Before a socialite audience in Manhattan’s Hotel Biltmore one day last week, dapper, 40-year-old Poet Joseph Auslander, recently appointed to the “chair of poetry” of the Congressional Library, proposed as his first official act the building of “a singing tower,” meaning a place where poets’ work would be safe against “the horrors of the hour, Beast passion and the lust for power.” At the end of a three-verse appeal which began
Against brutality and wrong
Build us a fortress pledged to song! . . .
Build us, O build the singing tower! listeners, uncertain whether the proposed structure was to be in the nature of a bird sanctuary or a bombproof dugout, asked him what the poem should be called. Said Poet Auslander: “Why, I haven’t given it a name. You name it. Name it anything you want.”
More Must-Reads from TIME
- Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington
- Why Do More Young Adults Have Cancer?
- Colman Domingo Leads With Radical Love
- 11 New Books to Read in February
- How to Get Better at Doing Things Alone
- Cecily Strong on Goober the Clown
- Column: The Rise of America’s Broligarchy
- Introducing the 2025 Closers
Contact us at letters@time.com