Sometimes we may need to take the unwelcome yet eye-opening bite into the raw onion of American history. On Thursday, writer, historian and poet Peter Neil Carroll walked into a room in the Science Center to find a warm and accepting audience. Carroll — who wasn't published as a poet until 2008 — has written and edited 17 history books, including Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Art of History.
Carroll discussed other events that add layers to America's story, including the Trinity Site in New Mexico where the atomic bomb was tested. He described the incident with the cynical one-liner, "tested here, proved in Nagasaki." According to Carroll, the Native Americans who inhabited this country saw the power of the world as held in circles, alluding to a cyclic, more natural philosophy of life. Carroll explained that European settlers "put [them] in square boxes," a reference to the square pieces of reservation land assigned to Native Americans by the U.S. government. After hearing Carroll's poetry, one might find it hard to see the reservations as generous. More importantly, by painting history through poetry, Carroll has found a way to provide a more circular and natural understanding of what has so often been provided in rectangular and straightforward forms of textbook history. Rather than capturing history, his poetry shines a light on it, with substance and the potential for a new kind of truth.
Carroll did convey some optimism that night, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson's "experience of universal truth" in nature. He went on to claim that the circular, universal beauty of this land "offers some hope" to the layers. Still, he acknowledges his own identity with the statement that he "cannot get this skin off." Upon leaving the talk, we audience members could not help but feel a sense of guilt or displacement for our ignorance about the land we have always called home. In destabilizing our sense of history, Carroll and his poetry have effectively handed us the opportunity to build better layers atop the ones beneath us, layers filled with tolerance, integrity and, hopefully, more poetry.