In 1921, when Sinclair Lewis’s book Main Street was passed over for the Pulitzer Prize in favor of The Age of Innocence, he sent Edith Wharton a congratulatory letter expressing his admiration for her work. She responded warmly, saying that this was the “first sign I have ever had–`literally’–that `les Jeunes’ at home had ever read a word of me.” Although distressed that Lewis’s book had been rejected because it had offended certain readers, she felt that his work had brought her hope: “Some sort of standard is emerging from the welter of cant and sentimentality, and if two or three of us are gathered together, I believe we can still save Fiction in America.” Lewis and his wife came out to Saint-Brice-sous-Forˆt soon after this exchange of letters. His relationship with Wharton was cordial but not intimate. They saw each other intermittently for several years, and he dedicated his novel Babbitt to her.¹

Edith Wharton is one of the few female authors to whom I often return. Her tangled, somewhat awkward relationship with Sinclair Lewis has always sparked my curiosity. Depending one whom one references, Edith’s note was laced with some irony. Last month I finally checked out a copy of Lewis’s Main Street from the library.

Lewis’s Main Street is criticized for failing to transcend the vice-like perspective of its heroine, Carol Milford. That is, to say, Lewis’s novel is not buoyantly American, per se. It is a satire meant to dissolve the romance and sentimentalism America often attributes to rural, small-town life. I approached Main Street prepared for an academic dissection, a cold-witted lab project that would dismember Lewis and point to his failure to become a “great American novelist,” an ambition after which he earnestly (not, as is in vogue, ironically) chased. It would be a lesson in what not to do, how not to stumble over oneself in the path. “Maintain a shrewd, academic distance,” I told myself, then just as soon forgot it.

But occasionally I find a character, author, or plot-line that strips me of the illusion of individuality. It pins those parts of myself that I find most sacred (or shameful) to a humble highway billboard for all to see. And although it may be possible to view one’s hidden self with a critical eye, one cannot escape the embarrassment of self-revelation. Indeed Main Street digs up that self-condemned part of your heart–whether it be a root of romantic populism, idealistic dreams of reform, or fanciful notions of self-autonomy–and exposes its futility.

This novel, like any, has its flaws. It is too clever. At points, it feels hackneyed, theatrically contrived. What sparse and eventual redemption Lewis summons at the end does little to redeem Main Street. But whatever its shortcomings, this novel becomes personal. To laugh at Carol is to laugh at oneself. To ridicule Carol is to ridicule oneself. To defend Carol is to defend oneself.

Although he is also a Nobel prize-winner, Sinclair Lewis is no Edith Wharton. And as you read Main Street you recognize that no one was more conscious of shortcoming than Sinclair Lewis. Lingerman, author of the biography Rebel From Main Street, noted that “[Lewis] measured American life by high standards and found it was not good enough. Yet who else depicted his country’s faults with such coruscatingly funny, ambivalently loving satire? His fiction functioned at its highest pitch when galvanized by anger at some banality or stupidity or injustice.” Those who have read Main Street should note what a striking parallel can be found between the Lewis Lingerman depicts and the heroine Lewis created. Carol Kennicutt seems to be born out of an autobiographical self-loathing and, broader still, a chagrin for “housebound and airless America.”

Lewis’s life was a maze of writers’ squabbles, alcoholism, and family tragedy. His immense popularity takes many by surprise for Sinclair Lewis’s works have all but disappeared from the American canon. Although his popularity fell as quickly as it rose, his prolific writing never flagged between the years 1912-51. Neither did his displeasure for American Arts and Academe in which Lewis found “the divorce in America of intellectual life from all authentic standards of importance and reality” personified. He made more enemies than friends prior to death and Lewis’s legacy was unfairly tarnished by an unfortunate biographer, the kind one wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy, the kind of biographer that hates his subject second only to himself by the time the scribbled manuscript is typeset.

Yet even the notoriously vindictive Mark Schorer, whose spiteful Sinclair Lewis biography was published within the decade Lewis died, begrudgingly admits that although “[Lewis] was one of the worst writers in modern American literature…without his writing one cannot imagine modern American literature. That is because, without his writing, we can hardly imagine ourselves….He gave us a vigorous, perhaps a unique thrust into the imagination of ourselves.”

For myself, reading Sinclair Lewis reiterated how relying on the popular “canon” can cheat us of formative works and worthy writers.  It increased my desire to hunt up the long-forgotten or oft-overlooked. It encouraged me to broaden my horizon and resist cursory judgment. I was reminded to hunt for resources in unlikely places and savor the unexpected.  Do yourself a favor: find a work that can do the same for you.  

¹The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian

Instead its transparent, if reductive, vision of American culture proved a stimulating surprise. WS boils American culture down to a handful of shamefully naked parts: a minimalist backdrop, a dull set of four principal characters, and the customary, even cliched, plot most often associated with a comedy of manners.¹ Yet James employs these innocuous elements in order to powerfully illustrate the American mentalité within a subtle, psychological novel.

Washington Square was a setting that James would have found familiar. James consciously constructed this community around sleepy drawing rooms, genteel architecture, and idyllic walkways.² Washington Square’s facades, like most of the characters within the novel, are scarred by a particularly American pretense. Nevertheless, James’s confined backdrop falls in step with the psychological undercurrent in his novel. This constricted setting mirrors the American mentalité with which James took exception.

James’s social commentary on the American mentalité crystallizes as the characters in WS develop. Dr. Sloper and Catherine Sloper deserve special attention in this context. Catherine, despite her empty-headedness and lack of ambition, represents potentiality. She is limited, being neither attractive nor clever. She does not fit into American society because she lacks the brains, physical beauty, and the social ambition that could earn her a role within it. (Ironically, even the artistic skills she possesses can do little to redeem her in the eyes of American society; only her financial assets earn her a second glance for they are tools for those attempting to redeem their own social identity.) Yet James endows Catherine with a deep and enviable impressionability in contrast with both the world-weary characterization of James’s European females and the spirited (even flighty) Daisy Miller. As the novel progresses, Catherine gains readers’ empathy as James develops her moral self.

Dr. Sloper epitomizes the stringent aspects of the American mentalité. His self-assuredness arises from his ability to both know his function and to keep it admirably. He measures others by those same standards. Dr. Sloper’s view of himself (and others) has been solidified through his successful climb up the social ladder via marriage and his social intelligence. The one thing he cannot control, his daughter’s success or failure in society, threatens his hard-earned contentment. Dr. Sloper may have climbed beyond the petty, commercial maneuvering of men like Morris Townsend, but he remains entrapped by the need to keep up appearances, to maintain his standing. His social ascension entraps rather than frees him.

Catherine is his greatest disappointment as she fulfills neither his expectations nor society’s. When Morris Townsend, a young man without prospect or principle, bids for Catherine’s attention, Dr. Sloper’s disappointment swells. Morris’s ability to make significant impressions on Catherine’s psyche both surprises and frustrates Dr. Sloper since he had long ago given up hope for his daughter’s development. Morris’s impact on Catherine threatens Dr. Sloper’s authority, but Dr. Sloper cloaks his disapproval in the language of social mores. Dr. Sloper objects to Morris on the grounds that this young man cannot fulfill a son-in-law’s appropriate function:

“I don’t dislike [Morris] in the least as a friend, as a companion. He seems to me a charming fellow, and I should think he would be excellent company. I dislike him exclusively as a son-in-law. If the only office of a son-in-law were to dine at the paternal table, I should set a high value upon your brother: he dines capitally. But that is a small part of his function, which, in general, is to be a protector and care-taker of my child, who is singularly ill-adapted to take care of herself. It is there that he doesn’t satisfy me. I confess I have nothing but my impression to go by; but I am in the habit of trusting my impression. Of course you are at liberty to contradict it flat. He strikes me as selfish and shallow…”

Of course, Dr. Sloper’s diagnosis seems quite accurate. Although far from monstrous, Morris amply reveals his selfishness, validating Dr. Sloper’s judgment. Yet Catherine is not a child, thus Dr. Sloper’s continual emotional manipulations weary us. He continually asserts her liberty to choose but, much as one would manipulate a child, he also continuously reminds her that her choices will destroy their relationship. He reminds us of all the parents warning their charges: “Do you want to make Mommy sad? If you choose to act like that I will be very upset.” Such emotional manipulation leaves Dr. Sloper, and the reader, jaded. Dr. Sloper’s integrity fades even as his daughter’s begins to blossom. His principled disapproval may seem justified:

“I am helped by a habit I have of dividing people into classes, into types. I may easily be mistaken about [Morris] as an individual, but his type is written on his whole person…the type to which [Morris] belongs was made to be the ruin of you, and you were made to be its handmaids and victims. The sign of the type in question is the determination–sometimes terrible in its quiet intensity–to accept nothing of life but its pleasures, and to secure these pleasures chiefly by the aid of your complaisant sex. Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going.”

But his disapproval is couched in self-interest and this vulgarity rivals that of Morris Townsend. Dr. Sloper’s tone strikes the wrong chord. Catherine has seen all that he and his worldview has to offer (e.g., her travels abroad) and rejected it by consciously choosing another life. When his impressionable daughter embraces her liberty, Dr. Sloper’s attempts to protect his artless daughter become a means of suppressing her instead. The father may be a principled ruler, but he is far from a “very good man.”

In Washington Square, James betrays his readers’ initial expectations. While the artless Miss Sloper begins as a misfortune, she ends as a Jamesian triumph. Her prospects never shift (Catherine remains a spinster), but she gains momentum as a moral force within the novel. Her moral success begs the reader to reevaluate the overreaching social mores which guide and enforce the American way of life even as Dr. Sloper’s moral failure challenges the integrity of American dogmatism.³

xx

xx

¹Many critics point out the ironic parallels between James’s tale and those of Jane Austen, an author for whom James offered little praise.

²Although Washington Square is the birthplace of Henry James, it remained his home for only two years before the family began their extensive travels abroad; his childhood experience in Washington Square probably entailed little more than those same benches and drawing rooms in which Catherine Sloper spent so much time.

³William James, Henry James’s brother, popularized early American Pragmatism. “He developed the notion of truth as a “leading” that is useful: it can change as human experience changes. The morality, as well as the truth, of an idea or action should be judged, according to James, in a similar way — in terms of its outcome in human experience.”

Too often critics fixate on multicultural literature’s identity awareness. They become disproportionately preoccupied with the cultural discomfort immigrants face as they reconcile contradictory aspects of selfhood into a stable, multicultural identity. It’s all the rage to dissect literature through the frame of identity politics, the study of the shared injustices suffered by specific social groups. But beware; identity politics can misconstrue immigrant literature.

To appraise the immigrant experience as a journey toward self-concept can be incredibly formulaic, sentimental, and cliche. The study of self-identity certainly has power to enlighten, so I do not wish to demean those authors and critics who devote scholarship toward identity exploration. Nevertheless, I dislike the manner in which naive, unrelenting, and sweeping identity politics can eerily transform a multicultural work into little more than a nostalgic (Western) coming-of-age novel, in which the protagonist tackles adventure, conflict, and pain in his or her quest for maturation (replete with the entertainment value of exotic characterization and curious trumpery, of course).

Like Porochista Khakpour, I suspect that American publishers deserve some blame for carving this “maudlin” archetype of immigrant literature. Market demand has an amazing chokehold on publishing companies. Most American readers expect one of two approaches to immigrant literature: romanticization or politicization. Many perceive the immigrant experience romantically. To them it is a journey from intimidation to liberation, from servitude to autonomy, from poverty to wealth. They expect a slow, emotionally-charged maturation process in which a sympathetic protagonist pacifies his/her homesickness for the old country by grasping hold of the American dream and overcoming prejudice in city ghettos.* The rest typically anticipate a political commentary, one which emphasizes the discriminated, marginalized, and misunderstood fate of immigrant groups. These readers anticipate the tale of the disillusioned immigrant, a man or woman who fled to America for refuge only to encounter the same ethnic strife, economic oppression, and political friction he or she fled rampant in the United States.

Although audience expectation plays a large role in the archetypal frame that American publishers impose on multicultural literature, publishers have proven they can downplay the sentimental and/or cultural realism of outdated archetypes in response to the crisis in the Middle East and post 9/11 global tension. (Of course, there is much more room for growth; for instance, I’d love to see migrant accounts of third-world migration to less traditional havens or more contemporary transnational narratives.) Nevertheless, our critical approach must shift as well. To holistically appreciate multicultural literature, I believe you must step beyond the frame of the formulaic identity crisis whenever possible because it implies an absolute beginning and endpoint, a narrative too simplistic for today’s global realities.

Gloria Vando’s Promesas: Geography of the Impossible presents just such an opportunity. While Vando beautifully portrays that discomforting immigrant identity, as a Puerto Rican post-immigrant, Vando views her identity as symptomatic of a larger conflict. Vando frames her own conflicts as arising from contradictions between cultural promises and cultural realities. Her poetry tackles the “disparity between [the] promises and reality” of both Puerto Rican and American culture. As a Puerto Rican immigrant, Vando lives a life of multiple estrangements. Puerto Rican islanders stiff-arm the mainland Ricans, yet mainland Ricans find an “American” identity improbable and unwieldy because of Puerto Rico’s commonwealth relationship with the USA. It’s a tale of transnational gone sansnational. Through two poems in particular, Vando voices her frustration with not only a suspended identity but also–dare I say, more importantly–the manner in which each country’s reality undermines their own mythic culture.

In “Nuyorican Lament” Vando begins by announcing:

San Juan you’re not for me.

My cadence quails and stumbles

on your ancient stones:

*

there is an inner beat here

to be reckoned with–

a seis chorreao, a plena,

an imbred ¡Oyeeee!

and ¡mira tú! against which

my Manhattan (sorry

wrong island) responses fall flat.

Vando continues with a lush explanation of her personal history and instinct to embrace this island which fails to reciprocate. Her closing stanzas depict the bitter injustice the island’s betrayal leaves on her tongue.

And now, you see me here,

a trespasser in my own past,

tracing a faint ancestral theme

far back, beyond the hard rock

rhythm of the strand.

I walk down El Condado, past

Pizza Huts, Big Macs and

Coca-Cola stands

listening for a song–

*

a wisp of a song–

*

that begs deep in my heart.

“Commonwealth, Common Poverty,” the second poem I want to highlight, grapples the universally unsavory dimensions of the American reality. The poem, dedicated to Zoltán Sumonyi, deals so broadly with the immigrant experience and the conflicting interpretations of that experience that I feel justified in posting the poem in its entirety below.

A visitor comes form Hungary as from outer space

dropping into my Midwestern world with poems

about himself and that bracketed place he hails from.

And though the gift he brings is veiled, submerged

in allegory and myth, I recognize myself. Say

to him: this poem you read is about me. He smirks.

*

He has read his poems before and not been heard.

He is weary, somewhat cavalier. His body is taut like

a gymnast’s. His eyes form flat black mirrors of distrust

adjusting to what he perceives as enemy turf. It’s August.

He sheds his jacket, rolls his sleeves above his biceps.

A pulse in his temple keeps rhythm with his words.

*

He tries again, leads me as he reads. I see us both,

two generations earlier, perhaps three, running down once

familiar streets with new strange names, and I am plagued

by what I might have been had nothing changed,

had Teddy’s boys not made it to the top of San Juan

Hill. Like him I, too, yearn for connections

*

between my parents’ world and this one, long for

a tie, cut short by strangers–does it matter

that his were Russians, mine American; or that

his lines allude to Greeks and gifts of death, while

mine–because our history has yet to be revamped–

still lament the Massacre of Ponce? Here we sit

*

in a Kansas City motel, hearing what we say

translated by a man we have to trust–could be

a friend, could be a secret agent–a clean-cut man

in a banker’s suit who keeps his jacket on,

claims he walked from Budapest to freedom, and

converts our pain into passionless sounds. Yes,

*

here we sit, feeling as our ancestors surely felt

the day their world shifted in its global socket

and everything they cherished perished in the quake,

leaving them disfranchised, disconnected from

their past, from each other, from themselves. How

they must have searched then for a look, a gesture,

*

a familiar word to ease their terror: the arch of a brow,

a jawline–something to bind them to their captors,

something so slight it might have gone unnoticed

had all remained whole. And we, their progeny, now

sit here immersed in Russian and American symbols:

we, their future, have become what they most feared.

“Commonwealth, Common Poverty” provides an opportunity to explore more than identity politics (the marginalized and marginalizing). It brings to mind questions regarding the conflict between cultural memory and cultural history, the shape of constructed communities, and the mythic claims one’s personal past introduces. It is this kind of inquiry that attracts me to multicultural literature and begs me to defend it against increasingly outdated and archetypal perceptions of it.

*

*I will say too much if I attempt to issue a rebuttal to this idealism. Suffice it to say that these perceptions are built on the misguided presupposition that all human beings equally value the prodigal amounts of liberty and wealth this country affords its citizens. Too few recognize that many immigrants are seeking some opportunity rather than this opportunity.

I catch myself appreciating Santiago’s novel on both an academic and personal level. Academically, I respect the range of material Santiago introduces and explores. Her first novel makes Puerto Rico a home. I found that refreshing. Often American migrant novels detail the distressing conflict between the migrant community’s expectations for America and the painstaking pull of homesickness and cultural isolation; typically, the novels emotionally climax in hard-won, familial affection for America. Santiago’s work explores her own migrancy in three different books; this allows the first novel to convincingly establish the joys and sorrows of life before America. In some respects WPR feels as much an emigrant novel, detailing a slow, necessary, and miserable divorce, as it is an immigrant one. Against the background of Esmerelda’s turbulent life, America presents more than an economic advantage but an opportunity for reinvention and release. Although America is not the solution to the Santiago family’s tumult, America affords Esmerelda distance from one way of life and the opportunity for another she may not have found otherwise.

Personally, and much more than other Puerto Rican works, WPR made Puerto Rico uniquely accessible to me. As a third-generation Puerto Rican immigrant (more precisely, post-immigrant or post-colonial), I carry a characteristic thirst to return and retrace what I feel I should already know. WPR cracks the door open to a past I’ve been unable to see or hear. Ironically, we are speaking of such a small opening that I scornfully laugh at my own pleasure in that sliver of space in the door frame. In reality, it wasn’t Puerto Rico that clarified (after all, Santiago writes of life on the opposite side of the island from where my father’s family would have lived), but life on the island and as a Puerto Rican. To my surprise, I identified with this proud, misfit Esmerelda in more ways then I care to admit online.

Last week I professed ignorance with some frustration in response to my Puerto Rican coworkers’ questions about my family. “Don’t worry.” They smiled wryly. “Not knowing the truth about your family…that is being Puerto Rican. I don’t think any of us really know who are Papi is.”

* There is some danger in unchecked self-identification with migrant literature. See “Anzaldúa’s Mestiza: Now You See Me, Now You Don’t.”

“Dedication” is the occasional poem Robert Frost famously failed to recite when he approached the podium in order to honor John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961:

Summoning artists to participate
In the august occasions of the state
Seems something artists ought to celebrate.
Today is for my cause a day of days.
And his be poetry’s old-fashioned praise
Who was the first to think of such a thing.
This verse that in acknowledgement I bring
Goes back to the beginning of the end
Of what had been for centuries the trend;
A turning point in modern history.
Colonial had been the thing to be
As long as the great issue was to see
What country’d be the one to dominate
By character, by tongue, by native trait,
The new world Christopher Columbus found.
The French, the Spanish, and the Dutch were downed
And counted out. Heroic deeds were done.
Elizabeth the First and England won.
Now came on a new order of the ages
That in the Latin of our founding sages
(Is it not written on the dollar bill
We carry in our purse and pocket still?)
God nodded his approval of as good.
So much those heroes knew and understood,
I mean the great four, Washington,
John Adams, Jefferson, and Madison
So much they saw as consecrated seers
They must have seen ahead what not appears,
They would bring empires down about our ears
And by the example of our Declaration
Make everybody want to be a nation.
And this is no aristocratic joke
At the expense of negligible folk.
We see how seriously the races swarm
In their attempts at sovereignty and form.
They are our wards we think to some extent
For the time being and with their consent,
To teach them how Democracy is meant.
“New order of the ages” did they say?
If it looks none too orderly today,
‘Tis a confusion it was ours to start
So in it have to take courageous part.
No one of honest feeling would approve
A ruler who pretended not to love
A turbulence he had the better of.
Everyone knows the glory of the twain
Who gave America the aeroplane
To ride the whirlwind and the hurricane.
Some poor fool has been saying in his heart
Glory is out of date in life and art.
Our venture in revolution and outlawry
Has justified itself in freedom’s story
Right down to now in glory upon glory.
Come fresh from an election like the last,
The greatest vote a people ever cast,
So close yet sure to be abided by,
It is no miracle our mood is high.
Courage is in the air in bracing whiffs
Better than all the stalemate an’s and ifs.
There was the book of profile tales declaring
For the emboldened politicians daring
To break with followers when in the wrong,
A healthy independence of the throng,
A democratic form of right divine
To rule first answerable to high design.
There is a call to life a little sterner,
And braver for the earner, learner, yearner.
Less criticism of the field and court
And more preoccupation with the sport.
It makes the prophet in us all presage
The glory of a next Augustan age
Of a power leading from its strength and pride,
Of young ambition eager to be tried,
Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play.
A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.

Instead, Frost delivered from memory “The Gift Outright” on that snow-blinding day:

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia.
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

Maya Angelou offered “On the Pulse of the Morning” for the 1993 inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton:

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no hiding place down here.

You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.
Your mouths spilling words

Armed for slaughter.
The Rock cries out to us today, you may stand upon me,
But do not hide your face.

Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song. It says,
Come, rest here by my side.

Each of you, a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,
Clad in peace, and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the rock were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.
The River sang and sings on.

There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African, the Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.

They hear the first and last of every Tree
Speak to humankind today. Come to me, here beside the River.
Plant yourself beside the River.

Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name, you,
Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet,
Left me to the employment of
Other seekers — desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Arab, the Swede, the German, the Eskimo, the Scot,
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought,
Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am that Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.
I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours — your passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

Lift up your eyes upon
This day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.

Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.

The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out and upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.

Here, on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, and into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope –
Good morning.

Miller Williams’s “Of History and Hope” marked William Jefferson Clinton’s second inauguration in 1997:

We have memorized America,
how it was born and who we have been and where.
In ceremonies and silence we say the words,
telling the stories, singing the old songs.
We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.
The great and all the anonymous dead are there.
We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.
The rich taste of it is on our tongues.
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go.
But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?
With waving hands — oh, rarely in a row –
and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.
Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child
cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said,
and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become –
just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.
All this in the hands of children, eyes already set
on a land we never can visit — it isn’t there yet –
but looking through their eyes, we can see
what our long gift to them may come to be.
If we can truly remember, they will not forget.

Today, Elizabeth Alexander recited her own poetic offering, “Praise Song for the Day,” at the 2009 inauguration of Barack H. Obama. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve accurately represented it below:

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer consider the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words, Words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; Words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by “first do no harm,” or “take no more than you need.”

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.