January 26, 2026: The Challenger Disaster: Predecessors

[Forty years ago this week, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart upon takeoff, instantly becoming one of the most visible and tragic American stories of the last half-century. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and a handful of contexts.]

On three earlier space program disasters that in distinct ways echoed into the Challenger’s.

1)      Apollo 1 (1967): 59 years ago tomorrow, on January 27^th, 1967, a fire swept through the command module of the first manned Apollo mission while the ship was on the launchpad for a preflight test, killing all three astronauts on board (Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee). Obviously a launchpad disaster that takes the life of an entire mission’s crew is eerily similar to what would happen with the Challenger a couple decades later, but there’s at least one significant difference: this was to be the first manned Apollo mission, and so it stands to reason that mistakes and failures were possible, and indeed likely inevitable when it came to things like the first launch (although of course this was a hugely destructive and tragic failure); while the Space Shuttle program had begun in 1981 and seen the first successful orbital flight in 1982, making the Challenger’s launch part of what would seem to have been by that time a well-established and safe routine before tragedy struck.

2)      Apollo 13 (1970): I don’t imagine I need to say too much about the story of this subsequent, successfully launched but hugely troubled Apollo mission, given the prominence of the 1995 film which depicts the mission’s events. As that film captures, the Apollo 13 astronauts were able to work with the NASA folks on the ground to get their ship and themselves back to Earth safely, one of the most impressive scientific feats in American history and a clear contrast to the Challenger tragedy. But the latter mission’s tragically different endpoint shouldn’t obscure something we can learn from the Apollo 13 mission: the remarkable level of skill, ingenuity, teamwork, and courage displayed by NASA astronauts and ground crew alike. That was just as true of every member of the Challenger mission (including the unique one about whom I’ll write tomorrow), even if they sadly did not have a chance to demonstrate it.

3)      Soyuz 11 (1971): As I highlighted in this post on Kennedy’s “moon shot” speech, the Cold War rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union played a huge role in the development of the U.S. space program, which means that (at least in my experience) we tend not to think much at all about Soviet space missions, and certainly not about them as parallel to U.S. ones. But if we take a step back, of course they were parallel; and moreover, as these are the two nations that (to this day) have had the most success putting humans in space, there’s a lot we can and should learn from comparing and contrasting their experiences doing so. Especially their most tragic experiences—and if Challenger is ours, I’d say the death of all three Soyuz 11 astronauts aboard the new Soviet space station Salyut 1 has to be theirs. And while all the lessons we might take from the latter are above the paygrade of this last moment in a brief blog post, I’ll just add this: mourning and memorializing those three Soviet astronauts should be just as much of a no-brainer, for Americans and all people, as doing so for the Challenger’s.

Next ChallengerStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Challenger memories or reflections you’d share?

January 24-25, 2026: Occasional Poems: Mine!

[65 years ago Tuesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ve AmericanStudied that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]

I could go on and on, and perhaps a free-verse epic would be required to really do justice to where we are in late January 2026. But that would be neither a challenge for me nor something y’all would likely want to read, so I decided on a sonnet (Shakespearean, natch):

 

I try to avoid language that’s rash;

AmericanStudies demands our nuance.

But honesty is ripe for a renaissance,

And I gotta say things have gotten pretty fash.

 

Don’t believe me—believe your honest eyes:

Our troops in Caracas, Minneapolis, even freaking Nuuk?

It’d be enough to make our Founding Framers puke,

And all because he didn’t get a Nobel Prize.

 

Of course that’s just the tip of the melting ice:

This nation I love is overrun with ignorance and hate;

Folks are looking for artificial intelligences to date;

And like eggs, sanity comes at an increasingly steep price.

 

I know this sonnet’s supposed to end with a turn,

But hard-won hope’s something we’re gonna have to earn.

 

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share, including your own?

January 23, 2026: Occasional Poems: 21st Century Inaugural Poems

[65 years ago Tuesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]

On quick takeaways from the three 21^st century inaugural poems to date.

1)      Elizabeth Alexander, “Praise Song for the Day” (2009): I’ve thought and talked and written a lot about critical optimism and hard-won hope over the last decade, and would say that Alexander’s poem for Barack Obama’s first inauguration captures those perspectives and concepts very eloquently. I especially like how the line that first introduces the poem’s title, “Praise strong for struggle, praise song for the day,” expands in the poem’s final full verse and then culminating single line: “In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,/any thing can be made, any sentence begun./On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,//praise song for walking forward in that light.” Each one of the poems I’m highlighting today looks different from the dimmed light of January 2026, but goddamn do we still need to walk forward.

2)      Richard Blanco, “One Today” (2013): I don’t think I had ever read Blanco’s poem, written for Obama’s second inauguration, until researching this post, and I was immediately struck by just how Whitmanesque it is, especially in those long lists (catalogs, as Whitman scholars call them) of settings and social roles alike. The poem’s final lines envision hard-won hope in ways that feel indebted to (or at least in conversation with) Alexander’s, and that Amanda Gorman would herself echo and extend eight years later in the poem I’ll get to in a moment. But the lines of Blanco’s that I love best are the ones that are in conversation with Martín Espada’s poem “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper?” (1993): “ring-up groceries as my mother did/for twenty years, so I could write this poem”; and “hands/as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane/so my brother and I could have books and shoes.”

3)      Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb” (2021): It’s very difficult for me to read or watch Gorman’s incredible poem, written for Joe Biden’s inauguration, these five years later, especially when we get to/ lines like “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it./Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy./And this effort very nearly succeeded./But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.” Jury’s still out on that one, I’m afraid. But I still find these lines not only just as inspiring as ever, but a crystal clear vision of how I would define both America and the work we must do: “If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made./That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare./It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit./It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.” Couldn’t have said it better myself, but I’ll try to say my own piece this weekend!

That special poem of mine this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share?

January 22, 2026: Occasional Poems: Angelou and Williams for Clinton

[65 years ago Tuesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]

On what differentiates Clinton’s two inaugural poets, and a crucial connection in their content.

I’m not going to pretend that Maya Angelou wasn’t already a very, very big deal long before she delivered her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration in January 1993. Indeed, it’s fair to say she had been one of America’s preeminent writers for at least a quarter-century by then, since the 1969 publication of her first memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. But nonetheless, it was both symbolically and nationally significant that the second inaugural poet in our history—and, as I wrote yesterday, the first in more than 30 years; I have to imagine that by 1993 it seemed like Robert Frost’s reading in 1961 was just going to be a one-off—was an African American woman. And honestly, it’s the combination of both of those sentences and contexts—that Angelou was one of the most important 20^th century Black writers, and that this was still a surprising invitation on multiple levels—which makes Clinton’s choice of Angelou to my mind the single most significant moment of occasional poetry in American history.

I hope it’s thus abundantly clear that I mean no disrespect to Clinton’s second inaugural poet Miller Williams, who read his poem “Of History and Hope” at Clinton’s January 1997 inauguration, when I say that the moment was in every sense less significant. Williams was a longtime English Professor at the University of Arkansas (he joined the department in 1970 and was emeritus until his passing in early 2015), and also co-founded and directed for twenty years the University of Arkansas Press. He published a ton of his own poetry, translated other poets including Pablo Neruda, and also happens to have been the father of Lucinda Williams. So this was an impressive figure on many fronts, and one deeply connected to the state of Arkansas that was so foundational in Bill Clinton’s life and story, making Miller a very logical choice for Clinton’s second inaugural poet—but, again, a much less significant one than Maya Angelou (which likely has a lot to do with why I didn’t know about his inaugural poem until researching this series).

But any student of mine, and probably anybody who knows me well at all, knows how much I value close reading, textual analysis, not letting such contexts dictate too fully how we approach the evidence in front of us. And when we look at these two inaugural poems, different as they likewise are in many ways, they have a crucial connection in a core element of their content: their visions of American history and its role in our present. I used a relevant quote from Angelou’s poem as the epigraph for my fourth book (the title of which begins with the same phrase as Williams’s title, “History and Hope”): “History, despite its wrenching pain/Cannot be unlived, but if faced/With courage, need not be lived again.” And very much in conversation with those lines are the concluding ones in Williams’s poem: “All this in the hands of children, eyes already set/on a land we can never visit—it isn’t there yet—/but looking through their eyes, we can see/what our long gift to them may come to be./If we can truly remember, they will not forget.” I’d say we still desperately need to hear and read both of these poetic works and voices in our 21^st century moment.                                    

Last occasional poem tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share?

January 21, 2026: Occasional Poems: Frost for Kennedy

[65 years ago Tuesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]

On the first poem read at an inauguration, the poem that could have been but wasn’t, and what we both lost and gained as a result.

Because a number of the recent presidential inaugurations have featured poetic readings (the last five in which Democrats were inaugurated—it’s funny that only Democratic Presidents seem interested in featuring these cultural figures and works…), it might seem like the practice has been long-established or consistently present at these historic events. But really the opposite is true: the first such inaugural poet in American history, and the only one before Clinton restarted the practice in 1993 (inviting Maya Angelou, on whose inaugural poem more tomorrow), was Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration 65 years ago today. Kennedy was a big fan of Frost’s, noting that “I’ve never taken the view the world of politics and the world of poetry are so far apart” (both perspectives that Frost himself had recently reciprocated and reinforced by actively supporting Kennedy’s campaign), and asked the poet to read his 1923 poem “The Gift Outright” at the inauguration.

Never one to do things the easy way, though, the 86-year-old Frost apparently didn’t want to just read that existing poem. He drafted a new prefatory poem for the occasion, “Dedication” (later expanded and known as “For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration”), which he planned to read ahead of “Gift.” Unfortunately the glare from the morning sun (especially as reflected by the new-fallen show from a serious nor’easter which had hit the city over the previous two days) made it impossible for Frost to read this new work from his papers; after struggling for a bit he noted, “this was to have been a preface to a poem which I do not have to read” and then, like the badass he was, recited “The Gift Outright” from memory. He subsequently gave Kennedy first a manuscript copy of the original “Dedication” and then another of the expanded poem “For John. F Kennedy His Inauguration,” which Frost had published in his 1962 collection In the Clearing.

I love the idea of Frost sharing a new poem as part of this inaugural inaugural poetry reading (repetition poetically intended, obvi), and “Dedication” begins with a really fun invocation of the occasion that I’m sorry he didn’t get to share there: “Summoning artists to participate/In the august occasions of the state/Seems something artists ought to celebrate./Today is for my cause a day of days./And his be poetry’s old-fashioned praise/Who was the first to think of such a thing.” But on the other hand, later in the poem Frost writes, “We see how seriously the races swarm/In their attempts at sovereignty and form./They are our wards we think to some extent/For the time being and with their consent,/To teach them how Democracy is meant.” There are a number of problems with those lines, but I would particularly note that as a preface to “Gift,” which more or less directly features a Manifest Destiny-like vision of American history and land, it’s especially problematic to refer to other “races” as “our wards.” I have to say I’m glad those phrases weren’t part of the first poetic work to be read at an inauguration.

Next occasional poem tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share?

January 20, 2026: Occasional Poems: Whitman on Lincoln

[65 years ago Wednesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]

On takeaways from the three poems Walt Whitman wrote on the occasion of Lincoln’s assassination.

1)      “Hush’d Be the Camps To-Day (May 4, 1865)”: Whitman’s book of Civil War poetry Drum-Taps (1865) was already in the printing process when Lincoln was assassinated, but the poet managed to get one more poem added to the book in order to reflect that tragic postscript to the war. Supposedly Whitman wasn’t too happy with “Hush’d,” which stands to reason if he completed it more quickly than normal to get it into the book (its first manuscript is in fact dated the day after the assassination). But I think his choice of speaker and perspective is quite brilliant—he writes in the collective voice of Union soldiers, which allows Whitman both to express the communal loss of Lincoln and (in a classic Walt move) make his writing of the poem a response to the soldiers’ request that he “Sing poet in our name/Sing of the love we bore him—because you, dweller in camps, know it truly.”

2)      “O Captain! My Captain!”: Written roughly six months after the assassination and included in his book Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865), “O Captain!’ is definitely Whitman’s most famous response to Lincoln’s death, and perhaps (thanks to a certain fictional English teacher and then a certain climatic tribute to same) his most famous poem period. That’s ironic, as it’s a lot more straightforward and as a result a bit less interesting than most of Whitman’s poems, which is perhaps why he later exclaimed, “Damn My Captain…I’m almost sorry I ever wrote the poem.” But he did add that it “had certain emotional immediate reasons for being,” and I believe that it’s in its two-part stanza structure that the poem fully and impressively embodies those reasons—moving from victory to loss, from wartime triumph to postwar despair, and doing so not just through the two four-line sections in each stanza but also through the page layout of those respective sections.

3)      “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”: Also included in Sequel to Drum-Taps, and indeed giving the book its subtitle, was this much longer and more epic poem inspired by Lincoln’s assassination. And, I would argue, a far more Whitmanesque poem than these other two, in two particular ways that I want to highlight here. First, and more overt, is the poem’s use of pastoral metaphors (including the titular lilacs but also a star and a thrush), rather than direct references to Lincoln and the war and so on, to achieve its powerful emotional resonances. But even more interesting to me is its balance of two very different styles, both of which are at the heart of another epic Whitman poem, “Song of Myself,” as well: first-person romantic elegies; and his famous “catalogs,” lists of people and places and social realities. This is Whitman’s truest occasional poem for Lincoln’s death, and it’s a beautiful one.

Next occasional poem tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share?

January 19, 2026: Occasional Poems: Wheatley to Washington

[65 years ago Wednesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]

On how an occasional ode reflects the equal boldness of its author and subject.

Nearly thirteen years ago, I focused a Black History Month post (part of a series on inspiring historical conversations) on the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley’s rumored in-person conversation with Continental Army General George Washington in March 1776. As I wrote in an IMPORTANT PPS that I added as a comment below the post, the awesome Revolutionary War and Boston history scholar J.L. Bell followed up with a note that there’s no real evidence that that meeting actually took place, and it now seems to me unlikely that it did. But what’s much more definitive (as Bell also notes in his comment) is Washington’s invitation to Wheatley to visit him at his Cambridge headquarters, as well as the reasons behind that striking invite: the young poet had recently penned her 1775 ode “To His Excellency George Washington”; and had then (as I note in that prior post) sent the poem to Washington himself, along with a letter introducing herself and defending her choice tosuch a work (despite her status as an enslaved person).

If we turn to that 1775 poem itself, we can find a similarly striking presence of Wheatley herself in her ode to Washington and the Revolutionary American cause. She uses three first-person singular pronouns, and while one represents a moment of self-deprecation (“Shall I to Washington their praise recite?/Enough thou know’st them in the fields of fight.”), the other two position the author as both overtly part of the poem’s occasion (“Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light,/Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write.”) and directly petitioning the heavens on behalf of Washington and the cause (“Muse! Bow propitious while my pen relates/How pour her armies through a thousand gates”). And those earlier references mean that the start of the poem’s climactic stanza, “Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,/Thy ev’ry action let the Goddess guide,” while making Washington the official subject of the sentence, nonetheless positions Wheatley herself as an equally powerful participant in the moment, a voice that parallels both Washington and the Goddess there.

The poem is an ode to Washington, of course, and after those two lines the final couplet reinforces that emphasis, in typography as well as content: “A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,/With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! Be thine.” But Wheatley’s bold choices likewise add another layer to her content, an underlying argument about the revolutionary place and ideas that this military layer symbolizes. We see that most clearly in the opening of the fourth stanza: “One century scarce perform’d its destined round,/When Gallic powers Columbia’s fury found;/And so may you, whoever dares disgrace/The land of freedom’s heaven-defended race!/Fix’d are the eyes of nations on the scales,/For in their hopes Columbia’s arm prevails.” I’ve written elsewhere about Wheatley’s complex and crucial poetic arguments for the Revolutionary cause, and included them as both celebratory and active patriotism in the first chapter of Of Thee I Sing. We can see all those layers to both the poet and her works here in this very early American occasional poem.

Next occasional poem tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share?