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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, on May 21, 1926. He attended...
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FURTHER READING
Politics and Patriotism
Howl, Parts I & II
by Allen Ginsberg
America
by James Monroe Whitfield
America
by Claude McKay
American History
by Michael S. Harper
American Names
by Stephen Vincent Benét
Bomb Crater Sky
by Lam Thi My Da
Children of Our Era
by Wislawa Szymborska
Dear George Bush
by Kristin Prevallet
December 2, 2002
by Juliana Spahr
Delicate Cluster
by Walt Whitman
Election Year
by Donald Revell
Exquisite Candidate
by Denise Duhamel
Exquisite Politics
by Denise Duhamel
Fellini in Purgatory
by Jean Valentine
Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind
by Carl Sandburg
How We Did It
by Muriel Rukeyser
I, Too, Sing America
by Langston Hughes
In a Country
by Larry Levis
Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes
Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds
by Eleanor Lerman
Patriotics
by David Baker
Praise Song for the Day
by Elizabeth Alexander
Thanksgiving Letter from Harry
by Carl Dennis
To Roosevelt
by Rubén Darío
Related Prose
Poetic Form: Ode
Other Odes
Age
by Robert Creeley
America
by Herman Melville
Flying Fish: An Ode [excerpt]
by Charles Wharton Stork
Ode on Dictionaries
by Barbara Hamby
Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
by William Wordsworth
Ode on My Episiotomy
by Kimberly Johnson
Ode on Periods
by Bernadette Mayer
Ode to a Nightingale
by John Keats
Ode to My Hands
by Tim Seibles
Ode to Spring
by Frederick Seidel
Ode to the Confederate Dead
by Allen Tate
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket
by Robert Lowell
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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.



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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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