Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
“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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.”


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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?


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## 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.

Output:
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.


Instruction:
## _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.

Output:
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.