America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Soon after the 2016 presidential election, Sixteen Rivers Press, a shared-work collective of Northern California poets, conducted a nationally advertised call for submissions, seeking unpublished poems that would "respond to the cultural, moral, and political rifts that now divide our country: poems of resistance and resilience, witness and vision, that embody what it means to be a citizen in a time when our democracy is threatened." In a matter of weeks, the press received over two thousand poems. The work came from across the country, from red states and blue states, high schools and nursing homes, big cities and small towns. At the same time, the poet-members of the press were asked to nominate poems. These poems could be old or new, published or not, the poets living or dead--anything from anywhere that spoke to this moment in the voice of poetry. In this way, we gathered another three hundred poems, ranging from Virgil and Dante to Claudia Rankine and Mai Der Vang, from Milton to Merwin, from Bai Juyi to last Thursday's just-posted Poem-a-Day.




This anthology is a blend of poems from these two sources, each of its nine sections a kind of town-hall meeting where citizen-poets gather to raise their voices, now raucous, now muted, now lyric, now plain: voices responding with dissent and consoling with praise, perspective, vision, and hope.




Around 1950, Pablo Neruda wrote the poem, "América, I do not call your name without hope" to a Latin America in crisis. In this anthology, Dean Rader's poem, in the spirit of Neruda but in the time of Trump, speaks, under the same title, to our America: "this is for you and your fear, your tar; / for the white heat in your skin and / for your blue bones that one day may sing." The title of our book echoes this cry: America, listen to what your poets are saying. Are we the corrosive, racist, authoritarian regime that the 2016 election brought to power, or are we a democracy, that fragile, imperfect form of government that must be constantly guarded in the struggle for equality, justice and freedom? In resistance and resilience, and not without hope, America, we call your name.

"Poetry is one of the oldest forms of resistance. Entering not only our minds but our hearts, poems can swim under the highest walls erected by the powerful, subverting the most staggering onslaughts of distortion and outright lies, undermining threats, answering despair, rescuing the simplest and yet most profound ways that we know, reviving our courage, inviting action. Tyrants, despots, fascists of all kinds, beware this book. It may bring even you to your senses!" --Susan Griffin

" 'The master's tools,' writes Audre Lorde, 'will never dismantle the master's house.' Poems are one of humanity's most important tools because they operate outside of policy, outside of the system. They are the instruments of the people not of the palace. This timely, urgent, and vital collection reminds us of the civic work poems do. They deliver a different kind of knowing--a deeper wisdom--than conventional news or posts or feeds. The resistance and resilience of these poems comfort and connect us, but they also catalyze our voices and our collective rage. Wallace Stevens once wrote,'Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.' America, We Call Your Name gives me hope in our work as poets and as citizens." --Dean Rader