The American Dream: a Juxtaposition...

…reading happened today at the womanMADE Gallery. Co-curated by Nina Corwin and Erika Mikkalo, it explored “A beautiful country with a history damning and redeeming in turns. A nation where all have opportunity but one percent of the population controls over a third of the wealth. A crucible of enlightenment democracy that allowed slavery.” I read some poems from After Robinson Has Gone since, as Donald Justice said, Weldon Kees is “one of the bitterest poets in history,” and that “the bitterness may be traced to a profound hatred for a botched civilization, Whitman’s America come to a dead end on the shores of the Pacific.”