“Let America be America again. / Let it be the dream it used to be. / Let it be the pioneer on the plain / Seeking a home where he himself is free. // (America never was America to me.)” Written in 1935, Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again” begins with a stanza of lines that seems to wish for a bygone era of the country, with its ideas of pioneering and freedom, but follows with a line in parentheticals that clarifies and redefines that notion of America from the speaker’s point of view. The poem’s next two stanzas follow this form with lines in parentheticals, the last one stating: “There’s never been equality for me, / Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.” This week, compose a poem that begins with the title of Hughes’s poem as your first line. Throughout your poem, use parentheticals to illuminate how some of your own ideas and experiences stand in tension with the country’s founding ideals.
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