Bicentennial

Ivan and I discussed section 7, the last section. We thought it was weird that the narrator's "tall, handsome daddy" was introduced this late in the poem. Who was he? Why did he never know the narrator? We discussed how the poem drops lots of these narrative threads and expects us to make something of it. I imagined that his dad was one of the hippies that he writes of, that his parents were "free love" hippies and that's why they didn't know ea. other, but who knows if that's right or wrong. I think that the poem is very much about the fact that we're all together, crammed into this giant country, that we're all (supposedly) equal, that we ea. have one vote and live in a community and that's a pretty good reason to throw a celebration.

The poem gives you lots of glimpses of the narrator at different times in his life. The poem works in the way that the mind works, in the way that the mind drifts through time. In fact, the poem seems to be playing w/ the very constructedness of time. Time is an artificial thing, it's something we created. Like Louie CK says, people living in 15 BC didn't know they were living in 15 BC, counting down to some year 0 so that they could then count forward.