Economies of Scale: Financialization and Contemporary North American Poetry (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics) 3031393406, 9783031393402

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Economies of Scale Financialization and Contemporary North American Poetry

Ann Keniston

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics Series Editors

Paul Crosthwaite School of Literatures, Languages & Culture University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK Peter Knight Department of English and American Studies University of Manchester Manchester, UK Nicky Marsh Department of English University of Southampton Southampton, UK

This series showcases some of the most intellectually adventurous work being done in the broad field of the economic humanities, putting it in dialogue with developments in heterodox economic theory, economic sociology, critical finance studies and the history of capitalism. It starts from the conviction that literary and cultural studies can provide vital theoretical insights into economics. The series will include historical studies as well as contemporary ones, as a much-needed counterweight to the tendency within economics to concentrate solely on the present and to ignore potential lessons from history. The series also recognizes that the poetics of economics and finance is an increasingly central concern across a wide range of fields of literary study, from Shakespeare to Dickens to the financial thriller. In doing so it builds on the scholarship that has been identified as the ‘new economic criticism’, but moves beyond it by bringing a more politically and historically sharpened focus to that earlier work.

Ann Keniston

Economies of Scale Financialization and Contemporary North American Poetry

Ann Keniston University of Nevada, Reno Reno, NV, USA

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics ISBN 978-3-031-39340-2    ISBN 978-3-031-39341-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39341-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © John Rawsterne/ patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For Jeanne Follansbee and Jane Thrailkill

Acknowledgments and Permissions

This book, perhaps paradoxically given its subject, has benefited greatly from the generosity of many colleagues, friends, and family members, as well as of my home institution, the University of Nevada, Reno. I am grateful to the several graduate student research assistants who helped me gather and review sources for the book, including Craig Charbonneau and Katherine Fennimore, and for the University of Nevada, Reno, English Department for supporting their work. Sandra Karkar conscientiously compiled the penultimate Works Cited for the book, while Lee Olsen was nearly a cowriter in the late stages: he drafted footnotes, suggested sources I’d overlooked, obtained permissions for cited material, painstakingly copyedited the final manuscript and regularized its many citations, and helped finalize the index. I am grateful to the UNR College of Liberal Arts, especially its Scholarly and Creative Activities Grant Program, for supporting Lee’s help with the manuscript. I did substantive early work on the book during a UNR 2016–17 sabbatical leave, during which I held a fellowship at the Arizona State University’s Institute for Humanities Research. IHR staff, as well as the faculty participants in and facilitators of our semester-long seminar, welcomed me, found me office space, and gave me feedback on early drafts that helped me turn my amorphous thoughts into the beginnings of an argument. IHR research assistant Courtney Carlisle tirelessly located relevant articles and books and compiled an early list of citations. A UNR travel fellowship allowed me to travel to examine one-of-a-kind artist books in the University of San Diego Library’s special collections, and a CLA Fellowship in Fall 2022 enabled me to complete the manuscript. vii

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A reading group with my colleague Nathan Ragain was especially helpful as I was starting to imagine the project, and colleagues Brett Van Hoesen and Linda Curcio offered emotional and intellectual support. UNR English chairs Eric Rasmussen, Ashley Marshall, and Lynda Olman offered me additional support that granted me the energy and time to complete this project. Students in several classes I have taught at UNR also helped me work through my ideas, including those in several iterations of my undergraduate American poetry class and in graduate seminars in ethics, engagement, and contemporary literature and in economics and contemporary literature. I am grateful for their patience and suggestions. Julia Kim and A.B.  Gorham answered specific questions about translation and bookmaking. I am grateful to the organizers and audiences of the literary conferences at which I presented readings included of this book, including the Modern Language Association, the International Network for the Study of Lyric, the American Literature Association, the Pacific Ancient and Modern Literature Association, and the South Atlantic Modern Literature Association. I am also grateful for the support of many colleagues I interacted with there and elsewhere, including Steven Axelrod, Jeffrey Gray, Michael Davidson, Lynn Keller, and Bonnie Costello, as well as those who invited me to present parts of the book in nonscholarly settings. Thanks also to Craig Svonkin and Steven Gould Axelrod for publishing an early version of the Introduction in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry (2022) and to ASAP/J (2020) for publishing my review essay on Mary Ruefle’s My Private Property. My family supported me in both direct and indirect ways through the more than seven years it took me to finish this book. I began to work intensively on it just as my sons, Paul and Jeremy Novak, were beginning college, and their love, humor, maturity, and solicitude during this and other transitions helped me complete this manuscript from a place of gratitude. My husband, Eric Novak, was as always a generous witness to the many struggles involved in writing and rewriting this book, listening repeatedly to my attempts to articulate my ideas in simple terms, helping me with messy early attempts, and picking up the slack around the house. His love over the years has been my greatest source of sustenance. My stepmother Suzanne Berger Keniston remained interested in and supportive of my ideas, remembered which chapter I was struggling with when, and offered me space and time to work, accompanied by wonderful meals.

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My dear friends and comrades-at-arms Jeanne Follansbee and Jane Thrailkill have been my most unwavering intellectual supporters over the many years since I began my doctoral studies. Their companionship helped me get through pandemic isolation, remember why I chose to live a life of the mind, and gave (and keeps giving) me tools to make good decisions both professionally and personally; it was Jane who first suggested the possibility of publishing this book as a short form monograph, which enabled me to reimagine and then finish it. Their support and love kept (and keep) reminding me how lucky I am to have friends with whom I can share literally everything. I dedicate this book to them, in immense gratitude. This book, of course, wouldn’t be possible without the work of the contemporary poets it examines. Their innovations and courage have inspired my work and enriched my life. I feel lucky to live at a time in which such poems are being written. * * * Thanks too to the following publishers for granting permission to cite from the poets’ works, as well as to the several other publishers who considered my citations fair use: From “Money Talks” from Money Shot © 2011 by Rae Armantrout. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission. From NOX, by Anne Carson, from NOX, copyright ©2010 by Anne Carson. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Lamenta 317” by Myung Mi Kim, reprinted by permission of the University of California Press Books. Harryette Mullen, excerpts from Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge. Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1995, 2006 by Harryette Mullen. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, graywolfpress.org.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Economies of Scale: Financialization and Contemporary North American Poetry  1 2 “[A]  fictive person / around whom the air is blurred with money”: Precarious Labor and the Work of Poetry 21 3 “Miss  Thing”: Prosopopeia, Aliveness, and the Female Consumer 39 4 “[A]n  arrangement of figures on an open field”: Death, Displacement, and Unrepayable Debts 61 5 “Were  you afraid // your book would vanish”: Gambling on the Print Book in the Electronic Age 83 6 Coda:  “[T]hese gestures of redress sailed to me!”: U.S. Poetry After 2016107 Works Cited121 Index137

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4

Title page, A Little White Shadow93 From A Little White Shadow95 From Nox98 Overlaid and manipulated copies of part of Carson’s translation of Catullus’ Carmen 101, Nox99

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Economies of Scale: Financialization and Contemporary North American Poetry

Abstract  This chapter offers an overview of the ways several central terms have been theorized, including scale, synecdoche, prosopopeia, and financialization, in relation to twenty-first-century North American poetry. Through a comparison of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Poem” and Joshua Clover’s “Long-Term Capital Management,” it traces the ways that the relation between currency and art has changed over the past fifty years. It also offers a reading of a poem by Myung-Mi Kim that links financialization with globalization, scale, synecdoche, and prosopopeia in ways central to the book. Keywords  Same as book as a whole • Also Elizabeth Bishop • Joshua Clover • Myung-Mi Kim This book derives from a simple observation: contemporary poets writing after the September 11, 2001, attacks and especially the 2008 Great Recession have considered economics in abundant and diverse ways. In ways consistent with what has been several times called a broader poetic turn to a more “engaged” (i.e., a more political and socially aware) poetry, the topic of economics, especially contemporary economics, recurs in

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Keniston, Economies of Scale, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39341-9_1

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formally, tonally, and thematically diverse contemporary poems.1 (I am not the first to note this tendency: this study builds on several earlier discussions of the topic, mostly in article form, and several book-length critical studies of slightly earlier poems, which I address below.) More specifically, this book argues, early-twenty-first-century poems often consider, though they seldom explicitly name, financialization. While financialization isn’t unique to the contemporary period—the term has been used to explain events going back at least to the mid-seventeenth century and in some ways overlaps with the neoliberalism generally associated with the 1980s—financialization is often identified as the dominant contemporary economic mode (Krippner).2 Contemporary financialization is often associated with several linked factors, which together enable what Karl  Marx called the derivation of profits from “money which begets money” (M-M’) without the intermediate step of commodity production (M-C-M’) (Capital 256). Relying “neither,” in Fredric Jameson’s terms, on ordinary modes of “production … nor consumption” (265), financialization emphasizes the kind of “immaterial labor” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 29–30) required to drive what is often called the information economy (Pietruska). But financialization also involves what David Harvey may have been the first to call “the financialization of everything” (Brief 33), a tendency to apply financial principles to concepts or entities formerly not for sale, including those associated with “[e]veryday [l]ife” (Martin, Financialization), from happiness to political activism to formerly free memes (of late repackaged and sold as nonfungible tokens) to trauma to creativity itself. It also engages in what has been called the “incorporati[on of] low-income and middle-class households in[to] financial markets” via credit cards, home mortgages, and investment-based retirement plans, the former a way to “sustain consumption in the face of stagnating real wages” (van der Zwan), especially in the face of a recent corporate emphases on share price over wages and productivity, another hallmark of financialization. But perhaps the most evident traces of financialization are in the proliferation of the arcane and sometimes dubious “complex financial instruments” (Harvey, Seventeen 239) developed before and notorious in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, including derivatives, credit default swaps, and the like, as well as new and even more complex products developed since.3 Recent critical analysis of poems engaging with contemporary economics has variously emphasized these poems’ wish to render marginalized people visible (Ronda), their defiance of capitalism in general (Nealon,

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“Anti-capitalist”), their emphasis on the “rhetorical” (Hunter 9), and their perhaps unwitting affirmation of “various forms of domination” (Tiffany, “Cheap”).4 This range of critical approaches helps frame my book’s first main claim, which extends Joshua Clover’s proposition that poetry may be “the signal literary form” of “the era of late capitalism” (“Autumn” 39): twenty-first-century poems treat economics in tonally and thematically diverse ways. Neither wholly resigned nor wholly condemnatory, they offer critiques that tend to be muted or self-­contradicting; and they seldom systematically depict the minutia of contemporary economic practices, history, or theory. Rather, they variously—and often within a single poem—adopt stances of righteous outrage, cynical or resigned acceptance, hyperbolic celebration, sometimes parodic didacticism, and bafflement, among others. This variety in some ways recalls what Jasper Bernes has called, in relation to John Ashbery’s 1956 “The Instruction Manual,” a mode of “free indirect discourse” characterized by “overlapping points of view, frequent pronominal shifts,” “epiphanic fragments, snippets of dialogue, and … incomplete description” (72), and “[f]ragments of reported speech [and] reported thought” (74). But recent poems are if anything more erratic: they draw on a range of citational techniques and at times deploy, often out of context, the specialized jargon that has developed in intervening decades. (Recent fiction concerned with financialization, in contrast, tends to feature trader and venture capitalist protagonists and to be set in New York.5) To offer just a few examples from recent volumes I don’t discuss in the chapters below, early-twenty-first-century poems about economics variously express the barely suppressed panic underlying comfortable middle-class U.S. life (in Robyn Schiff’s 2016 A Woman of Property), the incongruity between statistics about factory shutdowns and their human effects (in Mark Nowak’s 2004 Shut Up Shut Down), the giddiness-inducing vacuousness of contemporary commodity culture (in Alissa Quart’s 2015 Monetized), and the human attributes and voice of a personified stock market (in Susan Briante’s 2016 The Market Wonders). That poetry production and publication are imbricated in economic concerns further complicates its predicament. Once lauded for its absolute exclusion from monetary concerns—Pierre Bourdieu deemed it the purest art form because it was the least profitable (47–48)—poetry, like other creative endeavors, has been more recently seen as inextricable from economics, though it bears traces of a struggle, according to Nicholas Brown’s analysis of art, for “autonomy” from the logic of the marketplace.

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Corporate culture’s increasing cooption of the apparent anticapitalist rhetoric of artistic production has, several have argued, also contributed to the entanglement.6 Several influential popular articles published beginning in the early 2000s about the generally dire state of contemporary poetry, as well as a proliferating number of memoir-handbooks by poets, help exemplify contemporary poetry’s complex relation to economic concerns.7 On the one hand, poets are regularly castigated for writing inaccessible poems for a coterie readership and thus becoming increasingly alienated from an often vaguely defined “general reader” as well as from basic economic laws of supply and demand. On the other, they are condemned for their mercantilism, especially evident in the academic appointments that grant poets a steady salary while encouraging what has been called the overproduction of poems in the service of job promotions and the pay increases that accompany them. Several of the poetry handbook-memoirs published in recent years begin with anecdotes revealing the author’s early diffidence toward poetry, then swerve to poetry’s defense in noneconomic terms, at times full-throatedly extolling what one recent account calls poetry’s capacity to “[s]ave [y]our [l]ife” (Bialosky). Yet contemporary poets are expected to engage in extensive marketing and promotional activities for their books (what’s sometimes called pobiz) in ways that further imbricate poetry with business practices. One of the claims of this book is that poets, even when they don’t directly refer to such discourse, are affected by it: their poems about economics both struggle with poetry’s mercantilism and implicitly function as defenses of poetry itself. For various reasons then, economics seems an especially urgent topic for contemporary North American poets, as it is for contemporary citizens.8 This book’s second main claim is that contemporary poetry about economics, while formally diverse, often considers problems of scale broadly understood. Lynn Keller has identified related concerns with both the “minute” and the “vast” in several twenty-first-century poems about the “current environmental crises” (50), and Christopher Nealon has identified the “trope of a capitalist mismatch between the small and the large, the whispered and the shouted” in earlier poetry about economics (Matter 17), but the poems I consider emphasize not only discrepant but confused scales: the immense and the tiny, or what Susan Stewart calls the miniature and gigantic, are depicted simultaneously in ways that emphasize their disjunction but also, often, their indistinguishability.

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This feature of contemporary poetry isn’t surprising: poetry is famous, after all, for its capacity to depict immense ideas in what Sianne Ngai has called “short or condensed” forms (Our 70), a feature sometimes called poetic economy. And related disjunctions of scale are also evident in contemporary economic discourse, which emphasizes both vast impersonal forces (the traditional purview of macroeconomics) and a proto-neoliberal rhetoric of individual responsibility (associated loosely with microeconomics) and whose ideology of upward mobility and infinite expansion is at times violently undermined by the scarcity regularly experienced by individuals.9 Several theorists have argued that such discrepancies of scale are increasingly evident in the contemporary financialized economy.10 The short form of this monograph reflects related tensions, having impelled me to omit or condense discussions of poetry collections and sources on which I might otherwise have elaborated. Concerns with scale in recent poems—as in recent culture—thus seem to respond to actual attributes of the larger economy and the ways it is understood. In this way, Economies of Scale offers a more literal and material reading of economics in poetry than was prevalent into the 1990s, a mode of reading also evident in several recent studies of twentieth-century U.S. poetry.11 But my third main claim is that disjunctions of scale are often evident in poets’ explorations of synecdoche and prosopopeia. (Recent rhetoric associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, including the tendency to depict the economy as a sick person, often to exhort individuals to make personal sacrifices for the greater good, offers a recent nonpoetic example of similar tendencies.12) My reading of scale is thus, in ways that differ from but also extend several recent studies of economics and poetry, itself figurative, though part of my argument is that the poems I consider interrogate the efficacy of figuration as a strategy for addressing contemporary real-world phenomena.13 This interrogation, as I argue below, is partly evident through disruptions of the lyric mode with which these figures are often associated. I am not arguing that economics is wholly or even mostly figurative in these poems; rather, the pervasiveness of economics in contemporary culture has, it seems, prompted a range of poets to adopt proto-economic, but also figurative, strategies for making sense both  of this culture’s scalar inconsistencies and its simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility. This impulse is consistent with the ways that economics has been, and continues to be, understood, as a figurative discourse, or at least a metaphorical or symbolic one, especially by humanists.14 Financialization in particular is also often associated with what Marx called

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“capital elaborated into pure form” (qtd. in La Berge 28) and  what Richard Godden calls “form without content” (413). It is, as several have noted, fundamentally fictitious, creating money where none exists in ways that create “a state of total awe” that is itself a product of the vast scale or “sheer magnitude of money power” (Harvey, Limits 316). Scale, Stewart claims, is concerned with “inside and outside, partiality and transcendence” (ix) as well as “the part that is a whole” (xi) and the “desire of part for whole” (xii). Recent economic thinking involves related tensions, often evident through manipulations of synecdoche, which posits that the part represents the whole; it has been posited, for example, that the financialized marketplace repeatedly dismantles or “dividuates” seemingly indivisible entities in ways that prevent their reassembly into wholes (Appadurai, Banking 101), a topic to which I will return in Chap. 4. Recent poems evoke synecdoche  in often torqued ways: sometimes the part fails to represent the whole, or several parts fail to cohere, or the very concept of the whole is exposed as fictive; depictions of distorted or partial containment, incorporation, or inclusion recur. These poems also challenge traditional notions of synecdoche by explicitly considering the relation of the apparent inside (interior, intimate, private, familiar) to an enormous, sometimes phantasmagorical outside (at times an alternative to capitalism) that itself isn’t whole, intact, or even able to be located. At times, too, they imagine the future in ways that insist, impossibly, that it is already present. Such scenes of what I call problematic synecdoche are often accompanied by what I call problematic animation, often enacted through depictions of speaking objects or prosopopeia. In ways that recall economic thinking about the deanimation, variously, of workers and consumers that I consider in Chaps. 2 and 3, as well as the recent rise of corporate-­ benefiting artificial intelligence and the legal principle of corporate personhood, recent poems often animate objects and allow them to speak in ways that paradoxically draw attention to their unaliveness.15 Personified objects in poems often leach agency from human speakers and characters; aliveness (as well as the capacity to speak) thus becomes a contested category, evident in depictions of marginal entities, including automatons, fetishes, mirrored reflections, and facsimiles. In this context, my title, Economies of Scale, gestures in several directions. I mean, first of all, to imply a punning inverse corollary to the traditional notion that large-scale factory production leads to monetary savings: poems, including those that treat economics, valorize the small-scale,

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labor-intensive, and handmade.16 But while recent poems sometimes celebrate their exclusion from mass production, they also at times engage with, and at least metaphorically profit from, sociopolitical trends, including contemporary concerns with economics itself. The “of” in my title thus represents, as it often does in poems, a kind of fulcrum, allowing me to consider both recent poems’ treatment of economics and scale and the unfixity of these concepts; it represents an ambiguous equal sign expressing the problems of equivalence and containment I have begun to elaborate. * * * Two poems about the relation between paper currency and art written more than forty years apart help exemplify not only the development of poetic depictions of economics over time but also several of this book’s general claims as described above. Paper currency is from the outset figurative: intrinsically worthless (unlike gold or silver), it represents a value that it fails to embody. (As Jean-Joseph Goux has argued, retailers’ move from “cash” to “check,” then “charge” reveals the increasing abstraction of money [“Cash”], an abstraction intensified by the recent rise of e-­payment methods.) Financial and aesthetic value are, as several have argued, always linked, as the multiple meanings of the word value suggest.17 It is thus perhaps unsurprising that money has been linked to considerations of poetry; Christopher Nealon, for example, claims in relation to several 1970s and 1980s environmental poems that “[l]odged in [the] problem of what kind of matter money is, is the question of what kind of matter poetry is,” especially “poetry … opposed to capital” (Matter 30). Both Elizabeth Bishop’s 1972 “Poem” and Joshua Clover’s 2015 “Long Term Capital Management” address such issues. Both consider diminutive paper currency bills that evokes (and are at times indistinguishable from) not only the economic system as a whole but artworks that evoke a larger geographical or geopolitical world. Both Bishop and Clover manipulate the relation between monetary and aesthetic value in ways that ultimately challenge the archetype that art is outside the marketplace, albeit in quite different ways. From the outset, Bishop’s “Poem” opposes poetic and economic modes of valuation. Its subject is a miniature, hitherto ignored, and seemingly unimportant “sketch done in an hour” by the speaker’s great-uncle, which “has never earned any money in its life”; its value is instead wholly personal, with perhaps a tinge of the religious (it was “a minor family

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relic”). Yet economics keeps creeping, often punningly, into the poem. The painting is, the first line indicates, “about the size of an old-style dollar bill.” While this bill is removed both from circulation (it is “old-style”) and fixed valuation (it is either “American or Canadian”), the comparison nonetheless implies that the painting has a particular (low) monetary value. The speaker also uses other terms of economic valuation, often with primarily noneconomic meanings, noting that the painting has been “handed along collaterally” and referring to “our earthly trust.” But these words’ meanings are also more complex: an early reference to the painting as “useless and free” refers, it seems, to its existential freedom, but later Bishop uses the term free in an economic sense, describing “the little that we get for free.” Such terms locate the economic as a trace in the poem in ways that, as Eric Lindstrom has noted, transform looking into a mode of economic analysis and link money to art. It is also relevant that currency fascinated Bishop, according to Lindstrom, and that in a letter Bishop associates the painting described in “Poem” with her desire to buy a house in her native village.18 The poem also keeps resisting a vast, abstract scale that nonetheless keeps impinging onto the painting’s (and the poem’s) apparent insignificance. “Poem,” like the painting it describes, which the poet claims was “done in an hour,” seems offhand, vernacular, and sometimes hesitant. Yet it is arguably concerned with revaluing the kind of “serious” ideas the poem explicitly disavows: the speaker’s realization, midway through the poem, that she “recognize[s]” the scene the painting conveys is followed by a whimsical acknowledgment that “naturally” its depicted animals and trees no longer exist, a recognition then rendered poignant by the speaker’s assertion, in relation to the depicted elms, that they are “yet-to-be-­ dismantled.”19 This realization, it seems, is what enables her, toward the end of the poem, to consider large ideas, including “life and the memory of it” and the nature and status of what is “loved.” In this way, the poem affirms the affective value of emotions and memories that economics typically disavows, which Bishop associates with both what is “little” and “free.” But it also complicates this disavowal insofar as, in Lindstrom’s terms, it posits the poet’s “very way of seeing as … valuable,” if also “estranged,” partly because it enacts a “struggle to comprehend the monetary form” by aligning it, albeit obliquely, with “beauty” (363). David Orr’s claim that Bishop’s self-positioning as “minor” in poems such as this one has paradoxically increased her status as a poet in

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the years since her death further complicates the poem’s arguments about what is valuable (“The Great[ness]”).20 While currency makes only a brief appearance in Bishop’s meditation on the value of art, it is the central focus of “Long-Term Capital Management,” the final section of poet-critic Clover’s 2015 six-­ part “LTCM.” While in “Poem” the economic is a subtext that the poet mostly resists, Clover focuses directly on the effects of financialization, specifically its capacity to render national currencies (including but not limited to paper currency) worthless. The poem’s title refers the fact that, following a series of profits made just after the 1997 Asian currency crisis, the titular hedge fund, miscalculated the future value of Asian currencies, impelling a near-collapse and a 1998 U.S. Federal Reserve bailout intended to forestall a global financial crisis (Amadeo). These market upheavals were linked to the drastic devaluation of numerous Asian currencies: the Indonesian rupiah, for example, lost eighty percent of its value in the months following the currency crisis.21 Clover focuses not, as does Bishop, on the miniature but instead interrogates—albeit obliquely—the effects of multinational, and in this case explicitly financialized, trading practices. “Long Term Capital Management” describes various forms of Asian currency in ways that emphasize their aesthetic features rather than their monetary value. Most of its sentences identify a country and its currency’s name, then describe it using the verb “glows,” sometimes followed by an adverb, mostly “briefly”; most also describe the appearance of the currency, at times depicting the images on it as if they are real (as when “the South Korean won 10,000 glows through the now-destroyed Water Clock of Borugak Pavilion”) and at others emphasizing their status as representations, as when on “the peso convertible the pride of Argentina … appears in gentle blue the disgraced historian who first translated Dante into Spanish.” The poem’s structure thus catalogs currency that synecdochally represents different nations through the seemingly vast but brief (and shared) sense of awe implied by the term “glows,” though the glowing may also signal a past (or future) act of destruction. Bishop refers to what has been “dismantled”; Clover similarly describes what has been “now-destroyed.” But while Bishop looks back in time, Clover also anticipates a future “end to beauty.” As Bishop’s poem locates larger meanings in the painting’s material components (its brushstrokes and paint “squiggle[s]” as well as what they depict), Clover explores the slippage, and also the discrepancy, between

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money’s appearance and its symbolic meaning. “The South Korean won 10,000,” for example, is described as an object—“moiré on watermark and intaglio latent image”—while the Indonesian rupiah depicts a political figure ( “a friendly picture of Soeharto with open collar”) and an emblem of modernity (“Soekarno-Hatta Airport”). Other currencies depict artists (“the disgraced historian who first translated Dante into Spanish”) and natural scenes (as on “the humble kuai note[,] with its orchid watermark and Three Pools Mirroring the Moon at West Lake”). Transience functions primarily psychologically in “Poem,” which ultimately focuses on a kind of “[love]” associated with the painting’s depicted scene  which is  rendered especially poignant because  it has subsequently been “dismantled.” But “Long Term Capital Management” associates the brevity with which various currencies “glow” with the long-term effects of risky speculation in foreign currencies. The disjunction is both temporal and scalar: it seems that the fund’s concern with the “[l]ong [t]erm” is what has led to devastating short-term effects. Yet the poem also includes, at least briefly, a gesture toward singularity, paradoxically evident in the workings of a “System Entire which has no real name” and which manifests a “most tangled complexity” that enables at least a few “moments of great intimacy.” * * * Poem 317 in Myung Mi Kim’s 2002 “Lamenta” series offers a concrete example of the general claims I have so far been laying out about the ways poems about economics, especially financialization, consider problems of scale through incomplete synecdochic containment and ambivalent aliveness. Poem 317, the seventh in a series of thirty-eight poems whose numbers increase nonsequentially, explores  globalization’s effect on often marginalized workers  both thematically and formally. That the volume Commons, in which “Lamenta” appears, is concerned with economics is evident in the volume’s final multipage section, “Pollen Fossil Record” (105–11), which includes notes to and a gloss on the volume. Here, Kim lists a series of topics explored by the volume, including “[m]oney” and “[l]abor,” and juxtaposes the domestic “work of household[s]” with larger and more abstract concepts, including “[t]he interrelation between populations and their environments” and a “collapse in food production, socioeconomic differentiation, and poverty.” Kim’s interest in what Theodor Adorno called the relation of “fragment” to “totality” is evident

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in a question posed by Kim: “Even in the midst of (or perhaps especially in view of) a fully entrenched commodity society, how might it be possible to render the infinitely divisible moment.” Here Kim juxtaposes a totalized “fully entrenched” entity with an ephemeral “moment” that doesn’t synecdochally represent “society” but is capable of more fracturing, which in turn requires more scrutiny in order to be “render[ed].” The poem presents itself as a fragmentary, contingent attempt at speech, one in which coherent claims, as well as clear transitions and connections between its parts, seem impossible. Its nonlinearity seems to express the poet’s struggle—one at which the reader must guess, since it is not described directly—to devise a mode of speech true to the simultaneously immense and particular topic she here considers. Here is the poem in its entirety: —to settle refugees—to remove land mines And their task leaked cho-gah-jiib : a color—straw and wintered grass The question is labor Skin loosening from bone is age Ages longer than drought or rain Grafted ee . 은

Though the poem doesn’t explicitly identify economics as its focus, it considers the local effects of global (and globalized) practices that lead to both displacement and violence (evident in the reference to land mines). In perhaps the most explicit line of the poem, Kim identifies the central “question” as “labor,” though the poem, like “Pollen Fossil Record” shifts between large pronouncements and particular observations that evoke the “infinitely divisible moment[s]” of “Pollen Fossil Record.” In the first line, for example, the depersonalized “—to settle refugees—to remove land mines” is followed by a description of a group of people (“And their task leaked”) and then to a “color” associated, it seems, with a particular season, landscape, and, via the transliterated Korean phrase, shelter.22 The poem’s fragmentary diction and multiple languages in this way disrupt straightforwardly synecdochic relations. The poem reads like a

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series of citations from different documents or texts, and the verbs— “leaked,” “loosening,” and “[g]rafted”—depict transgressed boundaries, the last two emphasizing unstable bodies. The line “Skin loosening from bone is age” depicts only body parts (“[s]kin” and “bone”) rather than intact human bodies (or corpses), and the shift from embodied “age” to epochal “Ages” refuses to reconcile the individual with the epochal. The poem links the violence inflicted on humans by large-scale globalized economic practices to the impossibility of human aliveness. It contains no first-person speaker, and it refers to people only as plural “refugees” associated with a “task.” Nor does Kim use indicative verbs other than “is.” Her inclusion  of both a Korean character (meaning “silver”) and several transliterations from Korean, including one of that character, furthers a sense of linguistic distance that Kim has elsewhere identified as a central concern.23 Nor is the natural world depicted as alive; even the grass has turned to “straw” and is associated with “wintered” quiescence. A refusal to bring its characters to life evokes a (figurative) scene of dehumanization, one linked to unspecified material and economic conditions. * * * Each of this book’s chapters considers similar dynamics, linking scale, synecdoche, and prosopopeia in different ways. My intention is not to contain the disparate poems I consider synecdochally within a single rigid rubric but, taking their lead, to consider what each emphasizes. Read together, these chapters reveal the varied strategies—formal, tonal, and figural— used by contemporary poets to engage with the current economic moment; they also illuminate the range of contemporary North American poetry more generally. Each chapter considers the ways volumes by two poets represent a different element of economics, prefaced by a single poem by a third poet whose work focalizes the chapter’s concerns. These single poems are, as it happens, lineated and can be read separately from those in the volume in which they appear, whereas the volumes I consider comprise mostly linked prose sections, a distinction that has implications for my claims about synecdoche.24 The chapters move from the more traditional (and Marxian) elements of economics (labor and commodities, respectively) to the more financialized and also figurative (debt, followed by the derivative). In each,

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scale is central, but in varying ways: explicit depictions of disruptions of scale in Chap. 2 yield to an emphasis on the miniature in Chap. 3 and then to distorted representations in Chap. 4 and a trompe-l’oeil effect in Chap. 5. In the process, the poems in each chapter trouble synecdochic logic, or the possibility of such logic, by interrogating the relation of parts to wholes. In Chap. 2, useless, unpaid creative labor and the often tedious wage labor paradoxically necessary for artistic production awkwardly coexist; in Chap. 2, commodities can’t quite embody the feelings that their often numb human owners can’t fully summon up; the ubiquity of indebtedness in Chap. 4 renders loss impossible to contain; in Chap. 5, the print book signals an ephemerality that can’t fully contain all that poetry seems about to lose. In each chapter, a different form of partial or troubled humanness expresses the vexed relation between partialness and wholeness: Chap. 2 contrasts the (itself somewhat archaic) figure of the automaton with aesthetic autonomy; Chap. 3 links the fetishized, animated commodity, the nearly deanimated female shopper, and the hybrid but sterile cyborg; Chap. 4 foregoes the often-consoling ghost for a series of representations and translations; and Chap. 5 depicts the facsimile as an unalive entity nonetheless capable of summoning the reader. I turn away from such concerns in the Coda, tracing an alternate post-economic and nonsynecdochic aesthetic in a small group of poems published after 2016 about reparations. Chapter 2, “‘[A] fictive person / around whom the air is blurred with money’: Precarious Labor and the Work of Poetry,” explores the connection between scale, synecdoche, and prosopopeia in Christian Bök’s Eunoia and Jill Magi’s Labor, with an emphasis on the link between synecdoche and prosopopeia. A brief discussion of an excerpt from Timothy Donnelly’s poem-in-parts “The Cloud Corporation” depicts  the seemingly infinitely expansive, ebullient, and future-oriented effects of financialization, which renders manual labor merely picturesque. In contrast, Bök and Magi focus, in quite different ways, on workers constrained by financialization’s dematerializations but determined to engage in handiwork, no matter its inefficiencies. By focusing on the precarity of workers, including poets, both volumes draw a similarly paradoxical conclusion: tedious (even dehumanizing) manual labor is paradoxically required for artistic creation in ways that transform the precarity, or even the deanimation, of its creator into something necessary, partly by binding automation

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to autonomy. What is ultimately brought to life in these volumes is language, though it can’t help gesturing at its inanimate origin. Chapter 3, “‘Miss Thing’: Prosopopeia, Aliveness, and the Female Consumer,” focuses more directly on scenes of problematic animation and prosopopeia, which are especially evident in situations in which women are  confined to interior spaces. The chapter begins with a discussion of two brief 2011 poems by Rae Armantrout personifying money as a seductive woman, both of which emphasize the provisionality of money’s animation: in one, money talks in ways that affirm the titular expression, while in the other, money is a passive almost-object (“Miss Thing”) designed to satisfy male desires. I juxtapose two volumes depicting women shopping, Harryette Mullen’s 1999 S*PeRM**K*T—the only pre-2000 work in this study—and Mary Ruefle’s 2016 My Private Property, to emphasize disjunctions of scale: Mullen’s poems are highly compressed, while Ruefle’s are expansive, though they often focus on diminutive and trivial objects. Both volumes in this way evoke feminist claims that consumerism imprisons and objectifies women by pretending to set them free, but both also resist confinement using strategies ranging from puns that subvert dominant power structures in Mullen’s volume to occasional acknowledgments in Ruefle’s of the plight of the workers who provide her speaker with the luxury items she enjoys. Both volumes also expose the racist and consumerist origin of consumerist fantasies while granting nonliving entities an often-provisional voice; both in this way recall Marx’s claims about the fetishized or almost-alive commodity and the correspondingly deanimated human. But both volumes also imagine a hybrid mode that evokes what Mullen has called, in relation to race, partly human, partly mechanical cyborgs. Chapter 4, “‘An arrangement of figures on an open field’: Death, Displacement, and Unrepayable Debts,” turns from the classic Marxian economic principles explored in the first two chapters to debt, especially the bundled debt central to financialization. The chapter begins by considering Susan Wheeler’s 2003 “The Debtor in the Convex Mirror,” which links debt to acts of mirroring, distortion, and substitution as well as to precursot texts. As Wheeler links financial and other forms of debt to questions about representation, she foregrounds questions about textual indebtedness that also recur in Anne Carson’s 2010 Nox and Claudia Rankine’s 2004 Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, on which the remainder of the

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chapter focuses. While financial debt isn’t explicit in these volumes, death (associated by Annie McClanahan [Dead] and others with the logic of debt) is associated with a kind of excess compensation that undermines the possibility of literal repayment. Rather than bring the dead back to life, or even restore them to wholeness, both volumes depict scenes of displacement, translation, and transposition that emphasize the poem’s (figurative) aliveness while paradoxically embracing indebtedness. Chapter 5, “‘Were you afraid // your book would vanish?’: Gambling on the Print Book in the Electronic Age,” begins with a consideration of Brenda Hillman’s so-called “library poems” (2005), which consider the fragility of old books as well as their former instantiation as living trees. A related tension between imminent destruction and current  aliveness is visually central to Carson’s Nox, to which I return with a focus on its visual format, and Ruefle’s 2006 A Little White Shadow. I read these volumes, both of which reproduce apparently handmade (and hand-­manipulated) originals, in relation to the derivative, the archetypal financial product that concretizes a gamble about the future. Both volumes, I argue, engage in negative bets that attempt to profit from the book’s future obsolescence. Paradoxically, by evoking their authors’ handiwork, both summon up their future readers. In the Coda, “‘[T]hese gestures of redress sailed to me!’: U.S. Poetry After 2016,” I turn to poems published after Donald Trump’s election that gesture toward an alternate approach to the economic concerns presented in earlier chapters. I begin with a 2018  sonnet by Terrance Hayes that defines the term money both as currency and the town where Emmett Till was killed. The poem allows me to lay out a provisional alternative to the explicitly economic concerns of earlier chapters,  one that emphasizes the imbrication of politics, feeling, activism, loss, and economics in the context of racial injustice. A similar dynamic is evident, I suggest, in recent poems about reparations by Joshua Bennett (2020) and Marcus Wicker (2019-20). For both poets, reparations offer not only economic but also cultural and psychological repair. In this way, these poems gesture toward the emergence of a different idiom and mode of figuration, one less reliant on containment than on the capacity to speak in hitherto unheard voices.

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Notes 1. Jeffrey Gray and I used the phrase engaged poetry to refer to poems concerned with public and/or political events in our 2012 anthology (6–8). Claudia Rankine and Michael Dowdy use “the poetics of social engagement” to describe poetry that “offer[s] a robust history of the present that challenges the norms and narratives of social and political life” and “provide[s] unique lenses onto the histories and outcomes of conquest and colonization, slavery and mass incarceration, neoliberalism and globalization, patriarchy, environmental devastation, and anti-immigrant nativism” (1). 2. Financialization, as Giovanni  Arrighi has argued, has been part of every phase of capitalism’s development, from Dutch dominance during early European colonization to the present decline of the U.S. as a global power, as well as every crisis of capital accumulation (6). The so-called Dutch tulip mania (1643–47) is associated with financialization, as is the eighteenth-­ century transatlantic slave trade (Baucom 59). Annie McClanahan has traced neoliberalism’s origin to the late 1940s but notes that it was then defined differently from the ways it has been more recently (“Serious” 105). 3. Some of these more recent financial instruments include hybrid securities, variable annuities, structured asset-backed securities, and currency funds. The value of financial derivatives grew from a few million dollars in 1970 to one hundred trillion in 1990; the derivatives market has grown, according to one source, to “gargantuan size,” equaling, by 1990, the “total global manufacturing product for the last millennium” (Lipuma and Lee 47–48). 4. Margaret Ronda focuses on poems that consider “the unemployed and poor,” especially those who are “socially unrecognized”; Christopher Nealon identifies what he calls “the emergence of an emphatically anticapitalist poetry in the decade since the global financial crash of 2008” (“Anti-capitalist” 180); Walt Hunter considers “the links between poetry and finance” by focusing on “the rhetorical powers poets employ, question, or discard” (9); and Daniel Tiffany argues that some poems by privileged poet-professors that imagine the plight of low-wage workers “mask, and even protect, various forms of domination” (“Cheap”).  Elsewhere, Nealon argues that poets Claudia Rankine and Kevin Davies “imagine… an end to capitalism without a conceivable revolution” (Matter 141). Jasper Bernes reads the Flarf poetry of the early 2000s as a way of “figur[ing] resistance to work on multiple levels” (157). 5. Among the critics who have discussed fiction dealing with finance and economics are Claire  La Berge, Arne  De Boever, Alison  Shonkwiler, and David Watson. 6. Sarah Brouillette has argued that “creative-economy discourse dovetails importantly with neoliberalism” (Literature 2) and has analyzed “the

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evolving relationship between cultural commerce and artistic economy” (5), including the cooption of the rhetoric of artistic freedom and creation by corporations. 7. Articles on the topic from the 2000s include those by Bruce Wexler and Dana Goodyear, as well as sometimes ambivalent discourses on the worth of poetry from the 2010s by Matthew  Zapruder, Ben  Lerner, and Gregory Orr (You). 8. In a March 2022 Gallup poll, U.S. respondents consistently named economic issues as their top concern (Saad). 9. Wendy Brown defines neoliberalism as a condition in which “the state” is “privatized, enfolded, and animated by market rationality” (42) and in which “capital penetrates … every aspect of life” (44) by destroying “oppositional political, moral, and social claims located outside capitalist rationality” (45). Neoliberalism’s rhetoric of individual freedom and responsibility, David Harvey claims, conceals its actual goals, which include increased power for corporations rather than individuals (Brief 79). Harvey emphasizes neoliberalism’s concern with issues often associated with financialization, including “finance capital” (7), the value of stock prices and dividends rather than commodity production, and market speculation (32–33). Both Harvey (33) and Brown (28) associate neoliberalism with “the financialization of everything.” 10. Joshua Clover calls tensions between the smallest and largest (as evident in the “incommensurability” between value and price) instrumental in the development of twenty-first-century capitalism (“Value” 108). Ngai has called questions of scale fundamental to late capitalism (Our 30). 11. Two recent studies of mostly mid- to late-twentieth-century U.S. poetry, Christopher Nealon’s 2011 The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century and Jasper Bernes’s 2017 The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization, exemplify a more general tendency to consider economics in poetry not tropologically—as did several earlier studies, including Michael  Tratner’s reading of economic changes in conjunction with the articulation of once-taboo sexual desires and Richard Sieburth’s reading of Ezra  Pound’s engagement with economics in psychological and textual terms—but as a topic significant in its own right; Walt Hunter’s 2019 Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization offers a related argument in relation to Anglophone poetry more generally, emphasizing a “materialist analysis of lived conditions of interlocking forms of exploitation” along with an “exploration of poetic subgenres and forms” (4). Several scholars have recently attempted to redress what has been called a systemic disregard for politics in modern poetry (Filreis 509) and earlier critics’ “mostly dreadful job of incorporating poetry into their literary histories” (Marsh 121), omissions prompted, several have hypothesized, by an

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aversion to politics in post-McCarthyist U.S. (Filreis 509) as well as by the ethos of both New Criticism and poststructuralism. Several recent readings of modernist poetry have attempted to rectify this omission (including works by John Marsh and Linda Kinnahan, among others). Nealon defines his book’s aim as an attempt to chronicle the ways “a wide variety of poets,” mostly writing during the twentieth century “respond to the social changes wrought by capitalism” (1), while Bernes more narrowly considers the ­relation between what he calls “unfree work” and “art work” (1) in the postwar U.S. 12. To give just one example of such rhetoric, in an October 2020 Forbes article, Mike Patton described “a tug-o-war between the health of individuals and the health of the economy,” then argued that “[a]lthough individuals matter most, the health of many would have suffered had we fallen into a[n economic] depression.” 13. While Nealon expresses a desire to undermine the distinction between form and content (Matter 1), he defines  the term  matter “not only [in terms of] subject matter, but [of] subject matter given different forms, and expressed as different kinds of content” (1). Bernes identifies his book’s concern with the “thematic convergence between artistic avant-gardes of the 1960s in the United States and the workplace struggles that emerge toward the end of the 1960s” (Work 10) as well as the ways “imaginative transformations of actually existing economic conditions” led to effects contrary to the intentions of those who undertook them (6). These related strategies at times lead to quite different readings. Jane Elliott considers a series of narrative works that express “a version of human existence in which cost-benefit analysis becomes inseparable from a decision regarding the persistence of life” and “in which persistence as a life form and individual choice become so intertwined that each is measured in the coin of the other” (3). 14. Building on earlier scholarship about what Jean-Joseph  Goux has called the “[s]ymbolic” nature of “[e]conomies” and economics (Symbolic), Frederick Kaufman argues in a 2020 book that “[m]oney personifies the non-human world” (20) in ways that evoke prosopopeia (18); he also links money to other literary figures including metonymy, synecdoche, and catachresis. 15. Marx was among the first to identify factory workers as “living appendage[s] of … machine[s]” (Capital 614); later theorists have characterized (often female) consumers as impelled by marketers to desire and purchase what they don’t really need. Automated labor and algorithms, as well as the bots that have taken over informational tasks formerly performed by humans, have become ubiquitous, surveilling factory workers’ productivity, con-

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sumer preferences, and more (Waddell). The 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling granted personhood status to corporations (United States, “Citizens”) and further blurred notions about what and who is alive, what rights different entities possess, and who has the right to speak, as well as generate profits. 16. Exceptions to this tendency might include the Flarf poets of the 2000s, who generated poems by manipulating materials found on the Internet with then-relatively-new cut-and-paste computer functions (Bernes 157–66), as well as the often automated constrictions adopted by Oulipo poets and their heirs, including Christian Bök, whom I discuss in Chap. 2. 17. Dave Beech distinguishes aesthetic from economic notions of value, asserting categorically that “all judgements of value in art … are necessarily non-­ economic” (363). In contrast, Barbara  Herrnstein Smith claims that “a double discourse of value” opposing “humanistic [to] economistic … articulations of economy” exists in relation to artworks (115). As John Guillory and others have noted, aesthetic discourse arose contemporaneously with the rise of the commodities market (306); that the word value refers both to aesthetic and economic worth reveals the inextricability of these discourses, as Mary  Poovey has remarked in another context (7). 18. Lindstrom notes that Bishop was especially interested in the currency of Brazil, where she moved in 1951 (362) and where, he claims, she became more generally preoccupied with financial negotiation and monetary exchange (365n22). Bishop’s letter claims that purchasing a house would be difficult since she has earned less money from her work as poet than her relatives suspect (qtd. in Millier 347–8). 19. The poignancy comes from the phrase’s proleptic certainty about elms’ future dismantling, its denial of that fact in the past depicted by the painting, and also from the term dismantled, which links the elms’ death to something associated with handicraft, or even artistry. 20. While  Robert Lowell’s poems and persona seemed to manifest what David Wojahn has called “Greatness in the old-fashioned, capital-G sense” (qtd. in Orr),  Orr asserts that “it’s Bishop’s writing, not Lowell’s, that matters more in the poetry world today” (“Great(ness)”). 21. Like all hedge funds, the LTCM fund bet on future market values, often attempting to derive profit—as it did successfully during the 1997 Asian currency crisis—when its investments lost value, in this case partly due to over-investment by funds including LTCM.  The next year, though, the fund nearly collapsed as a result of a Russian currency devaluation and subsequent bond default.

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22. The meaning of the  transliterated phrase “cho-gah-jiib” is an old-style straw house (C. Kim). 23. Kim notes her interest in “ideas of translation, translatability, transliteration, [and] transcription”; “[s]ometimes,” she adds, her attempts to “render” the “presence” of “roaming” linguistic “fragments … necessitated conjoining the English and Korean alphabets” (109–110). 24. The volumes I consider, that is, are formally synecdochic in that their various separate parts contribute to the whole.

CHAPTER 2

“[A] fictive person / around whom the air is blurred with money”: Precarious Labor and the Work of Poetry

Abstract  “‘[A] fictive person / around whom the air is blurred with money’: Precarious Labor and the Work of Poetry” explores the connection between scale, synecdoche, and prosopopeia in Christian Bök’s Eunoia and Jill Magi’s Labor, with an emphasis on the link between synecdoche and prosopopeia. A brief discussion of an excerpt from Timothy Donnelly’s poem-in-parts “The Cloud Corporation” depicts the seemingly infinitely expansive, ebullient, and future-oriented effects of financialization, which renders manual labor merely picturesque. In contrast, Bök and Magi focus, in quite different ways, on workers constrained by financialization’s dematerializations but determined to engage in handiwork, no matter its inefficiencies. By focusing on the precarity of workers, including poets, both volumes draw a similarly paradoxical conclusion: tedious (even dehumanizing) manual labor is paradoxically required for artistic creation in ways that transform the precarity, or even the deanimation, of its creator into something necessary, partly by binding automation to autonomy. What is ultimately brought to life in these volumes is language, though it can’t help gesturing at its inanimate origin. Keywords  Immaterial labor • Precarity and poetry • Autonomy • Labor in poetry • Ouilipo • Timothy Donnelly • Christian Bök • Jill Magi

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Keniston, Economies of Scale, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39341-9_2

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In ways that recall the (seemingly mock-)awe of Clover’s “Long-Term Capital Management” as well as the marketing documents devised by any number of corporations, Timothy Donnelly’s 2010 “The Cloud Corporation” tends toward the hyperbolic. In the third of the poem’s seven sections, for example, the speaker adopts the voice of a documentarian, who may also be a mock-innocent, attempting “to determine why” the manufactured clouds produced by the titular corporation, though seemingly identical to old-fashioned ones, “provoke in an audience [a] more positive, lasting / response than do comparable clouds occurring in nature.” The answer seems linked to the fact that manufactured clouds both affirm and transcend the human scale: while viewers “prefer” objects created by “a merely / human mind,” they are also “comfort[ed]” by “the hum of [inhuman] machinery.” Yet the poem also affirms the apparently boundaryless, immaterial ubiquity of the corporation, which is, the poem asserts, “a business / project” concerned not only with creating clouds but with “acquir[ing] and retain[ing] control” over this process through “human speculation”; its employees include not only laborers, office workers, and a “chief executive officer of clouds” but also political action committees, “advocates of clouds,” “supporters of the wars // to keep clouds safe,” and marketers. On the corporation’s campus, which includes repurposed “glass-front factories” as well as corporate offices, the ritualized and seemingly awe-inspiring parting of the clouds (a scene repeated at the start of each of the poem’s seven seven-tercet sections) evokes both the vast vistas of the Romantic sublime and a strategically placed stage set. Rather than focusing on those who actually produce the clouds, the corporation (and the poem) mostly consider informational workers, at times “united into … a fictive person,” whose composite profitability is evident in “the air [around them, which] is blurred with money” and who relegates actual cloud production to a disembodied “flash of autonomous, ardent, local brainwork.” Only Part 4 (32) depicts actual manual laborers, or rather their “backs” seen from afar by the first-person speaker, who is also the corporation’s CEO. Though clouds “[cavort]” above them, these workers aren’t engaged in cloud production; rather, they perform anachronistic and seemingly picturesque farm work, “cutting the ripened barley” “in the field,” then separating the grain with old-fashioned “wooden” tools and “palm-fan[s].” This work is “[painstaking]” but also picturesque, a “perform[ance]” linked for the viewer to “a possibility of reward, of betterment” that seems another self-congratulatory reference to the corporation itself.

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Yet the poem’s tone, in ways that evoke what Jasper Bernes calls free indirect discourse (72–74), complicates this apparent devaluation of manual labor: the speaker’s enthusiasm seems to affirm his cooption by a corporate (and financialized) logic that seeks profit even from something—like clouds—freely available, though it’s also true that clouds have been monetized in the real world.1 In this context, the poem’s repetition of the phrase “The clouds part” seems less an emblem of the speaker’s seemingly incessant enthusiasm than a redundant catchphrase. The phrase, like the poem more generally, can thus be read as an indirect critique of what it seems to celebrate in ways that recall what Karl Marx and others identify as the deceptive language of scarcity and surplus deployed by corporations, though here the threat of scarcity doesn’t conceal an actual surplus.2 To recall this book’s central terms, then, Donnelly both enacts and exposes financialization’s reliance on a rhetoric that suppresses its human costs as well as the fact that, as Annie McClanahan has claimed in a discussion of several recent poems about financialization, “contemporary finance has everything to do with contemporary labor” (“Financialization” 249). Though the poem embraces a synecdochic logic in which the corporation’s employees seamlessly combine into a singular if also “fictive” person, it also suggests that this logic is not only self-serving but fallacious. * * * Donnelly’s opposition between the omnipresent, immaterial work of the CEO and anachronistic, theatrical  manual labor foregrounds a central paradox of financialized labor, one also central to the prose sequences on which I focus in the remainder of this chapter. Both Christian Bök’s 2009 Eunoia and Jill Magi’s 2014 Labor complicate Donnelly’s depiction of a mystified, dematerialized, and ecstatic scene in which money begets money. Instead, both Bök and Magi reveal what financialization tends to conceal, especially the poor conditions of many laborers in the contemporary economy.3 Labor in the contemporary financialized economy is clearly different from that in earlier eras, especially those in which factory production (often called Fordism or Taylorism) predominated.4 Contemporary labor has been variously defined as “postindustrial” (Bernes, Work 32) and “immaterial” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 29); associated with “knowledge” (Liu 1), “symbolic analysis and problem solving,” and “the creation and

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manipulation of affects” (Hardt and Negri 293); and reliant on what Jacques Derrida calls “techno-tele-media apparatuses” (qtd. in Clover, “Value” 112). Others have associated financialization with a blurring of the lines between production and consumption (Brouillette, “Creative” 143) and between work and leisure (Hardt and Negri, Multitude 111), trends that increase corporate profits, though a selective emphasis on the “essential” nature of some modes of labor has also recently increased such profits.5 While labor is sometimes called insignificant or “disposable” in the financialized economy, it has also been called central to the concept of value (Godden 421), despite the increased offshoring of labor, which has arguably rendered it less visible in the Global North.6 The word precarity refers generally to what the OED calls “instability” as well as “uncertainty or insecurity with regard to employment, income, and living standards” (“Precarity”); the term’s etymology, as Andy Ross notes, signals being “forced to beg and pray to keep one’s job” (34). Lauren Berlant calls precarity “the dominant structure and experience of the present moment, cutting across class and localities” (Cruel 192). Precarity is sometimes understood as an umbrella term designed to find common ground among diverse workers engaged in various modes of financially marginal work in developed nations and the Global South. But the concept is also euphemistic, as Ross has noted: it seems to “glorif[y] part-time contingent work as ‘free agency’” in ways that disguise the fact that workers deprived of benefits and job security are easy to “hire and fire … at will” (34), thus ensuring “lavish returns” for “[c]apital-­owners” (5).7 Because precarity concerns the ways “the regime of embodied capitalism becomes inscribed on the flesh of living labour” (Tsianos and Papadopoulos), it is also linked to precariousness, which tends to be  defined noneconomically, in terms of embodiment, resistance, and aliveness.8 This doubleness may explain why precarity is of interest to Bök and Magi, though precarity is also often associated with creative work. In an era in which corporations have successfully coopted previously non- (or anti-)  economic notions of creativity and in which artistic creation is imbricated in the marketplace, it seems evident that, according to Nicholas Brown, “the work of art” has been “subsum[ed] … under capital” (qtd. in Ashton 224), rendering the poem, in Jennifer Ashton’s more specific terms, a “commodity” (223). By juxtaposing Bök’s Eunoia with Magi’s Labor, I don’t mean to downplay the significant differences between these volumes. Instead, I wish to foreground the ways both depict the global and local effects of

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financialization on laborers. Both identify labor as their topic, as is evident in Bök’s concern with workers of different kinds throughout Eunoia as well as what a final note calls the text’s “Sisyphean spectacle of its labour” (111) and in Magi’s title. Both volumes also describe precarious workers and depict poets as by turns alienated, objectified, and underemployed; both juxtapose scenes of  disembodied, intellectual, informational labor with old-fashioned embodied handiwork. But just as Bök claims that his volume’s “wilfully [sic] crippl[ed] … language” has engendered “an uncanny, if not sublime, thought” (111), both volumes consider the subversive potential of precarity in ways consistent with the thinking of several theorists.9 My reading of these sequences also exemplifies this book’s general association between scale, synecdoche, and prosopopeia. Paradoxes of scale are evident in both volumes’ juxtaposition of redundant with compressed writing modes, as well as in their focus on omissions, a concern that both evokes and disrupts synecdochic modes of understanding. Bök valorizes (often via seemingly parodic catalogs) not-­ fully-­articulated financial practices, while Magi more directly considers, and critiques, the precarious work and living situation of adjunct academic workers and artists. Both also engage with what several critics have called indexical practices, which Paul Stephens has defined as modes of sorting and classifying extant words and texts in ways that evoke “the impossibility of ‘getting outside’ of the institutions of late-capitalist bourgeois culture” (754); several other readers have defined the term in similarly proto-synecdochic terms.10 Both poets also engage in the loosely prosopopeiac animation of fictive characters who, unlike the typically animated entities in lyric—for example  John Keats’s Grecian urn—are neither fully realized nor described. Nor are they fully alive. To borrow terms from other critics and contexts, both volumes in this way invoke what Daniel Tiffany has called automatons (Toy 71–72), quasi-human entities that in this case mediate between free (autonomous) and mechanical (automatized) conceptions of labor. * * * To attempt to interpret a text designed to refute the possibility of interpretation is, to put it mildly, confounding. Certainly Bök’s Eunoia has seldom been read thematically.11 To do so requires downplaying the sequence’s formal gambit, which is arguably its most obvious feature: each of its five chapters features a lexicon drawn from English words including a single

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vowel, which provides the chapter’s title. (Bök has identified eunoia as the shortest English word to include all five vowels [Eunoia 111]). A thematic reading keeps butting up against this linguistic fact: the sequence’s characters have the names they do and perform the activities they perform because of the limited lexicon available to the poet as he composed. To read interpretatively requires continuously switching scales, recognizing the constraints imposed by the poet on his own project alongside its larger themes. To frame this conundrum slightly differently, Bök seems to be grappling in Eunoia with what Nicholas Brown has called the problem of aesthetic autonomy, which Brown links to interpretation and deems antithetical to “market conformism” (21). (Brown here seems to invoke the so-called autonomists, who according to Sarah  Brouillette’s gloss “pursue creative inclinations without too much concern for market necessities” [Literature 143].12) Eunoia’s formal experimentalism attempts, I contend, echoing Brown, to “legibly assert a moment of autonomy from the market” by attempting to “produce an experience rather than … an interpretation” (34). But in Bök’s sequence, as in Brown’s general formulation, this attempt also evokes “the structure of the commodity” by “call[ing] for private attachments rather than public judgments” (Brown 7). The tension between Eunoia’s thematics, which concern the condition of laborers within a financialized economy, and its seemingly radical form thus raises at least two general questions: can a poem about financialization escape financialized logic? And what is the relation between formal constraint and political freedom? Problems of scale are in this way essential to the experience of reading Eunoia, as are questions about the sequence’s capacity to step outside of its various (formal and economic) confines. Bök’s comments about early twentieth-century French Oulipo practices raise related questions. Bök defines Oulipo as “the avant-garde coterie renowned for its literary experimentation with extreme formalistic constraints” and claims it “directly inspired” Eunoia (Eunoia 111), though he has elsewhere suggested that his volume extends Oulipean principles by offering the possibility of freedom from constraint.13 That the word Oulipo derives partly from the French ouvrier or factory worker focalizes this paradox: by depicting monotonous labor and engaging in what Bök calls “laborious” practices (“Xenotext”), Eunoia reveals its interest both in paid work and in “literary experimentation.” The sequence’s status as a formal experiment that is also a sustained treatment of economics thus renders it both textually and thematically precarious. The volume, that is, strategically deploys

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linguistic precariousness to document the precarity of workers. While these workers don’t necessarily interact with financiers,  they  remain in close proximity to them throughout the sequence. Eunoia considers precarity by juxtaposing chapters focusing on undifferentiated groups of laborers (in Chapters I and O especially) with those focusing on named and particular financial workers (in A and U, and, to some extent, E). Financialization is especially evident in Chapter A (12–30), which features a financier named “Hassan Abd al-Hassad” who is identified as an “Agha Khan.” Hassan is defined by his capacity to act; many poems in the chapter begin “Hassan can,” followed by an active verb; other sentences focus on what he “wants.” He has, at least in the form of potential, agency: he is capable of “call[ing] a vassal,” levying “tax[es]” on a range of characters and entities to improve his profits, eating a variety of expensive foods, “watch[ing] cancan girls,” and more. What he “asks” for, it seems, he receives, partly because of his ruthlessness. An investor on the “NASDAQ” Stock Exchange, he adeptly manipulates taxes, banks, advertisements, and global transportation. He also mediates between “Arab” and Western “banks” and markets while benefiting from the cultural products of globalization, variously “bask[ing] at an ashram,” gorging on “Alaskan crabs,” and enjoying “jazz” and “gansta rap,” as well as “a Catalan sardana.” Yet Hassan is also subject to the whims of the market; he is in this way financially precarious. He is compelled to “watch, aghast, as databanks at NASDAQ … chart a crash,” impelling him to sell his personal art collection; his manipulation of tax law at one point “sparks a flagrant backlash”; his capacity to “start a war” leads “[a] damp flag [to flap] at half-mast,” seemingly a symbol of the carnage he has caused. Among the many entities that Hassan taxes are “all farmland,” a strategy that the narrator identifies as “a cash grab,” though it also involves an old-fashioned mode of tithing, by which Hassan receives “half” of each farmer’s crop. He also devises a tax on items sold at outdoor markets, effectively limiting the profits earned by the various “workers” who are selling “scrap parts,” “handsaws[,] and hacksaws.” Such passages reveal finance’s imbrication with seemingly prefinancialized market modes. This connection is implicit in Chapter O (59–76), whose workers, like Hassan in Chapter A, want to get rich, even if they must adopt illegal tactics to do so; amid a few self-sacrificing workers, the chapter focuses on “crooks who con folks,” “Goths who rob tombs,” “[p]rofs who work on … H-bombs or N-bombs,” and the like, as well as those whose immaterial work

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objectifies others or themselves, from “[h]omos” [sic] who “shoot photos” of pornographic images to “blond trollops who … do promos for floorshows.” Several poems testify to the globalization of trade, albeit involving old-fashioned “scows” and “dhows” that stop at a variety of world ports carrying both traditional wool and newer, synthetic “orlon floss” to be woven by “commonfolk.” One poem midway through Chapter O depicts both the precarity of agricultural workers and their imbrication in larger financial networks. The poem begins with this description: Scots from hogtowns or cowtowns work from cockcrow to moondown—to chop down woodlots, to plow down cornrows. Folks who work from morn to noon throw down slop to hogs or corn to sows. Most workfolk who sow crops of broomcorn grow corn crops sown from lots of cowflop compost (blobs of poo or globs of goo). (70)

Unlike the idyllic farm workers in “The Cloud Corporation,” these workers perform messy and redundant work, as the references to “poo” and “goo” imply. Late references to “honchos who own lots of longhorns” and “rooks or crows roost[ing] on rooftops” accentuate the farmworkers’ precarity; even the birds are freer than they are. That they are “Scots” implies another mode of subjection while suggesting the importance of larger capitalist networks: these workers may have been forced into their working conditions because of their colonized status. (A poem in Chapter I focuses on Irish workers to similar effect.14) Bök has claimed that he aimed for a kind of synecdochic completeness in his use of each chapter’s lexicon, attempting to “cit[e] at least 98% of the available repertoire” for each letter (112). Yet, in ways consistent with his assertions about the capacity of Oulipo-inspired methods to subvert their logic of containment, his sequence fails to achieve synecdochic wholeness.15 This sense of incompleteness is especially evident in another of Bök’s self-imposed rules (there are many), what Bök identifies in Eunoia’s afterword as  his use of “syntactic parallelism” (112) and elsewhere calls “strict parallelism” (“Xenotext”). I referred above to Paul Stephens’s notion of the indexical, which Stephens associates with “conceptual writing [that] places in question our notions of individual agency and our ability to sequester ourselves from the global” (755) and with both financialization and Bök’s poetry in particular.16 Indexicality also raises questions that are broadly synecdochic, evoking not only what Alan

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Liu calls, in relation to “computerization,” “the dynamic assemblage of separated pieces of information in an interlinked contextual field” (108) but what Stephens calls the “place of the writer within global networks of aesthetic and economic valuation” (755). The volume’s catalogs reveal a related impulse: their enumerated particulars formally imply the existence of a larger whole. Yet Bök’s catalogs, including Chapter A’s depiction of Hassan’s various capabilities and Chapter O’s description of diverse kinds of work and workers, don’t cohere into wholeness, partly because alienation and precarity are so central to the depicted scenes and partly because they fail to consider the overall meaning of or connection between their parts. In contrast to Walt Whitman’s syntactically similar “I Hear America Singing” (174), for example, Bök’s workers don’t perform the same activity (singing, for Whitman); rather, what  they share is  the tediousness of their work and their desire to benefit financially from it, though the work itself often seems to make that goal unattainable. Nor is the poet an appreciative observer of those around him (as when, in a catalog in Whitman’s Song of Myself, the narrator “loiter[s] enjoying [the] repartee and [the] shuffle and break-down” of a “butcher-boy” at work [198]); nor does he express the desire to help others in anything resembling the way Whitman’s speaker gives a runaway slave water and a room and bandages his wounds (197). The narrator in the second poem of Chapter I depicts himself performing manual labor among other workers; like them, “I rig this winch with its wiring; I fit this drill with its piping. I dig this ditch” (51). Yet the narrator isn’t an integral part of the larger workforce; he depicts himself merely “pitch[ing] in” and also, on his own, makes the poem’s most important final discovery: “I find bright prisms twinkling with glitz.” It’s not clear whether the speaker gets to keep these prisms for himself—a similar ambiguity is evident earlier in the poem in relation to what the miners discover—nor whether they are valuable or worthless, as glitz usually is.17 Or perhaps the poet, like the poem’s narrator, is merely slumming, pretending to be a miner so he can (metaphorically) acquire material for his poem. To be fully alive as a worker is, many theorists have noted, a near-­ impossibility. Echoing Marx,  Liu has associated “the now familiar paradigm of the assembly-line or office slave” whose “deskilled tasks [are] pegged to the movement of the conveyor or message belt” (83) with a “so-called ‘robot’ or ‘automaton’” (95). A similar automatization is evident, he argues, in “the white-collar middle class” (98), as well as those who work in information technology (108).18 In a more tropological

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reading of the overlap between the concept of the automaton and lyric poetry (Toy 68), Daniel Tiffany makes a different claim: the capacity of automatons to emphasize “demechanization … paradoxically … enhances” the automaton’s “autonomy” (64). Such notions help link Eunoia’s disruptions of synecdoche to its ambiguous depictions of aliveness. As the passages cited above suggest, Bök never grants his depicted laborers subjectivity or even humanity. Not even the named protagonists seem real; Hassan, for example, lacks interiority or even “wants” that exceed the immediate. These characters are animated but not alive; instead, they evoke not-quite-human robots and automatons in ways consistent with Bök’s interest in these entities as well, perhaps, with his pleasure at being referred to as a quasi-inanimate object, “Dr. Book” (“Xenotext”).19 But Tiffany’s more nuanced association between automatons and poems and his implication that automatons are capable of autonomy are also relevant to Eunoia. While Hassan and the sequence’s other protagonists aren’t alive in the conventional sense, they also don’t exemplify what McClanahan has called a mode of “personification [that] imagine[s] the absolute destruction of personhood” (Dead 91). Rather, these characters embody and at times give voice to the inanimate word lists from which Bök crafted his sequence. Eunoia in this way engages in something like a curtailed version of prosopopeia by animating language itself in ways that render it autonomous, as when Bök claims that the volume’s “vowels themselves have conspired amongst themselves to speak on their own behalf” (“Xenotext”). Yet such a claim is also  figurative: language can’t literally become alive because prosopopeia is itself a figure. Bök’s description of his book’s autonomy (or that of its vowels) is also complicated by his depiction of his composition process as rote, tedious, and mechanical, as when, after asserting in one poem in Chapter I that “[t]hinking within strict limits is stifling,” he implies that composing resembles clerical office work: “I print lists, filing things (kin with kin, ilk with ilk)” (58). He also several times refers to the literary marketplace and has elsewhere acknowledged his impressive book sales.20 But Bök also positions his volume, and its composition, as antithetical to paid work: writing it, he has claimed, took him “six years, working four or five hours every night” after finishing working at his paying day job (“Xenotext”). And despite the rote nature of this work, he also emphasizes his refusal to “automate” the process of deriving words or to rely on “software”: he devised his lexicon, he explains, by “read[ing] through all three volumes

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of the Webster’s Third International Unabridged Dictionary … five times” (“Xenotext”). That he describes his “labor” on the book as “Sisyphean” (111) further emphasizes its uselessness and thus its position outside what Brown calls “market conformity” (21), no matter that the sequence’s constraints were self-imposed.21 Eunoia thus seems committed to having it both ways: it evokes market logic and automation even as it seeks autonomy from economic strictures. Precarious both in its depiction of dehumanizing economic practices and in its willingness to expose those practices as flawed, Eunoia also suggests that precarity offers an escape, albeit one predicated on confinement. In this way, the sequence echoes not only Bök’s optimistic statements about the project’s apparent evasion of his authorial will but also, more darkly, the extent to which precaritization has become, in Isabell Lorey’s terms, a “normalized political-economic instrument” (qtd. in Morris and Voyce 118). * * * Addressing worker precarity far more directly than Eunoia, Magi’s Labor is precarious in the vernacular sense: it feels unbalanced and is filled with non sequiturs, contradictions, and incompletely evoked situations, partly due to its juxtaposition of a variety of diverse documents and texts. Perhaps its formal challenges help explain why there is virtually no literary scholarship on Labor. Or perhaps the explanation lies in the volume’s seemingly deliberate obscurantism, evident in its refusal to unify its parts: the sequence juxtaposes descriptions of contemporary events, including visits to a New York University labor archive (81), with accounts of three female protagonists’ work situations as well as excerpts from apparently extant texts, including documents found in the archive, a historical text, and a handbook that includes directions for a series of performances. The result is a sequence that, in seemingly direct opposition to Eunoia, feels impromptu and uncontained; without its final Notes (81–85), it is difficult to make sense of its structure and aims. That the topic of precarity is central to Labor is evident not only in Magi’s stated interest in the topic but also in the sequence’s depiction of the precarious living and working situation of contingent university instructors, whose exploitation by contemporary corporatized and financialized universities has been well documented.22 Within Labor, Magi refers to studies about “persistent perceived job insecurity” (22) and “the

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Age of the Adjunct” (35) and notes “the trend toward hiring part-time workers” in an era of high “‘administrative salaries’ and ‘technology costs’ and ‘health care costs’” (68). While questions of scale are evident in Eunoia largely through tensions between the poems’ compression and the larger topics they address, in Labor they are linked to the situation of precarity itself, which, as I indicated above, is sometimes defined not only as a disjunction between the lived conditions of workers and the rhetoric that surrounds them but as what Vassilis Tsianos and Dimitris Papadopoulos call the ways capitalism as a system becomes “embodied” by workers. But Labor is also concerned with locating avenues of escape and freedom within and on the periphery of precarious situations in ways implied by an epigraph from Elizabeth Grosz, which reads in part, “I don’t want to suggest that the position of the outsider is always or only negative. … The outside is capable of great positivity and innovation.” The numbered and subnumbered directions for performances depicted in Labor’s Handbook sections exemplify this possibility, often by manipulating documents associated with precarious labor. Magi has claimed that the Handbook emphasizes “actions, procedures, and rituals” and “directives” that make seemingly “official [and] institutional” language “unusual, impossible, and subversive” (“Notes”).23 In one entry, “a copy of [a] gag order and final settlement,” “numerous letters of part-time appointments,” and other items are to be brought to the archive, though if the “head librarian” refuses to accept them, they are to be “dump[ed] out” into “brackish water,” then collected and discarded (30–31). Other Handbook entries  stipulate the burning, dousing, ingesting, or throwing away of documents related to labor or labor grievances, while others express a seemingly contradictory impulse to make ephemeral documents such as “bank statements from the past five years” permanent and public by “enlarg[ing and t]ransform[ing them] into blueprints” to be “tile[d over] a whole wall” (30), an act that anticipates a later “Ceremony” in which personal papers are stamped with “your name” and the phrase “LABOR ARCHIVE” for temporary display in “a plexiglass box” followed by “eventual shredding” (67). While several performances are meant to be filmed (31, 50–51), even this act doesn’t ensure their permanence, since it is sometimes optional. In this way, Magi repeatedly describes labor-intensive performances that can’t be enacted or, if they can, tend not to be witnessed or to endure. Though Bök depicts his poetic “labor” as “Sisyphean,” suggesting that it is futile, Eunoia also demonstrates Bök’s discipline. In Labor, though, unproductive labor offers an alternative to the rigid logic of the

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corporatized workplace. While Bök emphasizes his preference for compiling Eunoia’s lexicon by hand and “scribbling [the poem] in ink” (Eunoia 50), he also condemns the fact that poetry has “become … artisanal … (like needlepoint)” (“Xenotext”). But Magi’s sequence embraces not only the handmade but handiwork as a way to embody automated and impersonal official documents: a set of embroidered bank statements, for example, should “[u]se your handwriting” (30); another Handbook entry instructs the artist to “tak[e] your needle and writ[e] your story across the pages of the employee handbook” (69), while elsewhere the first-person narrator describes sewing “bank statements under the skin of my hand” (18). Labor’s cover also demonstrates that Magi, who has elsewhere associated “textile poetics” with questions about labor (“Textile”) and who is a textile artist herself, has done similar work: it features embroidered images of parts of several handwritten words.24 I argued above that indexical practices—especially Bök’s use of parallel construction and a severely curtailed lexicon—evoke the part-whole congruence of synecdoche but ultimately undermine it. In Labor, both the presence of the indexical and its anti-synecdochic function are more explicit. The volume begins with a list of partly alphabetical subentries related to the words work and workers (9–12). Though indexes generally affirm synecdochic logic by breaking a book’s contents into systematic parts, Magi’s index is idiosyncratic. “Gleaned,” as she has noted, from excerpts from several books’ indexes (81), her index alludes (incompletely) to several of Labor’s themes, including theories about labor (“as cultural expression,” “commodification of,” “restructuring bodies of”), with an emphasis on precarity (“devaluation,” “polarization,” “marginalization,” “austerity,” and “contingent labor” and resistance (“Workplace resistance,” “networks of solidarity, // organized resistance / and quitting”). That Magi has identified Labor’s index as a poem (81) further complicates its position and role. While indexes generally imply the existence of a complete text, Magi’s emphasis on adding items to and removing them from the official labor archive challenges this notion, as do Handbook instructions for the hand-­ transcription and reading aloud of the labor archive finding guide (50). Labor itself offers an alternate archive, or notes toward one, as is suggested by the implication that the sequence itself is “[m]y shadow archive my finding guide” (74). Yet if Labor is an archive, it comprises a series of fragmentary documents that it refuses to integrate into a coherent whole.

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The named protagonists in Eunoia, I argued above, remain subordinate to their linguistic constructedness: though Hassan acts, he is not a credible or fully defined character. Labor also includes named characters, identified early in the volume as J., “[t]the archeologist with tenure”; Sadie,“[t]he self-appointed inspector”; and Miranda, “the teacher who is also an artist” (17). All three are employed at the same university, and all have submitted work complaints or grievances. While these characters are depicted in more detail than those in Eunoia and seem to possess more autonomy, Magi also depicts them as products of her own imagination. The volume’s last page identifies them, along with “the book’s … places [… ] and events” as “fiction” in ways that recall Donnelly’s “fictive person.” Certainly they seem inconsistent and unreal. Though Sadie “descends into the subway in morning light” (33), shares a desk with J. (24), and witnesses a male “sophomore” jump or fall from the library balcony (49), she is also described as a wholly textual entity, “a blank form a potential grievance eating up her own outline and always arriving” (19). The speaker depicts herself “wait[ing] to take away [Sadie’s photocopied] poems” from the archive (29) but later, it is Sadie herself whom she “lift[s] … out of the box carefully reading” and then “revis[es]” (49). The other characters also exist primarily through their texts: J. is depicted mostly through excerpts from her work-in-progress, “My Seneca Village”; Miranda, the artist, seems to be the author of the handbook. These situations evoke prosopopeia quite straightforwardly: Labor, it seems, brings archival documents to life and grants them human names, bodies, and voices. Yet these characters’ status as “fiction[al],” along with Magi’s identification of Labor itself as “a fiction” (81), complicates this act of animation. Not only does J.’s manuscript fail to correspond to an actual book with this title, but the volume’s characters keep blurring into one another.25 Sadie is at one point described as “J.’s double” (45); Sadie is stopped from “leap[ing] into the [library] atrium” (52) but then depicted as having already fallen (70). Elsewhere, the narrator is more explicit, listing multiple “versions” of a single event (44) and then enumerating a “range of narrative problems” about the characters’ motivation and the sequence’s plot and continuity (45). Prosopopeia by definition grants absent or inanimate entities a body and voice (“Prosopopoeia”). Though Labor’s protagonists at times speak (or write), their bodily status is unstable in ways that exemplify (or perhaps

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embody) precarity itself, as Magi has suggested in a description of the adjunct’s conviction that “her seams are showing, … she is spilling, leaving a trail of blood and papers and empty water bottles behind” (“Notes”). Here the adjunct is deanimated (like something constructed or sewn, she has “seams”; she is associated with inanimate “papers” and “bottles”) but also alive (she contains “blood”). A description of Miranda in Labor uses similar language: overhearing a student make a condescending remark about janitors, she “grab[s] her rib cage on both sides[, … ] ripping spilling out red” (66). Recurrent scenes in which characters eat papers (17, 27), sew them into their skin (18), or merge with inanimate objects (14) further complicate the poem’s apparent animation of its characters in ways that remind readers that these precarious women aren’t actually autonomous or alive. Instead, they exist only on paper—within the pages of Labor—in ways that recall a related paradox in Bök’s animations. To animate texts is always a provisional act, one that ultimately affirms its own fictiveness. Magi’s characters, like Bök’s less realized and less sympathetic ones, embody but also confound ideas not only about precarious labor but about  materiality. Both Magi and Bök, read through the lens of Magi’s sequence, in this way  reveal the paradoxical poetic impulse to bestow life and also to acknowledge its impossibility, a paradox that also gestures toward the paradoxical nature of poetic making, which always, perhaps, traffics in the fictive, useless, and precarious. Perhaps Labor’s failure to have found as wide a readership as Eunoia is in this context anticipated by its themes and form; its performances, after all, are meant to be unwitnessed, ineffectual, and, as Magi admits, “impossible” (“Notes”). Yet the volume’s textual precarity—evident, for example, in its reliance on unidentified texts and its conversion of a partial, composite index into a poem—also makes the volume feel more autonomous than Bök’s carefully engineered series of containers. It’s also true that, as Labor’s characters are caught in the simultaneously constricting and vast dynamics of precarity, Labor itself is caught on paper, whose ephemerality Magi keeps documenting. In this way, Labor demonstrates that precarity offers, among other things, an aesthetic, and also that what Brown calls aesthetic autonomy can derive, albeit unexpectedly, from a capitalist mode that seems designed to destroy it. Entrapment, both volumes reveal in quite different ways, paradoxically enables a mode of escape, at least fictively, for a few moments at a time.

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Notes 1. Not only is interest in cloud seeding seeing a “small renaissance” due to intensifying drought in the western U.S. and elsewhere (Stone) but spending on so-called cloud computing is on track to exceed $1.3 trillion by 2025 with an annual growth rate of nearly seventeen percent (International Data). 2. Marx famously refers to the practice of creating an “industrial reserve army” of unemployed workers (Capital 785) in which, in David Harvey’s gloss, “unemployment” is “deliberate[ly] creat[ed] … to produce a labour surplus convenient for further accumulation” of capital by owners (Brief 163). 3. These poor conditions, according to Harvey, include low pay, a lack of benefits and job security, and the inability to organize to improve working conditions (Brief 76). 4. Taylorism, named for Frederick Winslow Taylor’s techniques of scientific management, aimed to derive increased profits from laborers through increased efficiency, while Fordism, named for Henry Ford, channeled Taylorist principles into systems of streamlined, automated production that paid laborers enough to buy the products they help produce, for example, cars. As Bernes notes, both involve “processes of ‘deskilling’ and ‘routinization’” (4). 5. As John Patrick Leary has suggested, the definition of essential worker used during the first months of the pandemic was “slippery,” due to lobbying by various interested parties; as he notes, those ultimately classified as essential workers were those who kept capital circulating. 6. U.S. multinational corporations’ offshored labor force—or, strictly speaking, workers involved with “foreign affiliates”—increased from thirty percent in 1982 to sixty in 2012 (Barbe and Riker). 7. Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter include “illegalized, seasonal and temporary employment[, … ] homework, flex- and temp-work[, and work performed by] subcontractors, freelancers or so-called self-employed persons” in the category of precarious work. 8. The OED defines precarious as “doubtful, dubious,” “uncertain; liable to fail; exposed to risk, [and] hazardous.” Judith Butler has associated precariousness with “what is human, what is precarious, what is injurable” (xviii); precariousness has been also defined as “a relational condition of social being that cannot be avoided” (Puar 165). 9. Neilson and Rossiter note that “the widespread practice of file-sharing within peer-to-peer networks is routinely cited … as an exemplary instance of resistance” to copyright, while Randy Martin proposes that one of the things “dance does best” is explore the kinds of “disequilibrium” essential to finance (“Precarious” 65).

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10. Bernes, paraphrasing an earlier study by Rosalind Krauss, defines indexicality as that which “takes extraction or selection as its technique” (22). Claire  La Berge calls indexicality a “financial form” and  also “a form of evaluation” (26). 11. Marjorie Perloff, for example, focuses on the tonal implications of each of the volume’s sections but doesn’t consider the logic of individual poems. 12. The autonomists, Sarah Brouillette claims, use a theoretical “vocabulary that fathoms creative expression as an essence of experimentation emanating from an internal and natural source, and that finds one of its models in idealized apprehension of artists’ ostensible resistance to routine, to management, to standardization, and to commodification” (“Creative” 142). 13. Bök notes in an interview that “Oulipo … left unexplicit [sic], if not unexplored, the political potential of constraint itself” and suggests that “using a constraint [has the potential to] expose some of the ideological foundations of discourse itself” in ways that might “[emancipate] us from [such foundations]” (“Xenotext”). 14. This poem, which I discuss below, depicts a mining operation run by Irish “firms” that engage in “hiring micks whilst firing Brits” (51), though it’s unclear whether the mining occurs in England, which colonized Ireland, or in a colonized Ireland. 15. Bök has called Eunoia as an example of “constraint writing,” a mode that he claims enabled the text to “[find] a way to be not only uncanny or sublime, but also ribald and sexual, writhing against the chains of its apparent handicap” (“Xenotext”). 16. Stephens cites Bök’s claim that another of his volumes “call[s] to mind index values or stock prices” (qtd. in Stephens 769). 17. The miners are depicted as “striking it rich mining zinc,” but the final beneficiary of those riches is unclear. 18. Liu associates the automaton with the era of factory work and claims that more recent white-collar workers exemplify a more “well-adjusted” version of the automaton (98); in information work, he claims, “work” is “not just automated” but “informated” (108). 19. Bök has expressed interest in what he calls “a potential robopoetics”] (“Piecemeal”) and has noted the possibility of “writ[ing] … for a machinic audience of artificially intellectual peers” (“Xenotext”). His interest in cyborgs is evident in his ongoing work on a large-scale project called “The Cyborg Opera,” which he claims “emulates the robotic pulses heard everywhere in our daily lives” (“Xenotext”); he has also experimented with poems generated by “genetic nucleotides” (Xenotext 150). 20. The poem several times positions written texts within the marketplace, albeit an archaic or rarified one, as when an undefined male character “pens fervent screeds, then … sells these letterpress newsletters, three cents per

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sheet” (31) and when  “dons” and “profs” scout “bookshops known to stock … top-notch goods,” assumedly rare volumes (59). Bök has noted that his books have sold “more than 20,000 copies at last count” (“Xenotext”); he also received a 2015 grant of nearly $100,000 for his project training bacteria to compose poems (Vaidyanathan). 21. This denial of his agency is also evident in Chapter A, whose speaker complains about “[a] law harsh as a fatwa [that] bans all paragraphs” lacking each chosen letter (12). 22. In a statement about a pair of chapbooks, one of them based on the same archival materials as Labor, Magi identifies one of her “purposes: … to say that precarity impacts poets, citizens and aesthetics, and not necessarily in a negative way” (“No” vi). The precarity of academic labor has been discussed by Jeffrey Nealon (66–84), Brouillette (“Academic”), Jasbir Puar, and many others. 23. Magi published a document entitled “Notes on  Labor: A Fiction and Installation” on her web page, which she identifies as “presented … in 2012” and which is distinct from the volume Labor’s final section of Notes; I indicate the difference by using quotation marks around the former but not the latter. 24. These words include system, along with markings that resemble the outlines of quilted squares or perhaps scars. Magi’s Acknowledgments indicate that the cover embroidery is part of a series entitled “LABOR: What is the Meaning of My No?” exhibited in 2011. 25. While a young adult book entitled My Seneca Village does exist, authored by Marilyn Nelson, a visiting professor at NYU (“Nelson”), it is not a work of archeology. Magi indicates in a note that she drew some of the language in J.’s narrative from a New York Historical Society booklet (81).

CHAPTER 3

“Miss Thing”: Prosopopeia, Aliveness, and the Female Consumer

Abstract  “‘Miss Thing’: Prosopopeia, Aliveness, and the Female Consumer,” focuses on scenes of problematic animation and prosopopeia, which are especially evident in situations in which women are confined to interior spaces. The chapter begins with a discussion of two brief 2011 poems by Rae Armantrout personifying money as a seductive woman, both of which emphasize the provisionality of money’s animation: in one, money talks in ways that affirm the titular expression, while in the other, money is a passive almost-object (“Miss Thing”) designed to satisfy male desires. I juxtapose two volumes depicting women shopping, Harryette Mullen’s 1999 S*PeRM**K*T  and Mary Ruefle’s 2016 My Private Property, to  emphasize disjunctions of scale: Mullen’s poems are highly compressed, while Ruefle’s are expansive, though they often focus on diminutive and trivial objects. Both volumes in this way evoke feminist claims that consumerism imprisons and objectifies women by pretending to set them free, but both also resist confinement using several strategies, including puns that subvert dominant power structures in Mullen’s volume and occasional acknowledgments in Ruefle’s of the plight of the workers who provide her poem’s speaker with the luxury items she enjoys. Both volumes also expose the origin of consumerist fantasies in racism and colonialism and both grant nonliving entities an often-provisional voice in ways that recall Marx’s claims about the fetishized or almost-alive commodity and the correspondingly deanimated human. But both volumes © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Keniston, Economies of Scale, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39341-9_3

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also imagine a hybrid mode that evokes what Mullen has called, in relation to race, partly human, partly mechanical cyborgs. Keywords  Consumerism and poetry • Commodity fetish and poetry • Cyborg and poetry • Rae Armantrout • Harryette Mullen • Mary Ruefle As I began to suggest at the end of the last chapter, prosopopeia is arguably among the most figurative—by which I mean the most artificial—of literary figures. Whereas synecdoche is concerned with the relation between actual concepts or objects, prosopopeia engages in something literally impossible: it brings an unalive object to (pretend) life. No matter how strenuously prosopopeia affirms the possibility of aliveness, it can’t ever fully vanquish the fact that the animated object is actually unalive and mute. Prosopopeia thus demands an extreme suspension of disbelief; like apostrophe, which Jonathan Culler has called embarrassing (71–4), prosopopeia is always a figure for voicing itself.1 To engage in prosopopeia, in which, according to Sianne Ngai’s paraphrase of Paul de Man, a “living human speaker … personifies or throws voice into [a] nonhuman object” (Our 92), implies a “violent connection between the animation of the thing and the death of the subject” (McClanahan, Dead 94). Speaking objects are also arguably both histrionic and childish. Animated dolls offer companionship to the children who bring them to life, but they can sometimes turn vengeful. Creepy, deranged, and sexualized dolls recur in popular culture, as do murderous AIs. That both living dolls and their owners tend to be female is also significant, especially in the context of the poets I discuss in this chapter: prosopopeia implies an asexual mode of pseudo-birth. The figure thus reveals anxiety about, or perhaps even a revulsion toward, maternity even as it expresses a more general anxiety about mortality and death. In Daniel Tiffany’s related terms, speaking objects (which he associates with what he calls riddle poems) are imbued with a paradoxical power: a speaking object “[sheds] its human qualities” even as, by speaking, it “become[s] human.” In poems, such objects foreground the capacity of “verbal gestures” both to “obscur[e] the thing [described]” and to “[transform] it into what it is not” (“Lyric” 79). Prosopopeia often

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performs a similar slippage between the speaking object and the poem itself, as I suggested above, by drawing attention to the figure’s status as figurative. Prosopopeia is, to adapt Tiffany, “a verbal striptease in the dark” (79), self-revealing and obscure but also disembodied, a purely “verbal” performance. A speaking object also can be understood as a kind of fetish, a thing imbued with living (and at times supernatural) attributes, which both requires and affirms the viewer’s faith in its impossible aliveness. A fetish makes demands on us: it impels us to suspend our disbelief. But it also affirms our capacity to bring it to life. We sometimes like to pretend that such objects are capable of possessing us, but in the end they are our creations, having come to life because we told them to. I have begun with these generalizations to help situate the recurrence of prosopopeia in recent poems about female consumerism and to begin to lay out the recurrent contradictions these poems explore, especially between agency and objectification and between desire and revulsion. Such contradictions, the poems I consider in this chapter reveal, are often evident in struggles between women and the often diminutive animated, speaking objects with which they interact in shops, other public spaces, and their own homes. But prosopopeia isn’t an arbitrary or convenient way these poets express the position of the consumer in the financialized marketplace; it enacts problems about voice and agency essential to financialization itself. In fact, prosopopeia broadly understood recurs in discussions of economics and financialization. Not only are money and the economy often understood to be symbolic as well as (or even more than) literally real in ways I outlined in the  Introduction, but the market—both the general concept and the specific markets in which U.S. trading occurs—is often understood as alive and embodied. Recent theorists have extended Adam Smith’s 1776 notion of the market’s (synecdochic and also personified) “invisible hand,” and personification seems especially pervasive in recent economic discourse: after a 2018 downturn, for example, the market was characterized variously as “vigilant,” in a bad “mood,” and “spooked” (Bineham), while at the start of the Covid pandemic, as noted above, discourse about the market’s—and economy’s—“health” recurred.2 Financialization’s reliance on automation also involves an implied act of animation: algorithmic autotrading, digital surveillance, and the like are

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often depicted as alternatives to fallible human decision-making. Financialization itself is also sometimes understood as possessing a kind of depersonalized capacity to impel humans to desire proffered products and services, from “gig” work to luxury commodities to unaffordable homes, though the 2008 financial crisis arguably exposed, at least briefly, the human actors behind and the human costs of seemingly depersonalized financial “instruments.” * * * Money’s capacity to take human, or almost human, form, is central to several poems in Rae Armantrout’s 2011 Money Shot. This volume is directly concerned with financialization and especially, as the book jacket indicates, with the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession. But financialization is decontextualized in the volume  it is reduced to catchphrases, including “Availability bias” (4)], “IndyMac” (5), and “heavy / trading” (47), which exist alongside similarly decontextualized references to features of contemporary experience. Several punningly titled poems, including “Soft Money” (37–38), “Money Talks” (73), and “Money Shot” (5) personify and feminize money in ways that recall Tiffany’s notion of the striptease. In “Soft Money” and “Money Talks,” money offers a series of titillating bodily performances that keep reminding apparently male viewers (perhaps unreliably) of their dominance over it; money’s powerlessness, as one poem asserts, is what makes it “hot” (37). But by shifting between the perspective of avid watchers and something more distanced and seemingly critical, these poems also provide a larger context for money’s simultaneous animation and objectification.  Armantrout’s poems consider financialization as well as colonialism and gender stereotypes, topics that also recur in Harryette Mullen’s 1992 S*PeRM**K*T and Mary Ruefle’s 2016 My Private Property, on which I focus in the remainder of this chapter. Images of bondage and desire are explicit in “Soft Money,” which considers an unspecified group (“they”) who perform for an also-unidentified “you.” The poem’s “they” literalize soft money—money whose source is difficult to trace (Levine)—by being variously  “sexy,” “needy,” and “degrade[d].” It’s unclear, though, whether these attributes exist only in the mind of the “you,” as is implied when “you” describe the performers’ apparent contentment as both “degrad[ing]” and “sweet.”

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Or perhaps this pliability is associated not with the personification of money but with its actual (if figuratively named) softness; “you” may, for example, refer literally to politicians who benefit from untraceable political contributions. Certainly, the  relation between the performers and the “you” is  depicted in contradictory terms: “they’re needy,” “they don’t need you,” and “they pretend / not to need you, // but they’re lying.” Nor are their motivations clear.  The “you” claim that the performing “they” don’t “need / to understand” what’s happening to them, a situation whose generalizability is implied by the fact that the phrase is lifted from a song.3 Yet in the second half of the poem, “they” are also granted a form of subjectivity, albeit filtered through the perceptions of the “you”: they are “content,” though they also “want” what they can’t have. The poem thus depicts a “they” caught between objecthood and personhood, “They” are partly literal (they exemplify actual soft money) and partly figurative (they are human performers). Unsurprisingly, their desires pertain to this ambiguous space: They want to be the thing-in-itself and the thing-for you— Miss Thing— but can’t.

That “the thing-in-itself” is itself associated with a preexisting philosophical concept furthers their subjugation: “they” aspire simultaneously to an unoriginal state and to an exalted register from which the poem immediately pulls back, first by articulating a more constrained wish to be “the thing-for-you” and then by asserting that they “can’t” fulfill either desire.4 The poem’s protagonists are, after all, personifications that by definition lack agency and desire. Their human attributes are bestowed on them not only by the “you” but the poet, who resembles an audience member. In this context, the poem’s reference to their location “across the border” is not only an allusion to the song from which Armantrout earlier cites but also an evocation of the precarious actual conditions of workers, especially, perhaps, exoticized foreign sex workers.5 (Armantrout has elsewhere called the song “objectionable” [qtd. in Ramazani, Poetry and 215].)

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The poem’s claim that “they” are content “to be / (not mean)” more directly undermines their “wants.” Here Armantrout repudiates epistemology for ontology in ways that seem at odds with her impulse to animate soft money in the first place. But the phrase’s echo of Archibald MacLeish’s 1926 “Ars Poetica,” which asserts that “a poem must not mean / But be,” complicates the concept of animation in another way. MacLeish is advocating the use of imagery rather than abstraction in poems; a poem, he adds, should evoke “all the history of grief” not directly but figuratively, via the evocation of “[a]n empty doorway and a maple leaf.” The “they” in “Soft Money” espouse something similar, but their situation complicates MacLeish’s generalization: Armantrout makes their desires evident only via the (self-interested) perspective of those who view them through their own (erotic) desires. Not only does the poem disallow anything remotely approaching MacLeish’s “grief,” its protagonists aren’t subjects or even images. Rather, they are living commodities, designed to fulfill the desires of their consumers. Yet, insofar as the poem itself seems aligned with the “you” it also suggests that repudiating meaning is dangerous, especially in relation to exploited workers. “Soft Money” thus offers a rejoinder to MacLeish’s archaic notions of what poetry should be  and thus something like “an anti-ars poetica ars poetica” (Ramazani, Poetry and 217). Money is arguably granted more agency, and fuller prosopopeia, in “Money Talks.” The poem begins by describing “[m]oney … talking / to itself again,” though we don’t know what it is saying. By the poem’s end, we hear its words, or at least read them “[o]n a billboard by the 880” freeway: money “admonishes, / ‘Shut up and play.’” Unlike in “Soft Money,” where “they” seem to be unable to escape, money here is only “pretending / that its hands are tied.” Its outfit suggests its capacity to manipulate, and even outwit, its viewers: both trendy (it is “this season’s / … / look”) and evidence of thrift (it was purchased on “closeout”), the outfit combines a “bondage … look” that evokes the sexy passivity of “Soft Money” with a “safari look” whose “camouflage” evokes adventure and exoticism. Yet “bondage” is also evident. Though money “[t]alks,” it uses words that have been apparently imposed by an advertising agency that has placed a (static) image of a sexy woman on a freeway “billboard”; in fact, this slogan has actually been used to advertise a casino. 6 (An earlier reference to “the refresh button” suggests that the image is also accessible online.) In ways that affirm the usual meaning of the phrase money talks, money here affirms its own importance in ways that undermine its autonomy. More explicitly than “Soft Money,” “Money Talks” thus ultimately

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undermines the fiction of prosopopeia, as is evident in Armantrout’s references to it using a lower-case m and the pronoun it. * * * I have begun with these poems because they manipulate literal and figurative aspects of prosopopeia in ways also evident in Mullen and Ruefle’s volumes. Armantrout’s poems make the relation between prosopopeia and financialization explicit by displacing financial concepts onto inanimate objects. By engaging in selective and partial acts of animation and deanimation, Mullen and Ruefle engage with related tensions between inanimate things and living beings and between being (aligned in their prose poems with a kind of drifting consumerist desire) and cultural and economic meaning. Both Mullen and Ruefle embrace but also implicitly challenge the subterfuges central to financialized, globalized capitalism, especially those evident in contemporary consumerism, which, in the last decades, has been associated variously with patriotism (as exemplified by President George W. Bush’s exhortation to Americans to “go to Disneyworld,” after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks), activism (including “‘brand aid’ and ‘shopping for change’ campaigns” [Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser 2]), and “pleasure and fantasy” (Bowlby 382), among other  topics.7 These trends more generally affirm an antisynecdochic mode—“that there is no ‘outside’ to the logics of contemporary capitalism” (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser 2)—and also a situation in which “the persistent, hysterical production of consumer appetite” has converted shopping into a mode of “self-validation and authentication” (Radia 2–3). Though financialization as a macroeconomic system is less explicit in Mullen and Ruefle’s poems than in Armantrout’s, both poets link specific purchased items to what Mullen calls, in a description of S*PeRM**K*T, “the global language of international capitalism” (qtd. in Robbins 106). Disjunctions of scale are central to both volumes: both emphasize what Ngai has called cuteness, “an adoration of the commodity” predicated on a wish to be “intimate with or physically close to” it, which both “resist[s]” and offers “a symptomatic reflection of” the large-scale “logic of commodification” (Our 12–13). Ngai associates cute commodities with “ anthropomorphized being[s]… appealing … to us for protection and care” (60), a process that, by offering the illusion that the consumer, rather than the marketplace, is in control, conceals consumers’ entrapment in larger economic structures.8

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Mullen and Ruefle depict commodities as repositories for the often-­ inchoate wishes and fears in which financialization traffics, and both draw attention to the ways corporations and advertisers objectify and even dehumanize female shoppers, a process in which shoppers are partly complicit. In the process, both evoke classic Marxian commodity fetishism, in which objects’ “sensuously varied objectivity as articles of utility” is split from the “value” derived from their exchange (Marx, Capital 166). This split, in Hylton White’s gloss, paradoxically allows commodities to become synecdochic “element[s] of capital” (677). Commodities for Mullen and Ruefle are simultaneously objects and sentient beings, “products of the human brain,” according Marx’s description of commodities, that appear to be “autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own” (165), having been “born” with certain attributes: “a born leveller and cynic” (179), the commodity is capable, according to Marx’s well-known description of a table for sale, of “stand[ing]… on its head” and coming up with “ideas” from its “brain,” albeit a “wooden” one (164). Mullen and Ruefle also update and critique Marx’s ideas by emphasizing consumerism’s link to colonialist practices that emphasize the exploitation, objectification, violence, and theft that recall de Man’s definition of prosopopeia. Ruefle in particular challenges the ways that Marxian commodity fetishism involves what Max Gulias calls the “empt[ying]” of the commodity’s “labor history” (146), especially the human labor involved in  commodity production: several of her poems directly consider the workers who provide her speaker with the commodities she craves.9 Both volumes also obliquely challenge what one reader has identified as Marx’s misunderstanding of the meaning of the fetish (Pietz 130) and his reliance on generalizations about the supposedly primitive groups that venerate it.10 Both volumes also emphasize gender in ways that evoke recent claims that female shoppers are “degrad[ed] and dehumaniz[ed]” by the marketplace (Willis 997). Insofar as consumerism has been synecdochally understood to be “part of what one is, part of the complex framework that constitutes identity” (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser 19), female shoppers have been depicted as unalive or, in Rachel Bowlby’s terms, “hybrid being[s]” combining a feminine half who is an “unhappy, or perhaps stupidly happy, victim of advertising’s forces” with a “sober [and] rational” masculine half (382). Though Mullen’s volume was published before the escalation of  recent financialized investment practices, both volumes evoke, using a personal scale, the “irrational exuberance” associated with

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U.S. markets in the 1990s and beyond.11 Both also engage with what Pavlina Radia calls the financialized conflation of “identity” with “spectacle” in “a world of commodity [and] corporate logic” (6), as well the breaking of female identity into distinct “brands.”12 * * * Mullen has associated S*PeRM**K*T with both the “language of international capitalism” and “the language of the declining Anglo-American empire” (qtd. in Robbins 106), as well as with “the language of advertising and marketing” and “language from a public sphere” that combines “mass media” with “folklore” (Preface x). S*PeRM**K*T uses the language of advertising to critique consumerism while emphasizing animation and deanimation in ways that evoke what Mullen calls Gertrude Stein’s capacity to “illuminate, animate, and eroticize the domestic space to which women have been confined” (Preface x). But S*PeRM**K*T goes further: it considers what critic Amy Robbins calls “the ways packaged goods convey … meanings … involved in our selffashioning as social subjects” (114) and transform consumers into “saleable products” (115). By foregrounding the dehumanizing gendered and racialized rhetoric of consumerism as well as its cooption of previously nonfinancialized modes of human reproduction, the volume evokes financialized dynamics linked to both “international capitalism” and “declining … empire.” I am basing these generalizations partly on Mullen’s 1991 essay “Miscegenated Texts and Media Cyborgs: Technologies of Body and Soul,” written while she was composing S*PeRM**K*T. Extending Donna Haraway’s notion of a hybrid, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal cyborg that defies neat boundaries between human and machine, Mullen’s essay defines a quasi-personified “media cyborg” (340) evident in contemporary culture as the product of an asexual “graft[ing of] black soul as a supplement to a white body” (339), a process that also involves what Mullen calls “the in vitro fertilization of radio and phonograph” (338). This mode of reproduction yields not a living child but “a more lucrative commodity than black bodies [alone] ever were” (343) by evoking yet “tam[ing]” the history of miscegenation, a term that simultaneously evokes the systemic rape of African American women during plantation slavery, later white anxieties about African American men’s purported

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sexual relations with white women, and late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-­century prohibitions of interracial intermarriage. This hybrid cyborg imbues the African American “Other” “with what is repressed and devalued in [white males]” (337) by transforming that Other into something “bankable” (340). While Mullen’s cyborg isn’t identical to the Marxian fetish, the cyborg, as a human-machine hybrid, is simultaneously alive and unalive; it is the bodily manifestation (something like Armantrout’s being) of an idea (or meaning). It is also, like a fetishized commodity, difficult to classify: it enacts (and embodies) a mode of mystification that increases profitability. But while Marx’s emphasis is on how the marketplace transforms an object into something seemingly animate, Mullen considers the media’s quasi-­ aliveness in ways that echo several recent discussions of the relation between financialization and contemporary consumerism.13 Though S*PeRM**K*T doesn’t address these issues directly, it is concerned, as Mullen has claimed, with “the collision of contemporary poetry with the language of advertising and marketing, and the clash of fine art aesthetics with mass consumption and globalization” (Preface x). Mullen emphasizes these collisions and clashes by relying heavily on puns, many deriving from advertising jingles popular during the 1970s, that conflate quasi-­ animated things with the often deanimated humans who buy and use them.14 But the volume also emphasizes actual women’s bodies. That reproduction is itself a pun—alluding both to the process by which children are conceived and to the strategies employed by contemporary manufacturers and media—is implied by the poem beginning “Iron maidens make docile martyrs” (72). (All the volume’s poems are in prose and untitled.) Here is the poem: Iron maidens make docile martyrs. Their bodies on the racks stretched taut. Honing hunger to perfect, aglow in nimbus flash. A few lean slicks, to cover a multitude, fix a feast for the eyes. They starve for all the things we crave.

In ways that evoke terms from Mullen’s essay, as well as Armantrout’s “Soft Money,” women here engage in acts of bodily degradation for the gratification of a collective “we.” The “maidens” are indistinguishable from their images: they exist only via the camera’s “nimbus flash” and in “slicks” or commercial women’s magazines. Their “docil[ity]” in this context seems partly a product of their immobility, which may inhere in them: an iron maiden, after all, is a metal torture device (Pappas). But while their

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“bodies” are “iron,”  the maidens are also “aglow” and “starv[ing]” in ways that imply aliveness. While Mullen’s essay emphasizes the ways the media helps create “cybernetic” women (348), here viewers’ “crav[ing]” for this kind of image implies that they may also have also engendered her.15 The poem’s puns further the blurring of (commodified) object with living being. “Iron maidens” in the poem are devices but also women; the “racks” on which their bodies are “stretched taut” imply both torture and display. The phrase “[a] few lean slicks” similarly elides magazines with the “lean” women themselves, who seem to be engaged in an active process of perfecting themselves even though they are already “perfect.” The “feast for the eyes” associated with the slicks is both a visual spectacle and, it seems, an actual meal, as the next sentence’s reference to them “starv[ing]” implies; the fact that they “fix” this feast aligns domestic activity with stasis. These and other puns and slippages complicate the maidens’ status as “docile martyrs” whose suffering (and “starv[ation]”) enable us mindlessly to “crave” the “things” they already represent. Rather, their starvation suggests that our own cravings have been imposed on us by whoever made those maidens docile. In “Iron maidens,” puns mediate between aliveness and unaliveness, but in other poems, they more directly convey women’s complex relation to objectification. In “In specks find nothing amiss” (80), one of several poems focusing on women’s interactions with cleaning products, this first sentence fragment, like most in the poem, lacks a personal pronoun. The evidence of an actual woman dusting is instead evident in scenes of reflection (as in the fragment “Spots herself in its service, buffed and rebuffed”). Puns, many deriving from 1970s’ television commercials for the dusting spray Pledge, evoke but undermine the possibility of escape (“Pledge Ad”). For example, the fragment “Pledges a new leaf shining her future polishing skills” undermines the familiar association of a new leaf with beginnings by recalling an earlier reference to a “shin[ed] … drop leaf maple tabletop.” A later reference to “a woman at a fork” similarly subordinates the idea of a (figurative) fork in the road to the actual utensil. The poem’s final sentence, “She beams at a waxing moon,” the only one that uses the personal pronoun she and the second full sentence in the poem, evokes the “waxy build-up” that Pledge claims to prevent (“Pledge®”) but also the false cheer (“beam[ing]” smiles) of housewives dusting in ads and the housewife’s inability to do more than imitate inanimate objects (insofar as the “moon” already has “beams”). While Mitchum Huehls has argued that puns in Mullen’s subsequent

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volume offer “a model for imagining a social climate of both/and-ness in which all difference can flourish” (20), Mullen here only partly animates her female protagonist. Though the possibility of escape is repeatedly hinted at, a reference to a “gleam of a sigh at a spotless rinsed dish” signals distress and entrapment. Other poems more directly consider the relation between cleanliness and race. A poem about roach motels refers to genocidal impulses (including the impulses to “[w]ipe out a species,” “dream the dream of exirpation,” and “[s]terilize the filthy vermin” [74]); another emphasizes the whiteness of women’s sanitary products and meat packaging designed to “blot blood” (71). The relevance of such claims to race and reproduction is especially evident in a poem that adopts an image from Mullen’s essay. The essay exemplifies its claim about “the commercial potential of black soul to sell everything” with the “California raisins (‘I heard it through the grapevine’)” (342), a series of ads featuring animated purple raisins performing the Motown hit (Whitfield and Strong). The poem, beginning “Bad germs get zapped” (85), refers early on to “Ivory”—the cleaner but also perhaps the colonial product—in AfricanAmerican diction that emphasizes the power of “white” products “to do the dirty work.” It turns to a description of personified laundry “shuffling into sorted colored stacks.” It then sets forth a negative genealogy, beginning with the logo for Fruit of the Loom: “That black grape of underwear fame denies paternity of claymate raisinettes.” The “black grape” is able to speak (to “den[y]”) but doesn’t obediently dance, as do similarly animated “swinging burgers”; “giggl[e],” as does the white Pillsbury doughboy; or adhere to racist stereotypes, as does a “Latina banana” whose “gringo derby” is also meant to appeal to U.S. consumers. But the grape’s refusal of the nonbiological “paternity” imposed, as Mullen’s essay indicates, by advertisers eager to use black soul to sell products to white people perversely affirms the “[m]iscegenat[ion]” Mullen’s essay ascribes to the media: the personified underwear grape’s disavowal of stereotyped and racist notions about African American kinship recalls white slaveowners’ self-serving denial of patrilineage. Nor, in the end, can this racialized commodity be objectified, much less, to recall Ngai’s terms, made cute. These poems hint at reproduction but don’t consider it explicitly. But other poems address the topic directly. An early one-sentence poem promises that “[d]esperately pregnant nubile … stock girls deliver … psychic space alien test tube babes, in ten or less, … we guarantee” (70). Here,

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“pregnan[cy]” seems conflated with artificially inseminated “test tube” babies. Yet it’s not babies but “babes” that are promised, suggesting that desirable, sexy young women are the item apparently being advertised for. These women seem to have been created from desirable genetic “stock” or else from standardized “stock” girls, perhaps the product of cloning. Or perhaps the poem should be read as an ad seeking gestational surrogates, who are  often nonwhite, impoverished women from so-called developing countries paid for carrying other women’s embryos. The poem, like “Iron maidens,” introduces a “we” toward the end, who “guarantee” the prompt (and also punning) “deliver[y]” of the babes, suggesting the surveillance and control of an already-ambiguous situation of aliveness and genesis. The volume’s title derives from the poem that most directly addresses reproduction, as well as the wresting of reproductive control from women. Asterisks in S*PeRM**K*T suggest a series of words, some of which are included in the poem beginning “Refreshing spearmint gums up the works” (94), including “spearmint,” “permit,” and “spermkit.” (Supermarket isn’t mentioned, though Mullen has elsewhere acknowledged that this is the primary meaning of the volume’s title [“Conversation”].) The “[b]igger better spermkit” in the poem is seemingly a product for sale, but its role is ambiguous: it “grins down family of four,” seeming both to condescend to and engender the normative family while making actual fathers obsolete, as the near-homophone gunned down may imply. What remains is the logic of the marketplace, specifically betting, signaled by the speaker’s insistence that a late-arriving “you” “[s]cratch and sniff your lucky [lottery] number,” a process that may reveal “you” to be “already” not a winner but a “wiener,” perhaps an allusion  to the now-unneeded male reproductive organ. As the spermkit makes old-fashioned noncommodified sexual human reproduction obsolete, it also “gums up the works” of patriarchy by empowering women, albeit using the commercialized logic of the supermarket. I have been exploring the ways Mullen’s puns, by shifting between meanings but refusing to commit to a single one, proffer the possibility of escape while affirming entrapment. But a different argument can also be made: Mullen’s puns revive the language of old ads by placing them into the contemporary financialized moment. While Marx identified the fundamental tension of commodities as one between apparent sentience and inorganic origin, S*PeRM**K*T exposes the racial and gendered subjugation that underlies commodification: its poems, Mullen has claimed,

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were “written … from my perspective as a black woman” (Preface xi).16 By revealing that commodities originate not only in “language” but in pervasive, if hardly noticeable, power dynamics, Mullen undermines the idea of the naturalness of commodities and also the idea that commodities are born rather than made. Yet the volume also exemplifies the aliveness of poetry, which Mullen claims “remakes and renews words, images, and ideas” (Preface vii) in ways that give them (always figurative) life. * * * Though Mullen’s poems don’t depict the actual buying of goods, purchases recur in Ruefle’s My Private Property, whose concern, as the volume’s title makes clear, is with how commodities become private property. Mullen uses compression and wordplay to offer a partial critique of consumerism, but Ruefle’s poems are often wordy and redundant. And while Mullen’s speakers are often occluded, ambiguous, or fused with the commodities they use, Ruefle’s poems are mostly narrated by a white, middle-­ class woman—or perhaps different women—able to buy what she likes but prone to overspending, who tends to focus on her feelings about what she buys, especially the “ugly feelings” that Ngai has called “the psychic fuel on which capitalist society runs” (Ugly 3). Such feelings, Ngai claims, are often associated with women (33). Though commodities mostly don’t come prosopopeiacally to life in these poems, as they do in Mullen’s, Ruefle’s speakers seem unalive without them. Dwelling on her feelings seems to help the speaker avoid considering more systemic economic dynamics. A series of poems describes modes of sadness keyed to different colors using universal terms: “[b]lue sadness,” for example, “is sweetness cut into strips with scissors and then into little pieces by a knife”; it is “that which you wish to forget, but cannot” (10). But the volume’s single final Note undercuts this taxonomic impulse by alerting the reader that if the word sadness is replaced with happiness in these poems, “nothing changes” (105). In other poems, feelings are unstable and shifting. A reproduction of a handwritten document entitled “April’s cryalog” (15) lists, as the next poem, “Pause” (17–24), explains, “the number of times I cried” daily. “Pause” first indicates that the cryalog was composed when “I wanted to die. Literally, to kill myself.” But then it notes that “[t]he saddest thing is, I now find the cryalog very funny, and laugh when I look at it” (17). Elsewhere, elation, or at least the happiness associated with possessions, coexists with

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more ugly feelings: “The Gift” (95–99), for example, depicts the speaker’s “[love]” for her books, which “had always made me feel happy in a teeming and chaotic way” but also describes an extravagant purchase that reveals her to be “vapid and shallow and guilty” and reminds her of her “stupidity.” That these contradictions have to do with money’s simultaneously symbolic and literal qualities is suggested in “The Woman Who Couldn’t Describe a Thing if She Could” (11–14), though the focus here isn’t on a physical commodity. The speaker, who like those in several other poems seems to be attempting to explain ordinary objects and transactions to someone completely ignorant of them, claims to be unsure why “good” and “bad” restaurant food costs the same and whether the payment at restaurants is for “the cooking” or “the eating.”17 She also seems confused about why money, which exists to be “give[n] … away,” is generally kept “out of sight” while jewelry that is “a sign of money” is flaunted. The delineation of such mysteries helps explain an  ambivalence in other poems about money and its synecdochic capacity to stand for larger concepts. In general, the volume’s speakers depict their imbrication in a system whose machinations they don’t fully understand but from which they can’t (or won’t) extricate themselves. Yet insofar as these speakers are understood, as I think they must be, as unreliable or deliberately self-­deluding, they reveal an indirect systemic critique that resembles Mullen’s. “The Gift,” which focuses on a solipsistic scene of gift-giving, crystallizes these ideas. Here, the speaker, who seems beset by writer’s block (“the thought of” writing “my thoughts in a journal … filled me with terror and boredom”), buys herself an extravagant “large gift box of glacé apricots from Australia” from a catalog called “South Sea Gifts,” including “a gift card that said from Mary to Mary.” The speaker’s inability to do the “work” of writing seems linked to her “worr[y]” about the workers she has interacted with, specifically “the people who answered the phone.” She wonders, “did they have enough to eat? Did they ever steal a glacé apricot or two?” Though the speaker’s concern doesn’t extend to those who grew, harvested, or packaged the apricots and though she doesn’t cancel her order, this moment challenges Marx’s claim that commodities excise the labor required for their creation. In this case, the speaker’s consumerist fantasies have to do with colonialism, as is especially evident when the speaker considers “a circle of

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white cotton mosquito netting” also for sale in the gift catalog. She doesn’t buy this netting, which she admits she has no use for, but admits that she “just like[s] the way it looks.” The appeal has various sources: the speaker remembers reading about a Buddhist woman who draped her books with netting to give an “effect of owning nothing, wanting nothing” and also fantasizes, just after considering the phone operators’ daily routine and dreary workplace, “drap[ing]” them with netting in a way that “muffle[s] their voices.” Then the speaker becomes aware of the sound of “water in [her] living room,” the first sign that her home is being transformed into a “village of sticks on the banks of a rising river,” replete with “trade winds,” “rains,” “scavenging” “piglets,” and, she imagines, mosquitos, rendering the netting useful. Here, then, the availability of an item designed to foster colonialist fantasies does just that. The transformation of the speaker’s home into a  simultaneously exotic and primitive village seems to demonstrate her cooption by the fantasies promoted by the catalog. But the poem also literalizes what the catalog seems to depict as figurative: the flood is depicted as real in the poem, leading the speaker to worry that she will have to hire someone to clean up from it, a thought that makes her ”ashamed.” In this way, the poet (if not the speaker) mocks the inclusion of the netting in the catalog. But the speaker’s elaboration of this scene also seems to relieve her guilt at her purchase of the apricots as well as at her failure to do her daily writing. Or perhaps more ugly (and unelaborated) feelings underlie all of this: the speaker hasn’t, she reveals, left “the apartment in five days.” The purchase, along with her  fantasies  about it, give her something to write about, perhaps engendering the poem itself. Yet insofar as the poem (figuratively) profits from colonialism, its speaker’s professed shame may also echo Gillian White’s general claim that in “expressive” (4) or seemingly autobiographical lyric, shame “floats free, everywhere and yet located nowhere” (16). Colonialism and the fantasies it enables are even more central to the volume’s long title poem (51–64), which directly considers both  the extent to which objects can be animated and the subjective nature of “private property.” The poem focuses on a miniature shrunken head with which, the poem explains, the teenaged speaker “fell in love” during repeated visits to the Congo Museum outside Brussels. Shrunken heads were used in various ways, as the poem elaborates; including as fetishlike “living troph[ies] … [which] contain[ed] the spirit of the vanquished.” Even when used as “plaything[s],” such heads simultaneously evoked

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things and living beings: they were, the speaker claims, “dolls, but with a difference—they [were] real dolls.” In the same way, the speaker affirms her capacity to “[give] life to” to the head, which she also calls “an inanimate object.” But then she asks, “can a human head ever really be said to be an inanimate object?” given that the person to whom the head belonged “had been, and was, a person,” “particular and unique and human and utterly real.” These contradictions seem to explain why she keeps describing her relation to the head as reciprocal: “we communed,” “he possessed me as I possessed him,” and “[w]e stood facing each other.” As in “The Gift,” the emotions these memories give rise to in the speaker are contradictory. She recalls feeling “deliriously happy to be free” to wander through the museum but also acknowledges “retrospective shame … for my sheer and utter ignorance.” Then she elaborates what she was then ignorant of: the museum I wandered in was built on rape and plunder and pillage and oppression and murder, [and] everything in it was stolen, [and] the very wealth necessary for such acquisition was stolen, wealth acquired by force of so filthy and unspeakable an evil our heads cannot fathom it … but must resort to endless corridors of words.

In fact, these words  resemble those in this digressive, fourteen-page, single-­paragraph poem. In this context, the head emblematizes colonialism and “slavery,” as well the profits derived from them: shrunken heads “became … commodit[ies]” once “the white man” entered indigenous territory, especially “the King of Belgium,” who “declared a vast territory [that didn’t belong to him] as his private property, and all the heads within it.” Ruefle also links the heads with “rubber and ivory,” the mention of which “quickly take[s] us down a corridor leading to more” commodities “and their equivalent—money.” This exposé of the workings of colonialist rapacity and greed, even more than her suspicions about the phone operator’s possible poverty in “The Gift,” sits uneasily alongside the speaker’s wish to possess the head. Just as the king falsely declares the Congo “his private property,” the speaker declares the head “my man.” Though she can’t physically possess the head because it remains in the museum, her description of it inspires a “daydream” in which she possesses “twelve shrunken heads, each one belonging to someone who has passed through my life,” which she stores in an egg carton for “portab[ility].” She imagines these “baby heads” as

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“my private property” but also acknowledges that this idea makes her “ashamed” because, it seems, “the desire to own as many heads as possible” is a sign of “monst[rous]” “greed.” Yet, as in “The Gift,” the speaker can’t fully extricate herself from the logic of colonialism because of the pleasures associated with possessing, or imagining possessing, commodities, especially those she can pretend to bring to life. As in S*PeRM**K*T, commodity possession in “My Private Property” offers an alternative to ordinary modes of reproduction. This alternative is evident when the speaker compares her shrunken heads to “babies” capable of “returning to live again.” Just as a child’s doll facilitates (and is designed to facilitate) a fantasy of motherhood, the speaker here converts her romantic love for the museum head into a maternal one that avoids the bodily messiness of procreation. Instead, the babies whose heads she collects  seem engendered by death: just before elaborating her “daydream,” the speaker explains that, during her final weeks of life, her mother’s head “swelled to inhuman proportions.” The wish for baby heads thus seems to echo the speaker’s wish to transform her mother into “the person” her head “belong[ed] to.” But she also expresses a wish to transform her lost  loved ones’ former (and figurative) capacity to “[touch] me in deep and unforgettable ways” into a form—arguably that of prosopopeia itself—that lets her literally “touch their faces.” But Ruefle aligns death with prosopopeia in another, more literal way: as in other poems in the volume in which the speaker briefly and at times flippantly confesses her unhappiness, “My Private Property” ends with a revelation about the speaker. After describing her former self as “ignorant, innocent, at my most beautiful,” she admits that “[i]t occurs to me I wanted to die” those days she skipped school to visit the museum, which explains why “I wandered off alone and found a friend among the dead.” Using the same phrase as in “Pause” (“I wanted to die”), she here resists converting this wish into an impulse to laugh. Instead, she lets it inform her fantasy of retaining the heads of those she loves. Turning to them for “comfort” links her wish to inanimate objects with death. I began this chapter by suggesting a similar link between the figure of prosopopeia, death, and the threat of violence. In ways that may evoke the Freudian rather than the Marxian fetish, Ruefle acknowledges, in reference to her imaginary personal collection of shrunken heads, her wish that “when I die, as I must … someone [will] preserve me as I was.” But she doesn’t end the poem there. Instead, she indulges in a quasi-archaic apostrophe that evokes de Man’s definition of prosopopeia as “the fiction of an

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apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity” (926): “O my pantheon of shrunken heads[,] … comfort me, … for I can almost hear you breathing.”18 The wish, of course, is just that: the speaker can’t actually acquire a “pantheon of shrunken heads,” and even if she could, they wouldn’t be “breathing.” This sentence, the last in the poem, mixes the grotesque and the poignant in ways that affirm the power of prosopopeiac wishes, but also the ambivalence inherent in the fetish. Both the literal fetish emblematized by the shrunken head and the more general capacity of commodities to make us want and then love them can’t be disentangled from shameful (and in this case colonialist) practices. The imagined flood in “The Gift” engenders, among other things, a flood of words that affirm the value of the speaker’s hitherto uncompleted “work.” Early in “My Private Property,” she expresses a related wish to “transcrib[e] the book of my head.” But the poem (and the book it provides the title for) doesn’t just fulfill that wish. It also engages with the animations central to the fetish. It’s appealing to imagine that books, like the poems they contain, bring their authors’ thoughts to life. But they also chronicle that fantasy’s impossibility. The poems of My Private Property, after all, don’t read like poems; they lack “economy” and beautiful language. Instead, they offer messy chronicles of the impossibility of animating both people and things. As do Armantrout and Mullen’s, Ruefle’s speakers tend to be unself-aware because they have been objectified by a larger  culture they don’t think much about. But these protagonists are also performers, or perhaps even  dolls, whom the poet has temporarily animated to demonstrate the complex, fraught, always ironic relation between women and what they feel compelled to possess, at least until they lapse back into silence. But it also seems, no matter what MacLeish and even Armantrout maintain, that things can’t help becoming symbols. Whether commodities provoke elation, thoughts of suicide, shame, or something else, those who seek to possess them keep wanting, it seems, to bring them to life. Armantrout’s Miss Thing, reading these poems together thus suggests, is simultaneously the shopper, the one opening up packages at home, the purchased object, and money itself, which can be soft or hard, visible or concealed. To pretend not to worry about all this, much less to feel compelled to sort it all out, is easier than getting angry at what probably can’t be changed, especially because, as current financialized wellness discourse insists, consumers are happier when they turn away from toxic thoughts and feelings. Besides, so many marvels still await, each thing promising to

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open out into something if not enormous then charming and unexpected, which is what poems also affirm, their cuteness illusory, their unwieldy meanings scaled down via images, which began as actual things.

Notes 1. In 1997, Culler reiterated his earlier argument that apostrophe is the poetic figure that “is most embarrassingly ‘poetical,’ most mystificatory and vulnerable to dismissal as hyperbolic nonsense” (77). 2. David Harvey identifies both a corporate “visible hand” and the state’s “heavy” one (Seventeen 141–42). 3. Jahan Ramazani identifies the lyrics as “dovetailed” from Duran Duran’s “Rio”: “Her name is Rio, she don’t need to understand / And I might find her if I’m looking like I can” (Poetry and 215–16). 4. The thing-in-itself is described in writings by Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. 5. The song’s chorus includes the line “Rio, Rio dance across the Rio Grande” (Duran). 6. The advertising agency David&Goliath used the phrase in several ads for the New York-New York Hotel & Casino, one of which depicts a man on his hands and knees surrounded by dancing women (“Bachelor”). 7. Rachel Bowlby contrasts the association of shopping with pleasure with its earlier association with “alienation” (382). 8. Ngai’s discussion of cuteness considers several poems by Mullen (Our 67–8) and Armantrout (72–3) that I don’t examine here. 9. Marx claims that commodification, turns the capitalist into “a personification of capital” rather than a real person (Capital 739). 10. According to William  Pietz,  historic fetishism did not  involving animating inanimate objects but focused on already “animate beings, such as snakes” (139). 11. Then-Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan famously used this term to describe the market in 1990, on the eve of the dot-com crash, which his comments arguably encouraged (Shiller 2). 12. Radia considers the rise of contemporary celebrity culture. It is also worth noting the continued objectification of women in contemporary culture and the post-#metoo backlash against women who spoke out about sexual abuse, including Christine Blasey Ford and Amber Heard (Gill). 13. Radia, for example, calls “postmillennial culture … the culture of the image, fed by the capitalist imperative to consume,” a tendency she calls “frequently mediated and enhanced by mass media” (2), and associates the transformation of “identity” into “spectacle” with “make-believe cyborgs” (6).

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14. Mullen has referred to “the power of” “twenty-year-old jingles … embedded in my brain” and their resemblance to the “mnemonic efficiency of poetry, of the quick line that is economical and concise and compressed” (“Interview”). 15. Mullen’s essay, however, is explicitly concerned with race, as is evident in a reference to a “cybernetic mulatta” (342). 16. Mullen has also acknowledged that S*PeRM**K*T’s audience was primarily white and her wish, in her subsequent volume, to write for a more diverse readership (“Conversation”). 17. “Observations on the Ground” (7–10) similarly offers a basic lexicon for an audience ignorant of common usage, explaining, for example, that “[t]he planet seen from extremely close up is called the ground” and that “garbage [is] also called trash.” 18. De Man continues that apostrophe must “[posit] the possibility of the [addressee’s] reply and [confer] upon it the power of speech” (926), which Ruefle here fails to do.

CHAPTER 4

“[A]n arrangement of figures on an open field”: Death, Displacement, and Unrepayable Debts

Abstract  “‘An arrangement of figures on an open field’: Death, Displacement, and Unrepayable Debts” turns from the classic Marxian economic principles explored in the first two chapters to debt, especially the bundled debt central to financialization. The chapter begins by considering Susan Wheeler’s “The Debtor in the Convex Mirror,” which links debt to acts of mirroring, distortion, and substitution, as well as to precursor texts. As Wheeler links financial and other forms of debt to questions about representation, she foregrounds questions about textual indebtedness that also recur in Anne Carson’s 2010 Nox and Claudia Rankine’s 2004 Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, on which the remainder of the chapter focuses. While financial debt isn’t explicit in these volumes, death (associated by Annie McLanahan and others with the logic of debt) is associated with a kind of excess compensation that undermines the possibility of literal repayment. Rather than bring the dead back to life, or even restore them to wholeness, both volumes depict scenes of displacement, translation, and transposition that emphasize the poem’s (figurative) aliveness while paradoxically embracing indebtedness. Keywords  Debt and poetry • Debt and death • Securitized debt • Gifts and poetry • Susan Wheeler • Anne Carson • Claudia Rankine

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Keniston, Economies of Scale, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39341-9_4

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I ended the last chapter with Mary Ruefle’s image of an egg carton full of her loved ones’ miniature severed heads. This image lets her speaker pull back from her recently confessed wish to die; the heads offer a kind of indirect compensation, a way of deflecting despair and loss. The scene is poignant partly because the speaker can “almost” but not quite “hear [the heads] breathing”; she claims these figures as her private property though they don’t actually exist. “My Private Property” ends as a not-quite-elegy that first acknowledges sadness but then deflects it, rendering the scene, if not “very funny” (17), then queasily ridiculous. This dynamic is also evident in Rae Armantrout and Harryette Mullen’s poems, which similarly evoke paralysis, entrapment, and death even as they attempt to bring inanimate things to (pretend) life. I begin here because the book-length prose sequences I discuss in this chapter, Anne Carson’s 2010 Nox and Claudia Rankine’s 2004 Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, explore a related and seemingly archetypally elegiac situation: both depict a survivor’s response to one or several deaths. But while arguably sadder than the volumes I discussed in Chap. 3, these sequences defy many elegiac conventions. Even as they exemplify the melancholic stuckness sometimes associated with contemporary elegy (Ramazani, Poetry of 4), they resist the prosopopeiac (and elegiac) possibility that the dead persist in ghostly or imaginary form. Instead, they repeatedly engage in manipulations of scale–both fracturing and expanding their texts and what they describe–in ways that insist on the separation of the living poet from the dead while  confirming a fundamental paradox: death is an absence evident as excess. Such notions evoke Ulrich Beck’s claim that debt is “a lack where there is always too much” (qtd. in Lazzarato 154), as well as Annie McClanahan’s association between debt and death.1 In ways different from my previous chapters, though, debt is mostly evident figuratively  in Carson and Rankine’s volumes rather than economically. In fact, debt in general is often understood in figurative terms. It is deeply imbricated, as several have observed, with traditional (and Judeo-Christian) concepts of obligation and ethics (Atwood) as well as with an enduring sense of “power, morality, and shame” (Taylor).2 Terms associated with debt—including credit, responsibility, value, obligation, and forgiveness, among others— tend to be central, as has also been frequently noted, to discussions of ethics and aesthetics.3 From the outset, then, Carson and Rankine’s references to debt intensify questions about the poetic function of figuration, to which I referred in previous chapters. Their volumes, this chapter argues,

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explore debt’s malleability, including its status as what has been called “a form empty of content” (Joseph 20), in ways linked to often amorphous concepts of obligation and power. In the process, both depict debt as simultaneously quantifiable and undefined, a kind of floating signifier capable of bonding to seemingly irreconcilable entities. * * * Susan Wheeler’s sixteen-page “The Debtor in the Convex Mirror,” published in book form in 2005, blurs economic with figurative debts in ways relevant to Nox and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Near the end of the poem, the speaker asks, then answers, a seemingly abstract question about debt: “What is this but an arrangement of figures on an open field? / But they overlap—and this is the heart … // the heart of the bind of the debtor: a debt becoming due.” This passage emphasizes the “arrangement” and also the “overlap” of discrete “figures” that together seem to embody the quintessence of debt, or at least “the bind of the debtor.” This bind is economic—the word implies a perhaps vexing contractual obligation— but “bind” also seems to link or bind debtor to lender. The term also joins the individual body (signaled by the repeated reference to the heart) to something else (“this”). Insofar as this passage (via the deictic “this”) also alludes to the poem itself, the literal dynamics of debt become even more figurative, a possible way of representing the relation of poem to reader, a relation both intimate (concerned with matters of the heart) and obligatory, though neither the date the debt “becom[es] due” nor its terms are specified. “The Debtor” is composed of similarly dense and riddling passages that elaborate the overlap between—and also the confusion of—literal and figurative debts. Wheeler mostly considers Quentin Massys’ 1514 painting The Moneychanger, which depicts a seemingly straightforward scene in which a moneylender “counts … out” coins beside his wife, who looks on, pretending to read a prayer book (“her hands are in God”); a debtor wearing a red hat (visible only in the convex mirror on the table) sits before them, while someone else, identified by Wheeler as another “[lienor],” waits outside. But “The Debtor” also hints at more general disjunctions of scale, transferability, and repayability, including one between the painting’s setting in Antwerp (identified as “the first ‘capitalist’ center … in the modern sense”) and a contemporary U.S. moment in which “[t]he market’s in side-flip” and speculation is recommended (“Buy low”).4 Elsewhere, debt is depicted as

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wholly figurative, as when a “debt to [a] skittering city” is exemplified by a punning “bank of birds” and “a trust in surfaces.” It’s unsurprising that debt is depicted as ungraspable. It’s both enormous—“large as a giant’s back turning, large as / a vulcanic forge”—and synecdochally divisible into seemingly tiny “fragment[s]” the “size of [the giant or forge’s] toy”; as these analogies suggest, it seems able to be described only in figurative terms. (Wheeler, though, has called Ledger, the volume in which “The Debtor” appears, “a book … about money” [“Interview” 583]). In this context, literal and figurative debtors, lenders, and artists seem interchangeable, among them “borrower, clipper, catcher, coiner, getter, grabber, hoarder, loser, lover, raiser, spender, teller, [and] thirster.” Elsewhere in the poem, what Wheeler calls the “overlap” between seemingly distinct (human) “figures” is more explicit: the moneylender “count[ing] … out” money resembles his apparently pious but heavily bejeweled wife, both the moneylender and the debtor are “distressed,” and “[m]ost [scholars] agree the red-hatted reader [that is, the debtor]’s the painter.” The poet also reveals her status as  a figurative debtor. Like Massys, whom she calls a “debtor to Leonardo, // to van Eyck,” among other painters, the poet repeatedly cites scholarly discussions of the painting and its historical context, often without directly identifying her sources.5 The poem also updates John Ashbery’s 1975 “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” in which a Parmigianino painting from the same period inspires a different set of digressions and meditations. In these ways, “The Debtor” arguably adapts the painting’s convex mirror as a justification for its own distortions and not-quite-copying. Like such a mirror, the poem distorts depth perception and distance while revealing clandestine acts of surveillance that undermine the ordinary logic of payment, as when the speaker describes stealing lipstick and magazines from a convenience store while a friend kept an eye on the cashier with the help of a convex mirror meant to surveil customers. * * * Though financial dynamics of borrowing and repayment are less central in Carson and Rankine’s volumes than in “The Debtor,” all three sequences respond to debt’s increasing centrality in the contemporary North American economy, as well as its capacity to control or discipline apparently irresponsible governments, institutions, and individuals.6 Both Nox

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and Lonely also arguably reflect debt’s recent securitization, a process by which separate debts are “pooled, sliced, and transformed into liquid assets that can be iteratively traded on finance markets” (Adkins 89). This process of transforming once-whole entities—a house, for example, but also an individual person—into “endlessly divisible, recombinable, saleable, and leverage-able” parts has been called “dividuation” by Arjun Appadurai (Banking 105–6) because it “render[s] moot or irrelevant the idea of the ‘whole’ [or the] classic individual” (110). Debt securitization, many have noted, has led to the need for ever-increasing levels of debt (including individual debt), no matter that some securitized debts are known to be “bad” or unrepayable.7 Yet what has been called a “collective problem of systemic risk” (van der Zwan) is often disguised by lenders and investors with a “discourse of personal responsibility and moral rectitude” (McClanahan, Dead 66), “individual … moral hazard” (Fourcade et  al. 603), and “citizen” responsibility (van der Zwan) that, as has also been noted, (synecdochally) blames vulnerable individuals for larger-scale problems.8 Related disruptions to the traditionally synecdochic relation between (usually small) parts and an (enormous, if sometimes fictitious) whole recur in Carson and Rankine’s sequences. Both volumes engage in dividuation by engaging in indexical practices of sorting and cataloging that break seemingly intact entities (including the authors’ volumes themselves) into non-assimilable parts. These acts, especially for Rankine, involve human bodies in ways that evoke the poetic practice of blazon, which arguably dividuates a (living, female) beloved’s body into what Nancy Vickers has called a series of impossible-to-reassemble “parts” and “dissociated objects” (266). Yet even as both volumes engage in strategies of dividuation, both also embrace excess and waste in ways that evoke the skewed dynamics of debt itself, which by definition requires that more be repaid than was borrowed.9 Such dynamics facilitate out-of-sync, unbalanced, and “useless” (the term appears in both volumes) payments, often to the wrong person. Scenes of doubling as well as inexact (and incommensurate) reflection, representation, reproduction, and translation evoke not only Wheeler’s notion of convexity but the distortions perhaps inherent in the attempt to represent absence and the always figurative attempt to compensate for what no longer exists. * * *

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Several of Carson’s writings both before and after the publication of Nox reveal her longstanding interest in the topic of  debt. Her 1999 critical study Economy of the Unlost: (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan) juxtaposes, as its title indicates, economics with loss (along with its opposite). Carson links the epitaphs of the Greek poet Simonides to the economization of poetry: as the first professional paid writer of epitaphs (16), he devised, she claims, a new concept “of human life in terms of economic relation” (80). Yet an epitaph by Simonides cited by Carson also emphasizes the figurative relation between debt and death: “We are all debts owed to death” (qtd. in Carson 80). Simonides here both insists on human obligation and converts humans into things: death seems capable of claiming what is owed to it, while “we” are converted into inanimate “debts.” Nor is it clear how exactly “we” can repay our “debts … to death” except by dying. Carson’s 2006 translation of Euripides’ Alkestis is more explicit; here Herakles states, “All mortals owe a debt to death. / There’s no one alive / who can say if he will be [alive] tomorrow,” a truth whose profundity Herakles immediately undercuts, adding, “Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink!” (Euripides 288). Nox explores related tensions between repayment and infinite indebtedness and between what is done for profit and for free. Central to the volume is a tension between withholding (death,  Carson claims early on, “makes us stingy”; we don’t want to “[expend] more on” someone who is “dead” [1.0]) and infinitude: the speaker later asserts of her dead brother, Michael, “I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end” (7.1).10 But Nox also depicts the need for indebtedness in relation to death; as Carson has indicated elsewhere, “the point is to put yourself in debt” (Economy 13).11 The volume can’t directly repay its debts to death and to Michael, a failure that transforms indebtedness into a way to hold onto something absent; debt gives loss a (figurative) form. Nox enacts these dynamics by emphasizing disjunctions of scale and wholeness that I associated above with debt, especially securitized debt. These disjunctions are evident in Carson’s characterization of Nox as both an epitaph and an elegy, the latter of which she describes in terms of wanting (or having “wanted”) “to fill with light of all kinds” (1.0).12 Epitaphs are concise in ways that affirm an “aesthetic of exactitude or verbal economy” (Economy 78); they also, Carson claims, transform the “body” (of the dead, but perhaps also the epitaph writer) into a figurative “sign” (73).13 Elegy, in contrast, is generally understood as more extended, introspective, and discursive, though it has also been associated with

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“regression” (Sacks 10) and “figurative” substitution (12).14 By associating Nox with both these genres, Carson merges scales, combining what Christine Wiesenthal calls “an expansive [with an] economical poetics of loss” (192). But this merger isn’t seamless. Among the different materials Nox includes are a series of numbered and subnumbered Roman-font paragraphs that provide loosely chronological information about Michael’s life and death alongside discussions of Classical historians.15 Brief, cryptic, unnumbered and italicized entries, often considering grief, interrupt these paragraphs; examples include “In small white sleep mitts your hands protrude,” “He who has tears let him,” and “It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.” These passages  are, like epitaphs, compressed, but they also reveal the atemporality of mourning, offering a more lyrical and figurative counterpart to the more literal prose passages. The book’s accordion format, as I will elaborate in Chap. 5, privileges both compression and expansiveness and both chronology and simultaneity.16 Nox more directly explores disjunctions of scale in its extended translation of Catullus’ Carmen 101, an intimate elegy for Catullus’ brother set at his graveside that addresses him as “you.” Catullus’ elegy, which Carson pastes on Nox’s first page, considers figurative dynamics of debt, theft, and bestowal. According to James Green’s translation, the poem describes presenting a “final tribute” or series of “gifts” at the brother’s “funeral,” assumedly items to be buried with him, but also depicts the brother as having been “stolen” by “fortune.” Such issues are essential to Carson’s translation, especially to its espousal of a seemingly rational process of dividuation alongside a more impetuous, sometimes self-defeating advocacy of what “doesn’t end.” Carson devotes half the volume (nearly all of its verso pages) to the sequential translation of the words in Catullus’ poem in a format that resembles a series of detailed dictionary entries: for each  Latin word, Carson offers multiple English definitions, often exemplified by sentences using the word. These translations link literal with figurative meanings and often indicate the ways a single word can have contradictory meanings. These contradictions, which evoke the paradoxes Carson elsewhere elaborates about debt, are especially evident in the definition of the Latin adempte (often translated as stolen), which Carson first defines in relation to lost property, associating it variously with “remov[ing] something by force,” “tak[ing] (property) away, steal[ing], [and] confiscat[ing].” But she also defines the term as a more general “refus[al] or fail[ure] to give”

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and, more neutrally, as “acquir[ing] by purchase, … buy[ing].” It is also associated with more figurative “exile” and “banish[ment]” and not only with “remov[als]” of property and “part[s] of the body” but with the apparently opposed idea of restoration, including “rescu[ing and] sav[ing] (from death).” Theft, Carson here implies, is equivalent to rescue; it signals both a failure to give and an acquisition; it is linked both to violence and mercy; and it is impersonal but defined by human interaction. Related paradoxes are evident in other definitions. Accipe (generally translated as to receive or accept), for example, is defined in terms of possession (“to take in one’s grasp, receive, take; to acquire, get; to exchange”) but also relinquishment (“to hand down”), as well, noneconomically, as interaction (“to receive, greet, welcome, entertain”). These complex definitions are further complicated by the sentences Carson uses to exemplify them. In ways that recall the italicized phrases elsewhere in the sequence, many include the word nox and consider topics—including grief, disappearance, and temporal disruption—not evident elsewhere in the volume. These sentences often have little to do with the word being translated, as when Carson includes under the definition of et or “and” the phrase “and do you still doubt that consciousness vanishes at night?”17 The copiousness and complexity of Carson’s translations of the poem’s words dividuate the coherent text of Catullus’ poem, blazon-style, into separate parts that seem impossible to restore to singularity or coherence; Carson admits within Nox that “I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101” (7.1). Yet Nox includes a translation of the whole poem, reproduced once before she has completed her translations of its words and again at the volume’s end in a physically distressed and almost illegible form. Here is Carson’s final translation: Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed— I arrive at these poor, brother, burials so I could give you the last gift owed to death and talk (why?) with mute ash. Now that Fortune tore you from me, you oh poor (wrongly) brother (wrongly) taken from me, now still anyway this—what a distant mood of parents handed down as the sad gift for burials— accept! soaked with tears of a brother and into forever, brother, farewell and farewell.

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Considered in terms of its length and compression, this translation seems to offer an efficient and synecdochic rendition of Catullus’ original, an epitaph rather than an elegy. But while Carson reconnects the poem’s separated words into singularity, the final translation is radically fragmented, as is especially evident in sentences that don’t syntactically cohere. In the phrase “what a distant mood of parents / handed down as the sad gift for burials— / accept!,” for example, it is unclear what exactly is being handed down (it seems to be the mood, which here functions as a kind of gift), who is doing the handing down (is it the parents?), and who is being exhorted to “accept!” the gift (or perhaps the mood). A more standard translation resolves all these questions: “But now accept these gifts dripping with fraternal tears, / handed down by the ancient custom of our forefathers” (Green). By mimicking the syntax of the original Latin, which defers verbs to the end of phrases or sentences (Derbyshire), Carson keeps reminding readers that the poem is a translation. Parenthetical interjections absent in the original expose her hesitation. In these ways, Carson enacts the contradictory impulses evident in all translation, which seeks to be faithful both to the original language and to the one into which the text is translated. But Carson’s word-by-word translations also convey the temporal process of translation by impelling the reader to witness translation’s seemingly wasted labor, which more conventional translations conceal. In this way, Carson indirectly evokes a temporal confusion associated with the financialization of debt, especially a mode of “speculative time” that makes “pasts, presents, and futures … open to constant revision” (Adkins 81) while it prioritizes “the nonchronological and indeterminate” (82). The poem’s incoherence also echoes its thematics of theft and attempted repayment. Carson’s assertion “Fortune tore you from me, you / oh poor (wrongly) brother (wrongly) taken from me,” for example, combines repetition (of “you,” “me,” and “wrongly”), an interjection (“oh”), a verb (“tore”), and proto-economic language (“poor”) to demonstrate not only the speaker’s distress but her sense of injustice. Carson also highlights the imbalance of the poem’s central transaction, in which the speaker is impelled to “give you the last gift owed to death.” That money isn’t owed but rather a “gift” intensifies the asymmetry involved in giving “you” what is in fact “owed to death,” an act that apparently indirectly repays an earlier “[wrong]” inflicted by a personified “Fortune,” which may or may not be synonymous with death.

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Carson also imposes another redundancy on the original poem. While most translations clarify that the gift offered early in the poem is the same as the one or ones referred to later, Carson distinguishes an early wish to “give you the last gift owed to death” from an apparently separate offering of a “sad gift,” this one both “handed down” and intended “for burials.”18 The first (but “last”) gift thus seems to unreceived or unreceivable, impelling the speaker to proffer a different, seemingly more modest one that is also verbally excessive and doubled, though it’s unclear that this second gift has been received either, since the speaker commands an unspecified addressee to “accept!” it. The poem’s thematics of indirect, delayed, wasteful, and repeated repayment also help explain Carson’s relation to both Catullus and Michael, as does Carson’s implication that translation offers a figurative way to grapple with Michael’s death. She acknowledges studying Michael’s “few” remembered “sentences” “as if I’d been asked to translate them” (8.1) and claims more generally that she “came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch” (7.1). This act of “grop[ing]” is unfulfilled, since, in contrast to her earlier, simpler wish “to fill my elegy with light” (1.0), she here asserts that “[p]rowling the meanings of a word” reveals that there is “no use expecting a flood of light” (7.1). In this context, Nox offers a (figurative) repayment of Carson’s (also figurative) debt to Carmen 101. But Catullus’ chronicle of grief also arguably prevents her from needing to compose her own elegy; it allows her to displace her (mostly unarticulated) grief onto Catullus’ words. (It is perhaps significant that Michael was, as Carson reveals, emotionally estranged and physically absent while alive; she admits not learning about his death until sometime afterward (6.1) and emphasizes other family members’ grief following his death rather than her own.19) The occasional expressions of grief in the word-for-word translations—often evident in sentences using “nox”—remain similarly contained. But Carson’s translation, like Nox more generally, can also be read as an indirect and unreceivable gift to Michael, one expressible, to recall Wheeler, only in a convex and self-inverting form. The volume, including Carson’s translation of Catullus’ poem, thus signals the complicated, multiple, and displaced debts the living owe to death as well as to the dead, who here include not only Michael but Catullus. Related tensions about holding onto and relinquishing the dead, it’s worth recalling, are often associated with melancholy, which Jahan Ramazani associates with a modern elegiac mode that “[s]corn[s]

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recovery and transcendence” as well as “consolation [and] closure” in favor of what is “unresolved, violent, and ambivalent” (Poetry of 4–5). Melancholy has also been characterized as a way both to “[disrupt] the tally-taking” essential to economic thinking (Mladek and Edmondson 215) and to deflect individual “aggressions” in ways that construct an unresisting “ideal subject under capitalism” (209). Nox engages both in indexical “tally-taking” and in its disruption; though it doesn’t refer directly to contemporary financialized economics, it appropriates economic vocabulary in ways that demonstrate its own “aggressi[ve]” relation to the notion of repayment. Or perhaps the unrepayable nature of debt is itself a source of comfort. Catullus refers not to monetary payments but to gifts, and Carson elsewhere cites I. Morris’s similar claim: though “the gift economy is above all a debt economy,” its “aim is never to have debts ‘paid off’ but to preserve a situation of personal indebtedness” (qtd. in Economy 13). Gift economies rely on what Jacques Derrida has called, using a term also used by Wheeler, “a bind” (qtd. in Osteen 15),  though their valorization of indebtedness, as others have noted, creates a “personal” connection distinct from, if at times also aligned with, traditional depersonalized economic transactions.20 Read in this context, Nox enables Carson to put herself in debt, then enact her indebtedness. At one point in Nox, Carson mentions Lazarus, who, she claims, symbolizes either “resurrection” or the need “to die twice.” It’s impossible to decide between these options because, she notes, “he is mute” at several key moments in the Bible. Giotto’s depiction of the scene, she adds, “load[s]” its painted “space with” a visible version of “muteness” (8.4). This discussion echoes Carson’s reference, in her final Catullus translation, to the speaker’s capacity to “talk (why?) with mute ash.” Here, speech is literally impossible: it is “mute.” (More conventional translations depict the poet talking to the ash of the dead brother [Green, Andreacchi].) The interjected “why?,” a word not in the original, suggests that such speech is ineffectual, though the poet (or translator) seems compelled to depict her need for it. To write about grief, this juxtaposition implies, may compensate for speech’s deficiencies. Like Giotto’s transposition of muteness onto something visible, Nox transforms the inability to speak into a gift that, because it can’t be accepted or received, keeps affirming the poet’s indebtedness, which seems, after all, to be what she requires. * * *

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Claudia Rankine’s longstanding interest in the relation between mourning and the contemporary disregard for African American lives is especially evident in her New York Times op-ed “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” written just after Dylan Roof’s 2015 murder of nine African American churchgoers. In a context informed by the historical “legacy of black bodies as property” and the contemporary reality that “[d]ead blacks are a part of normal life,” Rankine advocates for acknowledging the centrality of mourning, especially to African American women, for whom “mourning live[s] in real time.” It’s necessary, Rankine argues, not “to look away from the flesh of our domestic murders” but, in ways that recall Mamie Till Mobley’s 1955 insistence on displaying her son Emmett’s mutilated body in an open coffin, to “look … upon the dead.” Mourning offers “a method of acknowledgment” that affirms not only the “vulnerability inherent in black lives” but “the instability regarding a future for those lives.” “The real change needs to be a rerouting of interior belief,” she continues; only then can “action” occur in “a political justice system [that] would signify true societal change,” partly, it seems, through the mobilization of “a kind of collective we.”21 Implicit in the op-ed is an asymmetrical equation: the murders of African Americans can begin to be rectified through of mode of constant and unending mourning analogous to what I have been calling melancholy. Mourning helps facilitate potential future reparations by the “political justice system,” but it also redresses forgetting. Though Rankine doesn’t use the word debt, she refers to several economic facts, including the history of U.S. slavery and the ways that, following his 2014 murder by police, Michael Brown’s “name [was] commoditized and assimilated into our modes of capitalism”; she more generally advocates for noneconomic strategies that challenge both the reduction of African Americans into “property” and the injustices perpetrated against them. (This mode of figurative repayment is quite different from a subsequent poem’s association of financial indebtedness with whites’ anger and sense of “dispossess[ion]” [“Sound”].22) Though Rankine’s op-ed postdates her volume Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by eleven years, it illuminates the volume’s concern with mourning, death, and grief on the one hand and the simultaneous devaluing and “commoditiz[ation]” of African Americans on the other. While several other readers have noted the recurrent economic language in Lonely, my argument is different: Rankine is concerned not only with the ways contemporary economic notions inform apparently private experiences but

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with debt’s capacity to dividuate once-coherent lives.23 Rankine several times directly juxtaposes scenes of economic valuation with non-economic (and at times useless) modes of repayment, especially those associated with bodies that are, to adapt terms from her op-ed, “vulnerab[le]” and “precarious.” She also repeatedly asks what we owe one another and how modes of repayment different from financial ones  can be devised. This project of determining noneconomic meanings for terms associated with debt—including responsibility, value, and usefulness—is especially  relevant in a context in which African Americans tend to be generally understood as “surplus populations, excluded from the economy if not from the violence of the state” (Bernes et al.). Like Nox, Lonely thus renders debt figurative, but it does so to a more political end, humanizing those who tend to be ignored by emphasizing the debts implicit in loss and mourning. This figurative alternative to economic modes of understanding isn’t easy to implement, nor is it effective. Rather, in ways that evoke the ways the contemporary economy defines people in terms of their possessions (“[m]y air conditioner, my health insurance”), the sequence’s speaker repeatedly depicts herself as lonely, sad, and numb, destabilized as a person, caught between being “alive,” not alive, and “a product” (93). As I have begun to suggest, broadly synecdochic dynamics are central to Rankine’s volume, which attempts to challenge the fact that “billions of lives [have] never mattered” (23) by paying attention to (and grieving the loss of) particular people in ways she has subsequently extended.24 Rankine precedes her statement about the billions of lives with a description of George W. Bush’s failure to “remember” how many “people were convicted for dragging a black man,” James Byrd, Jr., “to his death” (21). Yet remembering and grieving can’t restore the speaker to wholeness. Rather, her grief creates a range of bodily symptoms, though she indicates that her body can’t incorporate or revive  those for whom she mourns, especially those whose bodies were violated. Nor can her repeated attempts to take responsibility for mistreated others unmake their having been harmed. That the volume itself is fractured amplifies this point: Lonely, though subtitled An American Lyric, is divided into prose  sections, themselves subdivided into separate paragraphs, many including photographs and other visual images. Each section is prefaced with the same image of a static-filled television screen, signaling both distance and unrepresentability. One of the volume’s most striking references to the transformation of a human life into a financial product involves an insurance company’s

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requirement that the speaker’s sister “assess the value of her dead children’s lives” for compensation purposes, though it’s unclear how the children died. The “value” of each child’s life is based on a compilation of records including “[r]eport cards, medical records, [and] extracurricular activities,” in which “[e]ach activity … points to social class, which points to potential worth” (77–78). Echoing Marx’s claim that “the credit relationship” is “vile” because it “estimate[s] the value of a man in money” (“Comments”), the speaker comments that such a process “divorce[s] compensation … from compassion.” Yet she (and her sister) seem impelled to inhabit the “place” defined by this financialized logic, which she calls “reasonable” though “no one lives” there (78). A similar sense of resignation is complicated later in the sequence, when Rankine depicts an analogous but larger-scale and more complex situation involving a 1997 South African law stipulating the use of generic antiretrovirals to treat HIV-positive patients. Rankine condemns the thirty-nine mostly multinational pharmaceutical companies who planned a 2001 suit against the South African government to preserve their drugs’ copyrights and thus their profits at the expense of “five million South Africans.” While these companies adhere to the same financialized logic as the insurance company (they too prioritize “compensation” over “compassion”), here the outcome is more positive: not only did they drop the lawsuit due to “national and international pressure” (Human,  “South”) but, as Rankine notes, South African president Thabo Mbeki reversed his “previous position against distribution of the drugs” (117). While the speaker’s response to her sister’s insurance company’s demands is intellectual, here it is bodily: “My body relaxes. My shoulders fall back,” she claims, enabling her to feel a sense of “hope” (118) that at least partly mitigates (but also recalls) her earlier self-diagnosis with what she calls “a deepening personality flaw: IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope” (23).25 Rankine prefaces her discussion of Mbeki’s reversal with an uppercase, boldface list of the thirty-nine plaintiffs in the suit to restrict the manufacture of generic medications (115–16). This list functions differently from Nox’s word-for-word translations of Catullus’ Latin in that it has a political purpose: it holds these companies responsible. It also suggests that indexical or dividuating logic can offer an alternative to exclusively economic modes of understanding, albeit at a radically different scale from that of the “five million” South Africans at risk of AIDS death.26

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While these scenes emphasize the ethical implications of economic modes of (re)payment associated with the financial valuation of human lives, Lonely also directly considers noneconomic responses to loss and injustice. As I suggested above, these modes often involve bodily identification with the suffering and dead, which Rankine, like Carson, associates with translation, as when “the entrance” of distress into her body “translated my already grief into a tremendously exhausted hope” (118). But Rankine’s acts of identification also at times fracture others’ suffering bodies, as well as her own, in a blazonlike manner more painful than the merely textual dividuation of Nox: here bodily injuries, including injury to a particular part of the body, is transferrable to someone else. The speaker’s devotion to the suffering other is thus evident through the dividuation and mortification of her own body as well through her conviction that it is already dividuated and mortified. After hearing of Mbeki’s decision to make “antiretrovirals … available” to HIV-positive South Africans, for example, the speaker acknowledges a “distress” that had until then “physically lodged itself like a virus in me” (117). The speaker’s bodily identification with AIDS patients isn’t redemptive or productive; instead, it affirms “how useless, how much like a skin-­ sack of uselessness I felt.” Identifying with loss thus multiplies the loss, as the repetition “useless … uselessness” implies: it entraps the speaker in her body (her “skin-sack”), exposing the “uselessness” of her suffering. In ways that recall the poets I discussed in Chap. 2, who resist financialized efficiency via an aesthetic of uselessness, Rankine here anticipates her op-­ ed’s insistence on the need for “[a] sustained state of national mourning for black lives” to counterbalance “their devaluation.” Earlier in the volume, the brutalization of others’ bodies enables a similarly embodied response in the speaker, but Rankine evaluates it differently on two facing pages that, read together, further affirm the uselessness of bodily identification. On the first of these pages (56), the speaker describes seeing a television report about Abner Louima, who was, the poet reminds us, “sodomized with a broken broomstick while in police custody”  in 1997. Rather than crying, which would “express emotion” and “recognize and take responsibility for the soul,” the speaker’s reaction is bodily: she reports feeling “a sharp pain in my gut … Not quite a caving in, just a feeling of bits of my inside twisting away from flesh in the form of a blow to the body.” This sensation of pain and powerlessness occurs in a financial context: Louima has just received a multimillion dollar settlement as compensation for his mistreatment by police. In the case of the

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insurance payment to her sister’s children, the speaker notes the incongruity of prioritizing “compensation” over “compassion,” but here it is Louima who makes a similar point: asked “how it feels to be a rich man,” Louima responds, “Not rich … Lucky, lucky to be alive.” Then he expresses his “hope [that] what comes out of my case is change.” While the speaker condemns her inability to cry while watching Louima on television as a failure to “recognize and take responsibility for the soul,” she calls crying “wasteful” on the facing page, which describes the death of Amadou Diallo in 1999 after being shot “forty-one” times by New York police (57). But she also condemns her compulsion to “value each life like that, to feel loss to the point of being bent over each time.” While similar bodily responses on the previous page offered a seemingly positive alternative to financial modes of repayment, enabling “recogni[tion] and … responsibility,” here the speaker calls such responses “sentimental, or excessive, … too naïve, too self-wounded.” While genuine and acute, they fail to accomplish anything, partly because they disrupt the scale of actual suffering, making the public private in ways that trivialize the actual damage inflicted on others’ bodies. The compulsion to incorporate or introject the absent body into one’s own is central to  Sigmund Freud’s ideas about melancholy, which he claims “set[s] up … the [lost] object inside the ego” (qtd. in Truscott).27 Rankine’s speaker’s melancholic identification with the dead and injured is consistent with the volume’s more general rhetoric of loneliness, which Rankine at one point defines as “what we can’t do for each other” (62). This condition leads the speaker to what Lauren Berlant has called both “suicidiation” (On 135) and a mode of “dissociation” deriving from “biopolitical pressures” (141), both linked to a “capitalist … proximity to death by illness” (136)  that may be especially evident in the speaker’s overidentification with the dead. But melancholy’s association with economic principles is also relevant, as is implied by the speaker’s repeated consideration of the body as a series of dividuated, potentially contaminated organs manipulated by pharmaceutical companies for profit. The liver in particular, she explains, is so “vulnerable to drugs” that “55 percent of … liver failure is drug-induced” (53–54). But Rankine’s point isn’t just that the liver is a synecdoche for the body. A diagram of the abdomen that includes the liver just above a map of the U.S. (54) also transforms the U.S. into a kind of internal organ while suggesting the body’s inseparability from national ideology.

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But the problem is also  temporal, as it is  in Nox. Rankine’s speaker emphasizes the multiple meanings of the word waiting in a contemporary financialized culture that emphasizes—and commodifies—what Adkins calls “speculative time” when she cites the advertising slogan for the antidepressant Paxil, “YOUR LIFE IS WAITING” (29). The ad’s implication is that a purchase of Paxil will be figuratively repaid with the purchaser’s “LIFE,” though Rankine later notes that “[a]ll life is a form of waiting,” which is “the waiting of loneliness” (120). By seeming to deny the ordinary chronology in which life is followed by—and by implication involves waiting for—death, the Paxil slogan indirectly confirms death’s inevitability. Elsewhere, the speaker more specifically describes the ways that death disrupts ordinary processes of chronology: she describes feeling “like I am already dead” (7) and also claims that extravagantly mourning others’ deaths—her example is Princess Diana’s—allows the living to proleptically “griev[e] the random inevitability of their own deaths” (39). Such situations imply, as does Carson in Nox, that life itself constitutes an anticipatory and figurative payment to death. By responding in melancholic and self-injuring ways to the death and injury of others, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, I have been arguing, attempts to refute the economic valuation of certain lives more than others. In this context, the book’s division into distinct and asymmetrical sections and its recurrent reproductions of already-reproduced images, including television  stills formally enact the emotional and experiential fracturings the sequence describes. Lonely keeps depicting the speaker’s abject response to the abjection of others and thus her compulsion to take responsibility for their suffering. Such responses are powerful despite—or perhaps because of—the speaker’s acknowledgment that they are “wasteful” and “useless” and thus outside the logic of economics. At one point, Rankine directly associates responsibility with “[t]he relationships embedded between the ‘I’ and the ‘we’” (84). She also paraphrases Myung-Mi Kim’s claim that “it was okay” to have bodily symptoms “and then to translate [them] here” (57). The deictic here, in ways that recall Wheeler’s “this,” suggests not only the speaker’s body but the page she is writing on. Translation, Kim suggests in ways that also recall Nox, isn’t exact or final. Yet Kim’s notion that “the poem is really a responsibility in social space” (57) offers a provisional way to begin devising what Rankine’s op-ed calls “a kind of collective we.” The poem to which Kim refers resembles a gift: it is unasked for, superfluous, and nonmonetary. It expresses a “responsibility” without specifying its object or agent, and it occupies a “social space” related to but

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different from physical space. Like gifts according to Carson, Rankine’s sequence is both excessive and useless. It undermines the economic logic of debt repayment and compensation while refusing to abandon the concept of responsibility. But loneliness, which Rankine indicates “stems from a feeling of uselessness” (129), also keeps surfacing. To anchor responsibility in words and also in the mortal, fallible, vulnerable human body thus keeps revealing the provisional and fragile nature of responsibility as a response to injustice, though responsibility also requires courage. These features are also central to debt: debt’s concern with the future is also a concern with death, which is why it resembles bereavement; debt quantifies but incorporates and displaces lack. A poem in this context, according to Rankine’s paraphrase of Paul Celan, is “no different from a handshake,” a gesture that she explains both “assert[s] (I am here) and hand[s] over (here) a self to another” (130). Or, as Rankine also puts it, in terms that would not be amiss in Nox, “The words remain an inscription on the surface of my loneliness” (129).

Notes 1. McClanahan notes that the etymology of “mortgage” is “dead pledge” and associates a pattern of “uncanniness” with financial institutions. Debt, she claims, enables “the past [to] continue to live on, like a ghost or zombie, in the present” (“Dead”) quite different from the dynamics in Carson and Rankine’s sequences. 2. Margaret Atwood has linked “the elaborate fretwork of debt” (12) to Christian tenets of sin and absolution (42), though she also notes that the notion of debt repayment is central to the Old Testament and the Code of Hammurabi (15). Atwood also associates  the need for debt repayment with noneconomic notions of “fairness” (12) and “equivalent values” (15). 3. Barbara Herrnstein Smith and John Guillory link aesthetic and economic value in different contexts without focusing on debt in particular; Mary Poovey has associated the rise of financial credit with notions of subjectivity and sociality articulated in the novel form. 4. The poem also notes that at the time of the painting, moneylenders had mostly abandoned “the obsolescence of … coins” for more abstract (and figurative) “paper / debts” and that “the world’s first stock exchange” was about to open. 5. While Wheeler includes a late Acknowledgments page, the exact relation between particular citations and their sources is not clear (81–82).

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6. Individual debt has dramatically increased since the 1980s, due largely, as McClanahan and others note, to “wage stagnation” (Dead 10) and evident  largely in increased home mortgage, credit card, and student loan debt. Gross household debt grew “from 50 percent of GDP in 1980 to 98 percent of GDP in 2007,” according to one analysis, while the proportion of debt to consumer income “grew from 62 percent in 1975 to 127.2 percent in 2005” (Mahmud 476). By 2022, U.S. household debt surpassed $16 trillion dollars (Dunsmuir). Since at least the 1980s, the International Monetary Fund has made loans contingent on borrower nations’ adoption of what are often called “austerity measures” and “structural adjustments,” often leading with controversial effects (International Monetary). 7. Securitized debt often generates profits at odds with the actual low value of its parts, a situation that notoriously became a problem during the 2008 financial crisis. Michael Hudson has called it “simply a mathematical fact that [many outstanding] debts … can’t be repaid.” 8. Victims of predatory lending practices, especially evident in the pre-2008 practice of targeting “racial minorities traditionally denied credit … with high-risk credit” (Mahmud 477), were often blamed as “intellectually (illiterate) and morally (greedy) unfit” (Charkravartty and da Silva 362) despite the fact that lenders knowingly “bet on and profited from [borrowers’] inability to pay the unpayable debts” (381). More recently, President Joe  Biden’s 2022 student debt forgiveness plan led several Republican senators to label student debtors irresponsible and morally deficient (Taylor). 9. Debt is often defined as a promise to repay a loan later with interest. 10. Nox’s pages are unnumbered, but some sections are numbered. 11. Carson makes this claim in relation to the ancient idea of xenia or “hospitality,” which emphasizes the “nonmercantile: goods are not measured, profit is not the point” (13). 12. The volume’s back cover identifies it as an “epitaph for [my brother] in the form of a book”; Carson has subsequently juxtaposed its status as epitaph and elegy (qtd. in Weisenthal 191). 13. Carson associates Simonides’ verbal economy with the “material fact” that he was constrained by the size of the stone on which his epitaph was to be inscribed (13). 14. Peter Sacks argues that to “accept … loss” in ways essential to “healthy … mourning” (6), the elegist must repress or disguise hostile or murderous impulses in ways that recall the repressions of the Freudian Oedipus complex and the Lacanian entry into language (6–12). 15. The volume contains many other kinds of materials, including excerpts from letters to, from, and about Michael, both handwritten and typed, as well as childhood photos and painted images.

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16. Nox can be read as a series of conventional codex book pages, but it also can be spread out and viewed all at once. 17. Other examples include the definition of adempte, which includes a phrase meaning “the day would not be long enough [night confiscates day]”; vectus (“to vanish by night into nothing”); and mutam (“deep speechlessness of night”). 18. Both James Green and Grace Andreacchi’s translations indicate that the early and late gifts are the same by referring the second time to “these gifts.” 19. Michael, the poet indicates, “ran away in 1978, rather than go to jail” for an unspecified crime and afterward contacted his family only sporadically; she notes that “he wrote only one letter, to my mother” (2.2)  and that “our conversations were few (he phoned me maybe 5 times in 22 years)” (8.1). Carson also describes Michael’s widow’s love for him (she calls herself “the love of his life” [3.2] and him “the ‘light of my life’” [4.1]) and reveals that their mother “for years after [Michael] left … would glance up every time a car came spinning along the road” (4.1), though later “[h]opelessness built a wall in her” (4.3). 20. Derrida, drawing on Marcel  Mauss, claims that “[t]here is no gift without … bind” but that each gift must also “untie itself … from debt, … and thus from the bind” (qtd. in Osteen 15). Among the analogies between gift exchange and market transactions are what Alain Caillé calls an “obligation to reciprocate” that arguably signals a “primitive [sic] form of … book-balancing equivalence, … mercantile reciprocity … [and] contracts” (qtd. in Osteen 7). The gift economy has also been linked to solidarity, obligation, responsibility, and other noneconomic values. 21. Rankine uses this latter phrase in a headnote to her op-ed. 22. The 2018 poem “Sound & Fury” enumerates economic conditions including “foreclosure vanished pensions school systems / in disrepair free trade rising unemployment unpaid / medical bills school debt car debt.” 23. Among critics who have noted the volume’s concern with economic issues are Angela Hume, who has described Lonely as an exploration of how “personal experiences like grief are mediated by the ideologies of capitalism and the state” (85); David  Lau, who notes that the volume “documents a revivified liberal and neo-­conservative nationalism in the dotcom postcrash moment when tech stocks failed to hit market projections” (471);  Heather Milne, who claims that “[b]y politicizing depression, Rankine refuses [its] neoliberal framing” (177); and Christopher Nealon, who considers the volume as an exemplification of a more general recent poetic tendency “to imagine … an end to capitalism without a conceivable revolution” (Matter 141), though all four  critics ultimately emphasize other aspects of the volume.

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24. Rankine’s subsequent volume, Citizen, includes at its end a list of name of African Americans killed by whites, each prefaced by “In memory of” (134–35); this list is updated every time the volume is reprinted. 25. Rankine links the idea of the “IMH” to Cornel West’s claim that “black people today” are “[t]oo scarred by hope to hope” (23). 26. In 2001, over four million South Africans had AIDS; the South African Medical Research Council estimated then that seven million would die of it between 2001 and 2010 without enhanced treatment options (Human, “South”). 27. Freud associates melancholia with incorporation and introjection, the latter of which Ross Truscott defines as “the psychic process whereby objects from the external world … are taken into the ego, internalized.” As Truscott explains, “Freud (1917) proposed melancholia, in contradistinction to mourning, as a refusal to accept the ‘verdict of reality’ … [or] acknowledge the loss of an object, whether a loved person or an ideal. … Simply put, the compromise in melancholia is being the lost object rather than having it.”

CHAPTER 5

“Were you afraid // your book would vanish”: Gambling on the Print Book in the Electronic Age

Abstract  “‘Were you afraid // your book would vanish?’: Gambling on the Print Book in the Electronic Age” begins with a consideration of Brenda Hillman’s so-called “library poems” (2005), which consider the fragility of old books as well as their former instantiation as living trees. A related tension between imminent destruction and current  aliveness is visually central to Anne Carson’s  2010 Nox and Mary Ruefle’s 2006 A Little White Shadow. I read these volumes, both of which reproduce apparently handmade (and hand-manipulated) originals, in relation to the derivative, the archetypal financial product that concretizes a gamble about the future. Both volumes, I argue, engage in negative bets that attempt to profit from the book’s future obsolescence. Paradoxically, by evoking their authors’ handiwork, both summon up their future readers. Keywords  Derivative and poetry • Hedging and poetry • Print book • Digital book • Brenda Hillman • Anne Carson • Mary Ruefle • Susan Howe Because all books contain, in Leah Price’s terms, both “material properties” and “textual content” (qtd. in Newton 32), they involve what Adam

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Keniston, Economies of Scale, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39341-9_5

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Zachary Newton calls a “peculiar rapprochement between inside and outside” (33). Books that seem original but aren’t intensify this tension: they visually resemble one-of-a-kind artist books. But touching them belies that illusion by affirming that they are reproduced and reproducible, part of the marketplace they seem to repudiate. To touch such a facsimile is to keep slipping between its evocation of the original and the realization that that original is absent and perhaps irrelevant. Facsimiles, especially those that bear marks of the author’s hand, also create an illusion of presence. In an era in which, as Harold Love has noted, “most inscriptional tasks have … moved to the computer,” leaving “handwriting [for] evanescent records such as shopping lists, lecture notes, or postcards” (197), books that seem handmade feel old-fashioned and intimate.1 To read a handwritten mass-produced book is thus to engage in a kind of trompe l’oeil, one that raises temporal questions about when and how the book was composed, questions different from, or more acute than, those in conventionally printed books. To touch or read such a book evokes several moments simultaneously, including that of the original’s creation, of its publication, and of reading or touching it. The facsimile book, especially in an era in which, as John Hamilton puts it, “the codex … is presumed … missing in our traffic with electronic formats” (qtd. in Brillenburg Wurth 14), makes “the past … present” (Brillenburg Wurth 15). Or rather, the multiple time frames to which the facsimile gestures both signal and undermine the past, “valoriz[ing] ephemerality” (Modernity 84) in ways that Arjun Appadurai has linked in another context to an “ersatz nostalgia” (78), albeit one that paradoxically affirms the power and adaptability of the marketplace (83). When John Keats exhorts his reader to observe his currently “warm and capable” “living hand” but also to anticipate the future moment when it is “cold /… in the icy silence of the tomb,” he simultaneously evokes the scene of writing, his imminent death, and our belated reading of the poem.  Walt Whitman’s assertion “Whoever you are holding me now in your hand” in “Song of Myself” performs a related act of time travel by foregrounding both the addressee’s self (“me”) and the reader’s “hand.” Seemingly handwritten books do something similar, but more dramatically: they invoke a future that the book already inhabits, even as it hearkens back in time. This sense of being spoken to by an inanimate object across time resembles what Susan Howe calls, in relation to the experience of working in literary archives, telepathy (Spontaneous). Telepathy involves the

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transmission of thoughts or feelings from what Frederic Myers has called “one mind to another, independently of the recognized channels of sense” (qtd. in Luckhurst 113), though Howe’s focus is on the ways that a touched original from another time enables something exceeding rational understanding. The tactility and “material details” of items including “twill fabrics [and] bead-work pieces,” as well as “quotations, thoughtfragments, rhymes, syllables, anagrams, … and crossouts” (Spontaneous 21), invite the viewer, Howe claims, not to “decipher” but to “just look” (46) in ways that enable a telepathic communication between reader and text, as well, by implication, as between the reader and the text’s (longdead) creator. The archive visitor antichronologically receives a “deposit from a future yet to come” (17) via “an occult invocation” (59), it seems, by  both the (partly animated) archival documents and the human who created them. In Chap. 4, I focused on the ways Carson’s Nox and Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely undermine and complicate chronology in ways that evoke what Lisa Adkins has called the speculative time of securitized debt. Both those volumes resist the elegiac impulse to reanimate the dead, partly because the dead, like the surviving poet and her text, aren’t whole or intact but rather dividuated into parts that can’t be reassembled. Securitized debt is a kind of derivative, a financial form defined by its immateriality that is often called the archetypal financialized form.2 In this chapter, I make a related claim: I argue that facsimiles of handmade books, especially Mary Ruefle’s 2006 A Little White Shadow and Anne Carson’s Nox, gamble on the future existence of the print book via their volumes’ derivativeness and unoriginality. These books also take a position that evokes several bets central to the derivative form: they simultaneously speculate on (that is, according to one definition, “[attempt] to profit from anticipat[ed] changes” in) and hedge against (benefit from “a fall in the value of their assets”) (Chui) the future status of the print book as a medium.3 * * * What Brenda Hillman has called the “library poems” in her 2005 volume Pieces of Air in the Epic (“Like”) are conventionally formatted: though spatially eccentric, these twelve twelve-line poems include no archival materials and nothing glued, erased, or overwritten. Rather, they discuss the print book, especially the often dusty old books found in libraries. Such books are ephemeral, as is clear when the speaker of one poem asks

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an unidentified addressee, “Were you afraid // your book would vanish” (71). Though Hillman’s poems associate print books with both fear and risk, her poems about them also hedge against their future vanishing by transposing their physical presence into language. Books, Hillman makes clear, are associated with aliveness, though they aren’t alive; instead, their paper, bindings, and pages evoke their former instantiation as trees. In the series’s first poem, “[r]eaders look up” at “a // life of paper inside the great / Life: scent of greenly ravished civilization” (68); another refers to “[w]hen paper lived in the Radiance // Forest” (70). But books are also alive in a figurative (and even whimsical) sense in these poems insofar as readers animate their authors and protagonists, as when “a prowl isaiah” (70) and “a // sprawl isaiah” asleep “in an armchair” (74)  are spotted; another reader is an “ironfoot iliad / girl” (73). Even the dust that these books contain seems nearly alive, as when “Dust motes land immaturely from // joy or have to Race” (71) and “Sweet Artaud dust // flies through decades” (74). Yet such moments of near animation (if not prosopopeia; these figures remain silent) exist in a context of imminent extinction: “the epoch of paper” is “los[ing] breath” (75) in an era of “praxis screens” (72) and “laptops” (77). The books Hillman describes are thus able both to figuratively transfer their former aliveness to their readers (or at least enable them to embody their creators  and protagonists) and to express their future vanishing in ways that confuse past with future, as well as the material with the figurative. This confusion is evident in—and may help explain—Hillman’s at-­ times ambiguous syntax, as in a description of “Silent Reading” in the poem of that title, “To hold // halfway letters from visible or with / To have no cause but breath” (69). Breath here persists, as does holding, but it’s unclear who performs those acts. What persist are “letters,” though these can only be “h[e]ld // halfway.” It is significant that Hillman’s poems take place in a library, a public gathering space in which books are freely available to all who seek them, rather than a bookstore or private collection. Libraries are also spaces of classification, as Hillman notes by referring to several Library of Congress identifiers.4 But while this classification system evokes what I have been calling the indexical, Hillman’s poems are neither comprehensive nor systematic. Instead, they offer a subjective and idiosyncratic alternative to the (proto-economic) logic of indexicality. This  alternative quantifies what can’t be counted in ways suggested by the volume’s title, which suggests both impossible countability (“[a]ir” doesn’t come in “[p]ieces”) and impossible spatialization (the “[e]pic” doesn’t have an inside).

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Though libraries aren’t spaces of economic transaction, Hillman’s use of the term aura indirectly evokes the marketplace. Hillman refers repeatedly to the auras emitted by people and books, suggesting that books emit an invisible essence similar to that which some believe surrounds living beings.5 But the term also recalls, as Susan McCabe has noted, Walter Benjamin’s association of the aura with the original, rather than the mechanically reproduced version or facsimile.6 Benjamin emphasizes that commercial reproductions undermine the “unique aura of” originals, as when a film replaces the actor as living “person” with “the phony spell of the commodity” (12). (Hillman was reading the letters between Benjamin and Theodor Adorno while composing these poems [Hass].) Hillman’s use of aura seems in this sense punning: it reminds us that books can be (or seem) both alive and commodified. Or perhaps books embody what Robert Kaufman has called “the commodity form’s version of aura or semblance” or more simply the “[c]ommodity aura” (211), the effect of the commodity’s “[attempt] positively to sell or serve up auratic luminosity as genuine, free immediacy” in ways that provide an “illusion” of authenticity essential to the workings of the marketplace (212).7 Libraries perpetrate a similar illusion by harboring commodities that possess the aura of noncommodities, though they also participate in the financialized marketplace, as the rise of e-book lending makes especially clear.8 Hillman’s interest in these issues is especially evident in “Brittle Economics Monographs” (75). In “the HF’s,” where economics books (more specifically, books on commerce) are stored, “[r]eaders are crying.” The cause is ambiguous: they may be crying because “the epoch of paper” is ending or because the books’ “graphs & maps, prone algebra squiggles” render “knowledge … lonely since meaning left,” a possible reference to the fact that commerce is classified as a science rather than an art (Library, Class H). Or maybe the readers are merely seeking a quiet section of the library. Then a “marx // boy passes,” holding a book that undermines the ordinary economics of the book market insofar as its “fabric” was “shipped // tariffless by cypher code.” In contrast, “Old Blake // sleeps upside down … //… six aisles hence,” the “aura around his // head” contrasting with the comparatively lifeless and “[b]rittle” “[e]conomics [m]onographs.” * * *

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While Hillman’s library poems directly consider the situation and future of the (print) book, the volumes by Ruefle and Carson that I consider in the remainder of this chapter enact these concerns by manipulating both their volumes’ archival sources and their own status as facsimiles of handmade originals. The future vanishing of these books, which Hillman identifies directly, is evident in Ruefle and Carson’s simultaneous rescue and debridement of already fragile paper works. (Several other poets have also published facsimile versions of handwritten texts to similar effect, including Susan Howe and Ander Monson.9) And while Hillman refers to economics, or at least to books about economics, both Ruefle and Carson’s volumes evoke—albeit figuratively—both financialization’s confusion of time frames and its capacity to profit from future declines. This chapter makes several claims. Reading Ruefle and Carson’s volumes in conjunction with the notion of financialization, and in particular the derivative, I here argue, helps explain their relation to originality and (literary) derivativeness. While, as in Chap. 4, these volumes don’t treat financialization directly—financialization is if anything even more figurative in this chapter—reading them in this context reveals their preoccupation with concerns that echo contemporary economic ones, as well as with valuation, permanence, and ephemerality more generally. These volumes thus consider the figurative nature of financialization  itself. To explore such issues, I will be less concerned with analyzing particular passages than in previous chapters; rather, my focus is on  exploring  how these books present themselves as textual objects. This difference is, I hope, especially clear in relation to Nox: I here link the volume’s physical instantiation to a form (the derivative) that instantiates the volume’s thematics of securitized debt, discussed in Chap. 4. Derivatives, whose annual valuation has increased dramatically over recent decades, are financial contracts whose worth derives from an underlying asset.10 As “a secondary investment vehicle, an asset whose value depends on … another” (Haiven 152), derivatives “have no intrinsic value” but rely on and seek to profit from future gains and losses in stocks, bonds, currencies (explored in Joshua Clover’s “Long Term Capital Management”), bundled mortgages, and other nonmaterial entities as well as commodities (Banca). Derivatives are always dividual: they enable “buyers to purchase only certain dimensions of an underlying security” (Haiven 152) even as they “bundle together or package” diverse securities

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(Martin, “Precarious” 67). By creating profits from bets about future rather than current value, derivatives alter the “speed, duration, and scale” of investing (Martin, “What” 202), partly by seeking “huge profits” through “small investments” (Haiven 152), converting what “might have appeared scarce” into “a kind of abundance” (Martin, “Precarious” 66). They also often profit when entitities lose value, a notion central to the derivative in general according to Appadurai, who defines it as a “bet on the risk of defaulting debt” (Banking 136). Ruefle and Carson engage with the derivative in at least two ways. First, they create works that are derivative in the vernacular sense by refashioning extant (if at times partial) source texts into facsimile versions that seem handmade. A related aesthetic of repackaging has been linked to financialization. Max Haiven, for example, has associated an often blurred “line between ‘creative’ and ‘derivative’ artwork” with both “post-Bretton Woods financialization” and new “technologies of art’s mechanical and digital reproduction” (150–51). Others have made related claims.11 Like several of the volumes considered in previous chapters, both A Little White Shadow and Nox employ indexical acts of sorting and collating, though their apparent attempts at comprehensiveness fail. Instead, as I suggested in Chap. 4 in relation to Nox’s Catullus translation, both volumes physically juxtapose thrift with waste: Ruefle’s selective erasure of a diminutive novella involves the application of large quantities of whiteout in varying thicknesses, while Nox’s transposition of a sewn notebook into an accordion book creates a blank backside to the book’s single printed-on page. Second, both volumes engage with nonlinear time frames by overlaying, and at times seeming to confuse, the moments of composition, assembly, and reading in ways that evoke the recent consensus (or at least the oft-repeated claim) that “‘the Age of Print’ [is] draw[ing] to a close” (Hayles 97), a view supported by recent changes in the book publishing industry.12 Such a  consensus has sometimes led to a nostalgia for print books, exemplified by Sven Birkerts’s 1994 “[e]leg[y]” for “the old act of slowly reading a serious book”; reading print books, Birkerts claims, both “cut[s] against the momentum of the times” and lets readers “slip out of our customary time orientation … into the realm of duration” (qtd. in Staid). More recent commentators have elaborated similar themes in the context of poetry.13 These notions recall the “insecur[ity]” and “ephemeral[ity]” generally  associated with print books (Harris

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120)  alongside their status as commodities;  even handmade and artist’s books have been called “market oriented” (Drucker 4).14 Appadurai links these ideas, claiming that the contemporary marketplace has created and profited  from an “ersatz nostalgia (Modernity 78) that emphasizes the “valorization of ephemerality” (83). Neither Ruefle nor Carson present nostalgic elegies for the print book, despite at least one scholar’s claim to the contrary.15 Instead, they participate in what Jessica Pressman has called a more general tendency to transform “the threat posed to books by digital technologies” into “a source of … inspiration and … experimentation,” including “experimentation with the media-specific properties of print.” Both volumes directly consider the ways nostalgia can be, as Appadurai suggests, manufactured and marketed. Both also manipulate nonchronological time in ways that evoke what one reader calls the “logic of pre-emptive futurity” (Haiven 152) essential to the derivative. Derivatives, that is, “[make] certain aspects of the future actionable in the present” (Martin, “What” 202). They engage in “a kind of time travel” that “actual[ly] bring[s] … the future into the present” (Clover, “Value” 16) in ways that allow “the future [to remake] the past” (17), a dynamic that recalls Howe’s claim that archived items antichronologically offer a “deposit from a future yet to come” (17). My focus in Chap. 3 was on dynamics of animation and deanimation in relation to consumerism, while in Chap. 4 I focused on the ways that the synecdochic possibility of wholeness (or individualism) was rendered impossible by the dividuation of entities associated with loss. The current chapter, like Chap. 2, links problematic synecdoche to animation, including prosopopeia. Ruefle and Carson’s emphasis on their volumes’ constituent parts—the texts they adapt as well as the ways they have been assembled—disrupt the possibility of synecdochic wholeness. But both also reveal ambivalence about aliveness. In ways that evoke Hillman’s discussion of the auratic qualities of the print book and Howe’s association of archives with “occult invocation,” both A Little White Shadow and Nox, as facsimiles, recall Kaufman’s “[c]ommodity aura,” whose “illusion” of authenticity  ultimately serves the marketplace (211–12). The physical properties of these facsimile book, that is, evoke the poet’s hand (and handiwork). But both Ruefle and Carson  also  figuratively animate their texts themselves, albeit in ways that depend on (and proleptically animate) their readers. * * *

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Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow takes as its source text a novella of the same name with a complex relation to economics: it was both, the title page indicates, “Published for the Benefit of a Summer Home for Working Girls” and based on what one reader has identified as a “self-published … Christian-themed inspirational tale of a young heiress summering in Italy” (Kaplan, “Destroying”). This contrast between the impoverished and the wealthy is evoked, and also rendered figurative, by Ruefle’s comment that her volume is “a book of poetry without a single poem in it” (qtd. in Kaplan, “Destroying”), a comment that recalls the derivative’s capacity to dispense with physical commodities. But Shadow is also derivative in a simpler sense: its “worth,” to recall Haiven’s description of the derivative, “depends on” the novella on which it is based, and its “value” derives from only “certain aspects of” this text.16 The volume’s manipulation of scale, another tendency often associated with the derivative form, as I indicated above, is physical rather than financial. Ruefle’s volume measures only 4.5 by 5.8 inches, the same dimensions as the original novella (Kaplan, Email). Ruefle’s erasure practices further diminish these already-small pages: her version of Shadow removes nearly all the original text’s words, leaving just a few on each page, though the implication is also that these excisions increase the value of the text. The epigraph, “So much the less complete,” itself a partial erasure of the original epigraph, makes this paradox explicit by joining bounty (“much”) with dearth (“less”) in the context of incompleteness. The volume’s title presents a related paradox: by unmaking the darkness of actual shadows, the white shadow turns absence into presence, a technique literalized in the volume, which imposes bright white whiteout on what appear to be pages turned sepia with age. The volume thus creates what one reader calls a “tangible quantity of … lack” (King): rather than excising words and eliding the space between them, as do several other erasure volumes, Ruefle lets readers see how much was removed by “preserv[ing] the spatial presentation of [her] source texts” (King).17 Though erasing of the original text is a strategy by which the volume makes meaning, Ruefle also materializes it by publishing her erased original in facsimile. (She has also, as Genevieve Kaplan notes, published at least two erasure volumes electronically.18) The variable ways Ruefle applied whiteout—sometimes it’s nearly transparent and sometimes applied in gobs; at times, it seems dabbed on, at others brushed—offers the reader another, nonverbal way to understand the volume, one that suggests, for example, the relative haste with which Ruefle worked on each

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page. At the same time, this variability evokes the kind of slippage I described at the start of this chapter; the reader keeps touching what looks like an original page, expecting to feel the thickness of the whiteout, only to be reminded that it is a facsimile. By impelling an old, seemingly forgotten novella into the future, Ruefle echoes the “time travel” engaged in by the derivative, which also renders the future present. But nostalgia, or what Appadurai calls ersatz nostalgia, also persists, along with a seemingly ironized sentimentality that recalls the interchangeability of “happy” and “sad” in Ruefle’s My Private Property. The original novella, the reproduced original title page reveals, was written “[i]n memory of E.B.M.” and copyrighted by “E.M.M.,” likely a surviving relative. It thus appears to be a sentimental, and perhaps didactic, account of bereavement and consolation directed at the “[w]orking [g]irls” for whom it was apparently written. A similar sentimentalism is visually evident in the old-fashioned Gothic font of the title and dedication pages. The cover uses what is apparently the volume’s original Gothic font but lists Ruefle as author in the same font. A full spread consisting of two copyright pages juxtaposes a recto containing the original copyright information with a facing verso that includes Ruefle’s name and the book’s actual publisher and publication date in the same font. The title page splits the difference: here, Ruefle’s name is hand-signed on a whited-out area that apparently conceals the original author’s name; the partly whited-out epigraph is included along with the printed publication information and date of Ruefle’s volume (Fig. 5.1). These features make the book seem antique in ways that evoke Appadurai’s definition of “patina” as the valuable “gloss of age” associated with venerated objects. For Appadurai, patina signals “a way of life … no longer available” to those whose “lifestyles are threatened” but also a way “merchandisers” sell objects associated with “‘imagined nostalgia,’ nostalgia for things that never were” (Modernity 76–77). In Ruefle’s original text, the patina—or at least the oldness of the source text—is evident in the sepia hue of the pages, though it’s unclear whether they were originally sepia or grew darker after the novella was published. But her reproduction of this text also affirms the artificiality of its patina in ways that evoke both imagined nostalgia and Kaufman’s commodity aura. While the volume’s front matter seems to explain the book’s provenance, stickers on several pages raise questions about the chronology (as well as the logic) of Shadow’s composition and assembly. These stickers (including images of a chair [25] and the words “on end” [42]) date from

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Fig. 5.1  Title page, A Little White Shadow

after the original novella’s composition, and while it’s likely that Ruefle affixed them, it is possible that they were inserted by an earlier reader. A miniature image of an old-fashioned hand-addressed envelope (41) seems more clearly to have been added by Ruefle, partly because it literalizes a reference in adjacent unerased text to “a letter.” But here too it’s unclear whether the reproduction is of a random envelope from the same period as the original novella, whether it is related to the novella (though the names on the envelope don’t correspond to those of author or dedicatee) or to Ruefle’s acquisition of the novella, or whether it has other significance. While such moments don’t fully render the future present, they raise questions about the volume’s composition and purpose that seem unanswerable. We don’t know, for example, whether Ruefle planned each

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page’s excisions or the entire volume ahead of time or whether they emerged spontaneously nor whether Ruefle initially planned to publish her erasure or whether it was originally done for her own amusement. Shadow in these ways offers a negative gamble on the print book. Its (faux) tactility evokes Ruefle’s original erasure, but it keeps reminding its readers that it is a facsimile. In a context in which, in Hillman’s terms, “the epoch of paper” is “los[ing] breath” (75), the volume seems to cling to this epoch while also parodying it, at least in the front matter. In this way, it engages in a derivative logic that generates profit from a future expansion as well as a future collapse. The volume offers a related negative gamble on the persistence of poetry by evoking and also exaggerating the poetic convention of prosopopeia. Ruefle repeatedly animates objects and ideas (including “the number // blue” [4] and “autumn” [5]), especially in the first part of the book. Objects are also given a partial or figurative voice, as when an unidentified “one in ruins // struck / notes” (3) and “seven centuries of // sobbing / gathered / in the /twilight. // and /had their / pages // wandered, through” (8). Like the shrunken head in Ruefle’s My Private Property, the objects depicted here are both beings and things. Ruefle makes a related point early in Shadow in relation to “the dead,” who “borrow so little from / the past // as if they were alive” (9). Though the dead are here capable of “borrow[ing],” they aren’t really alive, rendering the borrowing figurative: it is insignificant (“so little”) and comes “from / the past.” Or perhaps the point is that the dead—along with the logic of prosopopeia and poetic figuration generally—exist to make visible the logic of borrowing (or debt, to recall Chap. 4). But Shadow borrows not only from the past (exemplified by the novella) but from the future moment in which the book is read, which also seems about to vanish. Though the dead can’t be brought to life, Ruefle elsewhere emphasizes the pseudo-birth of text itself.  On the volume’s last two pages, she describes God, who “having once caught/ sight of // a letter // … / changed // the ‘Little / White Shadow’” (41–2). The “letter” is part of the alphabet but also a missive; like the poet herself, God generates from a provisional act of reaching out not a living being or even a little white shadow but the volume we are reading now. Animation is thus always a figure for “[change]”: it gestures toward a future filled with risk. Elsewhere, Ruefle more directly considers acts of voicing, including that of “birds … singing // in the language // which some believe he wrote after he drew the portrait of her” (34). Ruefle doesn’t specify the identity of the male writer/artist or the female model.

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Fig. 5.2  From A Little White Shadow

Instead, what matters is the transposition of song into “language,” then drawing, then writing. In case we still can’t understand what she means, Ruefle offers a translation: “Ren- / dered into English // this was something of its meaning: // paper / on /fire” (34–5) (Fig. 5.2). Perhaps this moment, both explicit (the poet here “[r]ender[s]” her meaning plainly “into English”) and opaque (“paper / on fire” is not the singing’s whole meaning), exemplifies the fact that Shadow, despite or because of its apparently constant backward glance, is also looking toward a future in which paper is, literally or figuratively or both, “on fire.” In this context, Ruefle’s volume seems especially ephemeral, thriftily “borrow[ing]” just a “little from / the past” because it won’t, and can’t endure. If this moment or my reading of it exposes the risks of default that derivative logic seems designed to conceal, risks that have become

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abundantly evident in post-2008 financial markets, Ruefle elsewhere hedges her bets. On her website, she has posted several erasures of other texts, noting her intention “to allow readers to experience her erasure books, which [could] otherwise not be seen as they are old, friable, oneof-kind things” (Maryruefle.com). Her publisher’s web page also for a time (from 2006 to 2022) included a page entitled “Erasures,” which included excerpts of texts ranging from Aristophanes’ The Clouds to a history of a “[g]un [d]etachment” by John Henry Parker and instructed readers how to perform electronic erasures to create “a newly sculpted text (poem)”; the website also had a section where readers could post their own erasures (Wave). In contrast, Shadow is simultaneously compressed and extravagant and also both wasteful and compact; its cryptic phrases mostly defy interpretation, derived as they are from idiosyncratic acts of erasure that create a product with a distinctive aura or patina. Ruefle’s volume, that is, seems intimate and one-of-a-kind, but it is also a commodity available to anyone with the desire and money to acquire it. * * * As a paean to (and exemplification of) the print book, Nox offers a gamble if anything riskier than Ruefle’s: Carson, whose interest in implementing collage and other visual-art techniques in her books seems to have increased since Nox’s publication, also arguably stands to lose more if the print book becomes completely obsolete.19 As I suggested in Chap. 4, Carson’s volume is concerned with protoeconomic concepts including loss, stinginess, gift giving, and indebtedness, which it explores through an extravagant (and perhaps overcompensatory) representation of absence. But the absence Nox conveys is also evident through Carson’s assemblage and reproduction of a variety of kinds of paper scraps, which Nox presents in a format that emphasizes excess. Nox reproduces a handmade original notebook on which the mark of the poet’s hand is evident. Yet, like Shadow, the published  book is a facsimile reliant on contemporary and computerized printing, binding, and reproduction techniques, their complexity reflected in the volume’s relatively high cover price.20 I have already laid out some of the ways Carson engages with wastefulness and lack, most notably in her extended translation of each word in Catullus’ Carmen  101.  The book as a physical object extends this

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interplay. Nox repeats the same visual images multiple times (an excerpt from a letter from Carson’s brother Michael, for example, is positioned differently on thirty sequential pages). The published book represents a change in format, or what might be termed, in keeping with my argument in Chap. 4, a translation: Nox reproduces a sewn-thread notebook as an accordion book; the original notebook’s thread is visible within each valley fold of the accordion. Most accordion books are two sided, enabling two distinct but linked reading experiences, but Carson’s version contains a facsimile of the original on the front side of what appears to be a single long accordioned page while leaving the reverse side blank. This decision reveals an excessiveness that recalls Ruefle’s thick application of whiteout; Carson’s published volume is twice as long as the original notebook. In this context, hints of the notebook’s format and three-dimensionality— including images of the backs of staples, indentations on pages previous to or following heavily inscribed or scratched-out text, and darkened pages facing an image based on a rubbing—visually gesture toward an original to which readers don’t have access, inviting the reader, as in Shadow, to touch a page that keeps revealing its status as a facsimile. While the materials Carson mostly glues, scrapbook-style, into the sewn-thread notebook preceded Nox’s assembly, the volume evokes a more complex time frame than Shadow. This complexity derives partly from the materials that Carson includes, which include apparent childhood photos of Michael, sometimes with other family members; text composed by Carson; reproductions of a letter in Michael’s handwriting; monochromatic paintings assumedly by Carson; a typed transcript of a conversation and a letter; and more. But Carson also reveals her manipulation of these sources, a process that seems to have occurred after she collected the parts of the text and also sometimes after their insertion into the notebook. Some pages—including all the word-by-word translations of Catullus—were crumpled and then flattened out before being glued into the notebook. Others, including both the original Latin of the full poem and Carson’s complete translation of it, are also blurred, apparently because the author wet the pages they were printed on; other pages are so dirty they are hardly legible. But Carson makes the varied time frames of the volume’s composition evident in other ways. Most of the pages include glued, or sometimes stapled, pieces of paper that Carson evidently prepared in advance. She several times makes her corrections of the original text evident by gluing an additional scrap of paper over the original

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Fig. 5.3  From Nox

glued-on page (Fig. 5.3). Carson also creates collages from cut-up photos of (and sometimes apparently by) Michael, some of which appear in intact form elsewhere. She also includes a collage made from several cut-up copies of her final Catullus translation (Fig. 5.4). It is evident that least one page was torn out of the original notebook. These and other compositional techniques invite a kind of archaeological reading practice: they enable the reader to reconstitute the order in which different parts of the text were composed. But they also introduce, as do the added stickers in Shadow, a series of unanswerable questions about the book’s order of composition. It’s not clear from Nox itself, for example, whether Carson originally conceived of the project as a private, personal scrapbook or whether it was intended for publication and if so, whether the accordion book format was always part of the plan, though

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Fig. 5.4  Overlaid and manipulated copies of part of Carson’s translation of Catullus’ Carmen 101, Nox

Carson has commented on such questions elsewhere.21 Nor is it clear whether the numbered sections of the text were composed separately and then cut up, or written piecemeal, or whether the book was assembled as its parts were being composed or storyboarded as a complete volume before being assembled. I have lingered on these uncertainties because they recall the related, if less acute, overlaying of time frames in Ruefle’s volume. I associated that impulse with the derivative’s impulse to make the future present, linking

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Ruefle’s depiction of a past imbued with attributes of the economized present with Appadurai’s belatedly imposed patina and Kaufman’s commodity aura, both of which impose an illusion of authenticity that they also undermine. A similar argument can be made about Nox, though, as I have been arguing, it contains a more complex chronology, one evident mostly spatially, via its overlaid bits of paper. That Nox is contained in rigid cardboard box enables a different chronological doubling: contained in this box, Nox can be read from beginning to end like an ordinary codex book, but it can also be removed  and  unfolded into a single, enormous page. In this way, Nox complicates the distinction between past, present, and future as it affirms the possibility that the future can be imposed, derivative-­ style, onto the present and the past onto the present. The volume’s physical form also refers to embodiment in ways that evoke Rankine’s Lonely, as is evident in several paintings in Nox of body parts, including a long bent leg, an open-mouthed face, and a pair of hands.  Carson’s attention to her book’s materiality and to its capacity to delineate and also  undermine straightforward temporality evokes the derivative’s negative bet. But it does so not by emphasizing the immaterial or fictitious capital in which the derivative demonstrates faith (Marx Memorial) but rather the material properties of the book. Carson’s scrapbook like, labored-over volume thus commits itself wholly to a hand-­ fashioned, print mode that seems at particular risk. Perhaps in this way the time travel of the derivative isn’t so different from that of book publishing or artistic making: all these modes express hope in a highly uncertain future. In this context, Nox’s excesses can be read as evidence of Carson’s capacity to pay it forward, gambling on the print book’s endurance while leaving open the possibility of profiting, hedge-style, from its loss. Nox is, after all, as I argued above, both an epitaph—an emblem of permanence apparently signaled by its enclosing box—and an elegiac, fragile consideration of what is already gone. I noted in Chap. 4 that Nox refuses to animate Michael, even in ghostly form, preferring the model of translation to full-scale animation or prosopopeia. But the volume arguably brings the poet to life, or at least reveals her bodily presence; as with Ruefle’s by-turns rapid and labored whitings out, Carson’s pressed-down images and corrected typos reveal her mindset. But Carson’s preparation of this book also, like Ruefle’s volume (and, to a lesser extent, any work of art) engages in another provisional act of

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animation: it anticipates its readers’ touch, even if it doesn’t depict these readers or make them speak. This is why holding and reading the book feels intimate: we gain proximity, more vividly and graphically than in Keats’s description of his living hand, to Carson’s actual one. By separating my discussion of Nox into two chapters, I have perhaps reinscribed a distinction I mean to undermine between the physical book and its contents and also between the book as physical object and the figurativity of its words. Carson, like Ruefle, disregards such distinctions, partly by manipulating a medium–the book–that is never literally alive. But both volumes also gesture, nostalgically perhaps because tenderly, at the possibility that they can represent their authors’ living hands not only in language but by visually representing their impetuosity and diligence. This is in a sense the fantasy perpetrated by the financialized market, which is often, as I suggested above, personified as a living being averse to human meddling. If the book even partly resembles the market, Ruefle and Carson may be suggesting, its value comes not from its near extinction but from the fact that it is, in the end, a commodity, albeit one compelled to flaunt its always artificial aura. * * * The capacity of financialization to profit later from what lacks value now is inherently figurative: it involves a fantasy, no matter that it may sometimes be supported by data and statistics. Financialization in this way contradicts ordinary logic by transforming disaster into a way to make a profit. That transformational possibility is a staple of contemporary narratives, many of which—for example, those touted by the wellness industry—exemplify the logic of financialization. In this context, the physical wastefulness of Ruefle and Carson’s volumes exemplifies their authors’ racial and economic privilege. But both volumes also arguably offer rejoinders to a logic of austerity whose effects are ever-evident in the lives of North American citizens. (I write these words in Summer 2022, as the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates, a move aimed to raise prices and unemployment levels as a way to eventually reduce inflation.) Poetry more generally, as the authors I have considered throughout this book have demonstrated, is antithetical to efficiency, partly because it traffics in the figurative. I have been tracing throughout these chapters the ways synecdoche and prosopopeia in recent poems convey and also challenge contemporary experience, especially

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economic experience. But this tendency also suggests something surprising about the recently maligned position of poetry in North American culture: even poems that don’t look or sound like poetry, much less like lyric poetry, keep repurposing traditionally lyric devices in ways relevant to contemporary situations. Maybe this fact helps undermine the omnipresence of economic modes of thinking in contemporary North American life, or maybe it simply reveals that poetry can’t, in the end, stand wholly outside them. But it seems more likely that the authors I have considered are also interested in the aesthetic and other pleasures—even if compromised, escapist, inconsistent, or vexing—enabled by  their engagement with contemporary economics. This sense of pleasure and play seems especially important given these authors’ commitment to making sense of the forces, economic and other, that compel them (and us) to feel by turns paralyzed—like unalive objects—and impelled to act, even if that action is writing a poem. I am ending this chapter, and the body of this book, then, by looking both back to the tradition of lyric and forward to its future iterations. But poetry is also important, as the poems I have considered demonstrate, because it so easily dispenses with chronological ways of thinking. Easily, repeatedly, effortlessly, poems look back at the future and forward to the past. In Elizabeth Bishop’s “Poem,” after all, the elms in the speaker’s great-uncle’s painting are “yet-to-be-dismantled,” enduring in the painting Bishop describes and in the poem in which she has placed them, their future obsolescence contained, if not by the elms themselves, then by the words that describe them.

Notes 1. In contrast, Love calls the typographical “remote and impersonal,” “sober and inexpressive,” and “authoritarian” (204). 2. Appadurai defines the derivative as “an asset whose value is based on that of another asset” (4). Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, among others, call the derivative “foundation[al] to global finance” (153). 3. In financial terms, speculating is a type of derivative contract that anticipates and attempts to profit from guesses about future “changes in market prices or rates or credit events.” Hedging, in contrast, attempts “to protect against adverse changes in the values of … assets or liabilities” by providing “an increase in the value of the derivative contract” if there is “a fall in [asset] value.” While these types of derivatives are often contrasted, it is “difficult to differentiate the two in practice” (Chui).

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4. Hillman refers both to the PS classification (73), which includes American literature  (Library, Class P), and to HF (75), which refers to commerce (Library, Class H). 5. For example, Hillman refers to “readers’ // delft blue auras” (71), to “Old Blake[’s] “bunchy brown aura” (75), and to “[l]ate auras … being // swept out” (78). The concept of the aura derives from Hindu beliefs and has been defined as “a fine, ethereal radiation or e­ manation surrounding each … living human being” and “a great egg-shaped nebula surrounding the body on all sides for a distance of two or three feet” that is synonymous with “the ‘psychic atmosphere’ of a person, or … his ‘magnetic atmosphere’” (Himalaya). 6. McCabe notes that just as Benjamin emphasizes the “los[s of] art’s singularity, immanence, and timelessness,” Pieces of Air “mourns the loss of ‘thingliness,’ … the erosion of oral culture … [and] the near demise of the age of the book” (67). 7. Kaufman derives this idea from what he calls Adorno and Benjamin’s “basically shared account” of the aura (211). 8. Daniel Gross has elaborated the ways that the sale of “digital distribution rights” rather than actual books to libraries has increased library costs along with publishers’ and “digital content” distributors’ profits. 9. Monson’s 2015 Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries reproduces and comments on marginalia the author found in various books, including those in libraries. The volume’s title emphasizes its faith in the future; Monson also defines a library as “a message to the future” (58). Howe’s poetry collections—which often combine prose sections with lineated  poems—have since the mid-1970s included pictures and images of overlaid lines of text; her 2003 volume The Midnight includes photos of overlaid book covers and pages, family photographs, images of historic characters, and other objects. Her prose text Spontaneous Particulars was, as Howe indicates, “originally conceived as a lecture” to be accompanied by “images” of manuscript and other written-on pages displayed in a “slide-show” (9); the volume discusses and reproduces documents from several archives. 10. The annual worth of derivatives has risen from several million dollars in 1970 to one hundred billion dollars in 1990 to one hundred trillion in 2000 (LiPuma and Lee 47). 11. David Watson has identified a recent preoccupation with the logistics of book “production and distribution” in recent fiction about financialization (95), and Alan Liu links an “avant-garde” aesthetic concerned with “mutations, remixings, and destructions” with the rise of digital information work (322).

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12. In addition to the longstanding consolidation of independent publishers into larger corporatized conglomerates, publishing has increasingly offshored and automated previously manual labor (Gardiner and Musto 166), while the rise of electronic publishing has introduced a new model of profit-­making based not on book sales but proprietary software (169). 13. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth lists the titles of several volumes of poetry from the 2000s that consider the end of print (17); Kevin Stein predicts that the recent tendency for poets to compose on the computer will lead “those things we now think of as draft, worksheet, and manuscript [to] fade like stars at sunrise” (161). 14. Artist’s books, Johanna Drucker claims, reflect publishers’ attempts both to establish “an expanded market for visual art” (emphasis added) and to appeal to “editors …in part as a new commodity” (3). Yet Drucker also distinguishes “market oriented” (4) editors from those dedicated to “publishing innovative, creative, or experimental work” who are, she claims, less concerned with “making money” (7). 15. Françoise Palleau-Papin has called Nox “a cultural elegy to the history of printing and communication” (qtd. in Wiesenthal 190–91). 16. Genevieve Kaplan notes that “creating [the volume] must have necessitated dismantling Ruefle’s … bound volume … , [then] scanning pages of the unbound book to form the new text” (“Destroying”). 17. At times so-called erasure poems or volumes “don’t preserve the spatial aspects of their source texts” (King), instead creating a new format for the resulting poem, though some black- or whiteout the original text or include it in a paler font (Macdonald). 18. Ruefle’s two other erasure volumes are “viewable solely online” and thus provide a wholly “visual” rather than tactile experience (Kaplan, “Destroying”). Ruefle’s promise to change the books displayed on her website annually (Maryruefle.com) makes them temporally precarious or, to use the term I introduced above, ephemeral. 19. Carson’s subsequent chapbook Nay Rather (2013) includes two distinct texts on recto and verso pages, as well as painted images. This print text was subsequently reproduced in her 2016 Float, which comprises separate pamphlets that can be removed and reinserted in any order. H of H Playbook (2021), an eclectic translation of Euripides’ Herakles, incorporates glued scraps of text, glued-on visual images, and drawings on pages in a codex format. 20. At a cost of fifty dollars, the book is arguably less accessible to readers than a conventionally bound volume would be. It’s worth noting that several publishers of handwritten facsimile books include multiple  formats:

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Monson’s Letter to a Future Lover, for example, is available in a codex trade edition as well as two more expensive “art” editions, including a limited edition—a box containing a series of unbound six-by-nine-inch cards that can be removed, reordered, and “tucked into books, as the reader desires”—and a deluxe limited edition of fifty numbered and signed copies. 21. In an interview, Carson revealed that, in Parul Seghal’s paraphrase, “After completing her [original ­scrapbook] copy of Nox, and not yet harbouring any plans to publish it (‘I didn’t think it possible’), she met a publisher of art books in Germany who offered to do a facsimile” (qtd. in Wiesenthal 190).

CHAPTER 6

Coda: “[T]hese gestures of redress sailed to me!”: U.S. Poetry After 2016

Abstract  The Coda, “‘[T]hese gestures of redress sailed to me!’: U.S. Poetry After 2016,” turns to poems published after Donald Trump’s presidential election that gesture toward an alternate approach to the economic concerns presented in earlier chapters. The Coda begins with a 2018 sonnet by Terrance Hayes that defines the term money both as currency and the town where Emmett Till was killed. The poem suggests a provisional alternative to the explicitly economic concerns of earlier chapters, one that emphasizes the imbrication of politics, feeling, activism, loss, and economics in the context of racial injustice.  A similar dynamic is explored in recent poems about reparations by Joshua Bennett (2020) and Marcus Wicker (2019–20). For both poets, reparations offer not only economic but cultural and psychological repair. In this way, these poems gesture toward the emergence of a different idiom and mode of figuration, one less reliant on containment than on the capacity to speak in hitherto unheard voices. Keywords  Reparations and poetry • Ethics and poetry • U.S. poetry after 2016 • Contemporary U.S. poetry • Terrance Hayes • Joshua Bennett • Marcus Wicker

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Keniston, Economies of Scale, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39341-9_6

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The third sonnet in Terrance Hayes’s 2018 American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin (7), one of five whose first line is “But there never was a black male hysteria,” emphasizes the indistinguishability of money’s economic and racial-historical-ethical connotations. Among several explanations the poem gives for the absence or failure of male hysteria is this one: “Because … / … / … a clutch of goons drove you through Money, / Stole your money, paid you money, stole it again.” When “Money” recurs in the twelfth line—the poem’s end words are repeated in inverse order, beginning with line seven—the reference is explicitly to “Money, / Mississippi,” where Emmett Till was lynched. While money is evident as currency, albeit currency able to be “stole[n], paid, … [and] stole[n] again,” it also alludes to an act of violence that the poem never explicitly identifies. Though Hayes doesn’t fully explain the relation between these different meanings of money, the fact that the volume as a whole, as Hayes has noted, responds to the Trump presidency offers a possible explanation (Theut), as do other slippages and puns in the poem and a reference to Till in relation to what “is owed” in another poem (49).1 Several references to the phrase “black male review,” for example,  variously signal a performance at “ladies night,” the work of “offices, … courts & waiting rooms,” and what occurs in “weight rooms.” According to Joshua Bennett’s gloss, these notions are linked: “What we might otherwise regard as celebrity, attention, or even love is shown here to be little more than another form of surveillance” (“Another”). It’s thus unsurprising that money is both freely traded (if also subject to theft) and associated with control. The instability of the poem’s you furthers the slippage: the addressee at first seems to be Till (in the line “a clutch of goons drove you through Money”) but later seems to refer to his assassins, though their “jolts & tears[, which] gained / Rubberneckers, eyeballers & bawlers” may also refer to Till’s posthumous fame. Or perhaps the addressee is the titular “past and future assassin,” who has killed and will again kill the speaker. Certainly the poem can be read as an ironic enumeration of the reasons a “black male hysteria” might be justified, although the poem seems to deny this justification. Economic factors (those associated with money) contribute to the problem, but they are less important than the “[a]ssassin[ation]” that occurred in “Money, / Mississippi.” It’s possible to read the poem itself as a not-fully-economic mode of repayment, which, like Mullen’s S*PeRM**K*T, uses puns to challenge what it seems to espouse. In this context, Hayes’s sonnet can be understood in terms of

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reparation or repair: rejecting economic logic, it indirectly advocates something akin to what Hayes has elsewhere called “forgiveness,” “compassionate heroism,” and “vulnerability” (“Idyllwild”).2 * * * I have begun with Hayes’s sonnet to exemplify this Coda’s two main claims. First, since about 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president, poets have emphasized economics’ imbrication with other concerns, especially racial injustice. This shift arguably echoes a more general change in U.S. culture, perhaps epitomized by the turn from the explicitly economic protests associated with the 1999 Seattle protests at the World Trade Organization and the 2011–2012 Occupy Wall Street movement to  those following the 2013 founding of Black Lives Matter.3 (As I am writing this Coda, a fierce backlash against movements for racial justice is evident in the U.S. and elsewhere.4) It is perhaps more generally true that, as the 2008 recession and its aftereffects have receded, the connection between economic and sociopolitical concerns has become clearer, as is evident in recent arguments about postwar rebuilding efforts (Klein, Shock), climate change (Klein, This), and the unequal effects of Covid infection on different ethnic groups (Reyes). But it may also be true that political polarization during and after Trump’s presidency eclipsed the economic disparities that arguably underlay that polarization, especially given the financial support given to individuals and others during the first years of the Covid pandemic.5 A full consideration of these changes is beyond the scope of this book, but Matthew Desmond’s article “In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation”—originally published in The 1619 Project special issue of The New York Times Magazine (2019) and revised and retitled “Capitalism” for the 2021 book version (Hannah-Jones et al. 165–85)—has become something of a flashpoint.6 To support his general claim that “our nation’s peculiarly brutal economy” originated in plantation slavery, Desmond draws attention to “our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people to exert its will” and links slavery’s reliance on “mortgage-backed securities based on the inflated value of enslaved people” to the mortgaged-backed securities essential to contemporary financialization, as well as to 2008 economic collapse (“In”).

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That poems written after about 2016 emphasize racial injustice and identity more than economics is evident in several recent anthologies, as well as in several critical discussions of twenty-first-century U.S. poetry more generally.7 While those concerns aren’t this book’s explicit focus, many of the poets whose work I have considered in the chapters above link economic concerns to concerns about identity, history, colonialism, and racial stereotyping. The poems I consider in this Coda, as well those in several other recent volumes, suggest that post-2016 poems in particular tend to forgo what Jos Charles calls the “fraught genres” of “identity, trauma, [and] witness poetics” for an often nonlinear mode that juxtaposes fragments of personal experience with imagery evoking larger political and cultural forces.8 My second main point, and the subject of the remainder of this Coda, is that several recent poems about reparations exemplify what I am calling the recent shift away from economics as a singular, or even a central, poetic focus. Among several poets who have recently written on the topic, Joshua Bennett and Marcus Wicker explore reparation’s capacity to link the ethical with the economic.9 Both explore the overlap between reparations as a financial “payment of damages” (“Reparation”) and as what Nikole Hannah-Jones calls a more general “restitution … for the centuries of stolen labor and robbed opportunities” (463).10 This double sense of reparations as both ethically “right and necessary” (Hannah-Jones 475) and a specific means to close a longstanding “wealth gap” (Coates) is evident in Bennett and Wicker’s poems, as it is in House Resolution 40, a proposal to establish a committee to consider reparations, which was moved out of a U.S. House committee for the first time in 2021 after being stalled for over a decade (Human, “Historic”)  but was not voted on by the full House.11 But reparation for these poets also refers to repair and even what Hannah-Jones calls “[redemption]” (476). Beginning in what HannahJones calls a condition of indebtedness (475), these poems occupy the position not of debtor, as do those in Chap. 4, but of potential payee. Perhaps this is why they mostly disregard synecdoche and prosopopeia, instead relying on a simultaneously intimate and nonspecific apostrophe and placing economics within a larger political-historical frame. * * * Hayes’s American Sonnets, poet Joshua Bennett has observed, transform “[t]he American sonnet” into “a site of both retribution and

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re-­ imagination” (“Another”). A related doubleness of tone informs Bennett’s 2020 volume Owed, especially its four poems entitled “Reparation.” Bennett has explained that Owed is concerned with “celebration” (signaled by the homophone ode) but also with an “aesthetics of reparation,” a concept that he claims refers to the specific need to “fund Black students’ projects [,] … Black cultural centers, … Black communities,” and the like, as well as to “a larger social and psychic shift through which we can amend our relationship to Black spaces, Black vernacular, Black objects and performance and ways of knowing” (Bennett, “Joshua”). The volume exemplifies these ideas by positioning its poems as modes of (figurative) repayment for debts that have been traditionally unacknowledged. In “Owed to the 99 Cent Store” (41–42), one of several poems whose titles begin “Owed to,” such dynamics originate in economic debt but quickly exceed it, as when an unidentified    you tug on a dollar bill until it becomes an open field ....

This gesture seems opposed to the store’s association with “hustle” and “all these / poor folks stacked on top // of one another.” Its “tenacious meditation / on excess” ultimately exceeds the transactional, as when, at the poem’s end, the store offers (and also perhaps embodies) a   clarion call to the righteous singing come fill and be filled.

Similar dynamics inform the volume’s “Reparation” poems, which Bennett has called its most important (“Ten”). Like “Owed to the 99 Cent Store,” these poems engage with both literal and figurative notions of repair, recovery, and liberation, but they also consider public discourse, as when the first and longest poem (45–47) refers to “An apology on the Senate / floor,” apparently Senate Concurrent Resolution 26, which on its passage in 2009 offered an “[a]pology for the enslavement and segregation of African-Americans” while explicitly forbidding “any [legal or financial] claim against the United States” (United States, “Apologizing”).

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This first poem, the longest of the four, enumerates several events deserving apology or reparation, from the general “plunder / of our names” to the more particular “stares / of the second-grade teacher / calling your son a distraction.” It also transforms the infamously reneged­on post-Civil War promise of slavery reparations into the possibility of [f]orty acres & a jewel-encrusted orchid crown for each & every living baby girl growing up the way we did. The way we do.

Here the utilitarian promised mule is rendered, like an “orchid crown,” extravagant and beautiful, and the suffering girls are transformed both into royalty and exemplars of the plight of a collective “we” for whom the past experience of “growing up” is continuous with the present one. Elsewhere in the poem, though, the overlaying of time periods challenges the possibility of simple or universal reparations. The legacy of slavery is still evident in the “pursu[it]” of an unspecified “us” by the “laserlike vision” of “the U.S. school-to-prison / [state].” But it’s also evident in a reference to Bras-Coupé, a slave famous for his several escapes, though he was ultimately bludgeoned to death in exchange for a promised reward (Wagner and Lee). Bennett verbally unmakes Bras-Coupé’s death, depicting him as “resuscitated / with a sledgehammer” in ways that anticipate a subsequent reference to “want[ing] to survive / [though] the world said die.” A related wish seems evident in the poem’s final image of an apparently future “ship [heading] to wherever // we point on the map,” a destination “we … dare call / harbor, sanctum.” This ship gestures both forward to an unspecified future liberation and back to slave ships, whose journey it seems to reverse by enabling contemporary endangered children to “come home whole.” The poem’s historical juxtapositions and elaborate, specific imagery offer a figurative alternative to the inadequate Senate resolution, imaginatively restoring what is owed while repairing what is broken. While Bennett here refers obliquely to current debates about slavery reparations, subsequent “Reparation” poems emphasize the ways personal crisis can create an opportunity for repair. In the third (49), emotional repair coexists uneasily with the “plainly economic relation”

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between psychotherapist and client, though the poem doesn’t identify its addressee until more than halfway through the poem. The poem begins with a different kind of transaction, one premised on the therapist’s habitual question “How are you feeling?” At first, the speaker acknowledges “invariably tak[ing the question] in the wrong way,” as a demand for “damage reports.” While he later answers in more neutral terms (“I’m all right today”), he finally offers a fuller response, not to the therapist but to his readers, noting that “I gave myself credit for trying to change.” Then he reframes his answer into one that dispenses with economic language altogether: “Something in me awakened, today, / ready for liftoff. It sang.” While “Owed to the 99 Cent Store” describes “the righteous singing” of others, in this poem the speaker or at least “something in me” embodies song. The speaker also acknowledges that “you are good to me,” goodness an implied antidote to “damage,” its acts of repair contained but not undermined by the “economic relation” between speaker and addressee. * * * Three poems about reparations by Marcus Wicker, published in journals in 2019 and 2020 but not, as of 2023, in book form, also link financial to figurative reparations. As Wicker indicates on his website, they are informed by recent public debates about slavery reparations, including Ta-Nehisi Coates’s influential 2014 essay on the topic.12 Unlike Bennett’s reparation poems, Wicker’s are jumpy and evasive, avoiding first-person revelations and instead focusing on often paradoxical rhetorical situations and cultural phenomena. As a result, reparation in these poems feels both less stable and less redemptive than in Bennett’s but also more directly imbricated with economic concerns, which are also linked to repair. Two poems beginning with the phrase “Reparations Metric” rely, at least implicitly, on the punning equivalence between metrics as a timeseconomic means of quantitative measurement (Lutkevich) and as an element of poetry, though Wicker’s poems don’t adhere to fixed meter.13 “Reparations Metric: Reverse Stump Speech for Courting the Black Vote,” as its subtitle suggests, engages in a complex speech act: it addresses one or several political “[c]andidate[s],” critiquing their actions and speech while offering an alternative strategy designed to more effectively (but also cynically) win “the Black Vote.” The efficacy of trading economic bonuses

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for votes is questioned at the poem’s opening, which beseeches the candidate, Please believe, nobody’s out here looking   for a promotional incentive to be your bestie. Nobody’s asking   you to slash our retail rates.

Then the poem goes on to criticize the addressee’s “high yield guarantee on every / deposit” and proffered “rebate[s].” But these tactics aren’t necessarily ineffectual: the speaker acknowledges that they “might very well” influence his vote, partly, it seems, because he engages in “therapeutic / spending patterns.” Immediately following these apparent bribery attempts, the poem shifts to a quite different, nearly ecstatic and also poetic claim: “Accidental / as lighting these gestures of redress / sailed to me!” Redress, defined as a “remedy” or “compensation for a wrong or grievance” (“Redress”), resembles reparation, though it’s unclear what exactly “these gestures” are or how they are to be distinguished from financial incentives. Subsequent references to “two spiral // columns of wind” and “oxygen / molecules oaring” give this redress a Biblical and cosmic valence. So, more prosaically, does the poem’s subsequent denial that you [can] just soundbite flesh …………      & expect to win our hearts come election day.

(These hearts seem to belong to the aforementioned “ black & woke vote.”) Nor is the traditional political rhetoric surrounding slavery reparations adequate: the speaker warns the addressee not to “just tell me // you’d appoint a commissioner / to form a taskforce to / examine the issue,” an apparent reference to H. R. 40. The poem thus, as its title indicates, “[r]everse[s]” the logic of the traditional stump speech and perhaps also its own initial logic in ways that raise questions about whether the speaker is a reliable stand-in for the poet. But Wicker’s focus isn’t just on a candidate eager to court the African American vote. As the punning terms “metric” and “measure” imply, it is

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also concerned with language. While language is mostly depicted as a blunt tool for persuasion, as “focus-grouped” as the “flag pin / that pricks each morning,” the reparative possibilities of figuration are implied toward the poem’s end: should you win, & win again—   it better be the wounded brick color scheme   you use to redecorate the Office.

“[W]ound[ing],” these lines suggest, “better be” evident not only in the physical “[o]ffice” in which the winner works but also the more abstract “Office” occupied. “[A] tone” should be adopted “which, [sic] builds & / braces the house, without acknowledgment.” Rather than explicit “acknowledgment” or political proclamations, what matters seems to be the remembrance of past “wound[ing]”, perhaps including the fact that the White House was built using slave labor (Lewis). But this seemingly symbolic act is also literally able to “[joist]” the house above the “mounting water” that ends the poem. Injury itself may thus offer a means of reparation or even a “[m]etric” for or way of measuring repair. Just as the pun on “Metric” in “Reparations Metric” isn’t directly alluded to in that poem, the titular pun of “Reparations Redefinition: Bond” is mostly implied. The poem’s epigraph defines bond as “[a] uniting or binding element or force” but not as bondage or involuntary servitude. Yet this double meaning—involving both the “uniting” of people under duress and what the poem calls “Power”—is central to the poem’s act of “[r]edefinition.” While “Reparations Metric” couches its advocacy for a less corrupt electoral system in hyperbolic terms, “Reparations Redefinition” more directly considers the possibility of “forgiveness” in its last stanzas. Yet even redefined reparations remain “figurative” and thus vulnerable to being appropriated by those motivated by a wish for profit. The poem initially presents these issues through a description of the television series The Fear Factor, especially a (possibly imaginary) episode in which a white contestant resembling a “sitcom dad” willingly “dive[s] into a pool of 10,0000 tarantulas” while the African American host Ludacris opines “Man, white people are crazy.”14 The relation between the

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contestant’s willing embrace of (prepackaged, scripted, predictable) fear and economics (as well as the body) is punningly apparent in a scene in which the tarantulas are described “ogling your property. Sniffin’ up [an] ol’ oak tree” associated with “acorns you squirreled away … when the market was healthy.” “Money,” the poem goes on, is often “lurking somewhere / near the root” of any interaction. That the poem’s topic is “facing your fears head on” in general, rather than only on the show, is evident in its turn first to a Shakespearean description of fear, then to a consideration of markers of historical events, including “a battlefield / of sun-blanched skulls.” While this battlefield seems real, the poet transforms it, first through simile (it “resembles one psychedelic mushroom patch”), then by identifying the evoked scene as a   figure … [that is] figurative—     a literal marker in the definition’s landscape representing blacks slain     during the Transatlantic Slave Conquest.

Meant to “[help]” an addressee who seems unable to imagine the magnitude of the slave trade, this explanation suggests that figuration helps represent horrific events but that it also disguises emotions—both the “fear of history” and the “fear // of Power”—that can’t be depicted directly. No matter whether it’s manufactured or real, chosen or involuntarily inflicted, fear offers a way, to recall the poem’s title, to bind people together: the human need to seek figurative scenes of humiliation evokes but also disguises historical acts of bondage. All this seems to have little to do with reparations, but it leads the speaker to articulate first his “understand[ing of] what steers our national / stasis” and then directly to state “I / forgive us.” Forgiveness here offers a promise of repair—and another way to bind the individual speaker to the collective “us”—that is paradoxically dependent on figuration’s capacity to disguise the facts. But forgiveness is also, unsurprisingly, imbricated with economics. As “an example of forgiveness,” the speaker imagines having “the money to produce this / 40 Acres & a Mule script with Spike Lee.” The script features a “plot twist ending” in which the “protagonist / attorney”

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    wins a class action suit to the tune of lifetime therapy    for everybody.

By specifying Lee’s film production company, the poem exposes not only the failed promise of Reconstruction, as does Bennett, but the transformation (if also commodification) of those promised reparations into art. Whereas Bennett approaches therapy with personal ambivalence but eventual gratitude, universal therapy in Wicker’s film plot repays not only victims but the perpetrators who should arguably be paying for rather than receiving reparations. In a culture in which victimhood is voluntarily chosen, the poem implies, the universal availability of both victimhood and reparations creates a bond between people that undermines the possibility of justice. Like the advice in “Reparations Metric,” the espousal of forgiveness here seems ironic. But Wicker’s verbal inventiveness offers another “[r]edefinition” of “[r]eparations” whose ebullience and showiness expose the connection between the bonds of camaraderie and the U.S. history of human bondage, all connected by a profit motive that can’t be disentangled from the plain old American fun of public (self-)humiliation. * * * I am ending this book with Bennett and Wicker’s reparations poems because they suggest a turn in mid-to-late-2010s North American poetry: here, economics is a part, but not the only part, of slavery reparations in ways that suggest that economics more generally is a part of, but not necessarily central to, contemporary experience. This situation confirms one of this book’s central claims: allusions to economics in poems are always both literal and figurative, partly because economics is itself an ever-­ changing theory imposed on changing and inconsistent facts. While none of the poems I have considered in this Coda focus directly on synecdoche or prosopopeia, they are clearly concerned with figuration, as well as with inclusivity and personhood, which arguably underlie synecdoche and prosopopeia respectively. These poems also help reframe what might be a more general feature of contemporary poems: these poems keep offering ambivalent gestures toward repair, at times overblown and at others so provisional that they threaten to come apart, partly because the culture they depict seems not only unrepaired but irreparable.

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When Mark Osteen claims that “[p]oetry, like sacrifice, creates value out of expenditure, turning loss into gain” (27), he makes the familiar point that, though poetry isn’t outside economics, poems articulate a fundamentally anti-economic logic. I hope to have demonstrated through this book something different: while contemporary poems may sometimes articulate an anti-economic or, to recall  Christopher Nealon’s term, an “anti-capitalist” logic (“Anti-Capitalist” 180), they also explore economic premises, logic, and vocabulary, by turns histrionically, savagely, tenderly, and poignantly. The poems discussed in this Coda, and this book, don’t simply transform “loss into gain.” Instead, they grapple with the relation between these concepts. Though financial reparations for slavery in the U.S. seem remote, there has been recent political action on the topic.15 In the meantime, the topic of reparations, and the always messy interactions between economics, history, culture, identity, and politics more generally, keep inspiring North American poets. Though the future form of their as-yet-unwritten poems is impossible to predict, it seems likely that they will offer yet more evidence for the continued engagement, innovativeness, and, not incidentally, the continued viability of poetry.

Notes 1. Hayes has also claimed that the volume was composed during the first six months of Trump’s presidency (Sonksen). The volume’s seventy mostly unrhymed poems are each titled “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin.” In a poem beginning “Drive like fifteen miles along a national parkway,” Hayes asks directly “How much have black people been paid for naming / Emmett Till in poems? How much is owed?” (49). 2. Hayes enumerates these qualities in response to an interviewer’s question “what role can poetry play in popping racism’s illusory bubble?” (“Idyllwild”). 3. Black Lives Matter was founded following George Zimmerman’s 2012 acquittal for murdering unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin. Its “mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes” (Black), and its influence was perhaps most apparent in global protests following the 2020 police killing of the unarmed African American George Floyd. 4. The White Lives Matter movement is generally understood as “as a racist response to the Black Lives Matter movement” (Southern), as is the pro-­ police “Blue Lives Matter” movement (Quinn). Ongoing debates about so-called “woke” politics and the teaching of critical race theory in the

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U.S., especially Florida, and abroad (Pilkington) are also sometimes understood as a reaction against the goals of Black Lives Matter. 5. The first round of these payments was implemented by Trump in late December 2020, after a threatened government shutdown and the ­expiration of unemployment benefits for millions of U.S. citizens (Samuels). Shortly after taking office in 2021, President Joseph Biden announced his administration’s “American Rescue Plan,” which included direct financial support to citizens (“President”). 6. Desmond’s claims have been contested in forums ranging from The Wall Street Journal (Guelzo) to the libertarian Independent Institute (Coclanis). 7. Only three of the seventy-five poems in The Best American Poetry 2021, edited by former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K.  Smith, for example, deal extensively with economics. In one, Rosa Alcalá considers a “pay down scheme [that] started / the moment you got off the boat” (1–2); Henri Cole’s “Gross National Unhappiness” converts the economic term gross national product into a more general condemnation of the policies of an unnamed president (33); and Angbeen Saleem explores the ways “brown and black people” embrace entrepreneurship on the television show Shark Tank (130–31). The previous year’s anthology contains a similar dearth of poems about economics (Rekdal). Timothy Yu’s introduction to a recent collection of essays notes twenty-first-century U.S poetry’s “renewed interest in exploring the potential of lyric to be turned to … more political ends” (3), while David Lau links “[t]he twenty-first-century politics of American poetry” to earlier political movements (469). 8. I am basing these generalizations on volumes by poets including Eduardo Corral, Natalie Diaz, Solmaz Sharif, and others, all published by Graywolf Press. Charles claims that the “poetic crisis” that expects the reader to occupy “‘another’s shoes’ … has resulted in something that resembles the larger capitalist crisis of profiting off the very individual trauma it composes: a kind of social justice commodity fetishism.” 9. Another recent poem, Ashley Jones’s multipart “Reparations Now, Reparations Tomorrow, Reparations Forever!” selectively erases and comments on then-newly elected Alabama governor George Wallace’s assertion in his 1963 inaugural address, which Jones includes: “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” (53–57). Jones also borrows the last section’s title from Ta-Nahesi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations.” 10. Hannah-Jones’s discussion of reparations also appeals to general principles of “societal obligation” (472) and “atone[ment]” (475), while identifying “wealth” as the most important marker of “security in America” (456) and exploring the “technical details” of what reparations in the U.S. might look like (473).

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11. House Resolution 40, named for “the 40 acres and a mule promised but never given to enslaved people after emancipation” (“HR-40”), proposes “to study the effects of slavery and discriminatory policies on African Americans and recommend appropriate remedies, including reparations” (United States, “Commission”). The bill was first proposed in 1989. 12. In 2014, Coates offered a general “Case for Reparations” that enumerated “our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-­citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans” and advocated reparations as a means of rectifying this longstanding injustice. 13. The other poem is entitled “Reparations Metric Ending in Assisted Schadenfreude.” While Wicker’s reparations poems don’t easily scan, they employ same-length stanzas. 14. Fear Factor was first hosted by controversial comedian Joe Rogan on NBC, then by rapper, producer, and actor Ludacris on MTV from 2017 to 2018. The show featured contestants enduring pain and embarrassment for the chance to win prize money and fleeting celebrity (Puc). 15. In 2022, Canada passed a comprehensive reparations package for its treatment of Indigenous people (Coletta), California began exploring the possibility of granting reparations to descendants of slaves (Lee), and several economic initiatives proposed by President Joe Biden emphasized “racial equity” (“President”).

Works Cited

Adkins, Lisa. The Time of Money. Stanford UP, 2018. Alcala, Rosa. “The Pyramid Scheme.” T. Smith, pp. 1–2. Amadeo, Kimberly. “Long-Term Capital Management Hedge Fund Crisis.” The Balance, About.com, 9 Apr. 2018. www.thebalance.com/long-­term-­capital-­ crisis-­3306240. Accessed 3 June 2018. Andreacchi, Grace, trans. “Carmen 101.” By Catullus. Gaius Valerius Catullus Blog, 07 Mar. 2011. http://rudy.negenborn.net/catullus/text2/e101.htm. Accessed 29 Nov. 2022. Appadurai, Arjun. Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance. U of Chicago P, 2015. ———. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. U of Minnesota P, 1996. Armantrout, Rae. Money Shot. Wesleyan UP, 2011. Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. Verso, 1994. Ashbery, John. “The Instruction Manual.” Selected Poems. Penguin, 1985, pp. 5–8. ———. “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Penguin, 1975, pp. 68–83. Ashton, Jennifer. “Labor and the Lyric: The Politics of Self-Expression in Contemporary American Poetry.” American Literary History, vol. 25, no. 1, 2013, pp. 217–30. Atwood, Margaret. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Anansi, 2008.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Keniston, Economies of Scale, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39341-9

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Index1

A Adkins, Lisa, 69, 85 Adorno, Theodor, 10 Alcalá, Rosa, 119n7 American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin, see Hayes, Terrance Animation, see Prosopopeia Apostrophe, 40, 56–57, 110 Appadurai, Arjun on the derivative, 89, 103n2 on dividuation, 6, 65 on ersatz nostalgia, 84, 90, 92 on patina, 92, 100 See also Derivative Armantrout, Rae, Money Shot, 14, 57 financialization in, 41, 42, 45 “Money Talks,” 42, 44–45 “Soft Money,” 42–44, 48

Ashbery, John, 3, 64 Asian currency crisis, see Currency Aura and commodity (Kaufman), 87, 90, 93, 100, 103n7 definition of, 87, 103n5 See also Hillman, Brenda Automatons, 6 and aesthetics, 26, 35 and autonomy, 14, 29, 30, 37n12 in poems, 13, 30 workers as, 29, 37n18 See also Brown, Nicholas B Beck, Ulrich, 62 Benjamin, Walter, 87, 103n6, 103n7 See also Aura

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Keniston, Economies of Scale, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39341-9

137

138 

INDEX

Bennett, Joshua, 15, 108 Owed, 111–113, 117 Berlant, Lauren, 24 Bernes, Jasper, 3, 16n4, 17n11, 18n13, 23 Birkerts, Sven, 89 Bishop, Elizabeth, “Poem,” 7–10, 19n18, 19n19, 102 Bök, Christian and cyborgs, 37n19 and market logic, 37n20 Bök, Christian Eunoia, 37n15, 37n19 and autonomy, 26, 30 “Chapter A,” 27, 29 “Chapter I,” 28–30, 38n21 “Chapter O,” 27–29 composition of, 30–31, 33 financialization in, 13, 23, 27 indexicality in, 25, 28, 37n20 labor in, 25, 29 precarity in, 24, 27–29, 31 precariousness of, 25–27 and prosopopeia, 30 and scale, 25, 26 synecdoche in, 25, 28, 30, 33 See also Oulipo Books aliveness of, 90, 101 artist’s, 74, 104n15 ephemerality of, 13, 84, 88 material properties of, 83, 84 print, 89, 94, 100 publishing, state of, 104n13, 104n14 See also specific poets Bourdieu, Pierre, 3 Bowlby, Rachel, 46, 58n7 Briante, Susan, 3 Brouillette, Sarah, 16n6 Brown, Nicholas, 3, 24, 26, 30 See also Autonomy Brown, Wendy, 17n9 Bush, George W., 45

C Carson, Anne, 105n20 Economy of the Unlost, 66, 79n12 Nox; Catullus, Carmen 101 translation, 67–71, 74, 97; composition of, 105n22; debt in, 14, 66, 70, 71; and derivative, 88, 89, 100; dividuation in, 67, 68; as elegy, 62, 66, 69, 79n11, 104n16; as epitaph, 66, 67, 69, 79n11; as facsimile, 88, 96, 100; format of, 67, 80n15, 96, 97, 99; as gamble, 100; and gifts, 69–71, 79n10; and grief, 70; and handiwork, 15, 90; and indexicality, 71, 89; material properties of, 79n14, 97, 100; and nostalgia, 90, 100; as print book, 96; and prosopopeia, 100; and scale, 66, 67; and synecdoche, 69; time in, 89, 97, 100–101; wastefulness in, 89, 96, 101 Catullus, see Carson, Anne Celan, Paul, 78 Clover, Joshua, “Long-Term Capital Management,” 7, 9–10, 22, 88 Colonialism, see Consumerism; specific poets Commodities, 13, 26, 46, 50, 51 See also Marx, Karl; Mullen, Harryette; Ruefle, Mary, My Private Property Commodity aura, see Aura Commodity fetishism, see Marx, Karl Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 119n10 Cole, Henri, 119n7 Consumerism in contemporary culture, 58n13 and financialization, 45, 48 female, 41, 46 rhetoric of, 47

 INDEX 

Contemporary poetry, see Poetry, contemporary Covid-19 pandemic, 18n12, 41, 109 Culler, Jonathan, 40, 58n1 Currency Asian crisis, 8, 19n21 See also Bishop, Elizabeth; Donnelly, Timothy D de Man, Paul, 46, 56, 59n18 Debt and death, 15, 62, 66 definition of, 65, 78n2 and the figurative, 62, 65, 73, 78n2 and financialization, 14, 64, 89 in poems, 13, 110 See also Financialization; specific poets “The Debtor in the Convex Mirror,” see Wheeler, Susan Derrida, Jacques, 24, 71, 80n19 Derivative, 15, 16n3, 95, 104n10, 104n11 and debt, 85, 89 definition of, 85, 88–89, 91, 103n3 logic of, 104n10 and time, 90, 92 See also Carson, Anne; Financialization; Ruefle, Mary, A Little White Shadow Desmond, Matthew, 109, 119n6 Diallo, Amadou, 76 Dividuation, 65, 88 See also Appadurai, Arjun; Carson, Anne; Rankine, Claudia, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Donnelly, Timothy, “The Cloud Corporation,” 13, 22–23 Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, see Rankine, Claudia

139

E Econ as figurative, 18n14 Economics as literal and figurative, 18n14, 117 and race, 109, 110 and scale, 4, 5 U.S., origin in plantation slavery, 109 See also Financialization; Neoliberalism; Poetry, contemporary Elegy definition of, 62, 66–67, 70–71 and melancholy, 62, 71, 79n19 See also Carson, Anne Elliott, Jane, 18n13 Ephemerality, see Appadurai, Arjun; Books; specific poets Eunoia, see Bök, Christian Euripides, 66, 105n20 F Facsimiles, 6, 13 See also specific poets Fetishes, 13, 41, 56, 57, 58n10 See also Marx, Karl; Ruefle, Mary, My Private Property Financialization, 3, 16n2, 41, 104n12 and debt, 64–65 definition of, 2, 16n3, 41, 79n9, 101 and the figurative, 88, 101 and hedging, 19n21, 103n3 and securitization, 65, 79n4, 109 See also Debt; Derivative; Neoliberalism; specific poets Freud, Sigmund, 56, 81n26 G Gifts, 71, 80n17, 80n19 See also Carson, Anne

140 

INDEX

Godden, Richard, 5 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 7 Great Recession (2008), see Recession, Great (2008) H Haiven, Max, 89, 91 Hannah-Jones, Nikole, et al., The 1619 Project, 109, 110, 119n10 Haraway, Donna, 47 Hardt, Michael, 24 Harvey, David, 2, 17n9 Hayes, Terrance, American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin, 15, 108–110, 118n1 Hedging, see Financialization; Ruefle, Mary, A Little White Shadow Hillman, Brenda Pieces of Air in the Epic, 15, 85, 103n4; aura in, 87, 90, 103n5; books and aliveness, 86; “Brittle Economics Monographs,” 87; “Silent Reading,” 86 Howe, Susan, 84–85, 88, 103n9 Hunter, Walt, 16n4, 17n11 I Indexicality, 16, 33, 65 definition of, 25, 28, 37n10 See also specific poets J Jameson, Fredric, 2 Jones, Ashley, 119n9 K Kaufman, Robert, see Aura Keats, John, 84, 101

Keller, Lynn, 4 Kim, Myung Mi, 10–12, 20n23, 77–78 L Labor, 6, 18n5, 36n6 and automation, 18n15 and financialization, 23–25 offshoring of, 36n6 in poems, 13, 110 See also Bök, Christian; Magi, Jill; Precarity Labor, see Magi, Jill Little White Shadow, A, see Ruefle, Mary Lindstrom, Eric, 8, 19n18 Liu, Alan, 23, 28–29, 104n12 See also Automatons Louima, Abner, 75–76 Love, Harold, 85 Lowell, Robert, 19n20 M MacLeish, Archibald, “Ars Poetica,” 44 Magi, Jill, Labor and autonomy, 34, 35 documents in, 32, 34 ephemerality of, 35 financialization in, 23 and handiwork, 13, 25, 33, 38n24 indexicality in, 25, 33 and precarity, 13, 31, 33, 35, 38n22 and prosopopeia, 34 and synecdoche, 25, 33 Marx, Karl on commodities, 51, 53, 58n9 on commodity fetishism, 14, 46, 119n8 on financialization, 2, 5, 74 on labor, 18n15, 36n2, 53

 INDEX 

141

McClanahan, Annie, 30, 70, 76, 78n1 on debt, 15, 62, 65 on financialization, 16n2, 23 and Freud, 76, 81n26 See also Elegy; Neoliberalism Money Shot, see Armantrout, Rae Monson, Ander, 88, 103n9, 105n21 Mullen, Harryette “Miscegenated Texts and Media Cyborgs: Technologies of Body and Soul,” 47–50, 59n15 S*PeRM**K*T; “Bad germs get zapped,” 50; and capitalism, 45; commodities in, 46; and consumerism, 14, 46, 59n14; and cyborgs, 14, 47–48; and financialization, 45, 46, 51; “In specks find nothing amiss,” 49–50; “Iron maidens,” 48–49; and prosopopeia, 52; puns in, 48, 49, 51; “Refreshing spearmint gums up the works,” 51, 59n16 My Private Property, see Ruefle, Mary

P Papadopoulos, Dimitris, 24, 32 Personification, see Prosopopeia Pieces of Air in the Epic, see Hillman, Brenda Poetry, contemporary and economics, 2, 4, 5, 12, 102 and engagement, 1, 16n1 erasure, 104n18, 105n19 Flarf, 16n4, 19n16 See also specific poets Precarity, 24, 32, 35, 36n7, 36n8 See also Bök, Christian; Magi, Jill Price, Leah, 83 Prosopopeia, 18n14, 40, 41 and death, 56, 62 definition of, 34, 40–41, 46, 56 and synecdoche, 13, 90 See also specific poets Publishing, see Books

N Nealon, Christopher, 4, 7, 16n4, 17n11, 18n13, 118 Negri, Antonio, 24 Neoliberalism, 5, 16n2, 17n9 See also Financialization Newton, Adam Zachary, 83–84 Ngai, Sianne, 5, 40, 45, 50, 52 Nostalgia, see Appadurai, Arjun Nox, see Carson, Anne Nowak, Mark, 3

R Radia, Pavlina, 47, 58n13 Ramazani, Jahan, 70 Rankine, Claudia, 80n21, 80n23, 81n24 “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” 72, 77, 80n20 Don't Let Me Be Lonely; and the body, 73–75; and debt, 14, 72, 73, 78; dividuation in, 73–76; and economics, 72, 80n22; and financialization, 73–76; loneliness in, 76–78; and mourning, 72, 73, 75; and synecdoche, 73, 76; and translation, 75, 77

O Oulipo, 19n16, 26, 28, 37n15 Osteen, Mark, 118 Owed, see Bennett, Joshua

Q Quart, Alissa, 3

142 

INDEX

Recession, Great (2008), 1, 42, 109 “Reparation” (poems), see Bennett, Joshua Reparations definition of, 110, 119n10 in poems, 13, 15, 110, 111 and repair, 100 and slavery, 117, 118, 119n10, 120n13 See also Bennett, Joshua; Hayes, Terrance; Wicker, Marcus “Reparations Metric: Reverse Stump Speech for Courting the Black Vote,” see Wicker, Marcus “Reparations Redefinition: Bond,” see Wicker, Marcus Robbins, Amy, 47 Ronda, Margaret, 16n4 Ross, Andy, 24 Ruefle, Mary A Little White Shadow; and derivative, 88, 89, 91, 94; and ephemerality, 88, 96; as facsimile, 92; and handiwork, 15, 91; and hedging, 96; and nostalgia, 90, 93, 101; and prosopopeia, 94; and scale, 91; time in, 89, 93, 99–100; and waste, 89, 96, 101 My Private Property, 14, 59n17, 62; animation in, 54–55; and colonialism, 46, 53–55; commodities in, 46, 52, 55, 56; and death, 56–57; feelings in, 52, 55; and fetish, 54, 57; and financialization, 45, 46; “The Gift,” 53–54; “My Private Property” (poem), 54–75; and

prosopopeia, 52, 56; and scale, 45; “The Woman Who Couldn't Describe a Thing if She Could,” 53 S S*PeRM**K*T, see Mullen, Harryette Sacks, Peter, 79n13 Saleem, Angbeen, 119n7 Scale, 5, 6, 13, 117n10 See also Economics; specific poets Schiff, Robyn, 3 Securitization, see Financialization Shopping, see Consumerism Simonides, see Carson, Anne, Economy of the Unlost Slavery and economics, 11, 109, 115 See also Reparations Smith, Adam, 41 Stein, Gertrude, 47 Stewart, Susan, 4, 6 Synecdoche, 5, 6, 13, 33, 41, 90 See also specific poets T Tiffany, Daniel, 16n4, 30, 40–42 Till, Emmett, 15, 72, 108 Translation, 13, 69 See also Carson, Anne; Rankine, Claudia, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Trump, Donald, 108, 109, 119n5 Tsianos, Vassilis, 24, 32

 INDEX 

V Value, 7, 19n17, 78n3 Vickers, Nancy, 65 W Wheeler, Susan, “The Debtor in the Convex Mirror,” 14, 63–64, 71, 78n5

143

White, Hylton, 46 Whitman, Walt, 29, 84 Wicker, Marcus, 120n11 “Reparations Metric: Reverse Stump Speech for Courting the Black Vote,” 113–115 “Reparations Redefinition: Bond,” 115–117 Wiesenthal, Christine, 67