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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
The author of over sixty books of poetry, Robert Creeley helped to define an emerging counter-tradition to the literary establishment—a postwar poetry originating with Pound and Williams...
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FURTHER READING
Politics and Patriotism
Howl, Parts I & II
by Allen Ginsberg
A Farewell to America
by Phillis Wheatley
America
by Walt Whitman
American History
by Michael S. Harper
Bomb Crater Sky
by Lam Thi My Da
Dear George Bush
by Kristin Prevallet
Exquisite Candidate
by Denise Duhamel
Exquisite Politics
by Denise Duhamel
I Hear America Singing
by Walt Whitman
I, Too, Sing America
by Langston Hughes
Identity Crisis
by F. D. Reeve
In a Country
by Larry Levis
Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes
On Being Brought from Africa to America
by Phillis Wheatley
Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds
by Eleanor Lerman
Patriotics
by David Baker
Patriotism
by Sir Walter Scott
Thanksgiving Letter from Harry
by Carl Dennis
The Star-Spangled Banner
by Francis Scott Key
Related Prose
Poetic Form: Ode
Other Odes
Age
by Robert Creeley
America
by Herman Melville
Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
by William Wordsworth
Ode on Periods
by Bernadette Mayer
Ode to the Confederate Dead
by Allen Tate
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket
by Robert Lowell
Adopt a Poet | Add to Notebook | E-mail to Friend | Print
America  
by Robert Creeley

America, you ode for reality!

Give back the people you took.

Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the world

you thought of first but do not
own, or keep like a convenience.

People are your own word, you
invented that locus and term.

Here, you said and say, is
where we are. Give back

what we are, these people you made,
us, and nowhere but you to be.



From Selected Poems by Robert Creeley. Copyright © 1991 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Used with permission. Originally published in Pieces (1969).
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