2001

Voices Bright Flags: Poems based on American historical events

Research at AAS

I was a William Randolph Hearst Fellow in 2001. As it turned out, I was in the very early stages of work on a motley group of poems about various episodes and figures of American history, poems that would come together more than a decade later in the collection Voices Bright Flags (2014). For me they were experiments in the limits of political poetry and what is sometimes called “public poetry,” as distinct from the more personal poems I was also working on the same time.

Watchnight: A play on the eve of Emancipation
Sacred Music and Theatrical Songs in Early Nineteenth Century America