Poetry saving America Day 10 #NationalPoetryMonth

With today's poem, we're almost halfway through Tony Hoagland's Twenty Poems That Could Save America. Once again we have Hoagland's own words providing insight into why he included "Topography" as poem 9.  (If you're looking for a specific link to Minnesota with this poem, we call your attention to the mention of Great Lakes, Central Time, and twin cities.)

poems defuse sexual anxiety and acknowledge the naturalness of curiosity

Sharon Olds’s “Topography” could perhaps shatter the petrified classroom notion that poetry has no libido or sense of humor. The poem’s narrative achievement is to be both playful and wholesome on the subject of sex. “Topography” is also a tutorial in the pleasures of extended metaphor and language itself, allowed as it is to somersault in a non-directive, extracurricular capacity.

After we flew across the country we
got into bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

By original image by NASA; crop by Ryan Kaldari [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky once said that American poetry would be a warmer, more inviting place if it included more sex, humor, and violence — if, in some ways, it artfully incorporated some of the “life-affirming vulgarity” of the popular entertainment that has, it sometimes seems, elbowed it aside. Olds’s poem dispels the atmosphere of stodginess and elitism we culture lovers must constantly resist. It also sets the table for a host of subsidiary conversations on subjects ranging from patriotism to porn, from the curious pleasure of phonemes (“Sonoma”) to the nature of innuendo (“Fire Island”). The god of play is Eros, and sometimes art leads with the libido. If Americans only knew that poetry is sexy, surely more books would be checked out of the library. “Topography” demonstrates one of the wondrous facts of American poetry — its populist brilliance and range. It can be high and low, entertaining, erudite, provocative, rude, brainy, and mysterious.

Our suspicion is that Hoagland's intent with this poem is to suggest we need to lighten up if we hope to save America. He has chosen a poem that we would not have found to be characteristic of Sharon Olds' oeuvre. We wouldn't be surprised if there was a message embedded in that. After all, despite our differences, we are all in this together. What was it that Benjamin Franklin observed about us? Oh--"We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." Division drives democracy down to doom and death.

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