124
Oh, Washington,
you slept here,
you left the imprint of your tired head
in the goosey pillow.
NORMAN MARTIEN
My own historical bed is empty without you,
father of my country.
The George Washington myths serve to express the failure of a
woman's relatitlns to her men, but the myths also give her a means of
talking about it. Partly
because
''George''
is
so distant, he can be a safe
listener, a discreet recipient of letters. At his remove he can allow her
a voice that can reaffirm human connections, impossible at closer ranges.
This process of recovery is at its best in the fine and moving poem, "The
Father of My Country," a woman's statement to the father who left
home when she was a child, while some of the later poems, where we
are told of a relation between her and a Black Uncle Sam, push too
hard on historical analogy. Surely it isn't necessary that we be
all
the
country's history. But by the last poems of the book we see that the
analogies have served well enough. The diffused emotion of the early
poems becomes an assertive human voice: "I won't take a lot of shit."
George Washington is returned to the past, once more a quaint anach–
ronism. The final poem can insist upon his failures, for Diane Wakoski
knows very well the danger of falling in love with distance -love for
The Father of Our Country may make us unloving "patriots." When
we arrive at "Triumph" in the last poem, it is an act of recovery, of
making new both personal and national histories.
The George Washing–
ton Poems
beautifully enact the reemergence of a woman and the pos–
sibility of loving.
Robert Kelly's
The Common Shore
makes no such personal claims.
The epic voice of his long poem seldom comes near us - at least not in
these first five books. The poem is subtitled
A Long Poem About Amer–
ica in Time,
and it doesn't mean America isn't late. The high solemnity
of "America" and "Time" (to say nothing of "Long") sets the tone for
what follows. Which is to say that
The Common Shore
contains some
solemn foolishness, but that it also rises now and then to meet its
am–
bitions. Kelly has a talent for a wide variety of verse technique. And
he knows what he's doing in attempting a long poem about America,
trying
to
bring together that impossible series of opposing tendencies
which describe our national life:
Me
&
America
My words
&
Things
Ideas
&
Facts
lIistory
&
]Vow
