14 July 2025
July we’ve been on the road. We, my home family, spent the entirety of the July Fourth week in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. On Thursday we will drive down to Jacksonville, Florida, and then St. Simons, Georgia, for a long weekend. I return at some point on Monday, then leave Wednesday for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. And all of this by automobile. Our family is not of the road warrior tribe. Though these trips have been and will be fun, the travel just takes it out of you. “You,” if you are like me, of course.
The road trip is a very American thing. The mix of agency, unfettered freedom, and a boundless land yet to be explored took shape in our late-blooming country: the Model T gripped the American life and imagination just as the last of the contiguous states joined the union. This heady mix is at the core of Walt Whitman’s famous pronouncement that “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” Found at the start of the preface to Leaves of Grass, this assertion powers a propulsive essay that barrels across the country for a transcendentalist manifesto that sanctifies the role of the national poet, ending with: “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” This statement quickly—almost immediately—relays to the opening salvo for “Song of Myself”: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” And the poetry commences.
As much as I’ve loved Whitman, especially in the elegies and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” these meta-poetic lines from “Song of Myself” have always grated me, particularly in the way “shall” creates a poetic relationship in which the reader is absolutely at the mercy of the poet’s will to power. Or, perhaps, Whitman simply lays bare the poet-reader relationship essential to lyric poetry, and, in that case, I would rather be mystified than knowing. But with his chapter “Whitman Drunk,” eminent critic Michael Warner threatens to rescue this part of Whitman from my skepticism. When looking at these lines as the diastole and systole at the heart of Whitman’s poetic practice, Warner sees the first line “thematiz[ing] a modern phenomenology of self everywhere,” but the second “make[s] the pragmatics of selfing a mess.” In the age of print—a time after the invention of the printing press and during a sharp rise in literacy and a boom in the capitalist circulation of goods—literature “relies on a discourse context defined by the necessary anonymity and mutual nonknowledge of writer and reader, and therefore on the definitional impossibility of intimacy,” Warner says. So here in Whitman is a paradox of poetry in print: “Assuming what I assume, you have neither an identity together with me, mediated as we are by print, nor apart from me, since neither pronoun attributions nor acts of assuming manage to distinguish us.” “Song of Myself,” Warner presses, and Whitman’s poetry, more generally, stage again and again this conundrum brought onto poetry by our modern age.
It’s within this context that I find Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s contribution to this issue particularly powerful. “These Rivers, the United States, & Me” is a tour de force that announces its intention of locating the poet (notably in the objective case) in relation to the United States. The poet and the country are certainly not absorbed together, at least from the get-go, given the comma and the imposing ampersand keeping them separate parts of a list. But Whitman’s operative word “absorbed” is very much at play in the poem from its second word on. Not only water from land and weather, but also liquids of other sorts—spilled wine, spilled tears, drunk mouthwash—run through the poem that, itself, runs through all of our country’s fifty states, at every moment a site of movement trying to find rest. Moreover, this is a poem pointedly about a poet trying to find her audience on her book tour. I suppose a book tour, after all, is the way to capitalize on, make up for, and/or follow through on the printed word’s promise of connection despite print literature’s “definitional impossibility of intimacy.”
But there is hardly that clean suffusion of sympathy that Whitman states as the gold standard of the national poet. This is not to say that the book tour is disastrous. Rather, the poem runs on interactions—embodied, imagined, and/or recollected—that make for a tremendously differentiated world, sometimes with race and/or gender differences prominent, and sometimes not; sometimes with others, and sometimes with herself; sometimes with those present, and sometimes with those only in mind. Warner says Whitman’s utopic fantasy is a stateless public constituted by gestures between individuals, which accurately describes what’s going on in Scenters-Zapico’s United States. She isn’t interested in indulging and ironizing the “modern phenomenology of self everywhere,” and thus eschewing the transcendentalist inclination that keeps “Song of Myself” somewhat rarified throughout. She works from anecdote, but it is one shot through with imaginative sight of the highest order—starting with a green that finds its way from Andrew Marvell’s garden to America (as a “Description without a Place”) courtesy of Wallace Stevens. Whereas “green” in Marvell and Stevens overpowers the entirety of the material world for a homogenizing
and unitary aesthetic—“obliterating all that’s made / to a green thought / in a green shade”—Scenters-Zapico’s green is more about empiricism than epistemology, demonstrating how powerful, and yet volatile, the imagination can be when one takes in the various world around her.
In both craft and content “These Rivers, the United States, & Me” adheres to that Coleridgean standard of aesthetic excellence: multeity in unity. Moreover, Scenters-Zapico takes up the Whitmanian project of demonstrating how well the United States can serve as a model for multeity in unity. (It is noteworthy from here that Whitman’s statement was made when convention had the United States a plural entity.) The title is the opening note and driving force. Water naturally merges with water into one, as poets like William Wordsworth and Langston Hughes have famously poeticized so well. Yes, but with Scenters-Zapico’s very first word, she wants to emphasize any body of water’s numerous sources. Just about every river mentioned in the body of the poem is singular, but the title collects them all, and moreover, in its most particular, concrete instance: “these rivers,” not “rivers” or “the rivers.” Additionally, arranging the moments alphabetically, by name of state, rather than chronologically or geographically, by region, the form forcefully uncouples river from its familiar tenor of time, which, bound to the sense of History that it itself helped make, tends toward a unitary flow. This bolsters the poem against homogenization, understandably important for a Latina poet, at least of this poem that attempts to maintain that delicate balance of multeity in unity. Such is the predicament of any individual in any group—national, literary, familial, cultural—especially one that values the individualism that democracy announces it does. Another effect of uncoupling water from its well-worn tenor of passing time is that the poem refuses to be a Bildungsroman, a work that placates us with the notion that with time comes wisdom that helps her turn herself into a productive member of society. When the son breaks the surface at the end of the poem, particularly in Wyoming’s question, it shook me, fellow parent, to my core.
OUT OF THE OFFICE:
• Please join us in congratulating Mercedes Rodriguez for winning the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, judged by Brandon Som. Their poem “Diabetes” will be published in the Spring 2026 issue. The full press release and list of finalists are on our website.
• We will be teaming up with the University of Georgia’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts to put on a poetry festival 4–5 November, which will bring Michael Collier, Edward Hirsch, Vievee Francis, Garrett Hongo, and Robin Coste Lewis to campus. If you are in our area, please join us. It will be a gathering you won’t want to miss.
• We are also collaborating with the Performing Arts Center, bringing National Book Award finalist Hanna Pylväinen to campus on Tuesday, 2 December to be part of their year-long series of events about Scandinavia, “Nordic Dream.”
• We will be tabling at the Burnaway’s art book and zine fair in Atlanta on Saturday, 11 October. And I will be in conversation with artist Victoria Dugger on Saturday, 18 October at the Hudgens Center for Art and Learning in Duluth, Georgia, to talk about her solo show there.
A literary magazine is certainly a type of literary public, perhaps its archetype. We do aim for that democratic balance of multeity in unity—that each reader feels part of a larger conversation, but in a way where the reader does not feel like he/she/they have to bracket off, or even demote, his/her/their preferences, predilections, and idiosyncrasies to keep reading with all of us. I hope you’ll roam around to find your own favorites. I find Carlo Paulo Pacolor’s shorts, in Soleil Davíd’s translation from the Filipino, powerfully estranging work. Daniel Halpern’s poem about Anaïs Nin makes me jealous of his encounter with her. Alexandra Isles’s surreal long poem about visitations to an incarcerated father is a can’t-miss. Hussain Ahmed’s “Blacksmith” is another poem that traffics in surrealism, this one a postcolonial venture in another type of place of confinement widespread here in the United States. Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes shares a story about how theater, tourism, and nostalgia play out in the mind of a woman pressed to make a life-changing decision.
G.M.