Panama, or the Adventures of My Seven Uncles

The poem runs on the era's great engine — departure. Around the child-narrator, the family's seven uncles vanish one by one into the world's work: America, Alaska, India, the ends of the railway lines — surviving as letters, rumors, and silences, while the Panama scandal (the canal-company crash that gutted French savings) hangs over the family fortunes like weather. Cendrars strings their fates on his clattering long line — the Transsibérien's rhythm gone global — and the boy's inheritance is clear by the end: all seven horizons at once, the itch that made the poet.

The 1918 Sirène edition dressed the poem as a travel brochure-cum-timetable, jokes and all — the avant-garde book as ticket out. Its American afterlife matters here: John Dos Passos — Hemingway's friend, the U.S.A. trilogy's engineer — translated Panama in 1931 with his own watercolors, importing Cendrars' documentary-collage line into American letters just as he was building his own newsreel prose from it. The lineage is direct and acknowledged: the poem of scattered lives fed the novel of scattered America.

One poem in seven-plus movements: the uncles' letters and legends, each a compressed adventure novel — Galveston, the Klondike, the Indian railways — braided with the Panama crash's ruin at home, the boy reading timetables like scripture, and the poet's own departures already boarding. The line is long, spoken, and switch-backed like the routes it follows.

Half an hour, best with an atlas open — the poem assumes the whole planet.