Terrain: Rock, weaponry.

I selected the following words from Alicia Ostriker’s History of America. Semicolons mark places were the mood changes. The paragraph break matches the gap between stanzas in the original poem.

Projection route ships new land; cut rock weaponry dark mastery yield reproachful gloomily kill skin teeth nothing defeat obsession snake reedy spit pray steel cold permanent decay murder driving laggard regiments; caring eagle heaven line wrinkled nest tumbles balls gold plastics ocean roots severed torn decides escape

Prior mouth nowhere everywhere swollen warm expanding children jungles black pennies blood dark suffering reaching throat disappear wonder fear bleeding pulse wonder

Just this string of words still captures the overall mood of the poem. Pilgrims set out for the New World, beginning a destructive conquest halted only by the Pacific (the ocean’s name is fitting). Nowadays, westward expansion is an imprisoned monster, or perhaps a black hole.

How can a string of words with no connections convey a meaning similar to the full-fledged poem? Most of History of America’s meaning comes from the emotional tenor of the words themselves. Sentence structure and more complicated constructs such as metaphor and imagery play a minimal role. Consider the passage:

Terrain: Rock, weaponry.   

Dark trees, mastery. Grass, to yield. Earth,   

Reproachful.

As you can see, some parts of the poem are strings of words with no sentence structure. Because the entirety of the poem is like this to some extent, the poem can be condensed into the list. It loses a lot of intellectual meaning in the process (it’s hard to tell what the barebones string is about), but the emotional content remains intact.