Lyndon Johnson: a Poem concentrates on the five-plus years of Johnson’s presidency, a time in which he briefly pulled the country a little closer to its professed ideals even as he began stoking a war that killed millions of people and destroyed the lives of countless millions more–and during which the seeds of our latest erosion of rights first sprouted. Throughout, I’m trying to borrow from Johnson’s sometimes-terrible energy to tell a story with real narrative force, even as, somewhat against my will, I’m grappling with my own role. The son of a man who was part of Johnson’s (by then, Nixon’s) war in Vietnam, I was an awkward kid, one who felt lost in his own portion of America even as the privileges the country bestows on people like me–white, hetero, cis-male, etc.–accrued. Half a century later, looking back on the years just before my birth, I’m still trying to make sense of that country, and Johnson’s contradictions spark in and against that effort. 

The book, which spans seven sections, plus an epilogue, begins immediately after Kennedy’s death as Johnson takes control of the country–embodied in the plane on which he took the oath of office (“Johnson insisted. Air Force One would wait.”)–along with the stories that America tells about itself. It ends with me and my wife at the cemetery where Johnson is buried, taking up once again the metaphor of the river with which I have tried–and ultimately failed–to find a unified vision of both Johnson and America:

… a family cemetery,
surrounded by a stone wall meant
in part to keep the river out.
The live oaks stretch across it,
some of them almost as old
as the nation Johnson represented
for a few years
with sufficient credibility
to alter it enough
the nation
in some measure must be said
to represent his life—
though each distorts the other,
a flawed lens you can’t see
the other one without. 

I’ve been working on this poem–researching, writing, scrapping, rewriting, researching more–for more than five years. What I’ve ended up with, I think, is a unified and compelling story of a life and a country too large to see in any unified way. I began writing the book in part out of frustration with proliferating definitions of poetry that seemed to leave so many poems out, as well as of course my frustration with the country in which I live. I didn’t end up with the book I intended to write–the poem and the stories insisted on something else–richer, I hope, and certainly more complex. I believe it’s a powerful book–one in which power’s restless motion maps the forces running through our lives.