White people like to pretend that white supremacy is a part of the distant past, but it’s right now, in the form of racial profiling and police killings of black and brown citizens, in voter suppression and disparate sentencing in criminal cases, in mortgage fraud and school zoning and a thousand other ways, including the stories we tell ourselves about the past and our place in it. If white supremacy is distant history, then we white people can claim it’s not our problem or responsibility. We can just say it happened a long time ago, to people who are dead and gone, and aren’t we happy we’ve managed to get away from those old horrible days. We can lie to each other and to ourselves, and we can lie to the people who continue to be oppressed by a society that abuses and incarcerates and murders them, all while denying this oppression is happening.

Well I keep asking, day after day, because I do not find myself reassured—again, day after day—by the lies coming out of the White House—What the fuck? The stories filed by some of today’s best independent journalists, whose muckraking—to say nothing of the men and women in the federal government now passing along telling anecdotes and, one hopes, republic-saving memos—leave me feeling repulsed and vigilant against the credibility chasm that is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And yet millions of Americans and their elected representatives in Congress endorse this president still. “Wherever you are on earth, you are safe,” writes Richard Hugo. Really? Because the poem reminds us otherwise.

A poem like Larry Levis’s “Some Grass Along a Ditch Bank” reminds you that being on the edge of the natural world is like being on the edge of time. It’s as if the figure in the poem is day by day participating in a preemptive act to safeguard the nation’s ancient language of working the land without abandonment even as the modern world—the modernist, human, urban world—conspires against it. There’s a kind of joy to be found in the bleakness, in the arduousness of farming in a hostile environment against the insatiable terrain. The scale seems true, at least.

I repeat, put me down as a skeptic. But in past cultural and political upheavals, there have always been those to argue that we need to become nationalistic. It’s a form of take-backism. Take back the Constitution. Take back the flag. Take back law and order. Take back America. Underlying all those take-backs are the underlying take-aways. Take away the right to free speech. Take away the right to peaceably assemble. Take away respect for diverse religious experiences. Take away the right of the press to criticize and question leaders. Take away the rights of the citizens to petition the Government.

And so beginning with the end of Reconstruction and the ratification of Jim Crow, the trail of sharecroppers fleeing the South, resistance to school integration after Brown vs. Board of Education, Nixon’s Southern Strategy of fueling white anger over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the codification of race-baiting in the GOP party platforms since the 1970s, the so-called War on Drugs, and xenophobic resistance following the election of Barack Obama, a poem like “Skinhead” can be read as one angry voice in a paranoid chorus of white backlash.

What I mean to say is, a nation’s poetry degenerates if it does not embody the language of what is mysterious, including all that which is hidden behind the eyes of each person that, time and again, becomes the “Urge and urge and urge,” as Whitman says, always the “procreant urge,” to express life.

In Merwin’s hands there’s an opposite tendency to let life pass through, to go with what’s present, to live in the moment, as the cliché puts it. Does this mean to forget the past? Hardly. Taken together, the past with the present and the future are in Merwin’s poetry infinite, exceptional. His poems are neither cynical nor penitential. In the manner that we all locate what is essential to our natures, “The Gods” vibrates in relation to the social world, seems to waver, mutable, like a distillation of an unclouded sensibility under whose eye the circumstances of the life, the language of the experience, and the inwardness of knowledge, become one.

One knows too well that, at the very first opportunity, many men and women leave town, set off for other locales, pay for leisures not found at home, vent about geopolitical politics, refute dogmatic faiths of the past, tumble into art and, if they must, poetry. Many people, like Wright, had a narrow escape from their youths and picked up and pressed on. There may be a death in the rearview mirror but Southern plainspokenness helps you steer away from that, too.