[Each state appears here in alphabetical order. With a poem for
the District of Columbia, and a poem serving as Preface, 52 poems. But
This Land invites (and even demands) that its organization and its
meanings be constructed by each reader. ]
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A PAGEANT OF AMERICA IN 52 POEMS  
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Jerry Dyer
December 23, 2022
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_ Each state appears here in alphabetical order. With a poem for the
District of Columbia, and a poem serving as Preface, 52 poems. But
This Land invites (and even demands) that its organization and its
meanings be constructed by each reader. _

,

 

_This Land: These People, The 50 States
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by Peter Neil Carroll
Press Americana, 2022

Peter Neil Carroll's new collection of poems (new and selected poems),
_This Land, _is profoundly evocative. Various voices were called to
mind as I dipped in and out of this slim volume: I thought of Jack
Kerouac's _On the Road _(Carroll writes that he has "seen and slept in
all 50 States," plus the District of Columbia). I thought, too, of
John Dos Passos' _U.S.A. _trilogy, with the titles and images of the
poems generating a similar sense of _sweep_, of an effort to somehow
capture all of America in a singular prism, or a kaleidoscope between
covers. In terms of poetry collections, I thought of Bob Hofman's
wonderful 1996 PBS series (and subsequent coffee-table volume), _The
United States of Poetry, _which captured a very broad swath of poetic
forms and voices in late 20th Century America.

This is not an anthology of poets, however, but the vision of one
Peter Neil Carroll, a distinguished historian and poet. In that sense,
the most obvious figure brought to mind is Walt Whitman. But to make a
distinction: this collection does not launch from the absorptive
egoism of Whitman--there is no pretense, despite the presence in many
of Carroll's poems of the first person singular pronoun, of capturing
all of America in a "Song of Myself." But, this _is_ a 21st Century
"Leaves of Grass," insofar as it is an attempt to capture the entirety
of America, its multifarious currents and realities, its histories and
amnesias. Nature is here, in images and sound; and American music and
song are here; holidays and traumas, personal and social; even a
snippet from a movie soundtrack--Humphrey Bogart in _Casablanca_. Many
historical figures make appearances, from Roger Williams to George
Floyd, and there are allusions to or cameos by Mark Twain, Allen
Ginsberg, and many others.

How can such richness be organized? In simple terms, each state
appears here, in alphabetical order. (With a poem for the District of
Columbia, and a poem serving as Preface: which makes 52 poems, not
accidentally--I have to believe--the number of cantos or sections to
Whitman's keynote poem in "Leaves of Grass!") Within that alphabetical
sequence, there are five numbered 'thematic' divisions: People in
Motion, Staying Put, This Land, Changes, and Passing. 

But I think _This Land _invites (and even demands) that its
organization and its meanings be constructed by each reader. The 'you'
that Walt Whitman so often invokes in his poetry--the reader--is also
implicitly but necessarily present here as well. In that sense, it is
a volume in a profoundly democratic tradition; we are integral parts
in shaping the meaning of these poems.

I will take my interpretive starting point from that tripartite
labeling of this volume, which is 'about' what we refer to as
'America.' Even on the cover, the full title occupies three lines: the
word 'Land' has nestled under it 'People'; and layered under that,
'States.' I will take soundings from this collection by translating
those terms into the themes drawn from Nature (Geography), Identity
(Ethnicity or Culture), and Politics. And so, for me, the questions
arise, "What is 'America,' then? Who is a real, or true American? And
how did we become what we are?

Landscapes are part of what create our identities as Americans (along
with, of course, our ethnicities and religions and families). In "A
Hoosier Woman" Carroll recounts meeting the title personage:

A tall gray-haired woman in blue jeans hosing
her Ford pickup can't believe I'm lost.

In her garden, the Ten Commandments stand
like grave stones. She gives directions.

In this poem, we can see an instance of the way that our identities
are dialectical. The landscape shapes us; but we also bleed into the
natural and constructed world around us, imprinting ourselves onto the
world. "A Hoosier Woman" begins abruptly with an image that suggests a
much larger spiritual reality, that finds its echo in her grave stone
monuments: "Dead End, the sign is bullet pocked."

Images from nature (or landscapes) are rendered beautifully throughout
this volume. For example, there's a Colorado early Spring meadow,
where the poet is startled to see

...woolly elk chewing bark, a herd
of fifty, their spring coats mottled between
seasons. A young pair rubs chins like lovers--

There's "The Road to Atchison," in Kansas, where one can see

...abandoned barns
nestled in lichen and vine,
a Victorian manse left to rot
near the tottering silo...

Yet in Nebraska ("Nebraska Spring"), we find renewal too:

Birdsong hidden in sycamore leaves,
oil-black soil ripening seed, and here's
the sun. Everything's ready to spring.

But who or what is a Real American, and how well do we fit--or not
fit--into our environment? There's the South Carolina history
professor, "true to his [southern] heritage" who can't make it in
academia. "Not exactly eccentric," but "He strung a maze of
clothesline from his office/ window to the door, hand-written notes
hanging/ like laundry on wood pins." (Yes, American truths, historical
facts sometimes do, perhaps, need to be laundered.)

Our various American souls are divided and contained by boundaries,
and not all of them are visible. In California, the line crossed is
from urban to rural, from San Francisco to Hollister, from the
cosmopolitan world to the "Backstage"--the poem's title--of a small
rural town's patriotic celebration. The young narrator, wearing his
"first brown broad-rimmed cowboy hat" encounters a "40ish, pot-bellied
horse-groom, brushing/ the sleek flank of his muscular Clydesdale
stallion," and he realizes "how ridiculous I looked under the brim."
He asks

_How many hands...._Which brought a pause to his labor
He asked where I was from. San Francisco,
I admitted, confirming his suspicion. Slowly,
without malice, he said, _Welcome to America._

It is also the case (People in Motion, yes) that our larger identities
are changing, as the artificial lines of states and countries are
crossed, as people migrate. The poem of the first state--Alabama--ends
with an image of an audience hiding from itself, in a state still
mired in racial conflict:

Our matinee features a civil rights
movie. When it goes dark at the end,
no one, white or not, leaves their seat.
No one wants to face the light.

But the civil rights issues in Alabama are themselves both continuous
and changing. The poem's title, "Aliens," refers to the influx of
Hispanic families, the migration of workers and their families to find
work. The first stanza expresses this change in haunting images of
what can't  be seen:

It's what you can't see in Alabama,
the kid's soccer ball hidden in a shed,
someone's mama behind a curtain
waiting for sundown to go outside.

How, though, did we become _this _congeries of people? That is, how
can we even begin to understand the historical and political currents
that have brought so many cultures to our borders? Or the politics
that have shaped our consequent identities? How can such complexity
even be represented? Several of the poems here capture facets of our
becoming, and our living together, more powerfully than many an
academic study might. In Alaska's poem ("Landfall"), for example, an
Inuit singer at a 4th of July gathering sings a song which reminds all
of us that "Lady Liberty did not greet us." Instead, "We slipped in
through the back door."

The Native Americans--all the more than 500 nations--did indeed slip
in through the back door, across the Bering Strait, and were waiting
for the Old World, so to speak, to show up. How many states are named
after those original inhabitants? And look at the complex _mélange_
of other nations that are represented just in the names of the states:
there are the numerous Native American names; there's a New Mexico but
also New Jersey; there's Florida and Colorado, but also Maine (French
in origin); Maryland and Pennsylvania (named after real people), but
also California, named after a mythical island ruled by a fictional
Queen Calafia). 

And speaking of mythical islands, how about Rhode Island? To my mind,
"A Little Key" is one of the strongest poems in _This Land, _and will
reward a deeper examination. (The 'representative' quality of any
single state show up here too, even in its name: in addition to the
fact that it is not an island, the name's origins lie either in
Giovanni da Verrazzano, who called it the 'isla di Rhode,' or perhaps
in the Dutch explorer Adriaen Block's 'Roodt Eylandt.' But, in either
case--perhaps both are true--the name links back to the red soil of
the Greek island of Rhodes. A state name and meaning, in other words,
that embodies so very much of the American reality: our multicultural
and indeterminable origins, and--as we soon see--the religious beliefs
and arguments, the errors and mistaken identities that thread though
our 'New World' existence.)

The state's capital is Providence, named by the Puritan Roger
Williams, and therein lies a key. The poem teaches us that
'Providence' had been Williams' refuge, his place of escape from
religious persecution. He was chased out of one 'Zion' because of his
conscience, his disagreements with the reigning religious views of the
Massachusetts Bay colony. He settled in with the Narragansett people,
and was determined to learn their language. 

Carroll brackets "A Little Key" with two quotes from Roger Williams:
at the outset, in the epigraph: _It was not price or money
that....purchased Rhode Island. Rhode Island was purchased by love.
_And then, at the end, Williams' explanation as to why he wants to
learn the Narragansett language: _"A little key may open a box/ where
lies a bunch of keys."_

Virtually every poem, I would argue--depending on each reader's
individual take on the meaning of America--could provide a 'key' to
the whole. Let's take, for example, a close look at "Everlasting," the
poem for Kentucky. The poem is set in Vanceburg, which "isn't a
tourist stop." At the outset

Blue smoke hangs like mist
over two frizzy-haired women sitting
cross-legged, backs against
a brick wall, savoring morning cigarettes.

They are on break from the industrial work of rendering chickens. The
poem takes a birds-eye tour--one thinks of filmic technique--away from
the women. We discover ourselves at the town's center, where:

At the courthouse, a column honors Civil War dead,
deeper in the etched script, a stormy history sleeps:

_The War for the Union Was Right, Everlastingly Right,_
_and the War Against the Union Was Wrong, Everlastingly_
_Wrong._

Such fervor--and down the block,
the two women stand up,
flip away their cold smokes, glance

toward the Ohio River a hundred yards away,
a tugboat stubbornly pushing against the stream
that separated slave from free.

Our struggles, as a people, are indeed everlasting; we need, tugging
one another along as best we can, to fight our way upstream.

And that notion of _resistance, _of a critical but affectionate look
at America, is a political tie connecting _This Land _to the spirit of
Walt Whitman--though perhaps there is a good deal more criticism in
Carroll's take on America than there is, on the surface, in Whitman's.
_This Land _has two epigraphs, both taken from "Leaves of Grass." The
first is worth quoting in full, both because of its command, and its
warning:

To the States or any one of them, or to any city of the States
_Resist_
_much, obey little,_
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after-
ward resumes its liberty. ("To the States")

The second epigraph (taken from "By Blue Ontario's Shores"), shifts
the burden as it were--as this collection does too, I believe--from
the poet's 'I' to the readers collective 'you':

I am he who walks the States with a barb'd tongue, questioning
every one I meet,
Who are you that wanted only to be told what you knew before?
Who are you that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense?

We meet the same encounter between poet and reader in Peter Carroll's
prefatory poem, "This Land; These People." In addition to providing us
with a few samplings of states, of images--Wyoming's "Medicine Wheel,"
for example, a brilliant and hopeful final poem--we find a hint of the
whole meaning, all the yoked contradictions of America. ("Do I
contradict myself?/ Very well then, I contradict myself/ I am large, I
contain multitudes" Whitman asserts, near the end of "Song of
Myself.") The final stanza of Carroll's Preface suggests the same need
to keep a large and open mind:

One thing is sure: you never know what you'll find
until you're there. Keep your eyes open. Be surprised.
Strangers live everywhere. So do neighbors.

In a possible final judgment then, America is in its own particular
way a country whose essence is to have no fixed essence. (And that is
not to traffic in any way with a notion of 'American exceptionalism.')
But we are clearly a country, as historian Daniel Boorstin suggests in
_The Americans, _constantly looking "for ways of living together."
Boorstin says that "America grew in the search for community." Let us
hope that, inspired by a willingness to understand our various
histories and perspectives, we will be able to, as a democracy,
continue that search.

Carroll's presentation of America is a mosaic, or a mural, overflowing
with embedded lives (with all their feelings,) with emotions and
moods. _This Land _is evocative, ultimately, of whatever experiences
and knowledge--gleaned from history (experienced or studied), or
travel, or films, or literature--that the reader brings to it. In my
case, the 52 poetic 'takes' on America made me think of Robert Frank's
iconic book of photographs of America. In his introduction to Frank's
_The Americans, _Jack Kerouac writes: "To Robert Frank I now give this
message: You got eyes."

Peter Carroll does too.

_Jerry Dyer [[link removed]] is a
very recently retired teacher. In that life, he taught a wide range of
language centered courses, from mainstream English to ELD (ESL), five
years of German, a bit of philosophy, and poetry. (The divisions were
less rigid than it might seem!) He taught from middle school up to and
including college courses, with the last 18 years at the high school
level, at Silver Creek in San Jose’s East Side Union.
Poetry has been at the core, always, the spark of creativity feeding
the curricular choices and the activities and enterprises in all his
work. Beyond the classroom, Jerry has been an active member of Poetry
Center San Jose, especially the Willow Glen Poetry Project community._

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