Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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?


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
“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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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/).

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.