The Lyndoniad
The poem or the poem in pieces, the fractured poem, which this volume comprises reflects a lifetime – almost 57 years – of reading and ruminating on the person and the career and the times of Lyndon Johnson. I was a senior in high school when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I had been enraptured to be studying American history all during the fall of 1963, but I would say that some connection between that subject and my own life and time had been missing. The Founding Fathers seemed far more alive to me than my own President and his retinue and the world of Washington did. This feeling of disjuncture changed with the elevation of Lyndon Johnson to the Presidency. The present moment suddenly seemed to matter to me as it had not under President Kennedy, whom I found something of a cypher, and in Lyndon Johnson – I'm not sure exactly why – I saw American history embodied as a living force, a reality . . .
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