SOURCE: Waniek, Marilyn Nelson. “A Multitude of Dreams.” Kenyon Review 13, no. 4 (fall 1991): 214-26.

In the following excerpt, Waniek considers the autobiographical, historical, and emotional implications ofThe City in Which I Love You.

As I write, the troops of the Federation are crushing the Klingon horde, and here in the world every other tree wears a yellow ribbon. Even the Pope is not a pacifist. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of graves twelve inches deep in the desert sand, and nowhere a truly reasonable and realistic argument against a necessary war. Auden was damn straight: poetry don't make nothin' happen. Yet, as he argues in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” poetry does more than make something happen: it is itself a way of happening; it is a voice. I'm inclined to believe that the way of poetry is the way of deep interior affirmation, as useless and as essential...