WWFD do

“There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution.”

Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 360.

Her source: William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), 371.

“There is no impeachment problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution.”

Sunday Walk

Listening to the NYT Book Review podcast…the poet Reginald Dwayne Betts was talking about his poems with largely redacted sections. The poems were written using official documents, pulling the direct language from various actors.

One of the twins in The Grammarians composed poems in the same way.

This would be an awesome assignment for a history class. How do we make sense of a testimony or a police report or some other source? How might we render it as poetry?