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250mph SECOND WIND

There was a good question posed the other day about a subject not often talked about: Poetry. It’s an everyday subject to poets, who hope to transcend the everyday normalcy in what they write, but to most of us it is something usually thought of at times of celebrations, anniversaries, remembrances, and often highlighted at historical times. It seems fitting to discuss that subject’s history, as we have one of those events coming up, in the 250th anniversary of our nation’s 1776 founding.

The question was, ‘What is the best poem written lately, as it reflects on the United States of America?’. I will for today define ‘lately’, to be the last hundred years, and will reveal my bias that prior to that point, in my humble opinion (IMHO), the best poem regarding our country was, ‘Song of the Open Road’, written by Walt Whitman in the 1840s. Its last line reads, ‘Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?’ I believe the American answer is still, and even more so today, ‘yes’.

At a mile marker of 250 years, when many historical empires, influences, and epochs have found themselves on the wane, we find our country on an ascendancy, having a second wind, that will portend through its third century.

My answer, IMHO, the best American poem written in the last 100 years is, ‘Brown River, Smile’, written by Jean Toomer in the 1930’s. The poems first two lines and last two lines are the same, and say, ‘It is a new America / to be spiritualized by each new American’. I believe that is also still true, in 2024.

I write this to encourage others read the poem, ‘Brown River, Smile’, and express their own opinion on the question. Look it up, ask your phone for a copy. It was the next meaningful step in American poetry from Whitman’s American perspective, continuing a great tradition, as it anticipates the next step.

Jean Toomer happens to have been a black man, but I do not believe the poem was written from a black man’s perspective, just as Walt Whitman did not write, I believe, from a white man’s perspective. They both wrote, IMHO, from an American perspective.

IMHO, and one in which I have no standing, the best poem written from a black man’s perspective, or maybe just the first, best poem from that perspective, was ‘Let America be America Again’, by Langston Hughes, coincidentally also written in the 1930s. Its first two lines read, ‘Let America be America again / Let it be the dream it used to be’. It may be, in tandem with ‘Brown River, Smile’, the latest best American poem. You tell me?

Dispensing with categories for the moment, IMHO, perhaps simply the best poem written in the last 101 years, had no title when it was published in 1923, and was written by a man who made his living delivering babies. It contained 16 words, two of which were colors, whose meaning may be – and my hope is that you’ll disagree and cite your own opinion – that color blinds. This poem also talks about a chicken and a wheel barrow, but it’s written in the tradition Emerson pointed out, that every word was once a poem, and in putting them together, we write history.