These people have got to go . . .

The story behind a stunning poem by Mary Makofske

The poem was born when Mary Makofske began contemplating both the sense and the sound of a single word that was frequently found in the news of the day twenty-some years ago. But it would go through many revisions, major and minor, on its way to eventual publication in Poetry, inarguably one of the toughest and most prestigious journals for any poem to …