American History in Verse by Ed Sanders

An active Beat-era "peacenik" with a penchant for poetry and music seems a uniquely talented individual. Ed Sanders wrote the History of America in Verse which starts in 1450 and ends in 2000 with the stolen election. He built his own instruments, and his 1982 performance in Times Square of Henri Matisse inspired many; and he is the founder of The Fugs, a kind of punk rock band avant la lettre. His writing (History of America) is clear, blunt, succinct, witty, off-hand, irreverent, and true, and bears the trace influences of Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass), Charles Olsen (of the Maximus Poems) & Allen Ginsberg (Howl). His writing, again, is politically savvy and recalls the Civil Rights Era and the happenings of his youth in the early Sixties when he placed flowers in the rifle barrels of National Guardsmen and exorcised the Pentagon. He now makes his Yippie home in Woodstock, New York where he publishes a newspaper.

Jazz Fan Looks Back by Jayne Cortez

Cortez's poem is in the strained syncopated meter of jazz, a kind of stride talk. It reviews the history of Jazz by naming the names of the great Jazz Legends who gave Jazz a name. It is a pure celebration, a paen to Jazz music, an epidictic. The speaker even styles herself after the women in Jazz whom she admired. The past tense is key, for the speaker is "looking back" on an era that no longer sizzles, larger than life, but which persists in memory and tribute. So for all its celebratory tone, Cortez's poem is also elegiac, like a good ol' fashioned New Orleans funeral.

For the young who want to by Marge Piercy

This refreshing poem is nearly thirty years old. I had never read Marge Piercy before. In "For the young who want to," the speaker's conclusion is that "Work is its own cure." After you've done something worthwhile, others praise you; but before the result occurs, all you get is criticism. The speaker seems to be pointing out, among other things, a tendency of human nature. Knowing this should forearm creative people against placing too much stock in what people say. Self-reliance is much more important than paying any mind to the "labels" other like to stick on you, whether they be talented, bum, delusional, sadist, etc.

Harlem by Langston Hughes

Here is a spiky poem, built like a virus, that infected the minds of class-conscious integrationists and militants, alike. It dared to speak in the voice of a "native" and portray Negro life as it was. Hughes enumerates several of the options open to Black Folk in a country that did not make good on its promise of emancipation, but chose rather to ignore the law, or strangle the hope of freedom in a tangle of legalisms. The dream of equal representation, enfranchisement, equal opportunity, and civil rights had been "deferred" after 1877 (the end of the Reconstruction era) by the "separate but equal" provisions of the Jim Crow laws in the South. The question that Hughes asks is how are Black people supposed to live, educate themselves, earn a living, and raise their children in a white racist society? What social "types" are engendered by veiled oppression and freedom in name only? Are Black people expected to just wither and die, or become ill, or turn to crime? Or become buffoons? Or use their strength to merely bear the weight of oppression? Or should Black people follow the revolutionary principles outlined by the framers of the Constitution?

Blackberry Eating by Galway Kinnell

A good poem about eating, and how eating is connected to the art of wordcraft, or speaking. The alliterations--liquids, sibilants, plosives, and bilabials--seem to evoke the lusciousness of the experience of eating blackberries: /l/, /s/, /p/, /b/, and /m/.