“Claudette Colvin Goes to Work”: Before Rosa Parks’s historic refusal to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, several other women had been arrested for violating that city’s public transportation segregation laws. On March 2 of the same year, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to yield her seat to white high school students. And on October 21, Mary Louise Smith was on her way home from a bad day when she was roused from daydreaming by an irate white passenger; she, too, did not vacate her seat voluntarily.

Acknowledgments

Acknowlednments

The poems in On the Bus with Rosa Parks first appeared in the following publications:

Agni Review. “Cameos”; American Poetry Review. “Best Western Motor Lodge, AAA Approved”; The American Scholar: “Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967”; Callaloo: “Dawn Revisited”; Chelsea: “The Musician Talks about ‘Process’”; Doubletake: “Parlor”; The Georgia Review: “On Veronica”; The Gettysburg Review: “Ghost Walk”, and “The Camel Comes to Us from the Barbarians”; International Quarterly: “I Cut My Finger Once on Purpose”; Meridian: “The Peach Orchard”; The New Yorker: “Incarnation in Phoenix”; Parnassus: “Against Repose” and “Gotterdammerung”; Poetry: “For Sophie, Who’ll Be in First Grade in the Year 2000,” “Testimonial,” and “The Venus of Willendorf”; Poetry Review (U.K.): “Singsong”; The Progressive: “Black on a Saturday Night”; Slate: “Against Self-Pity,” Revenant,” and “Sunday”; USA Weekend: “Freedom, Bird’s-Eye View” and “My Mother Enters the Work Force.”

The title sequence, “On the Bus with Rosa Parks,” was first published as a special section in The Georgia Review, Winter 1998.

“Lady Freedom Among Us” was read by the author at the ceremony commemorating the 200 anniversary of the United States Capitol and the restoration of the Statue of Freedom to the Capitol dome on October 23, 1993, and first published in the Congressional Record of the same day. It was subsequently commissioned as the four millionth volume of the University of Virginia Libraries in a fine press edition by Janus Press, West Burke, Vermont, 1994, and at the same time made globally accessible by the University of Virginia in a multimedia version on the Internet. “Lady Freedom Among Us” also appeared in The Poet’s World, a volume of the author’s poet laureate lectures at the Library of Congress (Library of Congress, 1995), and in several other publications.

“The First Book” appeared first in The Language of Life, ed. Bill Moyers, 1995. It is also available as an American Library Association poster and bookmark.

“There Came a Soul” appeared first in Transforming Vision: Writers on Art, ed. Edward Hirsch. The Art Institute of Chicago, 1994.

“Black on a Saturday Night” and “Singsong” (as “Song”) are also part of Seven for Luck, a song cycle for soprano and orchestra, lyrics by Rita Dove, music by John

Williams, and appeared in the program for the song cycle’s world premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood July 25, 1998.

The epigraph to the title sequence is from Simon Schama’s essay “Clio at the Multiplex,” The New Yorker, January 19, 1998.