Anatomy of a Poem: “Election Day”

I try to carry a poem around in my head as long as possible before putting it on paper. For me at least, it’s too easy to fall in love with anything set up in type. And love blinds one to difficult decisions. So walking around with Poetic Possibilities in mind, for days—or weeks, or longer—abstractly juggling and re-arranging them, allows me to establish the perimeters of a poem, and the necessary steps of its argument. Or so it seems, until the first sketch is typed up. It’s then that previously unthought-of directions suggest themselves; or one image leads unexpectedly to another; or a rhyme scheme needs freshening and the change prompts a reversal of emotion.

It usually takes a long while to finish a poem, but sometimes the process is, for one reason or another, speeded up. Here is one instance.

In mid-October I got a telephone call from an editor on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. Occasionally for holidays or turns-of-season, they’ll ask a few poets for work to run. For the first time, he said, they wanted to run a few poems on Election Day, 2008. Would I contribute? I agreed, because I think of myself as patriotic but not political. (Oh yes, I voted for Obama, am a registered Democrat and have been all my life. But “political” poems bore the pants off me—so Earnest, so Self-Righteous.)

Here is the first page I then wrote up, the top half of it isolated lines or phrases that I thought might be useful, and the second half of it the start of a poem that the earlier phrases had led to. I usually then take a typed page and begin to sketch what will follow, even as I begin to revise what I’ve just written.

Election Day first draft

I knew the Times wanted a short poem, and by the next day, I thought I had finished one. I typed it up as if to mail it in. But it then didn’t seem complete. More wanted to be said, and that is penciled in.

Election Day second draft

The following day, a still longer version is drafted. I’m already over the requested line-length, but it still needs one last stanza. It needs to end, not just stop.

Election Day third draft

And here is the final version that appeared in the Times. Curiously, after I sent them a “final” version, I noticed one or two tiny things I wanted to change in the proof they e-mailed me. That further-corrected version (it appears below) was what they printed. But they forgot to make the changes in the version they put on their web site—which, I gather, is where far too many people read the paper…and then copy things onto their blogs. The less-than-quite-final version from the web site circulated widely, alas.

One thing annoyed me, and one thing pleased me about the whole venture. I had been asked to write a poem that would appear on Election Day. After I voted I went to the newspaper store in my small Connecticut village and bought a copy of the Times. No poem. I e-mailed the editor to ask what was up. Oh, hadn’t he written to tell me? They’d decided to run it the next day, the day after the election. I registered my annoyance: if that had been the plan, I would have written a poem called “The Day After Election Day.”

The thing that pleased: as soon as the poem appeared, a producer from PBS’s The News Hour called and asked if I’d come to their New York studio to read the poem. It wasn’t aired that day, but a couple of days later—on Friday evening, at the end of a tumultuous week in American history. Many people, it turned out, watched, and liked the idea that a poem would cap the week’s news.

ELECTION DAY

The older couples had voted just after dawn,
And by noon the exit polls are underway.
Some talking head opines in San Jose.
A poster leans mute and smiling on the lawn.

“As the wind blows, so the flag will wave,”
Says a cynic who is nevertheless waiting in line.
The woman in front of him has been assigned
The nearest booth where she plans, again, to save

The Republic from itself—the drama played out
In this miniature theater, with its curtain and cast.
Today will be a performance of the past,
Its fortunes and flaws, its certainty and doubt.

The pencil has no eraser. She makes her choice,
Determined but still uncertain how it will end,
As the Founders were as well who thought to lend
So much importance to each small impassioned voice.

But will the cynic’s vote now cancel hers?
She stays behind to watch him enter the booth.
(In our democracy, we think “the truth”
Is what everyone, regardless, secretly prefers.)

She won’t know anything but threats and trends
Until, again in the dark, but midnight’s now,
She can sense what hope the numbers will allow,
And what you get when you smear or overspend.

She will sit and stare at charts on CNN.
(But aren’t we redeemed by what they cannot show?
The struggle in each restless heart to know
The terms on which the nation’s fate depends.)

She will think how, at last, millions have spoken as one,
That freedom requires an open mind and hand,
And the strength to be forgiven and understand,
And that tomorrow morning it has all just begun.

You can watch J. D. McClatchy’s November 7 appearance on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS’s Online NewsHour.

March 26, 2009, 12:15pm · election day, pbs, poetry, the new york times, the news hour with jim lehrer