Let us start our nation over again, Vachel Lindsay

from Roosevelt

(written for the Illinois State Teachers' Association, printed as a broadside, and read, and distributed the same day: April 4, 1924)  

Who elected these pole-cats rulers of men?

Let us start a gay nation over again!

Let us start a circus as honest as Barnum's,

With three clean rings, and plenty to see,

Athletes, not snakes, on the trapeze tree.

 

Let us start our nation over again,

In the names of legitimate rulers of men,

In the names of the greatest, and the famous dead:--

Yes, the name of the glittering cinnamon bear,

Never so wicked or sore in the head,

But he fed the children honey and bread.

He taught them the names of the great and the dead,

From the Irish sagas, to Carson and Boone.

 

He loved the villages, Deadwood, Medora,

Tuskeegee and Tuscarora,

Mexicali and Farmington,

Calexico and Bennington,

Arlington and Lexington,

Oyster Bay, Mount Vernon.

 

He loved the cities Denver, Manhattan,

And the wide, great spaces

From the Amazon to Saskatoon--

He loved the heroes, Columbus, Whitman, Lincoln--

He loved the heroes! He loved George Washington!--

Who was honest as youth and white as the moon.

 

--Vachel Lindsay

 

I was looking for something suitable for my mood (I've read nothing but news sites these last two days) and hoped that Lindsay would provide. He did. 

 

Roosevelt, that 'glittering cinnamon bear', is Teddy, who died in 1919. Lindsay says in a note to the poem, he'd read about the 'behavior of two middle western governors' and this poem was the result. I couldn't figure out who the governors were or what exactly they'd done, though...

 

Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was an American poet born in Springfield, Illinois, who died there as well, though he managed to walk across a huge chunk of America in the interim. He's featured on the blog a couple of times before. As a child of Illinois, I've known about him forever. This is about a quarter of the poem from near the end.

 

Political poetry is hard. Too often the political issues prove passing, but nevertheless the poetry is sacrificed to them. Not all of Lindsay's poetry is political, but a lot of it is, and he succeeds pretty often.

 

Let us start our nation over again. 

 

 

Miracles slip past us, Anne Carson

 

Lines

While talking to my mother I neaten things. Spines of books by the phone.

Paperclips

in a china dish. Fragments of eraser that dot the desk. She speaks

longingly

of death. I begin tilting all the paperclips in the other direction.

Out

the window snow is falling straight down in lines. To my mother,

love

of my life, I describe what I had for brunch. The lines are falling

faster

now. Fate has put little weights on the ends (to speed us up) I

want

to tell her--sign of God's pity. She won't keep me

she says, she

won't run up my bill. Miracles slip past us. The

paperclips

are immortally aligned. God's pity! How long

will

it feel like burning, said the child trying to be

kind.

 

-Anne Carson

 

This is from Carson's book of 2005, Decreation, in a section titled 'Stops', which includes several poems about her aging mother. The poem first appeared in The New Yorker.

 

I've been on a bit of an Anne Carson bender lately, mostly rereading, but not entirely. 

The Tragedy of Y

"Well, murder or no murder, all I can say is--thank God for the Mad Hatters!"

That's a reporter who's just been berating Inspector Thumm.

A couple of days before a trawler had fished up York Hatter's body in the New York Harbor. He'd disappeared from his house on Washington Square six weeks before, and from the condition of the corpse--fingers too battered for a fingerprint, face cut up beyond recognition--it seemed he'd been in the water the whole time. The identification was made from the clothes--and a suicide note on the body, in York Hatter's handwriting.

At this point, the dedicated mystery reader (and one anonymous New York reporter) will go, hunh, sure.

Still Thumm, one of New York's finest, unhappily lets it go as suicide until there's a clear murder attempt a month later at the Hatter household. Then he calls in Drury Lane, retired actor and amateur detective who had solved the earlier Tragedy of X. 

There are two more murders to come and one attempted before Drury Lane unwillingly reveals the culprit.

This has the clever conceit that there's a witness, Laura Campion, in the room when the first murder is committed, only she's blind, deaf, and dumb. What could she have perceived? How can she communicate it? 

I enjoyed this, and it shows up on lists of best mysteries, but it isn't as good as The Tragedy of X. I knew from Laura Campion's clue who had done it, and so the final explanation went on too long for me. Still fun! It's recently been reissued (with the cover shown) by Penzler Publishing as an American Mystery Classic.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1932). Spooky House.