According to Wallace Stevens, “Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea within the poem of the words.” We often put “the idea” in a brief phrase: “the evils of war.” We rarely talk about the poetry of the idea. By itself, the theme, the idea, is always banal: it has to be recreated by the poet’s imagination into something animated. (And since the poet at hand is male, I’ll call him “he” in what follows.) And then, how is he to arouse a glow of personal vividness within the language, and create “the poem of the words”? Suppose the poet wants the “idea” of his poem to be “the disparity of cultures.” What might “the poem of the idea” be? This particular poet’s imaginative move is to locate his two cultures in cosmic space, on two different planets, one of which is Planet Earth. And how will the words be made into “the poem of the words?” An answer occurs to him. What if a visitor from outer space had studied English, but could not escape mistakes in using it for the first time? At this initial stage, there remains a great deal to be done, since both the poem of the idea and the poem of the words are still sketchy and unfulfilled. But at least the poet now has the two poetries to work with. And the poet, Robert Hayden, an Afro-Amer-ican (his preferred term), is convinced that a poem written by a minority poet has to be as strong in the poetry of its words as in the poetry of its idea. In “Counterpoise,” a group-mani-festo that Hayden published in 1948, he declared emphatically, “As writers who belong to a so-called minority we are violently opposed to having our work viewed, as the custom is, entirely in the light of sociology and politics.” Let us suppose that it is 1978, and in a new book of poems a reader is seeing an odd entry, bizarrely bracketed fore and aft to show that the title is an editorial addition: “[American Journal].” Who, the reader asks, kept the journal; for whom was it intended; who attached the subsequent title implying, by its non-authorial initial capitals, an editor familiar with written-English usage? The answer is suspended. As the poem opens, the reader sees a series of totally unpunctuated sentiments flowing down the page in hesitant and unequal paragraph-stanzas halted intermittently by pauses. The journal-speaker is fluent, but not error-free, in English. The reader is in fact encountering the internal stream of conscious-ness of an extraterrestrial, dispatched by his rulers (“The Counselors”) to spy on, and report on, a group of brash new planetary invaders calling themselves “americans.” We see that the spaceman has learned only oral English, and knows none of the conventions of written English such as punctuation, apostrophes, and upper-case letters; but there must exist in his own native language some sort of honorific distinction reserved for the rulers, “The Counselors” (the honorific is translated in his journal by its sole and singular use of capital letters). In the poem’s prologue, the extraterrestrial muses on his new situation: here among them the americans this baffling multi people extremes and variegations their noise restlessness their almost frightening energy how best describe these aliens in my reports to The Counselors disguise myself in order to study them unobserved adapting their varied pigmentations white black red brown yellow the imprecise and strangering distinctions by which they live by which they justify their cruelties to one another charming savages enlightened primitives brash new comers lately sprung up in our galaxy how describe them do they indeed know what or who they are do not seem to yet no other beings in the universe make more extravagant claims for their importance and identity The spy, disguised and passing as a fellow-citizen, studies the unfamiliar new tribe, noting its heterogeneity, its “strangering” distinctions, and its repellent moral justifications. Little by little the inner voice of the spy reveals his burden: he must compose a report for The Counselors, and he feels inadequate to the task. Although the planet of the “aliens” belongs to the same galaxy as his own, he knows no group in the entire universe who regard themselves so insolently, so proudly, as these “savages” do. So far, the extraterrestrial voice has offered relatively little information about its own powers and intentions; only later — during a visit to a rough tavern — does it reveal that it has masked itself (at least in the tavern) as male. I am calling the voice “he,” but it has the power to exist in different genders and can adopt local skin-pigmentation at will. Since the planetary visitor is addressing himself, we can only guess, from his own categories and judgments, what sort of person is generating these words. We learn that he is fright-ened by lawless energy, by noise, by unpredictable restlessness, by multiple skin-colors: in disguise he has “adapted” — but he means “adopted” — various pigmentations depending on his social context. “Adapted” is one of his linguistic falterings, like “strangering” (in lieu of “strange”). He has strong moral views, and is revolted by the cruelties he sees among these “savages” (however charming); he has equally strong intellectual views, judging the newcomers as “primitives” (however sophisticated their technology). To him, the “americans” are aliens incapable of introspection or self-analysis yet ever-boastful in their claims to importance and to a unique identity. 
Hayden’s 141-line “[American Journal]” has attracted a good deal of contemporary attention, but its imaginative swirls of inconsistent “american” ideologies and behaviors have provoked more critical observation than its equally imaginative flights
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