A collaborative poem about America, from fifty-four of our best poets
Crossing State Lines: An American Renga is a poetic relay race across the continent: fifty-four poets responding to ideas of Americaβand to each other. This is a collaborative journey of impressionsβfrom the election and inauguration of President Obama, through foreclosures, job losses, chords of country music, and bombs in Baghdad, to a poet-soldierβs rifle-sight in Afghanistan.
The renga itself, in the ancient tradition of Japanese linked verse, provides the form of this historic conversation among the poets, as they meditate, within ten lines, on a moment in America. Crossing State Lines begins with Robert Pinskyβs recounting of a line of poetry by Lincoln as fall deepens and βmaples / kindle in the East,β and ends some five hundred lines later, with Robert Hassβs βgreeny Aprilβ on the Pacific coast.
All proceeds from sales go to America: Now and Here.
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