Kerry & Poetry

[_dynamicdems]

Here are a couple of items you might find interesting. The first is an article describing how Kerry quoted lines of poetry in his stump speeches in 2004. The writer discusses both Kerry's choice of poet (Langston Hughes) and how rare it is for a presidential candidate to be heard quoting poetry on the campaign trail.

Then there is a 2004 poem written about John Kerry. It's sweet and, in retrospect, very sad.

John Kerry's poetic gamble
Dan Brown, CBC News Online | July 26, 2004

No matter which candidate wins this November's presidential vote, 2004 will go down in U.S. history as a remarkable election year. That's because John Kerry, the Democratic White House hopeful, has been reciting poetry as part of his stump speech. And that kind of thing doesn't happen often in America.

Although there isn't a strict separation between the worlds of presidential politics and poetry, they don't collide with great frequency these days. And Kerry's use of Let America Be America Again, a poem written by the late Langston Hughes, represents a head-on collision– not only has the Massachusetts senator adopted the title of the poem as his official slogan, but he is also quoting entire lines from Hughes on the campaign trail.

When Kerry was in Pittsburgh on July 6 to announce his choice of John Edwards as running mate, for instance, this is how he closed his speech:

"Langston Hughes was a poet, a black man and a poor man. And he wrote in the 1930s powerful words that apply to all of us today. He said 'Let America be America again. Let it be the dream that it used to be for those whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, for those whose hand at the foundry – something Pittsburgh knows about – for those whose plow in the rain must bring back our mighty dream again.' "

"We've come here today to put a team together that's going to fight to bring back America's mighty dream," Kerry continued. "We're going out of here today to let America be America again. Let's go out and make it happen together." Hughes – one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s – intended the stinging piece to be a call for the U.S. to return to its founding ideals. By referring to Hughes, Kerry becomes one of the few presidential candidates – or presidents ౎ to embrace poetry in modern U.S. history, to use for political purposes the work of those whom Percy Bysshe Shelley called "the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

rest of article: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/features/poetryinpolitics/

John Kerry Is The Man For Us
© By Saundra J. Brown


JOHN KERRY IS THE MAN FOR US

People, people, hear what I say
Listen up everybody in the USA
Whether you're Puerto Rican, Black or White
We got to come together to do what's right
We need a new President, someone we can trust
John Kerry is the man for us.

We got to get our friends and relatives to all go and vote
Some of us are out of jobs because our company went broke
We need a new President, someone we can trust
John Kerry is the man for us.

The President was warned about the terrorists attacking
There should have never been any plane hi-jackings
We need a new President, someone we can trust
John Kerry is the man for us.

Whether you're young or old, you got to get registered to vote
Because if Bush gets in again, that'll be all she wrote.
We need a new President, someone we can trust
John Kerry is the man for us.


Saundra Brown 2004
http://www.poetryamerica.com/read_poems.asp?id=243445

Sigh! There just isn't another Kerry. Not even close. We need this man in the White House.

[beachmom]

1. Thanks for this. He should do more poetry in his speeches, because

it makes you pause and reflect. I also think that, in general, Kerry has a poetic flair in the speeches he writes. Dissent was as close to poetry as a political speech can get. Here's probably the best part of the speech, and I've divided it into stanza form. It's not quite there as a poem, but you can see how it has the rhythm of one, if some verbs and nouns would be removed.


The true defeatists today
are not those who call for
recognizing the facts
on the ground in Iraq.

The true defeatists are those who believe
America is so weak
that it must sacrifice
its principles to the pursuit
of illusory power.

The true pessimists today
are not those who know
that America can handle the truth
about the Administration's boastful claim
of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.

The true pessimists are those
who cannot accept
that America's power and prestige
depend on our credibility at home
and around the world.

The true pessimists are those
who do not understand
that fidelity to our principles
is as critical to national security
as our military power itself.

And the most dangerous defeatists,
the most dispiriting pessimists,
are those who invoke September 11th
to argue that our traditional values
are a luxury we can no longer afford.

[karynnj]

2. That part does almost read as poetry

I love the patterns in it. It is also so powerful and truthful - not words put together because they sound good together.

[_dynamicdems]

3. That's really amazing.

It wouldn't surprise me if he actually has a drawer full of poetry he's written.