What did Whitman Say to Ali?

Tucked away amongst Walt Whitman’s grass leaves, he asserts that he can “hear America singing.” He is listening to an American choir of voices that at the time is overlooked in favor of white men of means. In his telling, the American song is sung by the mechanics, the mason, the shoe maker, among other laborers. He hears America sing “what belongs” to each of them and “to none else.” The song he hears, and the America he proposes, is inspiring, moving, still mostly male, and from our view in 2024, missing a few parts. 

Langston Hughes offers a rebuttal that he too sings America, that he too is America, and that “Tomorrow/ [he’ll] be at the table” and “nobody’ll dare say…eat in the kitchen.” A bit later, Muhammad Ali asserts that he is America, handsome, loud, black, and unwilling to stay on the sides any longer. He says he is here, get used to him. Later still, Haunani Kay Trask demands that she is not American, but even in her shouts, she is adding another shade, another texture to the song Whitman heard.

This intertextuality, this building of a conversation across texts and times, is key to how humans grapple with ideas and move them ever forward. We need to notice these conversations, as my professors told me many decades ago, as I tell my own students now. And we need to join in if we want our voices to matter too. Joy Harjo and Gwendolyn Brooks are taking part in this back and forth with their poems “An American Sunrise” and “We Real Cool,” speaking directly and indirectly to each other and the authors mentioned above. 

While Brooks does not directly respond to the topic of whose voices matter in the song of America, she tells her poem in the voice of some of the Americans that Hughes mentions in his poem “I, Too.” Instead of leaving them in the other room, off camera as it were, promising to join the table soon, Brooks centers the people in a bar playing pool. She opens her poem with a sort of epigraph, a sub or alt title. She begins “The Pool Players/Seven at the Golden Shovel,” capitalizing the P’s as if to say, these are proper nouns too, proper Americans too.

From here, the body of “We Real Cool” is sparse, distinctive, like some jazz music. Brooks effectively uses enjambment, breaking sentences before they are finished, hammering up a distinct rhythm that is alien to the one Whitman might have heard. She also leaves that powerful word, capitol W “We” to end each line, forcing the reader to consider the diversity of who “We” are. In this America, we are not just European immigrants working hard for the American dream, but also we are these other men, “lurking late,” playing pool, and thinking about dying soon.

In “An American Sunrise,” Harjo calls back to Whitman, Hughes, Ali, and others in the conversation about American-ness with her title. This poem, she claims, is “an American sunrise,” no other kind, and so the reader must read in that context, asking how is this America? Across lines 6 and 7, Harjo responds even more directly to Whitman. She writes that “Sin/Was invented by the Christians, as was the Devil, we sang.” Whitman’s singers are probably rightly assumed to be generically christian as they sing, but in Harjo’s poem, she enters the conversation with a different song. These Americans know that sin was an invention of oppression. Harjo’s Americans “know the rumors of [their] demise” but insist that they are “still America.” 

While painting a picture of this American sunrise, of Native Americans inside a bar, Harjo is connecting to Brooks’s pool players at the same time as she is reminding Whitman that there was already a song being sung by the time his dock workers arrived. And that in fact this song is still being sung. And in this version, it is “they” who “die soon.” Harjo effectively warns Whitman here. On top of this, she directly responds to Brooks, repeating and rewriting most of Brooks’s poem by ending each of her lines with a word from “We Real Cool.” One can reread two thirds of Brooks’s poem by reading top to bottom the last words of each line in Harjo’s text. Whereas “We Real Cool” retains a minimalist musical feel due to the spare wording and the enjambment, “An American Sunrise” is fleshy, adding a Native voice to the songs of America.

When we notice the way authors converse across texts and times, we can follow important conversations. We can even, as I have done, purposely put texts into conversation to see how they might comment on and to each other. We can think about what it means to be American and who we include and who we ignore when we talk about America or “American Music,” and now I wonder what Gordon Gano might have to say about all this.