The American House Poem, 1945-2021 (Oxford Studies in American Literary History) 0192856251, 9780192856258

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The American House Poem, 1945–2021

oxford studies in american literary history Gordon Hutner, Series Editor After Critique Mitchum Huehls

Patriotism by Proxy Colleen Glenney Boggs

Unscripted America Sarah Rivett

Jewish American Writing and World Literature Saul Noam Zaritt

Forms of Dictatorship Jennifer Harford Vargas Anxieties of Experience Jeffrey Lawrence White Writers, Race Matters Gregory S. Jay The Civil War Dead and American Modernity Ian Finseth The Puritan Cosmopolis Nan Goodman Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866–1900 Elizabeth Renker The Center of the World June Howard History, Abolition, and the Ever-­Present Now in Antebellum American Writing Jeffrey Insko Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age Nathan Wolff Transoceanic America Michelle Burnham Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States Travis M. Foster

The Archive of Fear Christina Zwarg Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction Thomas J. Ferraro Violentologies B.V. Olguin The Latino Continuum and the Nineteenth-­Century Americas Carmen Lamas Time and Antiquity in American Empire Mark Storey Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835–1874 John Evelev Literary Neurophysiology Randall Knoper Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States Thomas Constantinesco Telling America’s Story to the World Harilaos Stecopoulos Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature Kelly Ross

Modern Sentimentalism Lisa Mendelman

Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics Michael Boyden

Speculative Fictions Elizabeth Hewitt

Schools of Fiction Morgan Day Frank

Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-­Century US Literary History Maria A. Windell

Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies Cody Marrs

The American House Poem, 1945–2021 WA LT H U N T E R

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Walt Hunter 2023 The moral rights of the author have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2023938870 ISBN 978–0–19–285625–8 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192856258.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

For Barbara Lewalski and for James Longenbach For Lindsay Turner I am thinking how we can use what we have / to invent what we need.

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction 1 1. Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right

25

2. Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs

57

3. An Immaterial World: James Merrill, Finance, and the Renovation of the House Poem

87

4. The American Poetic Subprime: Contemporary Poetry, Race, and Genre

116

Notes Bibliography Index

145 159 167

Acknowledgments This book was supported by a Work-­in-­Progress grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation and a Finish Line grant from the College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. A residency at the James Merrill House allowed me to complete the chapter on Merrill while living in David Jackson’s apartment at 107 Water Street, Stonington, CT. Thanks to the members of the committee and to Nan Danforth, Penny Duckham, Sibby Lynch, Joanna Scott, and Sally Wood. Special thanks go to Elizabeth Rivlin, who suggested, over lunch in Pendleton, SC, that an article I’d written could be a book. Thank you, Elizabeth, for the encouragement and inspiration. Thanks to the editors of New Literary History for publishing that article under the title “The American Poetic Subprime,” parts of which appear in Chapter 4. Gordon Hutner listened to me talk about the book when it was merely notional. Thanks to Gordon for his help at every stage of the book’s development. Andrew Daley read the chapter on Gwendolyn Brooks and provided key architectural and planning context. Elizabeth Fowler’s model criticism and friendship guided me through the middle stages of writing this book. Wendy Hyman’s teaching—­in a class on the country-­house poem at Harvard College in 2002—was indispensable. Thanks to Case Western Reserve University, Lee Thompson, and Joy Ward for their support. Thanks especially to Michael Clune, Georgia Cowart, Kim Emmons, Kurt Koenigsberger, Erika Olbricht, John Orlock, Thrity Umrigar, and to all the members of the English department. Thanks to colleagues at The Atlantic for conversations about poetry: Jeff Goldberg, Faith Hill, Ann Hulbert, Adrienne LaFrance, John Swansburg, Amy Weiss-­Meyer. Thanks to Peter Mendelsund for thinking about the cover with me. Thank you: Ken Bleeth, Lynn and Jeff Callahan, Amy and Elliott Callahan, David Coombs, Harris Feinsod, Aubrey and Aidan and Colin and Sean Flood, Erin Goss, Sunhee Hodges, April and Tony Jones, Mike LeMahieu, Emma Mackinnon, Brian McGrath, Maureen McLane, Lee Morrissey, Angela Naimou, Katie Peterson, Jonathan  F.S.  Post, Richard Re, Sandra Ricardi,

x Acknowledgments Pamela and Richard Turner, Willard Spiegelman, Johanna Winant. Thanks to my parents for a complicated and beautiful education in houses. Charlie Ericson deserves my immense gratitude for reading the manuscript and for helping with various research queries. Thanks to Susie Kim for her work at the final stages and Francesca Mancino for a last-­minute assist. Thanks to Hannah Doyle and Emma Varley at Oxford for their editing, to the three anonymous readers for their helpful reports, to Tim Beck and Suresh Gunasekaran for their copyediting, and to Dolarine Fonceca for seeing the manuscript through production. Selections from poems by Gwendolyn Brooks are reprinted by consent of Brooks Permissions. Thanks to the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust and Norton for permission to reprint her work: COLLECTED POEMS: 1950—2012. © 2016, 2013 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright (c) 2011, 2007, 2004, 2001, 1999, 1995, 1991, 1989, 1986, 1984, 1981, 1967, 1963, 1962, 1961, 1960, 1959, 1958, 1957, 1956, 1955, 1954, 1953, 1952, 1951 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright (c) 1984, 1978, 1975, 1973, 1971, 1969, 1966 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. I’m grateful to the estate of James Merrill and Knopf for permission to reprint lines from his poems: “Mirabell: Books of Number,” copyright© 1978 by James Merrill; “The Book of Ephraim,” and “The Ballroom at Sandovar” from THE CHANGING LIGHT AT $ANDOVER: A POEM by James Merrill, copyright© 1980, 1982 by James Merrill. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. “An Urban Convalescence,” “Days of 1964,” and “The Broken Home” from COLLECTED POEMS by James Merrill, copyright© 2001 by the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University. Used by permission of Alfred  A.  Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Introduction It’s hard to talk about poetry without talking about houses. No student of poetry can avoid learning, at some point, that stanza means room. Poems have long been associated with the places where people live, whether they are towers, mansions, tenements, cells, or kitchenettes. That relation can be a playful, notional one. “We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms,” John Donne writes.1 A sonnet’s signature qualities—­brevity and compression—­could be translated, imaginatively, into a nun’s narrow convent room, a hermit’s cell, and student’s “pensive citadel.” The limitations of devices such as rhyme offer occasions to think about freedom and constraint: “Twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground,” Wordsworth continues.2 There are other reasons to take the metaphorical link between poems and houses seriously. Poetry can aspire to the condition of architecture rather than to visionary flux or vatic spontaneity. Writing about Yeats’s stanzas in 1984, Seamus Heaney compares the Irish poet to a stonemason: “Rilke imagined the Orphic music of poetry springing like a tree in the ear, but when we think of W. B. Yeats a tower rears up, a dream of phonetic masonry, squared and plumbed and dominant.”3 Yeats memorializes the grand house of Lady Gregory, Coole Park, in monumental stanzas borrowed from Italian epic. Defending a sense of poetry as artisanal craftwork, with the stonemason its proudest emblem, meant defending specific cultural and aesthetic values against the forces that threatened them. In this way, the imaginative space mapped out by a poem can even provide virtual cues for real-­world behavior.4 More generally, however, entering the rooms of a house in the mind has been a catalyst for putting writing on the page. From Geoffrey de Vinsauf, the medieval rhetorician, to Tony Judt, the historian of postwar Europe, inhabiting a house in memory helps to generate arguments and stories.5 The creative activity of poiesis, sometimes translated as “making,” has a close and curious relationship to home-­making. But in the second half of the twentieth century, a strain of American poetry builds its stanzas with homeownership in mind as a matter of economic policy, crisis management, and national identity. Over a matter of a few decades, homeownership moves from a near-­impossible fantasy to a core component of American life—­first The American House Poem, 1945–2021. Walt Hunter, Oxford University Press. © Walt Hunter 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192856258.003.0001

2  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 for the white middle class and then, gradually, for a larger proportion of the population. Whereas owning a home requires, up through the early twentieth century, a 50 percent down payment, a short-­term loan, and a rapid-­fire repayment of the balance, the creation of Fannie Mae in 1938 sparked a revolution in home financing.6 The resulting change is dramatic: in 1950, only half of Americans own homes, but in 2000, two-­thirds do.7 What kinds of poetry do poets write when housing takes priority in the imagination and centrality in the organization of family and social life? How does poetry reflect, in its oblique, contradictory ways, the conditions that place housing at the center of social policy? The American house poem is the subject of this book, from its rise after World War II to its proliferation in the ongoing aftermath of the subprime mortgage crisis.8 The problem of housing after World War II takes hold of policymaking, civil rights activism, judicial decisions, and financial markets at the same time that a special set of American house poems emerge. But a longer course could be plotted, one that begins with Anne Bradstreet’s “Verses Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10, 1666” and continues through John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Snow-­Bound” and Emily Dickinson’s hymns on the metaphysics of interiors and exteriors, all the way up through the modernist “house in earnest” inhabited by Frost’s dramatic characters and the “dirty house in a gutted world” burnished by Stevens’s imagination. While these poems suggest that the idea of home has long preoccupied American poets who muse upon the places and uses of poetry in the world, the house poem I identify in this book is especially prominent in the decades after World War II. In the postwar era, American poets are, in general, torn between arguments for the aggrandizement of poetry and for its increasingly diminished cultural significance. This anxiety takes on tangible form through another vital preoccupation of Americans, especially from the New Deal through the Great Society and into the present: access to affordable housing as a front on which struggles for rights are waged. I analyze a particular strand of US poetry for which the materials of housing and the tools of poetic making have a curiously close, yet underexamined, relationship. I track the emergence of a kind or a genre, the American house poem, because it consolidates the questions, claims, and images of a historical moment in which housing was a central point of political contestation. I concentrate primarily on poems themselves, seeking to understand the historical conditions that become tangibly present by tracking the stylistic development of the house poem within a particular poet’s body of work. While that method has the cost of making my sample size very modest, it has the benefit of

Introduction  3 sustained attention to a particular facet of housing as these poets revise their work over time. Indeed, one of the small discoveries I made while writing this book was that the house poem very often lends itself to renovation and revision. The house poem, as a distinct kind of poem, even helps to draw a through-­line between earlier and much later poems that might otherwise seem quite removed. This matter of literary history might be of interest not only to the specialist, but also to the casual reader who wonders what motivates the changes in a writer’s style or why a poet returns to certain themes while abandoning others. The exception to my focus on a single author per chapter is the final chapter, which, because the book does move chronologically, necessitates a company of poets who are earlier in their careers, but for whom housing plays an outsized role in their poetry and compositional process. Poetry has ample room for the home: interior spaces, private lives, intimate conversations are part of the general myth of the inward turn, or return, to the “I” as fount of experience and authority. But it’s harder to say why we should turn to the genres of poetry for information about housing policy. No one needs poetry, or literature, to know the facts about redlining or home improvement associations. Some have argued that poetry about housing illuminates an alternative way of relating to the home than as a piece of real estate. Indeed, poets are good at exploring the home as a place where a network of belonging can develop, rather than as the location for profit or speculation.9 While that may be true philosophically, much of the major literature by writers like Lorraine Hansberry or Gwendolyn Brooks nevertheless highlights the importance of accessing the real estate market in a fair and unbiased way. My answer in this book is a more moderate one. While laws and Supreme Court decisions are one thing, and statistics another, US poetry about housing after World War II contributes to and provides some evidence for the new public awareness over housing as a civil right. In distilled and immediate fashion, the genres of poetry present the failures of federal housing policy to construct an image of the nation in which shelter was guaranteed for all, not merely an accident or a privilege for some. The period immediately after World War II required a new vision of the nation, and of community and social life in the US, so visible and credible was the US as a major power, even an empire.10 More intimately, on the ground level, the impetus to refashion US ideals of freedom and happiness collided with white resistance and violence against civil rights. Any major social and political change requires an almost kaleidoscopic variety of ways of talking and writing about it. Some of these kinds of discourse are private and

4  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 print-­based, while others can be more easily transmitted and publicly shared with large audiences. In historical periods that feature accelerated shifts in power, portals tend to open between these modes, so that one borrows from the other. That’s why, in this book, I focus on some familiar poetic forms and genres: the sonnet, the ballad, the epic. For my purposes, “form” and “genre” mean approximately the same thing. A poetic genre is a particularly vivid way of approaching a concept or a topic that deviates—­slightly or massively—­ from the norm of speech, precisely because poetry, no matter how narrative, inevitably repatterns the story it tells. Poetic genres and forms bring to life public arguments in ways that refresh understanding, even as they may also echo or report on the events of the day. To make old genres present new ways of looking at things requires both a nod to the form as it is given and an attempt at revision—­both tradition and innovation.

The Country-­House Poem: A Precedent This book assumes that poems speak to each other across vast spans of time. Within the longue durée of historical capitalism, there are moments in which a genre might resurface before going under again or adapting to a changed global environment. The emergence of home financing and the government’s guarantee of home loans made homes available for a vastly greater proportion of Americans from the 1940s onward. But poems about houses in the US do not, of course, magically arise then and only then. Two of the moments—­no doubt there are more—­when houses appear as an organizing motif for poetry are 1600–60 and 1945–2021, periods coinciding with particularly turbulent shifts in the status of two global powers. The genre of the American house poem has a very long genealogy, one that even might be said to begin with the most well-­known set of house poems: the English country-­house poem. The relatively brief appearance of the English country-­house poem in the first half of the seventeenth century casts a surprisingly long shadow. Usually limited to a half-­dozen poems written by Jonson, Carew, Lanyer, and Marvell, the country-­house poem has been “of peculiar interest to all who are concerned about the relation of poetry to the society from which it springs.”11 Country-­house poems appear during a period of British civil war and restoration as vehicles for praising a social order. They are, at their core, encomia for the hospitality of estates such estates as Henry Fairfax’s Nunappleton or Robert Sidney’s Penshurst. Seventeenth-­century English poets praised these houses because they reflected a set of social values: utility in design, hospitality in ethics, and, perhaps above all, a desire for “riches and abundance shorn of

Introduction  5 the exploitative and destructive effects” of colonialism.12 For Raymond Williams, Alastair Fowler, and Edward Said, country-­house poems are thus exemplary texts for bringing together, in Heather Dubrow’s words, “literary forms and social formations.”13 The seventeenth-­century country-­house poem in English is a “distinct kind,” built to examine spatial and temporal contrasts: between country and city, between patriarchal domestic norms and the decay of contemporary mores, between a hostile world outside and a comforting charity emanating from within.14 It is a thematic genre that might be identified with the georgic and its emphasis on “cultivated nature.”15 Some have also seen in the country-­ house poem the imprint of satire, encomiastic epigrams, and topographical poetry.16 Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” (1616) has been considered the origin point for the genre in English, though Aemilia Lanyer’s “A Description of Cooke-­ham” almost certainly predates it.17 Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” (1651) is perhaps its last, and strangest, manifestation.18 From its rhetorical devices to its themes, the country-­house poem promotes moderation, harmony, and utility over the “envious show / Of touch or marble.”19 The earliest versions of the house poem, as it appears in this book, can be glimpsed at an even greater distance from the present, however. Classical models lay the foundation for the country-­house poems of the seventeenth century. These poems by Horace, Bacchylides, and Vergil often open with an air of heightened formality and draw attention immediately to the rhetorical infrastructure of the poem. That rhetoric is most often aimed at exposing a vice by promoting a virtue. In the tradition of the house poem, the vice is ostentation, or decoration for its own sake; the virtue is usefulness, or truth in the fitting of design to purpose. Horace’s Ode 2.18 starts by describing the materials that are not used in the construction of the house: Carven ivory have I none No golden cornice in my dwelling shines; Pillars choice of Libyan stone Upbear no architrave from Attic mines; ’Twas not mine to enter in To Attalus’ broad realms, an unknown heir, Nor for me fair clients spin Laconian purples for their patron’s wear. Truth is mine, and Genius mine; The rich man comes, and knocks at my low door: Favour’d thus, I ne’er repine, Nor weary out indulgent Heaven for more.20

6  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 The same rhetorical gesture, which has the odd effect of enchanting the eye even as it banishes the object of enchantment, opens Jonson’s “To Penshurst”: “Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show / Of touch or marble; nor canst boast a row / Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold.” It appears in Richard Crashaw’s “Description of a Religious House”: “No roofs of gold o’er riotous tables shining / Whole days and suns, devour’d with endless dining.” Marvell dwells on the question at greater length over several stanzas of “Upon Appleton House,” asking “why should of all things man unrul’d / Such unproportioned dwellings build?” The Horatian house poem and its English heirs make much of the vanitas of decadence in architecture, castigating those who are “Ever building mansions new, / Nor thinking of the mansion of the tomb.” In writing the earliest English country-­house poem, Aemilia Lanyer pinpoints the connection between social relations and style that the house poem enacts. “Those fair ornaments of outward beauty” that Lanyer sees in both Cooke-­Ham and Margaret Clifford, “enforce from all both love and duty.” One of the functions often attributed to the country-­house poem is the reinforcement of the values and norms of patriarchy and the critique of deviations from them.21 In this sense, the poems grouped under the category of “country-­house” or “estate” poems sometimes try to conserve a status quo or restore a “Golden Age”—though nearly all of the accounts of the country-­ house poem examine contradictions and ambivalences in its conservative politics.22 As Barbara Lewalski argues in her groundbreaking work on the function of women in the country-­house poem, poetry of this kind not only registers and reproduces, but also helps to shape and to complicate. Reading Lanyer’s “A Description of Cooke-­ham” as a re-­writing of the genre that places at its center a community of women friends instead of a lord, Lewalski locates “the subversive power of the imagination”: “[the poems] enact resistance and challenge to oppressive institutions, not meek acceptance, and they move beyond dominant gender ideologies to more enabling conceptions.”23 Lewalski’s attention to country-­house poems written by women shows how these poems may “promote the development of other norms, founded upon more expansive concepts of women’s familial and social roles.”24 Illuminating the politics of the country-­house poem is its emphasis on labor and class as well. What G. R. Hibbard refers to as the “interdependence” of “man and nature” in the country-­house poem disguises the social relations of labor, occluding the process by which the land is cultivated and by which the conventional abundance of the country-­ house poem—­ its blushing apricots and eels leaping into hands—­enjewel the poem and captivate the eye.

Introduction  7 In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams notes the “unworked-­for providence of nature” that accompanies the “simple extraction of the existence of laborers” in the country-­house poem.25 The surplus of the country-­house poem, and its emphasis on charity to the poor, is how the poem defends itself against more radical claims of redistribution for those who haunt its margins. The flourishing of the genre coincides with the age of the first general enclosure bill in 1621, which, as Christopher L. Hill explains, eliminates the right to gather firewood from the commons.26 Constituting the country-­house poem is an overflowing bounty, though there is little place, within the poem, for the labor behind this bounty to appear.27 To make it appear would be to draw into the poem that which it has effectively banished, defeating its very attempts to patrol its perimeter. The country-­house poem marks one of the extreme limits of the erasure of labor, gender, and race precisely by its in­sist­ ence on the radical hospitality and abundance of its setting. The seventeenth-­century British country-­house poem, by producing a map of economic and social relations with the estate and the lord at the center, gestures indirectly toward the changing forms of exploitation of women and laborers. In this sense, it is part of a general seventeenth-­century attempt to assemble pieces of a world into a whole. In the half-­century during which the country-­house poem flourished, early modern thinkers take up “the task of imagining an abstract totality,” as Ayesha Ramachandran has shown.28 To that end, country-­house poems play a significant supporting role in the workshopping of an early modern global imaginary. The importance of classical genres of satire, epigram, and georgic has been well documented; the patronage system to which the country-­house poem contributes has been traced in its mutations from Penshurst to Nunappleton. Yet these contributions to the thematic topoi of the poem do not quite explain the formal shape of country-­ house poems. The evident formal geometry of the country-­house poem registers both the contraction of the poetic world to the estate, its lord, and its grounds, and the potential expansion of this world. As one of many attempts to imagine a new totality, the country-­house creates contiguity out of what might otherwise be sheer juxtaposition, just as it constructs relation across difference. The country-­house poem, as one of the poetic kinds that most directly addresses social and economic transformation, looks somewhat altered when placed alongside early modern thinkers’ “global imagining,” instead of solely within the context of British patronage or within the contest between classical genres. This is the period, Fernand Braudel observes, of the greatest expansion of the world-­system prior to the present.29 Under this lens, the aspects of the

8  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 country-­ house poem that seem most nostalgic and conservative might instead seem like an alternative vision for the future. Confronting a vastly increased scale of human interest and the emergence of a capitalist world-­ system, the country-­house poem envisions a world where the stranger is ­welcome, the extraction of surplus value is unknown, and a fiction of scarcity is not imposed. Thus the formal coordinates of the country-­house poem are spatial, not temporal: its structure, oddly, seems to expand spatially within a single moment in time (in contrast, say, with Spenser’s “Epithalamion,” or, later, with Milton’s Paradise Lost). Only in the final stanza of Marvell’s “Appleton House,” the latest of the poems, does the day progress—­to the point that the poet uses the word “now” twice: But now the salmon-­fishers moist Their leathern boats begin to hoist, And like Antipodes in shoes, Have shod their heads in their canoes. How tortoise-­like, but not so slow, These rational amphibii go! Let’s in, for the dark hemisphere Does now like one of them appear.30

Even here, in the poem’s famous final image of the “dark hemisphere,” the spatial turn of early modern world-­making becomes apparent. The seventeenth-­century country-­house poem in English makes explicit, normative claims about value, especially when it comes to architectural appearance. A late example by John Pomfret, “The Choice” (1700), reads like a parody of “Penshurst.” Its picture of a model life begins with instructions for the model home: It should within no other things contain But what were useful, necessary, plain: Methinks ’tis nauseous, and I’d ne’er endure The needless pomp of gaudy furniture.31

“The Choice” is adamant about usefulness as the virtue of the household. The trinity of “useful, necessary, plain” extends to reading, which should be limited to “pleasing, useful studies.” These values apply to friendship, to choosing a ­mistress, even to the wine served at dinner. The poem is nothing if not consistent about what choice to make: the useful is the guide to a life that all might emulate.

Introduction  9 The eighteenth-­century house poem does provide a far greater sampling of houses, though, than its predecessor poems. These poems are not part of a set, as the country-­house poems were, bound together by motifs shared in common and borrowed from classical sources. Nor does the house hold the same place as the ballast of an earlier social arrangement. Nevertheless, they are poems in which the house plays an indispensable poetic role as an index to social change. In that sense, they bear more than a passing relationship to the genre of the country-­house poem. While “The Choice” brushes away some of the rhetorical highlights of Jonson and Marvell to reveal the skeleton ethics of the “useful,” these great houses appear less and less frequently as the century progress. John Gerrard’s “A Remonstrance,” from 1769, sees miserliness where the house poem once saw thrift. The lord of the house is an “honest wight, as churls and niggards go,” who lets his “surly mastiff ” greet the beggars at the door.32 After the turn of the century, the house poem goes through two other iterations: it merges with the prospect poem and with a strain of poetic naturalism. Both draw out motifs that already exist, the survey of the grounds of the house and the critique of social relations. These are given new twists as the century progresses. In the case of the prospect poem, a genre that flourishes as the country-­ house poem largely disappears, the narrative perspective of the country-­ house poem is inverted. Instead of beginning with the interior of the house and then walking onto the grounds, the poet begins with a vantage-­point that surveys the landscape. Even when the house is a small detail in a larger prospect, which is where the eighteenth-­century house poem gradually situates it, the house poem still speaks in public discourse. They might seem surprising to modern readers who expect the house, at least in poetry, to be a place particularly associated with memory, nostalgia, childhood, and fireside reverie. Equally surprising, again to a modern reader, might be the general demotion of aesthetic surplus, filigree, or decoration to social utility. William Cowper’s “The Task” (1785) is a partial exception to this rule and a premonition of the Romantic house poem. The “mind contemplative” muses in front of a winter fire. For the first time in the house poem, there is a surplus of detail—­the shadows on the ceiling, the firelight—­which is included for aesthetic value, not for epideictic or pedagogical import. New virtues beyond necessity and plainness begin also to appear: “tis thus the understanding takes repose / In indolent vacuity of thought, / and sleeps and is refreshed.”33 Over a century and a half, the English house poem dramatizes a recognizable shift between neoclassical verse and Romantic meditation. Indeed, the opposition appears almost too neatly as the instructive descriptions of exteriors

10  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 and celebrations of social harmony (or execrations of poverty and inequality) make way for dreams, indolence, and contemplation. Cowper’s firelit scene makes the point clear: houses are prompts for the imagination to take flight and for the mind or soul to take over the poem. By the time of Cowper, of Crabbe and Goldsmith, and especially of Wordsworth’s “Ruined Cottage” (1797), we have moved far enough from the country-­house poem that a “distinct kind” is no longer possible to make out, even in its residual forms. Instead, the house poetry from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries emphasizes rural poverty, vagabondage, and housing insecurity, as we would call it today. Perhaps the biggest difference is that these poems depend on the conventions of naturalist description rather than on the conventions of classical epideixis and pastoral. The wealth of the country estate, doesn’t disappear, however; it moves into a different genre of writing, as Hugh Jenkins argues in Feigned Commonwealths.34 English and European novels represent the material realities of an emergent bourgeoisie and the problems that ensue from the in­her­it­ance of wealth and property, as well as the reliance of both on a quickly growing colonial empire. Honoré de Balzac’s houses are memorable for the exquisite objects and commodities that occupy so much narrative space in the long descriptive passages of Eugenie Grandet (1833) or Père Goriot (1835). His contemporary Charles Dickens made the rooms in the house of Ralph Nickleby or the cottage of the Cheeryble brothers amplify the acquisitive or generous ­personalities of their occupants. Houses are settings where the novel inflects its social intimacies with the shadows of imperialism and slavery as well as with the dreamscapes of emancipation and freedom. As the Gothic makes its  way through Horace Walpole’s castle of Otranto and Edgar Allan Poe’s house of Usher to William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), the psychological investigation undertaken by the  novel is partially displaced onto the very foundation and walls of the house. Houses, like novels, are baggy things, with lots of unexpected and underexplored space. They are therefore useful devices for the secrets they hold in their alcoves and bedrooms, whether those secrets belong to Bertha or Molly Bloom. A house scores the cumbrous totality of capitalism, colonialism, and war in the chamber music of its intimate family dramas, from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) to Katherine Mansfield’s “Prelude” (1918) and from the big house in Henry Green’s Loving (1945) to the Nazi-­occupied estate of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (1989). In Henry James’s A Portrait of a Lady (1881), we can find once again the “old English country-­ house” with its “name and history” and its “perfect lawn.” There are houses

Introduction  11 that are, essentially, the protagonists of novels themselves: Howards End, say, or the Ramsay’s summer house that, in To the Lighthouse (1927), falls into desuetude during World War I. For the novelist, the house provides a starting-­ point for a narrative form based in ownership and linked to the historical fate of capitalist regimes. It is a theater in which the social impulse of the novel can set its characters to work. The “proprietarian” political regimes on the continent in the nineteenth century are responsible not only for the presence of the house in the novels of that period, but also for some of the interfiliations between British house poems and certain European examples—­for instance, the French libertine poems that influenced Marvell.35 The US strain of the genre is quite different, since it emerges from the violence of settler colonization rather than the praise of a social order.36 The dates for the period that this book examines in detail, 1945–2021, begin with an American rise to financial and political hegemony and end, at least in many accounts, with the transition of an American century to a multipolar order after the 1970s. Seen from abroad, houses in the US were intended as the emblem of a successful and prosperous version of capitalism. This was true even earlier in certain cases: the investment possibilities represented by Roland Park, where Adrienne Rich spent her childhood, drew international interest in the early twentieth century. At home, housing transforms from the institutionalized vehicle of legalized discrimination in the early twentieth century to the solution to urban crisis after 1968. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin put it concisely: “the roots of the subprime mortgage crisis . . . lay in the way the anti-­inflation commitment had since the 1970s ruled out the public expenditures that would have been required just to start addressing the crisis of inadequate housing in US cities.”37 As the subprime mortgage crisis laid open to public view, US housing in the last fifty years has both expanded the opportunity to own a house and channeled wealth from the housing industry into the hands of the few. Many think of housing today as an expensive commodity but a relatively reliable asset in a bewildering world of speculation, financial instruments, and crypto-­currency. Not only does a house retain its value, at least compared to the volatility of other things you can buy, but you can also drive up to it, cook in it, fix it, and sleep in it, and even raise a family there. The value of a house depends, at least for most homeowners, not on abstract calculations, but largely on a hyperlocal comparison with other houses around it. As homeownership becomes the horizon of prosperity and upward mobility in the second half of the twentieth century, this process of housing valuation comes under scrutiny. The putative neutrality of each step of the

12  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 process of buying a home—­from loan pre-­approval to the inventory of homes and the availability of showings to the inspection, appraisal, and renovation businesses—­institutionalizes racism and segregation in ways that have resisted legislative and juridical intervention. Keeanga-­Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit (2019) studies the public-­private partnerships that exploit racial ­difference beginning in the 1970s. For Taylor, “the regular promotion of homeownership as a means to overcome poverty or as a method of building wealth in our society has been built on a mistaken assumption that all people enter the  housing market on an equal basis or that the housing market itself is a neutral arbiter of value.”38 Taylor notes how the new tools of finance made homeownership possible for more people, and also “produced an intense demand for more homeowners . . . while lax oversight and regulation incentivized unscrupulous and predatory targeting of urban communities.”39 In housing, as elsewhere, increased access is not equivalent to progress toward equality or economic justice. The 1970s are distinguished by the creation of new “debt instruments” for housing—­in other words, tools that enabled a wide variety of investors to put money into groups of mortgages, rather than to lend out money to homeowners themselves. But the transformation of US housing begins in earnest in the 1930s. During that time, the federal government passes important housing legislation, culminating in the Civil Rights Act; the Supreme Court decides the fate of legalized racist housing discrimination, at least in some of its more blatant forms; and the President of the United States calls for a second, economic bill of rights with housing at its core. Some of the energy behind this conception of housing comes from the new international human rights movement. Arguments against housing discrimination looked for precedent in the treatment of Jews.40 During this same time, the cultural treatment of housing across mediums and genres echoes, amplifies, and elaborates the claim for housing as a right, in large part by dramatizing the bleak effects of treating the home as a place for the accumulation of profit and connecting that to the lives of urban Black families. US cities, which in the 1930s and 1940s witness a massive internal migration of Black workers and families from the south to the north, give rise to a proliferation of poems and plays set in apartments. At the same time, the novel’s upper-­class manor houses take a step back from the cultural spotlight. American house poems predating the economic and democratic crises ushered in by the 1960s and 1970s typically focus on the abandonment or ruination of the house in elaborate meditations on loss and memory. In these latter-­day “golden age” house poems, written in the 1930s and 1940s, the house

Introduction  13 emblematizes a prior state of being characterized by opulence and wholeness. These mid-­century house poems are defined not by the praise of house’s structure—­the epideictic mode found in the country-­house poem—­but by an elegiac thrust that confronts conditions of loss and examines possibilities for repair.41 Wallace Stevens’s “Postcard from a Volcano” (1935) and Robert Frost’s “Directive” (1946) might be placed in this category.42 In the poems by Stevens and Frost, the poetic speaker explores the psychological ruins of childhood. Stevens encounters a “shuttered mansion house” around which children play, “picking up our bones” (CP 158–59). In Stevens’s poem, a contrast develops between the actual house (“the look of things”) and the mode of representation that is the poet’s gaze (“what we felt at what we saw”). “Postcard from the Volcano” concludes with what may be a metapoetic reflection on the rhetorical powers of epideixis. Whereas the fiction of praise in the country-­house poem, as Williams shows, subtracts the exploitation that keeps the house’s economy functioning, Stevens attempts to see the house for what it is: “A dirty house in a gutted world, / A tatter of shadows peaked to white, / Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.” The lord of the mansion is reduced to “a spirit storming in blank walls.” Other houses in Stevens—­in particular, the white walls from the third canto of “The Auroras of Autumn”—draw out a similar distance between the poet’s metaphorical imagination and the reality it smears with opulence. In “Directive,” the house poem also establishes a fiction for the encounter with the house, but here Frost subjects the orderly, schematic exploration of the country-­house and its grounds to the confusion of an unreliable guide and visitor. Once again a mode of poetic representation is called into question, but here it is the common set of topoi through which the reader of the country-­house poem moves, from the description of the exterior grounds to the movement to the domestic harmony of the interior. “Directive” centrally concerns a ruined children’s playhouse; it is one of Frost’s poems of diminished things. The poem ends with a hidden grail and a command to “drink and be whole again beyond confusion” (CP 378). The consolation of this line may well be sincere—­a closure that brings “poetic salvation”43—but it may also be read as ambivalent or even sarcastic: the poem has, by this point, exposed the memory of past wholeness as self-­mystifying and potentially false. These two representative house poems of the 1930s and 1940s, written by poets at the height of their careers, examine the aesthetics of writing about houses in an attempt to recover a lost social world, one that cannot appear directly in the poems themselves. Their nostalgia and longing can be situated historically at the moment that the US finds itself turning outward and into a

14  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 global economic power. Perhaps their abandoned rural houses presage the passing of refuge in the local, a holdout against what Stevens called “the pressure of reality” brought by the penetration of news and information. Or perhaps writing about the American house exposes the limits of the poetic devices used to praise and schematize the social function of the British country-­house. The nostalgia of these poems, in turn, has its parallel rage in poetry written from the perspective of those excluded from the economic growth of mid-­century America: nostalgia is not to be found in Brooks’s “kitchenette building,” which anchors its longing and desire in material conditions of racial capitalism.

Traditions of the House Poem: Colonial, Global, Vernacular I can imagine that, at this point or earlier, three questions might come to mind. What about the vast number of house poems prior to the 1930s? Bradstreet, Dickinson, Longfellow, Whittier, for example, all write varieties of the genre that are also landmark poems in American literature. From the beginning, American poets are painfully conscious of the house as something that can be arbitrarily taken away. It is probably untenable to claim a first example of an American house poem, but Anne Bradstreet’s “Verses Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10, 1666” is an early and a useful one, especially because of its relative contemporaneity with the last country-­house poems. A quick succession of impressions opens the poem: waking in the middle of the night to a sudden noise, hearing the shrieks of “fire,” seeing the light of it from the window, opening the door to “behold a space / The flame consume my dwelling place.”44 Bradstreet’s compressed couplets heighten the narrative of the poem and keep us close to her perspective. The house is present in the negative, in a list of things that have been lost: treasured possessions, conversations at a kitchen table, love and marriage. This litany of loss follows from the thought that the house was God’s: “it was his own, it was not mine.” The house was never hers to begin with, the poet tells herself: Thou hast a house on high erect Framed by that mighty Architect, With glory richly furnished, Stands permanent though this be fled.

Introduction  15 From her own perspective as a home-­maker in the early 1970s, Adrienne Rich describes Bradstreet as “keeping house at the edge of the wilderness.”45 Bradstreet’s early house poem is remarkable for the immediacy with which she feels its metaphysical inquiries, as though these pleas are present for her in the same way that the burning of the house is. Although they are written with the knowledge of a fractious polity instead of an assumption about shared beliefs, later American house poems nevertheless follow Bradstreet in one sense: they take the house as the occasion to meditate on the process by which language moves between personal expression and social use. Bradstreet casts the house in oppositional terms of its flammable structure on earth and a permanent “house on high erect.” Conscious of the absence of “that mighty Architect,” the American house poems in this book show how the precariousness of making a life in a house (manifest in markedly different ways) affects the literary expression available to understand that life. The doubt that is only present in Bradstreet’s repetition of her certainty makes its way into the later American poet’s faith in poetry. Does a poetic dream make an uncomfortably “giddy” sound, as in Brooks, or can it also be the “life-­raft” that will save us, as in Merrill? Second, as Bradstreet’s biography suggests, isn’t the house poem in English a transatlantic, transnational, and global genre? Yes, and there are too many examples of house poems, even since the turn of the twenty-­first century, for a single book; their implications extend far beyond the pivotal role that American housing plays in the history of segregation and the struggle for economic justice. The country-­house poem prompted Caribbean and Irish poets to critique the complicity of culture in imperial violence. Derek Walcott’s “Ruins of a Great House” goes directly into the plantation manor and finds that “the rot remains with us, the men are gone.”46 Derek Mahon’s “Penshurst Place” sets the entire Renaissance carpe diem tradition within the larger context of colonialism: the paths ablaze with daffodils, intrigue and venery in the air à l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the iron hand and the velvet glove— come live with me and be my love.47

Quotations from Marlowe and from Proust suggest that the aestheticized sentiment of European cosmopolitanism barely disguises the “venery” and exploitation that make it possible. Walcott and Mahon revise the country-­house

16  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 poem by bringing forward the world-­historical violence that enables it to exist and thrive. Other poets, while still conscious of the colonial power that invests English-­writing poetry with its enduring force, find a generative relation between house and creativity at work. Seamus Heaney’s longstanding claim for the presence of land within the sounds of a language takes family houses for some of its most profound local articulations—­in “Clearances,” for instance, when the poet and his mother clean potatoes in the kitchen.48 The subprime crisis has produced its own kinds of housing insecurity that span literary genres and urban settings more broadly. The ghost estates of Irish development memorably become the setting for one of the Dublin Murder Squad’s investigations in Tana French’s Broken Harbor (2012). Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (2021), meanwhile, returns to the exclusionary real estate industry in New York. In Detroit, residential segregation has reshaped the horror film in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2015). A more capacious, genre-­crossing survey could be written, but it would lose some of the specificity with which postwar poetry investigates claims to prosperity, democracy, equality, and class mobility. Of course, it’s necessary only to watch a few minutes of HGTV to register the draw of housing as a mass-­cultural phenomenon and preoccupation. But studying the postwar house poem brings with it some special advantages, not the least of which are the echoes across time and space from earlier house poems. I make no strong claims here for the scale of popular consumption of the poems in this book, though Brooks and Rich were comparatively well-­known figures in the literary world. Yet this again is an advantage because poetry tends to defamiliarize, not to reinforce, the way we look at things like houses—­not as commodities to be flipped, but as dwelling-­spaces with complex claims on our senses and imagination, ideas of community, family, and belonging, and an understanding of the ongoing presence of racism within ostensibly neutral legislative and juridical processes. Poems that emerge in the thick of economic and political transitions, as the house poem does, tend to bear on their surface, and in the vivid logic of their construction, the questions and uncertainties that are circulating more broadly. A third objection or question relates to the absence of an architectural approach, which will be immediately clear.49 Treatments of the country-­house poem have explored its influence by Italian traditions of architecture that were nearly contemporaneous.50 Vernacular American architectures in this book comprise city apartments, single-­family houses, and houses of memory and the imagination. I don’t quibble about what counts as a “house”: there is room in this book for a cramped apartment in Chicago or a suburban estate

Introduction  17 outside Baltimore. While construction and building are often metaphors in this book for the writing of poetry and the living of a life under material constraints, these poems rarely rely on analogy to blueprints or on the detailed exploration of a built environment. I don’t necessarily see the long tradition of house poems, whether seventeenth-­century British or contemporary American, as concerned very much with accuracy in description. But the real reason I leave out architectural theory or urban planning is primarily a disciplinary one: I am trained as a literary scholar in the traditions of English-­writing poetry. Moreover, the poets in this book did not, as far as I know, familiarize themselves with the long history of writing on architecture, from the continental aesthetic theories of Hegel and Heidegger to the vernacular approaches of Jane Jacobs. Their poetry does not, by and large, contribute to this body of knowledge, nor did they spend time building or designing homes. Merrill may be the partial exception here, but his poetic designs were cosmic in scale, his apartment renovations dictated by caprice, accident, and a predilection for the outré and the eye-­catching trouvaille. What their poetry does make plain, however, is that finding the right materials to construct a poem had become irrevocably tied up with the necessity to “make a house out of the life lived, out of the love spent.” The poems in this book are less concerned with what the house is, as an asset or commodity, than with how people live in it and use it.

From the Country-­House to the Kitchenette One of the ongoing stories about post-­1945 US poetry elevates a certain self-­ consciousness about writing that all writers probably feel. Poets in the midand late twentieth century talk about the difficulties of their art and let us peer in to the making of it.51 There are a few different ways to explain that story and its chapters, but for the poets in this book, making poetry is considered part of a larger project of making a life. The identification between poet and poem had been submerged under modernism’s impersonality, but raged to the surface in the work of “confessional” poets like Lowell, Berryman, and Plath. This account is a standard one so far. Its far-­reaching consequences are still felt in US poetry by Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, and Claudia Rankine. But the attempt to make a life in poetry does not occur in the abstract, as it had, largely, for the Romantic poets, for whom the material of experience was a fading coal destined to be turned into a monumental form. Rather, for Americans after 1945, constructing a life as a poet meant discovering new

18  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 possibilities and confronting new obstacles for making a home, a house, an apartment, a place to live. This book is about the extraordinary difficulties in doing so, the racism and financial exploitation and physical violence faced, and it is also about the settling in, the dreams and surprises and the changing light. Books about houses with less explicit consciousness of material conditions—­Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, for example—­play supporting roles for some of the poets in here, especially Jennifer S. Cheng. Poetics of Space is a philosophical walkthrough of houses, in which the most important parts of the house are those brought to light by the poetic imagination. The house, for Bachelard, is a “tool for analysis of the human soul.”52 Bachelard’s philosophy of the “house image” ultimately lands on a question of value. For the poet, the value of a house is very different from the value accorded to it by the surveyor: . . . the images I want to examine are the quite simple images of felicitous space . . . . They seek to determine the human value of the sorts of space that may be grasped, that may be defended against adverse forces, the space we love. For diverse reasons, and with the differences entailed by poetic shadings, this is eulogized space. Attached to its protective value, which can be a positive one, are also imagined values, which soon become dominant. Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination.53

The imagination is “partial” to houses: it distorts their value, as Bachelard goes on to show in his encomia to nooks, nests, and corners—­the spaces in the house where the poet finds value. The distinction Bachelard makes here, between the value the imagination gives to the “space we love” and the value the surveyor gives it, can be brought down to earth, as it were, by lingering with the surveyor and by questioning the putative universality of the poetic imagination. Keeanga-­ Yamahtta Taylor grounds her own analysis of value in race and real estate. She turns not to phenomenology, but to the Marxist terms of use value and exchange value. The history of US housing for Black people makes the house into a commodity; for whites, the house is permitted to be a “place of belonging,” a “place we love.” These contradictory objectives of real estate and home—­one a commodity and the other intimating a place of belonging—­also reinforced reactionary

Introduction  19 racial norms and deepened the perception of dual housing markets working at dual purposes . . . . Where white housing was seen as an asset developed through inclusion and the accruable possibilities of its surrounding property, Black housing was marked by its distress and isolation, where value was extracted, not imbued.54

Taylor’s history of the appraisal industry, in which the value of houses rose or fell depending on whether neighborhoods were homogenous or integrated, is only one example. For Black homeowners in the US, the value of a house is not matter only for poetic reverie, but also for profitable accumulation—­the profit of white home appraisers, real estate agents, and speculators. Housing has been the intellectual domain of the journalist, the sociologist, the anthropologist, and the historian. What does literature have to tell us about it? It’s a simple thing to say that poetry defies positivism, revealing to us the lived experience that surpasses all statistics. Yet that does not mean that poetry is a product of the liberal imagination alone. Poetry also defamiliarizes the structures and systems of things, never more so than during the grand age of US system-­building after World War II. Accounts of postwar economics turn, at some point, to housing policy as a central protagonist. Prominent histories of postwar art and culture, however, all but ignore the topic.55 It may be that the people most affected by housing and segregation write in too low a register to figure in the narratives of post-­1945 literature. Or that housing quickly slides into the category of the “domestic,” of lesser interest in an expansive era of the global.56 The signature poetry collections of the postwar period, from Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) to Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), anatomize the present by placing the self in history. In both those cases, that means including or even centering a narrative poetry set in houses. The centerpiece of Life Studies is a prose section titled “91 Revere Street.” Many of the anecdotes and microaggressions in Rankine’s book take place on lawns and streets in neighborhoods that remain de facto segregated. To call these books “house poems” brings out their larger themes, while also drawing attention to their experiments in form. Both Lowell and Rankine adopt a prosimetric structure, as though to suggest that the lyric poem, with its brevity and compression, cannot fully account for the self-­destructive whiteness of American culture and politics, nor for the violence against Black bodies. The house poem names a genre in which the making of a home and the making of poetry are identified, even if that means that both are equally fraught, equally unlikely or embattled. In that sense, the American house

20  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 poem deviates from its distant precursor, the British country-­house poem. Yet both are situated in a moment of nationalist self-­reflection and expansion. It is just that the earlier form of the genre speaks to its own contemporary form of enclosure: large estates providing ideological ballast for the property-­ based political regime of seventeenth-­century England. In the context of the US after World War II, the house represents instead the troubled emblem of democratic responsibility for the social welfare of its citizens. In both cases, though, the house poem shows us, and even bids readers to participate in, the sustaining or failing of national myths and their containment—­or not—­of daily material realities. This book maps post-­1945 poetry through overlapping economic aspects of housing. There is a schema at work that I explain more fully in the chapter descriptions below. But I approach the poems first through their words. Life studies of the poets serve an orienting purpose, and the background of each poet is scarred with material obstructions or blessed with material freedoms. But the focus is on the language and the style of the poems, rather than on following the biographies of the poets. I linger with single poets across their careers because their style changes as the reality of housing changes around them. In that sense, this book is interested in the work that genre does to uncover history. I came up with the list of poets because of their attachment to houses, apartments, and to the idea of homeownership in general: Brooks and Chicago, Rich and the suburbs, Merrill and his cosmic apartments, Wallschlaeger and the voices who were never given an audience in country-­ house poems. I chose to focus at length on three individual poets—­Brooks, Rich, Merrill—­for the different backgrounds their poetry engages: legalized housing discrimination, feminized care work, and financialization. In each larger topic, the house is a key protagonist. I look into the rooms of their poetic houses not for what their appraisal is according to the real estate professional, but rather for what kinds of creative appraisals poets themselves make of their houses and their own work. Metaphors for writing poetry are often artisanal: weaving and building are common ones. The product is a monument, a cenotaph, a clammy cell, a little room in a house set aflame. Poetry is always on the brink of turning into something else: the news, a song, prose.57 Brooks’s poems borrow from reportage and journalism; Rich’s tend toward the essay form she writes at the same time. Merrill’s are literally created from the alphabet-­games of the Ouija board. Wallschlaeger’s and Cheng’s are prose, often. These genres are unstable, first because poetry seems to require an “other” in order to form, and thus exists in the difference between a determinate state and nothing, a dissolving

Introduction  21 substance, in a kind of chemical resonance-­structure. But, more important for my purpose, the poems are unstable because the meaning of housing is in dramatic flux and contestation. As the central ideological, political, and economic anchor of US global expansion, conceptual tremors in housing render dramatic irruptions into poetic form.

Structure of the Book Racial discrimination closely accompanies the articulation of the American ideal of homeownership. Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry confronts the housing conditions under which it is written: “We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,” begins Brooks’s “kitchenette building” from A Street in Bronzeville (1945). Ta-­Nehisi Coates explains the process of redlining that forms part of the context and subject-­matter of Brooks’s poetry, writing that “from the 1930s to the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-­mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal.”58 Brooks’s poetry from this period asks whether its “dream,” its “aria,” and even its “lukewarm water” are conceivable in a kitchenette, a segregated residential unit in Chicago. The architecture of the sonnet, which she inherits and revises, lays bare the economic predation that shapes the lives of Black families at the dawning of national prosperity and global domination. For Brooks, writing about public housing in 1940s Bronzeville, the American sonnet makes a “giddy sound” when composed in a crowded apartment. Brooks’s city apartments are constantly under threat: segregation, eviction, and debt make the home a place where dreams of song and sonnet run counter to the economic realities they capture. The second chapter turns to the suburbs and to suburban housing after World War II. In their classic study American Apartheid (1993), Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton write that “as poor Blacks from the south entered cities in large numbers, middle-­ class whites fled to the suburbs to escape them and to insulate themselves from the social problems that accompanied the rising tide of poor.”59 Adrienne Rich grows up in one of these suburbs outside Baltimore, Roland Park. Her poetry returns frequently to “that dangerous place / the family home,” where the confined domesticity of the kitchen sink and the bedroom send her vision far into a settler-­colonialist past and a globalist present.60 This chapter asks whether poetry can be used not to survive the cramped space of home, but to take it apart and make it into something less private and isolated than the suburbs might allow. In Snapshots of a Daughter-­in-­Law (1963),

22  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 her collection that appears the same year as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Rich imagines the poet in the contradictory but poetically generative position of laying a roof she can’t live under, writing that “life I didn’t choose / Chose me: even / My tools are the wrong ones / For what I have to do.”61 Rich’s search for ways to “unmake” the family home culminates in the capacious style of her poetic sequences which attempt to undo the formalist constructions of her earlier work. There is no single poem that holds the place of a Penshurst in the American house poem tradition, which is generally more concerned with domesticity and vernacular architecture than with grand estates. The seventeenth-­century house poem does, however, find a late manifestation or revival in the work of James Merrill, whose house poems take place against the background of a third major phenomenon of postwar housing: the growth of a secondary financial market for investing in pools of mortgages. Merrill, whose many house poems have a formal range that matches his eclectic interior designs, was heir to the fortune of Merrill Lynch. Merrill’s own houses are thus crafted by the financialization of US imperial designs from the late 1960s to the mid-­1980s. Merrill’s confidence in the power of the poetic imagination to restore and repair the “broken home” is the strongest of the poets in my study, yet his house poems tend to emphasize de-­growth as much as accumulation. His domestic spaces, like his poetic stanzas themselves, are places of willed illusion, transformation, and renewal, rather than permanence and stability. Their wildly speculative forms are not directed toward accumulation—­as the newly speculative economy would be—­but rather toward the constant renovation that lies at the heart of Merrill’s notion of both poetry and ­family. Merrill’s epic country-­house poem, The Changing Light at Sandover (1976–80), ultimately invites us to consider the “immaterial” aspects of value associated with both his own wayward affections and with the instruments of housing finance. In the final chapter, a group of contemporary poems insist more urgently on economic exclusion and financial exploitation. The final chapter analyzes the poetry emerging after the subprime crisis of 2007–8. New forms have arisen to address the evictions, foreclosures, and debt associated with contemporary housing. Twenty-­first-­century US house poems are marked by the immiseration and exploitation of potential homeowners—­and by their successful tactics of carving out a domestic poetics of ethical care, linguistic hospitality, and phenomenological richness of detail. This final chapter examines how the luxuriousness of the house poem, its essential hospitality as a genre, is tested and strained formally when the working figures excluded from poetic

Introduction  23 subjectivity are positioned as the interiority from which the poem emanates. Twenty-­ first-­ century poems by Nikki Wallschlaeger, Jennifer  S.  Cheng, Tracy K. Smith, and Divya Victor craft a politics and poetics of domestic interiors by recentering the house poem on the bodies, affects, and perceptions the genre has traditionally excluded. For most of this book, I focus on single poets to trace the house as a recurrent figure, political preoccupation, and structuring device. That focus broadens in the final chapter—­of necessity, since all the poets in the final chapter are in the thick of their careers. The chapters illuminate the contrasts between treatments of housing in a way that I hope reveals a considerable complexity and uncertainty over the fate of homeownership. The long conversation about housing that develops across these chapters, meanwhile, suggests that commonplace divisions between post-­1945 American poets fail to tell the whole story. For example, scholars have discussed whether Brooks is an experimental poet—­indeed, the question of race and the avant-­garde generated much debate across the 2000s and 2010s.62 Similarly, Rich’s reputation still hangs, at least partially, on her feminist politics, as it has since reviews of her poetry collections from the mid-­1970s. These questions of belonging rely on implicit claims about value: Rich’s poetry is better, or worse, to the extent that it can be understood as feminist; Brooks’s poetry is better, or worse, to the extent that she explores an experimental Black aesthetics. Perhaps the period from about 1945–75 encourages this type of argument, since so many poets born in the 1910s and 1920s wrote among the enduring données of modernism. Staking a claim about value by making a decision about artistic groups and groupings still haunts cultural histories of the postwar period. What would be another way of telling the story? I don’t dispute the significance of tracking Brooks’s radicalization and immersion in the Black Arts Movement; nor do I think it unimportant to see how Rich’s widening poetic lens troubled her early definitions of feminism. The proliferation of schools and movements of poetry makes it tempting to re-­adjudicate the reception of a poet based on their placement within the wrong strain or line or network of influence. The stakes for such claims can be both broad—­placing oneself in a tradition can be an empowering and revolutionary political and artistic gesture—­and narrow—­if you don’t already care about or know about a particular strain of poetry, you might be left feeling excluded from the conversation. Since this book is unconcerned with situating post-­1945 poetry in separate camps based on changing political evaluations of poetic device, inherited forms, and range of difficulty, I largely avoid questions about, say, whether a  poet counts as one type or another. I’m more interested in identifying

24  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 the moments when Brooks, Rich, Merrill, and several others offer a greater understanding of social thought about housing (and related issues) in the post-­1945 period. The most natural way that I find myself tracing the course of ideas, in all their contradictory expressions in creative works, is by identifying salient archetypical genres and modes that appear during periods of global transformation. The emphasis falls off the poet and the poet’s critical acceptance into a particular group or style—­and thus off the increase or decrease in a poet’s value—­ and it falls onto the configuration between the poetic text (or performance) and the larger world it reflects and rearranges. A notion of genre, loosely defined, also makes comparison possible across time and space: a house poem in translation is still a house poem; a house poem across decades, or even across centuries, illuminates the relative importance of holding property, the perception of care work, the nature of what counts as family or kinship. Finally, the lack of an exclusive or restrictive idea of genre permits a broad range of homes and forms to enter into this book. These poems retain their hold on us because of their dynamic, if partial, recreation of the world in a literary sensibility. What a house poem is, then, is not a set of traits, but an instrument that both clarifies and obscures, a view that reveals and that obstructs the way that houses are embedded in the political imagination of a given time.

1 Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right In the summer of 1938, Gwendolyn Brooks, age 21, found her theme. Starting a few years earlier, as a contributor to the Chicago Defender, Brooks began to publish her poems in a column called “Lights and Shadows.”1 But in June 1938, Brooks, who was a member of the “Cre-­Lit” literary club along with her husband Henry, turned to study drama. A notice in the Defender read: “The study of poetry, which has been the main preoccupation of the members for the past four months, will be temporarily set aside in favor of an intensive study of the principles of the drama, and in the near future they will present a group of original plays and skits.”2 Writing in different voices, through various personae, was not entirely new for Brooks. A poem from three years ­earlier, “Corner in a Portrait Gallery,” finds Brooks experimenting with short “portraits” of individuals.3 Their style is epigrammatic, pointing to the individual as an exemplar of an ethical position. But two months after apparently turning to drama, on August 20, Brooks published her first poem about a house: a dramatic monologue spoken by an apartment house itself. “An Old Apartment House” is quite clearly a piece of juvenilia, but it anticipates the house poems that Brooks will write for the next thirty years. The poem begins “Nobody lives here now. / Gee, I miss the people.” Then it goes on to catalogue the residents, “all sorts of people,” including “Janitors and poets./ Real estate men and ministers. / Teachers and chorus girls.” “If there’s anything you want to know,” says the building, “ask an old house. Particularly / An old apartment house.”4 At least as far as the “Lights and Shadows” poems go from the mid- to late 1930s, “An Old Apartment House” also marks the first sustained experiment by Brooks in the form of the dramatic monologue. Brooks’s earliest poems are mostly short, carefully wrought love poems with “careful rhymes” and “lofty meditations.”5 “Selfish” and “Solace” are typical titles. These poems appeal to a wide readership and immediately precede “An Old Apartment House.” One more coincidence contrives to lead Brooks in the direction of the kitchenette, apartment, house, and vacant lots she would write for much of the rest of her career: a 19-­year-­old Brooks had worked for The American House Poem, 1945–­2021. Walt Hunter, Oxford University Press. © Walt Hunter 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192856258.003.0002

26  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 four months in the Mecca Flats apartment building, an old apartment house itself, an emblem of Chicago’s modernity, and, ultimately, a key protagonist in the city’s ongoing racial segregation.6 The link between Brooks’s study of drama as a “Cre-­Lit” member, her actual work in the Mecca apartment building, and her turn toward writing “portraits” of individual inhabitants amounts to little more than a set of biographical facts, of course. But the shift from abstracted love lyrics to profiles of people is  not only a matter of widening her palette as a poet. It’s also a shift from representing private thoughts to representing overheard speech. In this way, Brooks reanimates, quite literally, the house poem at precisely the moment when urban housing takes center stage in the civil rights movement, in federal policy, and in the Supreme Court. The FHA was created as part of the National Housing Act in 1934. While agencies write housing into law, Brooks makes housing speak. This chapter looks closely at the work of Brooks, for whom the house is inseparable from matters of racism, segregation, gendered labor, and class politics. Brooks’s poetry, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, pictures the civil rights movement by crafting intimate vignettes of the social life of South Side neighborhoods, focusing on Black women in kitchenette buildings. That’s in the two decades before 1967, the year when Brooks’s thinking takes on a more international cast, thanks to a conference at Fisk University, a visit to Nairobi, and many conversations with Black writers and editors. The story this chapter tells ends there, with the dedication of Brooks’s image on the Wall of Respect, a former “slum” building at 43rd and Langley. The fight for housing takes on new forms and strategies after 1968 and the Fair Housing Act. It also disappears from her poetry, for the most part—­which is not to say the problem has been solved. Rather, the failure of federal policy over housing prompts Brooks into increasingly radical politics. One piece of evidence might be her careful placement of “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed,” a searing ballad about violence and racism in housing in Chicago, at the end of her Selected Poems (1963). Brooks’s poetry is perhaps unique in how sustained her attention to housing is across multiple poetic genres. Equally important is the connection she implies between economic freedom and creative expression. For Brooks’s characters, who experience various kinds of housing insecurity and racism, the capacity for expression is starved, threatened, and sometimes cut off entirely. The right to housing, on the streets of Bronzeville, enhances individual freedom and, from the hallways of the Mecca building to the streets outside, animates a sense of collective responsibility.

Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right  27 Brooks writes her poems about housing during the period of housing legislation bookended by the National Housing Act in 1934 and the Fair Housing Act in 1968 (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act). While Brooks is composing and submitting A Street in Bronzeville (published in 1945), FDR gives his “economic bill of rights” speech in which he argues for the “right to a decent home” in the interests of an enduring peace: “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”7 In the history of US attempts and failures to ensure the “right to a decent home,” Chicago occupies an especially prominent place. Chicago, Beryl Satter writes, “had pioneered methods of Black containment that would be copied nationally and that turned it, not coincidentally, into the nation’s most segregated city by 1957.”8 The first Great Migration, which doubled the Black population in Chicago by the 1920s, and the invention of zoning laws and restrictive covenants made the city this way.9 By the time Brooks writes A Street in Bronzeville, Chicago “led the nation” in the use of restrictive covenants. But racism in housing was not only the province of private actors; the federal housing authority also played a large role. The FHA deployed a system of rating property A, B, C, or D—­D if the neighborhood had any Black residents—­ which “standardized and nationalized” the practices of white realtors.10 Brooks’s local Chicago streets were quite literally shaped by the decisions of the federal judiciary—­first, with respect to zoning and, thirty years later, with respect to restrictive covenants. In the stretch of cases from Buchanan v. Warley (1917) to Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the Supreme Court responded, albeit haltingly, to these shifting forms of segregation. The court found that racism in zoning, which had existed in the US at least since 1910, was subject to the Fourteenth Amendment, because it was a public process.11 But restrictive covenants, which were private agreements, had to wait until Shelley for the court to reject enforcement of them.12 The common denominator behind public and private varieties of racism in housing was home value. “Racial exclusion enhanced property values,” as Carol M. Rose and Richard R. W. Brooks put it.13 The coterie of private actors involved in adjudicating value—­ from real estate agents to inspectors to appraisers—­had clear financial incentives to keep the housing market segregated. But the federal government played an active role, most glaringly in the provision of FHA loans with criteria based explicitly on race.14 Later, too, it was the decision of the federal government to deregulate finance and expand

28  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 credit in the 1970s that would point the way to the foreclosures and subprime mortgages in the final chapter.15 Brooks knew the space of the kitchenette intimately: first, there was the “honeymoon kitchenette” she and Henry rented at 43rd and South Park;16 another kitchenette at 6424 Champlain; a garage at 5412 Indiana, “where our son contracted broncho-­pneumonia”; and, from 1941–48, a kitchenette at 623 East 63rd St., which she describes as “our most exciting kitchenette.”17 The kitchenette, she reveals, offers an endless array of prompts for poetry: “if you wanted a poem, you had only to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing.”18 While these were homes where Brooks remembered, at least initially, “feeling bleak,” the kitchenette was also the bridge between her creative imagination and the social world around her, the sanctum of her “breakfast talks” with Henry, the locus of her work raising Henry Jr. and Nora, and the site of improbably huge parties—“100 people in two rooms”—for luminaries and friends like Langston Hughes.19 Brooks’s own familial relation to racism in housing began far away from Bronzeville’s streets, however. While her poetry often tracks the lives that go on inside interior spaces, the “windy grays” that sometimes appear give reason to think about land as well the built environment. The land embeds Brooks’s poetry in a much longer history than the one that begins, in its modern form, with zoning laws and restrictive covenants. Before the set of Supreme Court decisions and federal housing acts in the twentieth century, there was the Homestead Act of 1860, which: enabled any man or woman, with no restrictions as to race or ethnicity, at least twenty-­one years old, or the head of a family, to receive 160 acres of undeveloped land in trust from the government for paying a modest fee. Homesteaders were also required to live on the allotted terrain, farm it, and build a home on it before they could own the land outright.20

Brooks’s grandfather was an enslaved person who, after escaping, took advantage of the Homestead Act, as Brooks narrates in her autobiography, Report from Part One. Housing provides much of the subject matter for Brooks’s early vignettes in kitchenettes. A Street in Bronzeville begins in intimate bedrooms and kitchens and ends in a vacant lot. The first poem of Annie Allen (1949) contains a “birth in a narrow room.”21 The chapter titled “Kitchenette folks” introduces a set of peripheral characters in Maud Martha (1953), a rehearsal, perhaps, for the

Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right  29 larger social world to come with In the Mecca (1967). After In the Mecca, housing fades somewhat into the background as Brooks embraces calls for Black liberation and solidarity across the diaspora. Throughout these poems, Brooks registers her experiences and diagnoses racism in housing by animating the lives it shapes and deforms. Harder to account for, however, is the changing fashion in which the voices of the kitchenette building or the old apartment mull over the capacities for poetic expression and creativity. The domestic interior of the house and the immediate pressure of Chicago segregation give Brooks an occasion to range over the longer history of Black poetic expression. At stake in the house poem is not only survival and the daily labor of keeping the house together, but also the surplus of dream and song—­in other words, the creative imagination—­that privileges aesthetic activity in a time of necessity, when political resistance and radicalized consciousness are more obvious accompaniments. As housing makes its way into poetry in the mid-­ century, the goal is more than a lasting security that, in FDR’s language, leads to “true individual freedom.” We can detect within Brooks’s use of multiple poetic and narrative genres—­as well as in the drama of her contemporaries Theodore Ward and Lorraine Hansberry—­the impact of racism in housing on human self-­expression. Poetry makes it clear that the value of a house lies not only in the price it summons but also in the creative activities, the myriad forms of home-­making, that it shelters. This is also the era when the way housing is framed politically relies on making claims about human character, claims usually based in race. Brooks’s poems foreground character as a response and a retort—­and as a result, the possibilities for formal verse are fundamentally transformed. We don’t usually talk much about characters in poetry, a kind of writing that makes use of the many ways that language can evade communication, transform itself into fictions of address to the absent or dead, stretch the imagination with elaborate metaphors, and revel in the deep history of words, sounds, or schematic patterns. If we do discuss character, it’s often through the lens of moral philosophy and psychology: the attachment to a character makes us reflect on a more general hierarchy between ourselves and others. That’s not really what Brooks is doing with character, since her concern isn’t that we think exclusively about the relation between two people, but rather that we set the figure of a person against the ground of a condition. Brooks’s poetry examines how the individual fits into the mesh of economics and politics that determines, at least in part, what role they play vis-­à-­vis others. A Street in Bronzeville (1945) makes for a good place to begin this book, first because of the publication date and second because so many of the poems

30  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 raise questions about the possibility of writing poetry at all. The immediate occasion for the poems, which Adrienne Rich will echo two decades later in her own description of Snapshots of a Daughter-­in-­Law (1963), is in fact a street of houses and the people who live in them. Jacqueline Goldsby quotes Brooks making this point: “Brooks revised her poems ‘to take my own street and write about a person or incident associated with each of the houses on the block.’ ”22 Brooks’s poems stage the little dramas that take place in apartments. Her choice of poetic genres, and especially the ballad and sonnet, bring an urgency to the page that extends beyond the reportage common in the previous decade of photojournalism. The value of her poems comes from the lives inside the home, rather than from the abstract methods of valuation that keep the housing market segregated. Brooks brings the value of her crowded apartments up by transforming the basis for value altogether, placing it in the hands of those excluded from the private businesses clustered around real estate. The unit of the poems isn’t only the single-­dwelling house—­it’s also the whole “street,” or the whole apartment building, as A Street in Bronzeville and In the Mecca suggest in their titles. Each poem in the former is a piece of a larger social life, gestured at but left incomplete, at least as far as a synoptic or birds-­eye view would present it to us. You can’t write a house poem on its own, Brooks suggests, and yet she is forced to do exactly that by the very nature of the discrete poem.23 A Street in Bronzeville conjures up the possibility of a house poem that might encompass the whole street, asserting the life of the block against the appraisal of the single-­family unit. At the same time, each poem dramatizes the material oppression and exploitation of Black families living in Chicago after the Great Migration, when housing supply and discrimination left families in the “crowding darkness.” Even poems that don’t refer to houses explicitly—“the mother,” for example—­are difficult to read without supplying Chicago housing as a context for the production of their dramatic monologues, vignettes, and “portraits in verse.”24

Bronzeville Interiors The poems in A Street in Bronzeville hold together a set of characters taken from Brooks’s observations. Her house poems dramatize the expressive interiority of the inhabitants of Chicago’s South Side as they long for a propitious social world, and material support, for that expression to flourish. Bronzeville, D. H. Melhem notes, is “a name invented by the Chicago Defender” that refers

Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right  31 to “a South Side area of about forty blocks, running north and south from 29th to 69th streets, and east and west about thirteen blocks from Cottage Grove to State Street.”25 Brooks’s poems set in Bronzeville stage the pressures of reality as they give rise to the revolutionary force of the imagination. In that sense A Street in Bronzeville makes a good companion for Saidiya Hartman’s contemporary account of the lives of early twentieth-­ century urban women, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019). Brooks’s poetry contains two thoughts at once: the apartment is the source of poetry making and it is also its most indefatigable antagonist. The kitchenette obeys a divided “residential logic,” in which “the pursuit of profit for housing” comes into conflict with “its use for living.”26 A Street in Bronzeville begins with a short poem about the end of the day titled “the old marrieds.” A couple is in bed reflecting on the day and what they’ve heard and seen. Love should be in the air—­it’s May—­but the two are silent and contemplative instead. The “crowding darkness” in the poem suggests an atmosphere for the rest of the collection.27 An irony between creative expression and clear-­eyed realism that emerges in this first poem repeats throughout the volume. Outside, there are the “pretty-­coated birds,” the “lovers in the side-­street,” the “morning stories,” and “sweets.” Inside, there is silence in the dark. But the contrast is complicated by the poem’s progress from inside to outside to inside again, working like a Romantic conversation poem in miniature. The basic strategy of the house poem, at least in its oldest guises, appears here: the poem manages a relationship between the outside and the inside and examines what social values might be reflected in that relationship. The lovers and birds and sweets are overheard and overseen (and remembered), not experienced directly. But really what the poem suggests is that both of the “old-­marrieds” have their separate memories of the day, things seen and heard, which can be shared within the poem but not with each other (“not a word did they say”).28 This first poem also mimics or borrows the structure of the roundel, at least in a modified fashion: it begins with the same line with which it concludes. The month is May, traditional for the setting of French and English madrigals and songs. Sara Teasdale’s “Roundel” and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes,” “Not They Who Soar,” and “Premonition” all end with the lines with which they began.29 In Teasdale’s case, the first line is “if he could know my songs are all for him,” which helps to craft the intimate fiction of a lyric expression overhead. The movement of a roundel is dynamic: the enclosing effect of the repetition alters the reading of the line by adding any new information or sentiment picked up along the way.

32  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 We know from George Kent that Brooks had listened to her father read Dunbar and that she had read Teasdale, who won the Pulitzer in 1918.30 When she was thirteen, Brooks writes, “certainly there . . . to look down at me whenever I sat at the desk, was Paul Laurence Dunbar.”31 But regardless of the source, Brooks foregrounds the artifice of the poem while she draws in the material of a quotidian domestic scene. One reading of the poem, which is supported by several of the poems that follow, would place the expressive form of Brooks’s verse as a version of the aesthetic experiences the old-­ marrieds don’t speak out loud to each other. The freedom to talk about art, love, delight with each other is a dream deferred onto the testifying lines of the poem itself. Whether or not the poem issues, by virtue of its composition, some compensation for the “crowding darkness” of its interior is a difficult question to answer. But “the old-­marrieds” sing what can’t be shared. The more famous poem that follows, “kitchenette building,” elaborates and develops the theme of “the old-­marrieds.” Modernist alienation—­Brooks was a good reader of Eliot32—runs through the first poem. The second discloses the material conditions that are essential to this alienation and that haunt an evocative phrase like “crowding darkness.” Kitchenettes, originally marketed to European immigrants and working women, were single apartments divided to hold multiple families in ever tighter spaces.33 These “lucrative investments” exposed their residents to disease and to fire and often lacked private bathrooms.34 In 1941, four years before Brooks publishes “kitchenette poem” in A Street in Bronzeville, Richard Wright brings the kitchenette to vivid, photorealist life in Twelve Million Black Voices. Alongside a series of pictures of the apartments, Wright writes a lyrical set of paragraphs that each begins with “kitchenette”: “the kitchenette is our prison, our death sentence without a trial, the new form of mob violence that assaults not only the lone individual, but all of us, in its ceaseless attacks”; “the kitchenette creates thousands of one-­room homes where our black mothers sit, deserted, with their children about their knees”; “the kitchenette piles up mountains of profit for the Bosses of the Buildings and makes them ever more determined to keep things as they are.”35 Wright’s catalogue of kitchenette vignettes shows how this “antidote” to the housing crisis contaminates past, present, and future for its Black families while drawing together and empowering a network of white profiteers.36 Brooks’s construction of the poem raises questions about what kinds of poetry can be made. “Kitchenette building” behaves like a sonnet, though it has only thirteen lines. The poem describes how life in the kitchenette takes

Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right  33 on the dimensions of the space itself, as well as the economics of what we might now call social reproduction: paying the rent, “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.” A sense of the future—­the poem calls that a “dream”—must confront “onion fumes,” “fried potatoes,” and “yesterday’s garbage.” Even then, the poem suggests, it would take a lot of care to “warm it, keep it very clean” and “let it begin.” The language of the poem in that third stanza still moves within the words available for housework. The imagination requires work, Brooks writes, for it to survive in the kitchenette.37 As the dream begins to “flutter” and take flight in “kitchenette building,” Brooks brings it immediately down to earth: in the crowded apartment, dreams appear like yet another duty of care. At the same time, though, the poem poses the dream’s life in the kitchenette as a question, as capable, at least in theory, of coexisting alongside the work of keeping a large family fed and clean. “Number Five” comes out of the bathroom in the final stanza, interrupting the reverie, which we see has been a product of waiting to use the bath. The whole poem takes place in that suspended interval; the “hope” at the end is for “lukewarm water.” Yet, as Elizabeth Alexander points out, it is nevertheless the final verb hope that closes the poem.38 “Kitchenette building” is a special type of house poem, one in which the temporality of living with a big family in a too-­small space transforms the sonnet as a poetic genre. This poem illuminates one of the larger arguments in this book. Housing, as it becomes a preeminent concern both for individual families and for the political and economic identity of the United States, brings old genres to hand while fundamentally altering them. In the case of Brooks, this alteration appears in the extraordinary density and compression of sound in the poem, which comes to a climax in the final phrase (“hope to get in it”). That short phrase, with its elided subject (“we”), and monosyllabic closure, conducts in miniature the extraordinary pressures constellating around the issue of housing in 1945. It is three years before William Carlos Williams will claim that “we do not live in a sonnet world.”39 A very different “we” is operating here in Brooks’s poetry. For Brooks, the world—­her world, and that of the Black urban population seeking housing in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia—­enters the sonnet instead. The “we” in the poem comprises other siblings, one imagines, as well as members of the other family in the building, waiting in line for the bath (much like the Youngers and Johnsons in the first scene of A Raisin in the Sun). That’s the occasion, the forced parenthesis in the day, that gives rise to the wonder in the poem. As the “dream” in the poem takes flight, it doesn’t lead us out of the poem to the street, or to some imagined other house or life, but rather deeper into the poem’s

34  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 environment, as the dream stands in for yet another child to take care of—­ literally, to keep warm and clean. The first section of A Street in Bronzeville ends with the disappearance of a house altogether in its final poem “the vacant lot.” Brooks captures the transformation of Chicago into “the most segregated city in the country” by elegizing the houses that are no longer there. “Southeast corner,” for instance, notes that “the School of Beauty’s a tavern now,” a line which captures, in its compressed reportage, the changing economic profile of the neighborhood. Both poems share the abcb structure of the ballad, but whereas “southeast corner” tracks its Madam to her grave in Lincoln cemetery, “the vacant lot” imaginatively reconstructs the house that used to be there.40 Though the official processes of urban renewal postdate A Street in Bronzeville, it’s not by very many years that they do. “The vacant lot” anticipates or prefigures the clearing of houses and the selling of the lot to private investors.41 The Illinois Blighted Areas Redevelopment Act, from 1947, was quickly put into action in a redevelopment project in the southeast corner of the city.42 In Brooks’s poem, the lot gives rise to a memory of the family who lived there—­Mrs. Coley, her “African son-­ in-­law / (Rightful heir to the throne)” and his philandering wife, who lets in men “when majesty has gone for the day.” Brooks’s sardonic pun on majesty—­the son-­in-­law, the daily illusions of the household, perhaps the sun itself—­makes a serious point, especially since it’s the last line before “The Sundays of Satin-­Legs Smith” begins. The irony and the caricature of the poem are not jokes at the expense of the people in it. Rather, the comic exaggeration of the scene derives from Brooks’s technique and chosen form—­the satiric portrait in verse, the ballad. Starting with the vacant lot, the poem conjures up not social realism, but rather a “low mimetic” mode that juxtaposes the heroic with the ordinary life.43 The idea of the sonnet as “narrow room” is overdetermined in “kitchenette building”: the sonnet captures the feeling of being trapped in one’s mind as in one’s situation, and the strain that that condition places on the faculties of desire and imagination. Poetically, this narrowness also requires and makes imaginable the quick moves, the schematic and tropological dexterity, that pushes the poem toward its understated final demand. Later, Brooks will set aside the sonnet and the ballad, but they will remain present in her work as objects of explicit critique, even as she calls for a more “jagged chiming” appropriate to her exhortations to a radical Black movement.44 The fissiparation of her lines in Riot (1969) testify to this urgency. In the 1940s and 1950s, though, the fragmentation toward which Brooks frequently veers occurs largely within the confines of poetic genres themselves.

Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right  35

An Epic at Home A Street in Bronzeville ranges through a variety of house settings, but the register of the collection remains tied to lyric vignettes, short stories with dramatic narrators cast in the mold of inherited forms. Annie Allen (1949) reverses the procedure and centers a single narrator in an epic plot, which Brooks calls “The Anniad.” The epic genre consistently holds a mirror up to the nation, often devising a founding myth. It is also the genre, from Lucan’s Pharsalia and Virgil’s Aeneid to Davenant’s Gondibert and Milton’s Paradise Lost to Olson’s Maximus Poems and Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, that represents a certain apogee for a poet’s cultural status, even in the case of the failed or fragmented epics of Pound, Eliot, and H.D. For Brooks, housing provides suitable material to work into an epic genre. At the same time, it’s quite clear she thinks of her poetry as continuous with the novel and toggles between prose narrative and poetry for much of her poetic career (a point to which I return below). Annie Allen begins, after its initial dedicatory poem, with “the birth in a narrow room.” The first line has no grammatical subject: “Weeps out of western country something new / Blurred and stupendous. Wanted and unplanned.”45 The structure of the lines recalls the opening of “The Sundays of Satin-­Legs Smith”: “Inamoratas, with an approbation, / Bestowed his title. Blessed his inclination.”46 But the lack of a subject is something relatively new—­most of the poems in A Street in Bronzeville don’t start this way. Brooks’s brief epic starts in a kind of syntactical in medias res, just as the classical epic plunges directly into events. Born in a “narrow room,” Annie is an epic heroine whose desires continually defy the conditions in which she must act. Many of the stanzas from the central poem in the book, “The Anniad,” pick up on the same syntactical headlessness. The metrical structure of the first line of that poem sounds like the first line of Auden’s “Lullaby,” “Lay your sleeping head my love”: Think of sweet and chocolate Left to follow or to fate Whom the higher gods forgot, Whom the lower gods berate; Physical and underfed Fancying on the featherbed What was never and is not.47

36  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 “The Anniad” has seven-­line stanzas reminiscent of the epic building blocks used by Tasso and Spenser. Seven-­line stanzas permit a narrative to develop (they appear in the old French narrative form the ballade), while still requiring the compression that Brooks tends to find so generative. This first stanza introduces Annie by constantly revising expectations. “Sweet” is a substantive adjective, but “chocolate” a noun to which sweet might have applied. “Left to follow or to fate” spins the grammatical position of “left” by attaching it to a verb and then to a noun, an example of the scheme called zeugma in which one word adopts multiple uses. The stanza follows the path of an unsettled parallelism, in which the ear hears closure that the syntax belies. “Physical and underfed / Fancying on the featherbed” play with the position of the “f ”; one almost hears “underfed” and “featherbed” as distorted versions of the same word. There is the faint echo, in Annie Allen, of a damaged neoclassical couplet, which may be one of the reasons why the poem has been considered a mock-­epic. Parallelism has never been a purely schematic maneuver in poetry: its conservative values (of balance, moderation, hierarchy, and, in general, order) are suspect when the subject is a young Black epic heroine “left to follow or to fate.” The final line is clear, in its negations, about the past prospects and present conditions, though it leaves the future open for the poem to write. Against claims that Brooks has devised a “mock-­epic,” Evie Shockley writes about the quest of Annie as an epic heroine by analyzing the poem’s “polyvocality.” The formal excess and extravagance of the poem “challenge the racist and sexist inclinations some might have to look upon Annie as a curiosity or nobody.”48 The polyvocality that Shockley places within an epic tradition certainly jars against the quiet emphasis on technique in much of mid-­century American verse, what von Hallberg calls a poetry of “paintings, social types, animals, foreign sights.”49 Building on Shockley’s point, I think the epic scale of the poem is even more pronounced for emerging, almost paradoxically, within the house as a setting in which Annie works as a wife and mother. Since the epic has historically flourished as a retrospective account of a nation’s origins and integrity, here Brooks positions not only Annie, but the house as key part of an epic myth about the US. Annie dreams of a “paladin / prosperous and ocean-­eyed,” but what she gets is a “man of tan” who leads her to a “lowly room.”50 In a passage from Report from Part One that encourages an autobiographical reading of “The Anniad,” Brooks writes “I remember feeling bleak when I was taken to my honeymoon home, the kitchenette apartment in the Tyson on

Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right  37 43rd and South Park.”51 Even then, Annie “makes a chapel” of it, until he goes to war and comes back a different person from the “hunched hells across the sea.” The “chapel” becomes “a paradise / paralyzed and paranoid.”52 Annie tries “culprit magics”: books, flirtations, children. But she ends up “tweaked and twenty-­four,” “almost thoroughly / derelict and dim and done.” The final stanza concludes in the kitchenette: Think of almost thoroughly Derelict and dim and done. Stroking swallows from the sweat. Fingering faint violet. Hugging old and Sunday sun. Kissing in her kitchenette The minuets of memory.53

The epic journey in the poem belongs not only to the “man of tan,” who goes to war and comes back, but also to Annie, whose voyage is an interiorized one. That interiorization of the epic is common to the genre at least from Milton onward. The centrality of a Black woman’s consciousness is not: Brooks’s chopped syntax represents Annie’s probing, restless thoughts. Her thinking, perceiving, and feeling make up the material for the epic. But the larger structure moves from inside the “narrow room” to venture beyond it, and then back in the end to the “kitchenette.” Annie’s domestic activities and her actual, physical housing scaffold the narrative of the epic. These activities delimit how far, for her as the poem’s heroine, the epic might go toward defining a nation held together by common values. Moreover, Annie’s birth in a narrow room turns paradigmatic for Black poets writing about the hostility of national-­mythmaking: Terrance Hayes’s sonnet “a little room in a house set aflame,” for instance, or Dawn Lundy Martin’s Life in a Box is a Pretty Life.54 Brooks takes on signal importance not only within the history of Black aesthetics, but within post-­1945 literature more generally, since through “The Anniad” she undertakes the critique of a national myth founded on universal and often chimerical ideals of private ownership. The appendix and the final part of Annie Allen, “The Womanhood,” return to the sonnet and to the ballad stanza to position Annie as an observer within Chicago at large. “Beverly Hills, Chicago” starts from a position outside the house. “The dry brown coughing beneath their feet” stands for the leaves; we hear it before we see “them,” which makes the order of perception the sound

38  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 of the leaves, the expectation of the “handyman” to clean it up, and “these people” in their “golden gardens.” The first quatrain of the poem sets up an entire scene, each line building to completion: “we say ourselves fortunate to be driving by today.” “Beverly Hills, Chicago” preserves, in its way, a fragment of the country-­house poem, beginning with a walk around the estate and with the locus amoenus of the garden.55 Yet the perspective is radically different: the view is from the outside, looking on as the car drives by. The poem is written in such a way as to deny both an easy social critique and also a personal revelation. Nobody is furious. Nobody hates these people. At least, nobody driving by in this car. It is only natural, however, that it should occur to us How much more fortunate they are than we are.

What “Beverly Hills, Chicago” adds to the house poem is a trip to a predominantly white neighborhood with detached houses. It is an exception to the apartment poems of much of Brooks’s oeuvre. This poem invents a new figure and locus of observation for the house poem. Nowhere in the country-­house poem, for example, was the excluded spectator featured. The social world of the country-­house poem was built on the invisibility of anyone not included in the magnanimity of the manor’s lord. Nor does the poem feature the Black mother in the kitchenette building, as Brooks had repeated earlier in “The Anniad,” and as she would further explore in “In the Mecca.” Whiteness appears in the poem indirectly, in one of its most pointed lines: “It is just that so often they live until their hair is white.” The external position of the speaker, presumably Annie, driving by in a car, overhears the leaves, whose coughing summons Romantic and symbolist lyric. Here Brooks exposes the contradictions built into her house poems. After recentering the house around Black women and families, she pushes on to suggest that to speak about housing in a poem, in a city still segregated by private covenants, is to change what kind of language, rhythm, and tone might be available. “Beverly Hills, Chicago” not only reports on the state of inequality in postwar Chicago. The poem also comments on the genre of the house poem itself, and on what might be said about the lived experience of driving by the “golden gardens” of the white.56 What sets “Beverly Hills, Chicago” apart, after “The Anniad,” is its subdued tone and lack of dramatic development. No epiphany comes from driving past the wealthy; no real clash emerges either.

Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right  39 We do not want them to have less. But it is only natural that we should think we have not enough. We drive on, we drive on. When we speak to each other our voices are a little gruff.

The force of class emerges more strongly for its hushed treatment. In ­comparison with the first sonnet of “The children of the poor,” or with the virtuosic language of “the Anniad,” “Beverly Hills, Chicago” invents a different route for the mid-­century lyric. Ten years before Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” this partly confessional poem has no dark night of the soul to overcome. Its matter-­of-­fact development of thought brushes aside more piquant claims on sympathy. Nothing much changes by the final lines of the poem, except that people in the car speak to each other with their voices a little gruffer. It is a dulled feeling that can’t be put into words, a quality of voice. The poem itself tamps down Brooks’s play with language, scattering rhyme here and there, but also modulating its tone to minimize the presence of the ballad meter.

Housing Plots Across Brooks’s work, the material fact of housing changes what the genres of poetry can do, see, and say. The house lets Brooks center race, class, and gender and observe what the effects of that centering are on the lyric, ballad, epic, and prose vignette. While her first poems had set the house a speaking role, her writing from the 1950s onward expands the idea of the house, until, in The Bean Eaters and In the Mecca, housing becomes the poetic means by which Brooks engages with both contemporary domestic events and their long, international histories. Over Brooks’s career, her thinking about houses centers Chicago, but increasingly as a way of illuminating the larger national stage on which civil rights were sought—­events, such as the murder of Emmett Till, that are deeply connected to the legal struggle against housing discrimination, but not on the surface explicitly related. First, though, Brooks’s novel provides the opportunity for thinking through the effects of the kitchenette on consciousness, desire, perception, and the horizon of value set by her Black women protagonists. Maud Martha, which Brooks had originally titled “The American Family Brown” and “Bronzevillians,”57 is a lyrical house novel, not a house poem. Yet it makes sense that, by the early 1950s, Brooks would want to examine how the novel

40  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 might give shape the housework she had written about in A Street in Bronzeville and The Anniad, as well as how the segregation of Chicago housing would demand a different shape for the novel. That structure has the form of short vignettes, glimpses of Maud Martha’s life from childhood to marriage to motherhood. As “a portrait unfolding from the daily round of existence,” Maud Martha comprises a series of events that take place in and around the house: looking out from the yard at the sky, trapping a mouse, reading in bed. And when the action shifts outside the house, the characters carry their houses with them, seemingly unshakeable viewfinders through which they perceive themselves and are perceived by others.58 To call one of Brooks’s poems a house poem is to not only to track a thematic kind across her poetic career. It is also to show how the type of poetry transforms as it translates housing into its inherited architecture. Putting it differently, writing a ballad about segregation requires (among other possible strategies and devices) the gruffness of voice and the limpid lines of “Beverly Hills, Chicago.” While Brooks’s poems can draw on the resources of satire, especially in casting the poetic perspective at a certain remove from the immediate situation, they are not exclusively satirical. They borrow much from tragic drama, because there is no separation from a character’s pursuit of goodness, beauty, truth, and self-­realization—­which both Annie and Maud Martha explicitly seek—­from the determination of that pursuit by the circumstances provided. Yet Brooks, through her semi-­autobiographical protagonists, continues to assert these values by casting them into dramatic relief with the disappointing rooms where they are conceived, maintained, and revised.59 Maud Martha’s particular strength is her deft navigation and rethinking of provisional goods. “What, what, am I to do with all of this life?” Maud Martha Brown asks at the end of Brooks’s novel.60 In Maud Martha, the experimentation of the late modernist novel—­its multiply centered perspectives, its ratio of consciousness to description and narrative emplotment—­takes a form adequate to the representation of housing discrimination. Maud Martha follows its main character, Maud Martha Brown, through a succession of houses from childhood to marriage to her second pregnancy. After receiving only half of the advance for Annie Allen that she had received for A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks may have written the novel to secure a down payment for her own house.61 Subtending each part of the novel is the physical environment of the house in which Maud Martha lives, her work to maintain it, and her carework for her husband, Paul, and child, Paulette. Even when the plot moves Maud Martha out of her kitchenette, such as a scene in which she and Paul go to

Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right  41 the World Playhouse, they perceive the hierarchies of class and race through the descriptions of houses. While the novel starts, in its “Description of Maud Martha,” with Maud Martha sitting on the porch looking out, it concludes with Maud Martha leaving her house in an ecstatic and thoughtful mood, as she reflects (alone) on her new pregnancy, the beauty of the day, the end of World War II, the casualties of the war, and newspaper pictures of lynchings in Georgia and Mississippi. She wonders at her own ability to hold these contradictory thoughts and images in her head; the scene serves, perhaps, as an apt summary of where Brooks finds herself—­leaving the kitchenette for the wider social themes of The Bean Eaters and In the Mecca. Before that happens, it’s worth tracing Maud Martha’s progress, since the novel enacts both her aesthetic education through the house and, at the same time, her entrapment within the social position associated with types of housing. As a child, Maud Martha delights in the views “from the steps of the back porch” and in the sensory beauty of the house.62 The house stands for more than shelter, security, or social reputation. It is also the vehicle for her aesthetic development and her early moral sense. Looking at dandelions, she thinks that “what was common could also be a flower.”63 When Helen sneers “at her father’s determination to hold his poor estate” and denigrates the house as “ ‘a hulk of rotting wood’, ” Maud Martha: saw herself there [in the kitchen], up and down her seventeen years, eating apples after school; making sweet potato tarts; drawing, on the pathetic table, the horse that won her the sixth-­grade prize; getting her hair curled for her first party, at that stove; washing dishes by summer twilight, with the back door wide open; making cheese and peanut butter sandwiches for a picnic. And even crying, crying in that pantry, when no one knew.64

Her awareness of the house’s shabbiness—“the kitchen, for instance, that was not beautiful in any way!”—does not vitiate the luxury Maud Martha draws from it. Yet the young Maud Martha also perceives vividly how precarious the family’s hold on their house is. In an early chapter titled “home,” she, her sister Helen, and her mother wait on the porch for their father to return from “the office of the Home Owners’ Loan.” As a child, she knows “[t]here was little hope. The Home Owners’ Loan was hard.”65 But the chapter ends when her father returns home, having successfully secured the loan. Just as the novel is framed by visions of the world outside the house, so too do many of the vignettes within the novel depend on a particular dramatic situation in which, it seems, the house is as much the protagonist or main character as Maud Martha is.

42  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 Reciprocally, the characters in the novel are treated as extensions of their houses. Maud Martha argues with herself about whether she should demand, of her new husband and their married life together, more than a stove heater and a basement.66 Later, after trapping a mouse in their kitchenette and then letting it go, Maud Martha suddenly sees herself in a new light, as an agent of creation and liberation rather than a passive receptacle of sensation: “a wide air walked in her.”67 But just as the house provides the space for epiphany and action, so too does it cling to her and Paul when they venture into company. In the earliest published chapter of the novel, “we’re the only colored people here,” the couple go to a movie at a white theater downtown, the World Playhouse.68 They see the women strolling in terms of their homes: “they looked—­cooked. Well cared-­for. And as though they had never seen a roach or a rat in their lives. Or gone without heat for a week.”69 Then they see themselves, “two shy Negroes wanting desperately not to seem shy,” through the eyes of white women. Maud Martha and Paul have no “special fault,” except that they make the women think “of close rooms, and wee, close lives.” When the movie begins, Maud Martha feels “as if, when you left it, you would be going home to a sweet-­smelling apartment with flowers on little gleaming tables . . . [i]nstead of back to your kit’n’t apt . . . .”70 At each moment in the scene, Paul and Maud Martha are metonymically linked to the house that marks their class and their race. The visit to the World Playhouse finds Paul and Maud Martha self-­ consciously reflecting on racism through the houses they trail behind them wherever they go. But the question of how to respond to racism, and how to teach others to respond, occupies both the penultimate and final chapters. Brooks examines this question as it emerges naturally: through the trials of parenting in a segregated society, and through the barrage of information in the news. In the first, Maud Martha and Paulette visit Santa, who ignores Paulette. Looking down at her child’s face, trying to convince Paulette that Santa doesn’t dislike her, Maud Martha “could neither resolve nor dismiss” the moment of racism directed at her. She reflects on the “scraps of baffled hate” in her, with “no eyes, no smile and—­this she especially regretted, called her hungriest lack—­not much voice.”71 In the final chapter, Maud Martha and Paulette are out in the street. This chapter ends the novel on a note of release, self-­questioning, and the intimation of a new freedom to think and to feel. But even as Maud Martha steps out of the house and into the sun and, she sees “behind her brain” the marching dead of the war; she sees in the newspaper the lynched dead of Georgia and Mississippi. At this point, Maud Martha reflects optimistically on the resilience of the human, telling herself that,

Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right  43 “through wars, through divorce, through evictions and jiltings and taxes,” “while people did live they would be grand.” Less important than what Maud Martha says here is the fact of Maud Martha herself. The image of Maud Martha with Paulette, and without Paul, lingers as a reminder of Brooks’s revolutionary centering of a working-­class Black woman’s consciousness in the bildungsroman. Yet I think it would be wrong, or incomplete, to identify the novel too neatly with the “humanistic faith and its joy” in the final chapter.72 The novel has something else to say at the end too, something about its own generative conceit. All along, the structure of the novel has followed Maud Martha’s home-­ making. Her insights, epiphanies, perceptions, and arguments are staged in terms of the house she lives in, or, in one case, the house she briefly cleans for a wealthy white family. While the story remains, of course, Maud Martha’s coming-­to-­consciousness, her care-­work as Black woman, and her grappling with “scraps of baffled hate,” the house is closely identified with the structure of the narrative—­so much so that when Maud Martha ventures outside, the novel ends. Brooks associates her poetic narrative with the house itself, not only with the development of Maud Martha’s consciousness. Like the earlier poem “the old-­marrieds,” the final chapter of the novel begins and ends with the same line: “the weather was bidding her bon voyage.”73 The novel ends on a moment not only of self-­recognition, but also of the recognition of the artifice of its device—­this association between a life and a house, or to be more specific, between Maud Martha’s dehumanization and the kitchenette building. Although the house provides the structure and the stimuli for Maud Martha’s thoughts and feelings, it does not, and cannot, contain her. Like the character of “cousin vit,” whose sheer vitality concludes the sonnet that elegizes her, Maud Martha’s final “bon voyage” marks a kind of excess or surplus of her humanity, which outstrips the capacity of the novel (at least for Brooks) as a representational form. Paul and Maud Martha are visible to others as representations of their houses. But the novel itself emphatically denies such a correspondence.

Disintegrating Compositions: The Ballad and the Couplet Brooks’s later house poems argue that to think about civil rights is to think not only about voting rights and integration of schools, but to insist on fair housing as well. To take one prominent example, the waves of anti-­Black violence in the mid-­1950s—­especially the lynching and mutilation of Emmett

44  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 Till and the integration of Central High School in Little Rock—­emerge in the kitchens of The Bean Eaters (1960). This book, which more directly incorporates references to current political events, nevertheless views the violence in the wake of the Brown decision by transforming Brooks’s house poem yet again.74 While the form of the novel is closely identified with the house in Maud Martha, the ballad does this work for Brooks in The Bean Eaters. The ballad itself appears almost as a flawed protagonist and irresponsible or insufficient vehicle for Brooks at this point. The Bean Eaters stands apart from Brooks’s work for its self-­reflection on her use of poetry. In “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon,” a white woman puts herself in the place of Carolyn Bryant. She attempts to aestheticize the murder: “From the first it had been like a / Ballad. It had the beat inevitable. It had the blood.”75 But she finds that the composition unravels as her bacon burns on the stove: “her composition / Had disintegrated.”76 We move from the house of the white woman burning bacon in Mississippi to the house of Emmett Till’s mourning mother via the ballad, which concludes the former poem by appearing only notionally: “The last bleak news of the ballad. / The rest of the rugged music. / The last quatrain.”77 The poem that follows, “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” is perhaps the remnant of one of those ballads that the Mississippi mother “never understood.” Between “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” and “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till” is the narrative of Till, left unfashioned into poetry. The pairing of the poems raises the question that Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten raise with respect to Aunt Hester’s beating: what poetic or narrative form, if any, is adequate to the representation of anti-­Black violence?78 I make two observations here: first, Emmett Till’s story has already been played and replayed to white audiences and readers; telling the story of his murder, in a ballad form, would retell an event that should remain subject to strict reportage or not told at all. Are the materials of poetry, Brooks presciently asks, too contaminated to hold the life and death of Till? Second, Brooks experiments—­in the juxtapositions of these two poems—­with the multicentered perspective that will soon appear in full-­fledged form in In the Mecca as the characters are asked about the missing child Pepita. Both narrators are women doing domestic work in their houses. The clash between house poems—­the white bourgeois Mississippi woman and Till’s mother—­takes the place of the ballad of Emmett Till. In other words, the house poem is a way of writing about something that can’t make its way directly, for Brooks at this point, into her favored ballad form.

Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right  45 Brooks’s poems about the domestic interior are ways of pointing out of the house to history. At the same time, they widen the scope of events to take in the position of Till’s mother, and even—­perhaps more controversially—­of the awakening into rage of the Mississippi mother. Although there are several short ballads in the book, the centerpiece, and the most traditional in form, is the poem that most clearly inscribes the homicidal violence of housing segregation into its narrative, “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed.” “Rudolph Reed” opens with a traditional ballad gesture, the introduction of a central character. “Sir Patrick Spens” begins, “the king sits in Dumferling town, / Drinking the blood-­red wine.” “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed” introduces the Reed family: Rudolph Reed was oaken. His wife was oaken too. And his two good girls and his good little man Oakened as they grew.79

Rudolph Reed wants to move his family out of their house with crumbling plaster and roaches. The best option for the Reeds, financially, is in a white neighborhood. The real estate agent sneers, but Reed moves anyway, and they shake off the stares from the neighbors with their joy at having a better home. Then the neighbors start throwing rocks through the windows; his daughter Mabel is hit; and Rudolph Reed attacks the white mob in a rage until they kill him. Brooks’s ballad follows a typical rhyme scheme (abcb), although the meter varies. In an interview, Studs Terkel asks Brooks about “Sir Patrick Spens,” and the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” She replies that she wasn’t thinking of the history of the English ballad when she was composing “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed,” but that she’s admired the form “for so many years”: “Once I get started, get a line, like ‘Rudolph Reed was oaken’—well, the rest just follows automatically. I love the ballad as a form.”80 The ballad is a particularly good choice for Rudolph Reed’s story because his tragedy is a representative one. Although Brooks describes him with vivid particular detail, his story could stand in for any number of Black families moving to white neighborhoods in Chicago.81 But the final lines eschew any didactic urge in order to underscore the ongoingness of the violence instead: “her oak-­eyed mother did no thing / but change the bloody gauze.”82 The wound remains and the gauze must be changed. Although there were many forms of non-­violent aggression that Black families endured when they moved into “white”

46  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 neighborhoods, violence in Chicago was particularly pronounced: a bombing occurred every twenty days in the period between 1917 and 1921.83 “Today,” Brooks writes in a capsule summary of the poem from Report from Part One, “the general black decision would be that bandages are not enough.”84 The bleakness of the final image in the poem reflects the moment of its composition. The ballad’s structure is not left untouched by history, either. One of the middle stanzas arrests the movement of the poem to ask a rhetorical question (in which the word “firm” appears again as the synonym for housing security): For were they not firm in a home of their own With windows everywhere And a beautiful banistered stair And a front yard for flowers and a back yard for grass?85

The stanza as an internal couplet and the final line lacks a rhyme, which sets it apart from the previous stanzas and the ones that follow. What does the stanza look like if the ballad rhymes are restored to their “proper” order? For were they not firm in a home of their own With windows everywhere And a front yard for flowers and a back yard for grass And a beautiful banistered stair?

Perhaps Brooks wants to keep the middle two lines as descriptions of the interior before venturing outside. Or perhaps the continuity in the interior of the stanza lofts the dream of the family into the air for a few more moments. But even so, the final long line in the printed stanza inserts a caesura into the story the ballad is telling. That caesura exists precisely between the “yawning eye” of the neighbor, which “squeezed into a slit” and the subsequent rock-­ throwing that leads to Mabel’s injury and Rudolph Reed’s death. The interruption in the ballad’s form sounds in the ear before it registers conceptually as an alteration in the pattern, particularly since the pattern is restored in the following stanza, when the violence begins that leads Reed to his murder. “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed” briefly lingers with the Reed family, firm and joyful in their new home. The ballad marks that place by changing its music for a stanza before proceeding on. “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed” documents the choice between racialized forms of violence. Either the family stays in a poor maintained apartment or they move into a white neighborhood and suffer the consequences. The poem

Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right  47 belongs in the company of Theodore Ward’s play Big White Fog, Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, and Frank London Brown’s novel Trumbull Park. Brooks thought highly enough of the poem to end her Selected Poems with it—­but initially, the poem almost didn’t appear in The Bean Eaters. Melhem describes how “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed” was defended by Brooks’s editor, Elizabeth Lawrence, who wrote that “this jars. I wonder whether the ballad form was chosen for that very reason.”86 The Reed family resembles the Younger family in A Raisin in the Sun, which was produced in 1959, just before The Bean Eaters was published but ten years after “Rudolph Reed” was written. Brooks saw A Raisin in the Sun on opening night in Chicago at the invitation of Brown.87 Like Brooks, Hansberry had direct experience with the housing crisis her play makes into a dramatic climax. Hansberry’s father was dubbed the “kitchenette king” of Chicago and made his living providing housing to Black Chicagoans.88 Brooks’s poems stage their characters and situations with a dramatic force and tableau-­like mise-­en-­scène that she may have recognized in Hansberry’s play. Though Brooks cites her admiration for the ballad as a form, the ballad itself runs through The Bean Eaters almost as a kind of antagonist, a genre that can’t quite do the work its narration promises, or that has been fundamentally challenged by the events it is asked to represent. “A Bronzeville Mother . . .” set up the ballad as a memory from a classroom lesson, now disintegrating in its “rugged music” (a phrase that reappears, in “Young Afrikans,” as “jagged chiming”).89 She thinks: “Although the pattern prevailed, the breaks were everywhere.” Later, in “Boy Breaking Glass,” the breaks themselves are the music, the hole in the window (or the pattern) the “cry of art.”90 But meanwhile, Brooks places next to each other the Mississippi and the Bronzeville mother, the former searching for the “thread . . . capable of the necessary / sew-­work,” the latter enclosed in the narrow room of the “final quatrain.” Brooks juxtaposes the conditions of her house-­bound characters—­often women doing work in kitchens—­by creating echoes between the appearances of the same genre. Two poems that follow in The Bean Eaters use the couplet instead of the ballad to create a satirical effect. In the case of “A Sunset of the City” and “A Man of the Middle Class,” she turns to the couplet and to its propensity for satire. The first poem is a lament for “summer-­gone,” both in the life of the woman speaking (identified as “Kathleen Eileen”) and in the time of the year. I am aware there is winter to heed. There is no warm house That is fitted with my need.

48  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 I am cold in this cold house this house Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs. I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.91

These lines refer to the work she does, to the conditions of the house, to the past as it haunts her, to the ritual, without the reprieve, of prayer. Rather than descending into bathos, Brooks’s lines tense the couplet into a vehicle for elegiac self-­reflection. The woman’s choices are “whether to dry / in humming parlor or to leap and die.” The dissonant last line—“Somebody muffed it? Somebody wanted to joke”—seems to refer to the ending of the poem itself, which “muffs” the poetic closure (of a couplet, or of a ballad or sonnet) that comes easily to Brooks. In jarring contrast, the poem that follows, “A Man of the Middle Class,” lampoons the existential crisis of the successful Black middle-­class male: I’ve antique firearms. Blackamoors. Chinese Rugs. Ivories. Bronzes. Everything I Wanted. But have I answers?92

Here the speaker sounds like Prufrock, as he does in a couplet of alternating line lengths: “I’ve roses to guard / in the architectural prettiness of my yard.” Housing, and its effects on both the woman and the man, calls for the couplet, that emblem of neoclassical order and hierarchy. In “A Sunset of the City,” the couplet plays against character, achieving a muted eloquence as it adumbrates the lack of any attractive choice. In “A Man of the Middle Class,” the couplet is called into question as a poetic version of the “architectural prettiness” of the middle-­class yard. The couplets create a dialogue between the poems—­almost like the alternating speech of a play—­in which the incommensurable futures of the speakers are compared. The topic of this chapter has been the association between housing in Chicago and Brooks’s poetic genres, including the sonnet, the epic, the ballad, and the couplet. I include Maud Martha here almost as a long set of prose poems or lyrical vignettes, though of course it has many of the elements of a  late modernist novel. Without discarding these forms entirely, Brooks holds them up to scrutiny in light of the conditions in a kitchenette or of  the anti-­Black racism of a neighborhood. Brooks places a questioning pressure on poetry to see if it is adequate to the violence unfolding around

Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right  49 her as the 1960s continue. From A Street in Bronzeville through The Bean Eaters, poetry continues to provide resources for her to report on housing as a vehicle for segregation, misogyny, class warfare, and anti-­Black discrimination. The density of her poetry, its syntactic leaps and dodges, and its aspirations toward music are certainly products of her virtuosic control over fixed forms, rhymes, and regular meters. But these qualities also contain evidence of her self-­consciousness about the limitations of the house poem. In other words, Brooks’s house poems are very much about their own inabilities to dramatize the stories they tell with the resources they have in verse. By the late 1960s, the figure for the singing poet becomes a child who goes missing in an apartment building, the Mecca Flats, filled with the remnants of poetry.

Missing “In the Mecca” For as many voices as there are in Brooks’s collection, there are an equal number of silences where voices were or might have been, empty lots where houses stood. The missing child takes a central position in the long poem “In the Mecca,” which Brooks publishes in the revolutionary year of 1968. I close this chapter with a brief look at that poem, which centers on the search for the child throughout an apartment complex. There is an important precursor poem in Brooks’s own work for “In the Mecca.” A famous earlier poem, “the mother,” with its dramatic monologue about multiple abortions, had introduced the theme of the missing child in a different, though no less tragic key, in A Street in Bronzeville. The trope of prosopopoeia—­addressing an inanimate object and projecting the capacity for speech—­is foregrounded in “the mother,” one of Brooks’s most anthologized poems. In this poem about abortion, the eponymous mother speaks to her lost pregnancies, addressing them as “you.” In readings of the poem, personhood has been a major issue at stake; others have seen the poem as an index of the material poverty that affects the mother’s decisions. Placing it in the context of A Street in Bronzeville as a whole, “the mother” is also a house poem—­in the sense that no poem about an apartment in Bronzeville could ignore the speech of mothers whose health is at stake in the segregation of housing. By placing “the mother” early in her collection, Brooks centers abortion as a housing issue. “In the Mecca” is not a dramatic monologue but an anthology of many poetic forms, and a tour of an apartment building through the lives of its many inhabitants, all anchored in “an extended narrative that is a mystery.”93

50  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 The poem “In the Mecca” was submitted to the press in September 1967, a year of protests and of the Newark riots.94 It was a transformative time for Brooks as a poet and public figure. The Fisk University Writers Conference in Nashville in spring 1967 was a major turning point: Brooks describes the event as a “blood-­boiling surprise” in Report from Part One.95 OBAC, the Organization of Black American Culture, was founded in 1967 as well.96 By 1968, Brooks had, as Angela Jackson recounts, immersed herself in the thought of young Black poets, writers, and activists. In August 1969, Brooks decides to publish exclusively with Black presses—­Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press and then Haki Madhubuti’s Third World Press—­after In the Mecca, her final single-­volume collection for Harper and Row.97 The poem’s origins and its narrative speak to its historical moment and call upon Brooks’s personal observations, but “In the Mecca” also returns to Brooks’s earliest house poem. “In the Mecca” incorporates the memory of Brooks’s own labor in the building as well as her youthful experiment, in the pages of the Chicago Defender, in making the “old apartment house” speak. In that sense, Brooks’s career, from the 1930s through the revolutionary years of 1967 and 1968, is bookended by apartment house poems. “In the Mecca” takes its poetic structure from the Mecca Flats, where Brooks had worked for four months in her youth.98 Built in 1891, the Mecca Building was at first an architectural innovation in Bronzeville, “with its atrium courtyards, its skylights and ornamental iron, its elaborate fountains and flower gardens.”99 After World War II, however, the building attracted attention for its poverty rather than its promise, and the Mecca Flats were taken down in 1952. Over the course of that period, as Jo Gill describes, the building went from all-­white to mostly Black, with an “absentee” landlord in the form of the Illinois Institute of Technology: “in 1900, the Mecca was home to 365 people in 107 units . . . all of whom were white,” but by the early 1940s, when most of the inhabitants were Black, “the Mecca housed more than 1000 crammed into multiple sub-­ divided units.”100 “Kitchenette building” was Brooks’s way of thinking about housing and poetry together at the micro-­ level of the sonnet. “In the Mecca” scales that thinking up to the level of the entire apartment building and the long poem. The skeptical stance of the first poem about the “giddy sound” of a poem or a song modulates into a darker conclusion. The song that is “rising” at the end of the latter poem is discontinuous and “chopped,” and of the nature of a warning rather than a dream.101 The Mecca Flats were replaced by a building designed by the modernist Mies van der Rohe, the figure with whom the poem begins: “Sit where the

Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right  51 light corrupts your face. / Mies van der Rohe retires from grace. / And the fair fables fall.”102 The long poem narrates a tragedy that becomes apparent when its current “face” or façade is held to the light. “In the Mecca” is the story of the door-­to-­door search of Sallie Smith for Pepita, her daughter, who may have been murdered by a resident named Jamaican Edward. Sallie and her other children go door to door looking for Pepita until the Law appears, taking over the search. Brooks renders the dramatis personae of the Mecca in an anthology of poetic forms, from couplets and dramatic monologues to interpolated ballads. One example is “The ballad of Edie Barrow”: I fell in love with a Gentile boy. All creamy-­and-­golden fair. He looked deep and long in my long black eyes. And he played with my long black hair.103

At the end of the ballad, the boy marries a white woman and leaves Edie Barrow with a “hungry tooth.” The search for Pepita reveals an entire building of lives made distinct through their modes of poetic expression and their individual sorrows. Their short cameos in the poem reveal their own losses, memories, injuries, and injustices. Black nationalist “Way-­out Morgan,” for example, accumulates guns and plots violence against whites, “remembering his sister / mob-­raped in Mississippi.”104 The search for Pepita opens each door to an anthology not only of poetic genres, but also of other crimes and forms of violence. But the neighbors are, almost without exception, unhelpful and sometimes cruel to Sallie Smith. The question “WHERE PEPITA BE?” gives way to the question “How many care, Pepita?”105 The dead child is rhetorically addressed, rendered as the absent addressee before we know for sure that she is dead, found beneath the cot of Jamaican Edward. The poem concludes on a “rising” that is the antithesis of the “fall” in the first stanza: She whose little stomach fought the world had wriggled, like a robin! Odd were the little wrigglings and the chopped chirpings oddly rising.106

I think these lines hold another, considerably more disturbing version of the kitchenette dream that makes a giddy sound. The simile in the first two lines

52  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 is bleak and absurd: Pepita’s hunger and then her wriggles in death recall a robin. In the neglected Mecca building, under the cot, Pepita’s “chirpings” rise oddly. Pepita’s death is connected to the earlier figures in Brooks’s poetry who find that the making of song is shaped by the housing conditions they experience. She is both a singular, named child and the representative of victims of  anti-­Black violence stretching back to the plantation and forward into a hostile future.107 The human subject of the house poem goes missing “In the Mecca.” Drawing a line from neighborhood segregation back to slavery and Jim Crow, that missing subject connects Brooks’s protagonists to their enslaved predecessors. The house poem lets Brooks make this link visible through the thwarted expression of the inhabitants—­and then through their disappearance. An element of Brooks’s own political radicalization might be observed in her exploration of houses from the very beginning of her career. The house poem provides a historical link, through the working and reworking of a thematic genre, between postwar segregation and earlier forms of racism. To put it simply, writing about houses channels not only the history of modern architecture and city planning, but also this much longer history, which continues in a line from zoning exclusion through restrictive covenants. The genres of poetry, in Brooks’s hands, illuminate a missing center in US poetry after 1945. They tell stories about the afterlives of slavery as it modulates into legalized housing discrimination. Brooks’s continual rewriting of the house poem connects her observations of Chicago segregation with earlier forms of racism stretching back to slavery. Her house poems testify to the material constraints on the inhabitants, but they also stand as monuments to the lives that cannot be directly spoken through her living portraits and “newsreel” descriptions.

Conclusion This chapter examines how Brooks’s poetic genres respond to the segregation and violence of housing. Brooks’s poems about kitchenettes and apartments are shocked into compressed scenes by the conditions they confront. Brooks takes inherited poetic genres and associates them with types of housing that span the racialized urban landscape of Chicago. These associations include the sonnet’s narrow room with its windows into the interiority of Bronzevillians; the couplet and the middle-­class lawn; the brief epics of Annie in “The Anniad” and Sallie Smith “In the Mecca”; and the fate of the ballad as it narrates the

Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right  53 move into white neighborhoods. Houses in Brooks’s poetry are largely explored through fixed forms and inherited genres, and then through the critique of these poetic architectures. Brooks’s later poems “cite” genres (the ballad, the sonnet) in a palinode-­like way that avers their increasingly irrelevance to her political project. Her turn away from housing as a theme for her poetry does not reflect the accomplishment of a national political agenda. 1968 hardly ended the many practices of forcibly preventing Black families from living wherever they wanted, despite the legislation against discrimination. Rather, housing is a paradigmatic political and generic concern that, when it makes its way into poetry, catalyzes the poet’s political and artistic development. The tension that inheres to using the sonnet to write about a kitchenette leads Brooks to embrace more radical positions. Bradley has shown that claims for human rights after World War II were used in arguments for fair housing in front of the Supreme Court of Michigan.108 Brooks’s vignettes about Black families in apartments become the reference points for a more expansive contestation of racism in the late 1960s. While I had at first planned to write about the house poem as a discrete literary kind, in the way Barbara Lewalski does with the country-­house poem, Brooks’s poems call for a different argument. The house poem, rather than marking out a set of poems that share a theme or formal architecture, emerges in the middle of the struggle against housing discrimination as a partial disaffiliation from poetry altogether—­or, less dramatically put, a skepticism about its unique partitioning from neighboring forms. Brooks centers kitchenette folks, but to make that happen, she needs to think of literary forms as provisional rather than final, even as characters in their own right, open to development. The sonnet, the sonnet-­ballad, the ballad, the dramatic monologue, the vignette, novel, and epic: these forms don’t fall in a succession of styles appropriate to the hierarchies of class and representation. They jostle against each other and substitute for each other. The American novel in this period largely abandons its association with the great houses of the late nineteenth century in Wharton and James. More significantly, perhaps, the house is an emblem of insecurity and danger in Black fiction from the period, say in Wright’s Native Son (1940) or Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). But instead of disappearing, or going entirely underground, the question of housing moves into forms with more dramatic qualities. Drama and poetry take up the American house in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. In part, this move occurs because the characteristic American house for an increasingly urban population is the apartment,

54  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 and a crowded one at that. Important exceptions exist, and the significance of suburban landscapes soon generates its own vast literature, as the next chapter finds in the poetry of Adrienne Rich. But immanent in both A Raisin in the Sun and in The Bean Eaters is an early call to rally around urban housing as a point of struggle. Housing speaks through Brooks’s characters. At the same time, Brooks shows how poetry is, at every point in her restlessly inventive career, partially inadequate for the representation of what housing stands for: the segregation and exploitation of Black families. It’s not only that material conditions make art and poetry unpropitious or constrained by necessity. To narrate housing conditions from within, as it were, requires placing considerable pressure on the kinds of poetry to which Brooks is drawn—­so much pressure, in cases like the ballad, that the literary history of the form no longer seems adequate when measured against contemporary urgencies. Brooks’s poems are therefore often ambivalent about the delineation between poetry and prose. Brooks seems to ask the same question James Merrill will later ask, for very different reasons, about his own house epic: “Best after all to do it as a novel?”109 Brooks tried many times over her career to present her work as prose narrative. “The American Family Brown” was submitted initially as poetry; “In the Mecca” was first a “teen-­age novel.”110 Maud Martha and its poetic qualities testify to the uncertain priority of poetry over prose in the first decades of Brooks’s career. Her Bronzevillians cross genres from poetry to prose to children’s books without evident anxiety on Brooks’s part. No doubt some of this fungibility between genres was an imperative of the publisher: novels sell, of course. But another explanation may that Brooks is committed to something other than a particular genre. Brooks is concerned with who the protagonists are in the narrative of US political history after WWII. The history of the United States after World War II is inseparable from the expansion of housing, from the fights over who gets to live where, and from the profit-­making motive that, increasingly, turns houses into much more than physical assets or domestic spaces. The years after World War II position the United States as the global representative of “the free world.” That freedom is sold on a new commitment to homeownership: “Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, less than half of Americans were homeowners. By 1980, more than 60% of Americans privately owned their homes.”111 By 1980, Brooks had published Primer for Blacks. Her work after 1968 takes as its premise that “the whirlwind was our commonwealth.” What is the proper music for the whirlwind? “Not the pet bird of poets, that sweetest sonnet, / shall

Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right  55 straddle the whirlwind.”112 It’s the Boy Breaking Glass, “whose broken window is a cry of art.” History makes strong demands on literature that can be readily perceived through subtle changes in genre and in form. Literary genres offer a way for a poet to situate the present in the past through the felt sense of distance from previous handlings and revisions. In response to the question “Is the poet affected by today’s social unrest?” Brooks responds: The poet, first and foremost an individual with a personal vision, is also a member of society. What affects society affects a poet. So I, starting out, usually in the grip of a high and private suffusion, may find by the time I have arrived at a last line that there is quite some public clamor in my product.113

Brooks is writing from the summer of 1967, a year she cites as critical for the development of her political consciousness. But what she says here applies to her earlier work as well. While Brooks is writing in the 1940s and 1950s, what affects American society is housing. Its centrality appears in major legislation and judicial decisions from 1934 to 1968, as well as riots and bombings of Black homes. Genres such as the sonnet, ballad, epic, and couple mediate between the public clamor for fair housing and the private suffusions of her personal vision. To use Brooks’s terms, the changes in genre mark out the effects society has on the personal vision of the poet. A clear example from her work would be “The Anniad” and the epic. Where the epic structure is most altered—­by focusing on Annie at home in her kitchenette—­the public matter of housing appears in the poem most vividly. Another would be the ballad: the ballad’s storytelling clashes with the Mississippi mother’s dawning awareness and rage. After 1969, Brooks leaves behind these reinventions of the fixed forms of poetry for a directly public voice, channeled through the sermon and through irregularly patterned free verse. One of the final “house” poems in Brooks’s corpus might be “The Wall.” This poem isn’t about a house, but it is written for the dedication of a building that was once divided into kitchenettes. Her face painted above her on The Wall of Respect, she reads to the crowd the final lines of the poem, which bring together displacement, violence, collective action, and poetry: “the dispossessions beakless // And we sing.”114 The poetic imagination, as it seizes onto housing, expands from the single issue into struggles for other rights, fodder for more capacious imaginations of justice. Poems can function as long-­lived precedents, reread and re-­recited, passed

56  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 around and memorized. In that way, they can revitalize languishing political struggles or light the fires for new ones. Working with genre is one way for a poet to underscore the demands that poems make, since genres open historical passageways, full of echoes of the use of poetry in the past. Even when a poem doesn’t spark a protest, its function as precedent, as something given, can transform the imaginative possibilities of a given situation by keeping the past on fire.

2 Unmaking a Home Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs

A massive transition was underway in the metropolitan areas of the United States while Adrienne Rich was writing the books that made her into a prominent feminist poet and essayist. This transition was suburbanization. “The most salient feature of postwar segregation,” Douglas  S.  Massey and Nancy  A.  Denton write in American Apartheid, “is the concentration of Blacks in central cities and whites in suburbs.”1 This chapter looks at how poetry imagines the suburbs, at what questions for poetry the suburbs raise, and at what resources a poetic imagination might have for contesting the privacy and isolation associated with the suburban house. Adrienne Rich takes us into the putatively private space of the single-­family house, and the life of the family within it, to show both are bound up with the labor, violence, and patriarchal power of American society. Rich’s poems take the family house, “that dangerous place,” as a governing metaphor or conceit that she attempts in various ways to “unmake.” Looking at her work as a whole, and considering individual poems from the beginning of her career through her late work in the mid-­1990s, I follow the house poem through Rich’s poetry, from her early dramas in drawing-­rooms and apartments through her later meditations on gender, care work, marriage, and imperialism. Her houses are not crowded into the city, but rather isolated by their settings—­a different mechanism by which the housing industry aimed to profit by expansion and segregation.2 “A kind of Emily Dickinson of the suburbs” is how John Ashbery describes Rich in a review of Necessities of Life (1966), Rich’s fourth book.3 Other early critics of her poetry conflate Rich’s style with feminized housekeeping. Analogies to the “modesty” of a domestic home-­maker begin with W. H. Auden’s assessment of her first book for the Yale Younger Poets Award. R.  W.  Flint imagines Rich, in a review from 1963, in a “homely, melodramatic smock” keeping an “over-­neat house.”4 In his own review, however, Ashbery goes on to add a precise description of where her poetry had landed by the mid-­1960s: Rich was “. . . bleakly eyeing the pullulation and pollution around her, sometimes being shocked into passionate speech.” Accompanying the development The American House Poem, 1945–­2021. Walt Hunter, Oxford University Press. © Walt Hunter 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192856258.003.0003

58  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 of the suburbs was massive investment in infrastructure, drawing Rich’s attention from the windows of her houses to the plants (the pullulation) and the highways (the pollution) that appear in her poems. The American investment in the connective tissue between suburb and city was intended to make life possible for the white families who left the cities—­of Chicago, of Detroit, of Cleveland, of Philadelphia—­by creating avenues for commuting to  the city center.5 Rich’s poems hold special interest not so much for their documentation of the making of the suburbs, but rather because of their strategies for unmaking the family house. By that, I mean by that Rich, as her readers have noticed, pursues ways of organizing her poems—“building a complicated house,” as she calls it—­that take her some distance from her early commitment to regular stanzas and meters.6 This process of “strafing the field” of her verse emerges “in the wake of home,” to borrow a phrase from and title of one of her sequences from the 1980s.7 Rich’s life brought her into intimate early contact with what she calls “the suburbs of acquiescence” and their “silence rising fumelike from the streets.”8 Rich grew up in Baltimore, first at “a comfortable fourth-­floor apartment” where her sister was born, then at 14 Edgevale Road in Roland Park.9 Rich’s father, Arnold Rich, was a pathologist at Johns Hopkins. When Rich moved, as a 12-­year-­old, to this “garden suburb,” she was one of the 30 percent of people in the United States who lived in the suburbs. By 1966, when Ashbery’s review was published, that percentage was over 50 percent.10 More important, perhaps, was the fact that suburbanization exacerbated America’s city segregation. 2.1 million white Americans left cities for the suburbs in the ten-­year period from 1960 to 1970, at the same time that 2.6 million African Americans tried to find housing in the cities.11 Housing in the suburbs affected housing in the cities, as Taylor demonstrates: “the limits on building safe, sound, and affordable housing in white suburban areas had foreclosed the possibility of expanding the availability of housing, which also helped to constitute an urban market filled with dilapidated housing.”12 Roland Park had a history of racist restrictions encoded into property deeds and, when the Rich family moved there in 1941, only one other Jewish family.13 The “Wrennery,” as Arnold Rich called the “stately brick house with white columns,” looms large in Rich’s poetic imagination.14 The house was the center of her artistic education, which focused on music as much as literature. It also was the center of the relationship with her father, whom Rich, as she grew older, wrote about as a “sacred poison.”15 On the dust jacket of her 1963 collection, Snapshots of a Daughter-­in-­Law, Rich uses zoning as a metaphor to describe the new subject-­matter her poems would take up:

Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs  59 These poems are concerned with knowing and being known; with the undertow and backlash of love and self-­love; with the physical world as mime for the inward one. Through them I have tried to expose common experience in an uncommon light. They move into neighborhoods usually zoned for prose: e.g. the situation of some women of our time, the meaning of written history for us today.16

As one of very few Jewish families in a neighborhood with actual zoning restrictions, the metaphor is clearly not chosen casually. Located just north of Baltimore, Roland Park plays an outsized role not only in Rich’s early life but in the history of American housing more generally: Roland Park was the first planned suburb.17 Photographs of Rich’s house show a wide set of steps that lead up to two pairs of tall white columns and towering trees. The routes and traces of finance capital and white settlement are not visible in the house’s façade or the greenery that assembles with an artful carelessness around it, but the story of the Roland Park Company shows suburbanization was a global phenomenon, with deep ties to the transatlantic slave trade and to British investment. Roland Park was financed by the Lands Trust Company, a British company that speculated on land considered to have special value because of potential future emigration.18 To the south was Baltimore and to the east, Cross Keys, a Black neighborhood founded nearly a century before Roland Park. As Paige Glotzer has shown, distant investors financed sewers for Roland Park that cut right through Cross Keys and emptied into a children’s swimming pool.19 Rich’s lifelong attempt to “unmake” the family house begins here, with the columns, the trees, and the “stately” house; it continues, in her long poetic sequences, through her expanding consciousness of the intertwined histories of American houses and global networks of racial capitalism. Rich’s adult life as “anonymous suburban housewife” was relatively brief, but the effects on her poetry were long-­lasting. The suburbs are the setting for Rich’s adolescence outside Baltimore and for a portion of her life with Alfred Conrad and children outside Evanston, IL, starting in 1956. In the fall of 1956, Rich moves to 20 Whittier Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.20 The book she writes while living in the city of Rotterdam on a Guggenheim with her family is not a book of city walks and sights, but rather the breakthrough Snapshots of a Daughter-­in-­Law, with its poems about suburban anomie, development, housework, and child-­raising.21 By 1966, when she publishes her fourth book, Necessities of Life, Rich is living in New York. There she leaves her marriage and feels her poetry push harder against, and push through, the limitations of the formal verse of her first two books, A Change of World

60  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 (1951) and The Diamond Cutters (1955). Later house poems, such as the sequence “In the Wake of Home,” take the Vermont house that Rich and Conrad bought in West Barnet as their occasion for an excavation of American history and critique of displacement. And from 1984 to the end of her life, Rich and her partner Michelle Cliff live in Santa Cruz, which helps to generate some of her least-­discussed poems, as well her articulation of a global perspective. The idea of a house, in Rich’s work, ultimately comprises a wide range of settings, from semi-­rural to suburban to urban to globe. Her meditations on home spur her to cast her life and her political commitments in changing shapes. Looking around her in 1972, Rich writes that “people were moving out to the suburbs, technology was going to be the answer to everything, even sex; the family was in its glory. Life was extremely private: women were isolated from each other by the loyalties of marriage.”22 Rich’s imagination, as it focuses on the lives of women isolated in suburban houses, turns over the stones of the suburban landscape, looks through the windows at the houses being built or demolished nearby, and charges its increasingly provisional, free verse lines with the foment of her will to change. There’s a contrast here with Brooks, who lets go of the house poem when she relinquishes fixed poetic forms and turns outwards toward a Black nationalist position. Rich follows an opposite path: as her poems abandon rhyme and regular meter, the house accumulates more and more power as a site she can explore. I draw a line in this chapter from poems like “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” which might be understood as notional house poems, through expansive sequences like “Calle Visión,” which explore the rooms of an unfamiliar house. When the movement to the suburbs captured and contained so much of the white imagination of social life, it makes sense that the house poem would emerge there as a form for grappling with the ambivalence and anger that Rich feels as a feminist and lesbian. This chapter steps through her various houses and discovers within them the landscapes of American history that, increasingly, form the evidence for Rich’s political statements and the grounding for her passionate anger. Rich’s suburban house poems showcase her tendency to push against the  settled boundaries between people and positions. Rich’s readers are rightly attentive to the movements between inside and outside, and between ­public and private.23 Rich helps these readings along, as at the end of “Contradictions: Tracking Poems”: “Remember:  the body’s pain and the pain on the streets / are not the same  but you can learn / from the edges

Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs  61 that blur.”24 Edge-­crossers and interlopers are common in Rich’s work. In  one section of “Twenty-­One Love Poems,” she is at home listening to music when she receives a letter from a political prisoner being tortured. In another poem, “From an Old House in America,” she catalogues the exploitation of women by settler-­colonialism and slavery, only to turn in the next section to the “plain and ordinary things” that “speak softly” in the garden: an iris and daisies, a porcupine, caterpillars, and the “webbing of a garden chair.”25 The slogan “the personal is political” certainly captures some of these impulses not to limit her attention to either the “body’s pain” or the “streets.” However, the significance and enduring claim of Rich’s work on our imagination extends beyond this truthful observation, which could apply to many poets whose work confronts the Romantic dynamic of personal epiphany and world transformation. Rich asks how the privacy of the house and the family is tied into the common history of the nation as a world-­power. In this way, Rich captures, through her poetic architecture, a form of thinking that maps incommensurate scales of place and time onto one another. In her management of the proportions between inside and outside, Rich draws on one of the generic habits of the house poem. The house is, throughout Rich’s career, as important a concept as the body, though readers have understandably been drawn to the latter, especially considering the disability that Rich over time brought into her poetry directly. The two poems I mention above—“Twenty-­One Love Poems” and “From an Old House in America”—move in and out of homes as a way of threading their perceptions, intuitions, and reactions into what Rich calls elsewhere “a complicated house.” In her reading of the seventeenth-­century house poem, Heather Dubrow discusses those poems as “controlling the relationship between inside and outside.”26 Rich’s house-­bound settings are porous ones, whether standing at a window, washing dishes, hanging laundry, or lying in bed. In general, Rich uses the house as a setting to dramatize its inability to protect, shelter, and otherwise remove women from the “outside” world of American society after the war. A house makes a convenient metaphor for containment, separation, privacy, and complacency. For Rich, whose imagination probes restlessly at the sources and the borders of thought and feeling, it’s important that the house poem fails these expectations—­and, by association, the lives lived in the house fail to adhere to heteronormative values and patterns. Rich writes, in “The Wave,”

62  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 And I think of those lives we tried to live in our globed helmets, self-­enclosed bodies self-­illumined gliding safe from the turbulence and how, miraculously, we failed.27

Rich’s houses are exposed to the world—­of work, of history, of violence against women—­rather than enclosed and protected from it. The odd adjective that appears over and over in Rich, “protectless,” speaks in its very awkwardness (why not “protectionless”?) to this effort and its “miraculous” failure. The reason it takes a miracle to fail, rather than an accident or a willed transformation, is because Rich understands behavior as shaped by language, which may always betray the poet. Rich sees poetic language as susceptible to the same weaponization and abuse as any other kind of language. Her setting for this struggle over language is the setting many white, bourgeois women would find themselves in after World War II: the isolated privacy of the single-­ family house. Taking Rich as the realist orator Helen Vendler declares her to be, we can learn from her house poems how to fail the ideology of the house as a space set apart from the social world.28

Confined Spaces: Bradstreet and Dickinson as Precursors I begin by touching briefly on two of Rich’s essays about her poetic influences, “The Tensions of Anne Bradstreet” and “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson.” In her imagined encounters with both poets, Rich locates the creation of poetry within house-­ bound settings. Rich’s self-­ reflective essays in the early 1970s are invaluable sources for tracking her development as a poet, teacher, and feminist. Rich situates herself in a line from Bradstreet through Dickinson, both of whom she reads as “confined” in their houses. To recall for a moment the larger historical background for Rich’s poetry: the shift to the suburbs was encouraged by white America’s will to segregation at the same time that the Supreme Court moved against racial covenants and restrictions.29 This context gives salience to the isolation that Rich identifies in her precursor poets. By the time Rich is writing her essays about Bradstreet and Dickinson and their isolation, she has moved to New York and is on the cusp of her earliest lesbian relationships. Looking back on her own former life via her analyses of Bradstreet and Dickinson, she can see privacy and isolation as both forms of containment and sources of poetic transformation.

Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs  63 Throughout her life, Rich seems to have felt and experienced many of her houses as ambivalent spaces for writing. Her essays show how the house is both a prod for and impediment to the creative imagination. Rich’s treatment of Bradstreet and Dickinson examines their stylistic innovation as conditioned by their material lives. Anne Bradstreet was, in Rich’s own words, a “woman of rank” who came to Massachusetts in June 1630 with her father, Thomas Dudley, the deputy governor.30 Of Bradstreet, Rich writes: “to have written poems, the first good poems in America, while rearing eight children, lying frequently sick, keeping house at the edge of wilderness, was to have managed a poet’s range and extension within confines as severe as any American poet has confronted.”31 The contrast between “extension” and “confinement” stands out from these comments. When Rich reflects on her own composition of Snapshots of a Daughter-­in-­Law, Rich describes her work in related terms: “In the late fifties I was able to write, for the first time, directly about experiencing myself as a woman. The poem was jotted in fragments during children’s naps, brief hours in a library, or at 3:00 a.m. after rising with a wakeful child. I despaired of doing any continuous work at this time.”32 Poetic composition, as described in her reading of Bradstreet and in her own artist statement, has its material basis in the discontinuous time required to care for children. For Rich, Emily Dickinson’s inspiration is just as marked by the physical space in which she wrote, her house in Amherst. Rich finds an analogue between the “confined space” of the house in Amherst and the charged compression of Dickinson’s poetry—­the way that individual words suggest multiple meanings and, in Sharon Cameron’s reading, jar open the finite time of human lives.33 Like Bradstreet, Dickinson turns the American house poem in the direction of a metaphysical drama, rather than, say, a physical description of architecture. Rich writes: I am thinking of a confined space in which the genius of the nineteenth-­ century female mind in America moved, inventing a language more varied, more compressed, more dense with implications, more complex of syntax, than any American poetic language to date; in the trail of that genius my mind has been moving, and with its language and images my mind still has to reckon, as the mind of a woman poet in America today.34

Here Rich uses the metaphor of a “trail” in which her mind moves. With Bradstreet, she imagines a poet in the present, such as herself, glimpsing “outlines of unaskable questions.” At stake is the pressing question for Rich of how

64  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 she will continue to rethink her own life by means of poetry’s particular resources. The house provides both a block and a catalyst for that change because of the work that it requires from her and because of the limitations that it imposes. This doubled status of the house emerges, at least in part, from her own conflicted relationship to her childhood house, her father, and his pedantry. The poem “After Dark,” from 1964, wrestles with her father’s influence in its precise image for his humanist pedagogy, the education in music and literature she has under him: “Faintly a phonograph needle / Whirrs round in the last groove / Eating my heart to dust.”35 Bradstreet and Dickinson offer Rich a way of understanding her own entrapment in the house. While Rich does not romanticize the isolation and deprivation of either poet, she pushes in these essays toward seeing the house as more than a constraint—­as, in fact, a source of power, to use the title of the first poem in A Dream of a Common Language (1976). Along with the contemporaneous work of Lorine Niedecker, Alice Notley, and Bernadette Mayer, Rich reinvents a  domestic poetics to seize the creative, potentially liberating possibilities within the daily accumulation of labor.36 Like these poets, Rich often employs provisional, diaristic, notebook-­like kinds of writing. These deceptively loose patterns of writing sometimes disguise or deflect the traces of formalism that carry over from her first two books. Over the long course of her career, Rich moves toward a near Whitmanian, visionary description of the house as a portal into the deep time of American history and dispossession. “In the Wake of Home” and “Calle Visión” are two poems of that sort that I discuss in the final section of the chapter. This poetry, though it may not always serve up a direct critique of US capitalism and nationalism, nevertheless splinters the view, like the prism that itself appears often in Rich’s poems, of the single-­ family house as the anchor of American democracy. Rich’s references to Bradstreet and to Dickinson are illuminating for another reason. Both poets wrote during periods of rapid transformation in US society: settlement, in the former, and the Civil War, in the latter. Rich grants Bradstreet’s language a “range and extension,” while she finds in Dickinson a sublime power, a poetics of “volcanic propensities” written in a “dialect called metaphor.”37 Rich’s own poems sense that the global preeminence of the United States after the 1940s brings a new and dangerous precariousness to the use of language in public, particularly as language can justify the violence of state power. Rich fears that “our words misunderstand us.” She also worries that “everything we write / will be used against us / or against those we love.”38 These concerns are not particular to Rich, nor are they

Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs  65 unique to Rich’s era, one in which poets, state institutions, and universities find themselves in increasingly close relation. Poets often find themselves mourning the gap between idea and representation or between feeling and expression. But her formulation of this longstanding poetic problem—­as linked to a set of suburban, house-­bound images and feminist politics—­ reorients the image of the poet in postwar American poetry. When Rich searches for a place to root her authority as a poet, she does so not in Boston Common, as her contemporary Robert Lowell does, but at the kitchen sink, table, and window. She is, in other words, not exempt from the potential weap­on­i­za­tion of language by virtue of her privacy or her choice of poetic form and subject. Her poems claim that the house is inseparable from the artistic imagination just as it is also the source of her successive reimaginations of herself.

Other People’s Houses What do Rich’s poems of life in the house look and sound like? The houses of Rich’s childhood make their way into her early poetry obliquely, primarily through a sense of their bourgeois isolation from the world and resistance to change. Rich’s earliest house poems encounter her at a moment when she keeps her own self at a distance, handling life with “asbestos gloves,” as she famously puts it later.39 A good example is “The Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room” from A Change of World. This dramatic monologue, which borrows its meter and some of its themes from Yeats’s “Easter 1916,” pitches the “mob,” “standing sullen in the square,” against the “frailties of glass” and the “antique ruby bowl” of an ancestral house. In another Yeatsian nod, this time to the artistry associated with the aristocratic heritage of such houses, Rich’s final couplet places the uncle between the “treasures handed down / From a calmer age” and the revolutionary forces waiting to break the glass of the house: “we stand between the dead glass-­blowers / And murmurings of missile-­throwers.”40 Rich’s critique comes through the ironized persona of the uncle. But in this poem, as in the poem that opens the collection, “Storm Warnings,” the suburban house poem intimates a disruption to the status quo, without exactly spelling out what that disruption will be: “the wind will rise, / We can only close the shutters.”41 These poems imagine threats coming from outside the house, but Rich soon sees the threat as internal to the suburban development. The speaking figures in A Change of World are sometimes sitting in drawing rooms or looking out of windows. But none of the poems in Rich’s first book

66  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 undertakes a sustained description of the house, even though many of them, such as “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” are hard to imagine without their domestic setting. That poem finds personal freedom displaced onto art, and specifically onto artisan craftwork and pictorial design. The first stanza dramatizes Aunt Jennifer’s craftwork by describing, in rhymed couplets, her tigers prancing on a green, unafraid of the men beneath the tree. The second stanza refers to the “massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band” as a metonym for the hold her marriage has over her. The final stanza looks toward her death, punning on the band: she is “still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.” In an ambiguous final couplet, the tigers continue to prance, “proud and unafraid.”42 The poem could be read as a defense of the autonomy of art and its potential inheritance by those who can seize its power; it can easily be read as a sober judgment on the failure of art to effect a genuine change of world. “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” opens a window onto a domestic scene that prefigures the constrained power Rich locates in Bradstreet and Dickinson when she writes about them in the 1970s. Poetic form appears by implication as a constraint that also animates. But while Aunt Jennifer is ultimately ringed by the ordeals she was mastered by, increasingly Rich searches for the liberatory energies the materials of poem-­ making and house-­making might make possible. Three of Rich’s early poems place us more explicitly in the house. The first poem in Rich’s corpus that takes a house as its subject, rather than as a setting for a scene, is “The House at the Cascades.” The situation of the poem is ­simple and quickly sketched: two people are exploring the grounds of a house after a heavy rain. “The House at the Cascades” adopts a Yeatsian, or perhaps Frostian, tone from the outset: “All changed now through neglect.” And the house, too, appears to be modeled after Yeats’s country-­houses, homes such as Coole Park where art and beauty flourished in aristocratic settings. Overtaken by decadent undergrowth, “drunken” leaves and a “riot of green,” the house is “dying in all that life.” The poem develops the metaphor: the greenery is “anarchy” and “demagogue weed.” Like those country-­houses, the house at the Cascades is the emblem of a faded claim to power and authority. Rich’s poem explicitly refers to empire and slavery:             together there They stormed the defenseless handiwork of man Whose empire wars against him when he turns A moment from the yoke.43

Although the sustained conceit could be Marvellian, summoned from “The Garden” or “Upon Appleton House,” the tone has none of Marvell’s slipperiness

Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs  67 nor Yeats’s wistfulness. The poem feels like an abandoned fragment of a country-­house poem, mostly because the “we” in it is undeveloped. It lacks the psychological drama of slightly later poems like “The Middle Aged” or “Living in Sin” because its vegetative metaphor takes on a historical refence to empire and anarchy. But the poem is nevertheless illuminating: anarchy, empire, and war are metaphorical forces, whereas later they will be the historical truths the American house brings into view. Rich’s house poems, at least at first, stage precarious balances between a stable “inside” and an unknown or sinister “outside.” That division becomes far more complicated and fraught by the early 1960s. Even though The Diamond Cutters, Rich’s second collection, can be read as a travelogue, a record of Rich’s time traveling in Europe, some of the book’s most difficult and moving revelations are placed within the privacy of houses. In its style and themes, The Diamond Cutters stands midway between the well-­crafted, premonitory lyrics of A Change of World and the fragmentary, unsettled Snapshots of a Daughter-­in-­Law (1963). Most of the poems themselves retain some of the cool, mannered ruefulness of Rich’s first collection. Rich’s year at Merton College, Oxford and her travels through Europe add a cosmopolitan air to poems like “The Celebration in the Plaza,” “Recorders in Italy,” and “Love in the Museum.” A postwar climate hangs heavily over the first poem, “The Roadway,” which conjures a minatory, near-­fascist threat of social alienation. Like the threat of overgrowth in “The House in the Cascades,” the roadway has become wild with disuse: Nowhere is evil spoken Though something deep in the heart Refuses to mend the bridge And can never make a start Along the abandoned path To the house at left or at right, Where neighbor and neighbor’s children Awake to the same daylight.44

This uneasy but formally precise stanza anticipates the theme of the book as a whole: poetic clarity diverges from epistemological certainty. The elegiac atmosphere that hangs over the bedrooms, plazas, playgrounds, gardens, and suburban neighbors of The Diamond Cutters draws Rich not to the past but rather to an unknown, disenchanted future. In The Diamond Cutters, two of Rich’s most moving poems take homes as the setting for scenes of rueful reality-­testing. In “Living in Sin,” a woman and

68  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 a man are living together in a bohemian apartment: the taps run, the windows are dirty. But an air of the “picturesque” covers it all, covers the derelict “plate of pears,” the piano with the “Persian shawl,” even the mice. Even as the poem begins, though, the scene appears in the rearview of desire: “she had thought the studio would keep itself / no dust upon the furniture of love.” The pluperfect verb distances the woman from the following description. The metaphor sets up a relationship between love and the studio. Neither keeps itself; both gather dust. The remainder of the poem unfolds this conceit until, at the end, the diurnal repetition of the scene, and the gathering dust, intimate a threat. Rich’s figure for that threat—­an Audenesque one, of time and love passing away and illusion succumbing to knowledge—­is “the daylight coming, / Like a relentless milkman up the stairs.”45 The steps on the stairs echo the sound of the clock, perhaps, or the feet within the iambic lines that Rich deploys through the collection. With its milkman, taken from the storehouse of images of apartment life, “Living in Sin” revises and regrounds bedroom aubades like John Donne’s “The Sun Rising,” which seek to protect the illusions of love from the inevitability of time passing and reality dawning. Like “Living in Sin,” “The Middle-­Aged” sees cracks in the surface of domestic life, but these disruptions come from what families conceal rather than what lovers stave off. The faces of the middle-­aged parents in this poem are “safe as an interior / Of Holland tiles and Oriental carpet.” Their house emanates a bourgeois comfort, with “a room upstairs we must call ours.” But the tranquil details that Rich describes—­having tea, gardening—“afflict” and “haunt” her. In their specificity, they are paired, later in the poem, with cracks in the balustrade and letters locked in a drawer. Rich draws her conclusion early in the poem, just as she does with the first lines of “Living in Sin”: For to be young Was always to live in other people’s houses Whose peace, if we sought it, had been made by others, Was ours at second-­hand and not for long.46

These lines are heavily overdetermined. Her own marriage may prompt her to reflect on the house of her childhood and her parents, and to anticipate the effort ahead of creating her own peace. Rich’s first child was born right before The Diamond Cutters was published. A different reading might emphasize the “peace” of Europe, “made by others,” through which Rich has been moving as she writes these poems. In any case, the house of the middle-­aged is an

Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs  69 extended metaphor for a state of being: the knowledge of self and of others comes through cracks in the materials, light from the windows, and steps on the staircase. Daylight arrives over and over in the windows and on the staircases of The Diamond Cutters, and not with lucidity as much as with the cold delineation of fact. The word “delineate” appears both in “Living in Sin” and in the title poem, as the action of the diamond or the poet’s pen. Those delineated facts are, at this point, intimated states of loss—­love growing old, friends leaving, time elapsing. As in “The House in the Cascades,” Rich makes use of fictional personae or pronouns without specific referents, whereas very soon her house poems issue reports on the world around her, its history, and her own place in time.

In the Kitchen, At the Window, In the Bedroom: Views from the Interior Rich’s earliest house poems are searching, largely suburban dramas of self-­ knowledge and enlightenment. The inside and outside of the house are held in delicate balance, but the poems suggest that balance will be difficult or impossible to maintain. As feminist thought moves to the center of her poetry, Rich’s house poems offer nuanced descriptions of the labor necessary to maintain the house as an actual place. Poems like “The Roofwalker,” written in 1961, show the house to be a more contradictory poetic setting for Rich. The house is an emblem for the life she didn’t choose that nevertheless chose her.47 Those lines refer to the work that Rich is doing, in the late 1950s and 1960s, as a woman raising three children. They gesture toward the body of thought known as social reproduction, and they anticipate, by only a few years, the Marxist-­ feminist critique of Silvia Federici’s “Wages Against Housework.”48 Federici was, along with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, a central figure in European Marxist Feminist thought of the early 1970s. Her essay argues not for compensation for housework, but rather for a critique of capitalism that begins from the perspective of women’s uncompensated work in the home. Federici adds a different starting-­point to the one that Marx uses in the “working day” chapter of Capital: not the factory floor, but the kitchen sink. Federici makes visible the labor of women as a means toward critiquing the wage in general. Increasingly, Rich’s poems take the house and housework as their starting point. Rich is interested, however, in connecting the work, thought, and artistic creation that take place inside of the house to the

70  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 political environment outside the house. Her poems refer often to a particular kind of psychological and bodily suffering that emerges when she combines a lesbian consciousness with an acute sense of the violence visited upon women in the city and across time. While her early poems hone her skill in fixed forms that are immediately recognizable through their rhymes and meter, Rich’s poems from her middle and later career are no less carefully structured. Rich is drawn toward the catalogue as a way of organizing her thoughts and words, as Willard Spiegelman notes.49 The inventoried items are placed in a context dense with history and memory, anger and exhaustion. One way to track the politics of Rich’s house poems is to start with a set of common scenarios or scenes that she repeats across her life. Cleaning dishes and rooms figure prominently. In “Poetry: III,” one of three short defenses of poetry, Rich wonders what would have happened had someone told her that poetry was “not a key / nor a peacock feather” but rather “the kitchen sink” and “the grinding stone.”50 “Kitchen sink” not only points to the labor Rich associates with writing poetry, but also to the housework that conditions the writing of poetry. Housework has a double-­edged status as both burden that chops up the time available to write poetry and subject-­matter that fills poetry. Snapshots of a Daughter-­in-­Law finds Rich remaking her own earlier aesthetics—­largely occluding the regular use of rhyme and meter that she had employed in the 1950s—­and sensing that a more dramatic unmaking of her life is in store. The title poem includes many jostling scenes and quotations from literary history, often spoken by proto-­feminists or women poets (Dickinson, Wollstonecraft) whom Rich identifies as flawed but important precursors for herself. The fragmentary form of the poem captures two related conditions. First, the poetry and philosophy of the white, male, European tradition requires, in response, a poetry of disruption and citation as methods of critique. Quoting Robert Campion’s sixteenth-­century lyric, Rich writes, “When to her lute Corinna sings / neither words nor music are her own.”51 Second, and equally im­por­ tant, Rich needs a new kind of house poem to write in the gaps between caring for her children. As she describes the period in retrospect, “I despaired of doing any continuous work at this time.”52 “Snapshots” is a suburban house poem and a late modernist collage made of fragments. Its perspective is kaleidoscopic and prismatic, unfixed from a single persona or point of view. Its ending is ambiguous in its anticipation of a future woman, arcing through the waves like a helicopter, who may arrive to represent “our” experience. But the moments of realism in the poem are

Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs  71 especially striking. In the second stanza, a woman stands at a kitchen sink, looking out of a window: Banging the coffee-­pot into the sink she hears the angels chiding, and looks out past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky. Only a week since They said: Have no patience. The next time it was: Be insatiable. Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save. Sometimes she’s let the tapstream scald her arm, a match burn to her thumbnail, or held her hand above the kettle’s snout right in the woolly steam. They are probably angels, since nothing hurts her any more, except each morning’s grit blowing into her eyes.53

“Raked” and “sloppy” are adjectives that modify the garden and the sky, but they also mark out the coordinates of the consciousness at work here. Rich stages a kind of dialogue: the three exhortations of the “angels” are answered by three self-­wounding actions. Rich figures the numbness of the “anonymous suburban housewife” as a near-­posthumous existence in which only the moment of waking in the morning reminds her of being alive. This “snapshot” captures the labor elided from the house poem—­and from the idealized domesticity of the “daughter-­in-­law.” Reading Rich’s house poems together make it clear how each is a draft, open to revision by a later poem in form as well as in the kinds of thought or self-­ awareness that they are capable of sounding. “Coast to Coast,” for instance, echoes and partly revises the second part of “Snapshots of a Daughter-­in-­Law” from over a decade earlier: There are days when housework seems the only outlet     old funnel I’ve poured cauldrons through old servitude     In grief and fury bending to the accustomed tasks     the vacuum cleaner plowing realms of dust     the mirror scoured     grey webs behind framed photographs     brushed away the grey-­seamed sky enormous in the west snow gathering in corners     of the north54

72  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 The most evident difference between the later and the earlier poem is the loosened form of “Coast to Coast,” which almost seems to take apart or undo the tightly bound stanzas of “Snapshots.” Or there’s the preeminence given to first-­person experience: “old funnel I’ve poured cauldrons through.” The earlier Rich animated a series of characters to write about the confinement of houses and the exhaustion of household labor, from the Aunt Jennifer and Uncle-­in-­a-­drawing-­room of A Change of World to the shifting “she” or the unnamed “you.” What unites the two poems is the permeability of the house: the sky is almost brushed away like the cobwebs and the grit blows into the eyes while she stands at the sink. The poem starts from a stilled moment in ordinary human time (rather than, say, a proclamation, or a vision, or a proposition). Rich, by isolating and beginning with a scene in the house, establishes a foundation to which she can return. There are a few common situations from which her poems begin and then proceed into meditations, often moving back to recycle a word or image, then moving forward in a different direction. Revision is a process that, for Rich, takes place against a larger personal and political background of disintegration and destruction: it is “the passion to make and make again / Where such unmaking reigns.”55 The windows in Rich’s poems reflect her confinement and open portals to a more expansive political vision. Much younger, Rich had watched from a train as “life lurches past us in a windowed twilight.”56 The characteristic windows in her poems soon become those of houses, particularly of kitchens. Much of the rest of the collection Snapshots of a Daughter-­in-­Law takes place at a window as well: “A day returns, a certain weather / splatters the panes, and we / once more stare in the eye of our first failure.” Staring at the “weight of equinoctial evening,” Rich thinks “then the houses draw you. Then they have you.”57 She watches from a window as a thaw comes after snow: “this morning, flakes of sun / peel down to the last snowholds.”58 One of the musical ground-­notes for the book might be the “landlord’s hammer in the yard,” which accompanies the blooming forsythia, “chrome splashed on the spring evenings.”59 Lost chances press hard against the background of the beauty Rich sees and notes, as “emptiness around the stoop of the house / minces, catwise, waiting for an in.” Rich’s readers have observed her ability to calibrate the external with the internal: a later window-­driven poem, “Homage to Winter,” directs the poet to a room “without a view” in order “to make the visible world your conscience.”60 The house poem defines poetry as continuous with dailiness, with repetitive work, with daydreaming, and with images of natural beauty. But the horizon, seen from the kitchen window, brings less

Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs  73 a sense of futurity than of menace and “first failure.” What plagues Rich’s “conscience” becomes clear in the visual world around her by the final poem. The final poem in Snapshots, “The Roofwalker,” ties together Rich’s window-­work and observations into an ambivalent palinode. This poem is occasioned by a pause in the construction of a house next door. Looking out of her window, Rich sees the dusk come “over the half-­finished houses,” where the builders stand like “giants . . . on a listing deck” or like “shadows / on a burning deck.” The poem’s intimations of danger enlarge the expressiveness of the silhouettes so that Rich imagines herself involved in the drama: “I feel like them up there: / exposed, larger than life, / and due to break my neck.” Rich draws a comparison between her work in the house and theirs building the house, but the comparison uncovers the urgency, “infinite exertion,” and potential futility of building “a roof I can’t live under.” The house becomes a metaphor for a life constructed by means that now seem suspect, damaging, self-­delusional. Since the speaker is a poet, the house is also a metaphor for  poetry, made from language not entirely her own. The architectural ­elements—“blueprints, / closings of gaps, / measurings, calculations”—recall the inherited metrical schemes of her earlier poems. A ghostly trimeter haunts the lines of “The Roofwalker,” as if both to summon and dispel the tools she had used before. These tools “are the wrong ones / for what I have to do,” but what she must do is not spelled out. Instead, she returns at the end of the poem to the image of the roofwalker, “a naked man fleeing / across the roofs,” and to herself, or to the reader, now “reading—­not with indifference— / about a naked man / fleeing across the roofs.”61 A little later, in “Leaflets,” Rich writes, “I am thinking how we can use what we have / to invent what we need.”62 “The Roofwalker” is poised at the moment of invention and the call of necessity, though it has no solution to the question of how to live an unchosen life or how to write in an unchosen language. As a poem, it gestures back to the meters Rich had used and forward to the complex conceits she will use in poems like “Diving into the Wreck.” Its closing two images, first of the roofwalker and then of the man reading about the roofwalker, remind the reader of their own involvement in the scene. Rich’s poem is a challenge on two fronts. First, the view from the suburban house emphasizes the physical and psychological danger of the work that goes into maintaining it as a shelter. Second, the window opens the possibility of a different life. In that respect, “The Roofwalker” joins a whole series of other window poems that notice “the neighborhood is changing, / even the neighbors are grown, methinks, peculiar,” and ask, “what would it mean to live / in a city whose people were changing / each other’s despair into hope?”63

74  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 Sometimes the window is all, Rich thinks, that a married couple can claim to share: They’re tearing down the houses we met and lived in, soon our two bodies will be all left standing from that era. [. . .] We have, as they say, certain things in common. I mean: a view from a bathroom window64

But perhaps most important, the window exists for Rich to talk about her writing as she is doing it:            All afternoon I’ve sat at this table in Vermont, reading, writing, cutting an apple in slivers and eating them, but mostly gazing down through the windows at the long scribble of lake due south where the wind and weather come from.65

The window, whether over the sink or next to the table, helps Rich develop the persona of the lyric poet as a housemaker, inhabitant, and builder. This persona adds to and complicates the catalogue of fictive poetic personae: Yeats in the tower, Crane at sea, Moore on the glacier, Eliot in the city streets. The house is where poetry, of necessity, begins, though Rich questions the idea that words and houses are at all natural, desirable, or safe. As “Dream Before Waking” and “The Roofwalker” intimate, the most charged time in a house for Rich, emotionally, is the morning or evening, liminal times of day that provoke self-­scrutiny and shape rhetorical questions. The aubade and the poem at evening often find Rich in bed—­with Alfred and, later, with women she loves. The intimacy of Rich’s bedrooms almost always opens out into a worldly knowledge: “the world breathes underneath our bed,” she writes in “A Marriage in the ’Sixties.”66 These poems of sleeping and waking position meditative states of partial consciousness as continuous with housework, not as rest from it:

Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs  75 Ho! in the dawn how light we lie stirring faintly as laundry left all night on the lines.67

The precision of the simile and the limpid meter disguise an unsettling premise. The sleepers have merged with material preoccupations that require attention. They also question the assumption that a house is a refuge instead of a barrier: Over him, over you, a great roof is rising, a great wall: no temporary shelter. Did you tell yourself these beams would melt, these fiery blocs dissolve? Did you choose to build this thing? Have you stepped back to see what it is?68

The morning and evening poems of this sort represent not the intoxicating incipience of love, as in “Living in Sin,” but rather the “numbness of soul in placid neighborhoods. / Lives ticking on as if.”69 They anxiously examine heterosexual marriages in which the couple, like the laundry, is “slowly bleaching // with the days, the hours, and the years,” while at the same time “getting finer than ever.”70 Yet together with the window and sink poems, the bedroom poems, rooted in her personal “I” and inflected by her own dissolving marriage, are gestures toward what Rich will soon call a “common language.” What is shared in these poems is not a political position but rather an orientation prompted by the house, a “view from a bathroom window” or “the way / water tastes from our tap, / which you marvel at.”71 These three generic categories or situations—­the kitchen sink poem, the window poem, the bed poem—­need the house (or apartment) to exist. Yet they also begin to do the work of taking apart the family home, working in explicit ways against its isolation and confinement. Poetic vision occurs “only with the musing of a mind / one with her body,” as a woman sits in a kitchen doing craftwork, having “quietly walked away / from the argument and jargon in a room.” These occasions blend the suburban domestic into a set of common images from poetic history. There’s the anonymous poet of ­

76  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 “Westron Wind” lying in bed and missing their lover as the rain falls; or there’s Whitman imagining himself as a woman standing at a window and watching men bathe. Rich’s poems bring these stock figures to life in suburban houses in the mid-­twentieth century and, by setting them in motion, show the possibilities and limits of their power. They place a consciousness in frictive contact with necessity of some kind or another, making clear the connections Rich intuits between unmaking a house and making a poem.

The House Poem as Poetic Sequence The example of Roland Park, the “first planned suburb,” forms the early treas­ ury of Rich’s imagination, her source for poetic images, and her training in meter and rhyme. The suburbs are a central mechanism for maintaining the segregation of American cities; they are also nodes in the networks of investment that tie the US into a global system. Rich’s lyrics can do some of the work of compressing scales of history and geography, but her longer poetic sequences elaborate more fully the ties between what is inside the house and what is far away from it in time and space. Ultimately, Rich requires a more expansive theater than the short lyric to stage the question of how we can go on living in American houses without occluding the pressure of history on the intimacy and privacy of the individual. For that, she turns to the poetic sequence. The poetic sequence, common in US poetry after World War II, captures a need for more development than the lyric can allow. Heir in some sense to the modernist collage, and farther back to the sonnet sequence, a poetic sequence tends to be more modest in its representational claims than the epic, as well as less committed to the unfurling of a narrative or the piecing together of a character. Rich’s poetic sequences start from the setting of a house and modulate into commentary on the nation, while resisting the aggrandizement of the epic as national myth. In fact, they present a counter-­myth to a nationalist one by scaling down the poem to the size of the house and the home. At the same time, the house stands not as the bulwark of US capitalism, but as the portal to a prismatic view of its historical origins and development. What comes afterward is, as the title of one such sequence puts it, “In the Wake of Home.” The titles of three poetic sequences by Rich all indicate a movement away from the house: “From an Old House in America,” “In the Wake of Home,” and “Calle Visión.” All three titles also push time into the future. These long

Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs  77 poems imagine a bedroom and radiate outward from that room to contemplate the historical violence of the expansion of the US, particularly as it affects women. “Any woman’s death diminishes me” is the line that concludes “From an Old House in America.”72 While the houses are anonymous in the three poems, the first recalls Rich’s stays in West Barnet, VT, and Montague, MA; the second her childhood in Baltimore; the third her move in 1984 to California, since it is set on a southwestern road.73 These are far from the only sequences in Rich’s work that summon the prospect of gendered identity (and gendered labor) as an ongoing revelation and responsibility rather than a settled fact. “Twenty-­One Love Poems” and “Sources” make for good companions, but since those poems are less concerned with probing the relation between house and nation, I leave them somewhat to the side. Written between 1974 and 1993, the poems might be set against the background of Rich’s developing politics, from the incipience of her lesbian feminism in the early 1970s to her work for the New Jewish Agenda in the mid-­1980s to her critique of US imperialism in the early 1990s. Yet apart from a few specific markers that might suggest these new commitments—­the word “Jodensavanne” in the middle poem—­the three sequences could be considered rewritings of the same basic skeleton of a poem. That poem charges itself with finding a language and a form for understanding gender as bound up with US settler-­colonialism. Earlier poems such as “Snapshots of a Daughter-­in-­Law” worked to establish and supercede a literary genealogy rooted in the lives and words of women rather than the perceptions and masterworks of men. These poems are more about the place of home in a capitalist society that divides men and women while occluding the value that both bring to the reproduction of society.74 The house, with its materials, objects, and hints of previous lives, provides a generative method of accessing the past from the position of a woman writing in the present. There are carcasses of old bugs “crumbled / into the rut of the window,” or there is a room with “bluegreen curtains / posters     a pile of animals on the bed.”75 The things that came before she arrives are still there and ask for interpretation. The smallness and triviality of these things is part of the point. The place where a poem begins is “Not what you thought:     just a turn-­off,” leading to a house with “scrub oak and cactus in the yard.” These poems rely primarily on aesthetics and on sense perception to dig into the past of US capitalism. The suggestion, implicitly, is that the history of social relations embedded in imperial expansion does not come immediately to view but needs to be encountered at first obliquely through the material traces it has left. This project takes on a significance beyond Rich herself, and beyond

78  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 the appreciation of her work, when we allow the timeline of the poems (1974–93) to reflect the pressure on the US to expand in new ways, through financial markets and wars. Rich’s sustained interest in writing and rewriting the house poem contributes to the analysis of what some economists have named the “long downturn” of the United States after 1973.76 The contribution of her poems is to uncover the process—­intuitive for Rich as a poet—­by which the “plain and ordinary things” of the old house in America “speak softly” of “the coming of the railroad” and “this continent of the homeless.” I  combine the lines of the three poems here not to conflate their different commitments and historical moments, which will become clear, but to suggest the through-­lines, since any poet will return again and again to a certain set of themes and images, whether out of dissatisfaction, obsession, or unconscious attraction. The poetic sequence makes for an ample canvas for Rich’s thought. The poems have the vestiges of narrative, but they also move by a dream-­like association, while anchoring the poem’s disparate parts in a few repeating words or phrases. Starting with the objects in the house, Rich moves back and forth between description and meditation. In “An Old House in America,” the simile the poem offers for its own process is “like turning through the contents of a drawer.”77 The poem is about the human suffering that lies waiting to be told by the everyday objects of an American house. The division of labor between men and women sustains the violence that Rich describes as endemic both to the family structure and to the expansion of the US. Rich approaches her theme indirectly, however, letting herself be guided by “the humble tenacity of things / waiting for people, waiting for months, for years.” Ultimately, waiting for Rich is not a what but a who, a putative “She” who stands at the end of a long process of questioning, confessing, and accepting (this “She” may be another version of the swimming woman at the end of “Snapshots of a Daughter-­in-­Law”). Placing her hand on a doorframe, Rich places her hand “on the hand / of the dead, invisible palm-­print.”78 Then she turns over photographs and sees the family come into view. Abruptly, the poem addresses Rich’s dead ex-­husband, Alfred Conrad: “if they call me man-­hater, you would have known it for a lie.” She thinks about the gulf between the dead and living as a “translucent curtain,” through which she begins to sense not only Conrad, but the lives of disparate American women. Stating “I am an American woman,” Rich threads the second half of the poem through a Whitmanian exercise in empathy and imagination. She sees herself as a pregnant slave, “shipped here to be fruitful”; as a witch, deserted by her “sisters”; as a woman in a daguerreotype who kills prairie chickens.79

Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs  79 In each case, she is a woman “who has lived in isolation from other women.” In this catalogue of what an “American woman” is, Rich finds the problem that the poem then confronts: what will remain of a human consciousness if it recognizes fully the myriad kinds of violence enforced upon women to keep them separate and alone, while using them to sustain the economy of the household and the country? The image Rich uses to identify this tension between knowledge and survival comes from the house once again: a nightshade (datura) that “tangles with a gentler weed.” The objects of the house led Rich to the “American woman” and her labor; the problem this knowledge poses for Rich’s politics leads her back to the house to find an analogue: “a dream of tenderness // wrestles with all I know of history.”80 Rich’s trust in the tenacity of household things parallels Gaston Bachelard’s contemporaneous musings in The Poetics of Space, published in French in 1958 and in English in 1964. His method of defamiliarizing household items, nooks, and rooms leads him to a theory of the origins of poetic language. Rich’s thought leads her to a far more materially precarious place. Bachelard begins the book with a setting that serves as refuge or shelter, as well as a fount of childhood reverie: the house. The house is a “tool for analysis of the human soul”; images of the house therefore provide us with “a topography of our intimate being.”81 Bachelard’s philosophical reasoning comes from an alternate set of conditions and influences than Rich’s poetic practice. But he soon pauses to wonder “how can housework be made into a creative activity?”82 His answer is to “practice phenomenology while polishing a piece of old furniture,” because “consciousness rejuvenates everything, giving a quality of beginning to the most everyday actions.” In that way, “we become conscious of a house that is built by women, since men only know how to build a house from the outside.”83 Bachelard’s phenomenology reifies the distinction between genders by associating them with different kinds of housebuilding; Rich insists on the material history that created “the separation of powers / the allotment of suffering.” Rich puts the question differently. The problem is not how to make housework into a creative activity, but how to set herself in relation to women who come before her and, by doing so, arrive at a “She” who is waiting.84 Bringing herself into relation with other women places her somewhere between “lucidity” and “darkness.” There is considerable danger, at the end of “An Old House in America,” that the process of coming to terms with being “an American women” will bring her not to freedom and self-­understanding, but to isolation and suicidal thoughts. The knowledge released by the doorframe of the house brings clarity and terror. In the short poem that follows, “The Fact of a

80  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 Doorframe,” the doorframe that Rich palms in “An Old House in America” reappears as a metaphor for poetry: Now, again, poetry, violent, arcane, common, hewn of the commonest living substance into archway, portal, frame I grasp for you, your bloodstained splinters, your ancient and stubborn poise —as the earth trembles— burning out from the grain.85

“An Old House in America” and “The Fact of a Doorframe” make the poet a kind of eavesdropper on the lives archived by houses. It takes Rich another decade to place her own home under the microscope in “In the Wake of Home.” Your Native Land, Your Life (1981–5) is a companion book to Rich’s essay “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity” (1982). That essay centers Rich herself at the typewriter as she wonders how to “claim” her father and to “break his taboos,” particularly around his Jewish heritage: “This begins for me,” Rich writes, “in Baltimore, where I was born in my father’s workplace, a hospital in the Black ghetto, whose lobby contained an immense white statue of Christ.”86 After tracing a pattern of her own denials and “betrayals” of her Jewishness, Rich winds up with a catalogue of the many “disconnected angles” that have comprised her perspective on the world: “white, Jewish, anti-­Semite, racist, anti-­racist, once-­married, lesbian, middle-­class, feminist, exmatriate southerner, split at the root.”87 Instead of attempting a synthesis, Rich leaves us with a “tension,” a “beginning,” and “a moving into accountability.” While her essay pursues these themes an­ec­do­ tally, moving from year to year and memory to memory of the late 1940s, “In the Wake of Home” maintains an immersive present tense and an address to a “you” until the final stanza. “In the Wake of Home” is Rich’s most persistent attempt to unmake the house—­her own family home, “that dangerous place.” In “Sources,” the long poem that begins Your Native Land, Your Life, Rich had set out the project: Coming back after sixteen years I stare anew at things that steeple pure and righteous that clapboard farmhouse

Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs  81 seeing what I hadn’t seen before through barnboards, crumbling plaster Decades of old wallpaper roses clinging to certain studs —into that dangerous place the family home.88

In Rich’s case, the reason the family home is “dangerous” is because of its “verbal brutalities” and because of its suppression of the very complications of identity that “Split at the Root” enumerates. Though Rich is not here speaking directly about the house as an architectural structure, it’s clear that in this period of her life the home stands for her father’s rejection of their Jewish roots. Will it be a “betrayal,” Rich wonders, if her poetry “becomes the bomb that rips / the family home apart”? “In the Wake of Home” uses straightforward language to take apart the family home. The problem, Rich realizes, is that “the family coil” is “so twisted, tight and loose” that “anyone trying to leave / has to strafe the field / burn the premises down.”89 This rapidly changing metaphor provides one key to understanding the poem: Rich allows a scene or image to develop briefly, then calls its reality into question. The poem is addressed to a “you” whose memories of stable home and family are relentlessly re-­grounded in scenes of abandonment, poverty, violence, houselessness, and war. “The home houses / mirages” and the voice calling the child in for dinner on suburban streets: has gone off on the wind beaten into thinnest air whirling down other streets or maybe the mouth was burnt to ash maybe the tongue was torn out90

The poem enacts “the rush of purpose to make a life / worth living past abandonment,” but Rich ends on a series of rhetorical questions: “what if I  told you your home / is the continent of the homeless / of children sold          taken by force.”91 “In the Wake of Home” undoes the lie of the American house, but the task of unmaking the house is an ongoing one, manifested in the way the poem keeps returning to a seductive image of comfort, “the familiar underpulse.” Her name for this process is simply “building a complicated house,” the comfortless work that a “child’s soul” must do “in the wake of home.”92

82  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 Rich’s vision of America as a “continent of the homeless” takes on more specific form in “Calle Visión,” dated 1992–93. “Calle Visión” finds the poet exploring a southwestern landscape rather than the pastoral Vermont of West Barnet. The poem uses mostly couplets, a form of composition that allows Rich considerable flexibility. She can use them for antithesis, or she can put similar ideas in apposition. She can draw on the antiphonal sound that comes from unrhymed couplets in a row, or she can let them generate meditative pauses as they accumulate aphoristically. The poem dips into the resources of fable at its beginning and end, letting the timelessness of the fabulist mode intersect with a specific American history: Not what you thought:     just a turn-­off leading downhill not up narrow, doesn’t waste itself has a house at the far end scrub oak and cactus in the yard some cats     some snakes in the house there is a room in the room there is a bed on the bed there is a blanket that tells the coming of the railroad.93

The successive prepositional phrases here mimic the telling of tales or fables in which one thing leads to the next. That prospect of progression from one to another thing will be the main formal issue the poem examines. Rich’s notes to the poem, meanwhile, explain the final line. ‘ “With the coming of the railroad, new materials and pictorial designs and motifs, including trains themselves, appeared in Navaho weaving (ca. 1880).” The citation sources the image from the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, NM.94 The first stanzas provide a primer for the structure of the poem, which seeks and enacts in skilled craftwork (poetry and weaving) an intuitive critique of American expansion west and its industrial continuations in the present. “Calle Visión” is a long-­distance sequel of sorts to “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” a poem that imagines a woman’s confinement in the house through the wishful image of the prancing tigers she creates with her needlework. The scale for this poem’s woven fabric is larger. There is a blanket that tells the coming of a railroad instead of “bright topaz denizens of a world of green” who cavort regardless of the “men beneath the tree.” But both poems search the house for

Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs  83 clues. “Calle Visión” goes farther because it explains why the house is so important for Rich. First, there is the unexpected discovery: you turn down a road, you find a house. In that way, the inadvertent turn-­off that begins the poem echoes the way the couplets proceed from one thing to the next: from house to room to bed to blanket to—­railroad. Later in the poem, Rich describes this metonymic method: “Once we were dissimilar / yet unseparate.”95 Contiguity as a method of composition makes good use of a couplet’s proclivity for setting up antitheses. But Rich’s poem develops a more specific question: how can beauty and history be summoned by the same encounter, share the same intuition, sit beside each other in a poem? In a way, Rich’s house poems have always prepared her for this question: standing at a window, looking out at the pullulation in the suburbs, Rich was aware of the pollution, and of the carework and housework that demanded her attention. For Rich in “Calle Visión,” the house is a museum of the senses and of the unexpected stimuli that set the senses alight. Beauty comes through most of all in two appeals to the senses: the image of a caught butterfly, which appears around halfway through the poem, and the smell of a window. At the same time, a sense of smell leads Rich to the primary image the poem offers for suffering and cruelty: a pig slaughterhouse. “Ammonia // carbon dioxide / carbon monoxide / methane / hydrogen sulfide / : the gasses that rise from urine and feces.” For “if you took the turn-­off / this is your revelation     this the source.”96 The house poem is the preserve of beauty—­beauty that leads Rich, through its intuitive call to the senses, to the cruelty and suffering that is “dissimilar / yet unseparate.”

Conclusion The poems Rich writes from the 1960s through the early 1990s provide essential documentation of a house-­bound imagination. In the poems that speak most clearly to Rich’s personal and political development, the single-­family house forms the center of Rich’s feminist consciousness. These also happen to be my favorite poems of hers: her aesthetic sense of the detritus of a house abandoned by time or by memory leads her to vital examinations of domestic inequality, settler colonialism, and imperialism. Rich’s house poems offer up exploratory images for a society that cannot decide whether the house is part of political life or a refuge from it. They move between thinking about the house as a force for containment and as a workshop for liberation. Rich’s work compels special interest for another reason: the house poem is a continuous

84  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 preoccupation and a matter for revision throughout her career. Looking at some of her later poems reveals how early, accomplished lyrics like “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” and middle-­ period masterpieces like “Diving into the Wreck” remain relevant for her thinking decades after they are written. Writing about the house engages her language in unusual ways, ultimately compelling her to find ways of expanding the lyric poem into a sequence without losing the local force of its compression. Making, maintaining, and unmaking the house, Rich revises her poetics, often by relying on analogies between building materials and poetic devices. This process of constant renovation is perhaps spurred on by the acknowledgment that the sheltering forms she creates can just as easily neutralize or entrap her. Yet despite the material presence of her houses, their undeniable solidity and their claims on the senses, the image of the house, and even the structure of the house poem, bears some uncanny resemblance to other conceits Rich develops. “Diving into the Wreck” is Rich’s most famous ars poetica from the 1970s. Supplied with only a knife, a camera, and a book of myths, a solo diver explores the “wreck,” a version of history narrated from the perspective of the defeated, oppressed, and erased. Diving into the wreck means peeling away the political fictions to see “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.” The diver searches a “book of myths / in which / our names do not appear.”97 Rich’s metaphysical conceit remains abstract rather than detailed: the point is that the wreck is a labile, mutable image rather than a definite structure. Depths and heights abound in Rich’s work; “Planetarium” searches the skies just as “Diving into the Wreck” goes under the water. The earthly companion image to the wreck, and the image that serves much of the same purpose for Rich in terms of political critique and self-­ exploration, is the house. “Waking into the house,” as it were, Rich’s poetry searches the wreck of the postwar American project: the claim that American capitalism would bring prosperity through private ownership and through the maintenance of the family unit. But in Rich’s poems, the inheritance passed down from the house is not the security of an aristocratic lineage, not the upward mobility of the capitalist fantasia, not the social immunity of a heteronormative family life. Rich’s houses are examined for the traces they contain of an alternative history of land-­use, possession, and tenancy. Their value comes from the whole sensorium of fragile and unspeaking things, from the desiccated bugs in the sill to the daguerreotype of the settler, and from the blanket that tells the coming of the railroad to the dirty windowpanes.

Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs  85 It’s worth lingering for another moment on the two companion images of shipwreck and old house. The wreck is an arresting image because a shipwreck (like a lighthouse) lends itself to a variety of interpretations. The wreck might be the literature men write about women, for instance, or it might be the social construction of gendered roles in the house. The wreck also sits firmly in the past as a lost or abandoned object waiting to be explored; it has no future for use, other than as an object of interpretation, and perhaps of fear as well. The house, however, is overdetermined by the past, the present, and potentially the future. In her lyrical house-­sequences, Rich senses that the place where she dwells offers access to layered histories of oppression and violence. The “book of myths” that the diver finds and the “family photo album” that the house-­dweller opens are related in their dissembling. They are both representations that lie or disguise the truth, which becomes available to the poet instead through the more oblique methods she uses as part of her art. Placing her hand on the “blood-­stained splinters” of the doorframe, Rich locates poetry in physical matter, in craftwork, and in the complex ecology of an overgrown garden. As Rich’s house poems move from the mid-­Atlantic suburbs of the 1940s to the “turn-­off ” on a southwestern road in the 1990s, they become sources of poetry that stand in complex relation to the literature of her father’s library. To put it more plainly, Rich’s house poems see the house as itself a kind of poem, one that uses associative techniques to bring together the “dissimilar / yet unseparate.” “Snapshots of a Daughter-­in-­Law” invents this method out of necessity: how else to write through the urgent and exhausting work of childcare than with a discontinuous style, adapted to the snippets of time available? The house not only provides the conditions for Rich’s poetic development. It is also where Rich finds her most vivid metaphors for the power of poetic language, which she sees variably as solid in substance as a doorframe or as mutable in meaning as a graffitied slogan on a wall. Rich’s poems channel the energy needed to unmake the version of the house that Rich finds increasingly oppressive: home, for Rich, comprises the memory of her father, her excitements and limitations of her literary education, the happiness and failed potential of her marriage to Alfred Conrad, and the difficulty of writing while caring for young children. A poem from 1974 titled “Not Somewhere Else, But Here” contains the line: “Spilt wine     The unbuilt house          The unmade life.”98 How to write a poetry that unmakes the house, that fails miraculously, and that draws out a power from the same source as her wounds? This power takes on many shapes: Rich seeks

86  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 self-­renewal, solidarity with women, with other lesbians, and eventually with Jews, anti-­racist politics, and a global feminism attuned to difference. The wounds, meanwhile, might be variously described as family trauma and estrangement, physical violence by men against women, and sustained horror at state-­sanctioned violence and torture. The question at the heart of Rich’s work—­in the 1960s and 1970s especially—­is how to fail the enclosure of the house, and to dream instead of a common language. I return to these terms, with their hint of a Marxist critique of capital, because they come naturally from her house-­bound imagination and from the centrality of houses to American capitalism. Seen against the background of a post-­war insistence on housing as the means to consolidating private property, Rich’s house poems contemplate how language is both the property of others and the shared storehouse of collective thought.

3 An Immaterial World James Merrill, Finance, and the Renovation of the House Poem

In a fashion probably unique within the history of US poetry, James Merrill had an unobstructed view of the making of financial markets, especially those that affected access to credit and to mortgages. The story of Merrill Lynch is part of the story of a dramatic shift in the global economy from trade based on commodities to a complex financial system in which derivatives, options, and other financial instruments occupy the most important place in the market.1 In Giovanni Arrighi’s analysis, the 1960s mark the beginning of the “the resurgence of private high finance in the production and regulation of world money.”2 This is not the first time that finance comes to dominate a firm’s profitability—­the example of Roland Park in Chapter  2 shows how British investment powers the creation of the suburbs—­but the global financial system of the late twentieth century is uniquely interconnected, the capital flow increasingly unregulated. By the 1970s, the height of Merrill’s poetic career, Merrill Lynch had become a central protagonist in this narrative. Merrill Lynch, which was, for a time, the largest brokerage firm in the world, was founded by Charles Merrill in 1914. It was one of the first firms to combine banking with investment banking, almost single-­handedly overturning the central protection of the Banking Act of 1933, which aimed to protect the economy by preventing banks from engaging in speculation. A 2014 memoir of the firm describes its world-­wide expansion into “offices selling US stocks and commodities to local citizens”: To meet their basic savings and investments needs, the average middle-­class American dealt with three or four different financial institutions. They might use their local bank for checking, the savings and loan for their mortgage, a regular broker for stocks, and a mutual funds group for money market funds. With the Cash Management Account, all of this could be consolidated in one place—­ the ultimate one-­ stop shopping . . . . In other

The American House Poem, 1945–­2021. Walt Hunter, Oxford University Press. © Walt Hunter 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192856258.003.0004

88  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 words, Merrill Lynch would handle its customers’ entire financial lives in a single all-­in-­one account with one monthly statement. Wall Street had never been known as a hotbed of innovation, but this was breathtaking. So unique was this idea that ML would one day patent it.3

By the early 1970s Merrill Lynch had expanded access to investment dramatically. The narrative acknowledges what happened next: “While this generated short-­term commissions, 97 percent of all people who speculated in commodities lost most of their money.” Nevertheless, a recent article by The Economist somewhat nostalgically recalls the perception of Merrill Lynch as “an investment bank for the 99%.”4 By creating the CMA, or Cash Management Account, Merrill Lynch asked ordinary people to risk their money for a greater return than they might find with a traditional savings account. The actions of Merrill Lynch took place against a dramatic background of development in the housing market. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, financial markets transform access to housing as fundamentally as the nearly concomitant legislation and Supreme Court decisions. Two aspects of the financialization of housing set the stage for the crises that come in the early twenty-­first century. First, the creation of mortgage-­backed securities expands access to capital for investors. Second, the removal of caps on interest rates expands access to credit for consumers. In 1968, the same year as the Fair Housing Act was passed, the government creates a secondary market—­in this case, a way to bundle and trade mortgages—­ to address the inherent localism of conventional mortgage markets.5 The mortgage-­backed security was a vehicle for drawing more money into housing from a more varied set of investors. Pension funds are often the example given: a pension fund wouldn’t want to offer a loan directly to a home buyer, but it might invest in an existing set of mortgages. The government, by setting up the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, played a key role in the “securitization” of housing, a term that refers, broadly, to investment in a pool of mortgages, rather than to the loan of money to buy a house.6 For the everyday consumer, meanwhile, finance became relevant in a different way. Interest rates on savings accounts had long been capped by the government so that when they reached a certain point, no mortgages were issued at all. You simply could not buy a home when rates exceeded a certain level. At that time, home loans were largely the business of Savings and Loan organizations. But by 1980, after a decade of inflationary pressure, which meant that one’s low-­interest-­bearing savings account essentially lost money, interest rates were deregulated and left to the market to rise and fall, rather

An Immaterial World  89 than to the government to cap. The decision about whether to take out a loan at a high rate to buy a house was left to the individual; the result was that rates grew higher and higher. An array of new means for everyday investors to seek higher returns, such as the CMA, had by then already emerged. I should make it clear from the outset that Merrill doesn’t seem to have known all these details about the financial changes that subtended his poetic career and made much of it possible. I don’t claim for him any special knowledge of the ins and outs of securities, though he did have a penchant for strewing financial metaphors and puns across his verse. Yet his poems offer a speculative vision of housing that emerges in tandem with the financialized housing market that develops in the United States in the 1970s. Merrill had a freedom and a wealth that separates his apartment poems from Brooks’s kitchenette in Chicago and from Adrienne Rich’s houses under construction. In those cases, the house’s materials are also less propitious for writing poetry: the poet comes up against their historical exclusion from poetry’s given arrangements, or their participation in reinforcing inhospitable norms that trap them inside. Merrill’s wealth and status admittedly make him an unusual addition to a book in which houses often contain stories of inequality, institutional racism, and labor. Merrill’s particular advantages and his economic status allow him to craft homes that inspire his poetic imagination, heal the wounds of the past, and offer him ample privacy to write. While Rich sets herself the seemingly endless task of unmaking the family home, Merrill’s confidence in the power of the poetic imagination to restore and repair the “broken home” is the strongest of the poets in this book. Merrill’s real houses, at least the ones of his adult life, are fitted to the life lived in them, and occasionally altered by the poems written about them. Although “The Orchard,” the Merrill home in Southampton, was designed by the famous architect Stanford White, most of his poetic houses are more distinguished by their eclecticism than by their grandeur. The houses that appear in Water Street and Nights and Days—­most notably, 107 Water Street and 44 Athinaion Efivon—­are not necessarily architectural marvels. A third, 702 Elizabeth Street, in Key West, comes into the picture in the early 1980s when Merrill had almost finished writing his epic. Merrill’s house poems are remarkable for what they let in—­stanzas, tropes, plays on language, vocabularies that span science and culture; antiques, mirrors, santos, and curios; children, cats, lovers, and dinner party guests—­rather than for what or who they keep out. In a similar tenor, but with far less propitious outcomes, Merrill Lynch makes its claim to the public’s imagination of owning a home by democratizing investment.

90  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 Reflecting on the reciprocal influence between Merrill’s home and his poems about homes, Langdon Hammer writes that “it was natural for Merrill to think of his poems as a kind of house, because his house was a kind of poem.”7 This book has generally avoided the literary tourism of poets’ houses. My intention, instead, has been to focus on the house poem as a literary genre that emerges concomitantly with the economic exploitation of homeowners in the second half of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-­first. But Merrill’s house has now become a major part of a reader’s approach to his poetry, since 107 Water Street houses a writer-­in-­residence program established after his death in 1995. After meeting Jackson in New York in 1953, Merrill rented the three-­story house in at 107 Water Street in Stonington, CT, in 1954 and bought the building two years later. Merrill and Jackson had apartments on the third floor; etchings from Proust by Philippe Jullian hung on the walls by the staircase.8 From Water Street to his final, posthumously published volume A Scattering of Salts, the designs of Merrill’s houses influence the formalism of his verse by providing impetus for the embrace of narrative and autobiography. The distinct rooms at 107 Water Street appear frequently in Merrill’s house poems. These rooms invite general questions about the origins and making of poetry: How do poems begin? What makes a poem, and how does it get from the imagination to the page? Three rooms offer different clues. There is the “inner room” where Merrill wrote and revised, the walls filled with books of poetry. Here the shelves contain American poets from the 1950s to the 1980s, but also the Greek poets George Seferis and Katerina Anghelaki-­Rooke, and volumes of earlier poetry from Greek and Latin works through modernists in French, English, and German. There is the upper studio and deck, with stunning panoramas of the Sound, built as much for composing poems as for  convening friends. The dining room, with the Ouija board and read “flame”-colored walls, is a third source—­in addition to the books and the views—­for the poetic imagination. These three rooms in the house—­the study, the deck outside, the dining room—­tell three stories about how poetry gets made. First, by sifting the words of other poets. Second, by taking elements from the world outside. And third, by submitting to chance, to the unconscious, to the Gods, to the bats and unicorns that are the dramatis personae of The Changing Light at Sandover. The alphabet of the Ouija board is its own inherited arrangement of letters that Merrill refashions into higher-­order stanzaic forms. There are many different names for this third source for poetry, which appears in Plato as well as, in English poetry, the song of Caedmon, who dreams his poetry

An Immaterial World  91 into existence in the eighth century. The rooms in Merrill’s houses, at least the ones of his adult life, provide more than luxury, space, or inspiration; they suggest competing frameworks for the making of poetry. They are rooms that are both “expressive of their owner,” as Hammer puts it, and pivotal to understanding their owner’s complicated embrace of self-­expression.9 The captivating bric-­a-­brac of the rooms in Merrill’s apartments might be understood as architectural equivalents of his heterogenous stanzaic forms. Merrill provides this interpretation himself. In a passage from Recitative, a collection of his prose, Merrill compares moving through a poem to moving through a house: Interior spaces, the shape and correlation of rooms in a house, have always appealed to me. Trying for a blank mind, I catch myself instead revisiting a childhood bedroom on Long Island. Recently, on giving up the house in Greece where I’d lived for much of the previous fifteen years, it wasn’t so much the fine view it commanded or the human comedies it had witnessed that I felt deprived of; rather, I missed the hairpin turn of the staircase underfoot, the height of our kitchen ceiling, the low door ducked through in order to enter a rooftop laundry room that had become my study. This fondness for given arrangements might explain how instinctively I took to quatrains, to octaves and sestets, when I began to write poems. “Stanza” is after all the Italian word for “room.”10

Merrill theorizes his own version of the connection between house and poem that runs through American poetry, turning it in a Proustian direction. Merrill’s comments on room and stanza suggest two things. The first is that writing a poem means coming to terms with, and inhabiting, the given arrangements that exist before the poet sits down to write. The second is that poems can play an active role, when moving between one of those rooms and the next—­one of those given arrangements and another—­in bringing things together than have been sundered and torn apart in life. The relation between the poem and the house does not only obtain in the overall shape of the poem, but also in the correlation between its parts. The essay, titled “Acoustical Chambers,” follows the opposite course, from unity to dissolution: it begins with the childhood bedroom and ends with a reference to Merrill’s divorced parents. Looking back at a diary entry in which he describes the “heavenly colors and swell fish” on a trip at Silver Spring, Merrill detects the personalities of both parents in the two phrases connected by “and.”11 Much of twentieth-­century poetry mourns the loss of human

92  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 presence in the appearance of the linguistic signifier—­as Robert Hass puts it, “because there is in this world no one thing / To which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, / A word is elegy to what it signifies.”12 But that is not necessarily the case for Merrill, who imagines a process of translation instead. Decoding his parents’ presence in the very syllables of his diary entry, Merrill commits his poetry to an attempt to “remarry on the page their characteristic inflections.” The task he sets for poetry in his essay is not to bear witness to the fallibility of language, but to transact a deal between art and life: “the unities of home and world, and world and page, will be observed through the very act of transition from one to the other.”13 I take “observed” here to mean “obeyed” and also “seen.” In other words, only through the substitutions that poetry offers for living (the “inflection” of someone’s voice or personality translated into the syllables of a common set of words) is there any power to fix the past, unify the parts, restore the possibility of a future. Merrill’s deceptively trivial example—­typical of his reluctance to appear too self-­serious—­reveals an ethics of poetic composition. The house has been such an enduring theme in poetry, and an enduring metaphor for poetry, because it holds together two contradictory aspects of the poetic proc­ ess. Poetry is crafted from materials that exist or rooms that have already been inhabited, rooms from which voices and presences have long since departed—­ but poetry is therefore also capable of renovation, of sprucing up, of an addition here or there, and even of demolition, if necessary. I’m aware that focusing on Merrill’s houses risks reinforcing certain ­bromides about postwar poetry that have placed Merrill within a “cult of poetic craftsmanship,” an etiolated poetry of “paintings, social types, animals, foreign sights.”14 Commentators agree that Merrill’s poetic craft captures the essence of this “fifties” poem, even as he ultimately pushes his consummate technique into an exploration of verse autobiography, what he calls, in Sandover, his “chronicles of love & loss.” The faith in aesthetic ideas of order evinced by Merrill and contemporaries such as Richard Wilbur or Donald Hall makes their poetry amenable to theories about literature’s compensatory power, its ability to substitute, for “life’s bloody page,” a “jeweled reprise.”15 Without a doubt, individual poems by Merrill attest to the transmutation of life into art. Lines such as “what happened is becoming literature” and “all things in time grow musical,” from “For Proust” and “McKane’s Falls,” resemble a Paterian ideal of aesthetic experience, refitted to the conservative aesthetics of mid-­1950s American verse culture. It is true that Merrill remains committed throughout his life—­in a way that Rich, Ashbery, Baraka, Merwin, and Wright do not—­to the constraints of line, rhyme, and meter, albeit in a

An Immaterial World  93 self-­conscious and sometimes self-­satirizing way: “form’s what affirms,” a motto sometimes taken for Merrill’s own, is spoken by a pedagogue in a poetry classroom near the end of an enchantingly recondite lyric, “The Thousand and Second Night.”16 Almost all of Merrill’s poetry, from his youthful love poem “The Black Swan” to his late self-­elegy “Christmas Tree,” invites the idea that art has a reparative power, that poetry can best acknowledge the tragic undertow of life by providing a scintillating surface in which to take pleasure and consolation. Yet the caricature of a decorous, somewhat revanchist “fifties” verse, while broadly applicable to Merrill’s two collections published in the 1950s, doesn’t fully account for the ways Merrill’s poetry reflects an age of vast accumulation of wealth. Below, I turn from Merrill’s grandest house, the epic Sandover, to his narrative poems that break and repair the homes of his past, and finally to the chamber-­music of “Night Laundry” and “Little Fallacy.” Adrienne Rich writes about her uncertainty that poetry’s “tools” will be the appropriate ones for her to use to make a life. Merrill, by contrast, finds himself drawn to “immaterials,” a word that he uses to describe the transformative, spontaneous touch of affection on the people, objects, and settings he collects. No accident, perhaps, that he writes during a time when the way his houses held value becomes increasingly detached from their physical properties and subject to the wind-­blown abstractions of high finance. Along with his pronounced aestheticism, which is evident across his work, Merrill proclaims his disengagement from a public or political role for poetry: “I rarely buy a newspaper or vote,” he writes in “The Broken Home.” Yet his house poems search for alternative criteria for value within the frantic search for growth of capital that goes on in the background of his work and life.

No Statelier Mansions: Sandover as Country-­House Poem Housing sits at the center of Merrill’s creative process, as it does for all the poets in this book. But for Merrill, the poem and the house have an unusual way of working changes on each other. Merrill’s corpus is vast, which makes finding a starting place challenging. Readers can choose to begin with the 640-­page epic, The Changing Light at Sandover, or, as I did at first, dive headlong into the Collected Poems, then read his novels and essays in the Collected Prose. Along with Elizabeth Bishop, he is one of the great letter-­writing poets; his biography, charting his “chronicles of love & loss,” makes for a near-­ operatic reading experience. It concludes with the wrenching tragedy of his

94  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 death from AIDS complications. The challenges of Merrill’s erudition, which he held as lightly as the puns he frequently used, have created a small industry for interpreters and scholars, especially when it comes to the genre mash-­up that is The Changing Light at Sandover. I begin with Merrill’s epic because it shines the clearest light on what could be called his poetics of accumulation. They are, to be sure, of the critical kind: possibly the wealthiest American poet of the late twentieth century, he is paradoxically also one of our poets of de-­growth, as it is called today. Readers often point to a late poem like “Self-­Portrait in a Tyvek Windbreaker” for evidence of a minatory stance that warns of the consequences of globalization and ecological devastation. “I detect behind / My neighbor’s grin the oncoming bulldozer // And cannot stop it,” Merrill writes in a characteristically serio­comic tone. But across his career Merrill’s house poems dramatize a quiet frustration with overuse and an indignation at ostentatious development (of the real estate as much as of the artistic kind). I say that Sandover offers the clearest view into Merrill’s peculiar relation to the exponential profit-­making of finance because it returns us to that earlier form of inherited wealth, the country-­house poem. In fact, Merrill’s Sandover is possibly the one American estate-­poem that competes with the British country-­houses inherited from the imagination of Jonson, Marvell, Carew, Herrick, and Lanyer. Yet the poem takes place, for much of its plot, in the modest, quirky setting of Merrill’s apartment at 107 Water Street in Stonington, CT. When the epic finally reaches the “ballroom at Sandover,” a further surprise is in store that embeds the celestial extravagance of the poem back in its human sources of affection. For his revision of the country-­house poem, Merrill takes an unusual route, one that bypasses the careful rearrangement of classical topoi seen in Jonson or Carew. Given the process Merrill uses and the sheer length of the poem, it’s hard to give a short synopsis, but some plot summary is useful. The Changing Light at Sandover, begun in earnest in 1974 and published in 1982, transcribes the conversations that Merrill and David Jackson have, via their Ouija board, with dead friends and lovers, poets, historical figures, fallen angels, bats, and unicorns. They learn from these figures—­Stevens, Auden, and Maya Deren all make appearances as instructors and guides—­that poets are part of a vast scheme for reincarnation, the “R-­Lab,” through which the two of them are gradually progressing. The first part of Sandover, “The Book of Ephraim,” was published as a long poem in Divine Comedies from 1976; the second and third parts, titled Mirabell: Books of Number and Scripts for the Pageant, appeared as stand-­alone volumes in 1978 and 1980. The seances themselves began very

An Immaterial World  95 soon after Merrill and Jackson met in 1953, so the poem can be read, without much of a stretch, as a record of their long cohabitation and, perhaps, as a means of keeping them together just as their illusions about each other were wearing thin. Merrill explicitly sets out to rewrite John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a near-­ contemporary of the British country-­house poems, but by taking inspiration from the apartments he and Jackson share and from the imaginative recreation of his childhood home into “Sandover.” Milton famously seeks to justify the ways of God to man and to tell the story of man’s first “disobedience.” Merrill’s labyrinthine plot comes to a climax when Merrill and Jackson learn that humanity is on trial and nuclear annihilation is imminent.17 Merrill and Jackson eventually do encounter God—­as, first and foremost, a poet. God speaks through the Ouija board in the guise of the Seafarer from the eponymous Old English elegy, but transported into outer space and singing in syllabic meter. The poem becomes, in its second and third parts, a signal of survival and collective action sent out from a “LIFE RAFT” called “LANGUAGE” and overheard through the automatic-­writing process of the Ouija board, which requires the mutual attention of DJ and JM. The capital letters in the poem mark the intrusion of the voices from another world. Despite the extravagance of the stakes, the human scale reasserts itself by the end of the poem in a deft sleight of hand. “Coda: The Higher Keys” concludes with the revelation that its epic storytelling has been an elaborate artifice to distract a grieving friend, who rings their doorbell of the apartment house and dispels the fiction.18 Part of what makes Sandover such an odd and compelling house poem is that it returns frequently from its heavenly “schoolroom” to the interior settings where Merrill and Jackson sit and to minor domestic dramas set within their apartment at 107 Water Street. Certain small but significant details in the poem show how integral Merrill’s house was to his poetry—­ not only as an interior space separated from the social and political world, but also as an actual source for the methods Merrill would use to write and for the progression of the epic’s narrative. By the time “JM” and “DJ” moved into 107 Water Street, they had already begun the Ouija board seances, many of which would be bookmarked narratively by changes to the Stonington house. In the second section of The Book of Ephraim, the long poem in the book Merrill called, after Dante, Divine Comedies (1976), the rooms of 107 Water Street make frequent appearances. This book is organized into 26 chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet on the Ouija board. Here is section B:

96  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 Backdrop: The dining room at Stonington. Walls of ready-­mixed matte “flame” (a witty Shade, now watermelon, now sunburn). Overhead, a turn of the century dome Expressing white tin wreathes and fleurs-­de-­lys In palpable relief to candlelight.19

Time is marked in the poem by the house, its renovations, and the place that Merrill and Jackson take up in the community: 1955 this would have been, Second summer of our tenancy. Another year we’d buy the old eyesore Half of whose top story we now rented; Build, above that, a glass room off a wooden Stardeck; put a fireplace in; make friends.

The next book, Mirabell: Books of Number (1978) begins twenty years later with “The Age of the Wrong Wallpaper.”20 Buckling and peeling into hallucinatory shapes, the wallpaper briefly drives the two out of the house and their minds. The most memorable detail of the Merrill apartment—­wallpaper covered in blue bats—­comes a little later and is modeled after the bats featured on a rug brought back from Boston. The friendly Satanic bats in Sandover seem to model themselves, in turn, on the wallpaper. There is a reciprocal action at work here: the house provides the origins of the poem, and the poem prompts renovations of the house. The elaborate world-­making of The Changing Light at Sandover takes place within the domestic spaces of Merrill’s houses, the social spaces in which puns are a common currency, and the economy of home-­making. The appearance of a poem might be a spur for changing something in the house: those bats on Merrill’s living-­room wallpaper, for instance, are hand-­crafted to resemble the Miltonic “fallen angels” that appear as bats. There is something preposterous about a sentence like that one, but the finely tuned poems that Merrill writes are right at home with the extravagant, the implausible, the playful, and the ridiculous. What is valuable for Merrill in terms of a house, a love, or a line of poetry comes from certain contingent elements (chance encounters, puns, the letters on a Ouija board) that make surprising claims on  the affection regardless of their inherent value. This would be the case throughout Merrill’s life, his many revisions, and his several houses. To dip into his biography is to see that his frequent lovers are, particularly to his

An Immaterial World  97 friends and to his long-­term partner, David Jackson, hard to understand or explain, the course of his affection difficult to predict. When it comes to his apartments in Athens and in Stonington, Merrill delights in the sudden appearance of quasi-­ allegorical figures and genre scenes. Some of these encounters are campy, cartoonish, and silly. To take one example, Bob the Boiler Man, a minor character from The Book of Ephraim who fixes the furnace in Merrill’s basement on Water Street, becomes Beelzebob in the epic’s Inferno-esque narrative. It would be somewhat obvious, though perhaps not false, to say that the aleatory logic of the Ouija board, and the seriocomic strokes of circumstance that tug life into the poem, mimic the general logic of financial speculation and its volatility. Certainly, the language of finance, even when domesticated by Merrill Lynch, has an occult, byzantine complexity that rivals the outré speculations and intricate stanzaic forms of Merrill’s poem. Merrill’s explicit comparison of Sandover to a country-­house, at one of the climactic moments of the story, brings out an ethical dimension of the poem in a way that might be less clear without recognizing the persistence of the house poem as a genre. In the ballroom at Sandover, where the great final scene of the poem takes place, Merrill’s friends and poetic influences convene: there are W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot, but also his dead friends Hans and Mimi. The whole epic has the feel, as Hammer writes, of a “family album.”21 In his description of the setting where they gather to hear a recitation of the completed poem, Merrill addresses the manorial houses of the past: Great room, I know you! Somewhere on Earth I’ve met you in disguise, Scouted your dark English woods and blood-­red Hangings, and glared down the bison head Above a hearth of stony heraldry—

There is no direct allusion here to Penshurst or to the country-­house poets. But, echoing the poets of those great houses, he turns against a monumental style for its own sake: For affection’s Poorest object, set in perfect light By happenstance, grows irreplaceable, And whether in time a room, or a romance, Fails us or redeems us will have followed As an extension of our “feel” for call them Immaterials . . . .22

98  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 In the process of rejecting the “great room” with its “heraldry,” he supplies a substitute, a Jamesian “feel” for “immaterials” instead. These lines could be read as another ars poetica: the forms Merrill choses are given to him as arrangements, but by filling them with “affection’s poorest object,” they stand a chance of having an unpredictable effect on their user, one that might be satisfying or disappointing or both in the end. What happens in the poem is always susceptible to influence from a life lived in open invitation to others. Sandover shelters a family not of kin but of poetic kind, a gathering of affection’s poorest objects, set in the light of Merrill’s cultivated hospitality to “happenstance.” Merrill shows scant interest in the social reproduction or patriarchy manifest poetically in the praise of the “lady” in Penshurst and the praise of Maria Fairfax at the end of “Upon Appleton House.” Indeed, Sandover proposes instead, through its capacious florilegium of lyric and narrative genres, a cosmology of queer kinship, built by the overlapping hands of JM and DJ, that partly subverts both linear models of poetic influence and of reproductive futurity. The kitschy hospitality of the imaginary country-­house in Sandover is inseparable from its earnest enactment of friendship, queer survival, and non-­biological kinship through the collaborative remaking of poetry out of the words of the dead. At the same time, it is impossible to separate the poem’s joy in promiscuity with the ultimate consequences on his body that Merrill’s many love affairs had. The spectral finale of Sandover coincides with the onslaught of AIDS, though not with Merrill’s own diagnosis several years later.23 Anthony Hecht, a contemporary of Merrill and a fellow formalist, observes that, when the rebel angles assemble in Paradise Lost, “their first act of revenge is architectural.”24 Merrill’s poem is a rejection of the house of Charles Merrill and the construction of a very different one. It is also a self-­conscious critique of its own epic aspirations. The compositional method of Sandover—­Jackson was the “hand,” Merrill the “scribe”—keeps Merrill and Jackson “hand in hand,” to quote the expulsion scene from the end of Milton’s epic. That supposed disobedience could be the same one he refers to in his sonnet sequence “The Broken Home,” namely, his putative failure to obey the example set by his mother and father, produce children, and make a house. Freed from the legacy of his father’s empire, not bearing children or marrying or otherwise carrying on a line, Merrill takes over the house for other purposes. I’ve left to the side one of the most striking elements of Merrill’s epic, which is its casual appropriation of a prolific number of sources, its “possession” by other poets and poems from the medieval period to the present. Thanks to a

An Immaterial World  99 wild heterogeneity of source material and precursor poems, the dream-­house of Sandover is too overdetermined by literary history, fantasy, and memory to have any actual blueprints.25 These sources appear chaotically and unexpectedly in the poem, rather in the manner that you might stumble upon a book in one of Merrill’s own bookshelves. I think of them not by analogy to Eliot’s forbidding cultural “ruins” in the Waste Land, but rather by analogy to stuff you can find lying around a house that you may have forgotten was there.26 To offer just a few examples, the poem’s frequent changes in form, tone, and pacing suggest, as Merrill says himself, the recitative-­aria structure of an opera. More prominent, however, is the fusion of Milton with Dante’s Divine Comedy and Wordsworth’s Prelude. These are forbidding names for a poem that takes as one of its signature moments the transformation of a bat into a peacock. Yet at the beginning of Mirabell: Books of Number, the second part of The Changing Light at Sandover, Merrill files a disclaimer against the aggrandizement of the epic itself: And that will be the end, we hope, of too much emphasis upon possessions, worldly or otherwise. No more spirits, please. No statelier mansions. No wanting to be Pope.27

When these lines appear, the long poem is nowhere near its end—­its most fantastical myths have yet to be uncovered—­but the punning lines echo the initial modesty within which the whole saga begins: “Admittedly, I err by undertaking / This in its present form.” The pun here on “possession” (like the one on “undertaking”) connects a rejection of ostentatious materialism with the Ouija-­board fiction of the poem’s composition. I don’t argue here for a direct correspondence between the rise of financial markets and Merrill’s penchant for “immaterials.” Perhaps there is a general echo between kinds of speculation, poetic and financial, that obtains in Merrill’s time and in his personal life. But I do believe that the changing light of affection, as it lands on the “poorest” objects, augurs a transformation in value that has little to do with the underlying asset, whether that be a person or a word or a color of paint (the bespoke orange “flame” of the dining room walls). These are abstract and perhaps even dehumanizing terms, yet these are the terms that Merrill uses. For all its elements of whimsy, camp, and comic opera, Merrill’s poetry makes a serious point that financial markets, which take on a life apart from the value of a house or a commodity, have both contaminated our affection for people and places and, at the same time, offered

100  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 a  far wider and more unpredictable array of emotional and aesthetic investments. Merrill is no social critic, at least not in any consistent way,28 so to look for a critique of housing finance, particularly as it mutates into ever more complicated forms, is less useful than it would be in the poets who come in the final chapter. But to the extent that finance and aesthetic perception share a revolution in value in Merrill’s work, the economic background of the 1970s shines an extravagant magic-­lantern play through Merrill’s life-­long preoccupation with poetic houses.

Entire Stories: “An Urban Convalescence,” “The Broken Home,” and “Days of 1964” In “Acoustical Chambers,” Merrill imagines his childhood bedroom as the origins of his poetic imagination. In his poetry from Water Street (1962) onward, Merrill makes the rooms of the house into an inviting form of narrative poetry. The first poems of Merrill’s that extend narrative over time are also the ones in which he uses his home life as a pattern for that narrative and the “correlation between rooms” as a metaphor for the unity of poetic design. While Sandover ultimately makes it clear that the value of even the greatest house rests in its “immaterial” properties, Merrill’s other house poems engage some explicit themes at work in the housing markets, both domestic and international, of the 1960s and 1970s. “An Urban Convalescence” takes up the problem of urban renewal, as its peripatetic speaker observes a house being demolished: “You’d think the simple fact of having lasted / Threatened our cities like mysterious fires.” “The Broken Home” reflects on the divorce of Merrill’s parents and the work of his father in building a financial empire while articulating a philosophy of withdrawal from accumulation and growth. And “Days of 1964” leaves the US for Greece to dramatize the overdevelopment of made possible by the Marshall Plan and EEC, channeling its house poem through the love poetry of C. P. Cavafy. These poems have often been presented as some of Merrill’s best and as breakthrough poems for his development as a poet. They also show how the genre of the house poem screws a concrete political and economic background into Merrill’s ethereal celebrations of beauty and illusion. “An Urban Convalescence,” “The Broken Home,” and “Days of 1964” can be found in volumes whose titles function as metonyms for a house: Water Street, for the location; Nights and Days, for the diurnal contingencies that leaven the use of classical myths and literary references (Hesiod’s Works and Days, Proust’s Pleasures and Days). Although the poems diverge in form and

An Immaterial World  101 theme, they share a certain overall structure. All three traverse a spatial route that echoes the schematic pattern of “To Penshurst” and “To Saxham,” moving from outdoor scenes to indoor activity.29 “An Urban Convalescence” finds Merrill “out for a walk, after a week in bed” and then brings him back “on the stair / As it were, of where I lived.” The first stanza of “The Broken Home” finds the speaker out on the street, looking up, and recalls the classical topos of the beatus ille: “I saw the parents and the child / At their window, gleaming like fruit / With evening’s mild gold leaf.” “Days of 1964” begins with a description of a mountain slope in Greece that leads to Merrill’s apartment there and ends with a bedroom scene of lovemaking. In order to preserve their domestic order, Merrill’s house poems are also epideictic: they articulate and praise certain values that the house, and by extension the host, allegorizes. “The Broken Home” concludes with the desire that “under the ballroom ceiling’s allegory / Someone at last may actually be allowed / To learn something.”30 “Days of 1964” proposes “laughter, pain, and love” as constitutive elements of human experience. That poem imagines class divisions as relatively harmonious, if hierarchical: Kleo, Merrill’s Greek housekeeper, and Strato, Merrill’s working-­class Greek lover, occupy roles in the house economy as the recipients of charity.31 Two other narrative poems might be mentioned briefly here as items in Merrill’s catalogue of house poetry. Offering up a similar vision of aristocratic benevolence, but brought down a notch to the level of a dinner party, “A Tenancy” judges the gifts of three guests and chooses as the best the one who offers only “his open, empty hand.”32 Such idealized domestic bliss is always threatened by personal and political turbulence—­perhaps most dramatically in “18 West 11th Street.” The title of this poem is the address of Merrill’s childhood house in the West Village, which was blown up accidentally by members of the Weather Underground. The poems I turn to now are three of Merrill’s most frequently anthologized works. Yet, despite their prominence in Merrill’s oeuvre, they have not been recognized as contributing to the genre of the house poem nor as setting the stage for his epic return to the country-­house genre in Sandover. “An Urban Convalescence” strikes a companionable, even chatty tone and employs a drifting, peripatetic mode.33 It begins: Out for a walk, after a week in bed, I find them tearing up part of my block And, chilled through, dazed and lonely, join the dozen In meek attitudes, watching a huge crane Fumble luxuriously in the filth of years.34

102  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 The limpid lines disguise rather than foreground their poetic qualities, which are nevertheless there. The phrase “after a week in bed” repeats the metrical pattern of “out for a walk” and adds two syllables onto the end. “Walk,” “week,” and “block” play subtle changes on “w” and “k” sounds, rising into the high “ee” of “week” from the flatter “a” of “walk,” and coming back to the short “o” of “block.” “Through,” “attitudes,” and “huge” pass along a different vowel for variation’s sake. All this work goes on without drawing attention to itself. The effect, however, of patterning thought into language is—­ as so often in Merrill—­to knock on the door of memory and wait for what emerges. What emerges in this poem is a house. From the ruins rises the memory of a different house than the one currently being pulled down, a house “some five floors high, of shabby stone.” Vague images creep into the poem, until the memory collapses in Merrill’s mind’s eye along with the house being demolished in front of him: So that I am already on the stair, As it were, of where I lived, When the whole structure shudders at my tread And soundlessly collapses, filling The air with motes of stone.

At first, the speaker of the poem draws a pat and pragmatic moral from his observation: “Well, that is what life does.” As he watches, “the massive volume of the world / Closes again.” “Volume,” being both the capacity of space the building held and a written collection, puns on the connection his poems make between writing about a house and writing about his life. The magic coincidence of a pun reinforces, once more, Merrill’s conviction that the “unities” of “world and page” are observed in the transition between them. But the poem doesn’t end there. Instead, it changes form. At this point, the setting of the poem changes too, moving from the street “indoors at last.” Merrill leaves behind the loose, conversational poetry of his walk and, as he comes back to his apartment, takes up, “with self-­knowledge,” what will become his most commonly used stanza, the rhymed quatrain. The architecture of the poem, in other words, changes rooms. The question, for Merrill, becomes the “correlation” between them. Why change forms in the middle of the poem? Not only is “An Urban Convalescence” about urban renewal and a house being torn down; the poem, to take Merrill’s metaphor seriously, has become like a house, as it moves from the blank verse stanza to the quatrains. The house is an object of description or a setting, and it is also a metaphor for

An Immaterial World  103 the organization of the poem itself, the internal logic to its development. To put it more casually, we move through a poem as we move through passages in a house, and certain rooms, like certain stanzas, might be charged with the force of memory. “An Urban Convalescence” ends with an ambiguous scene not of demolition but of construction. Now Merrill moves back out in the street, but in his imagination this time. He imagines it from the perspective of the middle-­aged traveler, who sees the city from the air. Unlike the young lover who sees “that honey-­slow descent / Of the Champs-­Élysées, her hand in his,” he feels the need to convert inner experience into a settled form: “the dull need to make some kind of house / Out of the life lived, out of the love spent.” The final line of the poem, with its phrases that repeat the exact rhythm and the exact syllables, brings to mind the first line of the poem, though with an added accented syllable at the end of each phrase. The end of the poem issues an ars poetica: the poem will be “some kind of house” the materials for which are “the life lived” and the “love spent.” This somewhat somber, disillusioned ending has the new assurance, and reliability, of the quatrain stanza. Moving from free verse into rhyme, the poem marks the transition from world to page, even as that very transition—­making a house out of the past—­is also its great theme. Where “An Urban Convalescence” ends with a look downward, “The Broken Home” begins with a look upward at a different house from the past. The first of seven sonnets begins at the window where parents and child sit, as though painted: Crossing the street, I saw the parents and the child At their window, gleaming like fruit With evening’s mild gold leaf. In a room on the floor below, Sunless, cooler—­a brimming Saucer of wax, marbly and dim— I have lit what’s left of my life.35

This poem draws implicitly on the traditional link between the sonnet and the “room,” a common metaphor employed by English poets from Donne through Wordsworth and Rossetti. But the poem is also very much about Merrill’s childhood house and, especially, his mother and father. In three short lines, he gives a biography of Charles Merrill: “My father, who had flown in World

104  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 War I, / Might have continued to invest his life / In cloud banks well above Wall Street and wife.” Taking the house as a governing metaphor for the poem’s form and the foundation for Charles Merrill’s wealth, the seven sonnets move through the dissolution of the marriage. In the penultimate sonnet, the world has narrowed to an interior room in which Merrill rejects the public life that his parents had embraced. “Thus,” he reflects, I rarely buy a newspaper, or vote. To do so, I have learned, is to invite The tread of a stone guest within my house. Shooting this rusted bolt, though, against him, I trust I am no less time’s child than some Who on the heath impersonate Poor Tom Or on the barricades risk life and limb.

The rejection of the newspaper, vote, and barricade contribute to an image of Merrill as the apolitical aesthetic, “no less time’s child” than his mother and father. But while that reading of the poem is undeniable, a different understanding of growth and futurity also comes into view at the same time. “Nor do I wish to keep a garden,” the poem continues, taking its material from the house setting instead of the high drama of his parents’ public life. The image that follows, the care of an avocado, “roots pallid, gemmed with air,” represents the entirety of the poet’s claim on growth (financial, reproductive) as the logic for the value of a life. I hear in the self-­justifications and quiet lines of this sonnet some faint echoes of the penultimate sonnet in Percy Shelley’s sequence, “Ode to the West Wind.” There the poet uses pleading conditionals to bring himself into the organic processes of death and renewal that he observes: “If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear / If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee . . . .” Here the organic process of growing the avocado accepts the homely cycles it entails: “when the small gilt leaves have grown / Fleshy and green, I let them die, yes, yes, / And start another. I am earth’s no less.” The poem substitutes this avocado, and its own earthy successors, for the large-­scale development of a career in war and finance and for the building of a family house. “The Broken Home,” in this reading, associates Charles Merrill with the house and proposes a new house poem, tuned instead to the lower frequencies of the avocado, not (as in the country-­house poem) the conservation of the social order, the construction of an ornamental garden, or the perpetuation of a line of heirs.

An Immaterial World  105 The poem is also tuned to puns that, once again, wink at the identity between writing a poem and building a house. The final sonnet has an apt image for the intransigence of memory and of parental influence: “A child, a red dog roam the corridors, / Still, of the broken home.” One pun that follows recalls the word “volume” from “An Urban Convalescence”: someone looking out from the upper “story” of his house will find, in the poem, “the unstiflement of the entire story” of his parents’ divorce. The family’s dog, a “red setter”—now the setting sun—­forms and dissipates in the shape of the clouds. In these two house poems, the movement from exterior to interior and back out does not establish an easy symmetry, but a kind of dialectic structure, in which the images that began the poem recur as metaphors for creativity. There is a subtle development, though, between the two poems. The house that is to come after “An Urban Convalescence” ends will be built from the material of a life, but “The Broken Home” (the poem) will itself stand for and in place of the house whose dissolution it described. The narrative in both poems moves from establishing a setting and introducing conflict to finding a resolution. But the resolution returns to the initial image, now a metaphor for making poetry. The unity of the parts, the movement between rooms and stanzas, is also a kind of revision, progression, or transfiguration. “Days of 1964,” the final poem in Nights and Days, asks whether the illusion-­making at the end of “The Broken Home” might be a good in and of itself. Like “An Urban Convalescence” and “The Broken Home,” “Days of 1964” begins with a description of the streets outside a house—­this time, Merrill’s house in Athens. The first lines describe the hills of Mt. Lycabettos with the prosaic detail and something of the “desert-­dry tone” Merrill finds in C. P. Cavafy’s descriptions of Alexandria.36 Houses, an embassy, the hospital, Our neighborhood sun-­cured if trembling still In pools of the night’s rain . . . Across the street that led to the center of town A steep hill kept one company part way Or could be climbed in twenty minutes For some literally breathtaking views Framed by umbrella pines, of city and sea. Underfoot, cyclamen, autumn crocus grew Spangled as with fine sweat among the relics Of good times had by all. If not Olympus, An out-­of-­earshot, year-­round hillside revel.37

106  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 The first ten-­ and-­ a-­ half lines comprise a topographic description of the immediate area around Merrill’s house in Athens. Their perspective is from the house itself, perhaps from the door. The view opens out on a street that separates the row of houses from paths winding up the hill opposite. Only in the eleventh line does a reference to Olympus move beyond the realist description into myth, and even then, the poem rejects the comparison. Unlike “An Urban Convalescence” and “The Broken Home,” the poem begins with its back to the house, rather than facing it, as though to raise the question immediately of the relation between the social world outside and the inner rooms within. The hillside setting for “Days of 1964” offers Merrill a view of a city in the grip of economic transformation. From 1950, when Merrill first visited Greece, through 1964, when Merrill and David Jackson bought their house on the slopes of Mt. Lycabettos, economic growth in Greece was dramatic. In the period 1955–63, per capita income doubled and the population in Athens grew by 35 percent.38 During the 1960s, Greece was second only to Japan in economic expansion.39 In “Nine Lives,” from Merrill’s posthumous collection A Scattering of Salts, a character looks back on those postwar years in Greece when the population shifted from the country to the city: “We lived those first years in a ‘wood near Athens’ / As my grandfather liked to call Kifissa then— / No loud cafés, no traffic . . . .”40 Unprecedented American investment and the accession of Greece to the European Union in 1961 imperiled the most vulnerable sector of Greece’s economy. As one economist demonstrates, “gross hourly earnings of manual workers . . . were less than half the EEC average in  the seventies.”41 During the same period, the Marshall Plan allowed the United States to exert tremendous influence over Greek politics.42 By 1980, the year Merrill and Jackson left Athens and the year that Scripts for the Pageant, the third part of The Changing Light at Sandover, was published, Greece, along with Portugal, had the highest rate of poverty in the EEC. Merrill noticed these significant developments as they transformed the Greece he knew first as a frequent tourist and then as a long-­term resident. Merrill’s articles and reviews from the period even warn of a catastrophic ending to the narrative of Greece’s rapid economic liberalization in the 1950s and 1960s, the “the heartening story of one country where American millions have brought progress,” as the Saturday Evening Post put it.43 In this new economic climate, Merrill wonders how the young, male, working-­class Greek population will survive. Looking at the figures of policemen and laborers in paintings from the 1950s by Yannis Tsarouchis, the poet asks, “How have they

An Immaterial World  107 fared, one would like to know, in that quarter century since he painted them? Did they, too, prosper when tourism and industry caused the per capita income to soar?”44 In Merrill’s analysis, a sense of doom, of “imminent replacement,” hovers over “those innocent days” of 1950, just before the collapse of the center coalition government of the following year, and well before the military coup of 1967. His comments about economic growth in Greece note “changes the perennial visitor must acknowledge with a pang”: “life itself grown over those years more prosperous, less joyfully improvised than before.”45 Although these comments certainly reflect Merrill’s attachment to a romanticized view of Greece, one that is “joyfully improvised,” they also show that, in his own way, Merrill was aware that a vast population of Greeks had been turned into a permanent poor class, destined for the lowest wages or for forced emigration. I mention these details because they help explain why, consciously or unconsciously, Merrill continues “Days of 1964” by moving inside the house to questions of domestic service. He describes a scene with Kleo, their neighbor and housecleaner who appears in several of Merrill’s poems, and then a scene with his lover in bed. Merrill is clear about the social hierarchy of the house and Kleo’s status within it: “I paid her generously, I dare say.” Abstracting his relationship with Kleo into a general formula, he thinks, “Love makes one generous,” and tests the idea on Strato, his younger Greek lover. “Look at us. We’d known / Each other so briefly that instead of sleeping / We lay whole nights, open, in the lamplight, / And gazed, or traded stories.” The poem is sanguine about Merrill’s noblesse oblige in these lines, though their self-­ consciousness is also striking. But then two moments of uneasiness occur outside the house: Merrill thinks he spots Kleo walking up the hill as a prostitute or sex worker; he finds himself in an outdoor market full of hagglers. “Was love illusion?” he asks. In the poem’s neat divisions, the exterior and interior are mapped onto opposing ethics. Inside the house, there’s love, laughter, and generosity (as well as labor). Outside the house, the poem locates necessity, commerce, and the fear of violence or exploitation. The poem’s own architecture develops this theme: a reader passes through stanzas of twelve, twelve, and five lines; fourteen, twelve, and five lines; and then a final stanza of fourteen lines. The sonnet’s hidden presence can be felt throughout the poem, separated by five-­line stanzas of reflective self-­ knowledge that mirror each other. One of these interludes comprises the lines about Merrill’s generosity; the other is a request for generosity in the form of forgiveness:

108  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 Forgive me if you read this. (And may Kyria Kleo, Should someone ever put it into Greek And read it aloud to her, forgive me, too). I had gone so long without loving, I hardly knew what I was thinking.

Finally, the poem returns again to the interior and to Strato—­but now in the terms Merrill had used to describe the hill outside and his encounter with Kleo there: Where I hid my face, your touch, quick, merciful, Blindfolded me. A god breathed from my lips. If that was illusion, I wanted it to last long; To dwell, for its daily pittance, with us there, Cleaning and watering, sighing with love or pain. I hoped it would climb when it needed to the heights Even of degradation, as I for one Seemed, those days, to be always climbing Into a world of wild Flowers, feasting, tears—­or was I falling, legs Buckling, heights, depths, Into a pool of each night’s rain? But you were everywhere beside me, masked, As who was not, in laughter, pain, and love.

Merrill moves into a lightly allegorical mode here, perhaps the equivalent of seeing the red setter take shape in the clouds outside the house. While Olympus might not have been the right reference point for the lovers, they appear here as larger than themselves, archetypal figures of illusion, laughter, pain, and love. The house provides Merrill with a convenient way to set up a division between the values of the bedroom—­generosity, forgiveness, love—­ and their ostensible inverses on the hill outside. But the resolution in “Days of 1964” returns us to the initial images of climbing and descending, now superimposed on the lovers. I read this poem as a development of the themes laid out by “An Urban Convalescence” and, especially, “The Broken Home.” “Days of 1964” reclaims the house from its function as a bastion of permanence and continuity and makes it over instead as the transient source of self-­ transformation and illusion.

An Immaterial World  109 As if to confirm this point, the poem ends by glancing at the possibility of a concluding couplet, only to avoid it through a feint of syntax. The final stanza has the rhetorical register of a prayer or supplication that illusion and self-­ transformation would continue as long as they can. An almost child-­like desire fills the past-­tense verbs: “I hid,” “I wanted,” “I hoped.” And in the poem at least, love does go on a little longer: the phrase “and love” extends beyond the rhymes of “rain” and “pain.” To imagine a slight change in the final three lines is to see the importance of Merrill’s decision to place love outside of the rhyme: “. . . Into a pool of last night’s rain? / But you were everywhere beside me, masked / As who was not, in laughter, love, and pain.” Rhyme itself, or the endless deferral of its completion, is perhaps another way for a poem to say “and,” to forge its illusory “correlation” between “rooms.” These house poems, written as the US transitions into an era of finance and global military occupation, reinvigorate several of the most prominent generic traits of the British country-­house poem: the descriptive movement from exterior to interior; the preservation of a natural, domestic order against the winds of change; the easy abundance and charity to lower classes; the praise of social values. Merrill’s poetic houses, built by someone at the very center of US wealth and privilege, are intricate emblems for the new period of capital overaccumulation, the “long crisis” of American imperial power on which their hospitality battens and their luxury depends.46 Merrill’s wealth gives his life a freedom, and his form a license, that make his houses the idiosyncratic and hospitable ones they are. But taken together, Merrill’s narrative house poems, from his early, dream-­like interiors and domestic arias, to his baroque, campy epic and multi-­part narrative lyrics, typically undermine rather than reaffirm the postwar association of houses with inherited property, heteronormativity, and monumentality.

Chores and Chambers I end this chapter with a pair of very short lyrics, written early and late in Merrill’s career, in which the speculative immateriality of poetic language merges with the house as a setting. The effects are unexpected: these poems are written at the intersection of housework and grief, and of war and romantic intimacy. One is “Night Laundry” from a sequence titled “Three Chores” in his second book, The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959). The other is “Little Fallacy,” which is the first poem in The Inner Room (1988), the

110  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 final book Merrill published while alive. The poems carry potentially weighty, if incommensurate, topics that are treated lightly. In the first, Merrill writes about the daily work of keeping a house or family together. The second refers directly to the Lebanese civil war. The aestheticism of both poems can be surprising. Merrill is adamant, and on record, about his refusal of a public role or political position. Looking back on his early work in an interview from 1982, Merrill explains modestly, “I didn’t have very much faith in my reliability as a witness to our times, and the best I thought I could hope for would be to turn out relatively perfect formal poems.”47 These poems don’t alter that statement or impression. In fact, they celebrate a kind of decadence and rueful worldliness that seems essentially true to Merrill’s life and poetics. Yet at the same time, there’s something else at work in Merrill’s chamber music that echoes the immateriality that is a cornerstone of his poetics, a definitive aspect of his cosmology, and a key feature of the financial markets churning in the background of his life. The early trio of poems “Three Chores,” from The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959), illuminates in miniature the way that Merrill’s poems inhabit their houses. Merrill recasts the work that takes place in the house—­ both of doing the wash and of grieving an unspecified loss—­as a near-­magical conjuring trick of language. The condensed space of the short lyric, which for Merrill resembles the interpolated arias of the operas he loved, reveals the echoing passageways of meter and the tropological turns of metaphor that ultimately form the building blocks of Merrill’s longer poems.48 “Night Laundry” reveals, in addition, that this repair-­work operates by analogy to domestic work, to the maintenance and construction of houses or to the performance of chores. “Night Laundry” is even prophetic in its defense of repetitive work as a means of distraction from grief. A telling moment in Merrill’s journal notes some 60 hours spent on a revision of a single page-­and-­a-­half long poem.49 “Night Laundry” begins by estranging language from its practical, everyday use—­so much so that the first lines take some time to make sense together: Of daily soilure laving Fabric of all and sundry With no time for believing Loving might work the wonder50

He takes the quotidian household event—­laundry—­and brings it into four-­ line poetic stanzas with rhymes and patterns of sound, inverted syntax, and repeated gerunds. In doing so, Merrill activates and brings together the rich

An Immaterial World  111 and diverse history of English poetry. As an example, the first line, “of daily soilure laving,” is an ornate way of describing the wash, but the word “daily,” with its Old English roots, flaps on the line alongside “soilure” and “laving,” which bring their French inheritance into the poem. The disguised occasion of the poem is sounded lightly in the words “loving” and “grieving”—from the line “well over wrist in grieving”—which are immured within the poem’s architecture of sound just as the feeling itself is submerged in the activity of washing. The next two stanzas repeat some of the tactics of the first two, but they add a lattice of rhyme that connects the two “rooms,” or stanzas, of the poem. Merrill rhymes “later” (in the first line of the third stanza) with “water” (in the first line of the fourth stanza), “depending” with “cleansing,” “flight” with “light,” and “water’s” with “matter’s.” Instead of just filling a single room, the rhymes make a passageway between two rooms, a strategy Merrill will employ to a similar effect in “Little Fallacy,” which is set in a bedroom.51 The poem lands on a theme by the end: the way to work through grief might be to distract oneself in work, the way to renew the spirit might be through “every dismal matter’s / absorption in its cleansing.” The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace begins with a poem dedicated to Hans Lodeizen, whose death at the age of 26 had greatly affected Merrill. There is good reason to think that Merrill, in his own way, was already writing about what he knew by heart. More than writing about it: the poem enacts its own kind of “cleansing,” bringing all four of the sundered rhymes to completion by the end of the final stanza. The other house poem in miniature is “Little Fallacy.” The collection in which the poem appears has a rendering of Merrill’s “inner room,” which is accessible in 107 Water Street through a trick bookshelf. Recalling that inner room and its privacy, the first stanza of the poem is set in the imagined “chamber of blossom” of the shelter of a cherry tree, where there is “not a petal spilled.” The second stanza, in a bracing but understated contrast with the first, draws us outward to the Lebanese civil war by referring to “a whole day in Beirut . . . with no one killed.” The relation between the two stanzas is complex and is facilitated by both the syntax and the rhymes, which Merrill arranges in the mirror-­like scheme of abcd dcba.52 The poem begins by idealizing a moment in early spring with an Imagist glimpse of a Japanese cherry, though “spilled” already conjures blood. A  summary of the stanza might be that two lovers are so enraptured with each other that they stay in bed until evening. But just as the poem seems on the verge of turning inward, it turns instead to the war outside. The news intrudes upon the reverie of the inner room: “according to the radio,” no one

112  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 has been killed. The phrase “a whole day” without violence expresses either gratitude or bitter irony or both. The poem poses a question or makes a provocation: in what ways has the activity of the lovers, whom we could assume here are gay, “borne fruit,” as the poem puts it? By connecting the tranquility of the bedchamber and the hiatus in fighting, is Merrill suggesting that peace follows from queer intimacy and from the passive cultivation of beauty? This poem is quite clearly a work by Merrill the consummate aesthete and may not bear the pressure of such intense questioning. Yet partitioning the poem off from other house poems, as a trivial exercise or a minor trouvaille found among the major works, ignores what Merrill has tried to teach about the value of the small and immaterial, in both the sense of insignificant and of non-­physical. To see that, we must take a close look at the form itself. This eight-­line poem comprises a single sentence, divided by a colon. As the second stanza unfolds, the end words of each line mirror, in reverse order, the end words of the first quatrain (“spilled,” “cherry,” “glow,” and “fruit”). Merrill employs a special version of what Dante, in De vulgari eloquentia, calls the claves, or “key” rhyme, and what the Provençal poets call rim’estrampa, a rhyme that has no match within the stanza.53 The establishment of rhyme in  the poem only occurs by joining “spilled” with “killed,” “cherry” with “January,” “glow” with “radio,” and “fruit” with “Beirut”—by attaching images of restraint, spring, natural light, and pastoral abundance to violence, winter, mechanical sound, and the city. Moreover, “spilled” and “killed” are the only exact rhymes in the poem; “glow” and “radio” rhyme on stressed and unstressed syllables, and all three of the rhyme words in the second stanza (apart from “killed”) expand in syllable count—­cherry’s two syllables give way to January’s four syllables, for instance. Through an intricate pattern of key rhymes and the distended syntax of a single sentence, Merrill superimposes the irenic “chamber of blossom” with the Beirut of the war. These short lyrics make tentative claims on being house poems because they have a kind of metonymic adjacency to the home: doing the laundry, lingering in the bedroom until evening. Perhaps they stretch the meaning of the genre too far, since The Changing Light at Sandover and narrative poems of Merrill’s mid-­career reflect at length on houses to question the transformations of economic value occurring all around the poet. The short poems that bookend Merrill’s collections, like “Little Fallacy,” are appreciated for their skill in presentation, but they also seem a bit like the miniatures that are scattered around Merrill’s apartments: an amuse-­bouche, as it were, for the main course of the longer, narrative poems, dense with autobiographical detail, allegory, myth, and human drama. Thinking back to Merrill’s fascination with

An Immaterial World  113 immaterials, however, I’m tempted to say that these “acoustical chambers” showcase how formalism itself plays with elements of immateriality. Sound is most crucial here: the first poem works largely because of the enchantment of the meter. The second poem achieves its effect through the use of its elegant rhyme. The ballroom at Sandover was where affection transformed the value of the poorest objects. These poems are themselves akin to household objects, too easily tossed away or skipped over. They are transformed into something else entirely through the household magic that keeps their disparate parts together.

Conclusion As the US poet who comes closest to writing a late twentieth-­century country-­ house poem, Merrill brings to the fore some of the epideictic urges of that distinct kind. His house poems suggest that what a house stands for is different than what it stands on. Hecht notes that Latin poets such as Martial, Juvenal, and Horace, influences on the country-­house poets, saw in houses “the moral emblems of their owners.”54 The British country-­house poems are not committed to photographic description. In fact, they have relatively little accurate description of the great houses they memorialize. Instead, they tend to be proscriptive: they tell us not only what we see, but, in a few special senses, how they think the owners of great houses should live. Merrill’s own sense of how we should live has a lot to do with the pressure exerted by financial markets to value certain ways of making money. Merrill shows that that pressure, which might, for the experts in the industry, be bound up in the complicated workings of securities and debt instruments, for the rest of us creeps through our houses into affection, love, and friendship, as well as the natural and built environment that surrounds us. It’s not that he makes a moral or political stand, but rather that his poetry follows the course of his own proclivity for “immaterials,” just as his affection exposes him to spontaneous, ephemeral attachments to people, objects, rhythms, and stanzaic forms. Merrill’s stated disdain, in The Changing Light at Sandover, for “too much emphasis upon possessions” recalls Andrew Marvell’s praise of the country-­ house in “Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax.” “Humility alone designs / Those short but admirable lines,” Marvell writes. He compares the human scale of Appleton house to some ostentatious newcomers, perhaps influenced by Italian design. Marvell picks up on a staple rhetorical disclaimer found earlier in Jonson’s “Penshurst”: “Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious

114  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 show / Of touch or marble.” From the ballroom at Sandover to the leaves of the avocado in “The Broken Home,” Merrill adopts a similar standpoint when it comes to excessive show—­this despite his reputation as, above all, a virtuoso craftsman. Jonson and Marvell are writing, in part, against the appeal of the city and its venery. The country-­house is a retreat but also the source of an alternative, aristocratic ethos. Merrill writes during a moment when the very foundation of a house, or the careful artisanship that goes into the making of a wall or floor, carries far less importance (and profit) than the secondary investment in a bundle of multiple mortgage loans. The world-­historical context for Merrill could not be more different, yet the poems, separated by hundreds of years, draw out general questions of value by lingering on the objects and materials of the house. The figures within Merrill’s house poems learn hard lessons from these houses as well. Leaning out of a window in “The House,” an early exercise in the genre, an older self remembers the site as where “soberly he learned what houses were.” The lover in “An Urban Convalescence,” looking down on the city, thinks not of “the honey-­slow descent of the Champs-­Élysée,” but rather of “the dull need to make some kind of house / Out of the life lived, out of the love spent.” Despite this early arrival of disenchantment, illusion lasts pretty long after all: the making of The Changing Light at Sandover endures through almost all of Merrill and Jackson’s relationship. The poem is the house they build together out of words, the shared materials of their life and love. In that sense, the poem renovates the country-­house tradition, placing at its center a queer relationship with no grand manor, except the one conjured by their twinned hands, the luxury of Merrill’s craft, and the generosity of their imagination. The value of the poem is in the ongoing process of its collaborative making and remaking, the touch of affection that consecrates even the poorest or silliest means of expressing it. Merrill’s house poems encourage a commitment on the part of the reader to happenstance, mutability, and receptivity, such as seeing things again, paying attention to echoes, listening for rhymes and wordplay, and, in general, roaming freely around in the cluttered stanzas. For this most decorous of poets, the interior of the house and of the poem is the place of play and creativity. The implications are, to borrow a phrase from a poet who admired Merrill, Agha Shahid Ali, that “rooms are never finished.”55 The renovations of the rooms of Water Street were ongoing; the revisions of the poems set in them were neverending. These are presented in contrast to the deleterious mania for rapid development, whether in New York or Athens. The ever-­renewing power of the imagination finds its home in his homes and in his poems

An Immaterial World  115 about them. Generating metaphors for the origins of how a poem gets made, Merrill’s open houses invite their inhabitants to continue to remake their own lives. Merrill’s defense of immateriality as a central component of the house poem makes its way to more contemporary poets who are less beholden to inherited forms and more explicitly committed to political engagement. Contemporary US poets Nikki Wallschlaeger, Jennifer  S.  Cheng, and Tracy  K.  Smith issue more revolutionary demands to the house poem as a renovated and rehabilitated genre. In part, this is a matter of historical timing. Merrill was writing during the expansion of housing, especially to middle-­class white communities, that his father’s firm abetted. But he was also writing during the global expansion of the US economy after World War II—­the period that economists refer to as embedded liberalism. This period comes to an end in the mid-­1970s, while Merrill was composing Sandover, but the consequences of an economic system based on finance become painfully clear to a wider public after the Great Recession of 2007–8. In the decade after the subprime mortgage crisis, the resurgence in the genre of the house poem accompanies the need to find poetic forms adequate to eviction, foreclosure, and massive amounts of debt. The next chapter turns to those forms, which in some cases throw poetry into skepticism as a vehicle for the illusory conditions of homeownership in the twenty-­first century.

4 The American Poetic Subprime Contemporary Poetry, Race, and Genre

The previous chapter explored how Merrill’s epic country-­house poem, with its emphasis on “immaterials,” can be read in the context of the turn to finance in housing markets. The central place of the house poem in Merrill’s development as a poet, particularly as a vehicle for bringing autobiographical ­narrative into his formal poetry, coincides with the domestic expansion of homeownership that Merrill Lynch abetted. What happens, however, when the houses in poems are defined by their susceptibility to eviction and foreclosure, or by practices of predatory lending? How does the house poem take shape in the imagination of first- and second-­generation immigrants to the US? And how do the lives of Black homeowners continue to be affected by the legal and extralegal racism in housing markets? The American house poem reemerges against a twenty-­first-­century backdrop of housing insecurity, dispossession, and debt rather than overflowing luxury and “a charity of consumption.”1 Contemporary American house poems insist on the alternative perspectives effaced, demoted, or erased from the genre of the country-­house poem and previous versions of the American house poem. This chapter provides context and framing for contemporary poetry by including an overview of the economics of the housing market that led to the 2007–8 subprime crisis. In the second part of the chapter, I turn to house poems written by Jericho Brown, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Jennifer  S.  Cheng, Tracy  K.  Smith, and Divya Victor, who reinvent the house poem for the twenty-­first century. With the word “subprime,” I mean to bring together the specific economic aspects of the historical crisis of housing in the twenty-­first century with new constraints placed on making poetry. The inhospitable conditions of the present give rise to an emergent set of creative strategies for home-­making that range across lyrics and conceptual poetries, prose poetry and formal verse, and poems by Black Americans and by first- and second-­ generation immigrants. While accounts of the seventeenth-­century country-­ house poem stress the novel structures and functions of Jacobean estates, twenty-­first-­century US house poems are marked instead by the immiseration The American House Poem, 1945–­2021. Walt Hunter, Oxford University Press. © Walt Hunter 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192856258.003.0005

The American Poetic Subprime  117 and exploitation of potential homeowners—­and by their successful tactics of  carving out a domestic poetics of ethical care, linguistic hospitality, and phenomenological richness of detail.

Inventing the Duplex I begin with an example of a contemporary house poem that raises questions about poetic genre, political commitment, and personal identity. These concerns have shaped conversations about American poetry in the last decade.2 The “duplex,” a poetic form created by Jericho Brown, is named after a type of multi-­family house. Brown is the author of three books, Please (2008), The New Testament (2014), and The Tradition (2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize. In an essay about his compositional process titled “Invention,” Brown describes his long search for a poetic form that speaks to the overlapping “truths” he holds as a “black and queer and Southern” man.3 His solution is to invent the duplex, “a house with two addresses,” which he puts together by “starting with the form itself and not with a single line of poetry” (italics in original). Brown comes up with a set of rules for the duplex that he derives, in part, by bringing together selected constraints of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues. In a poem titled “Duplex,” the blueprint of the form emerges clearly. The poem is in couplets, and the second line of each couplet repeats itself, with some differences, in the first line of the next. By the end of the poem, the first line recurs, but now carrying the weight of meaning of the lines that had fallen between. “Duplex” begins: A poem is a gesture toward home. It makes dark demands I call my own. Memory makes demands darker than my own: My last love drove a burgundy car. My first love drove a burgundy car. He was fast and awful, tall as my father.4

“Duplex” immediately unseats any notion of home as a stable origin to be described. Instead, the poem is a “gesture” toward it. The “demands” of the duplex are its formal constraints, which Brown lists in detail in “Invention.” The most striking rule is perhaps the first: “Write a ghazal that is also a sonnet that is also a blues poem of 14 lines, giving each line 9 to 11 syllables.” To make

118  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 these lines, Brown calls back his entire poetic corpus, printing out every line he wrote “since 2005” and putting them on the floor. In Brown’s essay on his invention of a new kind of house poem, the significance of the duplex as a title stretches to include the house in which the poem was written. As Brown arranges the printed lines, they take up more room than the house can accommodate: I could not fit it all on the floors of my living room and bedroom and on my dining room table. A literal need for space made one of my first decisions for me . . . . I put the longer and the shorter lines in the bathroom and kitchen . . . and focused on the lines I finally had room for on my floors that were less likely to get wet.5

A little like Merrill’s bats and color schemes making their way into the ­messages that comprise Sandover, Brown’s duplex comes about because of the “literal need for space.” A certain amount of chance governs the writing of the poem, and a certain amount of caution, since lines on the floor of the bathroom and kitchen risk damage from the activities that take place in those rooms. The duplex is not only a poem inspired by a kind of house. It’s an index of the house in which it was written. Brown’s description is both slightly comic and subtly angry at the middle-­ class pressures of teaching and grading that are placed on writing. The writing of a life takes up more square footage than the life is allowed to have. The features of the house spill over, maybe quite literally, to render the writing more precarious. There’s no solid wall, in this description of writing poetry, between the total environment in which the poem is created and the internal organization of the poem into longer and shorter lines. This process of composition emerges from a struggle with the traditions of English poetry and a search to find the right relation between the Black, queer, southern poet and these traditions. Brown’s intention is not mimicry or theft but rather “subversion” of the sonnet’s pretty rooms, as Donne had called them: One such subversion that I had thought through for about 10 years—­while washing dishes and cleaning the tub and grading papers and falling asleep next to one form of earthly beauty or another—­was a sonnet crown that only included the repeated lines of the sonnet. Yes, I’m so angry I spent years thinking of ways to gut the sonnet.6

The American Poetic Subprime  119 Brown’s account of his poetic process includes the kinds of everyday labor that keep up a house and a life. These activities are pulled into the narrative of the duplex, not placed to one side. The poem’s form emerges alongside the form of life that he maintains. Perhaps a result, the form of the duplex does not aspire to some total unity as an artifact. At first he thinks he’ll take only the repeated lines of the sonnet’s crown. Then he takes up elements of the ghazal, a form originally from the Urdu that had queer American proponents in Adrienne Rich and Agha Shahid Ali. The duplex, like the ghazal, relies not on the insulated, closed system of the poem, as the New Critics might have it, but rather on a regular process of defamiliarization and disruption. So, for instance, every even line in the poem alters the “impression” of the line that comes immediately before it “in an unexpected way.” The first six lines of “Duplex” show how each subsequent line revises or complicates the meaning of the previous one: the darker demands of memory turn into the burgundy of the car; the driver of the car reminds the speaker of his father. “Duplex” continues by moving inside the house where the father is beating the poet; the sound of the rain on the house reminds him of the sound of his mother crying. Finally, the poem ends by not only returning to its beginning, but also thematizing this process: Like the sound of my mother weeping again, No sound beating ends where it began. None of the beaten end up how we began. A poem is a gesture toward home.

Just as the violence leaves the speaker and his mother irreversibly altered, so does the poem leave each line marked by the accumulation of memory and contingent association. The poem, seemingly aware of the ethical dangers of making such a mimetic relation between violence and form, discusses this process directly, stating that “none of the beaten end up how we began.” All the nouns in the final line—­poem, gesture, and home—­appear in an ambivalent light. The poem’s gesture toward home might point to the violence that occurred in the home, or it might point to a home that has yet to be created—­ perhaps the home that exists, for now, only in the duplex itself. Brown mentions the ghazal, the “a a´ b” blues form, and the sonnet as ­influences for the duplex, which places the poem in conversation with multiple poetic traditions at once. The very title of the book, The Tradition, is more of a question than a description: whose tradition is this? The answer, for Brown, comes in the shape of a house poem—­perhaps even literally, since the alternating

120  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 indentations of the couplets recall the physical space of the duplex. Brown’s duplex shows how the twenty-­first-­century American house has asked for new kinds of house poems, in part by asking about the relation between poets of color and the traditions or genres of American poetry. Moreover, not only does the house appear as an urgent theme for Brown—­it also appears as a metaphor for the structure of his poem and a physical constraint for the actual process of its creation, recalling the correspondence Merrill imagined between rooms and stanzas. Richard Rothstein, in The Color of Law, finds that, from the 1910s on, racist zoning rules kept multi-­family dwellings out of white, middle-­class, single-­family neighborhoods. The very title of Brown’s house poem summons the history of housing discrimination and “exclusionary zoning” across the twentieth century in the US.7 Brown writes of the anger that leads him to “gut” the sonnet and “subvert” the tradition. Much contemporary US poetry is marked by a resurgent political commitment, public relevance, and directness of address. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), Solmaz Sharif ’s Look (2016), Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (2017), Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead (2017), and Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem (2017) are collections that, along with The Tradition, speak to the violence against racialized and Indigenous populations in the US by ­forging an active, immediate connection between poetic genre and political position. Without at all deflecting attention from the emergent political occasions that produce such powerful cries, this chapter takes a trans­his­tor­i­cal approach to contemporary poetry that looks backward as well as around and ahead. I  attempt to move beyond a smooth genealogy or agonistic theory of influence centered on white, male poetic precursors. I find instead that the resuscitation of poetic genre occurs in a punctuated fashion, embedded in the rhythms of historical capitalism. Restoring the generic context to contemporary American poetry clarifies the nature of political speech found in some of its dominant strains, which, I argue, depend as much on the arguments the poems conduct with poetic histories as on the rhetorical stances they take in the political present. My main examples, poems by Nikki Wallschlaeger, Jennifer  S.  Cheng, Tracy K. Smith, and Divya Victor, revitalize the genre of the house poem for the present period. These house poems collectively register the extraordinary pressures on householders in the last three decades—­ pressures that are imposed violently and asymmetrically on black, immigrant, and Latinx populations.8 The poems by Wallschlaeger, Cheng, Smith, and Victor, which, like other house poems, consistently attempt “to control the relationship between inside and outside,” examine the possibilities of an expressive

The American Poetic Subprime  121 poetics—­of a poetic subject who speaks her interiority—­under conditions of foreclosure and dispossession.9 Their house poems are gendered and racialized, tied to the relationship between “interior lives” and labor. The twenty-­first-­ century house poem is written not from the perspective of the amiable host or grateful guest, but from the perspective of the laborer who makes both of those positions possible—­the wife, the slave, the servant, the immigrant.10 To be sure, some of the perspectives missing in country-­house poems have already found visibility in popular and material culture from the early modern period on, as scholars for several decades have explored in genres from music hall to comics to cookbooks.11 Contemporary American poets reveal how the luxuriousness of the house poem, its essential hospitality as a genre, is tested and strained formally when the working figures excluded from poetic subjectivity are positioned as the interiority from which the poem emanates. The American poetic subprime imagines its houses as haunted by the dream of homeownership: property, privacy, security, heteronormativity, and inheritance. These houses are filled instead with a confusion of past, present, and future; they are embedded in a thick social and historical context that helps to explain their formal logic. They are houses that resonate with the overheard sounds of previous inhabitants and that are infiltrated by unexpected guests. Their interiors anatomize some of the contradictions of living together during a period of capital overaccumulation that is dependent on the extension of credit. As a group, the new house poems make visible some of the economic forces that define the “terminal crisis” of US power, in a similar way as the rise and decline of the British country-­house poem marks a precise half-­ century in the transition from the United Provinces to the United Kingdom as world hegemon.12 The poems I’ve chosen are all written by women who thematize the violence and exhaustion of household labor, but who also respond critically and imaginatively with the resources of poetry. I’ve turned to these four poets, out of many possibilities, because of the close connections they draw between making houses and making poems. The house, for them, is not only a synecdoche for the economic pressure and social violence they face as Black and Asian American women in the twenty-­first century. It also speaks to their position with respect to the traditions of writing poetry in English, those “given arrangements” through which Merrill moves with relative ease and comfort. Their procedure for thinking through the house poetically is frequently an unpredictable severing of poetic language from reference, so that the poems make up what Wallschlaeger calls a “poor dream autophony,” an attention to the poetic voice that follows its oneiric transformations through

122  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 the loose bits of language that float through the consciousness.13 These house poems have wayward and deserting voices that traverse, mine, and reclaim the degraded discourse of the present. Their relation to consumption and to subsumption is not mediated by the authoritative delivery of the witness or the documentarian, but projected through the insurgent spells of the fugitive, the evicted, and the dispossessed.

Race, Debt, and Real Estate in the Twenty-­First Century The emergent economic and political pressures on buying and making a house in the twenty-­first century help to explain the resurgence of the genre in the 2010s. Historically, the American ideal of homeownership is inseparable from the changing fronts of racial discrimination in the US. Ta-­Nehisi Coates has recently brought housing discrimination to broader public attention, writing that “from the 1930s to the 1960s, Black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-­mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal.”14 As Taylor describes in Race for Profit, the exclusion of the Black American family from homeownership, a practice consolidated in the early twentieth century, gives way in the 1970s to the demand for more homeowners: “Far from being a static site of dilapidation and ruin, the urban core was becoming an attractive place of unparalleled opportunity, a new frontier of economic investment and extraction for the real estate and banking industries.”15 Taylor argues that the expansion of housing to Black families met the needs of a domestic economy driven by finance and speculation, rather than by commodities and industry. Indeed, from the standpoint of lenders and banks, the bet that Taylor investigates has paid off: household debt in the US, in late 2019, made up over 70 percent of GDP.16 While the instruments of finance are abstract and obscure, much of their real damage originates from a relatively clear and straightforward necessity, at least in terms of making a profit: the constant need to find and capture new markets for credit.17 In the US since the 1970s, that has meant, especially, attracting Black families who are looking for a home. The subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–8 revealed to the public the extent to which housing, long considered one of the last relatively secure assets, had become not only untrustworthy as an investment but actively parasitic on home buyers. The “financialization” of housing—­an unwieldy locution—­refers to a complicated process by which mortgages are split up by lenders and sold to securitizers, who offer shares to investors.18 The marketing of houses, in the early twenty-­first

The American Poetic Subprime  123 century, also often included initial “teaser” interest rates that required almost immediate refinancing. For poor families unable to build strong credit, FHA housing programs are available to cover the down payments of astronomical housing costs—­but monthly mortgage payments quickly become unstainable. Twenty-­first-­century housing policy and practice in the US thus continues to  discriminate on two fronts at once: by finding new means to segregate neighborhoods and by dangling homeownership in front of poor families in order to capitalize on their debt. Despite the novelty of the financial means at work, the present period might best be understood more as a continuation and exacerbation of housing and loan construction policies, weaponized against racial minorities, than as a sharp historical break. Since the late nineteenth century, Rothstein points out, the federal government and local municipalities have colluded with banks to keep white neighborhoods segregated: “government’s commitment to separating residential areas by race began nationwide following the violent suppression of Reconstruction after 1877.”19 The global pandemic of late 2019 and 2020 has only underscored once again the state of housing insecurity in the US. An analysis from the Brookings Institute in June 2020 reports that one in three Americans could not pay rent in April 2020.20 Despite the eviction moratorium included in the CARES Act, evictions, foreclosures, and utility shutoffs increased dramatically in the first two quarters of 2020, with predictably asymmetrical impact on Latinx and low-­to-­moderate income households. The details of this narrative are, by now, somewhat familiar, but its cultural forms and manifestations, including poetry, have yet to be catalogued fully. Given the nature of financial predation on would-­be homeowners, including the expansion of credit and the spiraling into debt of most Americans, poetry about houses compels renewed attention for its sudden reappearance among contemporary volumes of poetry. The American houses in contemporary poetry are not so much emblems of social harmony and the preservation of a patriarchal status quo as they are engines for the redistribution of wealth upward and for the “spectacular magic” of the speculative economy.21 When real houses are being taken away by multiple, shifting means of eviction, dispossession, speculation, and deportation, the house poem becomes charged with the energies of a social life that fights to be made legible and survivable and that is manifest in the folding together of work, voice, and world. Though the seventeenth-­century estates of Penshurst, Saxham, and Cooke-­ ham have found no exact poetic equivalents in the foreclosed houses of the twilit American Century, the questions about poetry’s social function that they provoked have returned in force, if indeed such questions ever went away.

124  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 The critique of capitalism, nationalism, and of domestic labor is a leitmotif that runs through contemporary house poems written by Black homeowners, immigrants, and women of different classes and professions. But, since these are poems, they are not limited to exposing and cataloguing the predatorial practices of derivatives, teaser mortgages, evictions, and foreclosures. They are exemplary for the way they move beyond “meek acceptance,” to use Barbara Lewalski’s words, and deploy “the subversive power of the imagination.”22 Their versions of domesticity are potentially radical: ­certainly, in their execration of capitalism, but equally important, in their excavation of alternative, resistant, and creative modes of home-­making on the edges of survival. These house poems are frequently counter-­discourses of the home that establish what Susan Fraiman has called “a key site of aesthetic, political, and psychological innovation.”23 Their phenomenological investigations of the nooks, furniture, and textures of the house, which are tied closely to a celebration of dailiness, relationality, and the slow, continuous maintenance of a domestic space, flourishes in an oppositional and creative set of marginal voices, poetic structures, rhetorical ploys, figurative plays, and grammatical strategies.

The House Poem in the Subprime Era If there is a house poem after 2008, it is the American poetic subprime house, the house that is not abandoned, but rather foreclosed, flipped, or repossessed. The question of what a household might be, what a house might hold, takes far different forms, and far greater urgency, in a country in which African American, Latinx, and immigrant families have been disproportionately targeted and exploited.24 These new American house poems are written from the perspective of those who built the houses as slaves; those who worked in them as servants and as unwaged women; and those who came to them in forced or willing migrations. The distant genre of the country-­house poem has relevance now because of the labor—­on an international scale—­that such poems worked hard to conceal, the labor through which the poem itself was made possible in the first place. The American subprime house poem, as a “poetic kind,” redresses from the vantage point of the end of American power and influence the early stages of British world economic power. They are the revolutionary images of the radical, precarious friendship between women that Lewalski uncovers in Lanyer’s “A Description of Cooke-­ham,” as I describe in the introduction to this book. And their domesticity is itself a form of

The American Poetic Subprime  125 counter-­worldmaking as the world extracted from their silence, enslavement, and invisibility continues to dissolve. Building on the key interventions of Lewalski and Fraiman, I suggest that the structures of the contemporary house poem are animated in part by the gendered work of social reproduction. The expansive concept of social reproduction refers to the multifaceted and often invisible work of keeping human beings alive through “activities performed free of charge . . . done disproportionately by women and other feminized people.”25 Social reproduction includes, but is not limited to, unwaged house work, child-­raising, cooking, and cleaning. Recent theories of social reproduction have attended closely to both its necessary role in capitalist economies and its “potentiality as a site of resistance.”26 The potential for resistance has to do with the nature of this kind of work, once it’s recognized as a category of work: there are limits to the economic concepts of productivity and growth when the labor of caring for others can’t be done faster or more efficiently. While guarding against an overly optimistic separation of social reproduction from waged labor, Amy De’Ath asks, “Which kinds of time can be measured in units of socially necessary labour time? Which kinds of time refuse productivity increases and thus remain fixed units of time? Which kinds of time cannot be measured in units of socially necessary labour time at all?”27 For De’Ath and others, social reproduction resists intensification, rationalization, and increased productivity, all characteristic features of waged labor, since the nature of gendered work—­for instance, of watching small children—­is typically continuous and cannot be intensified. The contemporary house poem measures out a kind of speech that takes exactly the time it needs and that refuses the efficiency of paraphrase or of more “productive” communication. The house poem today not only renders visible the accumulation of capital through the reproduction of society—­a core component of the genre from its beginnings in the country-­house poem to its complicated presence in Merrill’s broken home. It also devises ways to express and defamiliarize social relations, while acknowledging their essential position within and not outside capitalism. To put it a little differently, the American house poem grounds its poetic devices in the work of women, particularly women of color, as they navigate an American social world still centered on buying and maintaining a house. These house poems, written after the 2008 financial crisis, capture a period when social reproduction is placed under critical pressure, in part by the proliferation of all kinds of debt, from education and car loans to home mortgages. Social reproduction refers not only to the maintenance of a labor force, but also, as Samuel Solomon

126  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 points out, to those to whom this work is outsourced in overdeveloped countries, including workers of color and immigrants.28 The language of social reproduction identifies the house as a site of gendered and racialized labor.29 In Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Houses (2015), the labor that maintains the house is brought into the space of the house poem itself. Born in a small town in northern Wisconsin, Wallschlaeger lives in the Driftless area, far from the urban “core” of poetry production and circulation.30 Her books, however, reflect her experience living in Milwaukee in working class neighborhoods, as well as raising two children. Wallschlaeger centers the perspective of mothers and caregivers in her house poems, but not through forms of documentary or reportage. Instead, she works within and against the inherited forms of the prose poem, with its erratic dream-­logic, compressed narratives, and oblique relation to the poetic line, and of the sonnet.31 Houses, Wallschlaeger’s first full-­length collection, comprises a series of prose poems that sketch out a neighborhood, though the voices in the poems seem to speak from houses separated in space and time. Crawlspace (2017), her second, moves to an interior space that recalls the crawl space in which Harriet Jacobs hid herself. In that book, Wallschlaeger employs the sonnet to “deconstruct and push against the form.”32 Her third collection, Waterbaby (2021), is a “book based on water and other fluid—­bluesy, ­flowing things,” among which she cites “lakes, tears, amniotic fluid, oceans, alcohol, the Middle Passage, flowage, rivers, clinical depression, tea, blues, storms, urine, etc.”33 The catalogue of watery things hints at a key element of Wallshlaeger’s poetry, the list, which she frequently uses in Houses for its power to capture the rhythmic propulsion of solitary voices turning thoughts over in their heads. In an interview about Houses, Wallschlaeger describes the book as containing “the bodies of women especially who keep households alive.”34 For Wallschlaeger this entails including “a lot of voices of women in the book—­ wives, slaves, servants, who are muttering under their breath.” The houses merge “their interior lives with the exteriors that they labor in.”35 The poem “Violet House” reflects on the erasure of a country that might belong to the women working in houses: So he made a / map of her country. In pen, I saw the truth of its neglect and the truth of / her exhaustion. She hesitated before I wrote the word ‘truth’.”36 Rather than starting from the fragments of an archive, as in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), or using found language from art exhibits, as in the middle section of Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015), Wallschlaeger invents these figures of social reproduction by plying language for its wild mutabililty and generative intransigence.

The American Poetic Subprime  127 The voices in Houses speak explicitly about childhood dreams and ­foreclosed futures, as in “Sable House”: I am little & I still believed dreaming about a big house supports a big life, like the dollhouse kits at Pope’s Hobbyland. We could not keep it together, mini chifforobes in my childish mitts cost money & we have no insurance in town where there are also many insurance houses in the stacks.37

The voices meditate, with humor, vitriol, and sadness, on family memories; they lampoon bourgeois homes and gardens; and they describe ordinary details while driving or mowing the lawn or making dinner. These house poems are situated in emergent conditions that are intensely and overtly racialized and gendered. Each poem generates its own distinct architectural logic. In “Silver House,” a group of friends are sleeping at night in the city, threatened by the cops. As though to capture the poem’s “tending to others,” every paragraph is connected to the next by the final word or phrase that ends one and begins the following.38 “Brown House,” one of the more narrative poems, tells a brief story about a man, possibly a father, who receives a twelve-­pack of Pepsi for Christmas because “everyone assumed he had given up on everything else.”39 The question driving many of the poems is something like: what kind of future might exist in which these voices would speak to each other instead of being isolated, divided, and silenced? “White House” puts this question starkly, embedding it in the history of whiteness and enslavement. Published in the last year of Barack Obama’s second term, “White House” draws a clear line between the foundation of the country on slavery—“old plantation times”—and the contemporary conditions of poverty and social precariousness explored by other poems in the collection: This is the place. High magic, she said. That’s what they’re doin, & it’s not the good kind, either. Old plantation times movin over my wrist, the shadow of this famous fence. How would it feel if the clouds were owned, if they finally figured out how to escape the weather? Somewhere, I think in Mississippi, are the boarded up bones of my women kin, but I believe all of their spirits are really being held hostage in the secret tombs of our nation’s capital, concentrated into the first lady’s gems with other folks, too.40

128  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 Near the end of the same poem, the “muttering” voice says, “That’s why the white house gets / repainted every year, they’re afraid the cracks will show. Black cracks.” The house poem itself provides the opportunity to make this ligature and lineage particularly salient, even as those excluded from prosperity or basic subsistence are told that it is a result of their lack of willpower, cultural inferiority, or resource scarcity. By using the voices of women, slaves, and servants to manipulate the genre of the house poem, Wallschlaeger makes the “black cracks” in the “white house” not the empty space but the text of the poem itself. As “White House” might suggest, the colors of Houses are loose metonyms for segregation based on class and race instead of cheerily multicultural rainbow-­colored houses. While the country-­house poem moved through the rooms of a single house, these poems instead make up a neighborhood, with each house marked not only by a color but also by a different voice and by distinct syntactical patterns. The color of the poems summons both the history of redlining (the process of selectively excluding Black families from home ownership) and the experience of looking at a parti-­colored “block” of houses.41 The colors get more specific and more fanciful as the poems progress, moving from Pink and Blue to Taupe and Candy Apple Red. As a group, the houses reunite women separated by racist housing policies and city planning designed to split up communities and separate Black families. In Houses, the material privations that shape who gets to hold a house, when, and how, are sounded out in the rhythmic scattering of the language in  the poems. In many of the poems, the form emerges as a preoccupation with a word or phrase, one that repeats across the poem while accumulating meaning. These repeated phrases function like kindling for rhythm within the blocks of prose. But they are also tied specifically to class, race, and gendered labor. They are, from one perspective, the ordinary obsessions of a racing mind when confronted by daily exigencies. Yet these poems have greater power than that; they do more than reflect the conditions they describe. In the absence of any stable expectation of homeownership, the host of each house wields language in ways that break open norms of syntax and signification. Some poems proceed by means of elaborations on a cliché. “Taupe House” is an extended riff on superlative adjectives. The poem recalls the praise lavished on the country-­house or on the suburban development, but turns the epideictic toward parody: The ugliest cars and the pissiest tree lines. The roundest 24–­7 christmas retail shacks. The prissiest teenagers with the most horrible parents with their home drug test kits. They don’t stand a chance.

The American Poetic Subprime  129 The flimsiest mayoral emergency bunker. The most popular projected war crimes. The sweetest olfactory organs of students as the key to the densest mass uprisings, with or without an ingrown lure.42

In other poems, the permutations of a sentence do seem to enact the ab­surd­ity, desperation, anger, and boredom of housework. “Pine Green House” begins with the sentence “the dishes suck.” The attempts to mitigate and to escape labor—­ turn on the TV, go to the woods—­only restore the labor in a different form: We avoid the dishes. The kids are gone. We make the dishes. We watch the dishes because the dishes suck. There is a room with TV where there are no dishes. We leave the light off but the dishes still suck But the woods, as always, do not suck. We buy dishes so doing dishes in the woods will not suck. But you know what? The dishes we bought really suck. They are made of woods so we will do the dishes43

A little later in the collection, “Cerulean Blue House” begins, “the laundry also sucks,” and then returns to the phrase again and again, expanding it into “the laundry sucks my time from me.”44 These apparently endless iterations of dishwashing and laundry call to mind the endless iterations of the same tasks—­the aspect of social reproduction that De’Ath describes as resistant to demands for increased productivity. In addition to the repeated phrases that catalyze many of the poems, a pun or play on sounds often slips in to disrupt a phrase or sentence. Examples are usually hard to miss: “around the turnip of the century,” “a likely cause of elderberry death,” “welcome to subverbia,” “the distance of the earn so we read an ode to an urn because a man once said this is required reading.”45 The house poem, from its provenance in the country-­house poetry of the seventeenth century, attempts to fix the relationship between inside and outside, host and guests, aristocrats and the poor, cultivation and wilderness. The poems in Houses reveal that the text is porous, liable to a casual infiltration by a word that cannot be assimilated into the rest of the poem’s description. In this sense, poems themselves play host to linguistic guests determined to rebuke a political and social order. While these house poems are discrete and self-­contained—­each house poem follows the course of a different “disembodied voice”—they might also be read together as staging a conversation that is passed from house to house.46 As a whole, the poems comprise a long, ragged, meandering dialogue.

130  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 In particular, the poems wonder, together, what to do with the past. Some houses are burdened by it: “we’re starting to look like people who are only used by the past”; “we are all parrots being paid to speak about histories of past owners.” In others, the past is monetized and coopted: “the past is the most profitable thing about me.” The past might, alternatively, provide material to be refashioned: “it’s a tradition, a creative tradition, for us to navigate what you take for granted”; “we’re using the past instead of letting it use us.” And the past can incite creative action: “We, as members of the ancestral revenge class // to flummox an already undignified nation, deserve no less”; “the future exists, only if I cut it up.” Wallschlaeger’s poems do more than put to rest the idea that, by gaining access to a house, a standard narrative of old-­fashioned mobility might follow, one that carries with it a certain shelter and immunity, as well as the American platitudes of happiness, freedom, privacy, and hierarchical divisions of reproductive labor. The powerful cumulative effect of these house poems is to build a multi-­centered consciousness, a collective dialogue focused on linking the houses together through common forms of labor and shared conditions of economic expulsion: “I will do something strange to pay homage to what we couldn’t bridge,” Wallshlaeger writes in “Bronze House.”47 The cumulative murmuring of their voices culminates in the poem that concludes the collection, “My House.” This poem takes the idea of “household” literally, turning the word “hold” into the gerund “holding”: Holding hands, holding beers. Holding grog for the monks­cloth, holding cameras fact-­checked in monskcloth. Holding friendships that get you killed. Holding babies. Holding ferrets at the entrance. Holding passels of fugue. Holding old tortures, holding new ones. Holding people you’ve never seen in your mind.48

The poem comprises a total of 26 verse paragraphs or strophes. Anaphora holds them together, “holding all the people that are in this poem.” What is a household, the poem asks? Who and what gets held? Babies need to be held to live; friendships, held on to, can get you killed. Rather than contracting into a family album, the house poem expands outward, taking in all the animals, experiences, people, and objects that can be or have been “held.” Placing the house poem in the voices and the hands of Black women workers, and concluding with the “hold” of the poet herself, Houses mounts a radical revision

The American Poetic Subprime  131 of the house poem genre, at the same time that it reasserts the social function of the house poem to weigh and assess national conditions.

How to Build an American Home Wallschlaeger’s Houses are color-­ coded to conjure both discriminatory ­housing practices and the emancipatory hues of poems animated by the voices of Black women. The houses in the poems are differentiated not by the beauty of their exteriors or the utility of their architecture, but by the insurgent voices they summon into their patriarchal spaces. That sense of the house as making possible a kind of counter-­habitation ramifies through Jennifer S. Cheng’s house poems as well. In addition to the racism of contemporary practices of segregation, the first two decades of the twenty-­first century have witnessed the embattled settling and shelter of immigrant families during a period defined by border closings, border walls, deportations, mass incarceration of migrants, and xenophobia. In Jennifer  S.  Cheng’s House A (2016), the American home is not a monument to permanence and security, but rather an amorphous, water-­filled archive where fragments of memory and reverie collect and repeat.49 Cheng’s two collections, House A and MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems (2018), seek out the material density of poetic language as a way of describing the remembered and imagined structures of a house built by immigrants. Cheng writes house poems that drift among the memories of her childhood in Texas, Hong Kong, and Connecticut. House A takes the condition of exile as the starting point for building a different kind of twenty-­first-­century home: “But what if the absence of a point of reference is not something to be lamented but a structural foundation on which to build a house we fill with water?”50 Written in three distinct sections, House A begins with “Letters to Mao,” a series of oneiric prose poems or lyric essays addressed to Mao. The second section, “House A/Geometry B,” is a catalogue of potential d ­ efinitions of and uses for “house,” with the letters A to Z as prompts. In the third section, “How to Build an American Home,” each poem is paired with a diagram, photograph, or design that complicates the idea of a blueprint for construction. The three broad subgenres of writing that provide the foundation for Cheng’s book—­letters, abecedarium, and instructions for building a house—­ coincide with three of the lived forms that a family of immigrants might use: writing letters to home, learning or incanting a language, building a new place

132  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 to live. In this way, the very composition of House A merges the genre of the house poem—­known for its hospitality to guests, but generated by the wealth extracted from global expansion and the displacement of peoples—­with genres that have a closer relation to the daily cultural work and lived experiences of immigrants. One way of bringing out the difference between Houses and House A might be to note that, while Wallshlaeger’s poems are full of voices that mutter, Cheng’s poems are full of thoughts that make their way uneasily into a poetry of silences and gaps. “Dear Blank Space: A Literary Narrative” is a companion piece to House A in which Cheng imagines, and addresses, the house of the daughter of immigrants.51 Cheng calls the lyric essay an ars poetica. Published in late 2015, the short, paratactic entries explore the unacknowledged places in a house: the recesses, apertures, tiny openings, shadows, and hollows that the blueprints of a house can’t represent. The structure of her essay is fragmentary and epistolary, with plenty of blank space interpolated between the passages. One passage reflects on both the material and immaterial aspects of the house as sources for poetry: Dear Specter of Immigrant History For we each live within our own language, some more literally than others, and mine is fractured into categories of intimate or functional, hard-­pressed or textured, but never something without knots and gaps. If I could take a shadow and sew it to another until it formed a roof above my head. My brother napping on the couch in his winter jacket, I in the next room, murmuring imaginary happenings to myself as the angle of the sun caught the ascending dust. Outside, my father put up wooden beams around our plants, sanding the logs until they made a satisfying sound against the rubber of my shoe. (Italics in original)

“Dear Blank Space” raises the question of how to build a house poem from the “knots and gaps” that define Cheng’s relation to language. The house appears in her ars poetica in two ways: as the source of mysterious alcoves for dreaming, and as the site of building materials that exceed their utility in either fashioning a habitable room or communicating a message. As Cheng writes, “Children of immigrants, like poets, know that language is sometimes a textural thing instead of something linguistic.” The sheltering roof is made of shadows; the wooden beams, built to protect the plants, make a sound against her shoe.

The American Poetic Subprime  133 Cheng revises the house poem by exploring the intimate settings, human time-­scales, and domestic interiors she inhabits with her parents, who were separated from their families during the Cultural Revolution.52 For Cheng, bringing the house into the textual space of the poem requires the activation of poetry as a “private, interior language” and the attention of the poet to rhythm and sound as a “foreshadowing oracle.”53 Channeling and quoting Bachelard’s Poetics of Space and Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, Cheng conducts a phenomenological approach to the house that grounds concepts of “history” and “homeland” in material “facts and tenderness”:54 What right do we have to believe in history or homeland? Like the coastline of certain islands, these things change shape every so often and in gradual increments. I choose instead to believe in the rhythm of my father gathering his briefcase and shedding his slippers, or the familiar shape of my mother’s hair, which began as short and sleek and grew in volume and curl until it was something ferocious like a bird’s nest.55

One characteristic of Cheng’s style is the restless imagination that takes concepts like “history or homeland” and compares their “shape,” as they change over time, to a “coastline.” Then the “gradual increments” are associated with the daily departure and arrival of her father, and the “shape” becomes her mother’s hair, which in turn modulates into a nest. The repetitions and transformations of the domestic home keep it from settling into a stable form; even the bird’s nest of hair is not “dense” or “woven,” but rather actively “ferocious.” Believing in the daily rhythms and unstable likenesses of the household rejects the “right” to abstractions, such as the nation, that are more resistant to change. This passage appears in the first section of the book, which telescopes the family’s history of immigration from China in a series of epistolary poems to Mao. In Cheng’s house, “Mao” is present in a series of everyday objects and intimations: he is the name for a face plastered on the front of a stamp collection, “a shadow underneath the floorboards,” and a portrait the family went to see when she was a child.56 Cheng examines the family’s history through a vigilant attention to the sounds and objects around her: In school we heard the narratives of Columbus and Pearl Harbor, and in college the professor gave lectures on Marxism, but whenever this happened, all I could think of was the dark

134  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 silhouette of my mother’s hair and how my father taught me to listen to the inside of a seashell.57

In Cheng’s writing of the house poem, the house and what it contains bring history within reach, sight, and, especially, touch. Their luxury is the splendor of loving description and haunted memory. House A highlights the capacity of poetry to linger in the fleeting but acutely felt temporality of experience. It is difficult to pin down the genre of Cheng’s poetry in House A, a book that hovers between the dream-­like prose poem and the probing lyric essay; the abecedarium and the incantation; the blueprint and the photograph. This kind of ambiguous relation to genre reinforces her proliferating, clashing definitions for an American house and her multiplying topoi for its poetic exploration. In the third section of the book, “How to Build an American Home,” each poem is preceded by a structural design. These images and photographs range from anatomical drawings to geometric diagrams to aerial photographs of topography. Set in an indeterminate relation to the prose poems placed underneath them, this section of the book offers a series of home construction projects—­designs for building and places for dwelling—­that enact “the tension of trying to map literal dimensions against the intangible.”58 In the penultimate poem of the book, Cheng writes: To prevent an invasion of overhead winds, I placed my child near the skin of the floor and wafted in a condensation of history. I drew up neat boundaries of here and there, we and they, and held my arms open to the walls. A lungful of door hinge, thumbprint of the window seam. A house steeps in spoonfuls of patterns, ghosts, leaves. Children of immigrants gather bits of wire, thread, a safety pin; they arrange them like a blueprint, not knowing why or how they know the shape.59

This passage reprises the relation to history that “Letters to Mao” had situated in the massed textures of everyday life. It also uncovers one of the conditions of writing house poetry from Cheng’s perspective. This house is not the multicultural dream of a house of Chinese immigrants assimilating their “culture” into the American home. The very notion of a house has changed as it has been captured by the phenomenological attention of the poet. An immigrant’s body, Cheng writes in the poem that follows this one, “is a plane that has already been inscribed” by geographies and ocean crossings.60

The American Poetic Subprime  135 To construct an American home is to glean the parts of a world already scattered around, “patterns, ghosts, leaves” and “bits of wire, thread, a safety pin.” Only after gathering and arranging them for their own sake, without certainty or knowledge, does the “blueprint” of the first, originary home, “house A,” appear. Cheng’s deconstruction of the blueprint—­something that comes after the parts of the house are arranged, not before—­is possible within the meditative prose poetry in which a body’s interior language, its private inscriptions, find a home. Both Wallschlaeger’s Houses and Cheng’s House A craft a politics and poetics of domestic interiors by recentering the house poem around the bodies, affects, and perceptions the genre has traditionally excluded. Wallschlaeger’s poems frequently hold voices “muttering under their breath.” Cheng’s are ­primarily rooted in a meditative consciousness and an “interior language” that looks and registers and remembers. My third example, a sonnet by Tracy K. Smith titled “Ash,” heightens the rhythm of the poem until it turns into a chant or spell, imaginatively returning the voices excluded from the country-­house poem into the lines of the sonnet structure she adapts.61 Across her four books of poetry, Smith experiments in both inherited stanza forms—­the quatrain poem, the sonnet, the narrative poem in blank verse—­and in conceptual poems that operate on found texts. Smith, the 2017 poet laureate of the United States, was a member of the Dark Room Collective, founded in 1988 in Cambridge, MA. The Dark Room Collective, which at various points included Natasha Trethewey, John Keene, and Kevin Young, was a home for Black writers, as well as a reading series, a library, and an inspiration for the development of other BIPOC writers’ collectives, from Cave Canem to Kundiman. Smith’s catholic inclination toward conceptual, expressive, and formalist poetries bridges the gap between poets such as M. NourbeSe Philip, whose Zong! (2008) uncovers the racism behind the language of the law, and Jericho Brown, whose anger at the exclusionary poetics of English traditions prompts him to invent new architectures. Smith’s 2018 collection, Wade in the Water, includes ghazals, pantoums, and erasure poems; a long middle section assembles poems from the letters of Black soldiers and their families during the American Civil War. She includes a house poem as well: “Ash,” which uses the house as an extended conceit for the body. This governing metaphor links the precariousness of homeownership to the physical violence done against the Black body. “Ash” returns to the theme of the sonnet and to its “subversion,” the ­strategy that led to Brown’s invention of the duplex. Smith brings together the house and the body through the sonnet’s particular memory of such conflations.

136  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 “Ash” recalls another subgenre of seventeenth-­century poetry: the religious sonnets of John Donne, George Herbert, and Mary Wroth. Those sonnets make spiritual longing and bodily desire inhabit the same textual space. In Smith’s sonnet, the things that might happen to the house and the way a house might be described are haunted by the uncanny and tragic resemblance to the racialized body with its own vulnerabilities, desires, and needs. The first couplet sets up the conceit that the rest of the sonnet develops: “Strange house that we must keep and fill. / House that pleads and eats and kills.”62 “Strange house” recalls the biblical link between the figure of the earthly body as a “house,” tent, or temple and its eventual fulfillment in a heavenly one. It also summons the memory of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and its lynched bodies swaying in the breeze. With both precursor texts resonating through that first phrase, the sonnet begins by referencing the history of violence against the fragile Black body. “House that we must keep” also telescopes into the same line both the labor of “housekeeping” and, perhaps, a feeling of bodily dysphoria—­the body we did not choose, but “must” nevertheless live in, keep up, and “fill.” Smith’s sonnet refreshes the correspondence between house and body by constructing each successive phrase out of the material of the previous phrase. In this way, the sonnet almost guides a reader through the process by which it has been written. At moments, it feels as though we have caught the writer at her work. After the first couplet, the next four lines build a series of discrete epithets for the house, placed in juxtaposition to each other. Rather than a simple parataxis or montage, however, one phrase will develop or echo aspects of the previous. The poem’s corridors open up as phrases are set in apposition to one another: House on legs. House on fire. House infested With desire. Haunted house. Lonely house. House of trick and suck and shrug. Give-­it-­to-­me house. I-­need-­you-­baby house.

Moving slowly through the poem brings out the syntactical and tropological patterns that hold together the sonnet’s appositions. “House on fire” picks up the preposition from “house on legs,” but reverses the direction of the metaphor: if the house has “legs” (for its foundation) like a body might have, the body is “on fire” (with anger, with love) like a house might be. A house on fire might also be a house infested, and the line break leaves that idea hanging until the bodily metaphor returns with “desire,” which also echoes “fire” in its rhyme. “Trick” picks up “haunted,” but takes on a possible sexual double

The American Poetic Subprime  137 meaning, branching out into a series of condensed scenes: “suck and shrug,” “Give it to me,” “I need you baby.” The easy plenitude of the country-­house poem, which relies on the invisibility of the constant labor that keeps it going, is nowhere to be found. Instead, the house and the body, both “pooled with blood,” are theaters of desire and of loneliness, emblems of vulnerability and of necessity. “Ash” presents “the house / That other houses built,” a line that combines the inherited architecture of the sonnet with the reminder that other “houses” have done the work to make this one possible. Part of what makes the development of the sonnet feel viscerally present is its imitation of a conjuring spell, curse, or chant. The power of language is activated through the lexical repetition of “house,” the word that begins all but four lines of the sonnet, and thus by the repeated strong stress that begins each line. This stress, the trochaic inversion of a generally iambic set of lines, propels each line forward. Sometimes Smith varies this momentum by introducing shorter phrases in a few of the lines, such as those quoted above. While a sonnet’s compression can often imaginatively enact a struggle against limitation or constraint, “Ash” adds, to that sense of force held in reserve, the propulsive anaphora of the chant. The cumulative effect is to suggest that the house and body can be animated, possessed—­or, at least in the space of the poem, reanimated and repossessed. More than a set of epithets for the house/body, the representation of the perspective excluded from and exploited by the country-­house poem takes on a distinct rhetorical form.

Over the Threshold The last house poems in this book are by Divya Victor, whose poetry ­combines lyric and conceptual forms and processes. A former student of the University of Buffalo’s famous poetics program, Victor is the author of four other collections: Kith (2017), Unsub (2016), Natural Subjects (2014), and Things to Do with Your Mouth (2013). She has been influential for her writing about poetry too: as a former editor for Jacket2, Victor has brought attention to the complexity of conceptual poetics by insisting on the politics, the interdisciplinarity, and the globality of its diverse practitioners.63 The scholar and poet Michael Leong places Victor’s own work within “a new wave of late-­twentieth-­century and early-­twenty-­first-­century documental impulses,” alongside the poetry of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Walter K. Lew, and Myung Mi Kim.64 Leong is thinking of the frequency with which found documents and legal forms find their way into Victor’s poetry, where they

138  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 are crossed with first-­person lyrics and anecdotes. I bring Victor’s Curb (2021) into this book because it widens the view, as it were, of what house poetry might reference and contain, and because, in doing so, it explores the extreme violence associated with residential neighborhoods in the two decades following 9/11. By ending with Victor’s book, I end with the work of a poet who identifies herself as Tamil and Catholic and who immigrated to the US as a child. She also carries with her the inherited memory of a different kind of migration, from India to Sri Lanka: “So much of my early sense of myself comes from my grandmother’s stories about her father, who travelled between Kanyakumari and Ceylon, and making that crossing across the strait into Sri Lanka.” I call attention to Victor’s background here, as I do with all the poets in this book, not to railroad her poetry through that particular personal history, but to allow those details of her life to inflect and intersect with the readings I give of her work. Curb is not an isolated case study, but the latest report from a long history of residential violence enacted in the suburbs, one that extends, in this book, from Brooks’s “Beverly Hills, Chicago” through Wallschlaeger’s Houses. Brooks had driven through the suburbs; Rich had seen the houses go up from her window and wondered what the consequences of suburban life would be on her own. Curb follows the process of “how we go from a place where we are loved and known” only to be “entering a space where we are strangers and threatening.”65 The suburban house, lawn, curb, and street are the places where Victor transcribes reports of anti-­immigrant violence and stages them in poetry. Across several of the poems, Victor deploys a consistent method in Curb of representing the violence enacted after 9/11 to South Asian immigrants. First she writes a poem that narrates the incident. Then she gives a brief synopsis of the facts. Here is one example of how that technique works and a description of the effects it has. “Blood/Soil” begins with a location: “Residental Neighborhood/Madison, Alabama.” The poem tells the story of a man thrown to the curb, but with a series of interruptions from other texts and voices. In lighter print, the cries of “HEY BUDDY” and “WHERE DO YOU LIVE” interrupt the text. The poet inserts herself at the beginning (“I slouch towards the writing sideways”) and at the end, after the assault: therefore, with these fingers, I will knot a garland of buds plucked from the camphorweed flailing on the curb where, cuffed by the soft folds of his neck, his spine snapped & swelled

The American Poetic Subprime  139 & therefore we will wear its scratchy rope for another century of stony sleep until our sunder feels more like survival.66

On the follow page, Victor includes a prose paragraph about Sureshbhai Patel, visiting family in Alabama to care for a new grandchild, who was assaulted by a Madison police officer and paralyzed while taking a morning walk around the block. Knotting a garland of buds for Patel recalls the valedictory tropes of pastoral elegy, threaded through the suburban pullulation of camphorweed “flailing” on the curb. The phrase “century of stony sleep” and the word “slouching” are direct quotations from “The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats, the Anglo-­ Irish poet and consummate elegist who was fascinated and appalled by colonial violence and anti-­colonial responses. The passage summons the participatory elements of elegy, as the speaker implicitly compares the garland of buds around the murdered man’s head with the poetic “garland” created in the poem. Reinforcing that effect, the poem ends with an exhortation to remember the dead until the separation (“sunder”) “feels more like survival.” Victor keeps Patel from being reduced to a statistic or piece of reportage at the same time that she creates an aesthetic distance from turning him into poetry. The way she fends off both potentially problematic impulses is by embedding herself in the poem, deploying the tropes of pastoral elegy, incorporating the interruptions into the narrative of the assault, and then providing the context. Inclusion in the “residential neighborhood” is exposure rather than protection for some of the victims. Like Jericho Brown’s poetry, but originating from a different set of lived experiences, Curb has an indexical relationship to its subject matter, at least in its first version as an artist book with accordion-­like folds. Brown’s “Duplex” had been written, according to his own account, by spreading the poems across the floor of his actual house. Victor’s Curb is written to mimic the unfolding map that the immigrant would read. “Duplex” comes up with a hybrid sonnet-­ghazal form that both indexes that house and that uncovers, by careful pressure against the withholding of memory, the domestic violence of home. Curb maps out the anti-­immigrant violence of suburban neighborhoods through its own tangible simulacrum of the map and the “matrix of the material page.”67 For the purposes of this study, Victor’s book blurs the edges between the house poem as a “distinct kind” and the house poem as continuous with a broader inquiry into nationalism, xenophobia, and white supremacy. The book moves outward from the body of the poet herself to the house to the block party and then beyond. Victor writes:

140  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 If the location of “Hedges” is my body, my abdomen, “Plots” takes us to the threshold of my house, my lawns, my yard. “Petitions (For an Alien Relative)” takes me further afield until we are in “Frequency (Alka’s Testimony).” The testimony is a courtroom scene in New Jersey, which to me is the farthest away from something like home. It’s a legal environment where we are abstracted into a series of precedents. Being legal subjects is the farthest thing from being loved.

The first poem plays on the word “settlement” and follows “settlers, over the  land, over the sea,” while the final poem is titled “Estates: Last Offices Concerning the Curbs of the Body” and is broken into sections “The Eyelids,” “The Jaws,” “The Bladder,” “The Ankles.” The title Curb recalls that elementary unit of residential segregation, of the integrity of homeownership, and even of the phenomenological experience of walking from the house into the street or vice versa. The double meaning of “curbing” violence also carries weight here. The book takes place on hedges, stoops, and lawns, but also in immigration offices and courtrooms. Some pages are “dogeared” with GPS coordinates that can be searched via a link Victor provides in the notes. The residential neighborhoods are populated by immigrants trying to navigate petitions and forms to help relatives immigrate to the US and the constant threats of physical violence. “It is a Thursday / & no one out on this long street / looks like your mother / So you go home / Wrap yourself in Form I-­130 / Knit a nest with a ballpoint pen.” The places here are not notional; the neighborhoods are real and can be pinned on a map via the coordinates provides. But the book itself also has a metaphorical threshold, a condition that must be met for it to be made (and read). In the first poem, “Since You Asked,” which is not listed in the Table of Contents, Victor and her mother are “roving the sidewalks” with her new child in a red wagon. Her mother says: yes; I am afraid all the time; all the places are all the same to me; all of us are the same to all of them; this is all that matters; all of us don’t matter at all.68

The American Poetic Subprime  141 Typographically, the final word “all” in each line looks like it forms a wall or barrier. The eight lines of rime riche, or identical rhyme, not only create an analogue to what her mother is saying, but also make the hand of the poet apparent in the obvious artifice of the lineation. Victor calls this a confession from her mother and a “threshold” she crosses as a writer; she also calls it a birth-­pang. Victor notes that “Tamilians cross the threshold of homes with the right foot, followed by the left (in the opposite direction of written Latin script).”69 So to write this book about bearing a child in the midst of anti-­ immigrant violence in the suburbs, one crosses a threshold and enters into a house. The conflation of textuality and experience brings back Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, on which Victor has written, and Rich’s exhortation to pay attention to the edges that blur—­the curbs, possibly. Curb seeks, in its many types of crossings, to measure “the tension and displacement of a body in memories of having traversed” and to investigate the force that could “lift a child into the air and throw her across the world.” Curb lays bare the violence of residential suburbs that are not legally segregated, that don’t have restrictive covenants or exclusionary HOA pacts, but that confer death sentences on the South Asian immigrants, from a range of classes, who walk across the lawn or the street and into an American “plot.” But Victor also presents the book itself as receiving a confession, crossing a threshold, and stepping into a house. I don’t want to press much harder on that metaphor except to draw out the differences and correspondences among the many versions, in this book, of moving through the rooms of a house as a means of poetic invention. Are the tools the house provides the tools for survival or for self-­sabotage? Do they make a “giddy” sound or do they speak by muttering and confessing their stories? Curb returns to the analogy between writing a poem and moving through a house that has appeared throughout this book. Referring directly to their own painful process of composition, the poems testify to the struggle to write about and to write through the deadly fear associated with the twenty-­first-­century house and neighborhood.

Conclusion This book began by turning back several centuries to the country-­house poem. This chapter concludes by making clear some of the prolonged arguments contemporary poets are waging with genres of English poetry. The country-­house poem makes for a distant and estranged relative to the poems

142  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 of American city apartments, suburban neighborhoods, or exurban developments. The epideictic rhetoric of the country-­house poem, its emphasis on the maintenance or examination of social values, and its relation to the pastoral seem more and more remote from the poetry of the twenty-­first century. To look for the afterlife of the English country-­house poem during the waning of American hegemony could perhaps mean to look away from poetry altogether: the epideictic rhetoric of the country-­house poem thrives in Cribs, in the pages of the New York Times real estate section, or in any number of neo-­georgic “reconstruction” television shows from This Old House to House Hunters. In the most general terms, as we have already seen, poetry has often spoken of itself by analogy to houses: architectural metaphors for the poetic stanza, Italian for “room,” are common in English-­ writing poetry, from Donne’s pretty rooms to Wordsworth’s plot of ground. What these metaphors occasionally acknowledge, but mostly work to conceal is the figure who toils on that ground, or who cleans that room. This study of the contemporary American house poem extends resurgent inquiries about poetic form that ask how poetic tropes and subgenres have been denuded of their material conditions, and how those conditions might be restored by attending closely and critically both to formal designs and to historical capitalism. Brown’s “Duplex,” Wallschlaeger’s Houses, Cheng’s House A, Smith’s “Ash,” and Victor’s Curb are difficult to recognize as direct inheritors of the house poem subgenre and its topoi. The seventeenth-­century house poem defends the manor house as part of a valid social and economic system with parts arranged and connected in harmonious functions. The house poem is a microcosm of the social order and a justification for the status quo. The luxury of the country-­house table is replaced, in these contemporary poems, by the uncertainty of living with life-­long debt payments; the imagined consonance of nature and cultivation is distorted by fires and suburban development; the harmonious social life of the country-­house is replaced by desperation, suicide, exhaustion, and violence: “None of the beaten end up how we began” (Brown); “Neighbor, our hearts pumped blood in the same room looking onto lakes that teenagers willingly drown in” (Wallschlaeger); “If I could take a shadow and sew it to another until it formed a roof above my head” (Cheng). “House whose rooms are pooled with blood” (Smith); “All my poems are manifests / for burials elsewhere” (Victor). These poems lay bare the violence, insecurity, and loss that are inseparable from their dreams of the American house in the present. As a genre, the house poem also makes visible the intense labor that goes into the poetic task of asserting control over the language and representation of making a household.

The American Poetic Subprime  143 Inevitably, my list of house poems and my examination of this “distinct kind” is incomplete. Other contemporary poems by women devise forms of the house poem that emerge from analogous conditions to the ones examined in this chapter. Jorie Graham’s “Dialogue (of the Imagination’s Fear)” describes a scene of foreclosure and indicts the complicity of the observer while also calling for a non-­extractive relation to the earth’s resources: “there is a / woman crying on the second floor as she does not understand what it will be like to / not have a home now.”70 Sharon Olds’s “Real Estate Ode” begins with a deliberately out-­sized comparison between a New York City skyscraper and the Pyramid of Giza in order to reflect on the “plunder / mined from the earth and from the lives of the miners.”71 Robyn Schiff ’s collection A Woman of Property (2016) is a series of internal monologues that range through a vast estate, reminiscent of a country-­house, so replete with scenes of sudden violence that even a swinging gate sounds like “the distress / call of a rabbit.”72 The poems in Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of (2018) push the genre of the house poem to some of its most extreme typographical forms. “An Empty House is a Debt” begins “there is a house in me. It is empty. I empty it. / Negative space: the only native emptiness there is.”73 Nguyen makes the house poem accommodate the mourning of the elegiac mode through a series of displacements and erasures: photographs of Nguyen’s family at home are edited to remove her deceased brother, while the shape of the hole in the photo becomes the shape of the text removed from a subsequent poem. Rather than performing a sociology of the marginalized, the twenty-­first-­ century house poem reimagines what a house is by incorporating aspects of racialized violence and social reproduction into the architecture of the poem. For Brown, the duplex poem indexes the constraints of a physical house, points to the exclusionary zoning of real estate development, speaks of domestic violence, and subverts the European sonnet tradition. For Wallschlaeger, the voices of racialized and gendered labor underscore the reality of the US house as a construction of whiteness. For Cheng, the water and the displacements constitutive of immigration become the foundations of the family dwelling. For Smith, the house is described through an extended metaphor of an immiserated Black body. In all these examples, the US house—­an emblem of privatization, social order, and reproductive futurity turned into a target for speculation—­is reimagined through aspects of the material lives that it excludes. Confronted with the predations of expanded credit, the persistence of slavery and anti-­Black racism in new guises, and the politics of assimilation faced by immigrants, these poetic houses have the uncanny sense of being tied to a

144  The American House Poem, 1945–2021 dilated present, one in which there is room for constant repetition, distracted reverie, and otherwise devalued forms of attention. These responses are sometimes made manifest through the contingencies of poetic language as it incorporates the unexpected guests of puns and associative leaps between proximate images. The language of these poems moves between speech and chant, description and dream, improvisation and design. The logic of their poetic structures is not inherited, but created on the ground, as it were, to meet the impossible demand that one make a home with the odds ever more stacked against it. Perhaps these contemporary houses seem unrelated to Saxham and Penshurst because scholars have not yet grasped fully one of the dominant methods of American poetry in the twenty-­first century: to revitalize and carry forward certain traditions of poetry in English by threading through them the lives and experiences they have excluded or suppressed. The result is not a bigger house or some new addition, but an inverted one that looks closely and critically at the original foundations of a genre, while also forging and energizing a new tradition of house poems. The admiring guest who praises the house and its idealized relation to a social world is replaced by muttering voices who connect the house, and the labor it demands, with worsening economic conditions. Twenty-­first-­century house poems underscore the complexities of thinking about some versions of contemporary American poetry that attend to political and economic crisis. Poetic genres lie at hand as devices for acknowledging the present, but the process of taking them in hand fundamentally alters them. Yet without the history of the house poem and its afterlives, poetic speech would be left with isolated appeals to emergent situations. My claim here is that US poetry aims for a less direct but no less committed critique, and that tracking the iterations of poetic genres gives this critique a full and cogent force. The institutions of poetic genre have always been tied closely to social, political, and economic institutions. The house does not only exist outside the poem, an element to be taken up for a theme of hospitality or invective against foreclosure, but internally to the very definitions, histories, and dynamic forms of what poetry might see and say.

Notes Introduction 1. Donne, Collected Poems of John Donne, 6. 2. Wordsworth, Collected Poems of William Wordsworth, 250. 3. Heaney, “A New and Surprising Yeats.” 4. Fowler, Poetry and the Built Environment (in progress). 5. Vinsauf, Poetria Nova; Judt, Memory Chalet. See also Carruthers, Book of Memory. 6. Glantz, Homewreckers, 23. Sellon and VanNahmen list four key developments in the 1930s: “the establishment of the Federal Home Loan Bank System and the insurance of savings deposits, the development of government mortgage insurance, the creation of the Federal National Mortgage Association, and the adoption of the long-­term, fixed-­rate mortgage contract” (4). Sellon and VanNahmen, “Securitization of Housing Finance.” 7. Glantz, Homewreckers, xxviv. 8. There are now countless books on the history of housing in the US after the war, from those that take a particular city as a case-­study to those that take housing itself as a kind of case study for globalization. The studies that have provided me with the most guidance in writing this book include Desmond, Evicted; Glantz, Homewreckers; Glotzer, How the Suburbs Were Segregated; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto; Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis; Madden and Marcuse, In Defense of Housing; Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; Panitch and Gindin, Making of Global Capitalism; Rothstein, Color of Law; Satter, Family Properties; and Taylor, Race for Profit. 9. Adrienne Brown and Valerie Smith argue for attention to the “affective side of homeownership,” by which they mean “a sensorium of possession and dispossession that a focus on institutions and statistics alone cannot address.” Race and Real Estate, 7. Sonya Posmentier offers an example of this sensorium, in her reading of Brooks’s “In the Mecca,” of how “to experience the poem’s geography . . . through the senses, to engage in a mode of poetic relation other than claiming or ownership.” Posmentier, Cultivation and Catastrophe, 296. 10. Panitch and Gindin, Making of Global Capitalism, 25. 11. Hibbard, “Country House Poem,” 159. 12. Jenkins, Feigned Commonwealths, 199. 13. Dubrow, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”. See Williams, Country and the City; Fowler, “Country House Poems”; Said, “Invention, Memory, and Place.” 14. Lewalski notes that country-­house poems “are properly approached as a distinct kind, a thematic genre defined by subject matter and specific topics rather than by form or mode.” Lewalski, “Lady of the Country-­House Poem,” 261. Hibbard explains how Jonson follows Martial in the structure of To Penshurst: “Both poets begin with a

146 Notes description of the house, stressing its unostentatious solidity and usefulness; both go on to paint the fertility of the estate with its cattle, its poultry, and its fish; and both follow this with a passage devoted to country hospitality.” Hibbard, “Country House Poem,” 162. 15. Fowler, “Country House Poems,” 4–5. Fowler lists “the seasonal cycle, abundance of produce, contentment with a sufficient estate idealized in terms of the Golden Age; renunciation of grandeur; the gods ‘Pan and Silvane’; hunting; moral virtue” as contents of georgic. 16. Lewalski, “Lady of the Country-­House Poem,” 261. 17. Lewalski, “Lady of the Country-­House Poem,” 265. 18. Mary Ann  C.  McGuire describes how the country-­house poem progresses from “a functional community within which an owner exercised the public responsibilities of his class” to “a private home that reflected the personal tastes of its residents.” McGuire, “Cavalier Country House Poem,” 96. 19. Hibbard writes that “it is this opposition between the useful and the ostentatious that provides a backbone for the whole body of poetry from Ben Jonson to Pope that I am considering.” Hibbard, “Country House Poem,” 163. 20. Horace, Odes and Carmen Saeculare, 1882. 21. Heather Dubrow traces the roots of the country-­house poem to three late sixteenth-­ century poetic subgenres: Juvenalian satire, the epideictic epistle, and the “beatus-­ille” poem, a pastoral that highlights the virtues and values of country life. Dubrow, “Country-­House Poem.” 22. Dubrow argues that the poems “searched for a mode that would allow them to resolve rather than retreat from these pressing economic and social conditions.” Dubrow, “Country-­House Poem,” 159. Fowler discusses the “generic grouping” in which the country-­house poem appears. Fowler, “Country House Poems,” 4. 23. Lewalski, “Re-­writing Patriarchy and Patronage,” 106. 24. Lewalski, “Lady of the Country-­House Poem,” 271. 25. Williams, Country and the City, 37, 45. Fowler rejects Williams’s claim by citing the laborers who do appear in the poems. Fowler, “Country House Poems,” 7–8. 26. Christopher Hill writes, “We must recall too the loss of the right to pick up timber, hunt animals, etc. on the common lands—­the total loss of which must have been very serious for families near the margin. Between 1540 and 1640 the price of firewood rose almost three times as much as general prices, so we can appreciate what the loss of free fuel must have meant.” Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, 51–52. 27. “A hyperbole known from Virgil’s phrase as the sponte sua motif,” writes Fowler, “Country House Poems,” 2. 28. Ayesha Ramachandran cites Marvell as articulating a profound intellectual shift: “the definition of ‘the world’ as a new category encompassing a previously unknown intellectual expanse and holding new imaginative power.” Ramachandran, Worldmakers, 5. 29. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 28–29. 30. Marvell, Complete Poems, 99. 31. J. Pomfret, “The Choice,” in Fairer and Gerrard, eds., Eighteenth-­Century Poetry. 32. J.  Gerrard, “A Remonstrance.” In Lonsdale, ed., New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-­ Century Verse.

Notes  147 33. W.  Cowper, “The Task,” in Lonsdale, ed., The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-­ Century Verse. 34. Jenkins, Feigned Commonwealths, 196. 35. “Proprietarian” regimes protected property rights as part of the state’s responsibility. The word is taken from Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 107. For the “libertine Marvell,” see Pertile, “Marvell as libertin.” 36. Piketty supplies the connection: “Euro-­American proprietarian modernity went hand in hand with unprecedented expansion of slavery and colonialism, which has given rise to persistent racial inequality in the United States.” Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 63. 37. Panitch and Gindin, Making of Global Capitalism, 307. 38. Taylor, Race for Profit, 261. 39. Taylor, Race for Profit, 4. 40. Bradley, World Reimagined, 93. 41. In her book on the abandoned house in Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery, Marit MacArthur writes that “the abandoned house is reimagined . . . as a trope of personal and cultural loss and consolation, which resonates with peculiarly American experiences, even as their poems speak to larger global audiences grimly familiar with displacement.” MacArthur, American Landscape, 8. 42. Stevens, Collected Poems; Frost, Poetry of Robert Frost. 43. MacArthur, American Landscape, 78. 44. Bradstreet, Works of Anne Bradstreet, 292. 45. Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, 32. 46. Walcott, Selected Poetry, 5. 47. D. Mahon, “Penshurst Place,” in Gardner and Greening, eds., Hollow Palaces, 88. 48. Heaney, Haw Lantern. 49. For a book that establishes a close connection between literature and architecture in the period directly following the heyday of the country-­house poem, see Morrissey, From the Temple to the Castle. 50. McClung, Country-­House in English Renaissance. McClung finds that the influence of Italian architectural design came too late to Britain to affect the country-­house poem. 51. See Stephanie Burt: “Look for self-­analyses or for frame-­breaking moments, when the poem stops to tell you what it describes.” Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense, 11. 52. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, xxxvii. 53. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, xxxvi; italics mine. 54. Taylor, Race for Profit, 11. 55. Louis Menand’s The Free World does not mention housing in its otherwise capacious survey of postwar literature and politics. Menand, Free World. 56. See Fraiman, Extreme Domesticity. 57. Ramazani, Poetry and Its Others. 58. Coates, “Case for Reparations.” 59. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 140. 60. Rich, Collected Poems, 580–81. 61. Sandra Gilbert calls this book “her first feminist manifesto.” Gilbert, “Life Written in Invisible Ink.” 62. See the introduction to Shockley, Renegade Poetics.

148 Notes

Chapter 1 1. Kent, Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, 40. 2. “Cre-­Lit Members to Study Drama,” 15. 3. Brooks, “Corner in a Portrait Gallery,” 16. 4. Brooks, “Old Apartment House,” 16. 5. Brooks, Report from Part One, 55. 6. Kent, Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, 42; Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 153. 7. Roosevelt, “State of the Union.” 8. Satter, Family Properties, 39. 9. Satter, Family Properties, 39. 10. Satter writes, “Through its appraisal system, its enthusiasm for racial covenants, and its refusal to insure mortgages for Blacks moving to white neighborhoods, the FHA effectively standardized and nationalized the hostile but locally variable racial biases of the private housing industry.” Satter, Family Properties, 42. 11. Rose and Brooks, “Racial Covenants and Housing Segregation,” 163. 12. Bell, “Hate Next Door,” 33. 13. Rose and Brooks, “Racial Covenants and Housing Segregation,” 165. 14. Criteria for FHA loans “prohibited the occupancy of properties except by the race for  which they are intended.” Rose and Brooks, “Racial Covenants and Housing Segregation,” 165. 15. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis. 16. Kent, Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, 47. 17. Brooks, Report from Part One, 59. 18. Brooks, Report from Part One, 69. 19. Brooks remembers, “especially did we both seriously enjoy, even in times of woe, breakfast talks in whatever we happened to be living in-­garage, kitchenette, room, or, finally, this small house.” Brooks, Report from Part One, 58. “I remember feeling bleak when I was taken to my honeymoon home, the kitchenette apartment in the Tyson on 43rd and South Park, after the very nice little wedding in my parents’ living room.” Brooks, Report from Part One, 59. 20. Fernández-­Kelly, “Land, Race, and Property Rights.” 21. Brooks, Blacks, 83. 22. Goldsby, “ ‘Something Is Said,’ ” 249. Kent, Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, 71; Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 19. 23. Elizabeth Alexander describes Brooks as “queen of the poetic tableau,” since “in her work we see the interplay between black life in public . . . and in startlingly intimate interior life.” Alexander, The Black Interior, 15. 24. See Kent’s overview, Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, 52. And see Jackson, Surprised Queenhood, 38 on Brooks’s portraits in verse. 25. Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 19. 26. Madden and Marcuse, In Defense of Housing, 17. 27. Gill suggests that the poem “produces a clamped and claustrophobic effect commensurate with the built surroundings.” Gill, “Gwendolyn Brooks and the Legacies,” 4. 28. Brooks, Blacks, 19.

Notes  149 Dunbar, Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 3, 18, 23. Kent, Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, 1, 30. Brooks, Report from Part One, 56. Kent, Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, 26. Shabazz, Spatializing Blackness, 36. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 25. Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, 106–10. Shabazz notes that Wright, like Brooks, had lived in a kitchenette in Chicago. Shabazz, Spatializing Blackness, 33. 36. Shabazz, Spatializing Blackness, 35. 37. Brooks, Blacks, 20. 38. Alexander continues “when a starkly sociological approach to the ‘Negro problem’ was the order of the day even in some black circles, it was bold of Brooks to name the imagination as a site worth tending, to honor the space of the dulce to go along with the utile.” Alexander, The Black Interior, 49. 39. W. C. Williams, qtd. in Caplan, Questions of Possibility, 64. 40. Brooks, Blacks, 41. 41. Melhem asks “What will occupy the vacant lot? Change and empty space suggest possible counters to the entrapment theme as the portraits begin.” Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 32. 42. Satter, Family Properties, 47–48. 43. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 34. 44. Brooks, Blacks, 494. 45. Brooks, Blacks, 83. 46. Brooks, Blacks, 42. 47. Brooks, Blacks, 99. 48. Shockley, Renegade Poetics, 44. 49. Von Hallberg, “Poetry, Politics, and Intellectuals,” 58. 50. Brooks, Blacks, 100–101. 51. Brooks, Report from Part One, 59. 52. Brooks, Blacks, 102. 53. Brooks, Blacks, 105. 54. Hayes, American Sonnets, 11; Martin, Life in a Box. 55. Brooks, Blacks, 128–29. 56. Responses by other Chicago poets—­Nate Marshall, for one—­speak to the significance of her landmarks. “Until I read ‘Beverly Hills, Chicago,’ I had never seen a poem—­or any piece of art—­mention a place that was a part of my daily world,” Marshall writes. Marshall, “Gwendolyn over Everything.” 57. Jackson, Surprised Queenhood, 72. 58. Kent, Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, 115. 59. “Brooks refers to Maud Martha as an autobiographical novel, a fiction based upon and elaborating sundry facts of her life.” Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 85. 60. Brooks, Blacks, 320. 61. Kent, Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, 104. 62. Brooks, Blacks, 143. 63. Brooks, Blacks, 144. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

150 Notes Brooks, Blacks, 181. Brooks, Blacks, 171. Brooks, Blacks, 200. Brooks, Blacks, 212. The chapter was published in Portfolio in the summer of 1945. Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 80. 69. Brooks, Blacks, 216. 70. Brooks, Blacks, 219. 71. Brooks, Blacks, 318. 72. Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 93. 73. Brooks, Blacks, 319. 74. Melhem notes “the increased specificity regarding political events” and “the increased irregularity (or freeing) of the meter while shifting formal weights from the sonnet to the ballad.” Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 101. 75. Brooks, Blacks, 333. 76. Brooks, Blacks, 335. 77. Brooks, Blacks, 339. 78. Moten, In the Break, 2003. 79. Brooks, Blacks, 376. 80. Conversations with Brooks, ed. Gayles, 10. 81. Melhem writes about a letter from Lawrence on June 30, 1964, about whether Harper might publish a “book about her childhood and youth” . . . “particularly with her background in predominantly white neighborhoods.” Melhem continues, parenthetically: “(Brooks notes that Lawrence was incorrect. She had always lived in black neighborhoods).” Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 134. 82. Brooks, Blacks, 378. 83. “In Chicago, fifty-­eight black homes were bombed between 1917 and 1921, one every twenty days.” Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 35. 84. Brooks, Report from Part One, 186. 85. Brooks, Blacks, 377. 86. Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 133. 87. Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 132; Kent, Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, 132. A Raisin in the Sun, possibly the most well-­known treatment of race and housing in twentieth-­ century literature, documents a similar defiance of housing racism, though the play ends before we know the outcome. 88. Imani Perry supplies the autobiographical background for A Raisin in the Sun. The Hansberrys had been threatened by white mobs for moving into 6140 South Rhodes Avenue, a property that was prohibited to them on account of a restrictive covenant. The Supreme Court heard Hansberry v. Lee in 1940 and ruled that “the racially restrictive covenant had been improperly executed” because “it hadn’t had enough signatures to be binding.” Perry, Looking for Lorraine, 44. 89. Brooks, Blacks, 494. 90. Brooks, Blacks, 438. 91. Brooks, Blacks, 353–54. 92. Brooks, Blacks, 356. 93. Jackson, Surprised Queenhood, 103. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

Notes  151 94. Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 156. 95. Brooks, Report from Part One, 84. 96. Jackson, Surprised Queenhood, 100. 97. Brooks moves to publish with Black presses in August 1969; Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 155. Alexander suggests that, by choosing to publish with Black publishers after 1968, Brooks’s “poetic voice would be more consciously calibrated to an audience that would presumably understand her on street corners and in taverns as well as in universities and lecture halls.” Alexander, The Black Interior, 45. 98. Kent, Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, 42. 99. Lowney, “ ‘A material collapse,” 3. Kent identifies the poem as the “culmination” of Brooks’s “power to wield a flexible free verse.” Kent, Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, 218. Melhem describes the poem as employing a “quasi-­divine reportage.” Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 157. For a reading of Brooks as offering a “counter-­narrative of architectural modernity,” see Gill, “Gwendolyn Brooks and the Legacies,” 3. See also Steinkopf-­Frank, “Rediscovering Mecca Flats.” 100. Gill, “Gwendolyn Brooks and the Legacies,” 9. 101. Brooks, Blacks, 433. 102. Brooks, Blacks, 407. 103. Brooks, Blacks, 425. 104. Brooks, Blacks, 430. 105. Brooks, Blacks, 427. 106. Brooks, Blacks, 433. 107. As Sonya Posmentier writes, the Mecca is “juxtaposed against the plantation,” a reminder that “the enclosure of the plantation was itself ‘built’ (that is, it was a space of human-­made divisions).” Posmentier, Cultivation and Catastrophe, 97. 108. Bradley, 92. 109. Merrill, Changing Light at Sandover, 3. 110. Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 153. “American Family Brown, the source of Maud Martha, was conceived as a series of twenty-­five poems about an American Negro family”: Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 80; “Bronzeville Men and Women,” soon to become The Bean Eaters, was submitted to Elizabeth Lawrence on December 21, 1958, together with another partial manuscript, a novel, “In the Mecca,” Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 100. At one point, Brooks included photographs as part of a work of fiction, “Bronzevillians,” but the manuscript was returned and then revised by Brooks into The Maud Martha Story; Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 83. 111. Madden and Marcuse, In Defense of Housing, 26. 112. Brooks, Blacks, 454. 113. Brooks, Report from Part One, 138. 114. Brooks, Blacks, 445.

Chapter 2 1. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 67. 2. “Real estate profits were rooted in residential segregation.” Taylor, Race for Profit, 254. 3. Ashbery, “Tradition and Talent,” 279.

152 Notes 4. Holladay, Power of Adrienne Rich, 152. 5. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 44. See also Madden and Marcuse, In Defense of Housing, 134: “Mortgage insurance and public expenditures on highways and other infrastructure added up to a massive public subsidy for postwar suburbanization.” 6. Rich, Collected Poems, 621. 7. Rich, Collected Poems, 616. 8. Rich, Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose, 144. 9. Holladay, Power of Adrienne Rich, 20. 10. Holladay, Power of Adrienne Rich, 44. 11. Taylor, Race for Profit, 106. 12. Taylor, Race for Profit, 255. 13. Holladay, Power of Adrienne Rich, 22. 14. Holladay, Power of Adrienne Rich, 23. 15. Rich, Collected Poems, 426. 16. Rich, Snapshots of a Daughter-­in-­Law. 17. Glotzer, How the Suburbs Were Segregated, 22. 18. Glotzer, How the Suburbs Were Segregated, 33. 19. Glotzer, How the Suburbs Were Segregated, 15. 20. The phrase is Hilary Holladay’s; Holladay, Power of Adrienne Rich, 122. 21. Holladay, Power of Adrienne Rich, 142. 22. Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, 42. 23. Halpern explains that Rich needed a new style, “one that could talk about events ­outside houses and inside them.” Halpern, “Uses of Authenticity,” 881. 24. Rich, Collected Poems, 656. 25. Rich, Collected Poems, 431. 26. Dubrow, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”, 68. 27. Rich, Collected Poems, 414. 28. H. Vendler, qtd. in Altieri, “Why the Poetry,” 24. 29. See Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 83. 30. Rich, “Anne Bradstreet and Her Poetry,” ix. 31. Rich, On Lies, 32. 32. Rich, On Lies, 44. 33. Cameron, Lyric Time. 34. Rich, On Lies, 163. 35. Rich, Collected Poems, 425. 36. In the UK context, Denise Riley’s poetry presents a different set of questions about the social reproduction of the home. 37. Rich, On Lies, 160. 38. Rich, Collected Poems, 176, 595. 39. Rich, On Lies, 40. 40. Rich, Collected Poems, 17. 41. Rich, Collected Poems, 3. 42. Rich, Collected Poems, 4. 43. Rich, Collected Poems, 44. 44. Rich, Collected Poems, 47.

Notes  153 45. Rich, Collected Poems, 71. 46. Rich, Collected Poems, 95. 47. Rich, Collected Poems, 154. 48. Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, 15. 49. Spiegelman, “ ‘Driving to the Limits,’ ” 380. 50. Rich, Collected Poems, 627. 51. Rich, Collected Poems, 119. 52. Rich, Lies, 144. 53. Rich, Collected Poems, 117–18. 54. Rich, Collected Poems, 522. 55. Rich, Collected Poems, 503. 56. Rich, Collected Poems, 33. 57. Rich, Collected Poems, 116. 58. Rich, Collected Poems, 350. 59. Rich, Collected Poems, 122. 60. Rich, Collected Poems, 630. 61. Rich, Collected Poems, 154–55. 62. Rich, Collected Poems, 273. 63. Rich, Collected Poems, 607. 64. Rich, Collected Poems, 175. 65. Rich, Collected Poems, 712. 66. Rich, Collected Poems, 139. 67. Rich, Collected Poems, 197. 68. Rich, Collected Poems, 200. 69. Rich, Collected Poems, 756. 70. Rich, Collected Poems, 197. 71. Rich, Collected Poems, 175. 72. Rich, Collected Poems, 437. 73. Holladay, Power of Adrienne Rich, 382. 74. De’Ath, “Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds.” De’Ath writes that “when literary texts engage the dialectics of aesthetic experience to think about the relation between sense-­perception and a total system, they are themselves doing a kind of theorizing.” De’Ath, “Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds,” 228. 75. Rich, Collected Poems, 616. 76. Brenner, Economics of Global Turbulence. 77. Rich, Collected Poems, 426. 78. Rich, Collected Poems, 427. 79. Rich, Collected Poems, 429. 80. Rich, Collected Poems, 433. 81. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, xxxvii, xxxvi. 82. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 67. 83. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 68. 84. Bachelard’s analysis is couched in universal terms, which leads him to assert, far more optimistically than Rich, that “contemporary poetry . . . has introduced freedom in the very body of the language.” Bachelard, Poetics of Space, xxvii.

154 Notes 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

Rich, Collected Poems, 438. Rich, Essential Essays, 199. Rich, Essential Essays, 217. Rich, Collected Poems, 580–81. Rich, Collected Poems, 616. Rich, Collected Poems, 617. Rich, Collected Poems, 620. Rich, Collected Poems, 621. Rich, Collected Poems, 759. Rich, Collected Poems, n. 1135. Rich, Collected Poems, 763. Rich, Collected Poems, 762. Rich, Collected Poems, 372–73. Rich, Collected Poems, 479.

Chapter 3 1. In Krippner’s account, “beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s, the competitive challenge from abroad precipitated a crisis of profitability for U.S.  firms, encouraging capitalists to withdraw from productive investment and instead channel capital toward financial markets.” Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis, 12. 2. Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century, 308. 3. Smith, Catching Lightning in a Bottle, 321. 4. “When Finance Was for the 99%,” The Economist. 5. Sellon and VanNahmen explain that “with a series of unconnected local markets for conventional loans, housing funds did not flow from areas with surplus savings to areas with excess demands for housing loans.” Sellon and VanNahmen, “Securitization of Housing Finance,” 7. 6. Savings and Loan organizations, or “thrifts,” suffered as a result. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis, 70. 7. Hammer, James Merrill, 252. 8. Hammer, James Merrill, 267. 9. Hammer, James Merrill, 20. 10. Merrill, Recitative, 3. 11. Hammer, James Merrill, 61. 12. Hass, Praise, 4. 13. As James Baird puts it, “exposed in the language of poetry, [Merrill’s interior settings] are imaginatively transformed into metaphoric structures” (362). Baird, “James Merrill’s Sound of Feeling.” 14. Hallberg, “Poetry, Politics, and Intellectuals,” 58. David Kalstone describes the “­virtues of fifties poetry” as “wit, elegance, [and] formal control” and the “fifties poem” as “a certain kind of emblematic lyric in which the poem assumes an almost impersonal, objective authority.” Kalstone, “Persisting Figures,” 131. In a contemporary review of eight poetry collections from 1951, Howard Nemerov praises Merrill for avoiding

Notes  155

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

“the indignant scream [that] has so nearly become the poet’s stipulated tone: [Merrill] does not appear to regard it as a duty to spend all or even most of his time being angry at something.” Nemerov, Poetry and Fiction, 196. Vendler, Music of What Happens, 346. Merrill, Collected Poems, 185. The apocalyptic tenor of the poem is explored by Materer, James Merrill’s Apocalypse. For the elegiac mode in Sandover, see Sacks, “Divine Translation.” Merrill, Changing Light at Sandover, 5. Merrill, Changing Light at Sandover, 97. Hammer, James Merrill, 645. In an exhibition catalogue essay about Merrill and Bishop’s homes, Hammer notes that “the Ouija board was after all something that Merrill and Jackson did at home.” Hammer, “Living in Style,” 38. Merrill, Changing Light at Sandover, 556–57. Hammer, James Merrill, 697. Hecht, “Houses as Metaphors,” 298. Merrill’s epic takes up some of the impulses behind the other long American poems of the second half of the century (Berryman’s Dream Songs, Olson’s Maximus Poems, Walcott’s Omeros, Williams’s Paterson) and of modernism (Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror, H.D.’s Trilogy, Pound’s Cantos). It might also remind readers not only of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but of the comoedia, or versified tale, in general. Finally, while paying explicit homage to Proust’s Recherche, Merrill’s epic recalls the medieval form of the vita, in which an account of the poet’s life would be periodically interrupted by samples of his work. Robert Polito suggests that “perhaps only George Herbert’s The Temple comprises so bedazzling a compendium of stanzaic and metrical forms, as Merrill magisterially spins out sonnets, villanelles, Spenserian stanzas, Rubaiyat quatrains, terza rima, Anglo Saxon alliterative meter, and a stunning, crowning canzone.” Polito, “Introduction,” 3. Merrill, Changing Light at Sandover, 99. Hammer, James Merrill, 726. See Cubeta, “A Jonsonian Ideal,” 22–23. Merrill, Collected Poems, 197–200. Merrill, Collected Poems, 220–22. Merrill, Collected Poems, 170. In an interview, Merrill conjectures that a source for the poem’s “self-­reflexive” side is theatrical dialogue. Merrill, Collected Prose, 97. Merrill, Collected Poems, 127. Merrill, Collected Poems, 197. Merrill, Collected Prose, 155. Merrill, Collected Poems, 220. Clogg, Concise History of Greece, 146, 152. Recent Social Trends in Greece, 35. Merrill, Collected Poems, 599. Fotopoulos, “Economic Restructuring.” As Langdon Hammer has shown, Merrill’s poetry documents his close connection to those intimately affected by the violence of Greek politics in the 1960s, including

156 Notes Vasíli and Mimí Vassilikos, friends exiled by the 1967 coup, and Maria Mitsotakis, the  wife of Konstantinos Mitsotakis, a rival of Papandreou and future leader of the conservative party. Maria, and to a lesser extent Mimi, have prominent roles in The Changing Light at Sandover. Both appear in shorter lyrics as well: Maria in “Words for Maria” (Merrill, Collected Poems, 235–36) from Nights and Days and Mimi in a sonnet from “Coda: The Higher Keys” (Merrill, Collected Poems, 544). See Hammer, James Merrill, 389–90. 43. Hauser, “Good News from Greece,” 102. 44. Merrill, Collected Prose, 344. 45. Merrill, Collected Prose, 345. 46. For “long crisis,” see Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot, 129–52. 47. Merrill, Collected Prose, 133. 48. Merrill, Collected Prose, 94. At one point, tempo indications of “arioso” and “vivace” appear in Scripts for the Pageant. Merrill, Changing Light at Sandover, 317. 49. Hammer, James Merrill, 780. 50. Merrill, Collected Poems, 90. 51. This rhyme scheme was one of Merrill’s favorites. Other poems that employ similar schemes include “Sundown and Starlight”; “Event Without Particulars”; “Dead Center”; “The Smile”; “Nightgown”; “The Hamann”; “Maisie”; “Between Us”; “Balanchine’s Discotheque”; “Nine Sleep Valley”; “The Fifteenth Summer”; “Volcanic Holiday”; “body”; “Beginner’s Greek”; and the sonnets in the R section of The Book of Ephraim. 52. Merrill, Collected Poems, 493. 53. See Giorgio Agamben’s comments on the claves in The End of the Poem. 54. Hecht, “Houses as Metaphors,” 292. 55. Ali, Rooms Are Never Finished.

Chapter 4 1. Williams, Country and the City, 44. 2. See Dowdy, “Introduction”; Reed, Freedom Time; Wang, Thinking Its Presence. 3. Brown, “Invention.” 4. Brown, Tradition. 5. Brown, “Invention.” 6. Brown, “Invention.” 7. Rothstein, Color of Law, 68. 8. Annie McClanahan notes that “losses in wealth were worst within communities of color: every cent of the wealth accumulated by African American households in the post-­civil rights era was lost in 2009 alone.” McClanahan, Dead Pledges, 100. See also Georgette Chapman Phillips, who writes that “according to some estimates, 85% of the worst-­hit neighborhoods (defined as where the default rate is at least double the regional average) have a majority of black and Latino homeowners.” Phillips, “Black, Brown, and Green,” 15. 9. Dubrow, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”, 68. 10. Spears, “Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat.”

Notes  157 11. One classic analysis of popular culture that covers the period of the country-­house poem is Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 81, though Burke laments a “lack of evidence” for much of popular culture by women. See also Potter, ed., Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century; Storey, ed., Making of English Popular Culture. For nineteenth-­century US popular culture, see Roth, Gender and Race. For two analyses of the representation of women in popular culture in the twentieth century, see Buszek, Pin-­Up Grrrls; Enstad, Ladies of Labor. Finally, for a study of the “radical imagination” of Black women in the early twentieth century, see Hartman, Wayward Lives. 12. “Terminal crisis” comes from Giovanni Arrighi, who charts a relay of imperial power by identifying the shifts from investment in manufacturing and trade to financialization. “Terminal crisis” refers to the onset of periods of financialization, which mark the transition from one hegemon to the next. Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century, 215. G. R. Hibbard finds that “after 1660 this poem was no longer written, because the way of life that it reflects, and out of which it grows, was on the decline.” Hibbard, “Country House Poem,” 159. Barbara Lewalski sets the dates for the topoi of her country-­house poems from 1600–60. Lewalski, “Lady of the Country-­House Poem,” 262. 13. Wallschlaeger, Houses, 30. 14. Coates, “Case for Reparations.” 15. Taylor, Race for Profit, 4. 16. A Reuters report from the 4th quarter of 2019 has household debt at 73 percent of GDP. “U.S. Household Debt,” Reuters. 17. See Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis, 15. 18. Phillips, Black, Brown, and Green,” 18. 19. Rothstein, Color of Law, 75. 20. Grinstein-­Weiss et al., “Housing Hardships.” 21. McClanahan argues that “the housing bubble marked a unique period in the history of US housing in which the home no longer gave refuge from the volatility of the market but instead came to symbolize the spectacular magic of speculative investment.” McClanahan, Dead Pledges, 99. 22. Lewalski, “Re-­writing Patriarchy and Patronage,” 106. 23. Fraiman, Extreme Domesticity, 9. 24. “As of June 2010 the nonprofit Center for Responsible Lending estimated that 11 percent of African American and 17 percent of Latino homeowners had already lost their homes or were ‘at imminent risk of foreclosure’—compared with 7 percent of whites.” Glantz, Homewreckers, xviii. 25. Solomon, Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-­Feminism, 6. 26. De’Ath, “Reproduction,” 401. 27. De’Ath, “Gender and Social Reproduction,” 1546. 28. Solomon, Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-­Feminism, 7. 29. Solomon explains that “the concept of social reproduction takes as its core interest the relations of capitalism that are frequently absent in analyses of the capital/labor relation. At the same time, it holds to an insistence that relations (direct and indirect) between capital and labor have a determining force in the development of social life.” Solomon, Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-­Feminism, 7.

158 Notes 30. Spears, “Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat.” 31. Leung and Wallschlaeger, “What the Body Keeps.” 32. Davids and Wallschlaeger, “Inverting Helplessness.” 33. Leung and Wallschlaeger, “What the Body Keeps.” 34. Spears, “Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat.” 35. Spears, “Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat.” 36. Wallschlaeger, Houses, 25. 37. Wallschlaeger, Houses, 66. 38. Wallschlaeger, Houses, 30. 39. Wallschlaeger, Houses, 28. 40. Wallschlaeger, Houses, 23. 41. Anthony Madrid points out that the poems are organized into strophes rather than lines. Madrid, “On Nikki Wallschlaeger.” 42. Wallschlaeger, Houses, 33. 43. Wallschlaeger, Houses, 37. 44. Wallschlaeger, Houses, 51. 45. Wallschlaeger, Houses, 35, 22, 38, 34. 46. Wallschlaeger, Houses, 47. 47. Wallschlaeger, Houses, 43, 54, 61, 19, 30, 49, 62. 48. Wallschlaeger, Houses, 74–76. 49. Cheng, House A. 50. Cheng, House A, 50. 51. Cheng, “Dear Blank Space.” 52. Cheng, “Writing Letters to Mao.” 53. Leeches, “2018 Contest.” 54. Cheng, House A, 55. 55. Cheng, House A, 27. 56. Cheng, House A, 23, 47, 55. 57. Cheng, House A, 33. 58. Wood, “What Is Being Charted Here?” 59. Cheng, House A, 113. 60. Cheng, House A, 114. 61. Smith, Wade in the Water. 62. Smith, Wade in the Water, 62. 63. Victor, “Preface,” n.p. 64. Leong, “Traditions,” 37. 65. Victor and Sur, “Coalition,” n.p. 66. Victor, Curb, 42. 67. Leong, “Traditions,” 40. 68. Victor, Curb, 9. 69. Victor, Curb, 149. 70. Graham, Place, 29–31. 71. Olds, Odes, 79. 72. Schiff, Woman of Property, 1. 73. Nguyen, Ghost Of, 54.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. aesthetic activity 29 development 41 distance 139 education 41 experiences  31–2, 92–3 ideas 92–3 innovation 124 investments 99–100 perception 99–100 sense 83–4 surplus 9 theories 17 values  1, 9 aestheticism  93, 109–10 aesthetics  15–16, 23, 37, 43–4, 70, 77–8 of verse culture  92–3 of writing  13–14 Alexandria 105 Ali, Agha Shahid  114–15, 119 American Civil War  64–5, 135 Amherst 63 Anghelaki-Rooke, Katerina  90 animals  36, 77–8, 92–3, 130–1 apartments  12, 16–18, 20–2, 25–6, 28–33, 36–8, 42, 46–50, 53–4, 57–8, 67–8, 75–6, 89–91, 94–7, 100–3, 112–13, 141–2, see also kitchenettes architectural appearance 8 approach 16–17 elements 73 equivalents 91 innovation 50 logic 127 marvels 89 metaphors 141–2

prettiness 48 structure 81 theory 17 architecture  1, 6, 21–2, 40, 52–3, 60–1, 63, 102–3, 107, 110–11, 131, 135–7, 143 ars poetica  84, 98, 103, 132 Ashbery, John  57–8, 92–3 Athens  96–7, 105–6, 114–15 Auden, W. H.  57–8, 94–5, 97 “Lullaby” 35 audiences  3–4, 20, 44 Austen, Jane Mansfield Park 10–11 authority  3, 64–6 autobiographical detail 112–13 narrative 116 protagonists 40 reading 36–7 autobiography  28, 90, 92–3 Bacchylides 5 Bachelard, Gaston  18 The Poetics of Space  18, 79, 133 ballads  3–4, 26, 29–30, 34, 36–40, 43–56 Baltimore  16–17, 21–2, 58–60, 76–7, 80 Cross Keys  59 Roland Park  11, 21–2, 58–9, 76, 87 Balzac, Honoré de Eugenie Grandet 10–11 Père Goriot 10–11 Banking Act  87 banking/banks  87–8, 122–3 bedroom  10–11, 21–2, 28–9, 67–77, 91–2, 100–1, 108, 111–13, 118 Beirut 111–12 Berryman, John  17–18

168 Index Bishop, Elizabeth  93–4 Black aesthetics  23, 37 Americans  116–17, 121–2 bodies  19, 135–6, 143 Chicagoans 46–7 containment 27 epic heroine  36 families  12, 21, 30, 32, 38, 45–6, 53–4, 122–3, 128 fiction 53–4 homeowners  116, 124 homes 55 housing 18–19 liberation 28–9 movement 34 nationalists  51, 60 neighbourhood 59 poetic expression  28–9 poets  37, 50, 118 population  18, 27, 33–4 presses 50 soldiers 135 women  26, 37–40, 42–3, 121–2, 130–1 workers 12 writers  26, 135 Black Arts Movement  23–4 Bradstreet, Anne  15, 62–6 “Verses Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10, 1666”  2, 14 Braudel, Fernand  7–8 Broadside Press  50 Bronzeville  21, 26, 28, 30–4, 47, 49–50 Bronzevillians 52–4 Brooks, Gwendolyn  3, 13–16, 20–9, 31–4, 36, 42–3, 48, 51–3, 55, 60, 89 “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi”  43–4, 47 “A Man of the Middle Class”  47–8 Annie Allen  28–9, 35–8, 40–1 “An Old Apartment House”  25–6 A Primer for Blacks 54–5 A Street in Bronzeville  21, 27–32, 34–5, 39–41, 48–9 “A Sunset of the City”  47–8 “Beverly Hills, Chicago”  37–40, 138 “Boy Breaking Glass”  47 “Bronzevillians” 39–40

“Corner in a Portrait Gallery”  25 In the Mecca  28–30, 38–41, 44, 49–54 “Lights and Shadows”  25–6 Maud Martha  28–9, 39–41, 44, 48–9, 54 Report from Part One  28, 36–7, 45–6, 50 Selected Poems 26 “Selfish” 25–6 “Solace” 25–6 “The American Family Brown”  39–40, 54 “The Anniad”  35–40, 52–3, 55–6 “The Ballad of Edie Barrow”  50–1 “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed”  26, 45–7 The Bean Eaters  39–41, 43–4, 46–9, 53–4 “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till”  44 “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith”  34–5 “The Womanhood”  37–8 Brooks, Henry  25 Brooks, Richard R. W.  27–8 Brown, Frank London Trumbull Park 46–7 Brown, Jericho  116–20, 135–6, 143 “Duplex”  117–19, 139, 142 “Invention” 117–18 Please 117 The New Testament 117 The Tradition  117, 119–20 Bryant, Carolyn  43–4 Caedmon 90–1 Cambridge (MA)  59–60, 135 Cameron, Sharon  63 Campion, Robert  70 capitalism  4, 10–11, 13–14, 59, 64, 69, 76–8, 85–6, 120, 124–6, 141–2 capitalist economies 125 fantasia 84 regimes 11 society 77 world-system 7–8 CARES Act  123 Carew, Thomas  4–5, 94–5 “To Saxham”  100–1 Caribbean poets  15 Cash Management Account (CMA)  87–9 Cavafy, C. P.  100, 105 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung  137–8

Index  169 Cheng, Jennifer S.  18, 20–3, 115–17, 120–1, 133–4, 143 “Dear Blank Space: A Literary Narrative” 132 House A  131–2, 134–5, 142 “How to Build an American Home”  131, 134 “Letters to Mao”  131, 134–5 MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems 131 Chicago  16–17, 20–1, 26–31, 33–4, 37–9, 45–9, 52–3, 57–8, 89 Mecca Flats  25–6, 48–51 childhood  9, 11–13, 39–41, 63–5, 68–9, 76–7, 79, 91–2, 95, 100–1, 103–4, 127, 131 child-raising  59–60, 125 children  12–13, 32–4, 36–7, 44, 48–52, 54, 59–60, 63, 68–70, 81, 85–6, 89, 98, 103, 125–6, 132, 134, 140–1 China 133 Chinese immigrants  134–5 civil rights  2–4, 25–6, 39, 43–4 Civil Rights Act  12, 27 class  1–2, 6–7, 12, 16, 21–2, 26, 39–43, 48–9, 52–3, 80, 87–8, 100–1, 106–7, 109, 115, 118–20, 124, 126, 128–9, 141 classical epic 35 epideixis 9–10 genres 7–8 models 5 myths 100–1 sources 9 topoi  94–5, 100–1 Cleveland 57–8 Cliff, Michelle  59–60 Clifford, Margaret  6, 59–60 Coates, Ta-Nehisi  21, 122 colonialism  5, 10–11, 14–17, 21–2, 60–1, 77, 83–4, 139 commodities 87 composition  31–2, 43–9, 63, 82–3, 91–2, 99, 118, 131–2, 141 compositional method/ process  2–3, 98, 117 conceptual poems/poetics  116–17, 135, 137–8 confined space  62–5

confinement  21–2, 34, 62–3, 72–3, 75–6, 82–3 Conrad, Alfred  59–60, 78, 85–6 consciousness  17–18, 29, 37, 39–43, 48–9, 55, 59, 70–1, 74–6, 78–9, 83–4, 107, 121–2, 129–30, 135 conversations  3, 14, 23–4, 26, 31, 94–5, 117, 119–20, 129–30 Cooke-ham  6, 123 country-house  10–11, 13–14, 17–21, 66, 101, 113–14, 128, 142–3 country-house poems  4–17, 19–20, 22, 37–8, 53, 67, 93–100, 104, 109, 113, 116–17, 124–6, 128–9, 135–7, 141–2 couplets  14, 32–3, 36, 43–52, 65–6, 82–3, 109, 117, 119–20, 135–6 Cowper, William  9–10 “The Task”  9 Crabbe, George  9–10 Cre-Lit literary club  25–6 Cultural Revolution  133 Dante 95 De vulgari eloquentia 112 Divine Comedy 98–9 Dark Room Collective  135 Davenant, William Gondibert 35 De’Ath, Amy  125, 129 debt  21–3, 115–16, 122–6, 142 debt instruments  12, 113 Denton, Nancy A. American Apartheid  21–2, 57 Deren, Maya  94–5 Detroit  16, 33–4, 57–8 Dickens, Charles  10–11 Dickinson, Emily  2, 14, 57–8, 62–6, 70 dispossession  64, 116, 120–3 domestic activities 37 arias 109 bliss 101 dramas 95 economy 122 events 39 expansion 116 harmony 13 home 133

170 Index domestic (cont.) home-maker 57–8 housing  19, 100 inequality 83–4 interiors  23, 28–9, 45, 133, 135 life 68 norms 5 order  100–1, 109 poetics  22–3, 64, 116–17 scene  31–2, 65–6 service 107 spaces  22, 54–5, 96–7, 124 violence  139, 143 work  44, 110 domesticity  21–2, 71, 124–5 Donne, John  1, 103–4, 118, 135–6, 141–2 “The Sun Rising”  67–8 drama  25–6, 29, 40, 53–4, 63, 73, 104, 112–13 dreams  1, 9–10, 15, 17–18, 21–2, 29, 31–4, 36–7, 46, 50–2, 64, 74, 78, 85–6, 90–1, 98–9, 109, 121–2, 126–7, 132, 134–5, 142–4 Dubrow, Heather  4–5, 61 Dunbar, Paul Laurence “Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes”  31–2 “Not They Who Soar”  31–2 “Premonition” 31–2 duplex  117–22, 135–6, 143 economic anchor 20–1 aspects of housing  20 background 99–100 bill of rights  12, 27 climate 106–7 crisis  12–13, 144 exclusion 22–3 expansion 106 exploitation 90 expulsion 129–30 forces 121 freedom 26 growth  13–14, 106–7, 125 identity 33–4 institutions 144 investment 122 justice  11–12, 15

liberalization 106–7 policy 1–2 power 124–5 predation 21 pressures 121–2 profiles 34 realities 21–2 relations 7 security 27 status 89 system  115, 142 transformation  7–8, 106 transitions 16 value 112–13 economics  19, 29, 32–3, 116–17 economy  12–13, 22, 78–9, 87, 96–7, 100–1, 106, 115, 122–3 EEC  100, 106 Eliot, T. S.  32, 35, 74, 97 The Waste Land 98–9 Ellison, Ralph Invisible Man 53–4 epic  1, 3–4, 22, 35–9, 48–9, 52–6, 76, 89, 93–9, 101, 109, 116 essays  20–1, 62–4, 69, 80, 91–4, 117–18, 131–2, 134 ethical care  22–3, 116–17 dangers 119 dimension 97 position 25 ethics  4–5, 9, 91–2, 107 European Union  106 Evanston  21–3, 42–3, 59–60, 115–16, 121–3 eviction 124 experience  3, 17–19, 26, 28–32, 38, 47, 51–2, 59, 70–2, 92–4, 101, 103, 126, 128, 130–2, 134, 139–41, 144 exploitation  4–5, 7, 12–13, 15–18, 22–3, 30, 54, 60–1, 90, 107, 116–17 Fair Housing Act (FHA)  26–8, 88, 122–3 Fairfax, Henry  4–5, 98 families  12, 15–16, 21, 30, 32–4, 38, 41, 45–6, 53–4, 58, 68, 105, 122–5, 128, 131–3, 135, 143 family  11–12, 16, 22, 24, 28, 32–4, 43, 46–7, 59–61, 83–4, 98, 109–10, 133, 139 album  85, 97, 130–1

Index  171 dramas 10–11 dwelling  119–20, 143 home  21–2, 75–6, 80–1, 89 house  16–17, 57–9, 62, 64, 104, 117 life  1–2, 57, 84 memories 127 neighbourhoods 119–20 structure 78 trauma 85–6 unit 84 Faulkner, William Absalom, Absalom! 10–11 federal government  12, 27–8, 123 housing acts  28 housing authority  27 housing policy  3 judiciary 27 policy 26 Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation 88 Federici, Silvia  69–70 “Wages Against Housework”  69 feminism  23–4, 77, 85–6 critique 69 politics  23, 64–5 thought 69 feminists  57, 60–2, 70 finance  1–2, 22, 59, 87–116, 122–3 financial changes 89 crisis 125–6 empire 100 exploitation  17–18, 22–3 growth 104 hegemony 11 incentives 27–8 institutions 87–8 instruments  11–12, 87 markets  2, 22–3, 77–8, 87–8, 99–100, 109–10, 113 means 123 predation 123 speculation  96–7, 99–100 system 87 financialization  20, 22, 88–9, 122–3 Fisk University  26, 50 Flint, R. W.  57–8

foreclosure  22–3, 27–8, 58, 115–16, 121, 123–5, 127, 143–4 Fowler, Alastair  4–5 Fraiman, Susan  124–5 freedom  1, 3–4, 10–11, 20, 26–7, 29, 31–2, 42–3, 54–5, 65–6, 79–80, 89, 109, 129–30 French inheritance 110–11 libertine poems  11 madrigals 31–2 narrative form  36 poetry 90 French, Tana Broken Harbor 16 Friedan, Betty The Feminine Mystique 21–2 Frost, Robert  2 “Directive” 12–13 Geoffrey de Vinsauf  1 Gerrard, John “A Remonstrance”  9 ghazal  117–20, 135, 139 Gill, Jo  50 Glück, Louise  17–18 Golden Age  6, 12–13 Goldsby, Jacqueline  29–30 Goldsmith, Thomas  9–10 Graham, Jorie  17–18 “Dialogue (of the Imagination’s Fear)”  143 Great Migration  27, 30 Great Recession  115 Great Society  2 Greece  91, 100–1, 106–7 Greek language 108 lover  100–1, 107 poets 90 politics 106 population 106–7 Green, Henry Loving 10–11 Gregory, Lady  1 Hall, Donald  92–3 Hammer, Langdon  90–1, 97 Hansberry, Lorraine  3, 29 A Raisin in the Sun  33–4, 46–7, 53–4

172 Index Harper and Row  50 Hartman, Saidiya  44 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments  30–1, 126 Hass, Robert  91–2 Hayes, Terrance  37 Heaney, Seamus  1, 15–16 Hecht, Anthony  98, 113 Hegel, Georg  17 Heidegger, Martin  17 Herbert, George  135–6 Herrick, Robert  94 Hesiod Works and Days 100–1 Hibbard, G. R.  6–7 Hill, Christopher L.  6–7 Holiday, Billie  135–6 homeland 133 homeless  77–8, 81–2 homeowners  11–12, 19, 22–3, 54–5, 115–17, 122–4 homeownership  1–2, 11–12, 20–1, 23, 54–5, 89, 115–16, 121–3, 128, 135, 140 Home Owners’ Loan  41 Homestead Act  28 homesteaders 28 Hong Kong  131 Horace  5, 113 hospitality  4–7, 22–3, 98–9, 109, 116–17, 120–1, 131–2, 144 housework  32–3, 39–40, 59–60, 69–71, 74, 79–80, 83, 109–10, 125, 129 housing  1–3, 15, 18, 20–4, 26, 28–31, 33–4, 37–41, 43–4, 48–50, 53–6, 58–9, 85–6, 93–4, 115 acts  26–8, 88, 122–3 as a civil right  3–4, 12, 25–56 conditions  21, 51–2, 54 crisis  32, 46–7 discrimination  12, 20–1, 39–41, 46, 53, 120, 122 finance  22, 99–100 financialization 122–3 industry  11, 57 insecurity  9–10, 16, 26, 116, 123 legislation  12, 27 markets  11–12, 18–19, 27–30, 88–9, 100, 116–17 plots 39–43 policy  3, 19, 122–3, 128

practices 131 programs 122–3 security 46 segregation  45, 52–3 supply 30 valuation 11–12 Illinois Blighted Areas Redevelopment Act 34 Illinois Institute of Technology  50 immigration/immigrants  32, 116–17, 120–1, 124–6, 131–5, 138–41, 143–4 investment  11, 32, 57–9, 76, 87–9, 99–100, 106, 113–14, 122–3 Irish development  16 Irish poets  1, 15, 139 Ishiguro, Kazuo Remains of the Day 10–11 Italian design 113–14 epic 1 traditions of architecture  16–17 Jackson, Angela  50 Jackson, David  90, 94–8, 106–7, 114 Jacobs, Jane  17 James, Henry  53–4 A Portrait of a Lady 10–11 Jenkins, Hugh Feigned Commonwealths 10–11 Jewish families 58–9 heritage 80 roots 81 Jews  12, 85–6 Jonson, Ben  4–5, 9, 94–5, 114 “To Penshurst”  5–6, 8, 100–1, 113–14 Judt, Tony  1 Jullian, Philippe  90 Juvenal 113 Keene, John  135 Kim, Myung Mi  137–8 kitchenettes  1, 13–14, 17–21, 25–6, 28–9, 31–4, 36–43, 46–53, 55–6, 89, see also apartments kitchens  14–16, 21–2, 28–9, 41, 43–4, 47, 64–5, 69–76, 91, 118

Index  173 Lands Trust Company  59 Lanyer, Aemilia  4–5, 94 “A Description of Cooke-ham”  5–6, 124–5 Latin poets 113 script 141 works 90 Lawrence, Elizabeth  46–7 Lebanese civil war  109–11 Leong, Michael  137–8 Lewalski, Barbara  6, 53, 124–5 Lewis, Robin Coste Voyage of the Sable Venus 126 Lew, Walter K.  137–8 Lodeizen, Hans  111 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth  14 Lowell, Robert  17–18, 64–5 Life Studies 19 “Skunk Hour”  39 Lucan Pharsalia 35 Madhubuti, Haki  50 Mae, Fannie  1–2 Mahon, Derek  15–16 “Penshurst Place”  15 Mansfield, Katherine “Prelude” 10–11 Marlowe, Christopher  15–16 Marshall Plan  100, 106 Martial 113 Martin, Dawn Lundy Life in a Box is a Pretty Life 37 Marvell, Andrew  4–5, 9, 11, 94, 113–14 “Upon Appleton House”  5–8, 66–7, 98, 113–14 Marxism  18, 69, 85–6, 133–4 Marx, Karl Capital 69–70 Massey, Douglas S. American Apartheid  21–2, 57 Mayer, Bernadette  64 Melhem, D. H.  46–7 memory  1, 9, 12–13, 16–17, 34, 37, 47, 50, 70, 80, 83–6, 98–9, 102–3, 105, 117, 119, 131, 134–6, 138–9 Merrill, Charles  87, 98, 103–4 Merrill, James  15, 17, 20–1, 23–4, 54, 87, 89–92, 96–7, 101–4, 107–16, 119–22, 125–6

“Acoustical Chambers”  91–2, 100 “An Urban Convalescence”  100–9, 114 A Scattering of Salts  90, 106 “Christmas Tree”  92–3 “Coda: The Higher Keys”  95 Collected Poems 93–4 “Days of 1964”  100–9 Divine Comedies 94–5 “For Proust”  92–3 “Little Fallacy”  93, 109–13 “McKane’s Falls”  92–3 Mirabell: Books of Number  94–5, 98–9 “Night Laundry”  93, 109–10 Nights and Days  89, 100–1, 105 Recitative 91 Scripts for the Pageant  94–5, 106 “Self-Portrait in a Tyvek Windbreaker” 94 “The Black Swan”  92–3 “The Book of Ephraim”  94–7 “The Broken Home”  93, 98, 100–9, 113–14 The Changing Light at Sandover  22, 35, 90–101, 106–7, 112–15, 118 The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace 109–11 “The House”  114 The Inner Room 109–10 “The Orchard”  89 “The Thousand and Second Night” 92–3 “Three Chores”  109–10 Water Street  89–90, 100–1 Merrill Lynch  22, 87–9, 96–7, 116 metaphor  1, 12–13, 17, 29, 57–9, 61, 63–9, 73, 79–81, 85, 89, 92, 100, 102–5, 110, 114–15, 120, 135–7, 140–3 Milton, John  37, 96–9 Paradise Lost  7–8, 35, 95, 98 Mitchell, David Robert It Follows 16 Morrison, Toni Beloved 10–11 mortgages  2, 11–12, 21–2, 27–8, 87–9, 113–15, 122–6 Moten, Fred  44 Museum of Indian Arts and Culture  82 myths  3, 20, 35–7, 76, 84–5, 99–101, 106, 112–13

174 Index Nairobi 26 National Housing Act  26–7 New Critics  119 New Deal  2 New Jewish Agenda  77 New York  16, 59–60, 62, 90, 114–15, 143 Newark riots  50 newspapers/journals Chicago Defender  25, 50 Jacket2 137–8 New York Times 141–2 Saturday Evening Post 106–7 Nguyen, Diana Khoi “An Empty House is a Debt”  143 Ghost Of 143 Niedecker, Lorine  64 Notley, Alice  64 Nunappleton  4–5, 7 Obama, Barack  127 Olds, Sharon “Real Estate Ode”  143 Olson, Charles Maximus Poems 35 Organization of Black American Culture 50 Ouija board  20–1, 90–1, 94–7, 99 Penshurst  4–5, 7, 22, 97–8, 123, 144 phenomenology  18, 22–3, 72, 79, 124, 133–5, 140 Philadelphia  33–4, 57–8 Philip, M. NourbeSe Zong! 135 Pico, Tommy Nature Poem 120 Plato 90–1 Poe, Edgar Allan  10–11 Pomfret, John “The Choice”  8–9 Portugal 106 Pound, Ezra  35 poverty  9–12, 49–50, 81, 106, 121, 127 Proust, Marcel  15–16, 90 Pleasures and Days 100–1 Pulitzer Prize  26, 31–2, 117 race  6–7, 18, 23, 28–9, 39–42, 116–44 racial capitalism  14, 59

covenants 62 difference 11–12 discrimination  12, 21, 122 exclusion 27–8 minorities 123 norms 18–19 segregation 26 racialized body 135–6 house poems  120–1, 127 labor  125–6, 143 populations 120 urban landscape  52–3 violence  46–7, 143 racism  11–12, 16–18, 26, 28–9, 36, 48–9, 52–3, 58, 89, 131, 143–4 in housing  5, 12, 27–9, 42–3, 116, 128 see also zoning Ramachandran, Ayesha  7 Randall, Dudley  50 Rankine, Claudia  17–18 Citizen: An American Lyric  19, 120 real estate  3, 16, 18–20, 27–30, 45, 94, 122–4, 141–3 Reconstruction 123 Rich, Adrienne  11, 15–16, 20–1, 23–4, 32, 53–4, 57–86, 89, 92–3, 119–20, 138, 141 A Change of World  59–60, 65–7, 72 A Dream of a Common Language 64 “After Dark”  63–4 “A Marriage in the ‘Sixties”  74 “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”  60, 65–6, 82–4 “Calle Visión”  60, 64, 76–7, 82–3 “Coast to Coast”  71–2 “Contradictions: Tracking Poems”  60–1 “Diving into the Wreck”  73, 83–4 “Dream Before Waking”  74 “From an Old House in America”  60–1, 76–7 “In the Wake of Home”  59–60, 64, 76–7, 80–1 “Leaflets” 73 “Living in Sin”  66–9, 75 “Love in the Museum”  67 Necessities of Life 57–60 “Not Somewhere Else, But Here”  85–6 “Recorders in Italy”  67

Index  175 Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law 21–2, 29–30, 58–60, 63, 67, 70–3, 77–8, 85 “Sources”  76–7, 80 “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity” 80 “The Celebration in the Plaza”  67 The Diamond Cutters  59–60, 67–9 “The Fact of a Doorframe”  80 “The House at the Cascades”  66–9 “The Middle Aged”  66–8 “The Roadway”  67 “The Roofwalker”  69, 73–4 “The Tensions of Anne Bradstreet”  62 “The Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room” 65 “The Wave”  61 “Twenty-One Love Poems”  60–1, 76–7 “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson” 62 Your Native Land, Your Life 80 Rich, Arnold  58 Roosevelt, Franklin D. (FDR)  27, 29 Rose, Carol M.  27–8 Rossetti, Gabriel Dante  103–4 Rothstein, Richard  123 The Color of Law 119–20 Rotterdam 59–60 Said, Edward  4–5 Santa Cruz  59–60 Santa Fe  82 Satter, Beryl  27 Saxham  123, 144 Schiff, Robyn A Woman of Property 143 Seferis, George  90 segregation  11–12, 15–16, 19, 21–2, 25–30, 34, 38–40, 42–3, 45, 48–9, 52–4, 57–8, 62, 76, 122–3, 128, 131, 140–1 Sharif, Solmaz Look 120 Shelley, Percy Bysshe “Ode to the West Wind”  104 Shockley, Evie  36–7 Sidney, Robert  4–5 slavery/slaves  10–11, 52, 59–61, 66, 78–9, 120–1, 124–8, 143–4 Smith, Danez Don’t Call Us Dead 120

Smith, Tracy K.  22–3, 115–17, 120–1, 136, 143 “Ash”  135–7, 142 Wade in the Water 135 Soldier, Layli Long Whereas 120 Solomon, Samuel  125–6 sonnets  1, 21–2, 29–30, 32–4, 37–9, 43, 48–50, 52–5, 76, 98–9, 103–5, 107, 117–20, 126, 135–7, 139, 143 South Asian immigrants  138, 141 Spenser, Edmund  36 “Epithalamion” 7–8 Spiegelman, Willard  70 Stevens, Wallace  2, 13–14, 94–5 “Postcard from a Volcano”  12–13 “The Auroras of Autumn”  12–13 Stonington  90, 94–7 suburban areas 58 development  65, 128, 141 domestic 75–6 dramas 69 estate 16–17 house poems  60–1, 65, 70–1 house/housing  21–2, 57, 59–60, 73, 75–6, 138 housewife  59–60, 71 images 64–5 landscapes  53–4, 60 life 138 neighbourhoods  67, 139 pullulation 139 streets 81 suburbanization 57–9 suburbs  20–2, 57–87, 138, 141 Supreme Court  3, 12, 26–8, 62, 88 Supreme Court of Michigan  53 Tanizaki, Junichiro Praise of Shadows 133 Tasso 36 Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta Race for Profit  11–12, 122 Teasdale, Sara “Roundel” 31–2 Terkel, Studs  45–6 Texas 131 Third World Press  50

176 Index Till, Emmett  39, 43–5 Trethewey, Natasha  135 Tsarouchis, Yannis  106–7 United Kingdom  121 United Provinces  121 University of Buffalo  137–8 urban communities 11–12 core  122, 126 crisis 11 estate 16–17 families 12 housing  21–2, 26, 53–4, 58 landscapes 52–4 planning 17 population  33–4, 53–4 renewal  34, 100, 102–3 settings  16, 59–60 Vendler, Helen  62 Victor, Divya  22–3, 116–17, 120–1, 139, 141 Curb 138–42 “Estates: Last Offices Concerning the Curbs of the Body”  140 Kith 137–8 Natural Subjects 137–8 “Since You Asked”  140 Things to Do with Your Mouth 137–8 Unsub 137–8 Virgil 5 Aeneid 35 Walcott, Derek  15–16 “Ruins of a Great House”  15 Wall of Respect  26, 55–6 Wallschlaeger, Nikki  20–1, 23, 115–17, 120–2, 143 “Bronze House”  129–30 “Brown House”  127 “Cerulean Blue House”  129 Crawlspace 126

Houses  126–32, 135, 138, 142 “My House”  130 “Pine Green House”  129 “Sable House”  127 “Silver House”  127 “Taupe House”  128 “White House”  127–8 Walpole, Horace  10–11 Ward, Theodore  29 Big White Fog 46–7 Weather Underground  101 West Barnet  59–60, 76–7, 82 Whitehead, Colson Harlem Shuffle 16 Whitman, Walt  75–6 Leaves of Grass 141 Whittier, John Greenleaf  14 “Snow-Bound” 2 Wilbur, Richard  92–3 Williams, Raymond  4–5, 12–13 The Country and the City 6–7 Williams, William Carlos  33–4 Wollstonecraft, Mary  70 Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse 10–11 Wordsworth, William  1 “Ruined Cottage”  9–10 The Prelude 98–9 World War I  10–11 World War II  1–4, 19–22, 40–1, 50, 53–5, 62, 76, 115 Wright, Richard  92–3 Native Son 53–4 Twelve Million Black Voices 32 Wroth, Mary  135–6 Yale Younger Poets Award  57–8 Yeats, W. B.  1, 66–7, 74 “Easter 1916”  65 “The Second Coming”  139 Young, Kevin  135 zoning  27–8, 52, 58–9, 119–20, 143