Many have noted the poetry latent in Sarah Palin’s speech. Now that she’s published a memoir, Going Rogue, many are noting the non-poetry of her non-prose.

But who would have imagined that Palin had a poetic forerunner, a partner in rhyme, a fellow Bard of Bad? Julia A. Moore (1847-1920), popularly called the “Sweet Singer of Michigan,” produced reams of writing that soon became known as the worst of the verse. If Palin wrote a poem, I posit, it would be this definitive work of Moore’s.

To My Friends and Critics
(an excerpt)

Perhaps you’ve read the papers
Containing my interview;
I hope you kind good people
Will not believe it true.
Some Editors of the papers
They thought it would be wise
To write a column about me,
So they filled it up with lies.

The papers have ridiculed me
A year and a half or more.
Such slander as the interview
I never read before.
Some reporters and editors
Are versed in telling lies.
Others it seems are willing
To let industry rise.

The people of good judgment
Will read the papers through,
And not rely on its truth
Without a candid view.
My first attempt at literature
Is the “Sweet Singer” by name,
I wrote that book without a thought
Of the future, or of fame.

There was also the other night with the video reading laced with empathy, resistance, Zidane, the wreckage of the pines, the taking of the photos of the sleeping men in their row, the cosmic interconnection of all things? Check. Futility of pain management as source of humour? Check. Controllable vices for purposes of a secondary level of interior life, echo of conscience trailing out? Check. A sense of time as discontinuous in its spread while expanding on a surface line that is only a reflection of a sense of line? Check. Total distrust of command but for the contradictory moments of necessity? Half-check. Digging the ecstasy of swinging? Yes. Laughing with the tree? Yes. Is the tree funny? Yes. Our ears act as instruments in responding to music, sounding their own tones in addition to the music in the room, like another instrument joining the orchestra.

Radioactive chalk on a wet post-portal playground was the yesterday excuse for meeting skipping. Help! I was frying some puppies on the stove when I thought I ‘d start to sell them on a blog in halloween costumes! But then I found your site (great site, really informative), and now I think I’ll sell surgical gloves made out of heroees. Thanks! Can I link to your blog? Can I buy goods from your friends and snort them? Not only is your blog pragmatic, it comes with a packet of silica gel (do not eat)! I like to make shapes in the head and in the ears, and I also like to make them in the room. Is there relation in the relation you relate to?

As lists go, to shatter the mindage of yea who built them, they may think of indolence in its softer terms, menu-like in its array of dreams in parti-colored favors: this brown face with those pink eyes cut out of these yellow cans, the artifice of neon whiskers, the textolatry of dirt in the form of specks riddling the dino-acts thinking through the objectification of feeling. So what if the rain is friendlier than your ever-slithering definition of work? What is most ordinary every day is defeating this desire to harden into respectable indifference.  I’m learning the characteristics of the space.

“So when I’m setting up I have to learn how to make the kind of shapes, the power of music that I want to generate in that place. I mix during performance only in one place, so I have to know the rest of the space by heard. It involves a tremendous amount of time, walking, listening, going back to the mixing-board, establishing levels and discovering what kind of world you want to make. In that sense you’re even composing, because you haven’t been in these spaces before. Do we perceive the sound in the room, in our head, a great distance away? Or do we experience these three dimensions at the same time? At Tokushima in these wonderful spaces it was even more possible to realize that. Or we perceive just enough to trigger patterns, melodies, created deep within our neural sensitivities, shaping some responses. Do we experience a sound dimension as though blocks away or very near, moving beside us, outside and around one ear only, do we feel melodies as they develop inside, within our ears, and we move our head, and we raise a hand to rub away a melody that’s circling our nose, does the sound drift, or does it fall like rain, does it make such a clear shape in the air we seem to see it, in front of our eyes? There are so many ways. Do we continue to hear sound as our mind processes aftersound, or music perceived minutes ago? And that affects how structural changes in sound happen in music.”

And it was very good to hear Claudia Rankine and Mom read, and to think about the above on sound from Maryanne Amacher, and to feel like the fresco of a collage at George Schneeman’s memorial, and to see into the future for no good reason, and to subdue verification for an angular tremulous wish in fastidious contrast to simoom for Will Alexander, whose Exobiology As Goddess caused the writing of my object is an emptiness on which words appear, and, much as one bends, to chalk the strong present tense against all rumours of wrath past and to come.

I own a pink skirt, a pink dress, a pink scarf, a pink coat, three pink sweaters, and six pink shirts. Each time I shop for clothes, my eyes wander toward another rose tee, and my fingers fondle another salmon sarong, and I ask myself, Why?

But I know why. I love pink because I am Woman.

Obviously.

The more serious implications of being Woman—and Literary Woman in particular—have lately drawn a lot of press. First, as poet Steve Fellner noted in his blog, men beat out women four to one in the prestigious, and historically male-skewed, Whiting Awards for emerging writers. Second, in a move that attracted much more attention than the Whiting wrong, Publishers Weekly compiled a boys-only top 10 books list of the year. The extended list of 100 best books featured 29 female writers.

In response, Women in Letters and Literary Arts started a list of their own. The purpose is “to note great books by women that Publishers Weekly missed in their all-male top ten ‘Best Books of 2009.’” Given that Marilynne Robinson, Alice Munro, and other stars published books this year, the task shouldn’t be too onerous. As of today, the WILLA list features so many books that this blogger felt dizzy at the prospect of counting them.

So many books, in fact, that as I skimmed down the page, one of the central mysteries of the issue emerged—a mystery that doesn’t necessarily pertain to sexism or feminism, though it might. Why the obsession with listing and besting? Does anyone believe in those lists? Are they just conventions that help readers, writers, and publishers navigate a confusing landscape? (Even if everyone agrees they’re just convention, of course, they still matter—they still affect sales and recognition.)

I haven’t noticed anyone puzzling over that question, but Lizzie Skurnick of Politics Daily writes a cutting, entertaining meditation on the subject, and Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin offers the usual biting sound byte:

Women are making their own lists, with no men on it. That’ll teach em! But don’t we expect this now from places like Publishers Weekly? The only surprise being that. . .no one at some point said, “We should put a lady on there, or the feminists are going to make a fuss about it” (or maybe they did and the next line was, “Actually, people might read us if that’s true”).

In unrelated developments that nonetheless appear related, The Guardian has amped up its coverage of Gender across Genres. British writer Joanna Trollope chews on chick lit. Jo Shapcott, who chaired an event called “The Female Poem,” raises the question: “Do women genuinely write different poems from men and, if so, what could be said to characterise the ‘female’ poem?” No one’s sure, which seems like the right answer. In her summary of the event, Shapcott proposes advantages of being a female poet:

The panel was convinced that a poet ought to be an outsider. The edge, the discomfort makes for clearer vision. Maureen Duffy reminded us of the audacity and courage of Aphra Behn in this regard. Virginia Woolf pinpointed the feeling of an outsider beautifully in A Room of One’s Own: “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”

White space criss-crossed yesterday’s New York Times opinion page like mortar. Uneven in length and width, stanzas gave the impression of crumbling brick. Poem titles appeared painted on, recalling graffiti.

In light of the endless debate over Whether Good Political Poetry Exists, the commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall with a wall of poetry–a throwback to the days when poems regularly appeared in newspapers–gave me a case of the grins. The poetry wall struck me as an editorial eye-roll, a visually complex, literarily ambitious “duh.” (Just the same, it’s worth bearing that debate in mind while reading these poems, which, like the rough-hewn wall, can feel uneven.)

The poetry wall is an appropriately international effort. American poets Marie Howe, Yusef Komunyakaa, C. K. Williams, Bruce Weigl, and Mark Doty, many of whom write on social and political themes, contributed; so did the European writers Zafer Senocak, Tomaz Salamun, Vera Pavlova, and Ewa Lipska. My favorite piece of masonry is Pavlova’s conclusion:

Under 11/09/89,
my diary says:
“Natasha lost a front tooth,
Liza for the first time
stood up in her crib
on her own.”

You wonder: had the speaker not yet heard the news? Was she ignoring it? Did she not understand the significance of the day? Or is the point that the significance of such a day lies not in what newspapers report, but in what diaries record, and that these kinds of events are sometimes, but not always, distinct? And if they are, why, and how?

Speaking of “how,” Marie Howe—whose poems so gracefully insist on the ordinariness of the extraordinary, and vice-versa—writes that the wall went up, “and that was that. People / lived and died, and married.” She describes watching TV, and noting how Berliners “touched the faces of their loved ones / and ran their hands over their heads and hair.” Her intimate moments go public, like diary pages ripped out and blown onto the street.

The title of the work by Salamun, a Slovenian poet, is nearly a poem in itself. “Remembrance of a Yugoslav” could suggest that the poem features a Yugoslav’s reminiscences, or that the poem remembers a Yugoslav—a gesture, perhaps, toward the idea that since Yugoslavia no longer exists, identification as Yugoslavian survives only in memory.

Take a look, if you haven’t already. What do you think of the poems?

The literati are like aliens. Some are cute. Some are hostile. All talk funny, and all require diplomatic outreach. (Daniel Nester recently described this phenomenon in his riotous, depressing takedown of the New York poetry scene, “Goodbye to All Them.”)

I here present the strategies I have observed and developed at literary gatherings, in hopes that you, reader, will not someday find yourself lying on a couch in a grungily chic neighborhood of San Francisco at 4 a.m., claiming, along with a bald, 13-year-old Norwegian you’ve just met, to be a Macarthur Fellow.

1. Describe a poet as “entirely disreputable.” Utter the judgment with sorrowful certainty. Utter it knowing full well that your interlocutor adores this poet. Observe her grow dubious—is anyone “entirely disreputable”?—and then uncomfortable—what does it mean for her to adore an entirely disreputable poet?—and then tragically determined—she understands her mission will be restoring faith in aforementioned disreputable poet. Express your solidarity with her cause. Then get her number.

2. Demand whether something even EXISTS anymore. This trick works equally well for concepts (i.e., patriotism) and objects (i.e., peanuts).

3. Variation: Demand whether something—patriotism or peanuts would be appropriate here—isn’t just BEGINNING, whether what we’ve seen thus far isn’t just the PROTOTYPE of what we THINK we’ve been seeing.

4. Clarify that you’re totally ignorant of something. Just make sure it’s nothing important. Declare your ignorance in a confident manner, so as to seem rakish.

5. Shock and allure interlocutor from (1) by quoting an entire sonnet from the supposedly disreputable poet. Quote it really loudly, so that the entire party pauses to observe you.

6. Err in your quotation. Err in an embarrassing yet metrically impeccable fashion. This will disorient your audience such that no one will dare correct you. Consider replacing two consecutive syllables with “pizza” (“My heart leaps up when I behold / A pizza in the sky”), four consecutive syllables with “hurdy-gurdy” (”I think that I shall never see / A hurdy-gurdy, or a tree”), etc.

7. At some point in the recitation—a point no sane person would consider touching—start weeping. Be sure interlocutor from (1) is standing nearby so she can comfort you if she is so inclined.

8. Exit, very slowly. Continue weeping for the duration of your exit, even if you must utter uncharacteristically banal comments (”Is it still raining?”).

9. Leave an ethereal reminder of your presence. A skull will do.

In the beginning of Paradise Lost, Milton paints and points and dallies, filling eight lines with sorrow and hope and mountains and fruit, disobeying the strictures of English grammar in favor of the more contorted Latinate, including, even, an “or” in line seven that threatens to undermine his progress, such as it is, until, in the beginning of line nine, he finally delivers the phrase “In the beginning”—the first words of Genesis—and then the sentence continues for several more lines, such that “In the beginning” serves as a sort of hinge, swinging the reader backward into the book’s preliminary lines or forward, if he will, into what follows, itself functioning as a sort of “or,” an opener of possibilities, a poser of questions.

It’s not over yet.

As if in tardy celebration of Milton’s 400th birthday (which, you’ll remember from all the parties, was last year), scholars and graphic novelists and rightist revisionists have been reworking the Bible. Certain conservatives are seeking to reform and void the King James version, which they view as troublingly liberal, while a Dutch scholar investigates Genesis’s first verb. R. Crumb’s Genesis is forthcoming, as is David Rosenberg’s Literary Bible. You’re doubtless wondering, as I am: will any of these make the Good Book an even Better Book?

Let’s begin with the conservative translation project, guided by ten commandments of sorts. One warns against “emasculation,” urging translators to avoid “unisex, ‘gender inclusive’ language.” Socialist incursions into Biblical text present problems, too (in one edition of the Bible, they write, “the socialistic word ‘comrade’ is used three times”). The authors of the Wikipedia-style page detailing this undertaking anticipate some discomfort with their ideas: “liberals will oppose this effort, but they will have to read the Bible to criticize this, and that will open their minds,” they write.

In analyzing this project, where does one begin?

The first word of the first sentence of the first book of the Bible, naturally.

With Milton’s opening in mind, I decided to compare and contrast their version of Genesis 1:1 with the King James translation. The latter reads, “In the beginning God created heaven and the earth.” This makes sense; the first word of Genesis is “B’reisheet,” meaning “In the beginning.” The “Proposed Conservative Translation,” by contrast, reads: “God created heaven and earth in the beginning.” The site provides the following “analysis” as explanation: “The first word is God.”

All right. But it isn’t. Also, the explanation itself rings of the King James translation of the Gospel According to John (”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”). If only they could offer a Miltonic defense for the revision–something about Classical syntax, perhaps.

Moving on to the second word of Genesis. Over in the Low Countries, academic Ellen van Wolde is scrutinizing the Hebrew verb “bara.” She argues that it means not “created,” as traditionally understood, but “separated.”

According to The Telegraph, she based this conclusion on the observation that God always “created” in plurals: “God was the subject (God created), followed by two or more objects. Why did God not create just one thing or animal, but always more?” Genesis according to van Wolde, then, begins: “In the beginning, God separated heaven and earth.” The idea that heaven and earth predated humans appears in other ancient texts, she writes.

But let’s not dither. The third word of Genesis is Elohim, or God, whose details, physical and otherwise, have provided fodder for R. Crumb. While crafting his recent comic book Genesis, which hews closely to the King James text, he told Time:

He has a white beard but he actually ended up looking more like my father. He has a very masculine face like my father. My problem was, how am I going to draw God? Should I just draw him as a light in the sky that has dialogue balloons coming out from it? Then I had this dream. God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearly what he looked like. And I thought, ok, there it is, I’ve got God.

(See picture at top.)

If this is getting to be too much, why not eschew that troubling sentence altogether? In his forthcoming tome A Literary Bible, David Rosenberg treats the Bible as a literary work rich with fissures and mysteries. Rather than insist on tidiness, as the conservative translators appear to, he delights in the work’s innate messiness. He writes:

The Bible is a deeply complex text, and its primitive passages are set in a sophisticated writer’s looking back, so it’s the wrong material for literal-minded comedians and artists, who are prone to react before they think. My translations, whether they render the Bible as strange or strangely familiar, engage the ancient texts in contemporary terms. I do not seek to embellish or alter the originals, but mainly to restore the original experience of reading them.

That original chaos, he suggests, is most generative.

The PEN World Voices conference in 2005, cited this disturbing statistic from an NEA study: “Out of the more than 10,000 works of fiction and poetry published in the United States in 1999, only 300 were works in translation.

UNESCO figures showed that while 50 percent of all translations published worldwide are translated from English, only 6 percent are translated into English. “Clearly,” the report concludes, “in the dialogue with the world’s non-English-speaking majority, we are not very good listeners.”

More recent statistics are no more encouraging. The on-line journal Publishing Perspectives predicts that “literature in translation will [face] a drop off this year – as much as 10%.”  The same publication also found that while 117 independent presses published at least one work of fiction or poetry in translation in 2008, only be 95 such presses will translate a literary work in 2009.

Why does this matter — particularly to the United States? Speaking at that same PEN conference, Salman Rushdie put it this way: “It has perhaps never been more important for the world’s voices to be heard in America, never more important for the world’s ideas and dreams to be known and thought about and discussed, never more important for a global dialogue to be fostered. Yet one has the sense of things shutting down, of barriers being erected, of that dialogue being stifled precisely when we should be doing our best to amplify it. The cold war is over, but a stranger war has begun. Alienation has perhaps never been so widespread; all the more reason for getting together and seeing what bridges can be built. “

Or consider this excerpt from a poem called “Under this Same Sky” by Bangaladeshi poet Zia Hyder (translated by Naomi Shihab Nye and Bhabani Sengupta):

There’s an enormous comfort in knowing
we all live under this same sky,
whether in new York or Dhaka
we see the same sun and same moon.

This poem became the title poem for Nye’s beautiful collection of world poetry, Under this Same Sky.  What a small but potent first step it would be if all people recognized each other as co-inhabitants of our planet.  As Nye puts in the book’s final page:  “Don’t ever believe what anyone told you about not talking to strangers.  Talking and listening to ’strangers’ may be the most important thing you do in life.”

The Obama administration has promised to end an era of political and diplomatic isolation even as it oversees two wars. Has there ever been a better time to open our ears and our hearts to world literature? Is there any better way for every nation to appreciate the full humanity of all the world’s peoples than by sharing each other’s literature?

Was William Safire a poet?

No.

He was a Nixon speechwriter, a conservative pundit, a four-time novelist, and a funny, fastidious observer of English usage.

But can we detect his influence, however great or small, on such dextrous manipulators of contemporary verse as Matthea Harvey, Heather McHugh, and Paul Muldoon (among others, perhaps including you, dear commenter)?

Yes.

And could anyone encounter a poem about a bartender, say, without recalling Safire’s column on bartenders, barmen, barmaids, barkeeps, innkeepers, and so forth?

I certainly can’t.

Some background:

Like you, I attended the scariest high school in the world. Like Safire, I attended one of New York City’s “specialized high schools” for science and mathematics. In my befuddling ninth-grade math class, I didn’t appear special so much as dyspeptic – but during those lessons, to paraphrase W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” William Safire was my Tums, my Maalox, my Zantac, and my Prevacid.

My math teacher’s hair would flop like a fish as he dodged around the classroom, explicating proofs in a gruff Brooklyn accent. Weathering his whirlwind of charts and graphs, probabilities and equations, I comprehended little, save that he loved Safire’s “On Language” column. Every now and again, he would pause to mention it, and one day he asked whether any of us read it, too. I said I did.

That moment struck like lightning in a storm, bringing with it illumination and connection. Suddenly my math teacher – let’s call him Mr. Carp – seemed just like me. He, too, marveled at the distinction between “enormity” and “enormousness,” and preached the equivalency of “comprise” and “include.” He knew that language, like people, could stumble, march, or dance, and that in Safire’s column, language jitterbugged. He evolved from challenger to ally, from stranger to friend.

I fancy I evolved in his eyes, too – from perennially baffled to potentially curable. True, I continued to sweat at the touch of a tangent, to squint at the squiggles and arrows of logical proofs. But I did learn that the logic of wordsmiths functions as follows:

IF a lackluster math student loves William Safire’s “On Language” column, AND a devoted math teacher loves William Safire’s “On Language” column, THEN an unlikely bond will develop between them.

I daresay even that:

An unlikely bond will develop between a lackluster math student and a devoted math teacher IF AND ONLY IF both love William Safire’s “On Language” column.

That bond expressed itself most frequently when we encountered an infelicitous phrase in a word problem. The scene usually played out as follows:

Mr. Carp reads a problem aloud while I think about lunch. He concludes: “Hopefully, the ladder will still be upright when the boy returns an hour later.” He points at me. I gaze back, alarmed. He announces: “As Abigail knows, and as Safire would surely point out were he in class with us now, the adverb ‘hopefully’ could suggest the ladder is itself hoping for something, which introduces an unhelpful vagueness. The sentence should read, ‘The boy hopes the ladder will await him when he returns.’” An approving nod in my direction. And then a return to the swirls of sines and confusions of cosines.

Perhaps Mr. Carp, who hopped around the room enforcing rules of logic, wasn’t so different from the amateur linguist who jauntily emphasized accuracy along with creativity, flexibility within form.

***

Now, a selection of wordplay-centric reminiscences of Safire — and an invitation to add yours below:

The columns, many collected in books, made him an unofficial arbiter of usage and one of the most widely read writers on language. It also tapped into the lighter side of the dour-looking Mr. Safire: a Pickwickian quibbler who gleefully pounced on gaffes, inexactitudes, neologisms, misnomers, solecisms and perversely peccant puns, like “the president’s populism” and “the first lady’s momulism,” written during the Carter presidency.

There were columns on blogosphere blargon, tarnation-heck euphemisms, dastardly subjunctives and even Barack and Michelle Obama’s fist bumps. And there were Safire “rules for writers”: Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid clichés like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!! — Robert D. McFadden, The New York Times

But he delighted in the infinite variety and power of language and covered the subject from all angles: the arcane origins of newly vogue phrases, acceptable grammatical innovations and lamentable passings, jargon and, his word for its blogosphere corollary, “blargon”; metaphors, euphemisms, malapropisms and “bonapropisms,” a word he coined for serendipitously appropriate misspeaks. Safire was an early victim of alliteration-addiction syndrome. — Lynda Hurst, Toronto Star

It wasn’t that the words were unknown, although “nabob” was a stretch, derived, as it was from an antique term from India’s Mogul empire. But when they were strung together — “nattering nabobs of negativism” — and issued from the mouth of Spiro Agnew, they became magically, memorably, melodically meaty. Turned on the critics of the Vietnam war, they were like the thrust of a foil, the stroke of a clever, graceful warrior. — OregonLive.com

Credit Safire with preserving his loyalties. For years, he relished making mincemeat of liberals as much as refusing to mince his puns. In 1994, Safire was calling the Clinton White House “the Whitewater House.” He wrote of Agnew in 1995, “His two-timing was out of joint.” — Todd Gitlin, The New Republic

Poems can sometimes help with that.

The Poetry Foundation has these poems available for your perusal today. No offense, fine poems, but kind of a weird list, isn’t it?

I hope no one will mind if I offer Robert Pinsky’s poem “9/11″ here. There’s a lot I like about this poem. Its unapologetically direct title. Its swerves from incisive analysis to granular reportage. Its inclusion of Marianne Moore, Ray Charles, Frederick Douglass, Donald Duck, and Emily Dickinson as American icons. I like the line “The donated blood not needed, except as meaning.” And many other things, but perhaps most of all the poem’s willingness to make large claims, and inclusive claims, at a time in our literary history when such gestures are generally scorned as de trop or naive. I think that takes some nerve, and I applaud it.

9/11

We adore images, we like the spectacle
Of speed and size, the working of prodigious
Systems. So on television we watched

The terrible spectacle, repetitiously gazing
Until we were sick not only of the sight
Of our prodigious systems turned against us

But of the very systems of our watching.
The date became a word, an anniversary
That we inscribed with meanings–who keep so few,

More likely to name an airport for an actor
Or athlete than “First of May” or “Fourth of July.”
In the movies we dream up, our captured heroes

Tell the interrogator their commanding officer’s name
Is Colonel Donald Duck–he writes it down, code
Of a lowbrow memory so assured it’s nearly

Aristocratic. Some say the doomed firefighters
Before they hurried into the doomed towers wrote
Their Social Security numbers on their forearms.

Easy to imagine them kidding about it a little,
As if they were filling out some workday form.
Will Rogers was a Cherokee, a survivor

Of expropriation. A roper, a card. For some,
A hero. He had turned sixteen the year
That Frederick Douglass died. Douglass was twelve

When Emily Dickinson was born. Is even Donald
Half-forgotten?–Who are the Americans, not
A people by blood or religion? As it turned out,

The donated blood not needed, except as meaning.
And on the other side that morning the guy
Who shaved off all his body hair and screamed

The name of God with his boxcutter in his hand.
O Americans–as Marianne Moore would say,
Whence is our courage? Is what holds us together

A gluttonous dreamy thriving? Whence our being?
In the dark roots of our music, impudent and profound?–
Or in the Eighteenth Century clarities

And mystic Masonic totems of the Founders:
The Eye of the Pyramid watching over us,
Hexagram of Stars protecting the Eagle’s head

From terror of pox, from plague and radiation.
And if they blow up the Statue of Liberty–
Then the survivors might likely in grief, terror

And excess build a dozen more, or produce
A catchy song about it, its meaning as beyond
Meaning as those symbols, or Ray Charles singing “America

The Beautiful.” Alabaster cities, amber waves,
Purple majesty. The back-up singers in sequins
And high heels for a performance–or in the studio

In sneakers and headphones, engineers at soundboards,
Musicians, all concentrating, faces as grave
With purpose as the harbor Statue herself.

(Robert Pinsky wrote this poem for the September 8, 2002 edition of The Washington Post Magazine; I cut and pasted it from here. You can hear Pinsky read the poem here.)

It’s municipal election day where I live. I went by the activity center at a Baptist church to vote on my way to work. Got there early and was first in line when the doors opened at 7:00, so I got to be the very first person to sign in. The poll workers were still drinking their coffee, still a little unclear on the procedures, still a little flusterable: the nice lady, who must have gotten up at 4:00 a.m. to do her meticulous silver hair, kept looking for my name in the registry among the scores of “Browns.” A poll watcher designated by one of the candidates hovered, frowning, alert to the possibility of fraud. But finally I received my ballot, that oddly large sheet, discovering on it, as I knew I would, just one opportunity to make my mark. (The current school board commissioner for district 4, Bryan Chandler, is facing a challenge from newcomer Kelly Horwitz.) I filled in one of the two ovals — right there on the table in front of the workers, not much caring who knew how I was voting — got my “I Voted” sticker from another amazingly coiffed senior, and fed my ballot into a machine, which, to much general consternation among the poll workers, kept spitting the sheet back out, making me wonder if I’d made the right choice, until finally someone pointed out that the poll workers had forgotten to tear off the little perforated receipt along the bottom. Problem solved, vote recorded. Outside, along the sidewalk across the street, beyond the required 30-foot perimeter, supporters for the candidates stood with signs. I suppose they’re working in shifts, since the polls will be open until 7:00 tonight. That’s a long time to stand up for your candidate for school board.

Last fall the NY Times printed a number of poems as part of their election day coverage. This was my favorite of them:

INFOMERCIAL 2

The old mule delivers the goods.
Nugatory diddlings are on the decline.
Stateliness has its day.

There are indeed many encouraging signs
in the weather and in handshakes.
Still there are those who mistake dark clouds
for raffish hucksterism. They have never savored
the elation of an empty crystal ball.

To them I say, seconds will call upon you
in the morning. Tonight there are dreams to be thumbed through
before the complicated, awful business
of summoning beautiful particles after the horse is stolen.

That’s Ashbery, of course. You can hear him read the poem here.

Elsewhere, the election news is not so good. Can’t blame the mules, though. They seem to have performed admirably.