Reclamation Part 1

The story of Robert Frost’s appearance at John F Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 goes something like this. Frost had endorsed Kennedy during his presidential run, and Kennedy had used an adapted form of the final stanza of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as part of his stump speech. He reportedly would close it by saying “But I have promises to keep, / and miles to go before I sleep.” I am trying to imagine how savage the response would be if a presidential candidate tried that these days with any poem, and maybe Kennedy caught hell for being corny too, but that was a different century.

When Kennedy won, he asked Frost to write something especially for the occasion. Frost said no at first, and so Kennedy asked him to recite “The Gift Outright” instead and Frost agreed. Frost wound up writing a poem for the occasion after all, and planned to read it at the inauguration, but the weather and the sun’s glare made it impossible for him to see the text, and so he recited “The Gift Outright” instead, which is how it came to be known as the first inaugural poem.

It might have been the only one if not for Bill Clinton, who revived the practice in 1993 when he asked Maya Angelou to write and present a poem at the inauguration, which she did, a poem titled “On the Pulse of Morning.” Miller Williams, who was one of my professors during my MFA years at the University of Arkansas and a deep influence on my work, did the same in 1997 with “Of History and Hope.”

George W Bush didn’t have poems at his two inaugurations but Barack Obama brought it back in 2009 with Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day,” which was one of the first times I ever saw a large number of people get loud about a poem online, mostly because I hadn’t really been in poetry online circles before then. People got loud though. Some of them showed their asses pretty good, in fact, some of them angry because they felt it didn’t hold power to account enough (is that what this poem is supposed to do in the first place?), some angry because it wasn’t, to their ears, poetic enough (it’s a formal poem, a praise song for crying out loud), and so on.

This was pre-social media as we understand it today, so virality was measured in the hits your blog got and how many times you were linked to as part of the “conversation” and how deep into the margins the arguments in your comment threads got. And so many of us wanted to be bloggers, oh my god. We had no idea what we were asking for, or how it could get so much worse when Facebook went live and the whole scene shifted.

What also happened in 2009 though was that people wanted more than just Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem. The AP published 10 inaugural poems by Billy Collins, Gary Soto, Yusef Komunyakaa, Alice Walker, David Lehman, Ted Newman, Amiri Baraka, Bob Holman and Julia Alvarez. Hers is my favorite. It’s a direct response to “The Gift Outright,” and I’m reproducing it here:

The land was never ours, nor we the land’s;

no, not in Selma, with the hose turned on,

nor in the valley picking the alien vines.

Nor was it ours in Watts, Montgomery—

no matter what the frosty poet said.

We heard the crack of whips, the mothers’ moans

in anthems like an undertow of grief.

The land was never ours but we believed

a King’s dream might some day become a deed

to what we did not own, though it owed us.

(Who had the luxury to withhold himself?)

No gift outright for us, we earned this land

with sorrow’s currency; our hands, our backs,

our Rosas, Martins, Jesses, our Baracks.

Today we give our land what we withheld;

the right at last to call itself one nation.

I love so much about this poem, the way it references, even echoes moments in Frost’s poem and takes a bit of a shot at him (the frosty poet). The “we” here feels especially earned in this poem while in Frost’s it feels exclusionary.

Look especially in the second-to-last line, “Today we give our land what we withheld.” Frost’s we is whiter, more patrician “it was ours in Massachusetts and Virginia,” but Alvarez’s is inclusive, and not just of people of color, though they are decidedly and deservedly at the forefront here. I read the second we in that line as referencing everyone who is willing to be part of one nation, how white supremacy harms white people too because it keeps us from experiencing the fullness of life, the possibilities that exist and will come about if only we let ourselves be part of it.

And look, I’m not going to get into Barack Obama’s tenure as president here because what I’m looking at with this poem is this moment where those possibilities seemed closer than they have since. This is a sliver of a feeling that quickly faded, though not before plenty of people wrote lots of books and magazine articles about post-blackness and the like that have not aged well.

Alvarez’s poem stuck with me though, because I love what it says and how she says it. The form is impeccable. She writes with the same cadence that Frost did, that pounding blank verse, though with a wiggle, an eleventh syllable in the last line, which I read as deliberate, a way of saying to Frost “you’re not in control of this anymore.” The last stressed syllable of NA-tion saying “nay.” Okay that’s probably a step too far.

I’ve also always loved poems that are in conversation with others, or which take on their forms, their skeletons and put new flesh on them. I’ve done it a number of times. There are two in my book (I have copies in my closet if you’re interested): “i sing of Brian, born of God” which owes a lot to “i sing of Olaf, glad and big” by E. E. Cummings, and “Jubilate Patro” after Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno,” which I wrote about back in April. I also did a parody of one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets which was published in Measure years ago which started “Batter my arteries, trans-fatty globules…” and so on. It was available on their website for a while but isn’t now, which is probably for the best.

Which is my roundabout way of saying that I kind of have one of these for “The Gift Outright.” Or rather, I have sixteen, each with one line of Frost’s poem in the place where it appears in the original. So I have 256 total lines of poetry, 240 of mine and 16 of Frost’s. And I’m going to post them on this Substack, in doses of 16 lines at a time, starting with this newsletter/blog/whatever this is I guess.

But first, some notes on what I was thinking when I conceived of this project maybe 4 years ago and then kept coming back to it fitfully because it wouldn’t leave me be.

Where Frost’s poem was about American exceptionalism with a special focus on New England and the 13 colonies and his idea of the United States and where Alvarez’s poem was also a sweeping look at everyone who had been ignored by Frost and also about how the US had not been exceptional before then but maybe had a chance to change that, my poem is a lot more focused on the local. I wanted to look at land and belonging to it in a much more individual and local way. And so all 16 of these poems take place in the New Orleans suburbs, St. Tammany Parish, mostly Slidell where I grew up.

I haven’t been back to Slidell, not really, since I moved away to get married for the first time in 1990. I’m sure it’s changed in some ways and is the same in others. Sometimes I’ll look at the local media and I’ll recognize a name or two. A childhood friend owns a restaurant. A guy I went to high school with was honored for his volunteer work with the local hospital. A guy I graduated with has been a sports journalist all over the country for the last two decades; another was a Navy fighter pilot and according to LinkedIn now flies with Delta. And so on. But I’m not in touch with any of them now. My connection to the place is in memory of the place, of the land, of the effect it had on me then and that I carry with me today all these years and miles later.

I called my poem Reclamation because that’s what I kind of feel like I’m trying to do here, is reclaim the land from Robert Frost but also from this big simplistic idea of the US. For all that Frost might have looked at me, a middle-aged straight white guy, and seen someone who fit into his view of America, he’d have been wrong. Yes I am those things but I’m also a southerner and a Louisianian and was a kid who wandered pine woods and carried a pocketknife just in case we saw a snake and got good grades but knew my accent might keep me out of more exclusive places and finally said fuck it I’m keeping my voice.

Reclamation

            after Robert Frost

The land was ours before we were the land’s.

As kids we claimed the woods, the creeks and all

that lived in them. We dug worms out of soil,

tramped through pine scrub with poles and a mostly

empty tackle box toward ponds where we’d catch

perch, baby bass three times, then throw them back.

Some days Eddie had cigarettes; the smoke

latched onto the sweat in our hair and necks.

Other days we’d raid the dumpster behind

the newsstand for comic books or porn

with the covers torn off, scrounge ditches for bottles

to return for nickels. I think we knew

we were poor but not quite what that meant

beyond manual windows on the car

that didn’t always start, hand-me-down clothes,

plain white labels on our cans of corn.

As always, thanks for reading. I plan to post a new section of the poem once a week until it’s done, and I have a list of poems by other people long as the trailer I grew up in that I want to get to as well. I’ll be back soon.