The Star-Spangled Banner - 9781581771992

The poems in The Star-Spangled Banner are each “explosive” reinterpretations of Francis Scott Key’s War of 1812 lyrics. They span a fifteen-year arc from 9/11 to 11/9, concluding with a rendering based on voices heard in the Wall Street Journal’s newsroom on the night Donald Trump’s election. The book is dedicated to the artist Jasper Johns and musician Jimi Hendrix—both famous interpreters of song and flag—and each poem uses the eighty-one words of the national anthem interspersed with language that act like the bullet holes in the flag of which Key writes. Each poem deploys a varied vocabulary: sometimes political and sometimes surrealist, like Ruby’s American Songbook (2013) and The Mouth of the Bay (2019); and sometimes personal, like his trilogy Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (2012). The Star-Spangled Banner is a poetic encounter with one of America’s leading national symbols, using the frame of Key’s lyrics in deviant ways, resulting in a verbal and emotional portrait of the United States in our time.