Scrolling through American Selves

Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again” (1936) has been invoked frequently in recent years because of its similarity to certain slogans on certain hats and hashtags. Hughes’s poem confronts the confines of the so-called American dream and the populations that have been historically excluded from and victimized by this dream; Hughes repeats and riffs on the line, “America never was America to me” throughout the poem. Ultimately, though, Hughes seems to welcome a new America that might embrace him and others locked out of America’s promise:

O, yes,I say it plain,America never was America to me,And yet I swear this oath —America will be!

In Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a collection that energetically grapples with American optimism and American despair, Dean Rader responds to Hughes’s poem in “Self-Portrait Bop.” Though the America Hughes anticipated remains elusive, his palpable frustration with America is familiar. Rader continues to stretch and repurpose the line “America never was America to me,” ending his poem admitting the limitations of the poem’s (and the poet’s) powers:

  Who is notBoth the music and the breath?Both the letters and the page? Men mightMake a country, but what I wrote about

America was never America to me.

Rader recognizes art’s successes and failures as he depicts a self again and again in various guises. The speaker of these poems is deadly serious and casually flippant, often in the same poem. The vision of an American self evolves as the collection does, adding more and more feathers to its cap and more and more weight to its restraints.

Rader takes the reader through poems that seem mostly resigned to restlessness and unable to settle on a singular self. The poems here reach beyond the page and engage the reader as they struggle toward completion. The poems also struggle to adequately serve this historical moment of technological anxiety and social isolation.

The first poem in Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry is entitled “Self-Portrait with Reader,” and though the poet couldn’t have foreseen me sitting and reading the poem on my own June day, I feel involved. The poem includes a direction to the reader to turn to a stranger and ask a prescribed question:

wherever you are, turn to the personsitting next to you — whether you are ona bus, in class, in a car, in heaven —and say, Lovely Stranger, you appear inthe last lines of a poem written tothe good and grave world. Now, what will  you do?

Reading these lines in an airport teeming with strangers to turn to, I chose to keep the question to myself. Like an audience member who had not counted on audience participation, I kept my head down and kept reading, certain that I’d let Rader down. That feeling of letting someone down through inaction seemed appropriate as the poems challenged their own efficacy and potency. By ignoring Rader’s call in the first poem, I had aligned myself with the rest of the American disappointments.

In the second poem, Rader continues to address a “you” that might be the reader, or might be America, or might be the self:

Give me the flash drive of your tongue:

I want to save everything. Even the goat  hornsyou strapped to the skull of the little girl,and yes, both of her hands. No, I don’t  reallyknow what that means, but so what?

Acknowledging the relationship between danger and wonder, seeking ways to communicate those contrasting ideas, propels us into uncertainty. In airports, malls, on highways, in front of computers, TVs, or phones, we are overwhelmed by images and ideas that upset and intrigue us, but we are not given the time to parse our reactions or respond effectively.

Rader includes familiar subjects presented in unfamiliar scenarios — as in the poems that feature Arnold Loebel’s characters, Frog and Toad. In one poem, they react to a...