![]() ![]() JFK had been the first president to conduct live televised news conferences, so he visited American homes frequently in an informal capacity. Its gatesīannered, streets flagged and swept, the city waits. ![]() Of these, new, nondescript, an engine starts,Ī car door slams, a man drives off. Outside of town the suburbs, crosshatched and wan, The last presidential assassination had been more than 60 years earlier when William McKinley had been slain in a nation existing before radio, television, automobiles and airplanes had revolutionized American life.Ĭharles Wright’s “November 22, 1963” captured the hollow shock in the streets of Dallas. Many could not imagine such a crime in the United States’ modern democracy. That impact was felt with paralyzing emotions in America’s homes and in its streets, as the nation-both Republican and Democratic-wrestled with an unrelenting sense of disbelief. “He believed that the arts were the source and sign of a serious civilization and one of his constant concerns while in the White House was to accord artists a nation’s belated recognition of their vital role.” The poems, he noted, “convey the impact an emphatic man can have on his times.” Poetry played a prominent role in Kennedy’s vision of America. “There is a sad felicity in the fact that the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy should have provoked this memorial volume,” wrote historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, in the forward of the album’s liner notes. Those works, along with some written during Kennedy’s presidency, were compiled into a book published in 1964 and an audio album recorded a year later. Glikes and Paul Schwaber solicited poems about the JFK assassination. ![]() The album itself, with Irene Dailey and Martin Donegan reading the works, can be found in the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections at the Smithsonian.Įditors Erwin A. Kennedy, and the album’s tracks are available on Smithsonian Folkways. Both are entitled Of Poetry and Power: Poems Occasioned by the Presidency and by the Death of President John F. Glikes and Paul Schwaber solicited poems about the assassination. In the wake of Kennedy’s death, many newspapers published poetry tied to that weekend. Within minutes after gunfire stopped echoing in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, this murder sent millions reeling, drawing them into a monumental event that would send a shock wave through the nation and create a commonwealth of grief. Before the four-day weekend had ended, more than a million had taken an active role in saying farewell to the president, and millions more had formed an invisible community as television linked living room to living room and brought almost every American within a big tent infused with unsettling questions.ĭazed citizens struggled to regain their equilibrium. People lined up in front of appliance store windows to watch the latest news on a row of televisions. A Greenwich, Connecticut, mail carrier reported meeting a long line of sobbing housewives as he made his way from house to house. Schoolchildren were stunned to see strict and intimidating teachers weeping in the hallways. Kennedy was dead of an assassin’s bullet. On that unsettling day 55 years ago this month, the nation began a pageant of tears. ![]()
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