election poems

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I’ve finally (mostly) dug myself out of the academic hole that several weeks of election distraction syndrome landed me in, and after one more long day, will finally get around to sharing stories (and some photos) from GOTVing in North Philadelphia. But first, this–I thought it was delightful how many of the blogs I read posted poetry as their immediate, morning-after reactions to the election, and wanted to do a link roundup.

Via Negativa got there first, unsurprisingly, with some original Election Day haiku (check out the comments for more) and is now running an Inaugural Poets Try-Out poll–go vote early and often, as I did.  I didn’t recognize most of the lines quoted, but a few are old familiar friends, and one in particular is by a poet who strikes me as a rather fitting choice for an Obama inaugural.

Manan gave us Wallace Stevens, “The Man With The Blue Guitar,” which was unexpected and lovely.

Lots of folks, including Jim Culleny at 3QD and Language Hat, put up Langston Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again”–I’m pretty sure it was on a lot of minds in the last days of the campaign.

Tamasha posted some lines of Tagore’s–and I’ve been meaning since to send them to the person I was texting back-and-forth with all of that election night, who wrote a dissertation chapter on Tagore’s political thought.

In the comments section of another blog, I saw a link to this post with a small wonderful poem by Elizabeth Bishop–“Rain Towards Morning”, that recalled the strange, weightless feeling in the rain-washed streets after midnight.

The New York Times got five poets to contribute poems, here–none set off real fireworks for me, but Ashbery’s is the best, and there are some odd lines here and there in Mary Jo Bang’s contribution that really work.

(and Maya wrote a waiting poem, weeks before, while Jay Smooth at illdoctrine gave us a spoken-word video: “Poem for the Young Voter“)

Ta-Nehisi’s Friday poem pick in the aftermath was Cornelius Eady’s “Victims of the Last Dance Craze”

and Teju built this beautiful, nuanced essay–which I’ll return to later, I hope–around the kernel of a stanza from Derek Walcott’s “The Arkansas Testament.”  A prescient choice, because it soon transpired that Walcott had written a poem for Obama–and the President-Elect himself was photographed shortly thereafter carrying a collected volume of Walcott’s work.

As for me, I was reading Glück the week before the election, but then, I’m almost always reading her.  Marge Piercy’s “The Low Road”, which a friend calls “the organizing poem”, was on my mind, as were bits of Martin Espada’s “Imagine the Angels of Bread”, Cavafy’s barbarians, some Auden.  On the bus ride back to New York, I was listening to Iqbal Bano sing Faiz.

Any I missed?  Drop some links below.

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