1. The first known account of surfing was written during the 1640s in what is now Ghana. Surfing was independently developed from Senegal to Angola. Africa possesses thousands of miles of warm, surf-filled waters and populations of strong swimmers and sea-going fishermen and merchants who knew surf patterns and crewed surf- canoes capable of catching and riding waves upwards of 10 feet high. —KEVIN DAWSON Our ways with water are ancient & invincible:In the 17th century, kids on the Gold Coastride longboards that are twelve feet long, scaling the crestsof waves, aimed at oceanic zones unreachableotherwise, outside such strange & elegant mastery,this lilt & lean & lightest touch. “Counting the seas,”they would call it, this blue vision, this sense of when topaddle in, forge ahead or exit, to commune with godswho cultivated kingdoms there, in the dark frenzied motionjust offshore, where our eyes meet the edge of the eternal. 2.The perpetual fear is contamination: swimming pools, drinkingfountains, the touch of a hand that is mostly water. The brain too:Lightning and rain. Surf-canoes were made from cottonwood treessaid to be sacred, to hold the souls of children who had not yetarrived. Ancestors walked through the world below. The boardwas a bridge. Language is only one way we walk across. 3.The city in the sky Daniella paintshas a dance studio, plant nursery, bodega,used bookseller, two children floatingas they play Go Fish, a mom-and-pop outfitcalled Surf Shack, where you buy boardsthat sail through the air like seraphim.The streets are named for birdsof prey. The water levitates like everythingelse, and there is no word in the commontongue for falling.
Kahalu’u Bay, Hawaii
(a companion history of surfing)
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“Kahalu’u Bay, Hawaii (A Companion History of Surfing)” from WE (THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES) by Joshua Bennett, copyright © 2026 by Joshua Bennett. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Dr. Joshua Bennett is Distinguished Chair of the Humanities and a Professor of Literature at MIT. He is the author of seven books, including The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), which was a winner of The National Poetry Series, The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), which won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was adapted for television in partnership with Warner Brothers Studios, and Spoken Word: A Cultural History (2023), which was named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker.
Over the past two decades, Dr. Bennett has recited his original work at a range of venues, such as the Sundance Film Festival, Madison Square Garden, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. He has also been invited to speak and teach writing workshops at hundreds of middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities across the United States, as well as in the U.K. and South Africa.
For his creative writing and scholarship, Dr. Bennett has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.
New York, New York
We (The People of The United States) is a book-length poem made to the measure of the modern world. Composed of 55 sections, it features a breathtaking range of characters and concerns: The Beach Boys, Gwendolyn Brooks, the invention of the typewriter, Zora Neale Hurston, Sun Ra, life on Mars, Robert Frost, experimental physics, The Jackson 5. Throughout the collection, Bennett summons Virgil’s Georgics as a lens through which to not only tell the story of his family, but a much larger one about the “form of the American mind,” our relationship to the natural world, and the pursuit of a dignified, abundant life. Published the year of the nation’s 250th anniversary, it is a collection that is right on time. One that calls us, as Langston Hughes once did, toward a future America that is not yet here, “and yet must be.”
“At a moment in American culture punctuated to a heartbreaking degree by acts of hatred, violence and disregard, I can think of nothing we need to ponder and to sing of more than our shared grief and our capacity not just for empathy but genuine love. Poetry is critical to such an endeavor—and Joshua Bennett’s astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable.”
—Tracy K. Smith
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