In the Stop 'n Shop in Orleans, Massachusetts, I was struck by the elegance of the mackerel in the fresh-fish display. They were rowed and stacked, brilliant against the white of the crushed ice; I loved how black and glistening the bands of dark scales were, and the prismed sheen of the patches between, and their shining flat eyes. I stood and looked at them for a while, just paying attention while I leaned on my cart--before I remembered where I was and realized that I was standing in someone's way.

Mark Wunderlich: In an article you published in the Hungry Mind Review about your experience as a judge for the Lenore Marshall Prize, you discussed your hopes for the future of American Poetry. I'm wondering if you could talk a little more about that. Also, and this may be impossible to answer, but I'm curious to know what vision you have for the future of your own work? What are your current ambitions?

Bolick: In the book [Firebird] you write about your "education in beauty," beginning with your sister's tantalizing drawer of shiny trinkets: crepe and tulle, glittery ribbons, "scraps of sheer and sparkled treasure." Could you talk about what beauty meant to you as a child  How has your relationship to beauty and artifice changed over time?

It was two years ago that I first read a book by a remarkable young American poet called Mark Doty. He was completely unknown in this country. His poems had a compassionate, lyrical urgency, a descriptive and metaphorical power that was more exciting than anything I'd read from America since the death of Robert Lowell in the 1970s.

Prologue: Is There a Future? April 1993

Espada’s “Bully” is marked by layers of irony that work to implicate the monumental totems of US nationalism in a playful but immensely subversive toying with the word “invasion.” In a largely Puerto Rican school in the US named after Theodore Roosevelt, vainglorious invader of Cuba during the Spanish-American War, Espada uses the same racist tropes white nationalists have elsewhere used to convey their anxiety about immigration to speak of a similar “invasion” of the US by the very peoples Roosevelt fought to subdue.

Legislated Union, in the wake of failed resolutions and bloody compromises, seemed more than ever a contradiction in terms, a premonition given added vehemence in "For You O Democracy". . . . It goes without saying that these pious exhorations count as little more than stop-gap measures, wishful prophecies whose inflated optimism is portentous in its own right.

In one declamatory poem in the "Calamus" section, "For You O Democracy," he does attempt to celebrate "the manly love of comrades" for its contribution to the social cause of democratic idealism.

Whitman's increased emphasis on adhesiveness was also a response to the deep cultural fear among Northerners and Southerners alike that dismemberment would give rise to a civil or military dictatorship. In poem no. 5 (''For You 0 Democracy"), Whitman invokes the Union as something more than a legal compact that could be held together by the machinations of lawyers or the use of arms:

States!

Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers?

By an agreement on a paper? Or by arms?

Whitman now offers his reader a radiant scene depicted with the objectivity and detail of such paintings by Thomas Eakins as "Max Schmitt in a Single Scull" or "The Swimming Hole." Both poem and paintings feature young men in a variety of activities: sporting on the grass, rowing in shells on the Schuylkill, shooting in marshes, and sailing before the winds. Whitman had always admired the candor and uncompromising reality of Eakins's paintings.