The poets were speaking at the Symposium
On Poetry and the National Purpose, attended
By many in the crowd, many poets and lovers
Of poetry and many lovers of poets
While one of the poets, the one I’ll call
The Poet, was telling the crowd, especially
The members thereof who themselves were in fact
Not poets, that nothing is as significant as Poets,
For it is poets who are the prophets of the race
As well as its annalists, yes, its analysts who notice not
Only what has happened and is happening to the race
But announce beforehand what is going to happen
—And that isn’t all; they make it happen,
They change your lives—while, as I say, The Poet
Was saying all this and the crowded crowd
Was brought to the verge of cheers while
He was chanting the terrific openness of the ego
Like a continent uncontained by the roiling steel
Breakers of any sea, he celebrates the openness
Of the great variety counter as plenitudinous as appetites,
Making of everything the ingredients for a possible
Though unexampled ingestion whether of delight
Disgust or what for others would be terror
Like the knowledge of his own death
Which becomes only one layer in his hero sandwich
Surrounded with relish by the cries of the suffering
The outcasts the whores the battle-losers
And the captains of wrecked ships all
Equally in the feast and of the feast and
At the feast with the color green the shouts
Of victors and the amorous bodies
Of young men—you might not think so but it proved
That this unmetered and immeasurable readiness
To keep from being fenced in by anything by being
The self that does the including excluding
Nothing but tragedy—this, this is the American
Way. The Camerado for whom he waits at the end
Of the long road, c’est nous, the children spawned in the open
Nets of his liberties. Between his long spiels
It’s we who pick up our tickets at the Thruway
Tollbooths, erect new shopping centers in the interstices
Of his strophes to the future, growing older while his leaves
Rattle in the wind. We turn the page to see his
Democratic Vista—“Never was there more
Hollowness of heart … the underlying principles
Of the States are not honestly believed in
Nor is humanity itself believed in,” he told us before
A century and a half brought us to the future
He believed in, saying, “I know nothing grander,
More positive proof of the past, the triumphant
Result of faith in human-kind than a well-contested
American national election,” a sentiment we
Perhaps had better leave Open-
                                                         ended—