Like this, like that / like call us all it / thou it.” Now she seems to be addressing God as both thou and it. “Sky to Spirit! Call us all it!” I love the double or triple meanings of that phrase. In one sense, to be called it is to be equated with a thing, to be brought low. Fanny seems to be saying, “Bring us all low. Make us humble.” On the other hand the lines remind me of the game of hide-and-seek, where the one who’s “it” is the center of attention and is searched for. So is “it” a bit of rubble? Or is “it” the beloved being sought? That’s a real question.

## Areíto por todos Me sacaron como apache de la llanura y del viento me arrojaron como inca de la barca del silencio pero vengo de la sombra del pasado y del futuro me sacaron como indio pero vuelvo como negro. Me sacaron como negro del tambor de la esperanza me negaron el trapiche para moler mis adentros me negaron en yoruba en bantú carabalí pero vuelvo en la manigua cimarrón en blanco y negro. Me sacaron por judío, por latino, por moreno me sacaron por hispano, por guloya y por negrero me sacaron de las nubes donde desnudé la lluvia me sacaron de los montes donde desnudé la tierra pero vuelvo como indio, pero vuelvo como negro. Per vuelvo en español, en yoruba y en taíno regresando por los montes estrenando un rostro nuevo vengo con el mascarón de los que no tienen patria me sacaron, me sacaron, pero vuelvo, pero vuelvo. —César Sánchez Beras ## Ritual Song for Us All They tossed me away as Apache from the plains and the wind they tossed me out as Inca from the bark of silence but I come back from the shadow of past and future they tossed me aside as Indian but I return as Black. They tossed me away as Black from the drumbeat of hope they denied me the sugar mill used to grind my insides they denied me in Yoruba in Bantú in Carabalí but I return to the scrubland as runaway slave in white and black. They tossed me away as Jew, as Latin, as Moor they tossed me away as Hispanic, as Gullah, as slaver they tossed me out of the clouds where I denuded the rain they tossed me out of the hills where I denuded the earth but I return as Indian, I return as Black. But I return in Spanish, in Yoruba and in Taíno trekking back across the wild trying on a new face I come wearing the mask of those who have no country they tossed me away, tossed me away, but I return, I return. —César Sánchez Beras, _Areíto por todos_ (Eng. trans. by Rhina P. Espaillat) ### __Rights & Access “Areíto por todos” by César Sánchez Beras, _Lawrence City and Other Poems / Ciudad de Lawrence y otros poemas._ Wellington House Publishing Co., Lowell, 2007. By permission of the author. English translation by Rhina P. Espaillat.

“Ritual Song for Us All” is my English translation of a poem in Spanish, titled “Areíto por todos” by César Sánchez Beras, a poet who was born in the Dominican Republic and, like me, has lived in the United States for many years. I've chosen this particular poem to read for the “Poetry of America” Project because it deals with Immigration and Migration from an unusual point of view, with a passion and urgency that befits the importance of the issue, but with a breadth that humanizes and universalizes the issue, rather than narrowing it down to the interests of any one group. The speaker of the poem conveys, in his first-person narrative, the situation of the many displaced human beings who, over the centuries and into the present, have been forced by countless circumstances to leave their birthplaces and roots, and begin life over somewhere else. The word “areíto” comes from the Taíno language spoken by the native people of the Caribbean islands. It means “group ritual” or “tribal invocation,̶ and suggests cultural unity, the sense of belonging that is fundamental to the traditional notion of identity. But in this poem, Sánchez Beras refers not only to the Tainos who presumably formed part of his own ancestry and mine, but also to the Apaches, the Incas, the various African people who were brought to the Americas as slaves—Yorubas, Bantus, Carabalis—and then, widening the circle to include still others who have wandered the earth and settled far from home, he goes on to the Jews, the Gullahs, and by implication “Others” from every culture. Speaking for that multitude he invokes, the speaker lists his dispossessions, his many losses: he has been denied the landscapes he once inhabited, the future, his hopes, the fruits of his labor, his liberty. But, he says, each time he is dispossessed, he returns, even if in a different guise: sometimes as the next wave of Others, sometimes, ironically, as a member of the very group that once tossed him out. Even the conqueror and the slaver turn up in the speaker's list of guises, and rightly so, because they, too, are part of our history, and even—for some of us—our ancestry, our present families, our children, and therefore our unborn descendants. Those of us who intermarry know perfectly well that “identity” is not a stable construct but an ongoing process, and that the blood of those who were once “enemies”; is now mingled forever with our own. That knowledge, and its acceptance as a reality of our national life, is one of the glories of America. The poem would be a recital of fruitless travels and endless alienation if it were not for the phrases—repeated nine times—“pero vengo” and “pero vuelvo,” meaning "I come, I return." That stubborn phrase, meant to convey the natural tenacity of every living thing, transforms the poem into a challenge, a triumphal promise that man makes to himself: “Whoever I may be, however I may be perceived and treated over time, however often I may be tossed from place to place, I return in some form or other, because I am indomitable.” That implied statement resonates with me, as the daughter of political exiles, but it applies equally to those “tossed out” of their place in the world for any reason at all, be it political, religious, economic, or military. And the poem does more than that: it suggests that the human race is—as the science of genetics now affirms—one race, one huge family, linked inexorably, interdependent, whose members are destined to return from every exile, changed but persistent, and continue to braid together, unbraid, and braid again, as long as we exist.

## A Step Away From Them It’s my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs. First, down the sidewalk where laborers feed their dirty glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets on. They protect them from falling bricks, I guess. Then onto the avenue where skirts are flipping above heels and blow up over grates. The sun is hot, but the cabs stir up the air. I look at bargains in wristwatches. There are cats playing in sawdust. On to Times Square, where the sign blows smoke over my head, and higher the waterfall pours lightly. A Negro stands in a doorway with a toothpick, languorously agitating. A blonde chorus girl clicks: he smiles and rubs his chin. Everything suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of a Thursday. Neon in daylight is a great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would write, as are light bulbs in daylight. I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of Federico Fellini, _è bell’ attrice_. And chocolate malted. A lady in foxes on such a day puts her poodle in a cab. There are several Puerto Ricans on the avenue today, which makes it beautiful and warm. First Bunny died, then John Latouche, then Jackson Pollock. But is the earth as full as life was full, of them? And one has eaten and one walks, past the magazines with nudes and the posters for BULLFIGHT and the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, which they’ll soon tear down. I used to think they had the Armory Show there. A glass of papaya juice and back to work. My heart is in my pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy. —Frank O’Hara ### __Rights & Access "A Step Away from Them" From LUNCH POEMS, Copyright © 1964 by Frank O'Hara published by City Lights Books. Permission by Maureen Granville-Smith.

Hi, my name is Ron Padgett. I’m an American poet, and I’ve been invited by the Library of Congress to read a poem that somehow deals with the idea of the “American identity.” I chose a poem by the poet Frank O’Hara, an American who was born in 1926 and died in 1966, called “A Step Away from Them.” I chose this poem not because Frank O’Hara in it talks about the American identity or discusses this concept, but because the poem itself is, I think, an embodiment of a particular kind of American identity; that is to say, the identity of Frank O’Hara, who was extremely American. And it’s just such a perfect example of a poem that, I think, well, I was going to say couldn’t be written anywhere else, but that’s an assumption I can’t make. I’ll say, though, that it _wasn’t_ written anywhere else up until the time Frank O’Hara wrote it. Frank O’Hara wrote this poem in 1956 at a time when, well, a lot of people knew who Jackson Pollock was, but not a lot of people knew who Bunny was, or John Latouche, or Edwin Denby, or even in America, Pierre Reverdy. But Frank O’Hara knew who they were, and he put them in this poem because they were either friends or someone he felt close to in some way. And it’s that closeness that I want to talk about here. That this poem, to me, sounds almost like a letter to a friend: it has a personal tone, it’s conversational, it’s very open and unguarded. So it’s kind of vulnerable in a way that European poetry, for example, at the time wasn’t, and, in fact, still isn’t often. So it’s particularly American in its willingness to be open to people and places and of course he’s totally open to his lunch hour [laughs]. That is to say, he has a lot of experiences during this lunch hour, and he puts them all in to let you know what they are. So, other things that make this poem “American” in particular are, well, first of all, the idea of the “lunch hour,” and then the product such as Coca-Cola, and a location such as Times Square, and then the sort of melting pot that America is supposed to be, and sometimes even is. In this poem there’s several Puerto Ricans, there’s a black guy, there’s a blonde girl, there are construction workers with no shirts on, there’s a woman wearing foxes. So there’s really a tremendous mix of people, which, again, in a lot of other countries at that time you didn’t find such an obvious international, multi-cultural setting. Other things about this poem that make it particularly American are these: for instance, he doesn’t use any rhyme in this poem; he doesn’t use any set, metrical, or rhythmical patterns; he doesn’t use any metaphors; he doesn’t use any so-called “poetic” language; he doesn’t try to compress the issue down to this very fine, dense, cryptic, sort of “diamond-like” that people often describe poetry as having. And on the other hand, it goes the other way: it’s quite open and expansive, and a little bit influenced, I guess, by Walt Whitman. But I think also, maybe, it was influenced by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who wrote a poem called “Zone,” which is kind of an account of Apollinaire’s walking across Paris. I think that might have been an influence on this poem. But also it has some nice bits of humor in it that are particularly American, and are kind of subtle. For instance, when he talks about the > . . . laborers feed their dirty > glistening torsos sandwiches > and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets > on . . . The word “on” there—I don’t know why it strikes me as funny, but it is, and also you kind of for a moment think the yellow helmets are on the Coca-Cola or the sandwiches—of course they aren’t, but . . . And then later, there’s another sort of delayed bit of information where he stops for a cheeseburger at—well, talk about an American thing, wow—: > I stopped for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S > CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of > Federico Fellini, _è bell’ attrice._ > And chocolate malted . . . So he delays putting the chocolate malted in. I don’t think Frank did that on purpose, I think it’s just the way he thought, that’s the way a lot of people thought, and think— _oh yeah, let me add this!_ And so he does, instead of putting it up with the cheeseburger, and somehow the delay between the cheeseburger and then you get this café, and you get Giulietta Masina the actress, and Federico Fellini the director, and _then_ the chocolate malted comes back. It’s also in a funny spot in which a lady in foxes on such a day puts her poodle in a cab. It’s funny [because] she’s taking such good care of her poodle but she hasn’t taken such good care of the dead foxes that she’s wearing. That juxtaposition, I think, is kind of funny. Let’s see, what else can I say about this? Maybe I should explain that Edwin Denby was a friend of Frank O’Hara’s and was a wonderful writer. He wrote about dance, especially, but also was a wonderful poet. And Bunny, another person in the poem, one of the people who died, was a woman who was a friend and a writer of Frank O’Hara’s named V.R. Lang, but known as Bunny Lang, and then there’s a reference to John Latouche, who was a wonderful writer of songs and of Broadway plays and of operas. And then Jackson Pollock, the famous painter, but they’re all three grouped here because they all three died in very quick succession, and they were all young. So it was quite a blow to O’Hara. And, let’s see, what else can I say? Oh, what’s interesting at the end of the poem—[in] all of this poem—I’m perfectly happy to believe that this really happened, that Frank didn’t make up anything. Except at the very end of the poem, the last parts say: “. . . My heart is in my pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.” And Pierre Reverdy was a French poet who actually died four years after this poem was written, but was hardly known at all in the United States. But Frank O’Hara knew his poems and he refers to what seems to be a book by Pierre Reverdy, but Pierre Reverdy never published a book called “Poems.” So Frank did a little inventing right there, but otherwise I think it all sounds like a thing that really happened. Anyway, the American part is also, as I said, it’s a very full poem for a lunch hour—a lot seems to happen. Partly because it’s happening in New York City, a big city with a lot of activity, and a lot of quick coming and going, and of all the different kinds of things. So it’s a bombardment of the senses, which I associate with New York City, certainly very much, and with the United States, certainly. Not the whole United States, of course. No place in America is as busy as New York. But it makes it a particularly American poem for me. Let’s see. Actually, one thing I didn’t say is I love this poem and I always have. When I first read it, along with some others in a similar vein by him, it had a big effect on me as a writer. At the time, I was kind of a young poet and very intense and serious and a little bit tight, actually, in the writing. While I tried to improvise and be far out, I really wasn’t, even that felt forced and tense. Reading poems like this by Frank let me realize I could relax. I could just sit back and relax and say anything I wanted. And something nice might happen as a result, so I’ve always loved these poems—these kind of lunch poems of Frank’s. I like other poems by him as well, a lot of them. In fact, trying to pick just one to read by him was kind of difficult. But this one is a sure winner for me. I’ve always loved it. So, I guess, let’s see, should I say anything else? Maybe I’ve said enough. Anyway, I hope you like this poem, too, and that you’ve read or will read a lot more poems by Frank O’Hara, because he is an American treasure, and if he’s any example of what it’s like to be an American, I’m happy to be one myself.

## The March into Virginia Did all the lets and bars appear To every just or larger end, Whence should come the trust and cheer? Youth must its ignorant impulse lend-- Age finds place in the rear. All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys, The champions and enthusiasts of the state: Turbid ardors and vain joys Not barrenly abate-- Stimulants to the power mature, Preparatives of fate. Who here forecasteth the event? What heart but spurns at precedent And warnings of the wise, Contemned foreclosures of surprise? The banners play, the bugles call, The air is blue and prodigal. No berrying party, pleasure-wooed, No picnic party in the May Ever went less loth than they Into that leafy neighborhood. In Bacchic glee they file toward fate, Moloch uninitiate; Expectancy, and glad surmise Of battle's unknown mysteries. All they feel is this: 'tis glory, A rapture sharp, though transitory, Yet lasting in belaureled story. So they gayly go to fight, Chatting left and laughing right. But some who this blithe mood present, As on in lightsome files they fare, Shall die experienced ere three days are spent-- Perish, enlightened by the vollied glare; Or shame survive, and, like to adamant, The throe of Second Manassas share. —Herman Melville ### __Rights & Access This poem is in the public domain.

I am Rosanna Warren. I am reading the poem, “The March into Virginia Ending in the First Manassas” by Herman Melville. This poem appeared in Melville’s collection of poetry _Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War,_ which he published in August 1866 at the end of the Civil War. It’s a poem much concerned with identity: North or South? Youth or age? What is it to be an American? What is it to be living? What is it to be dead? What is it to be ignorant? What is it to be (as the poem says) “enlightened?” The Battle of Bull Run, also called First Manassas, was fought on July 20th and 21 in 1861—one of the first major battles of the war—and in it the Union army of the North commanded by General McDowell was 35,000 men strong and marched out from Washington to meet the Confederates on the field at Manassas Junction, Virginia, just 20 miles away from Washington, D.C. The Union forces were so convinced of their superiority that they treated it like a picnic, or as Melville says, a “berrying party”— not b-u-r-y-i-n-g, which is the pun hidden there, but “berrying”—as in collecting b-e-r-r-i-e-s: strawberries, raspberries, blackberries. And so convinced was the North of its victory that civilians went out from Washington in their carriages and on horseback with picnic baskets and bottles of wine as if it were a sporting event they were going to witness and cheer on. What happened was a furious, bloody battle and a humiliating defeat for the North. There was revealed the military genius of the Southern commander who became known as Stonewall Jackson because in this battle he stood, as they said, like a stone wall and repulsed the Northern troops. So even though the Confederate army of 31,000 there under General Beauregard was smaller than the Union, they outfought them and outwitted them. The best description of the humiliation of the Northern army is by Walt Whitman, who wasn’t present at the battle, but was in Washington at the time and described the return of the defeated soldiers in his book, _Specimen Days._ Here’s Whitman: > The defeated troops commenced pouring into Washington over the Long Bridge > at daylight on Monday, 22d—day drizzling all through with rain. The Saturday > and Sunday of the battle (20th, 21st,) had been parch’d and hot to an > extreme—the dust, the grime and smoke, in layers, sweated in, follow’d by > other layers again sweated in, absorb’d by those excited souls—their clothes > all saturated with the clay-powder filling the air—stirr’d up everywhere on > the dry roads and trodden fields by the regiments, swarming wagons, > artillery, &c.—all the men with this coating of murk and sweat and rain, now > recoiling back, pouring over the Long Bridge—a horrible march of twenty > miles, returning to Washington baffled, humiliated, panic-struck. Where are > the vaunts, and the proud boasts with which you went forth? Where are your > banners, and your bands of music, and your ropes to bring back your > prisoners? Well, there isn’t a band playing—and there isn’t a flag but > clings ashamed and lank to its staff. Melville’s focus in his poem is on the boys, on the youth of the soldiers; as he says, “All wars are boyish and are fought by boys.” And, master poet that he is, he understands that meaning is carried by sound patterning in poetry. He gives us a very powerful patterning with the sound of “b”; we’ve already had the cue that “b” is associated with the boys—“all wars are boyish”—so we get these other “b” words like the sexual energy of the boys in the phrase “turbid ardors,” “Not barrenly abate,” with “banners,” “bugles,” “berrying party,” the air is “blue.” And the “b”s reach their height, their intensity, in the god Bacchus, in “Bacchic glee they file toward fate.” Bacchus, the god of wine, the god of freedom, the god of wild celebration. This is the boys’ ignorance, this “Bacchic glee,” they think it will be a wild party, this battle. In the very next line they are delivered to a very different god, Moloch. Moloch, the god, the Ammonite god of the ancient Near East, worshipped by the Canaanites and the Phoenicians through child sacrifice. This poem shows us that Melville regarded the Civil War as, among other things, child sacrifice. And part of the, I’d say, moral wisdom of this poem and its drama of identity and of Melville’s whole book _Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War_ is that he didn’t finally take sides as so many of the other contemporary poems did at the time, either pro-North or pro-South. Melville was a Northerner. He hated slavery. There was no question about his allegiance in this war, but his contemplation of the larger tragedy of the war went far beyond partisanship. He saw it as a dreadful, fratricidal killing of the children and killing of certain democratic possibilities in order to make possible other democratic possibilities, which he held sacred, as did Lincoln. Other points to make about this poem: the somewhat irregular pattern of the metrics; it veers between four-beat lines, three-beat lines, sometimes goes out to authoritative five-beat line as in “all wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.” And the pattern of light and dark, so that, in the early part of the poem, the boys are marching out to war in lightsome files, that means they’re in a kind of radiant light of hope and youthful ignorance, but what they experience, ironically, some of them by dying, is enlightenment as Melville says, “Perish, enlightened by the vollied glare;” that is the blaze of the rifle fire and the canon shot. “What good is it to be enlightened if you are dead?” the poem seems to ask us.

## Owl the sign for making the most of what you have on the human hand is a thumb at full right angle to the palm for the owl it’s two talons forward two back a flexible foot that crushes the prey and lifts it to the beak to the eyes which are legally blind this is why the owl hunts in the dark in the dusk when nothing is clearly seen and why the owl’s eyes are fixed facing ahead to better focus so its whole face swivels in each direction like the turret on a tank the round plates of feathers surrounding the eyes collect the least sound when it turns the owl is computing by geometry the exact location of the mouse or snake or songbird that moves imperceptibly in its nest toward which the owl sets out from the hole in the tree the burrow the eave of the barn and crosses the field in utter silence wing-feathers overlapped to make no sound poor mouse poor rabbit last night from the porch obbligato to the brook and the snuffling deer intent on the gnarled worm-bitten apples we leave on the tree I heard what must have been a Barred Owl or a Barn Owl or a Lesser Horned Owl close by not deep in the woods what I heard was less a call than a cry a fragment repeating repeating a kind of shudder which may be why the country people I come from thought an owl was prescient ill-omen meant to unspool the threads they’d gathered and wound I was a grown woman when my father took the key from under the eave and unlocked the door to the darkened house he had grown up in and stepped across the threshold and said as he entered the empty room hello Miss Sally as though his stepmother dead for weeks were still in her usual chair in the Medicine Wheel the emblem for wisdom is the same for gratitude at dusk at dark the farsighted owl strikes in utter silence when we hear it from the tree or the barn what it announces is already finished —Ellen Bryant Voigt ### __Rights & Access “Owl”, from _Headwaters: Poems_ , by Ellen Bryant Voigt. Copyright © 2013 by Ellen Bryant Voigt. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

My name is Sally Keith and I am a poet living in Washington, DC. Thinking about it today, it’s February 2018, I would call a great American poem one able to radically describe one kind of time, or experience, inside of another; such a poem would be magnificent in innovation but equally delicate, able to attend to and hear what might otherwise be overlooked. The poem I have chosen to read is Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Owl.” Reminding me at once of Whitman in its expansiveness and Dickinson in it sly profundity (if not also Marianne Moore for yoking the habits of animal and man) the depth of Voigt’s poem is shown most truly by its simultaneously fastidious and wild construction. “Owl” opens recalling an idiomatic phrase (“The sign for making the most of what you have”), one perhaps deeply entrenched in American ideals, a springboard for the description of the owl, and then its kill, that will eventually open out to the story of a human life. Ellen Voigt is a rural poet; having grown up in Virginia and then spending most of her adulthood in Vermont, she always has been. _Headwaters_ , the larger collection, is Voigt’s most recent book, one in which she innovates, letting go of punctuation in favor of carefully arranging “chunks of syntax,” as she has called them, over and across lines, a method of composing that necessitates a fine-tuned awareness of the grand sweep of the sentence, on the one hand, and the rhythmic stress of individual words and phrases on the other. Without an exhaustive dismantling of syllable, line, and sentence, it’s easy to see (and hear) dominant repetitive structures. Most notably, at first, are the extensions in lines like “to the beak to the eyes,” and “in the dark in the dusk,” which intrigue me in their combined dedication to the description and song. It seems this kind of repetition wouldn’t quite work if the sound didn’t dig back, making us recall an actual human voice. As the poem goes on and we are increasingly comfortable with its movement, the kind of repetition varies, and new parts of the poem feel as though they clap together outside of the sequence of the running sentence. We hear the “turret” and the “tank,” which makes way for, at the beginning of the fifth stanza, the sound of the owl as “less a call then a cry” (a phrase we, somewhat oddly, come to hear as repetition). The owl’s supposed “cry” leads, via its own modification, to the poem’s only literal and sequential repetition: the cry like “a fragment repeating repeating.” I’m struck by this reference back to the poem (as writing), and, more importantly, to the aspect of human behavior from which the poem began. The repeating fragment is like a shudder from the “country people” who “Thought an owl was prescient ill-omen meant to unspool threads they’d gathered and wound.” It is at this moment, in the poem’s tightest pivot, through a sonic repetition that is the most distant in its repetitive properties (“they’d gathered and _wound_ I was a _grown_ woman”) that a brief personal narrative emerges. Here, the speaker’s memory of her father revisiting his childhood home, his almost thoughtlessly calling to Miss Sally, his stepmother, long gone, allows the segue into the final consideration of the owl’s mysterious cry. We are ushered into silence, no sound. We feel the power of this invitation not because of the intricate weave of human and owl description, but because we have heard what it sounds like for sonic markers in a longer chain of language to call forth and prioritize one sound while the other, helplessly, falls away. I love the way “Owl” (along with all the poems in _Headwaters_ ) is likely to get described as a kind of writerly feat, which it is, but, then, how wrong we would be in settling there. It is the complexity of the innovation in combination with the tender humanity which makes me feel the poem as American. The poem’s belief (if I can say such a thing), felt both in its construction and what it actually says, is not that it has unearthed rare fact, or confessed a dark story, but somehow, and more deeply, that out of pattern and rigor, individuality will emerge, or has, or, better put: our originality is inherent.

## won’t you celebrate with me won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed. —Lucille Clifton ### __Rights & Access Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me” from _The Book of Light_. Copyright © 1993 by Lucille Clifton. Used with the permission of the The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, [www.coppercanyonpress.org _External links_](http://www.coppercanyonpress.org/).

My name is Sharon Olds and I’m going to read Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me?” Lucille Clifton: “Won’t you celebrate with me?” Yes we will, Lucille. I love this poem. I love that the poem is an invitation and it begins almost with a kind of negative: “Won’t you celebrate with me? Will you celebrate with me?” I love, also, the phrase: “A kind of life.” So many of us feel that we don’t have a normal life but something approximating it—a _kind_ of life. I love the words “shaped” and “model”, sort of Lucille as God in Genesis, creating herself, the way we must try to make ourselves, make our characters better if we can. I love the word “Babylon”, also, the biblical tones of that and the sense of the diaspora of exile. And I love the shiny word “starshine” and the gloomy word “clay” and the image of holding one’s own hand, the star-shine hand clasping the clay hand for solace and courage. And the way we are made of the earth and the stars—we actually, physically are made of the matter of the stars, it turns out. And oh, that ending, that “something”: “something has tried to kill me.” And the word “try”, the way the speaker of the poem _tried_ to shape a life, “something has tried to kill me,” “try” as a dangerous word here. And the word “fail” as a triumphant word: brief, poignant, tough, musical, swift with truth. Miss Lucille, how we do miss you.

## The Orange Bears The Orange bears with soft friendly eyes Who played with me when I was ten, Christ, before I'd left home they'd had Their paws smashed in the rolls, their backs Seared by hot slag, their soft trusting Bellies kicked in, their tongues ripped Out, and I went down through the woods To the smelly crick with Whitman In the Haldeman-Julius edition, And I just sat there worrying my thumbnail Into the cover—What did he know about Orange bears with their coats all stunk up with soft coal And the National Guard coming over From Wheeling to stand in front of the millgates With drawn bayonets jeering at the strikers? I remember you could put daisies On the windowsill at night and in The morning they'd be so covered with soot You couldn't tell what they were anymore. A hell of a fat chance my orange bears had! —Kenneth Patchen ### __Rights & Access “The Orange Bears” Kenneth Patchen from _Collected Poems of Kenneth Patchen_. New Directions, 1949. Reprinted by permission of New Directions.

This is Tony Hoagland. I’m going to read a poem by Kenneth Patchen, an American poet. The poem is called “The Orange Bears.” I love this poem by Kenneth Patchen, and let me tell you a little bit about him as an American poet. He was born in 1911. He died in 1972. He had a beautiful early career in which he was published by Random House and given a Guggenheim grant. And he belongs to a tradition I’d call the sort of buried visionary tradition in American poetry. He was a great pacifist; in some ways he was a socialist, in some ways he was affected by William Blake; and he was a romantic visionary. This is kind of a repressed tradition in American poetry, especially in 20th century American poetry. It seems we are embarrassed by our visionaries. We are also embarrassed by our political poets. The entire socialist tradition of the ‘20s and ‘30s has been repressed and sort of removed from the anthologies, which is a sort of canonical excision which has been documented and described by the scholar Cary Nelson in his anthology of American poetry. So Kenneth Patchen was sort of part of that tradition. He was born in Wheeling—he was born in Youngstown, Ohio, close to Wheeling, West Virginia. And the poem “The Orange Bears” is obviously set in a coal-mining area where there is coal soot covering everything. The poem is obviously in the voice of child, and it’s a poem of great passion, and great grief, and also great anger. To me, this seems like one kind of political poem, really worthwhile kind of political poem. The kind of poem that is in defense of the human, and defense of childhood, and defense of the innocent part of us that is childlike, and given to wonder, and has friends like the orange bears. One of the functions of the poet is to explain the world for the rest of us, for citizens, and to sort of sketch out a map of the world’s hierarchies and causalities and consequences. And I feel that Kenneth Patchen does this in this poem quite beautifully because he’s situating so many different kinds of social and imaginative and anti-imaginative forces in the world that he’s describing. You know the National Guardsmen coming over to strike break, to prevent the union members from striking with their drawn bayonets. You have the coal soot and the coal dust that settles on everything, which is the consequence of industry. And you have the orange bears which are these imaginative allies, part of childhood. You have the wounded child who’s angry at having his innocence taken away, and you have the odd ally, apparently, of Walt Whitman in the Haldeman-Julius edition which the speaker of the poem takes down to the creek to read. And then he says, What did he know about orange bears and the National Guard coming over from Wheeling, West Virginia with drawn bayonets? So, it’s wonderful the way that the speaker is situated among all kinds of forces, and his meticulous mapping of those forces justifies his grief, his anger. And in that sense, I feel like Kenneth Patchen’s poem redeems and reminds us of that part of us that has been violated. I don’t mean that in any kind of artsy, therapeutic way. He actually is describing the way that the soul is tarnished and innocence is evicted. This seems to me to be a beautiful social and political act performed through poetry, which is the act that really lies at the heart of pacifism and our ideas of justice and reminds us of our right to feel outrage, and reminds us of the defense of the soul or the violation of the soul that happens all the time. In that sense I just want to remind you of two other American poets. One is Wallace Stevens, who believed in a very different way that he practiced that the poem is an act of violence designed to push out, to push back at the forces of violence and invasion and nihilism that surround us—to defend the space of the self and the space of the soul. The other is—the other poet I want to bring up is Walt Whitman, who in Kenneth Patchen’s poem is in some ways maligned because all the promises that Whitman makes about the freedom of the self and the immortality of the soul and the great beauty of the world turn out to have been empty promises as far as the speaker of this poem goes. So I love that in his striking back, he strikes back at Whitman also and says: “What did he know about / orange bears with their coats all stunk up with soft coal / And the National Guard coming over / . . . with drawn bayonets?” I love it that this is an equal opportunity outrage on the part of the speaker of the poem. But the other poem, the other—there are a few lines by Whitman which I’d like to remind you of in which Whitman says, in the middle of “Leaves of Grass,” “I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat, / (It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you.” _I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat_ —and I just want to say here that we have to remember the urgent importance that certain things be said, and be said again and again, not to waste the time of our readers, and not to waste the mission of poetry and what it can do.