Poetic America: Literature and Lyrics Today

In "A Solution to Science, In Part," Amy King introduces formally what we want to explore. Here her narrator seems to critique the preoccupation with knowing all and consuming all that seems to define America today.

But this poem is in a collection of poems entitled "I'm the Man Who Loves You," a reference to a song of the indie-rock band Wilco. And it seems quite a lot of her work makes reference to objects that are already lyrically rich. So how did poets and songsters converge in terms of developing the same ideas?

From the page: This poem has a lyrical rhythm appropriate for an address to a child. In fact, it appears that Hopkins began composing a musical accompaniment to the verse, though no copy of it remains extant.

Now granted, this is a poem written by an Englishman. And it has nothing to do with our problem at hand, except two things:

1. Poems (duh) translate very easily into songs. All of us are aware epics were once sung. Poems in a sense are songs.

2. The theme of this poem, man's mortality and his ultimate yearning, is a universal theme. It does show up in American poetry, but I think it is safe to say in older American poetry mainly. The more recent concern is with love and a politics which reflects love, and wouldn't you know...

...why do we want a politics that reflects love? We want to know that we can speak the truth to each other and that can be a good thing and love can be achieved. 2 out of those 3 things - speaking and creating a good - aren't merely emblematic of politics. They are politics, and that might be why family and relationship drama mirrors courts and congress in the squabbling, complete with the appeal to freedom at the end.

...that might be as close to serious politics as we can get, though. Love is between individuals - if you need that written out for you, here it is. There's nothing wrong with emphasizing two and two only, over and beyond all, except one slight thing.

Going back to the Hopkins poem before, mortality is a universal problem. To contemplate it is to wonder what unites us all, and might act as a basis for another sort of love entirely.

The confusion of love and politics reaches a quietly intense breaking in Wright's poem. We journey emptily to our "joys" (restaurant) and to our fears ("border"). We're almost like those trying to cross the border, thinking there is a better life here, those who journey authentically. But we can't tell who is who - not even those that might be on "our" side ("Minutemen") perhaps because we don't care.

We don't care about the public things because we can't afford to care about the private things: to look like we care for the "lonely outline of the host" would interrupt what we think is freedom, his and ours.

There is a way around this problem. The trick is to look at ourselves in the mirror first. Why?'s "Sanddollars" gives us a speaker dissing another for not having achieved anything, but as he disses, we can see just how thin the line dividing the speaker and audience is.

This kind of self-critique - I don't know what love is, I don't know what's worth loving, I need to be sensitive to others - is Socrates' "knowledge of ignorance," the "know thyself" atop the Delphic oracle. The stuff you know, that you don't get taught nowadays because we're teaching science only.