THE LYNDONIAD is a poem or a succession of poems or a congeries of poems containing history. It treats of Lyndon Johnson in pieces, throws up facet-flashes of his life and of his epoch. The historians have had and will continue having their voluminous say about the throes and the tumult of the 1960s but here is a counter-approach to the same material: the 1960s as a kaleidoscopic epic poem with Lyndon Johnson at the center of it speaking for himself, and others speaking for him and about him and against him. Shards and tatters. The abstract and not so brief chronicles of a time when the nation was breaking.
