Michael Ruby and Sam Truitt, curators

In the diamond at the heart of the moon: Sixty-nine notes on the US elections, part 1

by Sam Truitt

Photo of a photo from a wall in Omar Perez’s apartment in Havana

Sam Truitt
In memory of David Graeber (1961–2020)

1.   two three four … / what are we fighting for?
2.   Is poetry’s role to keep open a human possibility until all may join? Isn’t that what the confounders sought?
3.   “Election” means something like the state or act of picking out or choosing.
4.   An election illuminates the space between us.
5.   “Election” shares the same cognate (Latin eligere) with “elite,” meaning “chosen people,” the adjectival use of which Byron introduced into English in a passage in Don Juan (Canto 13) recounting a party:

With other Countesses of Blank — but rank;
At once the “lie” and the “elite” of crowds;
Who pass like water filter’d in a tank,
All purged and pious from their native clouds …

American poetry and political defeat

by Michael Ruby

Michael Ruby and Sam Truitt, curators

IN THE first election year that mattered to me, 1968, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, my country killed hundreds of thousands of people in Southeast Asia, and Richard Nixon was elected president. In the decades that followed, I have always been unhappy with the leadership and direction of this country, usually very unhappy.

Michael Ruby

I was born a believer in peace. I say fight for the right.
Be a martyr and live. Be a coward and die.

— Susan B. Anthony speaking
in Gertrude Stein’s
“The Mother of Us All”

Introduction, a note, and first thoughts

Michael Ruby and Sam Truitt, curators

WE WERE commissioned to produce, in whatever form or scope we saw fit, this multipart series of commentaries to run from now into November on poetry and the election, bracing for and/or embracing the November 3 vote.

Michael Ruby, Sam Truitt, and fellow poets in New York's Hudson Valley survey the intersection of poetry and electoral politics — especially with regard to the November vote — and try to tell it like it is.

Michael Ruby is a poet who has worked for more than thirty years as an editor of articles about US politics at The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of The Star-Spangled Banner (Station Hill, 2020), The Mouth of the Bay (BlazeVOX, 2019), American Songbook (Ugly Duckling, 2013) and Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010), among other poetry books, and a trilogy in prose and poetry Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill, 2012). He is also coeditor of Bernadette Mayer’s collected early books, Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Station Hill, 2015). Recordings of many of his books, including his new book, are available on PennSound. He is currently living in the Hudson Valley in Gallatin, N.Y.

Sam Truitt was born in Washington, DC, and raised there and in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of Tokyoatoto (Station Hill, 2020 [October release]), Heresway (MadHat, 2018), Dick: A Vertical Elegy (Lunar Chandelier, 2014), Vertical Elegies 6: Street Mete (Station Hill, 2011), Vertical Elegies: Three Works (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008), and Vertical Elegies 5: The Section (Georgia, 2003), among others. He is the coeditor of In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley; and Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer. Robert Creeley likened Truitt to “a contemporary Everyman,” and he is the recipient, among other recognitions, of numerous Fund for Poetry awards, a Contemporary Poetry Award from the University of Georgia, and a Howard Fellowship. The producer and a cohost of the podcast Baffling Combustions and Director of Station Hill Press, he lives in Woodstock, NY. For more, visit: samtruitt.org

Jacket2 commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Jacket editors here.