The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry 9781350062504, 9781350062535, 9781350062528

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY Edited by Craig Svonkin and Steven Gould Axelrod

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Craig Svonkin, Steven Gould Axelrod, and contributors, 2023 The editors and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Paintings in Browns and Rusts and Reds, Laura Eve Borenstein. Photograph by Karla Castañeda. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Svonkin, Craig, editor. | Axelrod, Steven Gould, 1944– editor. Title: The Bloomsbury handbook of contemporary American poetry / edited by Craig Svonkin and Steven Gould Axelrod. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. | Series: Bloomsbury handbooks | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “With chapters written by leading scholars such as Steven Gould Axelrod, Cary Nelson, Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Marjorie Perloff, this comprehensive Handbook explores the full range and diversity of poetry and criticism in 21st-century America. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry covers such topics as: · Major histories and genealogies of post-war poetry - from the language poets and the Black Arts Movement to New York school and the Beats · Poetry, identity and community - from African American, Chicana/o and Native American poetry to Queer verse and the poetics of disability · Key genres and forms - including digital, visual, documentary and children’s poetry · Central critical themes - economics, publishing, popular culture, ecopoetics, translation and biography The book also includes an interview section in which major contemporary poets such as Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein and Claudia Rankine reflect on the craft and value of poetry today”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022027033 | ISBN 9781350062504 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350351929 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350062511 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350062528 (epub) | ISBN 9781350062535 Subjects: LCSH: American poetry–20th century–History and criticism. | American poetry–21st century–History and criticism. | Poets, American–20th century–Interviews. | Poets, American–21st century–Interviews. Classification: LCC PS613 B583 2023 | DDC 813/.54--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027033 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6250-4 ePDF: 978-1-3500-6252-8 eBook: 978-1-3500-6251-1 Series: Bloomsbury Handbooks Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com ​ ​ and sign up for our newsletters.

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The editors dedicate their part of this book to the blessed memory of their parents, Paula and Stanley Svonkin and Martha and Bernard Axelrod

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CONTENTS

A cknowledgments  

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Introduction  Craig Svonkin and Steven Gould Axelrod

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Part One  Roots and Branches of the Contemporary 1. A Conversation with Marjorie Perloff  Susan McCabe, Brian Reed, and Steven Gould Axelrod

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2. The Feminist Poetry Movement in America  Bethany Hicok

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3. American Poetry and War  Cary Nelson

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4. Experimental Asian American Poetry  Josephine Nock-Hee Park

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5. Undisciplined Writing: Postwar Prose Poetry  Michel Delville

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6. Lowell’s Turtles  Stephanie Burt

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7. Subjectivity and Identity in New York School Poetry  Terence Diggory

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8. Jewish American Poetry and the Late Twentieth-Century Literary Canon  Hilene Flanzbaum

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9. The Autobiographical Prose of Poets  Grzegorz Kosc

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10. Queer Poetry after 1945  Laura Westengard

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11. From Shingled Hippo to Gay Unicorn: Self-Othering in Bob Kaufman and Other Beats 139 Craig Svonkin

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12. The National Anthology Wars and West Coast Anthologies  Bill Mohr

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13. The Black Art of Confession  Steven Gould Axelrod

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14. Binding Nation-States: Poetry Anthologies of Hawai‘i, 1966–2018  Stanley Orr

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15. The Poetics of Chicana Daughterhood: Cherríe Moraga and Lorna Dee Cervantes  Lisette Ordovica Lasater

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Part Two  Interviews with Poets 16. Mitsuye Yamada  Steven Gould Axelrod, Craig Svonkin, and Traise Yamamoto

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17. Marilyn Nelson  Craig Svonkin

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18. Rae Armantrout  Steven Gould Axelrod and Craig Svonkin

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19. Lorna Dee Cervantes  Steven Gould Axelrod and Craig Svonkin

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20. Marilyn Chin  Steven Gould Axelrod and Craig Svonkin

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21. Geof Huth  Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.

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22. Juan Delgado  Craig Svonkin

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23. Claudia Rankine  Andrew Lyndon Knighton

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24. Crisosto Apache  Craig Svonkin and Steven Gould Axelrod

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25. Joshua Jennifer Espinoza  Steven Gould Axelrod and Craig Svonkin

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Part Three  The Contemporary Moment 26. A Conversation with Stephanie Burt  Craig Svonkin and Steven Gould Axelrod

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Contents

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27. Ecopoetics: In and against the American Grain  James McCorkle

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28. Economies of Scale: Contemporary Poetry and the Marketplace  Ann Keniston

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29. Contemporary Children’s Poetry: A Colloquy  Craig Svonkin, Mike Cadden, Richard Flynn, Michael Heyman, Krystal Howard, Michael Joseph, JonArno Lawson, Lissa Paul, and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.

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30. Multilingual American Poetry and Poetics  Maria Lauret

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31. Claiming Their Place: Contemporary Arab American Poetry and Poetics  Richard Hishmeh

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32. The Rise of Award-Winning Black Poets  Howard Rambsy II

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33. The Fourth Wave in Native American Poetics  Erika T. Wurth

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34. Recent Trends in Jewish American Poetry  Norman Finkelstein

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35. What Is the Queer Confessional?  Jan Maramot Rodil

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36. Poetry Translation and Poet-Translators  Brian Reed

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37. Prosthetic Poetics: Contemporary Poetry of Disability  Jessica Lewis Luck

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38. Data Dump: Poetry and Information in the Twenty-First Century  Jeffrey Gray

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L ist of C ontributors   I ndex

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors wish to thank everyone at Bloomsbury who was so supportive of our project, including David Avital, Ben Doyle, Laura Cope, Amy Brownbridge, and Saranya Manohar. Thanks go out to all of our very patient contributors who gracefully withstood our pandemiccaused production slowdowns. Particular thanks to Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Burt, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Marilyn Chin, Juan Delgado, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Jeffrey Gray, Geof Huth, Andrew Lyndon Knighton, Susan McCabe, Marilyn Nelson, Stanley Orr, Marjorie Perloff, Claudia Rankine, Brian Reed, Joseph T. Thomas, Jr., Mitsuye Yamada, and her daughter Hedi Mouchard. We wish to thank our research assistants: Zander Allport, Raymond Hong Jig Rim, Sonia Christensen, Maggie Svonkin, and Natasha McCone. Craig wishes to thank David John Boyd, Russell McDermott, Kathryn Stevenson, Paula Svonkin, and Jeanine Svonkin, for their advice and support. Steve wishes to thank Rise Axelrod for her invaluable advice and support. We wish to thank Laura Eve Borenstein for permission to use her “Painting in Browns and Rusts and Reds” as the cover image of our book. We also thank Karla Castañeda for her photograph of the painting.

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Introduction CRAIG SVONKIN AND STEVEN GOULD AXELROD

Attempting to design a Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry raises quite a few questions. First, how to organize the collection: what to include and what to exclude; which poets, poems, and perspectives to highlight; and how to decide those questions. Should the book attempt to trace a master narrative, a totalizing account of the progress of poetry in this era? Or should it settle for a metanarrative, a survey of preexistent accounts? We found ourselves convinced that neither of those approaches would produce the generative and interesting book we were hoping for. In a culturally and intellectually diverse society like the United States, influenced so deeply by the past and by other regions and world systems, we are doubtful that any single narrative of what has happened and is happening makes sense. This book, therefore, offers a series of partial views that don’t necessarily harmonize or add up. Each view reflects a particular gaze from a particular vantage point. Each essay takes its place amid the varied viewpoints of the other highly informed essays, each one causing what Elizabeth Bishop called “an active / displacement in perspective” (36). Perhaps our essays do keep mentioning certain key poems and highly recognized poets. If this were the Academy Awards, perhaps we would be handing out Oscars to certain stellar recipients. But of course, like any Academy Awards or Pulitzer Prize ceremony, we’d then be slighting many amazing poems and poets, leaving us with an acrid taste in the mouth. And nobody wants that. We have likewise chosen to reject a Handbook that aspires to tell an authoritative or complete story. As Henry James observed in his Notebooks, “the whole of anything is never told” (18). Instead this book highlights a multitude of contradictory poems and oeuvres, which find their way to the spotlight not quite randomly, but with a sense of contingency. We give you only parts of a story the whole of which can never be told. Our contributors would probably admit the wisdom of Anthony Bourdain’s remark, “I do my best; I look, I listen, but in the end I know it’s my story.” We hope we are providing useful ways into the vast, pleasurable, provoking, and consoling ocean of recent and contemporary American poetry. We wanted this Handbook to be a whale of a book, and moreover to be what Melville called a “Loose-Fish”—not one with clear labels but one that reflects the slippery nature of poetry, reading, and reality itself. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari define a minor literature as “that which a minority constructs within a major language” (Kafka 16). They regard Franz Kafka as exemplary because of his inability to fit into the dominant German linguistic culture of his time, and they celebrate Kafka’s contested, contesting, and always liminal and impossible kind of writing. Minor literature in this sense is about flight and escape, about the way some texts can elude “judgment, flee and become destratified, decoded, deterritorialized” (Thousand 40). These are practices that Deleuze and Guattari’s editor, Robert Brinkley, calls “particularly crucial for minorities who want to remain minorities and affirm

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perspectives that are not those of the culture they inhabit” (13). Deleuze and Guattari go on to argue, “There is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor” (Kafka 26). So, to adapt their concept of a minor literature to our purpose, we wanted a Handbook that was broad enough to welcome many “minor” or outsider poets, poems, and perspectives. We wanted a Handbook that was more rhizomatic than genealogical. The rhizome, as Deleuze and Guattari explain, is heterogeneous, multiple, and resists the unidirectional: “Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” (Thousand 7). And Deleuze and Guattari view American literature as particularly rhizomatic rather than linear or branching: “Everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome” (Thousand 19). Yes, we wanted a rhizome, not a family tree of a Handbook; a Handbook that would go a bit crazy and include offshoots and side paths, knowing that one person’s major poetry is another’s minor, and vice versa. And so the binding idea of a Handbook that certified the “best” or the “most significant” texts in contemporary American poetry had to go. As Emory Elliott pointed out in his introduction to Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age: “The critic in judgment who assumes that there are universal standards of beauty—that ‘we all recognize a beautiful face or a great poem when we see one’—will be likely to erase or subordinate an array of human differences and forms of creative expression as being inferior to a select few” (3). Harryette Mullen put the idea more bluntly: “When I think colored someone bleeds” (52). If the essays here explore what is valuable in contemporary American poetics, they do so in a pluralistic, multicultural, multi-perspectival context. And while we are interested in a more pluralistic aesthetics, we do not want to privilege aesthetics over history and culture, for doing so ignores the mutual entanglement of all three. As Jane Tompkins has written, “When classic texts are seen not as the ineffable products of genius but as the bearers of a set of national, social, economic, institutional, and professional interests, then their domination of the critical scene seems less the result of their indisputable excellence than the product of historical contingencies” (xii). So we worked to design a Handbook that engaged with questions of historical contingencies. And while we would like to consider how an attention to a pluralistic, diverse aesthetics might bring out new facets of a multitude of poems from a variety of poets, we agree that one cannot disengage aesthetic judgment from historical and cultural power dynamics. Therefore, we cannot find much use in Matthew Arnold’s aging dictum that the study of literature and culture should be the study of “the best which has been thought and said” (viii). Instead, we accept Wei Chee Dimock’s more contemporary invitation “to rethink the shape of literature against the history and habitat of the human species” (6). Part One of this Handbook addresses the new beginnings made in the latter half of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty-first—and the new beginnings made by individual poets and movements. Part One assumes that poetic history, like a single poem, is a “labyrinth of linkages” (Victor Shklovsky, quoted in Perloff 13). Here you find a range of approaches to that history, each orthogonal to the others. We begin with a wide-scale conversation with Marjorie Perloff. We then present essays that look at poetry from ethnic perspectives and that examine innovative poetic movements. We also present essays that examine queer poetry, war poetry, feminist poetry, multilingual poetry, and issues of genre and collection. And finally, narrowing the focus, one essay provides what Perloff might call “a super close reading” (xii) or a “micropoetics” of a single image by a single poet (Robert Lowell). Part Two of this Handbook is devoted to interviews with poets. Many of the poets are well known and much honored, while others may be emerging. All provide insights into their poetic

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Introduction

process and pursuit. Although a divergence of cultural contexts is on display, each poet illuminates and elucidates the interior life of poetry. Part Three includes essays that focus on twenty-first-century poems and aesthetic developments. Stephanie Burt starts us off this time with another wide-ranging conversation. Then essayists turn to some of the most significant topics of our time, including economics, ecology, globalism, and data and information. Other essays focus on the poetry that is flowering within ethnic, queer, and disabled communities—communities that are “minor” in the Deleuze and Guattarian sense of being revolutionary. We have aimed above all to produce a Handbook that wouldn’t, as Cole Porter said, “fence us in” (180). We sought a collection that welcomes us into “the light of lost words” (Ashbery 19) and into the language that “shakes the silence of memory” (Abinader 471). We hope you find this book to be a welcoming invitation to read, to ponder, and to be astonished by poetry.

WORKS CITED Abinader, Elmaz. “In the Country of My Dreams” (1999). The New Anthology of American Poetry, Volume 3, ed. Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano, Rutgers University Press, 2012, pp. 469–71. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Oxford University Press, [1869] 2011. Ashbery, John. “The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers.” The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry, Ecco Press, 1997, pp. 18–19. Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems: 1927–1979. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. Bourdain, Anthony. Parts Unknown. CNN Season 12, Episode 1: “Kenya.” Brinkley, Robert. “Editor’s Note” to “What Is a Minor Literature” by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Mississippi Review, vol. 11, no. 3 (Winter/Spring 1983), pp. 13–33. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan. University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizopohrenia, 2nd ed., trans. Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton University Press, 2006. Elliott, Emory. Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Oxford University Press, 2002. James, Henry. Notebooks, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth Murdock. George Braziller, 1955. Melville, Herman. Moby Dick, ­chapter 89. Norton, [1851] 2017. Mullen, Harryette. Sleeping with the Dictionary. University of California Press, 2002. Perloff, Marjorie. Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics. University of Chicago Press, 2021. Porter, Cole. “Don’t Fence Me In” (1944). The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, ed. Robert Kimball, Knopf, 1983, p. 180. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. Oxford University Press, 1986.

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PART ONE

Roots and Branches of the Contemporary

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CHAPTER ONE

A Conversation with Marjorie Perloff SUSAN MCCABE, BRIAN REED, AND STEVEN GOULD AXELROD

Marjorie Perloff is one of the most distinguished and prolific scholars of modern and contemporary American poetry in the world. She is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University and Florence Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. Among her books on contemporary American poetry are The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell (1973), Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters (1977), The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981), Poetic License (1990), Radical Artifice (1991), The Dance of the Intellect (1996), Poetry On and Off the Page (1998), Differentials (2004), Unoriginal Genius (2010), Poetics in a New Key (2013), and Infrathin (2021). The edited conversation presented below originally took place at the 2014 Riverside, California conference of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA). This is its first appearance in print. Axelrod: The person that we are all here to hear talk is Marjorie Perloff, who I think is the greatest scholar of American poetry. I think most people would say that, Marjorie, except your rivals. Marjorie has changed the discourse about poetry over the last forty years, introducing the avant-garde as central to the field; championing the new; employing subtle and illuminating close reading at a time when many others were not doing close reading; and bringing poetry into conversation with the visual arts, philosophy, culture, history, and European, Canadian, and Brazilian literature. I think her work seeks to provoke and inspire, bravely taking stands and being individual when many scholars exemplify somewhat herd-like behavior. Marjorie does not. McCabe: In 2013 Marjorie wrote “Take Five” in Poetry magazine. Some of you may have seen it. And it’s really a take on Pound’s “Don’ts” that was always sent as part of a rejection letter, as far as I recall, to poets who were not accepted. He would send that to suggest that incorporating a little foreign language here and there might help you, and that you don’t need to necessarily have meaning tied to the word. The word itself is more important. So in any case, “Take Five” is your kind of revision of Pound, wouldn’t you say, Marjorie? Perloff: For Poetry Don Share, the editor, organized a whole series of these “A Few Don’ts.” It was designed for the anniversary not of The ABC of Reading but for 1914, the year Pound wrote “A Few Don’ts.” Vanessa Place had a piece before I did, and there were four or five others. They asked me, would you like to do “A Few Don’ts,” so I said yes in honor of Pound. I really sort of did a riff on Pound.

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McCabe: Right, right. So Brian and I thought we wanted to address a few of the don’ts, and see how we might sort of expand or discuss or see whether Marjorie still agrees with herself or is wanting to be different from herself. Reed: The reason we thought this was an interesting place to start is this is one of the closest things that Marjorie has done to a manifesto. A distillation of a set of points or frustrations, advice, and it is a valuable place to spin off from. So if we don’t get through all five, that doesn’t matter. It just is an interesting start. McCabe: Brian, I think you wanted to start with two, right? I want to do three and five, but we can share them, of course. Two and four, you were interested in that. Reed: I’ll start with two because it’s “don’t take yourself so seriously,” which I think is good advice. You write: Don’t take yourself so seriously. In the age of social networks, of endless information and misinformation, “sensitivity” and the “true voice of feeling” have become the most available of commodities. Remember that, as Wallace Stevens put it, “Life is a bitter aspic. We are not / at the center of a diamond.”1 McCabe: Yeah, and one of my big questions for Marjorie is just how do we address this? Where is the place for feeling and emotion within this manifesto? Or is there a place for it? Perloff: I think so. I have a whole essay in press on conceptual poetry and emotion in response to Cal Bedient’s writing, in the Boston Review, that there’s no emotion in, say, the poetry of Christian Bök. I tried to answer that, and certainly I think emotion is very important.     I’ve written a great deal about Rimbaud, and nobody is more emotional than he is. But he arouses emotion in the reader; he does not write confessionally at all. And the corollary, as I said, is don’t take yourself so seriously, have a sense of humor. I talk about this in my new book [Edge of Irony] because the Austrians were so ironic. I mean a really deep irony. I have a very hard time with victim poetry, the sort of poetry that claims “I am the only one who understands! Nobody else understands, but I know.” Denise Levertov had her fight with Robert Duncan about precisely this topic, the Vietnam War. And the things Robert Duncan said to her, I think, were so very true: that she was always presenting herself as the innocent person who has the right attitude toward war, whereas everybody else has the wrong attitude. McCabe: I see, I see. Perloff: And Levertov’s view was that you have to “teach” them, and I find that very annoying because, as I say, we’re all in part implicated in the dominant culture. Nobody is not part of this capitalist culture, so I deplore the current endless attacks where whole essays are written just using that word. Capitalism. I don’t let people use that word without modifiers in my class. It’s really much too vague. The whole world is capitalist. So what do you mean by capitalists? You mean Russian capitalism? That’s very different from American capitalism. Or do you mean Chinese capitalism? You know, where in the world today isn’t there capitalism?    If you pick up American Poetry Review, pick up anything, you will find these endless sorts of poems implying “I’m so sensitive,” and “I hate capitalism.” But those people are on Facebook.

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Perloff Marjorie. “Take Five.” Poetry. Vol. 202, no.1 (April 2013), pp. 41–3. This quotation is from page 43.

A Conversation with Marjorie Perloff

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That’s pretty capitalist. You know you can’t have it both ways. You do use the internet and use Facebook, and those things would never have been invented had it not been for capitalism. Then they imply, “I am on the outside looking in.” One of the things I’ve always loved about Sylvia Plath—“Viciousness in the kitchen! / The potatoes hiss,” or “What a thrill— / My thumb instead of an onion”—is that she could look at herself and realize she was just part of so many of the things that she was criticizing. That was true of a poet like Robert Lowell, too. You know it wasn’t always the case that poets claimed to be the “good people,” whereas everyone else was wrong and needed to be corrected. But today it’s ubiquitous: everyone is so sensitive! It’s terribly hard to write good war poetry, because one should not evade the complexity of taking more than one side. There isn’t one easy answer. Look at that great war poem, Yeats’s “Easter, 1916.” In the midst of celebrating the heroes of the revolutionary Easter Rising—“MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse”—a catalogue that can make me cry when I recite it— suddenly the poet pauses and asks, “Was it needless death after all? / For England may keep faith …” That’s a great poem. McCabe: I see. Perloff: But as far as emotion goes, John Cage was always asked that question, and he said: What makes you think I’m not interested in emotion? But it might be the emotion of the reader.    So if you think of the old notions of ethos and pathos. The ethical argument, Aristotle would say, is presenting yourself in a certain light, as, for example, Philip Sidney does in “Astrophel and Stella.” And the pathetic argument is the appeal to the reader and the appeal to an audience, as in John Donne’s sonnets and sermons. And it’s amazing what people can do with the ethical and pathetic arguments. Think of Baudelaire, who is to me the greatest modernist poet if I had to name one, and he is writing in the 1850s. Baudelaire was certainly a very lyric poet, and he was certainly very emotional. But he was just as hard on himself as he was on anybody else. And that I think is the key. McCabe: Not taking yourself seriously. Perloff: I’m not only saying not to take yourself seriously but also to realize that there is complicity. Complicity, you know, and how one is oneself just as much to blame as are those others. McCabe: I think part of the controversy sometimes revolves around—you hear many people citing in graduate schools all over the world, oh we’ve done away with the quote “lyric I” unquote. So I just wanted to give you a chance to say that is really not what you mean. Perloff: No, I don’t at all. Obviously, most countries have lyric poetry, and I love lyric poetry. And I come out of a German tradition, greater than Baudelaire, the great lyric poetry of Goethe and Heine, there, but, corny as it sounds, the poet has to find an objective correlative, the set of words or images that immediately evoke that emotion without direct statement. Like the “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells” in “Prufrock.” In other words, instead of saying, I’m so sad since my Uncle Harry died or whatever, you show the feeling. It’s the old show versus tell dichotomy, which I know is considered very old hat now. But I still believe in it. Reed: It’s one of the things that Eliot talks about, that you used to be able to feel a thought. McCabe: And the dissociation of sensibility. Reed: But it seems that in so much of your own work you’re interested in logopoeia, the play of the intellect as Pound defines it. But as an experience or the excitement I make, there’s all sorts of ethics and emotions that accompany the wit or the intelligence.

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Perloff: I think that’s absolutely true, but you put it better than I could. I think it’s true that certainly thinking is very exciting too, and it is emotional in a way. I’ve never felt that I would make any argument against emotion. Obviously emotion is there, although it’s very hard to define affect. But of course it’s very important that you have that in all kinds of work. I think of [Christian] Bök’s essays, for instance. [Roland] Barthes was one of my favorite critics, who now is not as much read even though he really should be. And the essays themselves were quite emotional, and you could certainly always see character, and I would argue that, for instance, when people accuse, oh any of the conceptual writers, let’s say Kenneth Goldsmith, of not having emotion, I think that is unfair. It’s just that the emotion is not stated in his own words. It’s stated in other people’s words, but I read out loud to somebody, the piece Kenneth wrote about 9/11. That piece I really recommend in his book Seven Disasters, the piece about the radio broadcasters and television broadcasters living through the event. You live through 9/11 in that piece, and you can just see that terror, and I think the appropriated text, carefully tweaked, does contain a great deal of feeling. It’s just not specified in certain ways. And that’s what lyric does, if you think of earlier lyric, if you think of the metaphysical lyric, let’s say Herbert, Donne, and so forth, but when I think of Greek lyric with nature, there was never anything directly personal. McCabe: Right, right. Perloff: That started with Donne, and then with the Confessionals, and it was an interesting experiment, and I still, you know, love that poetry. But in the wake of Confessionalism, in the ’60s you got a lot of—that’s not my idea, particularly—the terrible side of confessionalism. But it’s interesting how many people have imitated Frank O’Hara too. After all, his poetry is certainly lyric, and it’s very personal. McCabe: Yeah, yeah. Very personal poems. Perloff: Yeah, in a certain way. It is, and it isn’t. You know, one of the O’Hara poems I worked on for an essay on Lunch Poems is “Naphtha.” It begins, “Ah Jean Dubuffet / when you think of him.” And it’s the poem that ends with the line, “I am ashamed of my century / … / but I have to smile.” Or something like that. And it’s the poem that has the passage, “how are you feeling in ancient September / … / you were made in the image of god.” No, “I was not / I was made in the image of a sissy truck-driver.” It is so funny, but O’Hara does not belabor the point. He’s very down-to-earth. He doesn’t write, “you are made in the image of God,” but “you were made in the image of god,” which of course means something else. It isn’t really that much of a compliment. It’s just stating a fact in a way, you see. That’s why I think you have to watch every word. “You were made in the image of god” is very different from “you are made in the image of a god,” or “of God,” right? You see. And so he plays with that. No, “I was not / I was made in the image of a sissy truck driver.” And at that time you still couldn’t be overt about gay things. He usually is, but in a certain funny and self-deprecating way, and the picture of his century is just hilarious because, in fact, he has all these awful things happening in that century.     You know, I’m ashamed of my century, but I have to smile, yeah? You know, I mean, I love that mood. I just like this, but anyway. McCabe: Yes, yes, yes. In an earlier session, someone cited Vendler’s comment or definition of the lyric as being able to go into the innermost chamber of another person’s life. I think what that quote leaves out is this whole notion that it’s not just a person living in a vacuum having emotions. There’s a context.

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Perloff: Yeah. McCabe: And so it fits in with your historical approach as well. Well, I just wanted to disabuse us of this notion that you were sort of anti-lyric or anti-emotion. Perloff: Or, for example, George Oppen is a poet who I think is very emotional and in a really heartbreaking way. For example, you have [in “Of Being Numerous”]:    There can be a brick    In a brick wall    …    Here is the brick, it was waiting    Here when you were born         Mary-Anne.    There are so many bricks, Mary-Anne. Look at the line breaks! You can just see how isolated he is and how lonely. And it’s as if something really bad has happened, and he’s very isolated. And I find that very heartbreaking. Very moving. Lorine Niedecker is another poet who is very moving in that way but without saying too much. Reed: Susan and I were talking about a figure like George Herbert. His poetry depends a great deal on feelings associated with faith and belief, and you can be completely an atheist and sit down and read those poems and be profoundly moved. Perloff: I love it. I think they’re just beautiful. How does that one poem go, the one with the windows. How does it begin? I’m trying to remember the first line of that poem, “The Windows.” I always use that as an example:    Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?    He is a brittle crazy glass;    Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford    …    To be a window, through thy grace. McCabe: Beautiful. Perloff: It’s such a beautiful poem. “Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?” That’s the first line. And the language and rhythm makes it comes across as—I hate to use the word— wholly sincere. No words are wasted, and the intimate address to the Lord is so convincing. McCabe: It has to have a sense of urgency. Perloff: It has to have urgency. Reed: You know there’s a statement that is not in your list of five don’ts, but it’s a positive assertion: “The slightest loss of attention leads to death.” Perloff: Yes, from Frank O’Hara. And I think he got it from Rilke. McCabe: Really? Perloff: Yeah, I think that is in one of Rilke’s early poems. Attention is everything. And Henry James’s “Try to be one of those on whom nothing is ever lost,” right? McCabe: Yeah. I love that quote. I want to put that on my office door. Perloff: It’s a great sentence. Try to be someone on whom nothing is ever lost. So there’s the idea of real attentiveness. A wonderful example is Yeats’s “Wild Swans at Coole,” where in the first

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draft I think it was, the poem begins, “Now I am here walking among these swans.” And he kept that line in draft after draft, with the “I,” at the center, and finally Yeats crosses out the whole line and replaces it with “The trees are in their autumn beauty / The woodland paths are dry,” and realizes he must get away from the extreme subjectivity of the first draft. And then of course the “I” does come in a little later. But he tried to distance it, and that is a wonderful thing to do. Axelrod: How do you reconcile that kind of writing, using really concentrated emotions, with Frank O’Hara, where it feels like … Perloff: I think it’s the language and rhythm—it looks casual, but it isn’t. Axelrod: Do you? Whatever is happening on the street as he’s walking by? Perloff: Well yeah, but look at the things he’s putting in. Take a poem like “A Step Away from Them.” O’Hara will write “I look / at bargains in wristwatches.” The whole poem, “A Step Away from Them,” is about time. It’s all about the passage of time: all the various deaths like Jackson Pollock’s. Do you think it’s a coincidence, after the meditation about time and death, that it’s wristwatches and not some other product he sees in shop windows? McCabe: Ties. Axelrod: Shoes. Perloff: Yeah, ties or shoes or whatever. So I think he’s very purposeful—though not always. You know he wrote some less good things, but I think “Lana Turner has collapsed!”—that is a great poem. And people think, well anybody can write that. But no. I actually looked that up. This is where scholarship comes in, as Susan said. But I actually looked it up, and it’s very interesting, Lana Turner, when he wrote that poem, was already a has-been. She was not the Lana Turner of The Postman Always Rings Twice. McCabe: Oh. Perloff: She was the Lana Turner whose daughter had tried to kill her lover Johnny Stompanato. Her daughter was fourteen years old. Cheryl. And she did kill him. I shouldn’t say tried, she killed Johnny Stompanato. So the “collapse” is not just silly. McCabe: At the Formosa Cafe. Perloff: So Lana Turner had had a lot of trouble. This is after that, and she was still very well known. But she was no longer the icon she had been. When the poet says “I was trotting along,” he doesn’t say I was running along or I was walking along. “I was trotting along” sounds so silly. You know. There I am trotting along, and it’s snowing and hailing, but hail hits you on the head so it wasn’t really hailing. And then you get that wonderful part. There is no snow in California. There is no hail in Hollywood. “I have been to lots of parties / and acted perfectly disgraceful / but I never actually collapsed / oh Lana Turner we love you get up.” I say that to people all the time because it has that wonderfully absurd mood. The headline is so absurd: “Lana Turner has collapsed!” But in a way it just fits on all grounds, you know. But it is Lana Turner, so I think he chose this particular movie star very carefully. It’s a very funny poem but sad too. McCabe: And it does seem inevitable. It does have that inevitability feel to it. Reed: And it’s a poem where the title is repeated twice. The first part is rampant enjambment that is also very controlled. Perloff: Very controlled. Reed: And he controls the bouncing around the conjunctions in the left- and right-hand margins. Then you have the repetition of the title and all of a sudden, it’s end-stopped. Single sentence per line down to the last statement.

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Perloff: That’s great. I didn’t realize that. Reed: The itinerary of everything in the poem is incredibly carefully controlled. Perloff: It’s very carefully constructed. Reed: Is that the poem he read at the reading with Robert Lowell? Where he says, I wrote it on the way on Staten Island. Perloff: Yeah, of course he says just that. Reed: Want to tell the Staten Island story? Perloff: That Staten Island story, yes! Reed: I don’t remember the details. Perloff: The story, perhaps apocryphal, is that Frank was invited to read with Lowell at Staten Island, and they went over on the Staten Island Ferry together. And O’Hara didn’t like Lowell. He really didn’t like Lowell. He famously commented on “Skunk Hour” where he said I think it’s perfectly disgusting to write about skunks, and I don’t want to read about skunks marching up Main Street. Why does anybody talk about skunks? Axelrod: And Lowell didn’t give him the time of day, either. Perloff: And Lowell didn’t give him the time of day. Frank played the role of bad boy and said to the audience, “well on the way over here I wrote this poem, and it was “Lana Turner has collapsed.” And Lowell responded, “Well, I’m not going to read a poem that I wrote on the ferry coming over here!” And he read, I forget which poem he read. But that became a sort of famous story of the difference between their poetics. But of course people have now shown, as Steve shows, that in fact Lowell and O’Hara have a lot in common. Yeah, they certainly do. And then there is a whole period mood. McCabe: And I think when O’Hara says he’s going by his nerve when he’s writing, he’s meaning more of an aesthetic rather than the process. Perloff: It has to look spontaneous. It has to look natural. McCabe: It has to look nervy. Perloff: It has to look spontaneous, but that’s like Wordsworth, you know in some ways. Axelrod: It’s also like Yeats. When someone asked him what did you do today, he said I spent the day trying to make a line more spontaneous. Perloff: Yes, exactly. This is it. And so he would revise and revise and revise. “Leda and the Swan” is another poem where the revisions are so fascinating. Because I think in Yeats’s first version it went something like now that God has found that girl, something like “Now shall the winged wonder have his will.” Then he finally changed it to “A sudden blow: the great wings beating still / Above the staggering girl.” Wonderful. Not that things always improve. Sometimes you feel the first version might be better—Lowell has many interesting revisions, too. Axelrod: Yeah. But many of his revisions were unfortunate. Perloff: There’s that Lowell line that first brought me to Robert Lowell, which was “Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed” [in “Man and Wife”]. And why do I like that line so much? Miltown. It had a kind of exactitude. It was very … Miltown was the first tranquilizer, and it was really, what was the chemical? McCabe: Nembutal? Reed: Barbiturates? Perloff: I’m thinking of something more specific. Miltown was THE famous antidepressant. But also “Tamed by Miltown,” the whole idea of a milltown. And then we lie, we’re lying on

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mother’s bed. What could be worse than lying on my mother’s bed? So you know from that line that everything is askew. So short. “Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed.” So it’s a matter of exactitude. And I came across a poem the other day that I really didn’t like by a young poet getting a lot of attention, and it began like this, “At the public college where I teach.” And I thought, why are you saying at the public college? Let’s hear what it is. McCabe: Naming. Name it. Perloff: City College or the other day at Brooklyn College? You know it’s in New York somewhere, but at the public colleges, this is what I mean by being evasive, and sort of wanting to create an impression that I’m teaching at a public college. I mean let’s hear what it is. And “at the public college” is condescending. McCabe: I see what you’re saying. Perloff: And so “Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed.” That’s it, isn’t it? Axelrod: Yeah, you’re right about that, and that Miltown is no longer used. It just brings back that whole era, yeah? McCabe: It does. Perloff: Yeah. That was a good name. Of course you can also say that later those will all have to be annotated, and I came across an Italian edition of Lowell that I’m sure you know. What’s his name? [Rolando] Anzilotti? And they annotate brownies. Brownies. Piccoli biscotti con cioccolato or whatever it is. You know, brownies and sarsaparilla, root beer. Brownies and root beer. McCabe: In his grandfather’s elegy [Lowell’s poem “Dunbarton”]. Perloff: Yeah, root beer has to be annotated for foreigners or whatever, brownies. McCabe: Yeah, right. [Laughs.] Perloff: But I do have one question which I don’t know how to answer. In Frank O’Hara, the names, the proper names that are the names of his own friends that don’t have resonances cause they’re just his friends. So why? Why do we like those? Or I like them anyway. Yeah, what do you think about that? Reed: That they’re always woven in. At their best moment they feel woven in, like “Grace to be born …” [from “In Memory of My Feelings”]. Perloff: And adieu to Norman, bonjour to Joan and Jean-Paul. McCabe: I think it’s a sort of defiance of the precursor not daring to say just an ordinary person’s name, a friendship or kinship. That sort of sense of what can’t be in a poem. I think that was one of O’Hara’s breakthroughs. I think he was one of the first to do that, right? Perloff: Yeah, names of that sort. McCabe: A casual acquaintance, brought in as sort of a significance for their sound as well as their designation. Perloff: But it could be pretty bad if the names weren’t contextualized as well. You could say why do I want to hear all those names? Reed: It could turn into a catalog, and we must be careful of the catalog. McCabe: It’s like “The Day Lady Died” where he’s buying something. Reed: Miss Stillwagon. Or “Joe’s Jacket” where you have just that moment of intimacy in the title. You don’t need to know it is Joe’s. Perloff: That’s right. That’s right. McCabe: Who is he bringing the Strega to in “The Day Lady Died?” I forget, there’s some friend.

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Perloff: Patsy? Audience member: It’s Mike and Patsy. He’s having dinner with Patsy Southgate and shopping for drawings. Perloff: Every item works in with Lady Day [Billie Holiday]. Every item leads up to Lady Day. We have Gauloises, we have exotic cigarettes. McCabe: Without naming her name in the title, just her nickname. Axelrod: It’s also misdirecting. You get into the ordinariness of the everyday and the quandary-ness. McCabe: And then he recreates the shock. Axelrod: Absolutely, yeah. McCabe: So he can’t be writing off the top. Reed: One thing about being always attentive, and it was the modernist problem, is how do you then write a long form list? Perloff: Yeah. Reed: You know, when someone like [Arnold] Schoenberg declares something like no repetition, everything must be important. How in the world do you build back up from miniatures to a full-length work? Like Beethoven had to write an awful lot of notes to make us remember “dun dun dun dun.” [Hums Beethoven’s Fifth] He wrote an awful lot of notes. And most of them are pretty forgettable. How does one manipulate …. Perloff: I don’t think there are that many good long poems. McCabe: Where do you stand with the long poems? Perloff: With The Cantos you have clusters of ideograms. And of course the poem doesn’t all have the same level of intensity, but on the other hand, if you take any given passage, the reader is amazed by the intensity of the conjunctions. In Paterson, which I’ve always liked less than I like Williams’s short poems, there are long slack passages that aren’t as good. You know that sort of go along, but in Pound I don’t think there are very many. I know the long poem became very fashionable. I’m not quite sure why. Actually, I don’t know why. There were all those courses on the long poem, and books on the long poem, but I can’t think of that many successful ones. McCabe: I taught one of those. Perloff: I mean Hart Crane, but that’s not that long. McCabe: The Bridge. Reed: John Ashbery’s books were so long. That is, if you read a John Ashbery book, you have the lyrics in it, but there was also a new long poem, and there was something about kicking up the level of seriousness. Perloff: True. But you know he’d be the first to say that people today don’t read a thing from beginning to end. They read a few lines. They go out to the movies. They come back. They might read some more. He said he never reads anything continuously. And I mean I don’t think one can read “A Wave” and “Flow Chart,” right?, beginning to end. McCabe: Right. Perloff: There are parts you don’t need. And on the other hand, if you open it, you’ll come across wonderful things, so I don’t know. When I. A. Richards would present these poems, and you have to figure out is that by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who is it, or just some student? Whatever it is, I don’t really believe in poems, framed poems, that way. I mean, I really believe in the oeuvre, so whether they’re short poems or long poems, I think you have to read it all.

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McCabe: A poem is part of a corpus. Perloff: So I’m always shocked when students have sometimes said may I put my reading list together? And they’ll put on Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” and maybe “Sextus Propertius” and nothing else. And I said, well, you can’t really do that. McCabe: Yeah. Perloff: I do think you have to read the whole in that sense. Even if you’re not going to like all of it, even if it isn’t that good. But I’m not sure from the poet’s point of view, whether wanting to write a long poem, I guess, is to have a much more ambitious work. But in Ashbery’s case they could also be shorter. I mean, he’s always writing another book. Sometimes they have short poems in them, and sometimes it’s one long poem. And I’m not sure there’s that much difference, is there? Reed: It depends on the phase of the book. I mean he had “Fantasia on ‘The Nut-Brown Maid,’ ” and I don’t know how many people have read that book [Houseboat Days]. Perloff: I can’t get through that. Reed: I love that book. I love all of Ashbery, but there are different ways in which these poems have been received. “Litany” is probably awfully long. Perloff: Tedious. Yeah, it’s awfully long. McCabe: One of the things I’m thinking about is that there’s so much nostalgia in modernism, or this notion that we all want to go back. Perloff: But the reason that Walter Benjamin, whom I started with in Unoriginal Genius, why his Arcades Project is so moving is that’s his life. That’s his world in the quotes, the things he’s quoting. That is what his life consists of, and I think, by the way, that Charles Bernstein’s libretto for the opera Shadowtime is one of his best things. In order to write about Walter Benjamin, instead of making up a play or an opera about Benjamin he uses the language that he actually gets from Benjamin, and so that’s very moving. There’s a work that’s actually very emotive because Benjamin makes so many mistakes, including that he was convinced he wouldn’t get over the border, so he committed suicide, and then everybody else got over the border. That was the ultimate “mistake.” So he lost his life, but he didn’t often miss the point on something, and that comes through when you can use his own language. McCabe: Right. Perloff: I think documentaries are among the great art forms of our time. I mean the things you can do now with documentaries on TV and in movies, and some of the ones that have been made, you know, political documentaries, they’re just wonderful. And so if you can have a very good documentary, why do you want to see, I don’t know, a play or a long poem about the past? A dramatic monologue, let’s say, like Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England,” you see, when I even see a title like that, I just run the other way. I don’t want to read it. Reed: We don’t have a lot of poetry nowadays with documentary style. Perloff: I think that it’s a very good thing to do, but then you have to know a lot. Then you really have to know a lot, and you have to know what quotes you’re using, and why you’re juxtaposing them, and it’s very hard to do a good conceptual work. People think all you have to do is just copy it out of somewhere because Kenneth Goldsmith goes around saying that. Which is just like Frank O’Hara saying you just go on your nerve. But Goldsmith works very hard in creating these “natural” effects. It’s not easy to do it well, and other people have not done it as well. There have been people who have a feel for some earlier author, and let’s go

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back to Ashbery, and not that I like those authors in Other Traditions, such as Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Who else did he do in his little book? McCabe: Clare. Perloff: John Clare. Now those are poets who mean something to Ashbery. John Clare doesn’t mean that much to me at all. McCabe: I like him. Perloff: Those poets mean something to Ashbery, and so he can then do things with them, or quote from them. But it has to be something that really means something to you. Audience member: What do you think about Harryette Mullen’s works then? Perloff: I have always admired her work very much. McCabe: Well there’s that one that plays off of … Perloff: But I love the Gertrude Stein one [Tree Tall Woman]. I’m sorry I haven’t read the newest ones yet. Audience member: Mullen in “Dim Lady” takes, it’s kind of a variation of an Oulipian S + 7 exercise, where she cuts out words and substitutes other words, makes it kind of like a … Axelrod: “My mistress’s eyes are …” McCabe: “… nothing like the sun.” Axelrod: That’s the one. Perloff: For some reason, I haven’t read that one yet. But the ones on Gertrude Stein, on “Tender Buttons,” are excellent because she has a real relationship to Gertrude Stein. Audience member: To me Mullen’s play on Shakespeare’s sonnet, “Dim Lady,” is clever and funny and weird because it changes the voice so much. Perloff: Yeah, that could be a good idea! McCabe: I think it’s good. There’s a variation where he stopped laughing, kind of. Axelrod: It brings race and class and language in, which Mullen cares about a great deal. Perloff: It does bring in things that she cares about. McCabe: Do you think there’s a paucity or lack of ideas on the part of the poet? What do you think motivates poets to do that, to write about what they don’t really feel or care about? Perloff: Because you’re getting somewhere. Being successful. I mean obviously these days you have to have one book to get tenure in the creative writing program, and two probably to get promoted. I mean, let’s be realistic, people write whatever is the fashion. I’m not saying that’s bad. You sort of have to. And you think, well, this might be a good idea. It might be fun, you know, and I can’t really know people’s motives. McCabe: Yeah, but I’m just curious as to what you would speculate. Perloff: When Donald Allen edited The New American Poetry back in 1960, he could say that here is these poets’ first book publication, which is incredible. His chosen poets had never published a book. Only little chapbooks. [Charles] Olson, [Robert] Duncan, [Robert] Creeley. None of the people in there had yet published a book when he edited that collection, so this was their first real book publication. Today there are so many chapbooks, and so many little handbooks that people do in their own basement. And then, you know when poets are introduced, we regularly hear that so-and-so is the author of fifteen books. In the NAP, each poet has forty pages. But today there’s no serious peer review. It’s become too easy, and there are just too many people writing and publishing. Craig Dworkin did this survey of how many poetry books get published every year.

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    Yeats said somewhere, “I had already met all the poets of my generation.” Imagine saying that today. But he had. He had met all the poets of his generation, in England and Ireland, anyway. Maybe not in other countries. Today I come across people who haven’t met the poets in the next town, whatever it is, who are well-known, who other people think are very wellknown. That is, in California, if we take some very well-known New York names right now. Tim Donnelly. Adam Fitzgerald. Dorothea Lasky. If I mentioned them in L.A. to most people, they’re going to say who? And it works the other way around too.     That’s why I wanted to go back to Pound. As wrong-headed as he was, he didn’t like anybody. He dismissed all of French literature from Francois Villon down to Rimbaud. He didn’t like Balzac, so it’s ridiculous. But insane as those things are, you get people to think about it. So I would actually love a situation where I would hear poets say I can’t stand so-and-so, and take on most of the establishment, but nobody dares saying anything now. Everybody likes everybody. They don’t really. [Laughs] McCabe: Interesting. You shut down so it’s not bad manners. Perloff: You’re not allowed to say anything is plain awful or just plain bad. And it hasn’t done poetry any good. Because you can’t criticize anybody. People like D. H. Lawrence and the Modernists would do that. Virginia Woolf did it. She said she hated Ulysses. I think she’s dead wrong, but I respect her saying it. You know, it shows certain things about her, and she was willing to say it. Eliot said he hated Milton. Axelrod: But he took it back. Perloff: Yes, he took it back, but by then he wasn’t such a great poet anymore, after he took it back. It’s very salutary. I think if every now and then everybody came along and said, you know what, I don’t think Whitman is really that good. Let’s look at it. Is he really that great? If they did that, then you are forced to reread Whitman. McCabe: Not Whitman. Not Whitman. Perloff: Well, why not? Anyone. Who is above that? And then you can see how good it is. You see what I’m saying?

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CHAPTER TWO

The Feminist Poetry Movement in America BETHANY HICOK

The close alliance between second-wave feminism (the Women’s Liberation Movement) and feminist poetry reshaped the landscape of American poetry in the postwar period.1 As Nancy Berke has argued, “In the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, poets, and the poetry they wrote, were integral to the movement’s organizing and theorizing” (162). Poetry was not only an individual means of expression for the poet, but also a “ ‘tool’ for movement building and resistance” (162). The alliance is documented in some seventy-three feminist periodicals and sixty-six presses operating between the late 1960s and mid-1970s.2 Feminist poetry anthologies, such as the iconic 1973 No More Masks! (expanded and reprinted in 1993), and magazines such as Sinister Wisdom (still being published), created a significant forum and shared space for women to articulate the politics and poetics of change. This chapter tracks the crucial alliance between feminist politics and poetics in order to help define what has now become the canon of American feminist poetry. As Lisa Moore, adapting Percy Bysshe Shelley, has recently argued in the Los Angeles Review of Books, it is time we acknowledged poets as the “legislators of the women’s movement” (n.p.). There are of course many American women poets writing in the twentieth century whose work explores female identity and women’s experience in interesting and complex ways. Elizabeth Bishop’s tour de force poem about the “strange” formation of gender identity, “In the Waiting Room,” is but one example. But what I am calling feminist poetry is part of “an identifiable poetry movement,” as Kim Whitehead has argued, that grows out of “women’s political struggles” and is concerned with “the place of literary expression in women’s lives” (Whitehead xiii). These poets saw their work as a driving force for change. Their poetry emerged from the heady days in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s as women found each other in poetry readings and in print, as well as during protest marches on Washington.

For a good introduction to second-wave feminism, see Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. Particularly useful is Rosen’s chronology, which provides a detailed timeline, starting with the First Women’s Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls in 1848 (also the year that married women were allowed to own property). The timeline runs to 2006. Rosen also usefully includes the backlash against feminist gains, which picks up steam in the 1980s, as one might expect. Much of this backlash has been focused on women’s reproductive rights, which continue to erode, and LGBTQ+ rights. 2 These figures are reported in Polly Joan and Andrea Chessman’s 1978 Guide to Women’s Publishing (see Voyce 162). 1

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Feminist poetry throughout its evolution takes many poetic forms, but in all its variations, it shares key characteristics and concerns—a sense of the shared experience of oppression within patriarchy; a utopian impulse toward equality; anger as a driving force for change; a belief that the “personal is political,” a key slogan of second-wave feminism (“there is no private life, which is not determined by a wider public life,” Adrienne Rich, quoting George Eliot, tells us);3 reinvention; a desire to reclaim women of the past through myth and history (as Carolyn Kizer does with Hera and Sappho); the subject of rape and other forms of violence against women (e.g., June Jordan’s “Poem about My Rights” and Pat Parker’s “Womanslaughter”); attention to the body; solidarity; the reclaiming of spaces that have been off-limits for women (e.g., the park after dark in Marilyn Hacker’s “Regent’s Park” sonnet sequence); relations between mothers and daughters; the intersections of race, gender, and history; female sexuality and its expression; the intersections of feminism with other identities (lesbian, Jewish, African American, and Native American, such as Joy Harjo’s attention to feminist issues, as well as uniquely Native American ones). These poets speak to each other across time and space and build a community of shared concerns. We can locate a moment that signals the close alliance between feminist politics and feminist poetry in Adrienne Rich’s 1958 poem “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law.” Written on the eve of a full-scale movement, “Snapshots” is Rich’s “first overtly feminist poem,” as Marilyn Hacker notes, for here, “Rich not only considered the question of women’s aspirations and achievement directly, she placed it within defining social and cultural contexts which would be equally characteristic of her ongoing poetic/political project” (n.p.). After the often mannered poems of Rich’s earlier work, suddenly Wham! the daughter-in-law of the title is “Banging the coffee-pot into the sink” (Rich, Collected 117).4 The poem is a tour de force of energy and cathartic anger that does not shy away from how women hurt each other—“the argument ad feminam,” Rich calls it (118). And, facing the mother-in-law, she delivers her death sentence: “all the old knives / that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours, / ma sembable, ma soeur!” (118). Witty simile reveals the lengths women must go to be attractive to men: “she shaves her legs until they gleam / like petrified mammoth-tusk” (119). The force of Rich’s energy leads to the amazing lift at the end of the poem, the emergence of a new kind of woman. Contained in this figure is Rich’s strong desire to challenge gender binaries, which continues throughout her career. Drawing on a key feminist text, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (first published in France in 1949 and then in 1953 in English translation), Rich locates the origins of a new woman and a new kind of poet in de Beauvoir’s image of the helicopter: “Well, / she’s long about her coming, who must be more merciless to herself than history. / Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge / breasted and glancing through the currents, taking the light upon her / at least as beautiful as any boy / or helicopter” (Collected 121). This poem, as well as the poems of Sylvia Plath’s 1966 Ariel (composed in 1961–3), mark the beginning, the first cries, as it were, of what would later become a codified feminist poetry movement. Plath’s Ariel, like Rich’s poetic sequence “Snapshots,” makes clear the relationship between a woman’s personal life and the patriarchal social system that traps her in prescribed and oppressive roles. In “The Applicant,” for instance, Plath stages a chilling interview with a

ich quotes George Eliot in her epigraph for her volume Diving into the Wreck: Poems, 1971-1972. R This posthumous edition of Rich’s Collected Poems, edited by Pablo Conrad, and with an introduction by Claudia Rankine, makes available in one volume the full range of Rich’s extraordinary and long poetic career. It is a joy to read and is a powerful testament to the range and enduring relevance of one of the twentieth century’s most important poets. 3 4

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prospective bachelor looking for a bride. The poem deploys an arsenal of Cold War–exclusionary rhetoric (“First, are you our sort of person?”), mechanistic repetition (“Will you marry it, marry it, marry it”), and gender stereotypes (his prospective Stepford Wife5 emerges from the closet “naked”—“a living doll,” her status as solely an object for his pleasure evident in her conversion to an “it”: “It can sew, it can cook, / It can talk, talk, talk”) (Plath 4–5). Plath’s “Daddy,” too, remains one of the most powerful statements of a totalitarian patriarchy of violence and oppression. In Plath’s poem, the “daddy” of the title becomes father, husband, and finally Nazi. But the brilliance of Plath’s metonymic “Daddy” is also the recognition that women internalize and project this violence into their own lives: “Every woman adores a Fascist,” Plath tells us. “The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you” (49–51).

“THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL” Context is important to the emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement and to understanding the poetry that developed alongside it. It grew out of other protest movements of the period, such as the Civil Rights and the Black Power movements, and in concert with others, such as the mass organized protests against the Vietnam War and later the fight for gay rights. Grace Paley’s 1973 poem “The Women in Vietnam,” for instance, entwines an anti-imperialist message while extending the hand of global sisterhood. “Sisterhood is Powerful,” used for the first time in 1968, was a key slogan of the movement. Paley’s poem stages a conversation between the poem’s speaker and “the women of that country” who now do their planting “in straight rows / so the imperialist pilot can see how steady our / hands are” (136). The poem reports their words, beginning each refrain with “They said,” but by the time evening comes, the women speak to each other: “I said is it true? we are sisters? / They said, Yes, we are of one family.” Many of the major gains of the Women’s Liberation Movement were achieved during these years. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966 to fight for a broad range of women’s rights issues, including reproductive rights, pay equality, LGBTQ+ issues, and family and marriage law. Title IX, prohibiting sex discrimination in education, was passed in 1972; and Roe v. Wade, giving women the right to an abortion, in 1973. Before Roe, women resorted in many states to a network of illegal, backstreet abortion providers. Anne Sexton’s 1961 poem “The Abortion” speaks to this terrifying choice. The speaker of the poem drives south through Pennsylvania where “I met a little man, / not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all … / he took the fullness that love began” (189). Sexton’s terza rima and exact rhymes (man/began, mouth/south, where/ hair) create a fairy-tale effect in this poem that speaks of the nursery; the tragic refrain that follows the speaker throughout her journey to the abortionist and back with its slant rhyme (born/gone) undermines the fairy tale: “Somebody who should have been born / is gone.” This is no fairy-tale journey but a terrifying reality for women who sought abortions before they became legal. Lucille Clifton’s powerful elegy “the lost baby poem” from 1972 also deals with an abortion, but here, the speaker directly addresses the lost child in order to describe the conditions of her life at the moment of her painful choice (“you would have been born into winter / in the year of the disconnected gas” (60)) and the ethical responsibility that she has to her other children (“your definite brothers and

5

Ira Levin’s dystopian novel The Stepford Wives was published in 1972 and made into a horror film twice, in 1975 and 2004.

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sisters”). Clifton then offers an invocation, enlisting the rivers and seas to rise up against her if she is “ever less than a mountain” to her living children (60). Clifton’s poem moves beyond the world of backstreet abortions to one of ethics. There is no judgment here against the woman who has had the abortion; only a recognition of the duty she has to be strong for her “definite” children. In this invocation, the poem looks to the future and offers hope. Violence against women, a major agenda item of second-wave feminism, became the subject of legal cases, activism, and poetry. The first battered women’s shelters opened in the United States in 1973. Rape law reform was on the political agenda for this era’s feminists, and feminist poets began writing about rape (and other forms of violence against women), and they spoke out in public (New York radical feminists held their first “Speak-Out” on rape in 1971, giving women a platform to share their personal experiences). The speaker of June Jordan’s “Case in Point” finally breaks her silence on the subject in order to describe two terrifying rape scenes. She was raped first by a “whiteman,” then by “a blackman actually / head of the local NAACP” (122). As Stephen Voyce has argued, these poets “challenge the gender oppression implicit in conservative America,” as well as “among proponents of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements” (11). Before 1978, a woman’s reputation could be used to discredit her in a courtroom in cases of rape or attempted rape. So, in 1972, in her powerful poem “Rape,” Adrienne Rich thus wrote of the terrible humiliation and guilt that women faced when reporting rape to the police: “There is a cop who is both prowler and father,” the poem begins, and “when the time comes …. / You have to confess / to him, you are guilty of the crime / of having been forced” (Collected 391–2). Congress passed a bill, which was signed into law, to prevent this defense in 1978, but, as my women college students know all too well, they can still be tried in the court of public opinion. That same year (1978), Congress also passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which made it illegal for employers to discriminate against pregnant women. These are only a few of the key legal cases that transformed women’s lives during this period. The shift in the legal landscape was the crucial gain of secondwave feminism. First-wave feminism culminated in women gaining suffrage in 1920, but it wasn’t until this second wave that women made substantial gains in the legal protections that would lead to greater educational and employment opportunities.

“THE WORLD SPLIT OPEN”: FEMINIST ANTHOLOGIES AND THEIR ROLE IN THE MOVEMENT One could do worse than begin one’s exploration of the feminist poetry movement with the anthologies that reflect the vitality of the movement: from Florence Howe’s No More Masks! ([1973] 1993), to Laura Chester and Sharon Barba’s Rising Tides (1973), to Louise Bernikow’s The World Split Open (1974), to Lucille Iverson and Kathryn Ruby’s We Become New (1975), to Honor Moore’s recent Poems from the Women’s Movement (2009)—the latter’s Library of America imprint testifying to the canonization of the movement and its poems. Moore writes of the heady days of poetry readings and gatherings of women that changed the face of American poetry, when the concerns of women became collective concerns rather than simply those of individuals writing alone. Moore writes, “I wrote without the company of other women until December 11, 1971, when I volunteered to take part in a women’s poetry reading I’d seen advertised” (Poems xxi). The reading took place in the Loeb Student Center at NYU. Most of the twenty-one women who read that night were not yet published, Moore writes. But over the next two years, six more readings

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followed, bringing in widely published poets, such as June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, and Carolyn Kizer (Honor Moore xxi).6 This particular set of readings, organized by Kathryn Ruby and Lucille Iverson, resulted in its own anthology, We Become New. In her preface to this anthology, Iverson writes of this event that “some 250 women came—a large number for a New York poetry reading— and filled to capacity the South Lobby of New York University’s Loeb Student Center. Laughing, screaming, and applauding, the crowd stayed for an intense three hours of readings by 21 women until they were finally asked to leave, long past closing” (Iverson and Ruby xviii). Both Ruby and Iverson note in their prefaces that they selected poems they felt were specifically feminist. But, as Ruby points out, these poems are not just about oppression, but about “liberation,” as well, a casting off of the old roles and a desire for new alternatives: for self-identification and self expression in art, vocation and life; for social, political, and economic change in America; for new ways of relating to men—open marriage/monogamy, eroticism based on mutual respect; for new ways of relating to women—sisterhood, supportive behavior, lesbianism; and for alternatives to the traditional family—radical motherhood, changing roles, and experimental lifestyles. (Iverson and Ruby xiii) We Become New offers a range of poems that strongly represent the movement and its variations. Iverson writes that they chose to organize the poems like “voices in a musical arrangement, juxtaposed to counterpoint one another” (Iverson and Ruby xx–xxi). The effect is to offer varying moods, tempos, and tones throughout. Marge Piercy’s opening poems use the blues as a metaphor for women’s oppression: In the first poem, “The Morning Half-Life Blues,” the “girls” rushing down the street to work are hounded by the furies of capitalism and public opinion: “The shop windows snicker / flashing them … dresses they cannot afford: / you are not pretty enough, not pretty enough” (Iverson and Ruby 1). The deeply disturbing “Burying Blues for Janis” examines the “great-hearted suffering bitch fantasy” that Janis Joplin’s blues represent for Piercy—the seductive danger of the woman as victim: “You embodied the pain hugged to the breasts like a baby. / You embodied the beautiful blowzy gum of passivity, / woman on her back to the world endlessly hopelessly / raggedly / offering a brave front to be fucked” (4). But these poems are quickly followed by Sonia Sanchez’s experimental and self-defining “Three X Three”: “a blk / woman / speaks … and u can hear the /sound of my walken / as i bring forth green songs / from a seasoned breast / as i burn on our evening bed / of revolution” (9). There is also a great deal of wit in this volume, such as the revenge fantasy at the heart of Cynthia Macdonald’s “Objet d’Art.” The poem relates an incident when the speaker was seventeen and accidentally entered a Men’s Room at Dakar Station, whereupon a man says to her: “You’re a real ball cutter” (Iverson and Ruby 215). The speaker, intrigued, decides to live up to the role assigned to her: “Preservation,” she tells us, “was at first a problem: pickling worked / But was a lot of trouble. Freezing / Proved to be the answer. I had to buy / A second freezer just last year” (215) We also have here one of the great wits of the feminist poetry movement, Carolyn Kizer, with several poems, including the first three sections of her much-anthologized Pro Femina, a feminist anthem of sorts. Kizer grounds this work in an astonishing range of literary references from the ancient Greek Sappho, to the Roman poet Juvenal to Charles Dickens’s Madam Defarge from A Jaime Harker and Cecilia Konchar Farr note in their introduction to This Book Is an Action that “performance was a key to the aesthetic of feminist communities, [including] poetry readings and an emerging theater scene” (7–8). 6

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Tale of Two Cities in order to investigate the “fate of women.” Part one opens: “From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women. / How unwomanly to discuss it!” (Iverson and Ruby 50). Kizer pinpoints the problem for women if they speak of their oppression, their “fate”: they risk being thought “unwomanly,” or worse. The roles we must play and the masks we must wear (“Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking, / In need of continuous check in the mirror or silver-ware”), Kizer tells us, “Keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces” (Iverson and Ruby 52). Kizer’s sense of humor exposes deeper truths about the lot of women and the paucity of literary foremothers: “I will speak about women of letters, for I’m in the racket. / Our biggest successes to date? Old maids to a woman. / … Think of that crew of self-pitiers, not-verydistant, / … / Or the sad sonneteers, toast-and-teasdales we loved at thirteen” (53). Is there hope? Kizer writes in the last stanza of part three that “we’re emerging from all that, more or less” (54), and yet that emergence means the pressure seems to be once again on women themselves to do the right thing, which Kizer relates brilliantly in a series of subordinate clauses: “If we submerge our self-pity in disciplined industry; / If we stand up and be hated, and swear not to sleep with editors; / If we regard ourselves formally” (54). These contingencies do not make us free, as the last line suggests, since it means we have to depend on “the luck of our husbands and lovers, who keep free women” (55, my emphasis). Judy Grahn’s “A Woman Is Talking to Death,” another urtext of the movement, presents in its title a paradox of being a woman in the 1950s: she is accused of talking too much, as in talking a subject to death, while simultaneously being taught to “hold her tongue” when it comes to speaking out against injustice.7 But this woman is literally talking to death itself. Each section of the poem is a testimonial to the senseless violence and injustice that the powerless experience every day: the nurses’ aide who is abused by nurses and doctors; the lesbian who is the subject of the mock interrogation of part four; the Asian woman who is raped by the cab driver and thrown out onto the street. Each section bears witness and finds a way to testify against injustice, creating a space for justice that is beyond the reach of many of the poem’s protagonists. Part one of Grahn’s sequence describes a scene of terrible violence on the San Francisco Bay Bridge witnessed by the speaker. The scene: a White man on his motorcycle in the middle of the bridge, head flung back; a Black man plows into him, killing him. This opening movement describes the speaker’s struggle against the social forces that have taught her to be silent. The Black man pleads with her to be his witness. She walks away, reassuring him she’ll be his witness later. She convinces herself and later the man’s wife that everything will be OK: “He’ll be all right” I said, “we could have hit the guy as easy as anybody, it wasn’t anybody’s fault, they’ll know that,” women so often say dumb things like that, they teach us to be sweet and reassuring, and say ignorant things, because we dont invent the crime, the punishment, the bridges (Honor Moore 80; Grahn 24)

Parts four, six, and seven appear in Iverson and Ruby’s We Become New and Moore’s Poems from the Women’s Movement. Grahn’s The Judy Grahn Reader (pp. 22–33) reprints the entire sequence. 7

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Anyone could have hit this man in the middle of the road. But because it was a black man, the police beat him up, create a trumped-up charge of drunk driving, and his second-rate lawyer gets him to “cop a plea,” so he’s put in prison for twenty years instead of life. Grahn pushes back against this mandate by giving “testimony in trials that never got heard,” as the opening lines tell us (Honor Moore 76). Grahn’s sequence exemplifies the basic tenet of one of the key texts of the feminist movement, Audre Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” which Lorde originally gave as an MLA talk on the “Lesbian and Literature Panel” in Chicago on December 28, 1977. Lorde told her audience that the difference between women is not the problem, silence is: “The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.”8 Lorde urged her audience not to “hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.” These separations include the excuses that both Black and White women have given for not teaching a particular writer. White women say they can’t teach “black women’s writing” because “their experience is so different from mine.” Black women say, “She’s a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?” (Lorde, Sister 43). But Lorde points out the illogic of these arguments by asking her audience, “Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust?” (43). These excuses are some of the “endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other. … There are so many silences to be broken” (44). In her cover blurb for the second edition of No More Masks! (1993), which is now out of print, June Jordan calls the anthology a “pioneering” work. While the purpose of such blurbs is to tout the “fabulous” qualities of the book in hand, as Jordan does, there is no reason to doubt her final clause: this is a “beautiful anthology,” she writes, “which we really needed in our lives back then, and which we really, really need in our lives right now!” That was 1993. Sadly, in 2021, her statement still holds true. Let’s look at those two moments: 1973 and 1993. The 1973 volume, as Florence Howe notes in her foreword, very much grew out of the women’s movement, since she and Ellen Bass, her coeditor at the time, began their project by “reading back issues of women’s movement magazines and newspapers” (Howe xxviii). And the volume’s dedication (not included in the 1993 edition) emphasizes this point: “to our sisters / in jail / underground / at war / whose lives are their poems.” Since women poets had largely been left out of the canon, part of the goal of the anthology was to establish a tradition with a selection of early twentieth-century writers, such as Angelina Weld Grimké, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore, but “nearly half (95)” of the volume’s 220 poems “were published in the 1960s” (Howe 4). Other anthologies of the period, such as Bernikow’s The World Split Open, which begins with poems by Queen Elizabeth I and ends with those of Gwendolyn Brooks and Muriel Rukeyser, reach much farther back in their attempts to establish a women’s poetry tradition. The second iteration of No More Masks! reflects the difference that the feminist movement has made for women poets. It is possible to read No More Masks! and begin to understand the full arc of the feminist poetry movement. Howe explains that part three of the 1993 edition is the most changed and reflects how the women’s movement led to a group of women poets whose “poems and lives are freer than the generations that preceded

8

This talk was reprinted in Lorde’s collection of essays, Sister Outsider, p. 41.

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them: in style, with language, about women’s bodies, about sexuality, and about difference. More of these poets are openly lesbian” (Howe, 2nd ed. xliv). Moreover, half of the women included in this section of the anthology are now women of color. This move toward greater inclusiveness reflects the successful efforts of women of color to build a coalition of women of color writers, feminist periodicals, and feminist presses (such as Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press) throughout the 1970s and 1980s that could represent the diversity of women’s voices in the movement. They also published their own anthologies.9 One of the most important of these anthologies, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back, originally published in 1981 and now in its fourth printing, continues to be important in articulating, as Moraga writes in her introduction, “the complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of color oppression and liberation” (xix). Many of these women felt excluded by the White middle-class feminists who came to dominate the feminist movement. In her preface to the first edition, Moraga writes, “The deepest political tragedy I have experienced is how with such grace, such blind faith, this commitment to women in the feminist movement grew to be exclusive and reactionary. I call my white sisters on this” (xxvii). The anthology explores these issues in a range of genres, including essays, testimonials, art work, and poetry. Nellie Wong’s “When I was Growing Up,” for instance, explores the complex issues of gender and national identity, the pain of being “a child / born of Chinese parents” and feeling “un-American” (Moraga 5–6). In “And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures with You,” Jo Carrillo confronts “our white sisters / radical friends” who “love to own pictures of us / sitting at a factory machine / wielding a machete / in our bright bandanas / holding brown yellow black red children,” but who don’t really see women of color when confronted with them “in the flesh” (10).

“A THINKING WOMAN SLEEPS WITH MONSTERS”: ADRIENNE RICH AND AUDRE LORDE These anthologies present a rich and varied body of work that helps define the feminist poetry movement. But it is the poets themselves who make the movement, and it would be difficult to find two more important and central figures than Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde as poets and theorists of feminism. Both Lorde and Rich had long careers as writers, teachers, editors, and activists, including teaching in the SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) writing program in the late 1960s. This program was directed by Mina Shaughnessy at City College, City University of New York, and was an open admissions, “pre-baccalaureate program of compensatory education,” serving mainly poor and working-class students of color.10 Both poets came of age at a time when heterosexuality was “compulsory,” as Rich was to write in one of her most important Although I do not have the space here to discuss them, feminist magazines also played a significant role in shaping the movement and articulating the relationship between politics and poetics. In addition to poetry that ran in mainstream feminist publications like Ms. Magazine, one of the key magazines of the period for defining a lesbian feminist literary tradition was Sinister Wisdom. For an excellent discussion of how the first twenty-four issues of Sinister Wisdom helped shape the lesbian feminist movement, see Joy Parks, “Sinister Wisdom: A Chronicle.” Back issues of Sinister Wisdom are available online and free of charge, making them a wonderful teaching tool for students in women’s gender and sexuality studies classes. 10 Lorde and Rich (724 n.7). Lorde and Rich discuss their experiences in the program more generally on pp. 723–5. 9

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essays (“Compulsory” 23–75). And both married, had children, and then came out as lesbians and left their husbands. Rich believed strongly in lesbian love as a source of political and revolutionary power. Her stunning long poem from The Dream of a Common Language, “Twenty-One Love Poems,” explores the dimensions of this erotic power. She speaks of “the desire to show you to everyone I love, / to move openly together / in the pull of gravity, which is not simple” (Rich, Collected 466). In a later section, she observes, “The rules break like a thermometer, / quicksilver spills across the charted systems, / we’re out in a country that has no language” (471). And in one of the most beautiful erotic scenes, she reflects, “Whatever happens with us, your body / will haunt mine—tender, delicate” (473). This section ends: “I had been waiting years for you / in my rose-wet cave—whatever happens, this is” (473). Lorde, too, believed in the power of the erotic to challenge oppression: “In order to perpetuate itself,” she writes, “every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives” (Sister 53). In a conversation between the two women published in the journal Signs, they explore this territory in their discussion of Lorde’s lesbian “Love Poem,” which was both an open expression of lesbian sexuality and political. When the poem was published in Ms. Magazine in 1974, Lorde ripped out the page from the magazine and defiantly tacked it up on the wall of the English Department at John Jay College (Lorde and Rich 727, Bowen 112). It contains these lines: And I knew when I entered her I was high wind in her forests hollow fingers whispering sound honey flowed from the split cup (Lorde, Collected 127) Lorde had been working for two years with other faculty of color at John Jay “to create and implement a Black Studies Department,” and Lorde uses the incident to provide a telling example of the separatism and damaging divisions between the feminist and Black liberation movements. Members of the department tried to use Lorde’s lesbianism to discredit her, and, as Angela Bowen has noted in her excellent discussion of the poem, Lorde “was subsequently shunned … because of her feminism and lesbianism” (112). Lorde’s act of defiance demonstrates a fusing of activism and poetry that is fundamental to the powerful poetry that she created. Lorde and Rich understood poetry as a vehicle for change and as a way to explore the power issues that lie at the heart of questions of gender, race, and class. As Lorde argued in her influential volume of essays Sister Outsider, “for women, poetry is not a luxury” but a “vital necessity” (Lorde, Sister 37). One of the key poems in Lorde’s oeuvre that speaks directly to this “vital necessity” is the poem “Power,” which opens her 1976 collection Between Ourselves. “Power” explores the rage Lorde felt at the acquittal of a White police officer after he gunned down a ten-year-old Black boy, Clifford Glover, who was walking with his father in Queens.11 Lorde describes the gruesome scene after the shooting, when the policeman

See Bowen for excellent context on this poem.

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stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and there are tapes to prove it. (Lorde, Collected 215) The 37-year-old White policeman also said that he didn’t notice the boy’s size but only his color. He was set free by a jury consisting of eleven White men and one Black woman who said, “They convinced me” (215). The poem is a serious meditation on this miscarriage of justice and on a coercive system that does not allow a Black woman to speak up for a child. The speaker translates the meaning of the Black woman’s words (“They convinced me”) by succinctly describing the arc of systemic racism and sexism that “convinced” this woman to side with the men: they had dragged her 4’10” Black Woman’s frame over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval until she let go the first real power she ever had and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children. (Lorde, Collected 216) Lorde describes to Rich the incident that led to the poem. She was driving when she heard the news of the policeman’s acquittal on the radio. She was “so sick and so enraged” that she pulled over to jot down ideas in a notebook (Lorde and Rich 734). She imagined herself being the only Black woman on the jury: “What kind of strength did she, would I, have at the point of deciding to take a position—,” she tells Rich, and Rich finishes her sentence “against eleven white men.” Lorde recognizes “that archaic fear of the total reality of a power that is not on your terms.” The conversation develops further after Rich asks Lorde what she “really” means when she describes the “difference between poetry and rhetoric” in the opening lines of “Power” as “being ready to kill / yourself / instead of your children” (Lorde, Collected 215). In Lorde’s extraordinary, soul-searching answer to Rich, she outlines the “vital necessity” of poetry, how one has to confront “that archaic fear” (735). It becomes, finally, for Lorde, the Black Woman and her decision to be “convinced” on which the question of power revolves. At the time that she heard about the verdict on the radio, Lorde felt strongly that she “was that woman.” As Lorde tells Rich, There is the jury, white male power, white male structures, how do you take a position against them? How do you reach down into threatening difference without being killed or killing? … To put myself on the line to do what had to be done at any place and time was difficult, yet absolutely crucial, and not to do so was the most awful death. And putting yourself on the line is like killing a piece of yourself, in the sense that you have to kill, end, destroy something familiar and dependable, so that something new can come, in ourselves, in our world. And that sense of writing at the edge, out of urgency, not because you choose it but because you have to, that sense of survival—that’s what the poem is out of, as well as the pain of my son’s death over and over. Once you live any piece of your vision it opens you to a constant onslaught. Of necessities, of horrors, but of wonders too, of possibilities. (Lorde and Rich 734–5)

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Lorde’s power (and that of her sister poets) depends first on recognizing ourselves in the other: “I was that woman,” and then reaching down into that threatening difference—that is the difference between poetry and mere rhetoric. At the same time (between 1974 and 1977), Rich was writing the most powerful feminist poetry of her career, collected in The Dream of a Common Language, which also begins with a poem called “Power.” This poem, like a number of others in this volume, focuses on historical women—in this case, Marie Curie, and the power (and dangers) that meaningful work affords. The poem ends: “She died a famous woman denying / her wounds / denying / her wounds came from the same source as her power” (Rich, Collected 443). She tells us in “Hunger,” a poem dedicated to Lorde, “Until we find each other, we are alone” (454). In an essay written at this time called “Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women,” Rich argues that community is “the essential condition for all fully realized work,” which is something that women have not found in “the common world of men,” or in the male-dominated work force (On Lies 207). As she says in “Poetry and Women’s Culture,” published in The New Woman’s Survival Sourcebook, “It is not as interesting to explore the condition of alienation … as it is to explore the condition of connectedness” (quoted in Voyce 108). The promise of the women’s liberation movement for Rich was that “more and more … women are creating community, sharing work, and discovering that in the sharing of work, our relationships with each other become larger and more serious” (On Lies 208). One of the most powerful aspects of The Dream of a Common Language is the poems focused on women’s relationships within the context of their work. These poems build on the promise in Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own that it was possible for “Cloe” to not only love “Olivia” but also share a laboratory with her. Rich conveys this idea of community in several powerful poems. In “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev,” Rich again focuses on a historical figure: Elvira Shatayev, who, as the headnote tells us, was the “leader of a women’s climbing team, all of whom died in a storm on Lenin Peak, August 1974” (Rich, Collected 443). Yet this is not a poem about the dangers of their profession, but the strength they find together in the end, written in the voice of Shatayev: “choosing ourselves each other and this life / whose every breath and grasp and further foothold / is somewhere still enacted and continuing” (445). The danger lies rather “down in our separateness,” as Shatayev realizes at the end; “till now / we had not touched our strength” (445). In another poem, “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff,” Rich mines the letters of these two early twentieth century artists who, as the headnote says, “became friends at Worpswede, an artists’ colony near Bremen, Germany, summer 1899” (Collected 481). They traveled to Paris together in 1900 for half a year where Becker painted and Westhoff studied sculpture with Rodin, and they returned to Worpswede that same year in August and spent the winter together in Berlin. Westhoff married the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in 1901. Becker married the painter Otto Modersohn and later died in childbirth. The poem begins with a letter from Becker to Westhoff about the child she is carrying: “I didn’t want this child. / You’re the only one I’ve told,” and states that “marriage is lonelier than solitude” (481–2). But Becker goes on to write about her work: “I’m looking everywhere in nature / for new forms, old forms in new places” (483). She remembers How we used to work side by side! And how I’ve worked since then

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trying to create according to our plan that we’d bring, against all odds, our full power to every subject …. Clara, our strength still lies in the things we used to talk about …. Clara, I feel so full of work, the life I see ahead, the love for you, who of all people however badly I say this will hear all I say and cannot say. (483) Rich’s ability to write these women back into our history through powerful poetry is a testament to poetry’s continuing power to be meaningful, relevant, vital, and alive into the twenty-first century. So, too, is Lorde’s urgent need to explore her deepest fears, to reach down into “threatening difference.” When Rich wrote in her 1969 poem “Tear Gas,” “(I am afraid.) / It’s not the worst way to live,” she took seriously Lorde’s charge and her own to confront her fears. “Poetry,” Lorde wrote, “is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. … It lays a bridge across our fears of what has never been before” (Lorde, Sister 37–8). When I return to these poets now at this moment in America’s history, I find that we need these voices more than ever; poetry is a good tool for thinking with; in that way it is close to theory and philosophy. Unlike narrative, poetry provides the house of possibility in which to dwell, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson. We move through Adrienne Rich’s thoughts, and they become not so much ours as shared: “the true nature of poetry,” she writes, is “the drive / to connect. The dream of a common language” (Rich, Collected 446). This is the fundamental drive that speaks most accurately to the feminist poetry movement and its continuing legacy.

WORKS CITED Berke, Nancy. “The World Split Open: Feminism, Poetry, and Social Critique.” A History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry, ed. Linda A. Kinnahan. Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 155–69. Bernikow, Louise, ed. The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552– 1950. Vintage, 1974. Bowen, Angela. “Diving into Audre Lorde’s ‘Blackstudies.’ ” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 4, no. 1 (2003), pp. 109–29. Chester, Laura, and Sharon Barba, eds. Rising Tides: 20th Century American Women Poets. Washington Square Press, Pocket Books, 1973. Clifton, Lucille. Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969–1980. BOA Editions, 1987. Grahn, Judy. The Judy Grahn Reader, ed. Lisa Maria Hogeland. Aunt Lute Books, 2009. Hacker, Marilyn. “The Young Insurgent’s Commonplace Book,” Poetry Daily, poems.com/special_features/prose/ essay_hacker3.php. Accessed November 3, 2017. Reprinted from Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics #77 (Fall 2007), Oberlin College, as part of a symposium on Rich. Harjo, Joy. She Had Some Horses. W. W. Norton, 2008. Harker, Jaime, and Cecilia Konchar Farr, eds. This Book Is an Action: Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics. University of Illinois Press, 2016.

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Howe, Florence, and Ellen Bass, eds. No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women. Anchor Books, 1973. Newly revised and expanded edition as No More Masks!: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets. Harper Perennial, 1993. Iverson, Lucille, and Kathryn Ruby, eds. We Become New: Poems by Contemporary American Women. Bantam, 1975. Jordan, June. “Case in Point.” Poems from the Women’s Movement, ed. Honor Moore. Library of America, 2009, pp. 121–2. Kinnahan, Linda A, ed. A History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 2016. Kizer, Carolyn. Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women. Copper Canyon Press, 1984. Lorde, Audre. Collected Poems. W. W. Norton, 1997. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, revised ed. Crossing Press, 2007. Lorde, Audre, and Adrienne Rich. “An Interview with Audre Lorde.” Signs, vol. 6, no. 4 (Summer 1981), pp. 713–36. Moore, Honor, ed. Poems from the Women’s Movement. Library of America, 2009. Moore, Lisa. “Sister Arts: On Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Others.” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 8, 2013. https://lare​view​ofbo​oks.org/arti​cle/sis​ter-arts-on-adrie​nne-rich-audre-lorde-and-oth​ers/. Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th ed. SUNY Press, 2015. Originally published by Persephone Press in 1981. Paley, Grace. “The Women of Vietnam.” No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women, ed. Florence Howe and Ellen Bass, Anchor Books, 1973, pp. 136–7. Parks, Joy. “Sinister Wisdom: A Chronicle.” Women’s Review of Books, vol. 1, no. 5 (February 1984), pp. 14–15. Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. Harper Perennial, 1966. Rich, Adrienne. Collected Poems: 1950–2012, ed. Pablo Conrad, with an introduction by Claudia Rankine. W. W. Norton, 2016. Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980). Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985, Norton, 1986, pp. 23–75. Rich, Adrienne. Diving into the Wreck: Poems, 1971–1972. W. W. Norton, 1973. Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978. W. W. Norton, 1979. Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. Penguin, 2006. Sexton, Anne. “The Abortion.” No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women, ed. Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. Anchor Books, 1973, p. 189. Voyce, Stephen. Poetic Community: Avant-Garde Activism and Cold War Culture. University of Toronto Press, 2013. Whitehead, Kim. The Feminist Poetry Movement. University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

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CHAPTER THREE

American Poetry and War CARY NELSON

Where the grim savage devastation spread,   And drench’d in gore his execrable hand; Where prowling wolves late wander’d o’er the dead,   And repossess’d the desolated land; There beauteous villages and cheerful farms   Now variegate the far extended plain; And there the swain, secure from future harms,   Delighted, views his fields and waving grain. (Jackson 79) This is the second stanza of Capt. Paul Jackson’s “Ode,” celebrating Britain’s victory in the French and Indian Wars and vituperating Native Americans. Jackson was a Pennsylvania physician and a veteran, and he first published the poem in a broadside in 1763. In the poem, Jackson calls upon the muses to reach “the tawny Chief on Erie’s Shore” and “bid him quick his Bow unbend” for “Hateful War is at an end.” Just over two hundred years later, W. S. Merwin contemplated the Vietnam War, then still in progress, and intensified the utopian pastoralism of Jackson’s vision of the end of war but did so not in celebration but as a bitter and sardonic testimony to the way we repeatedly delude ourselves about what our wartime aims are and just how long the blessings of peace will last. A broadside version of Merwin’s “When the War Is Over” appeared with a typed version of the poem printed above blood pouring down the page. Especially during the Vietnam War, many American poets issued broadside poems without copyright notices; the aim was to facilitate reproduction and mass distribution. Both poems refer to national pride in victory, Jackson’s in celebration whereas Merwin’s ironic usage suggests sadness and contempt. And both poems invoke nature tamed, restored, renewed, or miraculously perfected. Jackson depicts cheerful farms and fields of grain that have replaced a battlefield landscape where wolves fed on corpses. Merwin’s speaker imagines, once the war is over, the air and water will be restored. But in Merwin’s poem, peace and its benefits remain mere fantasy projections of a fundamentally hubristic America. These fantasy projections empower Merwin’s crushing final lines: “The dead will think the living are worth it … // And we will all enlist again” (Merwin, Lice 64). Of course, self-knowledge as a nation and a species is precisely the foremost benefit we will not achieve in war. We will simply march blindly into the next inferno. As we will see later, Merwin rings one other reversal on the tradition Jackson embodies. Jackson’s “grim Savage” with an “execrable Hand” drenched in gore becomes the Asian victim in Vietnam, and it is America’s hand that is soaked with blood, not the opponent’s.

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I juxtapose these two poems because they represent fairly the two faces of American war poetry— from the prerevolutionary war period to the present day. We now tend to honor, value, and validate the tradition of anti-war poetry, as our preeminent heritage, though pro-war poetry is deeply embedded in our history as well, especially when we move from elite to popular culture. Philip Freneau’s 1780 “The British Prison Ship,” an elite Revolutionary War poem written to expose the British mistreatment of American prisoners of war, also communicates the representative horrors of war as a whole: Four hundred wretches here, denied all light, In crowded mansions pass the infernal night, Some for a bed their tatter’d vestments join, And some on chests, and some on floors recline; Shut from the blessings of the evening air Pensive we lay with mingled corpses there, Meagre and wan, and scorch’d with heat, below, We look’d like ghosts, ere death had made us so … (Freneau 173) In terms of its influence on subsequent poetry, as a body of war poetry that served as a defining model for all who followed, and as a body of war poetry that continues to haunt us, it is, however, the Civil War poems of Walt Whitman that stand above all others. In “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” (1865), as Betsy Erkkila writes, in the starlight illuminating the darkened landscape of war, the poet-soldier buries his “dear comrade” and “son of responding kisses” in a private ritual of mourning and love. Modulating formal control with a tone of uttermost woe, Whitman’s “strange” vigil suggests that it was the loving affection among men—released and allowed in a wartime context—that enabled him to rise from the “chill ground” of the battlefield. (Erkila 220) A few lines from the poem suggest its tone and focus: Vigil strange I kept on the field one night; When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day, One look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look I shall never forget, One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground, Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle, Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way, Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,) … (Whitman 328) Fred Carlisle adds, “The war made the relationship possible, and it gave the friendship, perhaps, a depth and immediacy it might not have had in other circumstances” (131). The poem rejects all the typical consolations war poetry offers in contemplation of the dead, especially the transformative power invoked by the larger cause of the war itself. Instead it is the human relationship—paternal, fraternal, and erotic—that occupies the speaker. The next wars that drew many poets to write were the Spanish American War (1898) and the war in the Philippines (1899–1902). Patriotic and jingoistic poems dominated the public sphere in the case of the former, but a strong anti-war movement developed in the case of the Philippines.

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Some poetry castigated the war as a racist and imperialist project, anticipating themes that would emerge again during the Vietnam War. Few anti-war poems of the period have the special insight of William Vaughn Moody’s turn-of-the-century “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines”: Toll! Let the great bells toll Till the clashing air is dim, Did we wrong this parted soul? We will make it up to him. Toll! Let him never guess What work we sent him to. Laurel, laurel, yes. He did what we bade him do. (Moody, in Untermeyer 106) Moody ends his poem with a telling pair of lines: “Let him never dream that his bullet’s scream went wide of its island mark, / Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in the dark” (107). Unconditionally opposed to US armed imperialism in the Philippines, Moody nonetheless manages to distinguish between the ordinary soldier and the officials who make policy. His critical lesson, that ordinary soldiers in an unjust war are victims as well, has to be relearned by every generation. It was a lesson the Anti–Vietnam War Movement found very difficult to learn. Decades later, during the 1936–9 Spanish Civil War when a number of progressive American poets wrote about the conflict, they avoided that kind of tension because they were writing in opposition to fascism and thus endorsing both the heroism of those who fought and the cause to which they were devoted. The Spanish Civil War was in many ways the prelude to the Second World War. Right-wing generals led by Francisco Franco staged a coup against the Spanish Republic’s democratically elected government. They could not have succeeded without the help they received from Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini. Some three thousand American volunteers were among the international volunteers who came to the Republic’s defense. Langston Hughes spent half a year in Spain in 1937, visiting troops on the Republican side, talking with people in Madrid, and acquiring extensive wartime knowledge. His wartime poem “Letter from Spain,” given to Edwin Rolfe for him to publish in November, 1937, in Volunteer for Liberty, the uncopyrighted English-language magazine of the International Brigades, is a splendid example of the way Hughes uses colloquial language to put the struggle between democracy and fascism in Spain in a broad context of international racism and imperialism. Hughes’s biographer Arnold Rampersad describes “Letter from Spain,” which Hughes repeatedly published without copyright notice, as “a maudlin dialect poem in ballad-epistle form” and says it is typical of the sort of “proletarian doggerel” Hughes wrote in the 1930s and 1940s (Rampersad 351). Rampersad also reports, apparently echoing Hughes’s account in I Wonder as I Wander, the second volume of his autobiography, that some of the American soldiers objected to Hughes’s use of dialect, since most of the Black volunteers were educated. Since the poem adopts the voice and persona of a Black volunteer in the Lincoln Battalion, it is understandable that some Americans felt the use of dialect misrepresented their comrades, but it is equally easy to imagine that others among the Lincolns would have understood why Hughes put the poem in what is actually a rather mild form of dialect—not simply to appeal to common people, as Rampersad suggests, but also to make a specific political point: that the common sense of oppressed people gives them an appropriate experiential basis for understanding international politics. For all their

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fabled ferocity, the North Africans were partly there as cannon fodder, expendable because they were people of color. The Black American soldier-speaker perceives that the captured, wounded “Moor” is just as dark as himself, but when he asks him why he was fighting, the North African answers in a language he can’t understand (Hughes 201–2). Another soldier explains that the North African had been kidnapped and forced to join the fascist army. He says that the North African has a feeling the “whole thing wasn’t right” (201). He didn’t know anything about the people he was fighting. The view from Alabama, therefore, had the potential to clarify fascism’s racist character—to link Franco’s use of North African troops with Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia, for example—and to identify imperialism as a form of international racism. The relative universality of working-class interests, moreover, also made for a vantage point from which it was possible to understand why British industrialists and financiers supported Franco; a progressive Spain threatened not only one source of potential profit but also, by its example, many others: Cause if a free Spain wins this war, The colonies, too, are free— Then something wonderful’ll happen To them Moors as dark as me. I said, I guess that’s why old England And I reckon Italy, too, Is afraid to let a workers’ Spain Be too good to me and you— (Hughes 201–2) A fairly complex set of political relationships are thus condensed by Hughes into a poem written in ordinary language, and the ordinary language asserts more clearly than any other kind of language might that expertise in international politics need not be restricted to those in power and authority. Indeed, one of the notable things about the volunteers in Spain was the diversity of their class background. Political understanding is thus not an elite, moneyed, high cultural capacity; it is in some ways the clarity that comes when some of that obfuscation is swept away. The use of dialect in the poem makes possible the material instantiation of some of those insights. Thus, when the speaker looks across to Africa, makes the appropriate connections between his Spanish experience and global racial and financial relationships, the moment of recognition makes it possible to envision the existing structures of power undone, to “seed foundations shakin’ ” (Hughes 201). “Seed,” an “improper” usage quite proper to dialect, is actually a pun: it is a moment of sight and insight which is also the fertile seed of radical change. The proffered handshake that concludes the poem—when the Black speaker asks the North African prisoner to shake hands with him—is an offer of alliance politics, a simple gesture of solidarity dependent on nothing less than a different understanding of the world. Yet the difficulty of reaching such understanding, the power national cultures have to impede such knowledge, is apparent in the North African’s failure to recognize the speaker’s offer. The wounded prisoner is dying and doesn’t understand. These interrelationships are foregrounded and heightened in the republication of the poem in the January 23, 1938, issue of the Daily Worker. There three of Hughes’s poems in the voice of the Black volunteer Johnny—“Dear Folks at Home,” “Love Letter From Spain,” and “Dear

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Brother at Home”—are printed as a dramatic double-page poster bordered with illustrations that blur the distinction between the Spanish peasant and the American worker. The sombreroclad peasant plowing a field behind a horse in Spain is substantially interchangeable with an American sharecropper. The farmer taking a hoe to the land before his modest home could easily be either here or in Spain; indeed, the industrial strikers just below him carry signs in English. The Republican soldiers in the images clearly stand guard over their mutual interests. Grouped together this way, the poems also reinforce these connections. “Folks over here don’t treat me / Like white bosses used to do,” Hughes writes in the first poem (202). Those who might are on the other side: “Fascists is Jim Crow peoples, honey— / And here we shoot ’em down” (202). Some American poets, including Edwin Rolfe, continued to write Spanish Civil War poems into the 1950s. Others, most notably Philip Levine, wrote Spanish Civil War poems through the end of the century. Despite the clear moral force of the struggle against Hitler, most of the notable American poems of the war that immediately followed did not emphasize anti-fascism. The Second World War began when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the same year the Spanish Civil War ended and Franco established his dictatorship. American poetry about the Second World War, however, understandably did not become a major cultural force until the United States entered the war in late 1941. Yet there were some American poets who foresaw that the war would touch us and issued warnings. Weldon Kees’s “June 1940” drives home the lesson: The beaters of drums, the flag-kissing men, whose eyes Once saw the murder, are washing it clean, accusing: “You are the cowards! All that we told you before was lies!” (17) The poem concludes, “An idiot wind blows; the conscience dies.” Partly because isolationist sentiment blocked many Americans from supporting US entry into the war until Pearl Harbor gave the country little choice and partly because casualty rates and the horror of total war moderated patriotic sentiment, many of the more complex Second World War poems emphasized the war’s cost rather than the heroism of the war. In any case, once the United States entered the war, poetry commanded significant space in magazines, journals, and books. The country also saw a revival of a practice not popular since the American Civil War—the publication and distribution of poems printed on the left side of envelopes. During the Civil War both soldiers and civilians could buy packets of poem envelopes and use them to send letters. In 1941, this practice became widespread again. One of the more important examples was Archibald MacLeish’s “The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak.” It is one of the relatively few American poems that emphasizes the importance of the cause for which soldiers gave their lives: “They say: We were young. We have died. Remember us. // They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must stay this” (381). MacLeish thus argues that those who survive the war have a special responsibility to make the deaths of these soldiers meaningful. The single most talented American poet with a substantial body of Second World War poetry is no doubt Randall Jarrell. Jarrell enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1942, serving briefly as a flying cadet. Thereafter he became a celestial navigation tower operator, and in that role shared the experiences of returning pilots, knowledge that informs a number of his poems. More than any other poet, Jarrell understood the contradictory character of air warfare as it was introduced in the

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war. That included delivering death to invisible victims below and extreme vulnerability for the young air crews who manned the bombers: In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school— Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among The people we had killed and never seen.  (Jarrell 145) That is from his poem “Losses.” In “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” the speaker testifies dramatically to the incomprehensible shift from adolescence to the collective identity of a soldier, metaphorized in the opening line as a transit from the mother’s womb to membership in the military. Positioned beneath the belly of the plane in the completely exposed yet weirdly womblike ball turret, the gunner, expendable and dehumanized, could be killed by heavy bullets that ricocheted back and forth across the shell of the turret and through his body: “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose” (144). Throughout the war, progressive poets sustained a critique of wartime violence, either implicitly or explicitly seeking to deliver a wake-up call to the poor and working-class men who die in battle in the largest numbers. Even though the Second World War was a necessary fight against demonstrably evil forces, we gain nothing by suppressing its racial and class-based ironies and inequities. Thomas McGrath wrote sardonically about the brutal race and class relations that underlay America’s wartime unity of purpose. His 1940 poem “Deep South” insists that traveling through the south means necessarily coming upon “the hidden glacier, / Whose motives are blonder than Hitler’s choir boys” in that place where “Golden Lovers” read to one another “in the flaring light / Of the burning Negro in the open eye of midnight.” The labor of Black and White poor alike, he promises, will eventually provoke change: The sun burns equally white man and black. The labor which they do makes more and more Their brotherhood condition for their whole existence … (McGrath, Selected 20) McGrath’s “Crash Report” (1944) delivers a sardonic rejoinder to wartime heroism. You may read, he begins, “How Captain—or maybe Private—so and so” has been killed. Would you “think him a hero?” he asks: It isn’t important one way or another. The guy is just as dead as Grant took Richmond. (“Crash” 26) Gwendolyn Brooks’s triumphantly accomplished long poem “Gay Chaps at the Bar” (1945) explores the anguished experience of African American soldiers fighting, dying, and facing humiliating and discriminatory assignments in military service. And yet, in the final section, they nonetheless maintain their troubled patriotism: Still we remark on patriotism, sing, Salute the flag, thrill heavily, rejoice For death of men who too saluted, sang. (Brooks 75)

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The patriotism, however, is further complicated by the lines that immediately follow: “But inward grows a soberness, an awe, / A fear, a deepening hollow through the cold” (75). The irony of Black support for the war comes through especially strongly in Claude McKay’s 1945 poem “Look Within.” The speaker feels he cannot remain silent during the war against the Germans and Japanese While fifteen million Negroes on their knees Pray for salvation from the Fascist yoke Of these United States (McKay 253) Two late–Second World War topics continued to occupy American poets for decades: Hiroshima and the Holocaust. The explosion of the first atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima by the United States on August 6, 1945, and the revelation of the mass murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany from 1939 to 1945 together marked a historical turning point in our understanding of the potential of human violence. Together they marked the demonic culmination of an era and the beginning of postmodernity, an era in which values we assumed to be fundamental could no longer either be counted on or guaranteed. Many poets, however, were not ready to address either event until years had passed. Philip Levine published “The Horse” in 1963, a poem that evoked the immediacy of the Hiroshima explosion and a sense of its fundamental rupture of all living being as though it had been written in 1945. Anthony Hecht served with the US 97th infantry and participated in the liberation of Flossenberg, an annex of the Buchenwald death camp. He would observe “For years after I would wake shrieking,” but he did not write “The Book of Yolek” until 1982. Levine’s “The Horse” is an imagined poem that embodies factual details of the atomic bomb’s detonation and its aftermath, including photographs of the blasted city. It describes a horse, maddened and running wild “without skin, naked, hairless, / without eyes and ears.” It lurches in search of the stable boy’s caress. The stable boy is later found with “his mouth opened / around a cry that no one heard” (11). So it seems there really was no horse, that the creature who ran, butting his “skull to pulp,” could not be a horse. It was a nightmare loosed in the day. And then there was nothing. No survivors remained in any recognizable form. Even the natural will to revenge was seared out of them: “the rage had gone out of / their bones in one mad dance” (12). Anthony Hecht’s “The Book of Yolek,” a harrowing sestina in which the metered form barely contains its defining emotions, alludes to a remarkable Holocaust event, in which Janusz Korczak, educator, children’s author, and pediatrician, chose to accompany the children from a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw on a 1942 forced death march rather than leave them to their fate and save his own life. Yolek is one of the children “forced to take that terrible walk” (79). The story of that day, factually based, is juxtaposed with the contemporary moment, forty years later. The memory of the Holocaust can surface in any moment, disrupting and altering the meaning of the day. And its intrusion will be uncanny, personal yet outside the realms of ordinary meaning. Yolek, perhaps five years old in 1942, is five years old forever. He “will walk in as you’re sitting down to a meal.” So “prepare to receive him in your home some day” (80). He has yet to be cared for; you must comfort his ghost, for he is also your child. And Yolek is you, yourself, as we are all Holocaust progeny, products of the ruined history left to us, of a legacy of evil that cannot be erased. At the very least, many hundreds of Holocaust poems have been published by American poets to the present day.

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William Heyen is a poet who has returned to the Holocaust repeatedly throughout his career. “Riddle” (1991) is merciless in leveling accusations against not just the obvious perpetrators, but against the German people as a whole, listing many categories of people who facilitated industrialized slaughter. Readers might keep in mind that a group of German historians answered the “Who knew?” question a generation ago with a clear statement—all German adults: From Belsen a crate of gold teeth, from Dachau a mountain of shoes, from Auschwitz a skin lampshade. Who killed the Jews? Not I, cries the typist, not I, cries the engineer, not I, cries Adolph Eichmann, not I cries Albert Speer.  (Heyen, in Leder and Teichman 238–9) Although Heyen repeats the key question—“Who killed the Jews?”—only four times in the complete poem, it feels as if it punctuates every stanza. The poem’s other key question is whether the Nazis were human, and the answer to that is, of course, “yes,” whether we like the answer or not. After the Second World War, it was the Vietnam War (1955–75) that generated a major outpouring of American poetry. Although some poems supported the war, anti-war poetry was dominant, in part because many poets and their readers opposed the war, in part because there was a mass antiwar movement that organized large public demonstrations in major cities, and in part because the American public as a whole began to turn against the war in the 1970s. Despite the strong sense that Vietnam powerfully embodies the postwar era, and thus that there is a huge cultural gap between it and the Second World War, there are significant continuities in the poetic treatment of the two wars. The most significant continuity in poetic representation in effect reads Vietnam-era doubt back into the representation of the earlier war. We can see that tendency in Brooks’s and McKay’s condemnation of the racialized separation of US forces, in Levine’s indictment of the inhumanity of bombing Hiroshima, and in the Holocaust poems that portray the evisceration of all human value. There is also at least one poet, Robert Lowell, who established a voice that bridges the two wars. In such poems as “Memories of West Street and Lepke” (1959) and the paired “The March I” and “The March II” (both from 1970), Lowell uses a bemused account of his personal political commitments as an entry to larger cultural and historical issues. In the earlier poem, Lowell is a conscientious objector serving time in a federal prison where he encounters his fellow Americans depicted in such ironic relief that they become comic actors in a historical drama. There is Abramowitz, a pacifist “so vegetarian, / he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit”; and the vastly diminished gangster, Czar Lepke of Murder Incorporated, lobotomized and drifting “in a sheepish calm” (Lowell 129). The two March poems, both about Lowell’s participation in an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Washington, DC, depict the human frailty of the protestors, most of whom retreat when trampled by a wave of military police. Yet neither the Second World War nor the Vietnam poems, however anti-heroic, actually dismiss the political commitments they humanize. W. S. Merwin’s “The Asians Dying” (1967) is his most famous poem overtly about the Vietnam War; it merits an analysis by infiltration, a criticism surrounded and deadened by the poem’s political echoes. I proceed through the poem in order. “When the forests have been destroyed,”

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Merwin writes, “their darkness remains,” their heaviness and their thick foliage weigh on us like our guilt (Second 118). No defoliation, no consuming fire, is decisive. The landscape, leveled in the outside world, rises again in us. The shadows among the trees are now a brooding absence and an inner darkness. In our eyes are traces of each obliteration; our will is choked by compulsion, our sight layered with erasures: “The ash the great walker follows the possessors” (Merwin, Second 118). As readers, we too are possessors, but the poem’s images decay through association. The enlightenment the poem offers is experienced, paradoxically, as suffocation. We are possessed by a past that invades each anticipation; ruinous memories fly into every future, like migrating ducks. The only remaining migration is our residual unrest: “The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky” (118), darkening the light. The only constant is our discontent, the only change the rhythm of a returning nightmare. Twilight is the moment when consciousness—itself a confusion of misdeeds— submits to new violence. Merwin’s poem is a tapestry of recognition and forgetfulness; its lines endlessly comment on one another. Each image (unique in its context) is immediately enfolded by a torpor of historical sameness; in an age whose destiny is past, each name names everything. The poem is a claustrophobia verbally enhanced by false relief; each new line rediscovers old ground. But Merwin’s fine musical sense always provides for surprises in tempo. These verbal shocks (like their unpunctuated lines) bleed off into silence, which only increases their hold on us: “Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead” (Merwin, Second 119). This line and its two successors are set by themselves as a lone tercet on the page. If we could, we might join them to another stanza to deaden their horror. The lines relate a simple fact, one we secretly knew but had not consciously thought of, but the image lends the war an unbearable solitude. It is as though a single and essential benediction were lacking at the core of everything we are. It is too late; death cannot be contained. We cannot bury the dead of Vietnam; raindrops hammer at their delicate eyes, and we cannot reach out to close them. Everything has taken on the color of the dead; their violated sight is taken up into the limpidity of the air. Thus “the nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed” (Merwin, Second 119). Dawn is merely burning darkness. There are no more beginnings. We are not truly healed (nor can the poem heal us); we are uniformly, though not terminally, wounded. The body politic absorbs its crimes; they are its substance. The war is the absolute limit of knowledge; its pain remains. Above us, trembling but unfulfilled, the seasons rock like bells made of paper—now unnatural signs that no longer signify, that call to nothing living. For a world that will not be reborn, seasonal change is mockery. And “The Asians Dying” resembles its image of paper bells; it too is a paper bell; it tolls no prophecy, for its message was apparent long ago—embedded equally in every historical act and in every line. “The possessors move everywhere under Death their star,” Merwin writes, but he is naming all of us, not accusing anyone, for the poem too possesses a history it loathes (Second 119). What we are has corrupted the elements we are made of, reducing them to smoke; all that we cannot see is unspeakably known to us. Lacking a past, he concludes, the possessors have “fire” as “their only future”; the third-person plural pronouns reveal not the clarity of distance but a special kind of self-knowledge—forgetfulness and revulsion in contest. The possessors have no past because what they do cannot be distinguished from what they have been. The final line is merely a rebuke, a false seal on the poem’s form; fire is the future already with us. As William Rueckert has written about “The Asians Dying”:

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No American reader who lived through that time would need to have the poem’s powerful selfaccusing political thrust explained. Though the poem mostly concentrates on effects rather than causes, those responsible are everywhere present and indicted in the poem as the “possessors.” The “possessors” will be followed and haunted forever by the ghosts of their victims; “nothing they will come to” will be “real” again. (63) Adrienne Rich’s 1970 “(Newsreel),” the ninth poem in the sequence “Shooting Script,” is written in testimony to a national will that does not merely end with blindness and amnesia but is grounded in it from the outset: “This would not be the war we fought in. See, the foliage is heavier.” “Yet the dead look right, and the roofs of the huts, and the crashed fuselage burning among the ferns” (409). It is as though we act (and record our actions) through a gray perceptual film, a hopelessly clouded mental newsreel. It is not my war, I know my war. Its images are in me, though I cannot recall whether I fought or not. Yet somehow, in a self I cannot recover, in features I cannot now recall, are assembled those images of my war. The Vietnam War is one of the sequence’s recurrent motifs, but it is interwoven with images of broken human relationships and failed understanding. Rich summons all the actors in this historical moment: the perplexed foot soldier, taken up by a process he begins to understand only when it is too late to resist; the nation unconsciously pursuing new approval for its past (the General “whose name they gave to an expressway”) and futilely seeking relief for its collective dread (“I wanted to see the faces of the dead when they were living”); and even the poet herself, subtly implicated despite any protest (409). If Merwin’s poem notably includes no nouns that link it directly to Vietnam, Allen Ginsberg’s long “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (1966) is saturated with them. More than most Vietnam poems, “Wichita Vortex Sutra” is permeated with public language, indeed with the managerial rhetoric and political slogans of the war. Constructed as the diary of a car trip toward Wichita, the poem presents a version of Ginsberg’s consciousness on route. Ginsberg records some of what he sees, in descriptive passages often sparse and underplayed, though consistently careful and appreciative, and includes fragments of radio and newspaper reports. In his familiar adopted persona, he embraces Whitman and channels his stance toward the country: “Come lovers of Lincoln and Omaha, / hear my soft voice at last // O Man of America, be born!” (Ginsberg 403). Ginsberg deeply believes in the Whitman connection, but he is consistently more self-deprecating about its efficacy than his critics usually recognize. That reticence helps the poem survive its topicality. Ginsberg thus calls on Whitman’s prophetic posture, invoking the role and its still powerful symbolism, while displaying no conviction that anyone will heed his voice. The language of the war is faulted, but with regret and fatalistic humor rather than with self-righteousness. Ginsberg recognizes that the war for most Americans was mainly language and photography. “Rusk says Toughness / Essential for Peace,” Ginsberg notes, and describes “Viet Cong losses leveling up three five zero zero” as “Headline language poetry, nine decades after Democratic Vistas” (407, 408). “On the other side of the planet,” Ginsberg reports, “Flesh soft as a Kansas girl’s / ripped open by metal explosion” (410). Meanwhile, “this American nation argues war” with “conflicting language, language / proliferating in airwaves” (410). Mixed with this reportage are Ginsberg’s vignettes of silent Kansas landscapes and his own observations. He satirizes the rhetoric of politicians, pleads with, teases, and challenges his American audience—“Has anyone looked in the eyes of the dead?” (408)—and asks a pantheon of gods to

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come to his aid in “this Vortex named Kansas” (415). Yet Ginsberg’s voice never dominates. Absent is the insistent personal lamentation that carries the listings of his earlier poems. His presence here is intermittent, as if he realizes that while our language is being “taxed by war” a poet cannot entirely shape it to his will. The poem consequently seems only partly to belong to Ginsberg. History writes much of the text; while Ginsberg can try to identify what history has written, he cannot pretend to dominate it. The rhythm of alternating vantage points carries us through to the end; the poem is even hopeful about the possibility for intimacy and joy despite the war’s toll on all of us. The poem is finally only elegiac about the vocation of poetry. There is little left for poets to do, and no convincing reason for them to do even that. Nonetheless, Ginsberg manages a gesture whose political significance is arguably its powerlessness. If the war for us is language, he will let it end on his tongue. It is an act committed in his own voice: “I lift my voice aloud,” and pronouncing “the words beginning my own millennium,” “I here declare the end of the War!” (415). It is a poignant, remarkable moment, utterly gratuitous though an exemplary lesson and grandly Whitmanesque in its way. Yet it gives back to the rude history written by politicians all but the speech of vision and witness. Hearing Ginsberg read “Wichita Vortex Sutra” during the war was exhilarating. In a large audience the declaration of the war’s end was collectively purgative. The text of the poem retains that fragile but dramatic effectiveness because it registers its unresolvable ambiguities with such clarity. “Wichita Vortex Sutra” is also nearly unique among longer anti-war poems for its effort, sometimes affectionate, sometimes sardonic, to reach out to middle America—in this case represented by the poem’s Kansas setting—and urge a reconsideration of its blind patriotism. Other poets were more uncompromising. In “Up Rising,” Robert Duncan elevated President Lyndon Johnson’s administration to near mythic status, identifying him with the twentieth century’s great mass murderers: Now Johnson would go up to join the great simulacra of men,      Hitler and Stalin, to work his fame with planes roaring out from Guam over Asia. (366) Old evils arise anew, and “the very glint of Satan’s eyes from the pit of hell” now shines “from the eyes of the President.” “What is it that ‘rises up’ in the poem?” asks Ian Reid: Not only the overweening arrogance of a president whose “name stinks with burning meat and heapt honors” but also the fear of “good people in the suburbs” as they pile food on their barbecue plates; not only the waves of bombers but also the “deep hatred” of the new world for the old, or for any alien culture; not only the zeal of the “professional military” for victory but also the surge of infantile fantasies of destruction; not only America’s present passion for dominance but the half-buried guilts of its past. (Reid 170) One of Duncan’s themes is the way the war perverts creative human impulses he would encourage in himself. Though the tone of her Vietnam poems is far less apocalyptic, Denise Levertov explores a related territory, the way the war darkens our consciousness, in “Life at War”: the mucous membrane of our dreams coated with it, the imagination filmed over with the gray filth of it. (Selected 64)

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In our own bodies, this knowledge contends with a Whitmanesque faith that our designs are “fairer than the spider’s most intricate web” (64). Until Vietnam, Levertov avoided encountering the larger myths of our history and kept her poetic territory elsewhere and self-enclosed. Her earlier poetry nurtures a vision exceedingly fragile, almost evanescent. The poems declare their own articulation to be a substantive human action, though the assertion is continually vulnerable. Yet with Vietnam a moral commitment to practical action outside poetry enters Levertov’s poetry itself. Moreover, she demands that her vision proves equal to direct confrontation. Levertov’s sense of the war’s human cost for us is precise and telling, though her litany of its distant violence lies heavily on her tongue. Brutal and accurate as her lines about “the entrails of still-alive babies” may be, they are essentially clichés of violent war (Selected 65). We can hear in them a history of violence verbalized at a distance, perhaps even specific rhetoric like that of the English reaction when Germany invaded Belgium in the First World War. Moreover, our own physical security makes the language flat and unconvincing. We have no historical ground for sympathetic identification; such words will not come to us. William Carlos Williams argues that our poetry must seek the remnants of Native American history in our hearts, but he never truly finds that voice. To give voice to the land, to give voice to Vietnamese pain—these passionate quests are generated partly by internal needs. In “What Were They Like” Levertov tries to remember “when peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies” and of the Vietnamese says, “It was reported their singing resembled / the flight of moths in moonlight” (Lowenfels 73). The first image is weak because of its postcard conventionality; the second suffers from a cultural difference that cannot be traversed without more exact knowledge. These poems are fashioned from personal defeat. Levertov admits she cannot clearly see “the delicate, firm, whole flesh of the still unburned” (Selected 91). She fears an insect has come to see through her eyes. The wellspring of her own humanism fails her; the lines opposing poetry and love to the war ring flat. We believe her despair and her revulsion, but her mystical language is hollowed out by the events that drive her to use her vision as an opposing force. Nothing we do, she confesses, has “the quickness, the sureness, / the deep intelligence living at peace would have” (Selected 65). She would create a poetic world in which love is the greater power, but in the face of the war she cannot do so. Nor can she give full witness to anger. The hidden subject of Levertov’s “Staying Alive” is this blocked and subverted expressiveness, the poet’s despair that appropriate images of pain—so specific and telling as to be unforgettable—are unachievable. The Vietnam poems most likely to survive may be those that emphasize not moral outrage at the private suffering so easily visible in televised images but the mixed translucence and inaccessibility of those images. Levertov herself moves toward that kind of treatment in The Freeing of the Dust (1975), which includes her first fully successful Vietnam poems. “The Pilots,” based on direct experiences in North Vietnam of the sort very few established American poets have had, records her touching reticence in questioning captured American pilots. Since her hostility cannot survive their actual presence, she is reticent about asking them if they knew “precisely / what they were doing, and did it anyway, and would do it again” (Freeing 30). In no way does this reticence lessen the horror at what the bombs do, yet it does complicate the poet’s ability to act and speak; it complicates them with a poignancy exactly right for Levertov’s poetry. If the men understood their acts, she writes, then she must learn to distrust her “own preference for trusting people” (30). In “Modes of Being,” another poem in the same volume,

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Levertov uses a form that emphasizes the disjunction between her own consciousness and the history taking place in Vietnam. Four sections dealing with her own reactions are separated from but interspersed with three italicized passages about the prisons in South Vietnam: “Near Saigon, / in a tiger-cage, a woman / tries to straighten her / cramped spine / and cannot” (Freeing 98). The flat narration establishes Levertov’s respect for suffering that is, finally, not her own. Free herself to take pleasure in nature, she can neither forget nor fully maintain the connection with the unspeakable mutilations of the tiger cages. If we strain to open a bridge between “joy” and “torture,” she writes, we will “fail” or “all but fail” (99). As an expression of mixed rage, horror, and irony, Robert Bly’s “Counting Small-Boned Bodies” (1967), published without copyright on broadsides, remains one of the Vietnam War’s most memorable short poems. It sardonically suggests that if the dead bodies could be miniaturized, “Maybe we could get / A whole year’s kill in front of us on a desk!” (50). As Charles Altieri writes, “the poem’s tone and grammatical mood express a technological fantasy inspired by the false language of advertising”(87). When Bly read the poem during the war, he would first turn his back on the audience, reaching into a bag behind him, then turn around wearing a grotesque Halloween mask of an ancient decaying figure and proceed in that persona’s imagined voice. It was a voice of shrill, enraptured glee, with the ring sealing the marriage of blood lust and US policy. As Altieri concludes, “those dead bodies will remain intimately involved with our lives for a terribly long time” (87). Long enough, as it happened, for some poets to write about the Vietnam War years after it ended in 1975. Yusef Komunyakaa’s 1988 book about Vietnam, Dien Cai Dau, is one of the most important examples. Komunyakaa served a 1965–7 tour of duty in Vietnam as an information specialist and military newspaper editor, but it would take some time before he could begin writing about the experience. “Tu Do Street,” the title referring to a busy warren of bars, brothels, and bistros in the center of Saigon, South Vietnam’s capitol, is built on awareness that the prostitute’s brothers were often enough among the Viet Cong soldiers that US troops fought in fields and jungles. Yet those women’s bodies were also social, cultural, and racial crossroads in yet another sense, for White and Black American soldiers alike had contact with them: “black & white / soldiers touch the same lovers / minutes apart,” and unconsciously taste “each other’s breath” (Komunyakaa 29). The most famous American poem to come out of recent Central American wars and stateorganized murder is no doubt Carolyn Forché’s prose poem “The Colonel” (1978), which describes a meeting with a Salvadoran military officer. Forché worked in El Salvador as a reporter and human rights activist: What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar … On the television was a cop show. It was in English … . The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table … I am tired of fooling around he said … . Something for your poetry, no? he said. (Forché 16) Forché knowingly compromises our inevitable sense of horror with startled fascination, which prevents us from feeling we can decisively keep the poem at a distance. We are thereby led to think about the consequences of US military aid and diplomacy. The war in Iraq was the first major post–internet war in which the United States was involved. And there was substantial international opposition. Anti-war poetry thus had both motivation and a new means of distribution. Poets Against the War was founded as an international movement

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in February 2003. Within weeks, over thirteen thousand poets had submitted their poems to the organization’s website. The Iraq War produced at least one American poet, Brian Turner, who has acquired a major reputation, based on his books Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise. As George Packer wrote in the April 7, 2014, issue of the New Yorker: “Turner has at least one truly astonishing poem, ‘Al-A’imma Bridge.’ It describes an incident that took place in 2005, when a Shiite religious procession across a bridge over the Tigris in Baghdad turned into a stampede with the rumor of a suicide bomber, and almost a thousand people were trampled to death or drowned.” Written as a single sentence that “cascades over twenty-three free-verse stanzas,” the poem incorporates those directly caught up in the disaster along with references to historical figures reaching back to Babylon, with Scheherazade “made speechless by the scale of war.” Within the poem, all are ghosts subsumed in a nightmare, as the Tigris fills “with bricks from Abu Ghraib, burning vehicles” and all the detritus of war. The poem’s speaker wishes to “give daisies and hyacinths / to this impossible moment,” so that their bright beauty might “light the darkness.” It is remarkable that an American soldier wrote a poem of such generous, Whitmanesque, empathic spirit about this single Iraqi disaster. Other poets, notably Adrienne Rich, who wrote powerfully and inventively about Vietnam, went on to write about the war in Iraq. Composed on the eve of the war, Rich’s brief lyric “Wait” (2003) recalls Moody’s “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines.” Rich’s poem combines a fierce condemnation of the impending war—“hell’s noise” crawls “into your ear-shell”—with an enigmatic portrait of the manipulated soldier and his people, neither of whom ever understands the reason the war was pursued. Indeed, “they never told you” (Collected Poems 958). No coverage of contemporary war poetry could suffice without mentioning the line of contemporary poet-musicians, from Bob Dylan to Gil Scott-Heron. Scott-Heron’s “Work for Peace” (1994), for example, begins with Eisenhower and ends with the 1990–1 Gulf War. The full lyrics are widely available online, as are multiple videos of his jazz- and blues-influenced performances of the poem. His calm, understated performing style lends his political humor a special edge. When he describes a US President “who is standing under a spotlight shaking like a leaf,” we can easily visualize more than one commander in chief. And like so many war poems from the ancient world to the present day, despite deliberate topicality, these song lyrics generally retain their relevance and sense of immediacy. There is, sadly, no evidence that the world has left organized state violence in the past, nor that it has any intentions of doing so any time soon.

WORKS CITED Altieri, Charles. Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960’s. Bucknell University Press, 1979. Beecher, John. To Live and Die in Dixie & Other Poems. Red Mountain Editions, 1966. Bly, Robert. Collected Poems. W. W. Norton, 2018. Brooks, Gwendolyn. The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, ed. Elizabeth Alexander. Library of America, 2005. Carlisle, E. Fred. The Uncertain Self: Whitman’s Drama of Identity. Michigan State University Press, 1973. Duncan, Robert. Collected Later Poems and Plays. University of California Press, 2014. Errkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. Oxford University Press, 1996. Forché, Carolyn. The Country between Us. Harper Perennial, 1982.

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Freneau, Philip Morin. Poems on Various Subjects but Chiefly Illustrative of the Events and Actors in the American War of Independence. John Russell Smith, 1861. Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems 1947–1997. HarperCollins, 2007. Hecht, Anthony. Collected Later Poems. Knopf, 2003. Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. Vintage Books, 1995. Jackson, Paul. “Ode.” 1763 Broadside held at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Reprinted in Poems on Several Occasions: With Some Other Compositions, ed. Nathaniel Evans. John Dunlap, 1772, 78–81. Jarrell, Randall. The Complete Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Kees, Weldon. The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, ed. Donald Justice. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960. Komunyakaa, Yusef. Dien Cai Dau. Wesleyan University Press, 1988. Leder, Sharon, and Milton Teichman, eds. Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems of the Holocaust. University of Illinois Press, 1994. Levertov, Denise. Freeing of the Dust. New Directions, 1975. Levertov, Denise. Selected Poems. New Directions, 2003. Levine, Philip. New Selected Poems. Knopf, 1992. Lowell, Robert. Selected Poems: Expanded Edition. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Lowenfels, Walter, ed. Where Is Vietnam? American Poets Respond. Doubleday Anchor, 1967. MacLeish, Archibald. Collected Poems, 1917–1982. Houghton Mifflin, 1985. McGrath, Thomas. “Crash Report,” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, April 1946, https://www.poetr​yfou​ndat​ion.org/ poe​trym​agaz​ine/issue/70720/april-1946. Accessed February 19, 2022. McGrath, Thomas. Selected Poems: 1938–1988, ed. Sam Hamill. Copper Canyon Press, 1988. McKay, Claude. Complete Poems, ed. William Maxwell. University of Illinois Press, 2004. Merwin, W. S. The Lice. Atheneum, 1967. Merwin, W. S. The Second Four Books of Poems. Copper Canyon Press, 1993. Packer, George. “Home Fires.” New Yorker, vol. 90, no. 7 (April 7, 2014). Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume 1: 1902–1941, I, Too, Sing America. Oxford University Press, 1986. Reid, Ian W. “The Plural Text: ‘Passages.’ ” Robert Duncan, Scales of the Marvelous, ed. Ian W. Reid and Robert J. Bertholf, New Directions, 1979, pp. 161–80. Rich, Adrienne. Collected Early Poems: 1950–1970. Norton, 1993. Rich, Adrienne. Collected Poems 1950–2012. Norton 2016. Rueckert, William H. “Rereading The Lice: A Journal.” W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson and Ed Folsom, University of Illinois Press, 1987, pp. 45–64. Untermeyer, Louis. Modern American Poetry. HardPress, 2013. Whitman, Walt. The Complete Poems. Penguin Classics, 2005.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Experimental Asian American Poetry JOSEPHINE NOCK-HEE PARK

The opening page of Bhanu Kapil’s 2015 Ban en Banlieue reaches for the urtext of experimental Asian American poetics: Two weeks later, exhausted, trying to write [re-write] Ban, as I do every day, I lean over to the bookshelf and brush [touch] Dictee, a book I have not read for many years. I close my eyes then open them, my finger on page 4. A volt of violet [orange] fire goes through my body when I read these words: “Now the weight from the uppermost back of her head, pressing downward. It stretches evenly, the entire skull expanding tightly all sides the front of her head. She gasps from its pressure, its contracting motion.” In this way, Cha’s “dead tongue” licks the work. No. I feel her licking me. The inside of my arm, the inside of my ear. My error. I wake up. It’s time for the auto-sacrifice to begin. (7; brackets in the original) Kapil’s book is a culmination of years of meditations on and performances of Ban, an “unreal” girl “both dead and never living” whose postures Kapil herself inhabits (30). The serendipitous touch of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée (1982) in this opening gesture tells us volumes about Kapil’s book: both present dislocated girlhoods, in scenes of imperial violence and colonial occupation, and they both detail the experience of bodying forth these figures. Kapil renders an explicit connection between her book and Cha’s; it is Cha herself who licks, who stretches her tongue inside Kapil’s ear. This intimacy triggers an awareness of its impossibility—“My error. I wake up.”—but the feel of Cha nevertheless launches a ritual time, an invocation to begin. The instigating work of Dictée has been and continues to be vital for Asian American poetry— and myriad other genre and identity formations. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s masterpiece, a ninepart, multimedia epic, presents a series of women trapped in various underworlds, all the while writing out the agonies of occupying these positions. The significance and prevalence of this book is both undeniable and surprising: just after its publication in 1982, Cha was raped and murdered in New York, but this appalling crime was little noted in the broader artistic scene of the period and the book was little read until a decade later, when it was reclaimed by Asian American scholars who reprinted Dictée alongside a foundational critical volume edited by Norma Alarcón and Elaine H. Kim, Writing Self, Writing Nation, which offered readings and contexts for Cha’s work. This reception history has had a defining influence on Asian American literature, and Asian American poetry today is unimaginable without the aesthetic risks and devastating politics of Dictée.

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Asian American poetry after the widespread adoption of Dictée on college syllabi exhibits a shared debt to Cha’s avant-garde praxis. A visual and performance artist, Cha’s aesthetic efforts are deeply imbued with the Continental theoretical trends that circulated in the arts and literature departments at Berkeley, where she was trained. Yet, for all the wealth of Western literary allusions and cultural traditions on display in Dictée, deeply imbued with Classical tropes and Catholic ritual, the Asian American poets who have been touched by Cha’s book rarely cite them. Kapil’s ambitions for her Ban are telling in this regard: “I want a literature that is not made from literature” (32). The desire Kapil expresses here is a referential relation to lives, whether actual or textual, in which avant-garde experimental techniques do not serve to fold works into a literary lineage but instead intervene in lived experience. In beginning with this touch between Bhanu Kapil and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, this essay seeks to reconsider Asian American poetry as shaped by a sense of embodied experiment. It is my contention that this living touch, within and across often inhospitable worlds, extends throughout this poetry, from its modernist instigations to its present proliferation. This is not to suggest a particular affinity for experiment in Asian American or minority artists; instead, it is to seek out formal traces of the pressures of marginalized existence. Poetry, of course, is an art of constraint, a fact that has come to the fore in the experimental or “unoriginal” works that have taken center stage in the wake of the Language revolution (Perloff 12–14; 80–1). The procedures of poetry have become all too visible today, in contemporary poetry that routinely features the meta-commentary so critical to Kapil’s art. In this drive toward self-reflexivity in modern poetics, we can trace a rich vein of experiment in Asian American poetry. I begin with a paired set of modernist instigators: Sadakichi Hartmann and José García Villa, poets who shrouded their work and themselves in highly wrought mystique. In both cases, their embodied presences preside over their art, and they masterfully controlled their self-presentations— no small feat in periods governed by orientalist fascination. From these singular efforts, this essay turns to two complementary movements and theorizations of the avant-garde: the foundational urgencies of activist poets central to the Asian American movement, and the experimental work of poets ensconced within realms of visual and conceptual art. These cultural and aesthetic vanguards both came to prominence in the 1970s, and this essay considers their twinned legacies in concert as a way of comprehending the larger arc of experimental expression and presence in Asian American poetry. The final portion of the essay returns to Dictée as an exhibit of the melding of these social and formal strands, and I conclude with a foray into the recent poetry of Lily Hoang, whose meditations on social formation and aesthetic possibility express the “[brush] touch” (Kapil 7) of an embodied literary charge.

TOO, MUCH // TOO, FAST Sadakichi Hartmann and José García Villa achieved prominence well before the formation of Asian America, and their iconic presences were alternately rejected and illegible to the aims of the movement. Hartmann, a mixed-race Japanese German shipped to the United States by his father in 1882, cut an extraordinary figure: as Ezra Pound put it, “If one hadn’t been oneself, it would have been worthwhile to have been Sadakichi,” a bohemian playwright, poet, essayist, and actor whose outré works included a “perfume concert” (quoted in Legro). Hartmann’s true work of art was himself—he commanded fascination, as in his late, emblematic appearance in Douglas Fairbanks’s

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1924 film The Thief of Baghdad as a court magician; his wildly various works were epiphenomenal to this core presentation. For all of these reasons, Hartmann’s writings are poor candidates for Asian America: as exemplified in his arrival on America’s shores in 1882, the year of the Chinese Exclusion Act, much of Hartmann’s life flouted the legislated constraints on entry and livelihood that defined the vast majority of Asians in the United States. Hartmann was a thorough product of orientalist desire and fantasy, who embraced and capitalized on Asiatic mystique. An efflorescence of Gilded Age japonisme, Hartmann’s largely forgotten works show us both the manner and limitations of inhabiting this cultural vogue. His first 1904 collection, Drifting Flowers of the Sea and Other Poems, presents little of note in its watery sentiments, but an ordered drift of lines hints at an imported formality. Hartmann has been credited by his contemporary admirers as the first poet to introduce Japanese poetic forms into English, and his instantiations of these forms present glimpses of pleasure and beauty. Indeed, the limited range of Hartmann’s poetic forays is retrieved from banality by his inclinations toward Japanese form. Hartmann’s 1916 collection Tanka and Haikai: Japanese Rhythms briefly notes the two forms: “The Tanka (short poem) is the most popular and characteristic of the various forms of Japanese poetry” and the “haikai” (an older term for what we now call “haiku”) “is purely poetical.” His notes indicate, too, the liberties he has taken with the forms: he explains that “the addition of the rhyme is original with the author” and that the “association of thought” captured in the Japanese haiku is “too vague to be conveyed in English with such exaggerated brevity” (Hartmann, Tanka). In thus foregrounding his modifications of Japanese verse forms, Hartmann suggests the incommensurability of Japanese forms with English even as he tries his hand at them. White avant-garde poets such as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, H.D., Adelaide Crapsey, and William Carlos Williams, of course, reveled in this seeming disjunction, in the wide adoption of Asian verse forms and the new tonal experiments that culminated in the rise of Imagism, a movement governed by spare tones that little accorded with Hartmann’s excesses (and led to stilted evocations composed by legions of imitators). José García Villa’s poetry, by contrast, presents deeply interior and often refractory meditations. The torments of Catholic faith furnish much of the material of his verse, which possesses an inward, Blakean intensity. Like Hartmann, Villa was a notable figure in New York, famously included in the 1948 Gotham Book Mart photograph of literati,1 in which he stands between Gore Vidal and W. H. Auden. Villa came to the United States as a foreign student from the Philippines, and he made his way from a planned course of study in agriculture to become the “Pope of Greenwich Village” after enthusiastic reception of his brilliant 1942 collection Have Come, Am Here.2 Villa is remarkable, too, for not writing poetry; he halted the practice fifteen years later, when he determined that he had exhausted his reserves of verse and instead turned to composing a highly abstruse philosophy or science of poetry, only recently edited by a long-time student of Villa’s, Robert King (Villa, Poetry Is). Villa’s poetics took a highly idiosyncratic formal turn in his second collection, Volume Two (1949), which presented a new kind of writing: “Comma poems.” This new style necessitated an opening note by Villa: “The reader of the following poems may be perplexed and puzzled at my use of the comma: it is a new, special and poetic use to which I have put it” (Doveglion 78). We can

1 2

rwin R. Tiongsan dubs it “The Most Famous Photograph of Poets Ever Taken,” the title of his lively account in Salon. E Collected in Villa, Doveglion. The appearance of this edition marked a critical revival of Villa’s work.

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see the perplexing quality and singular innovation of Villa’s style in these representative opening lines, from “Elegy for the Airplane”: At,last,the,automobile,flew. At,last,Icaros. At,last,too,much. At,last,too,fast. At,last,the,present. (Doveglion 106) “Elegy for the Airplane” transposes Greek myth into the modern world. Most of Villa’s work stays in the mythic world and makes no mention of the world of airplanes and automobiles, but the modernity on view in this poem makes it particularly revealing for sketching out Villa’s world. The shock of Villa’s “comma poetry” lies in the disjunction between the meditations within them and the proliferation of commas, which shatter the music of the poetry he has created. The brash and machine-like perforation of the comma evinces a modern world that insists upon punctuating divine contemplation. These poems blast away rhythm and meter; and because they cannot be scanned for movement and emphasis, they call forth a new reader, one who can hear and feel these breaks without losing the images and emotions that they consistently puncture. Villa’s poems require a critical labor that readers have come to identify with modernist poetry, and in his own, inimical fashion, he chops up the surface of his poems to roil the sentiments beneath. Like all of Villa’s verse, this poem tells us nothing about Villa’s life, experience, or social world; instead, it depicts an interior flight that bursts into flame. We can see in his verse a late product of the modernist literary era, which repackaged universalist sentiments within broken visions and fractured forms. Both of these singular poets broke into avant-garde scenes that advanced aesthetic daring. Hartmann styled himself as a cultural bridge, but his Bohemian circles were largely cosmopolitan, transatlantic affairs; Villa was a figure of reverence for Filipino elites, but he increasingly guarded against community interaction, toward a deepening aesthetic isolation. In works spanning the turn of the twentieth century into the midcentury height of modernism, Hartmann and Villa belonged to rarefied and ultimately isolated spaces, and neither imagined or encouraged ethnic identification. The rise of ethnic nationalism in the movement era buried their achievements, but both Hartmann and Villa have enjoyed significant critical rehabilitation in recent decades—and their lives and works have intrigued readers well beyond the borders of Asian America. In leading with their outsized performances, this essay reconsiders their works and selves as precursors to the experimental advances that would culminate in the captivating embodiment Bhanu Kapil would reach out to touch again in her twenty-first-century performances. Between these ends, however, lies a roiling period of social and aesthetic ferment, in which avant-gardist strategies of action and expression came to both establish Asian American poetics and exceed its formation.

POETIC AVANT-GARDES The particular efficacy of the concept of the avant-garde for Asian American poetics has been critically elucidated in two important scholarly studies: Timothy Yu’s Race and the AvantGarde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 (2009) and Joseph Jonghyun Jeon’s

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Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry (2012). Both of these works write against what Jeon identifies as “the widely regarded incompatibility between avant-garde artistic forms and racial politics” to argue, in Yu’s case, “that the communities formed by contemporary American writers of color can themselves best be understood in the terms we have developed for the analysis of the avant-garde” (Jeon xxv; Yu 2); and in Jeon’s, that avant-garde Asian American poetry has sought “to reconfigure and realign inherited fault lines according to the exigencies and contingencies of contexts—emergent and inherited—and to seek alternative modes of articulation, not mere reprisals of previously effective forms” (Jeon xxix–xxx). The work of these scholars and others3 has dismantled distinctions between aesthetic and social poetic impulses—and rereading the longue durée of Asian American poetry in light of this scholarly labor, this divide becomes increasingly difficult to sustain, despite the persistence of hidebound critics who cling to outmoded distinctions and those poets who continue to attack them. For Timothy Yu, theories of the avant-garde provide a critical, explanatory framework for comprehending activist Asian American poetry in particular. Usefully parsing theories of the avant-garde to explain that this movement imagines “a social life that is itself grounded in art,” Yu demonstrates that “Asian American poets of the 1970s, far from taking race as the unifying ground from which their work emerges, actually approached questions of Asian American identity through debates about poetic form” (6, 7). In thus establishing poetry as a key site for working through social formation, Yu’s readings are especially invested in the formal work of presenting collective endeavor, and his special attention to the poetry of the movement activists of the 1970s, such as Francis Naohiko Oka, Janice Mirikitani, and Alan Chong Lau, has revived this era of minority poetics in particular. While Yu notably rehabilitates a formal understanding of the activist period, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon builds from Yu’s reconceptualization of the Asian American avant-garde to reconsider those poets more properly read within the category of the avant-garde as a domain of aesthetic advance, to consider the formal rendering of experiences of racialization that present the aesthetic pressures of “objectifying tendencies” (xxv). Jeon’s approach, less bound to periodizing social movements, provides a critical framework that can range across the sweep of Asian American poetry to showcase experimental efforts whose forms address racial stigma “by magnifying the operations implicit in racialization” (xli). The central poet of the Asian American movement, Lawson Fusao Inada, chanted the new entity of Asian American into being in rhythmic verse. Inada sought to distinguish himself from the “tradition of Japanese American verse as being quaint and foreign in English,” explicitly targeting Sadakichi Hartmann, who “momentarily influenced American writing with the quaintness of the Orient but said nothing about Asian America.” (Chin et al. xxi). Against the importation of Asian verse forms, Inada’s early poetry willed the creation of new political identities by ushering in a radical social formation. With his fellow activists, Inada created a minority literary canon, and their recovery efforts revealed the particular significance of poetry to Asian America. The experience of early Chinese and Japanese immigrants has been rendered visible in now-foundational literary exhibits: the Chinese poems carved into the walls of the Angel Island immigration station and the verse composed during and about internment by multiple generations of Japanese in the United

3

See Wang, Yao, and Park.

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States.4 Himself interned as a child, Inada’s camp poems remarkably present the experience as a crucible of cross-racial identification: his radical poetics insists upon the geography of Native American spaces and the music of African American blues and jazz. The governing influence of Black Arts is everywhere evident in the work of the early movement, whose cries for Yellow Power harbored a distinctly masculinist echo and linked arms with African American cultural warriors. This racial awareness was core to the panethnic inclinations of the movement, which sought to transcend narrower ethnic distinctions between Asian nationalities to fashion a raced identity. The claims for solidarity across ethnic lines was largely waged across the divide between Chinese and Japanese Americans—a then-notable achievement in the wake of the political enmity between China and Japan—but this East Asian focus remains a legacy of the movement, which shunted Filipino experience to the sidelines, despite their significant numbers in the United States and their special colonial status. Scholars have labored to correct these oversights and to expose the narrowed political contours of the movement, but the activist foundation and racial solidarities of the field remain critical—and are especially relevant in the deepening struggle against white supremacy today. Beyond the core group led by Inada’s band of brothers—Frank Chin howling most vociferously among them—a range of artists held the activist banner and did the important work of gathering cultural work. The powerful literary and organizational efforts of Janice Mirikitani deserve special mention: Mirikitani’s editorships assembled a range of voices, and her collections featured women’s experiences in particular. Timothy Yu elaborates the significance of Mirikitani in the formation of Aion, the first Asian American literary magazine: “The journal grew directly out of the San Francisco State strike, and its chief editor was Janice Mirikitani, a master’s student in creative writing during the strike who would become one of the best-known Asian American poets of the period” (77). Mirikitani’s feminist verse insists on breaking silence, and we may read her avant-garde intervention both alongside and contra Inada’s efforts: both poets write out of a radical strain to perform aesthetic acts of cross-racial solidarity; and while Inada chants out a live tradition, Mirikitani’s verse ruptures systems of oppression. This variance presents differing means within an ultimately shared avant-garde project, and the tones employed by both poets resonate within a broader music of movement poetics, with its special attention to performance, breath, and multivocality. This cluster of avant-garde aesthetics acts—the recovery of poetry composed in situations of exclusion and detention, the chanting evocation of radical lives—birthed the Asian American literary canon. The layering of a political spectrum onto artistic modes, of course, is a core legacy of movement poetics, which taught us how to read and hear for emancipatory aims; but these foundational revolutionary acts cannot account for the broader range of poetic impulses captured under the rubric of Asian America. It is worth emphasizing that the avant-garde of the movement notably detached itself from the modernist aesthetic ventures of Hartmann and Villa; indeed, this genealogical rupture was critical to the launch of the movement, which drew a decisive line

The Chinese migrants detained at Angel Island—the West Coast counterpart to Ellis Island—carved poetry into the walls of the station in Chinese verse. The discovery of these poems in 1970, decades after the station was shuttered, formed a profound testimony in Asian American literature. The afterlife of internment has fashioned a literary subgenre of poetry, which presently extends to the verse of later generations of Japanese Americans who continue to feel the reverberations of incarceration in their families. 4

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between orientalist and radical approaches. The special importance of orientalist fascination to high modernist poetry necessitated Inada’s resistance to playing the oriental gentleman and Mirikitani’s refusal to inhabit the tragic silence of Madame Butterfly. Activist efforts to found a radical tradition and break silence were emphatically anti-orientalist—and this stance cordoned off modernist resources for presenting the pleasures and horrors of modern life. Disabling these methods was vital to the new music fashioned by activist poets; but this critical stance also produced an isomorphism of message and voice. That the music of this radical strain should be recognizable and capable of folding in multiple concerns are key strengths of the movement; but its anti-modernist politics have necessitated formal restrictions that are especially pronounced in poetry. This Asian American avant-garde was thus particularly unable to appreciate concurrent avantgardes drawn from aesthetic legacies, as in the important work of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and John Yau, whose long publishing careers began in the 1970s. Both Berssenbrugge and Yau work closely with avant-garde fine arts practitioners: Berssenbrugge’s work with the form of the art book is especially significant and visible in the striking forms of her collections; Yau’s poetics of difficulty and visibility recall the refractory edges of later modernists like John Ashbery. Both Berssenbrugge and Yau evince a fascination with surfaces in their verse, and both are keenly aware of orientalist images and tones, which are a source of play for Yau’s verse in particular. Neither presents their art as an avenue of social revolution or political alliance; instead, they fashion deeply felt arts of dislocation. If the modernist efforts of Hartmann and Villa relied on their highly idiosyncratic presences, however, these avant-garde poets make difficult virtues out of absences. Berssenbrugge’s complex meditations on aesthetic qualities can both illuminate and obscure her identity. Though her books often foreground embodied and sensory experience—as in the literal surfaces she employs for her art books5—her work does not present the kinds of investments in positionality recognizable to activist programs. Instead, Berssenbrugge inhabits a different radical end of avant-garde verse, and her experimental ventures have encompassed a wide range of concerns, from philosophies of perception to more worldly questions of space and structure. Opacity and vision, natural laws and the movements of desire: her work moves through its own rigors with what feels like a scientific detail; her verse has a material heft and density that unfolds with a procedural force—all the while retaining an elusive core. John Yau’s poetry, too, can slip beyond the reader, but a significant bulk of his oeuvre explicitly engages pulp orientalism. An enormously productive writer, Yau’s poetry ranges over a life of aesthetic play, and his verse is especially distinctive for its phrasal and linear repetitions. His highly distinctive ear often plays with verse forms in both spectral and ossified modes; his poems are capable of invoking trashy and refined pasts of orientalist demonization and desire with a formal and often wry distance. With this wide-ranging play, the material Lawson Fusao Inada pointedly cordoned off can become a resource in Yau’s work, in his often surprising applications of avantgarde formal modes. The social and aesthetic avant-gardes represented by Inada and Mirikitani, on the one hand, and Berssenbrugge and Yau, on the other, pitch their works in the service of differing formations. Yet one avant-garde can readily slip into the other: the vocal renderings in the more performative verse of Inada and Mirikitani present forms and shapes that readily approach the formal play that

5

See Jeon, 71–107.

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is the hallmark of the aesthetic avant-garde; the highly visual presentations of selves and subjects in the work of Berssenbrugge and Yau, too, can skewer conventional modes of racial and political appropriation—and all of these poets brilliantly inhabit the fringes of the dominant literary codes that cut away the explicit and the obscure ends of these avant-gardes.

DICTÉE AND AFTER The reception of Dictée indicated a welcome interweaving of these two avant-garde strands.6 It is difficult to overstate the significance of Dictée, which has become a staple of university curricula, in large part because of the live sense it continues to exert, as Kapil captures in her presentation of its touch. The passage from Kapil that opened this essay directs us to Cha’s prefatory introduction of the “diseuse,” the speaker whose touch later poets couldn’t escape: She allows others. In place of her. Admits others to make full. Make swarm. All barren cavities to make swollen. The others each occupying her. Tumorous layers, expel all excesses until in all cavities she is flesh. … Now the weight begins from the uppermost back of her head, pressing downward. It stretches evenly, the entire skull expanding tightly all sides toward the front of her head. She gasps from its pressure, its contracting motion. (Cha 3–4) This is the labor of the diseuse, who brings forth other voices: figures of myth and history, but also more intimately known others, as in Cha’s presentation of her mother’s experience as a young woman conscripted to teach in Manchuria. The somatic pressures of speaking are a swarm, a swelling of flesh; this graphic expression of a physical onslaught precedes a series of unfolding occupations, in which the diseuse is repeatedly visited by colonized subjects. The “volt” that Kapil experienced when she reopened her copy of Dictée adds an electric charge to Cha’s birthing scene: the downward contractions felt on the skull of the diseuse flash through Kapil’s body to appear as a phantom tongue, licking arm and then ear. This feels like an animal parturition and lineage, and though the sensation passes, this connection launches a time of ritual: “My error. I wake up. It’s time for the auto-sacrifice to begin” (Kapil 7). The resonance between Cha’s ritual occupations and Kapil’s “auto-sacrifice” is deeply felt, but between the two artists we can identify a shift between third and first person: the painful articulation of the “she” of the diseuse has been digested into a first person, who wakes up from the dream to initiate the ritual and ultimately sacrifice herself. We can credit Dictée with instigating this self-consciousness: Cha’s art blazed the ritual of taking in and becoming other, and the poets who have been transformed by her touch wield a potent resource for fleshed encounters and living speech. The final pages of Dictée register the possibilities and limits of the connections it has sought. The epic’s nine sections are shaped into a novena, and near the end of its ninth meditation, Cha recounts a Korean fable: a young girl, in search of a cure for her ailing mother, meets a woman

Students and scholars from multiple fields have cherished Cha’s text, but the critical work of Norma Alarcón and Elaine H. Kim, both housed in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, conditioned its reception. Kim is a groundbreaking figure whose monograph Asian American Literature was the first sustained study of this field; her later scholarship has been focused on Korean American literature, a field for which Dictée’s presentations of colonialism in Korea has been especially important. 6

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at a well who gives her ten packets of medicine. Nine are for her mother, but the tenth packet is for herself—an indication of the end of the nine-day ritual and an intimation of an ultimate opportunity to indulge herself. The story ends, however, with the child about to enter the house where her mother is waiting: Already the sun was in the west and she saw her village coming into view. As she came nearer to the house she became aware of the weight of the bundles and the warmth in her palms where she had held them. Through the paper screen door, dusk had entered and the shadow of a small candle was flickering. (Cha 170) The weight and warmth of these bundles promise to alleviate the pressing weight felt by the diseuse—and yet the ninth day ends here, at the threshold. At this final moment, when it is clear that the child will cross into the house to be reunited with her mother, she hesitates before the flickering screen. The art of Dictée is to make such boundaries visible; indeed, Cha discovers revelatory possibilities in proliferating borders. It is the screen between mother and daughter—an intimate variant of the multiple dividing lines that run throughout the text—that matters: its surface is a site for multiple projections across time, space, and aesthetic mode. The cinema screen holds pride of place for Cha, and the projection of the diseuse onto the screen allows the entry of the second person: “Upon seeing her you know how it was for her. You know how it might have been” (Cha 106). In its meticulous preservation of divisions and distances, Dictée “allows” the primary and constitutive other of “you” to experience “in place of her,” “to make full.” So many poets have been transformed by this painstaking labor, as in the audacity of Kapil’s “auto-sacrifice,” whose first person can collapse the border between self and other that Cha made so irreducibly palpable. I would like to close with a recent instance of a further transmission of Cha’s tongue, to Lily Hoang’s “On the Geography of Friendship,” from her 2016 collection A Bestiary. Organized into musical movements, the piece opens with a “Fugue” that collates philosophical and poetic musings on friendship to consider the “swarm” of community and the detachment felt at the death of an old friend. A bestial genealogy shapes itself in this work, which resonates with Dictée’s “Make swarm”: the command to accept fleshed inhabitations. In the “Presto” movement, Hoang notes that “In Ban en Banlieue, Bhanu Kapil writes, ‘I want the swarming movements mixed with static forms,’ ” one of a series of brief, aphoristic passages on swarms (96). Hoang, too, wants the swarm and stasis, but the mixture is unattainable; instead, the swarm devours and leaves stillness behind: “You want language to swarm and eat this carcass you have become until there is only the glint of bone against sunlight” (98). From Cha to Hoang, the nominal and verbal force of “swarm” threatens the speaker: Cha’s “Make swarm” can be both parts of speech to make a movement and a collective, and the force of the swarm for Hoang, too, is in a group formation rendered from a movement. The musical notations in her poem operate similarly to make a movement, and the layered tones and materials of this verse presents an exhibit of the learned and highly fractured legacies of experimental Asian American poetics. In suggesting this lineage, it is worth noting that, like the efforts of Cha and Kapil, Hoang’s book, too, feels utterly singular. Perhaps what is most distinctive about Hoang’s verse in an essayistic endeavor that reads less like prose poetry than like Montaigne or even Aristotle, whose quotations on friendship resonate alongside Hoang’s own lines. In fact, Hoang cites from poetry as though from essays, as in “Kim Hyesoon writes, ‘my shadows swarm like a pride of lions on

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the plains / A place where my ashes get up and dance after I’ve been burnt today’ ”—she routinely transposes line breaks into slashes, foregrounding sense over space (95). A Bestiary is evacuated of lyric feel or form; instead, its essayistic style harkens back to what occasionally can feel like archaic form—but plunged within modern suffering and ennui. This sensibility feels remarkably distinct from Cha’s work, whose multi-generic surfaces are all submerged within lyric tones. We have traveled a long way to Hoang’s expository mode, but the animal order that governs this work marks out a trajectory that can look beyond the suffering of the diseuse—to the animal remains of postcolonial survival. This is a long way indeed from Sadakichi Hartmann and José García Villa, who cultivated themselves for very different ends. And yet the longing for consumption extends from that era to the present, now layered with self-reflexive turns that have eaten away poetic conventions. This essay has sought to trace an embodied experimental poetics, punctuated by the chants and abstractions of the avant-gardes of 1970s. The core drive toward social and aesthetic vanguards established during that roiling era has come to the surface in contemporary avant-garde verse, which writes through the interconnection of community and artistic endeavor—of swarm as noun and verb, the collective and the chaotic advance.

WORKS CITED Alarcón, Norma, and Elaine H. Kim, eds. Writing Self, Writing Nation: Essays on Dictée by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Third Woman Press, 1994. Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictée. Third Woman Press, [1982] 1995. Chin, Frank, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong. “Preface.” Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers, ed. Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong, Meridian, [1974] 1997, xi–xxii. Hartmann, Sadakichi. Drifting Flowers of the Sea and Other Poems. Manuscript ed., copy no. 116, 1904. Hartmann, Sadakichi. Drifting. Tanka and Haikai: Japanese Rhythms. San Francisco, Author’s ed., 1916, n.p. Hoang, Lily. A Bestiary. Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2016. Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun. Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry. University of Iowa Press, 2012. Kapil, Bhanu. Ban en Banlieue. Nightboat Books, 2015. Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Temple University Press, 1982. Legro, Michelle. “A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes.” Believer, vol. 98, May 1, 2013, https://beli​ever​mag. com/a-trip-to-japan-in-sixt​een-minu​tes/. Park, Josephine. Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. University of Chicago Press, 2010. Tiongsan, Erwin R. “The Most Famous Photograph of Poets Ever Taken.” Salon, December 11, 2019, https:// slate.com/cult​ure/2019/12/photo-elizab​eth-bis​hop-maria​nne-moore-auden-tennes​see-willi​ams.html. Villa, José García. Doveglion: Collected Poems. Penguin Classics, 2008. Villa, José García. Have Come, Am Here. University of Michigan, 1942. Villa, José García. Poetry Is, ed. Robert King. Ateneo De Manila University Press, 2015.

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Villa, José García. Volume Two. University of Michigan, 1949. Wang, Dorothy. Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry. Stanford University Press, 2014. Yao, Steven. Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Yu, Timothy. Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965. Stanford University Press, 2009.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Undisciplined Writing: Postwar Prose Poetry MICHEL DELVILLE

In his landmark introduction to The Prose Poem: An International Anthology (1976), Michael Benedikt argues that the genre’s basic characteristics include “a visionary thrust,” an “insistence on the reality of the unconscious,” and “a certain humor … which truly registers the fluctuating motions of consciousness, and which subsumes ordinary ideas of ‘poetic’ gravity or decorum” (49). Benedikt’s take on the prose poem is clearly in accordance with Baudelaire’s famous definition of the genre as “the miracle of a poetic prose, musical though rhythmless and rhymeless, flexible yet rugged enough to identify with the lyrical impulses of the soul, the ebbs and flows of reverie, the pangs of conscience” (Baudelaire 25). It also insists that prose poetry is particularly well-suited to an investigation of the unconscious mind “unfettered by the relatively formalistic interruptions of the line break” (Benedikt 48). That Robert Bly and Russell Edson figure prominently in Benedikt’s 600-odd-page anthology (about a hundred of which are devoted to American writers) is hardly surprising given the editor’s strong surrealist bias, which is reflected in the dominance of post- or neo-surrealist poetics in the American section of the anthology, where Jack Anderson and Benedikt himself are also featured to the detriment of other major representatives of the American prose poem such as, say, Gertrude Stein or William Carlos Williams, a Modernist tradition otherwise well-represented by the likes of Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valéry, Max Jacob, and Pierre Reverdy in the French section of the volume. That Kenneth Patchen, Karl Shapiro, and Russell Edson are the only featured American writers whose work in the genre predates the 1970s1 is even less of a surprise given Benedikt’s (rightful) insistence on the prose poem “revival” (39) taking place at the time of the anthology’s publication. While critics have traced the origins of the American prose poem to such varied sources as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Notebooks, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, or William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell, the genre inexplicably vanished almost completely from the American literary scene in the 1920s, only to reemerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The prose poem, which, until then had been neglected and underrepresented in mainstream and experimental publications alike, was growing in popularity in the world of American poetry. It became more widely available than ever before, thanks to

Patchen’s and Shapiro’s entries date back to the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Edson selections are taken from his 1964 collection The Very Thing That Happens. 1

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the joint efforts of an ever increasing number of writers, publishers, and editors. This renewal of interest in the form has since then led to the publication of several important anthologies,2 special issues of magazines,3 specialized journals,4 and numberless collections from both major and small press publishers. Benedikt’s introduction was the first significant attempt by an American poet to describe the genre’s formal and structural features. Benedikt regards the prose poem as “a genre of poetry, self-consciously written in prose, and characterized by the intense use of virtually all the devices of poetry, which includes the intense use of devices of verse. The sole exception to access to the possibilities, rather than the set priorities of verse is, we would say, the line break” (47). In recent years, however, definitions have tended to emphasize not so much the genre’s tendency to rely upon the technical devices of verse—which are conspicuously absent from most prose poems published in the second half of the twentieth century—as its capacity to reclaim and subvert a number of modes and subject matters that have come to be associated more or less exclusively with prose genres. This is one of the methodological premises of my own contribution to the scholarship on the prose poem, as evidenced in The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre. In his groundbreaking Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse, the first critical book devoted exclusively to American prose poetry, Stephen Fredman explains why some contemporary American poets decided to turn to prose in order to escape from the claustrophobic enclosures of traditional genre boundaries and to reclaim for poetry a number of modes and registers usually considered to be the private ground of prose. Fredman’s focus is mainly on William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell (1920), John Ashbery’s Three Poems (1973), and Robert Creeley’s Presences: A Test for Marisol (1976). The real focus of Poet’s Prose, however, is on the ways these poets have responded to the tendency of modern poetry to question itself and turn back upon its own medium: form and language. Fredman’s description of the ensuing sense of “crisis” that characterizes contemporary American poetry points back to Mallarmé’s famous essay, “Crise de vers” (“Crisis in Poetry”), which states that poetic language itself—and not the subjectivist space of the lyric—should become the main object of investigation of modern poets.

CRISE DE PROSE Poet’s Prose stresses the centrality of Emerson’s essays to the emergence of self-dramatizing, selfaware, and self-questioning prose works that reassert the primacy of the act of composition and seek to apprehend “how things arise from the matrix of language” (Fredman xiv). Fredman then proceeds to examine how the Emersonian tradition of oratorical and meditative prose evolved into what he himself calls “poet’s prose,” a coinage describing “works that are conceived of and read as extensions of poetry rather than as contributions to one of the existing prose genres” (xiv).

See also George Myers’s Epiphanies: The Prose Poem Now, Steven Wilson’s The Anatomy of Water: A Sampling of Contemporary American Prose Poetry, Stuart Friebert’s Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem, Robert Alexander’s The Party Train: A Collection of North American Prose Poetry, and David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. 3 From the early “Fifty-Four Prose Poems,” edited by Greg Kuzma and Duane Ackerman (1974), to the special issue of the Denver Quarterly, edited by Donald Revell (1991). 4 Most notably Peter Johnson’s The Prose Poem: An International Journal (1992–2000), Gian Lombardo’s key satch(el) (1997–9), and Brian Clements’s Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics (2003–13). 2

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Fredman avoids the term “prose poem,” which, he argues, “remains redolent with the atmospheric sentiment of French Symbolism” (xiii). These terminological considerations aside, one of the main strengths of Fredman’s analysis lies in its willingness to address a wide range of issues that are central not only to the aesthetics of prose poetry but also to our understanding of the current theoretical debates about language, textuality, and the analysis of modes of discourse. While the opening chapter of the book considers Williams’s “organic prose style” (Fredman 52) in the light of Emerson’s notion of the panharmonicon, Fredman’s subsequent discussion of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger introduces us to a line of thought that straddles the divide of creative and critical, literary and philosophical composition. These writers, Fredman argues, provide us with a key to a fuller understanding of Robert Creeley’s “poetics of conjecture” (62), one whose aim is to convey a sense of “thinking gauging itself ” and thereby achieve what Creeley himself describes as “a condition of speculative wonder or curiosity” (64). On a formal and structural level, having the sentence rather than the verse line as the basic compositional unit of “poet’s prose” enables the poet to indulge in an endless series of narrative and speculative digressions that “[resist] the gravitational pull of the complete thought” (57) at the same time as they preempt the possibility of poetic closure. Here, as elsewhere, Fredman’s notion of the “generative sentence,” where “grammar leads the writing through a succession of ideas” (57), echoes the Baudelairean project to reproduce the actual rhythm of thought itself. As for Ashbery’s “translative prose” (101) in Three Poems (which, according to Fredman, aims at the Mallarméan ideal of poetry as “pure” language), it is clearly in line with recent definitions of the prose poem as an organic, paratactic chain of forms and ideas—a principle central to Donald Wesling’s “narrative of grammar” (Wesling 176) and Ron Silliman’s “New Sentence” (Silliman 91) among other examples. Other critics, such as Jonathan Monroe and Margueritte S. Murphy, have approached the prose poem in light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “heteroglot” text, which undermines the autonomy of the lyric self at the same time as it sets an implicit challenge to the now ossified presumptions of traditional genre theory. For Murphy, the prose poem challenges those categorizations that secure contexts in which to read literary texts. Accordingly, she approaches individual texts and writers primarily in terms of their resistance to predetermined conventions ruling both poetic and nonpoetic genres and subgenres. Where this procedure, in Monroe’s study, involves a Marxist hermeneutic, Murphy prefers to center her analysis on the formal choices that determine the prose poem’s alliance with “an aesthetic that [values] shock and innovation over tradition and convention” (2–3). For Murphy, as for Fredman, Williams is shown to be the dominant figure in the development of a consciously cultivated tradition of the genre, one whose main purpose was to reproduce the ragged but uninterrupted flow of consciousness in a way that emphasizes the poetic possibilities of the American idiom.

FABULISTS AND PARABOLISTS Like Fredman, Murphy clearly feels a special affiliation with longer experimental prose poetry works, rather than with what Mary Ann Caws has identified as the “traditional qualities recognized in the prose poem—brevity, intensity, and self-containment or integrity.” (Murphy viii). Murphy’s study rarely even mentions contemporary masters of the “short” prose poem whose works in

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the genre have contributed to creating new formal and ideological possibilities for the genre. In my own study of the American prose poem, I have suggested that the great majority of prose poems published in the United States in the past fifty years can be roughly divided into two main categories: a “narrative” and a “language-oriented” trend. The first kind—which is exemplified by the Surrealist-inspired poetry championed by Benedikt and exemplified by many other prose poets who emerged in the 1970s and 1980s5—bears affinities with short prose forms such as the fable, the parable, the dream narrative, the journal entry, the “short short story,” or even the stand-up comedy joke. The publication, in 1964, of Edson’s aforementioned The Very Thing That Happens inaugurated what has since then become the most popular subgenre of the American prose poem: the neo-surrealist, absurdist fable. The first-generation American “fabulists” are Russell Edson and Michael Benedikt. Second- and third-generation fabulists include Margaret Atwood, Maxine Chernoff, Lawrence Fixel, Morton Marcus, Jack Anderson, Peter Johnson, and Marie Harris. What they share is an ability to “[take] a metaphor and [pursue] it right through to make of it a story” (David Ignatow, cited in Mills 76). Consider, for example, Maxine Chernoff ’s “Phantom Pain,” a prose poem of only 143 words. It begins, “After the leg is lost, the pain remains as an emblem; so the kidnapper cannot part with his ransom notes” (1). What follows is a proliferation of non-sequiturs, a surreal play of signifiers, though each sentence includes imagery of either loss or violence: a crowd fading to waves, a mad bomber offering to give up his career for his wife, a train conductor dreaming of a murderer. In the end, the bomber visits a diner whose clientele is composed of other bombers: “Anxious, he drops a coffee cup, white fragments exploding at his feet” (1). Chernoff ’s own comments on the genesis of “Phantom Pain” (the opening text in Utopia TV Store) insist on the necessity for the narrative prose poem to “exist independently” from the author’s experience and to consist of “self-contained worlds” (Chernoff, cited in Lehman 27). “The yoking of disparate elements—such as ‘phantom pain’ and a kidnapper’s lost ransom notes,” she explains, is “characteristic of both metaphysical poetry and surrealist collage” (27). Prose poems, she adds, are “a contemporary equivalent of metaphysical poetry” (27), since in both cases metaphor can expand to become the text’s central conceit. Finally, her choice of the prose poem form can be accounted for in view of the fact that “attention to line breaks, syllables in a line, end rhyme and stanzas would limit or distract attention from the narrative development and metaphorical density” (27). Implicit in Ignatow’s and Chernoff ’s comments is an interpretation of the genre as a compromise between the “metaphorical density” of the traditional lyric and the metonymic energy of the narrative mode. As for the use of metaphor in a seemingly “prosaic” context, it bears its own particular brand of richness and unexpectedness. The “metaphorical” content of “Phantom Pain,” for instance, draws attention to itself at the same time as it is undermined by Chernoff ’s objective, matter-of-fact tone and the “fast-forward” effect conveyed by the narrative. This intensification

A full list of American “fabulists” would have include the names of Duane Ackerson, Jack Anderson, David Benedetti, Elizabeth Bishop, Greg Boyd, Steven Ford Brown, Kirby Congdon, Philip Dacey, Lydia Davis, Stuart Dybek, Dave Etter, Gary Fincke, Siv Cedering Fox, Dick Gallup, Elton Glaser, Philip Graham, Donald Hall, Marie Harris, Michael Hogan, Paul Hoover, Brooke Horvath, Louis Jenkins, Peter Johnson, Nancy Lagomarsino, Hank Lazer, Gian Lombardo, Morton Marcus, Bin Ramke, Vern Rutsala, Ira Sadoff, James Schuyler, James Tate, Charles Webb, Tom Whalen, Peter Wortsman, David Young, and Gary Young. 5

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of the metaphorical within the prosaic is probably what the British critic Clive Scott has in mind when he writes that “metaphor in prose is more nakedly and alarmingly metaphorical than in verse. It is no longer one of a particular form’s habits of speech, part of the act, but a figure born out of a reality that has no knowledge of such figures. Its power doubled by its borrowing the submissiveness of prose” (356). Another type of fabulist poem is characterized by what Donald Wesling calls a “narrative of grammar” (176). The first paragraph of the “Each Other” section in John Yau’s Edificio Sayonara (1992) is not really a story dressed up as a poem but, rather, a poem that seeks to construe the movements of the speaker’s mind into a story. The focus here is clearly on the intellectual “leaps” that allow the story to be told in a way that underscores the rhetorical “hardware” of both poetry and narrative: In the middle of the unfolding, neither yours nor mine nor ours, simply one of many we are in, we occupy (Read: standing, sitting, sprawling) different quadrants of a room, waiting for night’s air to open its pockets, let us slip into its cubbyholes of respite. This story is true in this room, but not in the tropical breeze outside the sentences spelling it out, neon pulses crashing against the cranial area. You were speaking, though there is nothing to corroborate what I just heard, which was not you. I heard it nevertheless. We have reached the end of allegory, the thinking that makes this storytelling possible, and must now find a way to understand the space between us cannot be filled, that we are on different sides of a window that neither opens nor shuts. (Yau 127) Yau’s interest in the “thinking that makes [the] storytelling possible” refers back to a tradition of self-reflexive fables which—from Max Jacob to Jorge Luis Borges, Henri Michaux, Italo Calvino, Julio Cortázar, John Barth, and beyond—has put the emphasis on the telling of the tale rather than on the tale itself. Indeed, there is a sense in which Yau’s “Each Other” can be read as an application of postmodern metafiction to the art of poetry writing. Another recognizable feature of this kind of prose poetry is a foregrounding of form and discourse. As suggested by the image of “the tropical breeze outside the sentences spelling it out,” the Poetic Word becomes, in Yau’s poem, literally de-capitalized, words are turned into verbal objects within and against which the poet evolves a new estranging poetry out of the elaboration of form. In the works of Yau, Lawrence Fixel, Lydia Davis, and others, the prose poem seems to have veered in the direction of what Jacques Derrida regards as the basic constitutive feature of Maurice Blanchot’s “récit,” The Madness of the Day, a narrative staked on “the possibility and the impossibility of relating a story” (Derrida 234). The fabulist mode has been used by different poets for different purposes. The best known representative of the “absurdist” school of the American prose poem is undoubtedly Russell Edson, whose hilarious post-Freudian family romances and fairy tales are collected in such books as The Very Thing That Happens (1964) and The Wounded Breakfast (1985). Michael Benedikt’s Mole Notes (1971), another early example of the so-called American prose poem “revival,” combines an extraordinary level of literary experimentation, urbane wit, black humor, metapoetic playfulness and rhetorical sophistication with the raw energies of surrealism. The immediate impression in reading Benedikt’s prose poems is one of rhetorical control and intellectual authority, and yet the overall sense of indeterminacy present in many pieces contained in Moles Notes often seems to undermine the poems’ aspirations to rationality and seriousness. Out of that self-deflating authority the prose poem becomes a form of shared play, one that allows imaginative open-endedness to

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prevail. As for Charles Simic’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The World Doesn’t End, its use of the prose paragraph blends myth and humor while opposing fables, parables, nursery rhymes, riddles, and other “minor” genres to the totalizing power of grand master narratives. While the prose poems of Benedikt and Simic show the influence of French masters of the form such as Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and André Breton, the “short shorts” of Margaret Atwood and Richard Kostelanetz point back to Donald Barthelme’s metafictional games and, by way of pre-postmodern predecessors, have more to do with the prose tradition of, say, Franz Kafka’s Ein Landarzt or Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones—or even with the nonliterary tradition of the stand-up comic—than with any poetic tradition as such. More generally, however, the importance of parody and humor in many prose poems of the narrative or fabulist variety allies these poets with a line of postwar poets and fiction writers who, like Kenneth Koch, have learned “the possibility of being funny and lyrical at the same time” (Hoover 111).

LANGUAGE WRITING AND THE NEW SENTENCE The other main “camp” in postwar American prose poetry is represented by writers whose work is associated with Language poetry, a loose group of experimental American poets, which emerged in the early 1970s and developed around a network of specialized magazines, small presses, talk series, and other collective projects. The Language poets shared a number of aesthetic, theoretical, and, ultimately, political concerns that include a renewed attention to the act of writing itself, a rejection of the norms of the plainspoken “voice” lyric and a conviction that theory is central and even inseparable from the writing of poetry. The language-centered dynamics of Ron Silliman’s “New Prose Poem” enacts a critique of referentiality that undermines common assumptions about the transparent “naturalness” of syntax. In his classic book, The New Sentence (1977), Silliman lists the qualities of the “New Sentence”— his alternative to the referential strategies of conventional mimetic or narrative prose—as follows: 1) The paragraph organizes the sentences; 2) The paragraph is a unity of quantity, not logic or argument; 3) Sentence length is a unit of measure; 4) Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity; 5) Syllogistic movement is (a) limited; (b) controlled; 6) Primary syllogistic movement is between the preceding and following sentences; 7) Secondary syllogistic movement is toward the paragraph as a whole, or the total work; 8) The limiting of syllogistic movement keeps the reader’s attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often at the sentence level or below. (Silliman 91) Silliman’s manifesto of the New Sentence (which was influenced by Gertrude Stein’s chapter on “Sentences and Paragraphs” in How to Write) signals a radical break from previous compositional methods even within the tradition of the American prose poem (with the obvious exception of Stein herself). Many writers associated with Language poetry were influenced, whether directly or indirectly, by the work of Gertrude Stein who, in the early years of the twentieth century, had already perceived that one way of renewing the strength of poetry lay in a discovery of the “poetic”

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potential of descriptive and argumentative syntax. A precursor of a certain form of postmodern poetry rather than a typical representative of the modernist avant-garde, Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) argues both for a radical reexamination of the use-value of prose and a radical questioning of the aspirations to figurativeness and “poeticity” of poetry. Her early portraits and still lifes laid the foundations of a self-conscious critique of the claims to transparency of mimetic and utilitarian prose that paved the way for the post-lyric mode recently developed by many Language poets. Among them, the works of Lyn Hejinian, Harryette Mullen, and Rosmarie Waldrop stand out. Hejinian’s most famous work, My Life (1978), is an Oulipian experiment in procedural poetics (its first edition comprises 37 sections of 37 sentences, each section standing for a year of the author’s life). As for Mullen, she combines African American cultural perspectives with discursive strategies associated with Language writing. Trimmings—her second collection, appropriately published in 1991 by Lee Ann Brown’s Tender Buttons Press—was inspired by Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) and sought to investigate the cultural mannerisms pertaining to feminine clothing, mixing references to Stein’s “cubist” prose sketches with elements of Black dialect and fragments of blues songs in a way that alternates between the literal and the metaphorical, the philosophical and the erotic. Rosmarie Waldrop has produced some of the most intellectually rewarding books of prose poems to have been published in the last fifty years. Her Lawn of Excluded Middle (1993) amounts to playful and critical appropriation of Wittgenstein’s project to make “language with its ambiguities the ground of philosophy” (Waldrop 81): I knew that true or false is irrelevant in the pursuit of knowledge which must find its own ways to avoid falling as it moves toward horizons of light. We can’t hope to prove gravity from the fact that it tallies with the fall of an apple when the nature of tallying is what Eve’s bite called into question. My progress was slowed down by your hand brushing against my breast, just as travel along the optic nerve brakes the rush of light. But then light does not take place, not even in bed. It is the kind of language that vanished into communication, as you might into my desire for you. It takes attention focused on the fullness of a shadow to give light a body that weighs on the horizon, though without denting its indifference. (Waldrop n.p.) One of the most remarkable features of Waldrop’s Lawn is its willingness to integrate many different discourses from areas such as philosophy, science, narrative, and the lyric. But is this polygeneric quality what makes Waldrop’s paragraphs “prose poems”? As we know, the mixing of different genres and styles per se is by no means the privilege of poetry written in prose: Pound’s Cantos and Zukofsky’s “A” come to mind, not to mention many recent poetry collections made up of interwoven lyrics, stories, newspaper cuts, or even drawings and photographs. What makes Waldrop’s work so interesting is precisely that it does not confine itself to mixing or juxtaposing antipodal modes and registers. Waldrop does not resort to the asyntactic and disjunctive strategies encountered in many experimental works of the “language-oriented” variety. Rather, she proceeds to undermine the logical, syllogistic authority of expository prose from within by confronting it to the changing psychic terrain displayed by a consciousness that is using all its rhetorical vigor to keep up with the “accelerating frame” of a world that is “edging away and out of reach” (69, 67). As is apparent in the paragraph I’ve just quoted, Waldrop’s prose poems account for the particulars of subjective experience in a way that accounts for the geometries of language, body, and self and combines them in “an alternate, less linear logic” (81). The constant shifts from the general to the particular, the abstract to the sensuous, the metaphorical to the literal

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need to be understood in the context of the author’s proposition that “we have to pass from explanation to description in the heroic hope that it will reach right out into experience” (74). It is a tribute to Waldrop’s extraordinary stylistic talents that the transitions always remain fluid, achieved by almost unnoticeable shifts of tone, register, and grammatical structure. The result of the poet’s meditations on the principle of ambiguity encompassed by “the gravity of love” (Waldrop 81) reads like Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse translated by Wittgenstein into a Poundian “dance of the intellect,” one that allows the self to struggle with the “uncertainty of fact” (60) indicated, in various ways, by a post-Newtonian model of the universe. Waldrop’s investigation of the contradictions and paradoxes that undermine the consistency and authority of logical thinking invalidates what Charles Bernstein has condemned as the anachronistic assumption that “philosophy is involved with system building and consistency and poetry with the beauty of language and emotion” (Bernstein 218). In this sense, her work is in keeping with what Bernstein defines as the ongoing project shared by modern poetry and philosophy: that of “investigating the possibilities (nature) and structures of phenomena” (220). Waldrop’s desire to write a kind of poetry that recognizes that “the picture of the world drawn by classical physics conflicts with the picture drawn by quantum theory” (Waldrop 81) joins up with a number of other recent works that bridge the gulf between poetry and the language of the new sciences, most notably Botho Strauß’s Beginnlosigkeit (1992), a collection of short aphoristic prose fragments whose nonlinear, noncausal dynamics are meant to reflect the sense of “beginlessness” embodied by the (now obsolete) steady state theory. All this, of course, has very little, if anything, to do with the supposedly fraudulent misuses of scientific terms and theories recently denounced in the context of Alan Sokal’s crusade against the “intellectual impostures” of late-twentieth-century critical theorists. The point here is clearly not to import the authority of scientific culture into poetry but to explore the metaphorical and cultural value of contemporary science in the light of the self ’s attempts to see, think and feel beyond “the bland surfaces that represent the world in the logical form we call reality” (Waldrop 74). By doing so, Waldrop’s Lawn suggests that one possible way out of the epistemic gaps allegedly separating science, philosophy, and poetry is to incorporate them in an alternative form of knowledge—a form of knowledge that combines the heuristic pedestrianism of the Baudelairean flâneur, the speculative mind of the scientist, and what Habermas has termed the “problem-solving” aspirations of philosophy. Jackson Mac Low’s Pieces O’Six: Thirty-Three Poems in Prose (1992) raises similar issues related to the use-value of poetic discourse vis-à-vis the language of expository, truth-bearing discourses. The dissolution of boundaries between creative and essayistic writing advocated by prose poets associated with Language poetry has been confirmed by the adoption by Bob Perelman and others of the expression “Language writing” to define work produced by the movement or by writers associated with the movement. Clearly, one of the lessons to be learned from the “New Prose Poem” is that poetic language can no longer claim to be truly impervious to the debates which have dominated academic thought in the last three decades of the twentieth century. The theoretical concerns that inform the speculative prose of Waldrop, Silliman, Hejinian, Mullen and other experimental prose poets should conceivably prove congenial to academics engaged in deconstruction, critical theory, cultural studies, and interdisciplinary approaches to art and literature. The paucity of critical material on their work, however, has the disquieting effect of reminding us that we still lack the critical vocabulary to reexamine the paradoxes built into some of the most interesting and ambitious work done in American poetry over the past few decades.

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CONCLUSION: BOUNDARIES AND EXPECTATIONS Poised between the center and the margin, the “public” language of prose and the “private” realm of the lyric, moving back and forth between lyrical, narrative, philosophical, and critical material, the prose poem can be seen as part of a more general movement in contemporary literature toward the dissolution of generic boundaries. In the course of its repeated and often brittle attempts to define and re-create itself, the prose poem, starting from the assumption that poetry can gain from a renewed interaction with other forms of writing, has so far succeeded in expanding the possibilities of contemporary poetry in a significant way. Despite the success story of free verse and the subsequent obsolescence of metric and stylistic criteria for distinguishing poetry from prose, the prose poem has paradoxically continued to be regarded by many as a rather disturbing, if not downright illegitimate, mode of literary expression. Though it would no longer seem necessary to refute essentialist notions of genre, the relatively unexpected commotion caused in the poetic and critical Establishment by Charles Simic’s 1990 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of prose poems, The World Doesn’t End, suggests that a number of prescriptive norms about the formal premises of poetry continued to prevail twenty years after the beginning of the prose poem “revival” hailed by Benedikt, in a country which was among the first to free poetic expression from both stylistic sophistication and prosodic convention. In a country where, to quote Marjorie Perloff, “free verse has become quite simply the lyric norm” (135), the survival of a certain number of formal expectations and prescriptive boundaries between literary genres remains the uncertain ground from which the prose poem still manages to draw a significant part of its subversive and, some would argue, political potential. The prose poem has remained an oddity in American letters, one which has continued to derive its energy from what Suzanne Bernard has described as “the essential antinomy which gives it the character of an Icarian art, aspiring to an impossible transcendence of itself, to the negation of its own conditions of existence” (13). As far as I can tell, it is precisely that tension between content and form, innovation and tradition, which makes the prose poems of Rosmarie Waldrop, Ron Silliman, Maxine Chernoff, Marie Harris, Peter Johnson, Cyrus Console, Gian Lombardo, Morton Marcus or Michel Gizzi—to cite but a few of the most remarkable prose poets of the past twenty or thirty years—such a powerful and challenging read. Now that the American prose poem has given rise to a number of recognizable trends such as the “poetic parable,” the neo-surrealist dreamscape or the post-Steinian “New Sentence” of the Language poets, one can only agree with Steven Monte when he remarks that “the fact that a poem is written in prose does not necessarily mean it is subversive” (8). As Monte wisely acknowledges, the claims that critics like Murphy, Monroe, and others have made about the genre’s revolutionary potential are “more nuanced and always qualified by the historical fact of the prose poem’s marginality” (8). Monroe himself, in his seminal study of the genre published in 1987, already devoted a whole chapter to the deep-imagist poetics of Robert Bly and characterized the poet’s turn to the prose poem as a retreat from radical politics into a poetics of inwardness and domesticity. Be that as it may, any attempt to divide the American poetry scene into a “formalist” and “experimental” camp on the basis of formal features or the reputations of individual poets is more misleading than helpful. As Monte argues, “we need to be circumspect when arguing that a work or genre breaks with traditional form or lacks form: conventional forms have a way of reasserting themselves when we think we are rid of them, and sometimes working through

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conventions is the best way of working round those conventions that are in our way” (222). By urging us to regard generic terms primarily as interpretive categories, Monte effectively shows that the question of what is or is not prose poetry—or, as Monte puts it, whether it was “a genre at some historical moments or moments and may no longer be one in a significant sense” (114)—matters less than how this perspective affects how we read individual works within and against accepted generic traditions, intertextual influences, and historical contexts.

WORKS CITED Alexander, Robert. The Party Train: A Collection of North American Prose Poetry. White Pine Press, 1996. Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Originally published in French in 1977 by Éditions du Seuil. Reprinted by Hill and Wang, 2010. Baudelaire, Charles. The Poems in Prose, ed. and trans. Francis Scarfe. Anvil Press, 1989. Benedikt, Michael. The Prose Poem: An International Anthology. Dell, 1976. Bernard, Suzanne. Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours. Nizet, 1959. Bernstein, Charles. Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984. Sun & Moon, 1986. Chernoff, Maxine. Utopia TV Store. Yellow Press, 1979. Creeley, Robert. Presences: A Test for Marisol. Scribner’s, 1976. Delville, Michel. The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre. University Press of Florida, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature. Routledge, 1992. Edson, Russel. The Very Thing That Happens: Fables and Drawings. New Directions, 1964. Fredman, Stephen. Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 1990. Friebert, Stuart. Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem. Oberlin College Press, 1995. Hoover, Paul, ed. Postmodern American Poetry. Norton, 1994. Kuzma, Greg, and Duan Ackerman, ed. “Fifty-Four Prose Poems.” Pebble 11, July 1974. Lehman, David, ed. Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 85 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems. University of Michigan Press, 1996. Lehman, David. Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. Scribner, 2003. Mac Low, Jackson. Pieces O’Six: Thirty-Three Poems in Prose (1983–1987). Sun & Moon Press, 1992. Mills, Ralph J. Open between Us: David Ignatow. University of Michigan Press, 1980. Monroe, Jonathan. A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre. Cornell University Press, 1987. Monte, Steven. Invisible Fences: Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature. University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Murphy, Margueritte S. A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem from Wilde to Ashbery. University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Myers, George. Epiphanies: The Prose Poem Now. George Myers, 1987. Perloff, Marjorie. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media. University of Chicago Press, 1991. Revell, Donald, ed. Special Issue. Denver Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 4 (Spring 1991). Scott, Clive. “The Prose Poem and Free Verse.” Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Penguin, 1991. Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. Roof, 1989. Stein, Gertrude. “Sentences and Paragraphs.” How to Write, Plain Edition, 1931, reprinted Dover Publications, 1975.

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Waldrop, Rosmarie. Lawn of Excluded Middle. Tender Buttons, 1993. Wesling, Donald. The New Poetries: Poetic Form since Coleridge and Wordsworth. Associated University Presses, 1985. Wilson, Steven. The Anatomy of Water: A Sampling of Contemporary American Prose Poetry. Linwood, 1992. Yau, John. Edificio Sayonara. Black Sparrow Press, 1992.

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CHAPTER SIX

Lowell’s Turtles STEPHANIE BURT

In the way that some people—some poets—are cat people, or dog people, Robert Lowell became a turtle person. Plenty of twentieth-century poets see themselves in many sorts of animals—think of Marianne Moore’s pangolin, Elizabeth Bishop’s giant toad—but Robert Lowell had an unusual track record of seeing himself, and his close relations, in, and by means of, amphibious creatures: not only literal amphibians but reptiles, fish, and mammals that live partly in water and partly on land. As Calista McRae has explained, Lowell “attends to animal life habitually,” but his preferred animals change with his worldviews and styles (19). The animals in Lord Weary’s Castle are almost uniformly fierce predators or victimized prey: the whales off Nantucket, the targets for the Drunken Fisherman and his strained version of Christ. There and especially in the transitional poems of The Mills of the Kavanaghs, and in the first part of Life Studies, they are birds, often stuffed birds, figures for the hollow or unbelievable spirit or soul. Consider “Fear, / the yellow chirper, beaks its cage” (Lowell, Collected 55); the dove, “chickadee and shrike” of “Where the Rainbow Ends” (69); the regimental eagles and fantastical bird-priests that dominate “Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid”; the caged cockatoo of “Thanksgiving’s Over,” whose hallucinating “German-American Catholic” cites Saint Francis, in a dream within a dream, “The Lord is Brother Parrot, and a friend” (104); and, in Life Studies, the poet’s self-portrait at “five and a half ” as a “stuffed toucan / with a bibulous, multicolored beak” (164). And then the birds, by and large, belong to history. The “sharp-shinned hawk in the birdbook” in “Eye and Tooth” arrives as a printed relic of a past age, representing an imperial—indeed a Roman—knowledge that Lowell would like to disown, “one ascetic talon // clasping the abstract imperial sky” (Lowell, Collected 334). He is not Lowell, nor does he represent us. The regularly anthologized late poem “Our Afterlife 1” makes the point that Lowell and Peter Taylor, for all their ambitious souls, are precisely not birds: “We are things thrown in the air / alive in flight … / our rust the color of the chameleon” (Lowell, Collected 732). They live, but they fall. Rather than birds, post-breakdown and post-Catholic Lowell repeatedly and engagingly sees himself and others in animals that swim or crawl. Robert Tillinghast, twenty-five years ago, noted Lowell’s attraction to sea creatures, “fish, gulls, whales, turtles, seals”; Steven Gould Axelrod has cataloged some of them (Tillinghast n.p.; Axelrod 219). “Skunk Hour” has attracted so much attention (not least from McRae) that I treat it as an outlier here, and will not return to that famous poem: I note in passing that its skunks are purposely not like Lowell, and do things he cannot— making them, as we will see, unlike his Testudines, though like his seals, and like the ducks in his last two completed poems (“Loneliness” and “Summer Tides”), who do things Lowell’s human family never could. Toward the end of his final book, Day by Day, Lowell placed the last of several

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poems portraying the poet as, or in, a turtle, providing his own shell, his own lyre music, his own protection from himself. Why these liminal animals? Why, in particular, the turtle? To follow the animals through Lowell’s work, noticing his insects (ants, dragonflies, grasshoppers—Randall Jarrell is a grasshopper), his fish, his serpents, and his enticing mermaids, is to notice figures for kinds of embodiment that the poet cannot enjoy, or cannot share: these animals’ bodies are fleeting, unconscious, feminine, or collective (like ants), by contrast with the melancholy, apparently long-lived, all too masculine, too often isolated and self-isolating Lowell. Seals, in particular, represent an unselfconscious bodily pleasure that Lowell can access only when not in his right mind. The Lowell of “Waking in the Blue” may feel like he is about to be harpooned (both whales and seals may be harpooned), but it is his fellow patient Stanley, “now sunk in his sixties,” who “soaks, / a ramrod / with the muscle of a seal,” “more cut off from words than a seal” (Lowell, Collected 183). In “Soft Wood” the unselfconscious seals “must live as long as the Scholar Gypsy. / Even in their barred pond at the zoo they are happy” (370). “Seals” near the end of For Lizzie and Harriet likewise represent an able embodiment, enviable and (at least at first) inarticulate: “creature could face creator in this suit” (641), with a pun on suit (skin, wetsuit) as against suit (lawsuit, case, attempt at self-justification). Even if one night a seal “could not sleep” and learned to write their name, the seals would not wallow in anguish, but “take direction, head north,” to live forever underwater, “green ice in a greenland never grass” (641). Seals—slick, “easy,” fluent swimmers who can also flop along on land—belong in their bodies, on earth, in this life, as human beings feel we do not. What distinguishes human life as Lowell knows it from (for example) life as a seal is not language or self-consciousness or desire so much as our self-alienation, which is understood in Lord Weary’s Castle as sin, and after that book as our human condition, in which existence may precede essence but anxiety precedes both. Readers of Vereen Bell’s monograph Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero may see how my readings grow from his. For Bell, Lowell’s “commentators tend to want to make the poems seem more conventionally affirmative than they truly are”; the poet himself, meanwhile, keeps choosing to live before he can know why he lives, trying “to extort from experience some unmediated value that remains for him imaginable but stubbornly undisclosed” (Bell 9). It is, as Bell acknowledges, a Sartrean or else a Kierkegaardian task, one very much in tune with Lowell’s postwar moment (5–6). We may understand the procession of seals in Lowell as a series of hypotheses about human bodies, his own and others, adult and child, male and female. (Nonbinary bodies are, alas, not much in evidence.) Why are we unlike seals, whose bodies so clearly belong to them? Do our bodies and lives really belong to us? If not, what good are they? If so, why do we so often feel otherwise— or is it only Robert Lowell who so often feels that way? Other land and sea animals in Lowell can play similar roles, though not with the seals’ audacity. Decades before the current boom in animal studies, Helen Vendler, reviewing Lowell’s sonnets for the Atlantic, noticed the seals along with the fish and the lizards: “Lowell’s poetry exhausts all species,” she wrote, and “Lowell views himself as not distinct from the lizard,” or rather distinct only in his greater self-consciousness, not in any greater access to spirit or goodness or utility or truth (Vendler). Even before the sonnets, those stanzas of retreat, disillusion and almost Eliotic rappel á l’ordre that Lowell published as Near the Ocean begin with a list of species less fraught, less responsible (for war, for the war in Vietnam, for civilization’s sins) than we ourselves: “the chinook / salmon jumping and falling back,” and then (with a nod to Auden’s “The Fall of Rome”—Lowell, too, writes about falling civilizations):

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Vermin run for their unstopped holes; in some dark nook a fieldmouse rolls a marble, hours on end, then stops; the termite in the woodwork sleeps (Lowell, Collected 383) The modern academic subdiscipline of animal studies, with its twinned insistences that nonhuman animals are not like human beings and that we are animals too, might find an early herald in Lowell’s low-to-the-ground creatures, no worse or less useful than humanity at our best, but only less ambitious. The grasshopper and the “caged squirrel on his wheel,” in Lowell’s three poems for Randall Jarrell, stand among the very few naturally occurring animals in Lowell to reflect on their actions, the exceptions that prove the rule: they seem to have been conscripted into an all too human self-consciousness, and into the restlessly Jarrellian, distractable, Sisphyean labors that go with it. Lowell’s “wheel / turned by the water buffalo through the blue / of true space before the dawn of days” echoes the wheel and the well from Jarrell’s own semi-sonnet “Well Water” (523). That said, the most nuanced—and the most formally interesting—among Lowell’s liminal animals are certainly his turtles: the lyre-shell of “The Neo-Classical Urn,” a focus for the young Lowell’s cruelty and the adult poet’s regret: the paired turtles of For Lizzie and Harriet; and the final turtle of Day by Day. These are not only poems of embodiment, but also poems of guilt, of attempted repentance: in them, the powerful, prestigious, often self-loathing, and (as we now say) cishet poet, so often taken (not at his own choice) to represent America or contemporary life or poetry itself, is able to see himself as both predator and prey, victim and villain, to find in this understudied animal emblem a figure both for unmerited aggression and for ways to survive. The turtle poems do not just show us a part of Lowell’s talents; they may also help us teach, appreciate, even (if the word is the right one) redeem Lowell’s poetry at a moment when his reputation has dimmed. Lowell cared about turtles before he cared about poems. The memoirs he drafted during the 1950s, on the way to writing Life Studies, contain a paragraph and a half about his childhood pastime of catching and stacking painted turtles in an urn until they began to die: I could catch the yellow-spotted black turtles, as they flopped off a fallen sapling or moved encumbered through the concealing but stubbornly retarding underbrush. Then I would run home and drop each new turtle into the garden well—not a real well, but a sort of plaster barrel about as big around as a mill wheel and ornamented with Greeks in procession. It was an urn: after the number of turtles reached the thirties, they began to die. Despite my putting bits of old meat, green crab apples and buckets of fresh water in the urn, the turtles died and stank. Then did the joy of catching more turtles grow tedious, meaningless, and at last the sickly survivors—ten or so—were released. And the hunt, the single track of my appetite, led nowhere, and I could not understand.1 Force without limit, and a belated self-consciousness applied only arbitrarily or ineffectively to that use of force: these qualities are, for late Lowell, what distinguish humanity from, say, lizards, turtles, and seals. They are not admirable qualities, but we have them; we should understand them. Lowell’s poem “The Neo-Classical Urn” is one attempt to understand them.

From Lowell’s manuscript collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Reprinted by permission. Published in Robert Lowell, Memoirs, edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, p. 97. 1

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It is, at the same time, a turtle-based ars poetica. As the poem begins, the poet’s own balding head resembles “a turtle shell / stuck on a pole” (Lowell, Collected 358). Bone is to flesh (or brain) as body is to soul as carapace is to the creature inside, “poor head”: the vulnerable, pitiable second requires protection through, but ends up confined by, the first. The poet discovers—ashamed, and baring his shame—that he is like the turtles, but also that he is still the boy who caught, and manipulated, and stacked, and ultimately killed, the turtles, delighting in their half-intended destruction. Lowell’s sporadic aba or axa rhymes hint at Dante while his story parodies Keats and the Homeric Hymns: I swerved between two water bogs, two seines of moss, and stooped to snatch the painted turtles on dead logs. In that season of joy, my turtle catch was thirty-three, dropped splashing in our garden urn, like money in the bank, the plop and splash of turtle on turtle, fed raw gobs of hash (358) The impulsive boy Lowell imitates the boy-god Hermes, making a lyre out of a tortoise shell, strumming the theme to destruction or distraction, stacking up rhymes as he once stacked up dying reptiles: will, kill, skull, shell, smell, pass, grass. He manipulates the vulnerable armored animals to their detriment, like a bad emperor (Caligula, say) or a demiurge. At the same time he is like them: “I rub my skull, / that turtle shell” (Lowell, Collected 359). “Caligula 2” recalled the turtle-like head of the bad emperor who gave Cal Lowell “my name at school” and beyond: “head hairless, smoother than your marble head … bald head, thin neck” (445). The shell and the skull and the poem, meanwhile, are both containers and contained, like the urn of the title. That urn, of course, points back both to Keats’s “Grecian” (i.e., classical) vase and to Cleanth Brooks’s then-influential book about how to read poems, The Well-Wrought Urn. The critics who took cues from Brooks in the 1940s and 1950s—and from Eliot, and from Donne (Brooks’s “urn” is not in the first place Keats’s but Donne’s!) were the same men (almost all men) who promoted the early Lowell. Admirers, even now, see Brooks’s work as a way to do justice to the intellect, and to the mixed feelings, behind canonical poems, their “effect of a total pattern” (194). Detractors, then as now, see Brooks’s approach as a way to fix and kill (and perhaps sacralize, and depoliticize) poems that deserve to be living, changing, worldly things. Stuffing the turtles into an urn, Lowell killed most of them without wholly meaning their deaths: did the younger Lowell who wrote Lord Weary’s Castle do the same thing to the words he used? What would it mean to see oneself, and one’s poems, as secular, vulnerable living things, extending below and beyond the shells we carry? Lowell’s turtles let him ask those questions, here and in his subsequent career. Katharine Wallingford finds that the turtles represent “guilt and terror,” though also “creativity and poetry,” and—perhaps less persuasively—his wives (48, 51). But they do more than that. The turtles let

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Lowell see himself at once in them and in their tormentor, his younger self: they are the only animal that adequately represents the poet, whose dual vision is not available in his poems about lizards and seals, squirrels and squirrel wheels and wasps. They are—usually (though he does mention tortoises)—animals that he can envision in water and on land, animals he tends to see as migratory or as displaced from home (not least because humans have wrongly moved them), nonmammals who look nothing like us, who move more slowly than we do, and who carry (as we do) a kind of protective art wherever they do. For us, it’s the art of words, of self-justification, of setting goals in existentialist fashion—existence precedes essence as a young turtle precedes its hard carapace. For turtles, it’s the shell, the literal container. At once the defender and the creature to be defended, human-like, inhuman, and like the poet himself, the turtles also incarnate, for Lowell, an intellectual current of the American mid-century, the same current that led the post-religious Lowell (as Bell saw) to a kind of exhausted existentialism, the current that Mark Greif has summed up in his influential monograph on American fiction, The Age of the Crisis of Man. In Greif ’s summary of Cold War thought, Man—whoever or whatever he may be, which had been so centrally in question earlier—is what we defend (as he is naturally) and they endanger (as they shape him unnaturally). One can begin to feel even a sentimentalism of man, plucking at the string of mobilizing pity customarily felt for children, the family and the hearth. (256) It is the kind of pity—for “man,” for himself, for obsolescent ideals—that Lowell would show in his sonnets, even using Greif ’s terms: “Man at the root of everything he builds” (559); “a broken clamshell labeled Man” (503). It is also the futile pity—the self-pity—Lowell explored as early as For the Union Dead in “Night Sweat,” where someone—but who?—is a turtle: Poor turtle, tortoise, if I cannot clear the surface of these troubled waters here, absolve me, help me, Dear Heart, as you bear this world’s dead weight and cycle on your back. (Lowell, Collected 375) This second of two sonnets that comprise “Night Sweats” seems to address Elizabeth Hardwick, “my wife”: her armor bears him up. The first sonnet, however, points back through the rest of the book to the urn, in some of Lowell’s most arresting pentameters: always inside me is the child who died, always inside me is his will to die— one universe, one body … in this urn, the animal night sweats of the spirit burn. (375) The angst-driven, never-resting adult Lowell, like one of the boy’s captured turtles, like the urn in which they died, is both container and contained, the thing destroyed and the instrument of destruction: body and soul. These turtles thus make an exception to McRae’s rule (derived from her studies of Moore) that Lowell’s “animals have none of the self-consciousness, mannerism, and solipsism that he struggles with and tires of in himself. Lowell sees in them the possibility of being free of the trammels of ego; they represent stable beings” (McRae 22). By and large, they do—except for the turtles, which represent the divided poet himself.

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If there are other animals anywhere in Lowell who represent poets qua poets they are rare or mythical or both, as in the rarely-noticed “Eating Out Alone,” where the French poet and rightwing political writer Paul Claudel becomes a “minotaur steaming in a maze of eloquence” (Lowell, Collected 577). The author of “Reading Myself ” is like “a bee, / adding circle to circle, cell to cell, / the wax and honey of a mausoleum” (591). By the time we taste the honey, or shape the wax, the bees are gone. Not so for the writer who lives on inside his hard work; not so for the turtle who gets his own sequence in For Lizzie and Harriet, plaything of God or gods or human beings, a painted turtle petrified by fear. I picked it up. The turtle had come a long walk, 200 millennia understudy to dinosaurs, then their survivor. A god for the out-of-power. (635) When he and his daughter Harriet found a stray turtle in Maine they took it home, rehabilitated it, and released it into the wild: Lowell wrote two sonnets about it—I quote the first. Inheriting the dinosaurs’ cold blood (as Lowell’s era believed) as well as the look and feel of the turtles that the young Cal stacked and neglected, this “painted” creature becomes not so much a god as a representative for the helpless, hay-like, pawn-like human beings who march or stumble through so much of Lowell’s History. The poet goes on: The laughter on Mount Olympus was always breezy … Goodnight, little Boy, little Soldier, live, a toy to your friend, a stone of stumbling to God— sandpaper Turtle, scratching your pail for water. (Lowell, Collected 635) A turtle kept in a pail may not find water, and surely will not escape, no more so than the minotaur in his labyrinth. But the poet and his daughter can return the “beautiful,” colorful turtle to a body of water, to his unselfconscious, pre-poetic, seal-like animal nature: or can they? We drove to the Orland River, and watched the turtle rush for water like rushing into marriage, swimming in uncontaminated joy, lovely the flies that fed that sleazy surface, a turtle looking back at us, and blinking. (635) Bell sees this sonnet (“Returning Turtle”) as disjunctive, fragmentary, even incoherent, and therefore typical for Notebook, without “structural integrity of a conventional kind” (152). Its middle lines liken the turtle, who can return to his putative home, to “the last Sioux grown old and wise,” who cannot: “we” (Lowell’s family, Lowell himself, perhaps we human beings, “Man”) are like the Sioux, and worse off than this turtle. Of course, in real life there is no “last Sioux” (in 2011 there were 16,000 enrolled members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe alone): the now-discredited trope of the vanishing Indian punches a hole in what would otherwise be a complete, achieved poem, and in the idea of common experience, of “Man,” behind it (“Indian Affairs”). But the poem regains its footing when it returns to the turtle’s return. Notice the unstressed syllables finishing nearly every line: the effect is one of irony, de-emphasis, mixed feelings. Once returned, the turtle looks back at us: is he older or younger than we are? Wiser, or more innocent, or more jaded than the poet who writes about him?

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Is the poet exempt from aging, from humiliation, from the troubles that come to all worldly creatures, from becoming self-conscious about those troubles, recording them, framing them for others to see? He is not: that humbling universality of the aging body guides the last, still-underrated poems of Day by Day. “A man without a wife / is like a turtle without a shell” (Lowell, Collected 826): he cannot care for his own body, nor for his own mind. Lowell condensed most of his final musings on the turtle into the eponymous two-page poem. As in most of Day by Day, the balance and force in the individual lines belies the apparent disarray, the un-urn-likeness and the drifting, associative progress, we hear in the poem as a whole. The “old turtle’s” armor is now a “useless shield,” a “foolsdream of armor,” the pomp of failed courtship display: such a turtle, boastfully ineffective, lands about as far from Marianne Moore’s succession of armored animals as it is possible for a turtle to go (809). Soon enough we are back in Moore’s territory: “Snapping turtles only submerge. / They have survived … not by man’s philanthropy.” (Compare Lowell’s 1973 letter to Elizabeth Bishop, on Moore: “aren’t all her animals her?” (Letters 602).) Painted turtles are not snapping turtles, though they prefer the same New England habitat: the young Cal who stacked painted turtles in previous poems here hunts, or attempts to hunt, for snappers. Instead he loses his balance in a swamp: I stepped on a turtle’s smooth, invisible back. It was like escaping quicksand. I drew it in my arms by what I thought was tail— a tail? I held a foreleg. I could have lost a finger. (Lowell, Collected 809) Body parts resemble other body parts: animals resemble minerals, and are harder than minerals: as in so much of Day by Day Lowell’s aesthetic goals include disorientation, giving us the sense that he does not know where he is, or even who he is—surely not who he will be. But he knows he is old. Some turtles and tortoises famously live longer than human beings can: the poem’s chiasmus brings us from a poet who sees himself in an old turtle, to a young poet, to an old poet who sees, in turtles, his lost youth, the intersection of body and soul, desire and capability, that he did not notice in himself when he was young—and that (the poem suggests) once almost killed him. The poet of Day by Day recoils from familiar unities: not only does he avoid creating urns, he imagines dismembering himself. Like other poems in Day by Day, perhaps as much as any of those poems, “Turtle” incorporates an array of allusion to Lowell’s previous books. He sees “three snapping turtles” on his clothes, in his bedroom, as he wakes up from a dream. The turtles are first like infants, or like puppies, one “tweaking / my empty shirt for milk” (810). Then they recall children, like the child Lowell once was, going out to collect painted turtles. And then they become teens: When they breathe, they seem to crack apart, crouched motionless on tiptoe with crooked smiles and high-school nicknames on their tongues, as if they wished to relive the rawness that let us meet as animals. Nothing has passed between us but time. (810)

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Lowell’s turtles are what they have always been for him, both the poet and not the poet at all, both animal (unlike him) and all too human. Their cracking, breathing motion echoes Lowell’s sonnet about Rembrandt: “His faces crack … if mine could crack and breathe!” (Lowell, Collected 466) The high school nicknames, as if Lowell faced jeering acquaintances, recall the literally jeering acquaintances of Lowell’s experiment in short-lined, polyvocal abjection, “St. Mark’s, 1933.” Lowell described himself, in “Home after Three Months Away,” as “frizzled, stale and small” (186). Marianne Moore, on the other hand, seemed to him—in a letter to Bishop—better off small (as well as feminine): at an in-person meeting in 1956, in the company of less-gifted poets, “she was always small, gracious, mobile and beautiful. I fell utterly in love with her” (Letters 262). Since at least David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, the road between Lowell and Moore has run through their shared friend Bishop. (McCrae’s careful essay stands out as one exception.) We might see more about what Lowell learned from Moore— and what he rejected in her ways of seeing—if we connect them instead through Randall Jarrell’s influential essays about Moore’s powers and her flaws. Jarrell admired Moore’s poems greatly, but he did not admire them all: he saw limits to her imagination of violence, and believed her succession of armored animals presented too rosy a picture of human beings—“like the Literary Digest,” whose 1936 poll famously mis-predicted the Presidential election, “she sent postcards to only the nicer animals” (Jarrell 178). Lowell’s armored Testudines revise her pangolins, her nautilus, her pelican. If turtles have long been, for Lowell, at once his alter ego, the poet’s self, and the securely embodied animal selves he could not be, these turtles have come to stand for his prior selves, and for the figures his prior selves could not be. And they arrange themselves by age: they offer, as Lowell’s previous animals could not offer, a longitudinal picture of the poet, his partners, his enemies, and the figures whom he has failed to become. I have written elsewhere about Lowell’s adolescence, about his versions of adolescence, the stage of life in which Americans expect to become someone new, someone else. For Lowell, this stage has no final satisfactory conclusion—he is, like his version of Jarrell, forever unsatisfied, forever becoming. But for the Lowell of Day by Day the always-becoming, never-resting self peters out, collapses or dissipates into the self defined by aging, by old age (though Lowell died at sixty!), by the regress of bodily failure. And that is why turtles serve him so well here too. They are not only poet and animal, self and non-self, as for Lowell they have always been. Nor are they only completion and incompletion, closed-off urn and hungry roamer. Rather they have aged, can age, along with the poet, more slowly and less visibly than the poet. Common snapping turtles can live up to a hundred years, and wild painted turtles half that: they approach the poet as reminders, as figures and faces, for his past selves, belonging to no teleology, learning nothing, but changing nonetheless. (Snapping turtles and painted turtles cannot shed their whole shells, but they do outgrow and shed old scutes annually (McLeod).) And then they drag him down. “Turtle” ends with a level of violence rarely seen in Lowell since his Miltonic, Catholic 1940s: in the awful instantness of retrospect, its beak works me underwater drowning by my neck,

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as it claws away pieces of my flesh to make me small enough to swallow. (810) Biting off bits of ourselves, changing species and settings, vanishing into memories and recurring in dreams, Lowell’s final turtles present him with the opposite of the urn-virtues incarnate in Moore’s pangolin, who maintained his integrity: the latter “rolls himself into a ball that has / power to defy all effort to unroll it; strongly intailed, neat / head for core, on neck not breaking off, with curled-in-feet” (Moore 141–2). The latter can, and the former cannot, become a ball, a unity. In fact, snapping turtles evolved their snappy beaks in part because they cannot pull themselves all the way into their carapace. The snapper of Lowell’s hypnogogic vision, the hunted snapper of “school vacations,” breaks him up into tiny pieces to eat him, pieces as small and raw as the gobbets of meat young Cal once fed the stack in the urn. They divide him—that is, he divides himself—into fragments, like the “raw” fragments and phrases that make up so many of the sonnets, like the fragmentary cadences of Day by Day. Really, of course, Lowell has divided himself: not, this time, into body and soul, spirit and seallike animal, but into many bits with no shared purpose, not even a shared nutritive value, unified by nothing except their life course: they happened in time to this man, then. These turtles, with their “murderously innocent reality,” as Bell put it, have no consistent container to offset them, no neo-classical urn (211). “He has more reason than most to be skeptical” Bell continues, “of the Sartrean thrust towards the future”: he cannot choose what he will be, and he doubts that anyone can (209). And if we do tell one story about this man, the story describes a predator who became prey: an eater eaten, a figure who started out full of faith, power and certainty, striding the air, and ended with none of those things, albeit with hard-to-forget poems about having lost them. If we are still following the fate of Man—or rather of “Man”—through Lowell’s poems, as per Greif, we can see a denouement in the literally dis-integrating pathos of Day by Day in general, and in this poem particularly. Greif locates the end of the “crisis of Man” where other intellectual historians locate the start of the American postmodern, in 1973, the year of the oil embargo, of Watergate, of Lowell’s three books of sonnets, one and only one called History, trying to have it both ways (or fourteen ways at a time) with regard to whether one man can understand History, or grasp Man. In the last poems he cannot: he understands, instead, the history of his own body, with a particular focus on its sources of shame. The pronoun “we” no longer applies to people in general, but to a generation at most, a dyad or a group of friends at least: “We feel the machine slipping from our hands,” about Lowell’s cohort (Lowell, Collected 741); “We are lucky to have done things as one” (813), about Cal and Caroline; “We were kind of religious, we thought in images” (630). Except that it doesn’t. That last example comes from “My Heavenly Shiner,” one of the last sonnets in For Lizzie and Harriet: the trend by which “we” means a small group or a couple or a family, not Man, began before Day by Day. Adam Kirsch, among others, has credibly praised Day by Day as a poetry of impoverishment, of self-diminishment: after the verbal riches of the sonnets, the last book, for Kirsch, shows “a man going bankrupt” (Kirsch). Yet Lowell begins taking apart his expectations, feelings, powers, climbing down from his heights and disclaiming his centrality, before that—arguably even before Life Studies, in the dramatic monologues of the early 1950s, with their disoriented reveries and fantastical dead birds.

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Katharine Wallingford has remarked that Lowell “seemed automatically to think in associational and relational terms,” moving sideways from one image or one idea to another rather than finding a center, an axiom, a basis for syllogism or stable generalization (31). Certainly the idea of man, or a man, at the center of everything, making decisions, does not survive Lowell’s books of sonnets, whose other animals include hollow arthropod husks at beach bonfires, like the “brittle lobster- / shell” in “Long Summers,” with its “two burnt-out, pinhead, black and popping eyes” (943). (Vendler, too, had praised these lines for their “quintessential beauty of the appalling exactly drawn.”) Here, too, the Lowell who kept coming back to turtles, and who learned (as McRae shows) from Moore, takes apart what Moore had kept together: the sense of the poem as armor for the poet, enabling her, him or them to triumph over the challenges of the day. And if we can hear and feel a disintegration within Lowell’s earlier unities, we should also hear and feel what holds together the poems in Day by Day, whether or not they include birds or insects or turtles: though Axelrod finds its “fragments of free association” to be (laudably) “without artifice” (Axelrod 234), it is, like all memorable poems, a work of artifice nonetheless. At the level of line and sentence it is an astonishingly coherent collection, as quotable as anything Lowell ever made: The single sheet keeps shifting on the double bed, the more I kick it smooth, the less it covers; it is the bed I made. (Lowell, Collected 819) Has anyone ever depicted adult anxiety, adult unsettlement, uncertainty after love and marriage, more compactly, or with more self-blame? Or, about the anxieties that beset the fortunate in our fifties and sixties: Age is another species, the nothing-voiced. The very old made grandfather look vulgarly young, when he drove me to feed them at their home. (802) Day by Day compiles poems, sentences, lines about bodies falling apart, axioms and beliefs that fall to pieces, human connections that are just unreliable memories now: its dejection makes an early poem of lost faith, like “Beyond the Alps” or “Thanksgiving’s Over,” seem positively triumphant. But the sentences themselves remain in the mind. The poem that wants to emulate bodily failure, to disclaim triumph, discovery, wholeness, conclusive relief, must do so through a successive of sonically memorable anticlimaxes, nonisometrical, un-alike remarks and asides and observations and griefs: “our poor bones and houseware,” Lowell reflects in “Home,” “are lucky to end up in bits and pieces” (824). The title for that poem refers to a mental hospital, where Lowell has found himself confined again: mental hospitals feel, to him, like home. In the same way the shells of Moore’s favorite animals—the pangolin, the paper nautilus—feel, to them, like their homes, where they protect themselves as the bipolar, dejected Cal Lowell cannot. The famous conclusion to Day by Day, “Epilogue,” looks back not only to Lowell’s painterly aspirations—directly then at Rembrandt, now at Vermeer—but also to Moore’s pangolin, who also greeted “the sun’s illumination” (838) at the start of the day, and to Moore’s 1936, which placed (to quote Greif) “someone at the center—man, human, subject, individual, defining the ground of authority and hope” (321):

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      there he sits on his        own habitat,  serge-clad, strong-shod.           The prey of fear, he, always     curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done,           says to the alternating blaze,  “Again the sun!     anew each day; and new and new and new,     that comes into and steadies my soul.” (Moore 144) Late Lowell can say no such thing: instead, he wishes simply for accuracy, his “we” dissolving into “passing facts” (Lowell, Collected 838). It is exactly the unambitious, anti-ambitious, perhaps literally impossible, task of fact-gathering, record-keeping, local and historically grounded analysis that Greif, at the end of his opus, recommends: “if we wanted to seek the new” (to make it new, as it were) “it would require … returning to the basic concrete project of taking apart and exhibiting our underlying notions of sequence, record-keeping, causation, explanation, obligation, necessity, objects and subjects” (325–6). A tall order, but one that Day by Day hopes—however dejectedly— to fulfill. But why fulfill it through turtles? Turtles matter here because they are long-lived, because they appeared in Lowell’s earlier poems, because they mattered in his earlier life, because they are not classic, noble, culturally exalted aerial predators (like eagles) and yet they can still eat flesh, eat pieces of us, and be prey. They contain, and yet (when they are out of their shells) exhibit, the awkwardness the later Lowell takes pains to display: “My frightened arms / anxiously hang out before me like bent L’s, / as if I feared I was a laughingstock” (Lowell, Collected 820). (Snapping turtles, unlike many species, cannot fully retract their limbs and head.) Turtles live between water and land, as Lowell did for almost all his life, if not near the ocean: they cannot fly and have no historical association with empire, heroism, or nobility. They matter because they are like him and not like him, at the same time, as none of his other animals are, and they matter because they age, because they live human-scale lives. Most of all, they matter because they exhibit both artifice and the lack of artifice, like the supposedly-confessional poet (and also not like him).They may congregate but they need not, and they are not necessarily social: nor, contra Moore, will their armor always protect them—they are surprisingly, counterintuitively, vulnerable, even as they can bite. Nor will Lowell’s powers protect him. “Too weak,” feeling barely able “to give my simple autobiography a plot,” (Lowell, Collected 829, 831), the Lowell of Day by Day wants to set an example in apparent defeat: he achieves, at the least, a self-dramatizing humility, like the “primitive head” in “Thanks-Offering for Recovery,” “created to be given away” (837). “I can do nothing that matters,” he said in his last finished poem (853). He has nothing more to offer—except his poetic technique, which he uses to say he has nothing. Nothing of value remains in his urn. And that selfsplintering, self-humbling poet will not cease to see himself in the turtles he once stacked and let die, or tried to feed. He is theirs; they are his. They consume him; they are him.

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WORKS CITED Axelrod, Steven Gould. Robert Lowell: Life and Art. Princeton University Press, 1978. Bell, Vereen. Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero. Harvard University Press, 1983. Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn. Reprint, Harvest, [1947] 1964. Greif, Mark. The Age of the Crisis of Man. Princeton University Press, 2015. Indian Affairs Commission, North Dakota. “Statistics.” https://www.indian​affa​irs.nd.gov/tri​bal-nati​ons/sta​tist​ics. Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age. Alfred Knopf, 1953. Kalstone, David. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. Kirsch, Adam. “On Lowell’s Day by Day.” https://www.book​crit​ics.org/2010/04/26/in-ret​rosp​ect-adam-kir​ sch-on-rob​ert-lowe​lls-day-by-day/. Lowell, Robert. Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Lowell, Robert. The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. Saskia Hamilton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Lowell, Robert. Memoirs, ed. Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. McLeod, Lianne. “Scute (Shell) Shedding in Water Turtles.” https://www.thespr​ucep​ets.com/tur​tle-she​ lls-peel-1238​366. McRae, Calista. “ ‘Another Armored Animal’: Robert Lowell’s Allusions to Marianne Moore.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, vol. 72, no. 2 (2016), pp. 1–28. Moore, Marianne. New Collected Poems, ed. Heather Cass White. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. Tillinghast, Richard. “Robert Lowell on Native Ground.” Virginia Quarterly Review, winter 1995. https://www. vqronl​ine.org/essay/rob​ert-low​ell-nat​ive-gro​und. Vendler, Helen. “The Difficult Grandeur of Robert Lowell.” Atlantic, January 1975. https://www.thea​tlan​tic. com/magaz​ine/arch​ive/1975/01/the-diffic​ult-grand​eur-of-rob​ert-low​ell/376​285/. Wallingford, Katherine. Robert Lowell’s Language of the Self. University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Subjectivity and Identity in New York School Poetry TERENCE DIGGORY

Poised on the indefinable divide between modernism and postmodernism, the poets associated with the New York School appear at the center of some of the most significant controversies in poetic practice and theory since the mid-twentieth century. In various ways these controversies revolve around questions of subjectivity and identity. Against the “confessional” mode that dominated mid-century practice from Robert Lowell to Allen Ginsberg (Breslin 110), the “personism” of Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) reveled in masking, a self-consciously “camp” and, in O’Hara’s case, gay performance of multiple selves, often exploding the identity of authorship through the practice of collaboration. O’Hara’s close friend John Ashbery (1927–2017) explored the activity of consciousness as an activity of language, an abstract operation analogous to the “abstract expressionism” of the visual artists who were first dubbed the “New York School.” Yet insofar as New York School poetry remained “expressionist,” it preserved an allegiance to the lyric tradition that was rejected by Language writers during the 1970s and 1980s, only to be recuperated amid a “post-Language crisis” during the 1990s (Wallace). O’Hara and Ashbery, as well as Barbara Guest (1920–2006), Kenneth Koch (1925–2002), and James Schuyler (1923–1991) were grouped as “the New York Poets” in Donald Allen’s epochal anthology The New American Poetry (1960).1 According to Allen’s introduction, the poets in the anthology shared an inheritance from the Pound-Williams tradition of modernism and an aversion to reigning “academic” conventions, a position that made the later designation of the New York poets as a “School” a source of persistent embarrassment.2 The academy that Allen had in mind espoused the doctrines of T. S. Eliot and the New Critics (Breslin 13–18). Against Eliot’s “impersonal theory of poetry” and the New Critics’ insistence on treating the poem as an objective artifact, apart from the poet’s intention, the “New American poetry” assigned priority to “breath” or “voice” as the poet’s embodiment, as explained in Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” and encapsulated in the title of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” two touchstones of Allen’s anthology. The work of the New York poets was as fresh and personal as anything in The New American Poetry; “Fresh Air” Allen’s inclusion of a sixth poet, Edward Field, in the New York group was an anomaly arising from a brief love affair between Field and O’Hara, who recommended Field’s work to Allen (Field 84–5). 2 Ashbery (“New York School” 113). Although in this statement Ashbery claims not to know who the source of the “School” term was, he later acknowledged the source to be John Bernard Myers, director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery (Ashbery, “Robert Frost Medal” 249). 1

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was the title of Kenneth Koch’s best-known contribution. Yet this group was also distinguished by qualities of voice that made it difficult to answer the question, “who is speaking?” That question would gain in resonance in both poetic practice and critical debate over the next decades (Barthes 49; Foucault 115, 138; Hejinian). Frank O’Hara’s “In Memory of My Feelings” (O’Hara, Collected 252–7) is the New American Poetry selection that best exemplifies the New York School questioning of the speaker’s identity— or any personal identity—while at the same time it stands apart as a singular achievement. It has been praised as “one of the great poems of our time” (Perloff, Frank O’Hara 141), and “one of the major accomplishments of contemporary poetry” (Breslin 242). In an extended performance of “the scene of my selves, the occasion of these ruses” (O’Hara, Collected 257), O’Hara presents, instead of a singular “self,” plural “selves”; instead of an essential nature, artificial “ruses.” Artifice is highlighted by the characteristic New York School orientation toward painting, especially two paintings by O’Hara’s close friend and collaborator, Grace Hartigan, for whom O’Hara posed as a model: “One of me is standing in the waves, an ocean bather, / or I am naked with a plate of devils at my hip” (O’Hara, Collected 255).3 Encountering multiple reflections of himself in his friend’s art, O’Hara puns on her name to state his goal for both art and life: “Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible” (O’Hara, Collected 256). These words are inscribed on O’Hara’s gravestone (Gooch 283). It is clear that the multiple selves of “In Memory of My Feelings” do not serve the unifying function that the New Critics ascribed to the persona they sought to identify in a poem’s dramatic situation (Breslin 231; Ransom 61–3). However, by the time O’Hara’s work began to receive serious critical attention, only after considerable delay, a new paradigm for the role of the self had emerged in the movement known as “confessional” poetry, which seemed to invite the reader to receive the poem as a direct statement from the poet in person, not as a dramatic utterance (Rosenthal). This is the paradigm against which early critics of “In Memory of My Feelings” measured the difference of O’Hara’s work. Often, they took their bearings from O’Hara’s “mock-manifesto” (Gooch 338) called “Personism,” published in the same year as Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), the volume that inspired the concept of confessional poetry. O’Hara seemed to anticipate, and to fend off, the confessional movement when he declared, “Personism … does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it!” (O’Hara, Collected 499).4 As an initial gloss on this claim, Marjorie Perloff suggested that O’Hara’s poetry “does not … ‘confess’ or ‘reveal’ anything about his inner psychic life. The role of the ‘I’ is to respond rather than to confess” (Frank O’Hara 135). After quoting the same statement from “Personism,” James Breslin further elaborated: “No confessional poet, O’Hara does not explore the unconscious depths in order slowly to construct a managing ego, the way Lowell does in Life Studies” (223). A “managing ego,” looking back on a past self and judging it, stands apart from the flow of time. In contrast, the speaker in O’Hara’s poetry, as both Perloff and Breslin read it, is fully immersed in time, experiencing every moment

The paintings O’Hara refers to here are Ocean Bathers (1953) and Frank O’Hara and the Demons (1952) (Perloff, Frank O’Hara 210n.7). For O’Hara’s collaboration with Hartigan, see Diggory. For collaboration as characteristic New York School practice, see Silverberg. 4 The initial publication of “In Memory of My Feelings” (1958) predates Life Studies (1959). After reading Life Studies, O’Hara objected: “Lowell has … a confessional manner which [lets him] get away with things that are really just plain bad but you’re supposed to be interested because he’s supposed to be so upset” (O’Hara, “Interview by Edward Lucie-Smith” 13). 3

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as present yet ephemeral. By implication, the title “In Memory of My Feelings” designates the speaker’s present location—in memory—rather than an act of remembrance of some past object. The self never takes shape as a coherent object to be viewed from a distance in time; it is only a confused bundle of “feelings” that are “part of the poem’s present” (Perloff, Frank O’Hara 136). The contrast of O’Hara to Lowell involves more than a passing reference in the context of the critical projects of both Perloff and Breslin. Perloff ’s Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters (1977), the first full-length study of O’Hara, had been preceded by The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell (1973), in which Perloff concluded that the confessional mode was “already losing its momentum” (179). Speculating about the future direction of poetry, she pointed to the work of Sylvia Plath, but the subsequent direction of Perloff ’s criticism suggests that O’Hara replaced Plath in Perloff ’s mind as the index of poetry’s future; indeed, the terms in which Perloff discusses Plath’s “The Stones” are remarkably similar to those she would later apply to O’Hara’s “In Memory of My Feelings” (Poetic Art 180–3). Breslin’s book, From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945–1965 (1985), presents a sequence of poets—Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, James Wright, and Frank O’Hara—representing various attempts to break out of the confines of the late-modernist academy. Lowell’s placement toward the beginning of the sequence and O’Hara’s at the end is meaningful. According to Breslin, O’Hara wrote at “the outermost brink” of the contemporary movement to make poetry new; he “offers the deepest questioning of traditional ways of ordering both poetry and the self ” (211). Perloff and Breslin wrote about O’Hara at a time when it was becoming increasingly fashionable to include the new poetry under the category of postmodernism, a broad term covering all of the arts as well as other expressions of contemporary culture. In 1982, Donald Allen, now with coeditor George Butterick, issued a new edition of The New American Poetry under the title The Postmoderns. Guided in part by their reading of O’Hara, both Perloff and Breslin resisted the “postmodern” designation. What was new in O’Hara, Perloff argued, was new to the Anglo-American tradition, but it derived from the surrealist tradition in French poetry extending back to the proto-surrealist Arthur Rimbaud. As an autobiographical poem, “In Memory of My Feelings” has roots in English Romanticism, but as a “surreal-autobiographical” poem, it “reanimates” the traditional genre with an infusion of French modernism (Perloff, Frank O’Hara 139). Breslin acknowledges the influence of surrealism on O’Hara’s poem (242, 245), but in his view O’Hara calls into question the very notion of genre along with the notion of historical periods—hence Breslin’s resistance to “postmodern” as a period term. These modes of identity, formal and historical, dissolve in the same flux that dissolves personal identity in “In Memory of My Feelings.” Although O’Hara needed to mark formal divisions in his poem in order to write it, Breslin acknowledges, in the reader’s experience “units of the poem can only be distinguished by bringing to an artificial close the turning, transforming movement of the poem in process”(243–4). Similarly, Breslin argues, “contemporary poetry is not an exactly surveyable field but an ongoing process” that can only be distorted by the imposition of period terms (58). Wherever New York School poetry might be placed in literary history, the amount of attention that the problem of historical periods received from critics was a clear indication that literary criticism had entered the Age of Theory. Breslin notes that “of all the clusters of poets that emerged during the 1950s, the writers of the New York school remained the least polemical, the least interested in committing themselves to a theory of poetry” (210). That did not prevent critics from drafting New York School writers or taking aim at them from one or another side in

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the theory wars. In a series of essays starting in 1973, Harold Bloom promoted John Ashbery as a major contemporary example of a Romantic tradition that was ongoing, a view that solved the modernism/postmodernism debate by denying the historical reality of either movement. Bloom also dismissed Ashbery’s ties to the New York School, an irrelevant distraction, in Bloom’s view. Meanwhile, a group who came to be known as Language writers, drawing heavily on Marxist and post-structuralist theory, developed stringent criteria for determining what to preserve and what to reject in the work of their New York School predecessors. The “poetic self ” whom Bloom placed at the center of the Romantic tradition (“Breaking” 14–15), and of his reading of Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (1976), was rejected as the illusory “lyric ‘I’ ” in the postmodernist agenda of the Language writers (Perloff, “Language Poetry”), for whom Ashbery’s distinctive achievement was the experimental collage poems of The Tennis Court Oath (1962; Schultz 6). The progress of Ashbery’s career contrasts markedly with that of O’Hara, who died tragically in 1966 after being struck by a beach taxi. Both poets published initial chapbooks through the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York City, but Ashbery gained early recognition by the poetry establishment when his volume Some Trees was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets series in 1956.5 While O’Hara developed close ties with an emerging “second generation” of poets in New York, Ashbery spent most of the decade between 1955 and 1965 living in France, where he wrote art criticism for the international edition of the Herald Tribune. The Tennis Court Oath was followed by Rivers and Mountains (1966), The Double Dream of Spring (1970), and Three Poems (1972), the latter written in prose. Recognition of O’Hara received a boost in 1971 with the posthumous publication of his Collected Poems, introduced by Ashbery, but Ashbery’s reputation overshadowed all rivals when Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1976) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. More than twenty volumes followed, including the tour de force performance of Flow Chart (1991), a book-length poem, and a Collected Poems in the Library of America series (2008), the first time that series honored a living writer. In the title poem of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Ashbery, Collected 474–87), questions of identity are every bit as central as they are in O’Hara’s “In Memory of My Feelings,” and they are explored even more extensively (Ashbery’s poem is over 500 lines). The art of painting again provides a crucial point of reference. However, the painting Ashbery refers to is not contemporary work by a friend but rather an example from art history, “the first mirror portrait” (Ashbery, Collected 479), by the Italian Mannerist master Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, better known as Parmigianino, dating to 1524. As treated by Ashbery, the painting is less the subject of the poem than the starting point for an experiment in tracing the flow of consciousness in language, which is really what the poem is about, as Ashbery has suggested (Kostelanetz 108). In a review of the Self-Portrait volume, Alfred Corn described Ashbery’s method of “imitating consciousness, or the stream of consciousness” (83) as “a poetic equivalent of music—a kind of abstraction of argument and theme in which the reader follows a constantly evolving progression of mood, imagery, and tone, with sudden shifts and modulations, and a

The Tibor de Nagy chapbooks are O’Hara’s A City Winter (1952), with drawings by Larry Rivers, and Ashbery’s Turandot (1953), with drawings by Jane Freilicher. 5

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whole rainbow of emotive and conceptual sonorities” (85). Nevertheless, focusing on Ashbery’s treatment of Parmigianino’s painting is a useful way of tracing a continuous thread in the work of the New York School. Although Ashbery considers only one painting, an effect of multiple selves, similar to O’Hara’s experience of Hartigan’s paintings, derives from the fact that Parmigianino has represented not only his subject, his own face, but also the medium of representation, the mirror as convex reflecting surface. Consequently, the viewer, in Ashbery’s account, has the uncanny sensation of seeing an expected self-image (in a mirror) dissolve into an unexpected self-image (in a painting):      you could be fooled for a moment Before you realize the reflection Isn’t yours. (Ashbery, Collected 479–80) Even as the speaker insists that the reflection is not “yours,” the repetition of “you,” “you,” and “yours” suggests that somehow “you” are the entire experience, made up of multiple positions. In the immediate context of this passage, “you” jostles with “I,” “we,” and “one” and glides into an address to the artist as “you,” Francesco (Ashbery, Collected 480). Shifting and often indeterminate pronoun references are a characteristic means of playing with identity in Ashbery’s poetry, as many critics have noted (Vincent). As in the case of O’Hara’s “ruses,” the possibility of being “fooled” is present at every level of Ashbery’s poem, starting with the distortion produced by the mirror’s convex surface. Within the poem Ashbery cites the art historian Sydney Freedberg, one of several quotations that multiply the number and the tones of voices put into play, as is evident when this quotation breaks out of quotation marks:           “Realism in this portrait No longer produces an objective truth, but a bizarria … . However its distortion does not create A feeling of disharmony. … The forms retain A strong measure of ideal beauty,” because Fed by our dreams (Ashbery, Collected 478) That closing remark, breaking away from Freedberg’s voice, suggests that what realism produces in this painting is surrealism, the experience of dislocation and fantasy that Perloff and Breslin trace in O’Hara. Writing about Parmigianino in one of his reviews for the Herald Tribune, Ashbery led off with a quotation from the proto-surrealist Giorgio de Chirico, from whom Ashbery took the title of his volume The Double Dream of Spring. A work of art, according to de Chirico, must approach “dreams and the spirit of childhood” (Ashbery, “Parmigianino” 31). “Why be unhappy with this arrangement,” the speaker (or one of them) asks in “Self-Portrait,” “since / Dreams prolong us as they are absorbed?” (Ashbery, Collected 479). If “dreams prolong us,” increasing a sense of vitality, Ashbery explores another possibility of being “fooled” that is more negative, even death-like: the suggestion that “posing” is the necessary condition of selfhood:         The soul has to stay where it is, Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane,

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The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind, Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay, Posing in this place. (Ashbery, Collected 474) The references to the weather in this passage hint at the movement of time that contrasts with the stasis of place throughout the poem. In French, the word for weather, Ashbery reminds us, is le temps, “the word for time” (Ashbery, Collected 476). Trapped in the interior space of the painting or of reflections about the painting, which turn inward on self-reflection, the speaker in Ashbery’s poem often seems to be in a condition at the opposite extreme from the speaker of “In Memory of My Feelings,” who is immersed in the flow of time. In fact, in Ashbery’s poem there are frequent hints of the confessional tone of Robert Lowell, spoken by the “managing ego” set apart from time, although Ashbery expresses little confidence in the ego’s ability to manage. If he retains any confidence, it is in the mysterious messages conveyed by time, messages that function like the “memories” of O’Hara’s poem. Ashbery’s poem concludes:         The hand holds no chalk And each part of the whole falls off And cannot know it knew, except Here and there, in cold pockets Of remembrance, whispers out of time. (Ashbery, Collected 487) Harold Bloom treats “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” as his “proof-text” in an important summary statement of his theory of poetry, “The Breaking of Form,” published in a collection entitled Deconstruction and Criticism (22). Despite the context, Bloom goes to great lengths to distinguish his theory from deconstruction, which, like post-structuralist theory in general, rejects the concept of an autonomous self, a creative human agent, rather as Ashbery’s version of the portrait of an artist asserts “the hand holds no chalk.” However, as Bloom reads the closing lines of Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait,” he insists on “a supermimesis achieved by an art that will not abandon the self to language” (37). Those “whispers out of time” are not speaking by themselves, despite the post-structuralist claim that for the contemporary reader the “author” is dead and “it is language which speaks” (Barthes 50). Rather, the voice that Bloom hears in Ashbery’s work is the voice of the “poetic self ” (12–15), the creative power of the imagination celebrated in the Romantic tradition, or simply human creative power, since Bloom swerves from the Romantic tradition in regarding the imagination as “over-idealized” (21). In Bloom’s understanding of literary history, the Romantics established a pattern for subsequent lyric poetry as the enactment of a crisis (12), a sense of the loss of creative power reversed by recovered confidence in that power through the achievement of the poem. Bloom reads “SelfPortrait” according to that pattern, though he risks obscuring it by breaking it down into a system of “revisionary ratios” whose names he derives from a range of ancient rhetorical and religious traditions and whose function he derives from Sigmund (and Anna) Freud’s theory of psychic defense mechanisms. What I referred to above as Ashbery’s lack of confidence in the ego’s ability to manage has its place in Bloom’s system under the ratio of kenosis (18, 29), the emptying out of creative power in order to defend it against attack, a kind of literary “playing dead.” The imagined attackers are the poets of the past whose power threatens to overwhelm the poet of the present, for Bloom’s theory is simultaneously literary history (the Romantic tradition), genre theory (the

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“crisis lyric”), and a theory of influence. The “anxiety of influence” in which Bloom sees creative stimulation is certainly evident in Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait,” in a passage that gives a negative turn to the notion of multiple selves: How many people came and stayed a certain time, Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you Like light behind windblown fog and sand, Filtered and influenced by it, until no part Remains that is surely you. (Collected 476) For Bloom, the assertion that “no part / Remains that is surely you” is one of the “ruses” performed by the poetic self, ironically in order to preserve distinctive selfhood or creative power. For post-structuralist theorists, on the other hand, the statement can be taken literally, or rather, linguistically. If “it is language which speaks” (Barthes 50), then the poetic self is never “surely you” but always a construction of language. Hence Michael Davidson concludes his rebuttal of Bloom’s reading of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” with the claim: “The deep structure is language itself in its ability to mediate and mask identity” (“Ekphrasis” 208). The speaker of a poem is a subject in the grammatical sense, determined by its position in a linguistic structure. But the linguistic structure is also a social structure, as Davidson elaborates elsewhere: “The subject upon which the lyric impulse is based, rather than being able to generate its own language of the heart, is also constituted within a world of public discourse. The lyric ‘I’ emerges as a positional relation. Its subjectivity is made possible by a linguistic and ultimately social structure in which ‘I’ speaks” (“Hey Man” 41). In this view, the “light or dark speech” uttered by “many people,” in the passage from “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” quoted above, signals “public discourse” rather than the voices of an exclusive literary tradition. And public discourse is experienced not only in speech, the “clichés and idioms” so prominent in the texture of Ashbery’s poetry (Mohanty and Monroe 45), but also in the forms of “everyday life” that are structured like language, according to postmodernist theory. In another post-structuralist reading of “Self-Portrait” aimed at countering Bloom, S. P. Mohanty and Jonathan Monroe describe the everyday as “the otherness that underlies even our deepest experience of self ” (31), or as Ashbery puts it:         this otherness That gets included in the most ordinary Forms of daily activity, changing everything Slightly and profoundly, and tearing the matter Of creation, any creation, not just artistic creation Out of our hands, … (Ashbery, Collected 485–6) No wonder “The hand holds no chalk” (Ashbery, Collected 487). The link between language structures and social structures in post-structuralist theory suggested the possibility that operations performed on language were at the same time performed on society. Emerging at a time of social crisis, under the shadow of the Vietnam War, the Language writers grasped at this possibility to conceive of a writing practice that would be simultaneously aesthetic and political. Although the New York School poets manifested as little interest in politics as they did in theory, they constructed their poems out of the materials of language with sufficient critical

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awareness that the Language writers were willing to grant them at least an implicit politics and to acknowledge them as predecessors.6 Thus, against David Lehman’s portrayal of the New York School poets as apolitical (305–17), Charles Bernstein, one of the leading Language writers, argued that “the politics of Ashbery’s poetic form is its cutting edge” (“Meandering” 267). Another Language writer, Barrett Watten, conceded that “O’Hara’s casual ironies” provide critical distance on the forms of everyday life rehearsed in what O’Hara called his “I do this I do that poems” (O’Hara, Collected 341; Watten, “Conduit” 33). Watten observed, however, that O’Hara’s critique does not extend to major political events—“the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam war”—which O’Hara “either trivialized or ignored.” New York School poets seemed to trivialize or constrict the idea of society by celebrating personal interactions within a “coterie.” Watten questioned this practice especially as it appeared in the work of Ted Berrigan (1934–1983), a leader of the “second generation” of New York School poets, who borrowed from O’Hara the device of peppering his poems with the names of personal friends. For Watten, the coterie thus invoked was really nothing more than “the ‘I’ [being] acted out in multiple emanations, for instance, ‘Dick,’ ‘Anne,’ and ‘Ron’ ” (“After Ted” 105). However, when Lytle Shaw, starting from the premises of Language writing, including Watten’s (Shaw 8–10), conducted a full-length examination of the concept of coterie as it operated in the work of O’Hara, Watten was persuaded that the operation provided a means of social critique. In a review of Shaw’s book, Watten reported, “Shaw is thus able to recast the expressive, biographical O’Hara, chatty and engaged with friends, as in alignment with the textual, allegorical O’Hara, unfolding language in world-making abstract poetry” (Watten, “Life”). O’Hara’s “In Memory of My Feelings,” to which Shaw devotes an entire chapter, is an example of such “abstract poetry,” as Watten calls it, although Shaw argues that “for O’Hara, subject positions enacted in writing would not be stable abstractions of a unified psyche (what the New Critics would call ‘personae’)” (Shaw 113). Rather, Shaw traces “fluid subject and gender positions” in “In Memory of My Feelings,” for instance, in the interaction between O’Hara and Grace Hartigan, the queer poet and the woman artist, whose relationship Shaw illuminates with considerable biographical detail. In O’Hara’s writing, Shaw argues, such relationships are not merely private but “take on a socially embedded set of meanings,” and even, he implies, political significance. The greater political significance that Shaw assigns to O’Hara, as compared to Watten’s initial assessment, arises at least partly from the fact that Watten judged O’Hara in the context of the 1960s, whereas Shaw applies the standards of his own, more recent time. Traditional international politics—the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam war— now has a rival in identity politics. Given the prominence of Ashbery and O’Hara, who were both gay, it is not surprising that the fluid subjectivity that has come to be associated with the New York School has been understood especially in terms of gay male identity (Byron; Imbriglio; Kikel; Ross; Shoptaw; Vincent). In particular, the queer performance known as “camp” has helped critics uncover the social practice underlying O’Hara’s poetry, and further sharpen its political edge (Ross 387–8). But women of the New York School, both straight and queer, have also staged the performance of multiple selves in ways that reflect significantly on gender politics, literary politics, and even national politics (Nelson). Eileen Myles (born 1949), a member of what is sometimes identified as the “third Geoff Ward suggests that it may be possible “to view Language writing not as an inheritor or successor but actually as a part of the New York School in an expanded sense” (197). 6

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generation” of the New York School (Kane 186), staged a write-in campaign for president in 1992, a performance they had anticipated the previous year in “An American Poem.”7 Barbara Guest, the only woman of the “first generation,” always seemed something of an outlier when the “school” style was first being defined (Nelson 32–3; Ward 196). While her peers, following the lead of the abstract expressionist painters, emphasized surface effects in their writing, Guest hinted at depths that she left deliberately mysterious. To women of the next generation, such depths suggested a space for subjectivity that was neither subject to nor striving to become a “managing ego,” which emerging feminist critique identified as male. When Guest read her poem “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1964 (Guest, Collected 14), the young poet Kathleen Fraser heard “the condition of the tenuous, spoken out of a peculiarly interior experience, yet as far afield as one could imagine from the battering ‘confessional’ model” (127). It was, Fraser recalls, “for me, the beginning of a new plane of ecstatic response to poetic language.” After moving to the San Francisco Bay area in 1972, Fraser connected with a group of feminist writers who sought to build on the experiments of modernist women such as Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) rather than the “confessional” model. The magazine HOW(ever), founded in 1983 by Fraser, Beverly Dahlen, and Frances Jaffer, served as a vehicle for this exploration, and frequently featured work by and about Guest. Meanwhile, Guest’s production of poetry slowed as she explored new forms: the experimental novel Seeking Air (1978), and a biography of H.D., Herself Defined (1985). By the late 1980s, her continuing commitment to experiment won her renewed attention from the community of Language writers. One of their publications, Poetics Journal (no. 9, 1991), featured Guest’s essay on “Shifting Persona” (Forces 36–42), her version—though very different in tone—of O’Hara’s “Personism.” Sun & Moon Press, a publisher associated with the Language writers, issued Fair Realism (1989), Guest’s first collection of poems since Moscow Mansions (1973). Charles Bernstein alluded to “fair realism”—sometimes taken as Guest’s play on “surrealism” (DuPlessis 210)—when he introduced Guest on the occasion of her receiving the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America in 1990. “It has taken so long,” Bernstein observed, “to recognize Barbara Guest’s work, to acknowledge it, perhaps because this work seeks neither recognition nor acknowledgement but that a fair realism may awake in us as we read, inspired not by the author but by the whirls and words and worlds that she enacts” (“Introducing Barbara Guest”). Not the author but the words: “it is language which speaks” (Barthes 50). One of the poems included in Fair Realism, “The Farewell Stairway” (Guest, Collected 232–6), provides an especially clear illustration of the practice that Guest would soon explain in “Shifting Persona”: “The person inside a literary creation can be both viewer and insider” (Forces 36). Rachel Blau DuPlessis, a contributing editor of HOW(ever), takes this “multiple positionality” to be typical of Guest’s work: “A speaker being in at least two or three places at once, speaking from the vectors of a site, and not from one voice or any one identity” (DuPlessis 203). She finds this “certainly the situation of the ‘persons’ of ‘The Farewell Stairway’ ” (203). “I was outside the vortex,” says the speaker at one point (Guest, Collected 235), indicating the spiral shape of the stairway into which she is looking down. But she is also looking into a painting by the Italian artist Giacomo Balla, an early work (1909) sometimes known by the title that Guest has chosen for her poem.

7

Myles (I Must 134–8). Myles has recently expressed preference for they/them pronouns: Interview by Meinen.

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The Futurist movement in which Balla would later participate is hinted at, as Sara Lundquist has noted (274), in the speaker’s curious claim: “I saw it futurally” (Guest, Collected 234). At the same time, so to speak, she sees archaically, because, despite their “modish” contemporary dress (Guest, Collected 235), she reads the three figures that Balla depicts descending the stairway as the three manifestations of “the triple goddess”: Hecate, Demeter (whom Guest calls by her Latin name, Ceres), and Persephone (whom Guest does not name) (DuPlessis 201; Lundquist 279–81). We assume the speaker to be female, identifying her in part with the author, in part with the women in the painting: “Hecate managed me,” she says (Guest, Collected 235). In the three figures on the stairway, she is therefore seeing herself, as female, multiply reflected, rather like the multiple reflections O’Hara sees in Grace Hartigan’s paintings in “In Memory of My Feelings.” Yet despite the archetypal status of “the triple goddess” and her depiction in a painting, these three figures are not, DuPlessis argues, “the female icon” of art history, fixed in place as the object of the conventionally male gaze (DuPlessis 203). Rather, they are mobile, like O’Hara, immersed in time, seen “futurally.” And where are they headed? Sarah Lundquist, in a feminist reading that DuPlessis complements, proposes that the version of the myth that Guest has in mind does not involve Persephone being violently abducted by a personified Hades, leaving her mother to mourn her loss. Rather, Guest’s is “another (older) version of the myth,” in which Persephone willingly descends—in the company of her mothers, we should note—to a Hades conceived not as a person but as a location, of “sexuality,” perhaps “death,” certainly “mystery”—a key value in Guest’s aesthetic (Lundquist 280). One of her contributions to HOW(ever) (vol. 3, no. 3, October 1986) is entitled “Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious” (much revised in Forces 83–6). The situation of Guest’s “The Farewell Stairway”—an “outside” observer looking down on three women with whom the observer identifies—bears a structural similarity to a scene in Eileen Myles’s 1982 poem “Romantic Pain” (Myles, I Must 51–5). Despite the similarity, striking differences between the two poems reveal the new possibilities that younger voices brought to the New York School, as well as an expanding range of identities that challenged feminism. Myles sets the scene in “the / ladies room” on the Staten Island Ferry: Three women at different angles smoking cigarettes. We each sneak peeks at ourselves in the mirror. Push this piece of hair. Move that collar   Inspect that eyelash.           I can see us from overhead and call the configuration “Feminism” (I Must 52–3) Here again are the multiplication of identities and the shifting point of view that are characteristic of the New York School and that distinguish Myles from the confessional poets, despite their use of the first person “I” to stage often startlingly direct address (Durgin 207). The blunt, casual tone is close to O’Hara, while the mirror device especially recalls Ashbery. Although we might expect feminism to be the link to Guest, Myles has turned feminism inside out. It has none of the depth suggested by Guest, whose feminism remains mysteriously implicit in her poem, leaving it to her critics to give it a name. Myles names it directly and places it in quotation marks, like the title of their poem. “Feminism” thus seems reduced to a label whose application to the scene is questioned as much as it is asserted.

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Granted, each woman before the mirror makes similar gestures, but do they really belong to the same “movement”? Just before the scene in the ladies room, the speaker, who is clearly identified with Myles, has said “I am a weird bitch” (52). She is a lesbian, so her performance before the mirror is not a rehearsal for attracting the male gaze. She just wants to see how “shitty” she looks after a night of bar-hopping and wandering the city streets (52). On the other hand, her sense that she belongs “downstairs / where the scum are allowed to / smoke” (54) hints at another, lower-class identity that alienated Myles from second-wave feminism. Even “lesbian feminism,” they recalled, “left me feeling that I didn’t cut the mustard, like I’d gone to the wrong non-Ivy League school and liked punk rock and amphetamines too much and Aphra Behn too little” (“My Intergeneration”). Later, Myles found “the postpunk third wave of feminism” much more to their liking, and that “utopian cadre of female outlaw optimists” have liked them. Their poetry and characters based on them to varying degrees, have appeared in the TV series Transparent (2014–19) and the film Grandma (2015), creating for Myles a postmodern version of Frank O’Hara’s experience of seeing himself in Grace Hartigan’s paintings. When the director of Grandma, Paul Weitz, contacted Myles about the project, they asked, “Am I going to be some old lesbian sitting on the porch scratching her balls?” (Barnes). In both Myles’s poetry and person—the two prove to be inseparable (Notley 57–8)—Myles represents the “democratization of the art world” that Gary Lenhart, another poet of the New York School’s “third generation,” traces with particular attention to social class (Lenhart 104). Like O’Hara, Ashbery, and Guest—none of whom was born in New York—Myles came to the city in 1974 seeking reinvention as a writer: “I came to New York and thought I would do something I hadn’t done in Boston, without even knowing what that was” (interview by Lamm). However, the first-generation poets, like the lesbian feminists who alienated Myles, enjoyed a privileged position that Myles could not and apparently did not want to claim. O’Hara, Ashbery, and Koch had all gone to Harvard, and even in Guest, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Myles detected “a kind of lordliness.”8 In the “second generation,” poets with working-class backgrounds, like Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett (1942–), rose to prominence (Lenhart 98–111); Bohemian style became Beat (Kane 108–12); and an institution, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, evolved to encourage democratic participation, including participation by a greater number of women (Rifkin; Myles, Contributor’s Note). Eventually, Myles would serve as director of the Poetry Project, from 1984 to 1986. Increasingly, they came to feel at home, not only in New York City, but in the colloquial language that New York School practice encouraged them to accept as their own (interview by Lamm). In the meantime, there were reminders of the class differences that Myles had struggled with in Boston. In 1977, they wrote “On the Death of Robert Lowell,” scandalously refusing to care about the Boston Brahmin whose “imagined / pain”—the phrase anticipates the “’Romantic Pain’ ” of Myles’s later poem of that title—had earned him a place at the private McLean’s Hospital outside Boston, “a really lush retreat” (Myles, I Must 45). At about the same time, Myles met

Myles (On Barbara Guest’s 89). In referring to Guest’s “lordliness,” Myles is playing on the fact that Guest’s husband, the Englishman Stephen Haden Haden-Guest, came in line for a barony during their marriage and eventually, after their divorce in 1954, inherited the title. The first-generation New York School poet who had the least claim to an upper-class background was James Schuyler, who attended Bethany College in West Virginia for two years before joining the Navy. Myles had a close personal relationship with Schuyler (interview by Foster 50–2; Lamm). 8

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Charles Bernstein, whose L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine was part of an explosion of poetrun periodicals then being launched in New York, including Myles’s own dodgems. After learning that Myles had attended the University of Massachusetts (UMass), Boston, which educated the working class, Bernstein asked if they could explain why he and his fellow Harvard students had found it difficult to recruit UMass students in protests organized by SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). They could explain: “we all were working in Filene’s basement. There was no time to demonstrate” (interview by Foster 53). Gary Lenhart, who was present during this exchange, recalls Myles’s resentment at the presumption of the “Harvard boys” that the UMass students would naturally follow their lead (117). In the later literary politics of experimental poetry, a democratization of forms has been encouraged by renewed attention to the practice of New York School poets, whose example has encouraged a new generation of poets to challenge the prohibition of the “lyric ‘I’ ” in the theory of Language writing. Steve Evans, one of the more vocal advocates of this challenge, observes in poets emerging in the 1990s “a returned emphasis on poetic practice as opposed to theoretical discourse” (“American Avant-Garde” 652). As one instance of the new work he cites Rod Smith’s In Memory of My Theories (1996), a title deliberately echoing O’Hara’s “In Memory of My Feelings” (“American” 653–4, 664–5). Characteristic features of the new work in general, Evans observes, include “a perceived rehabilitation of lyric forms, musical values, and direct address—all in tacit contrast to the previous generation’s penchant for abstraction and hostility to lyric practice” (“American” 655). However, the new poets go farther than the previous generation in their critique of identity, questioning even the notion of a “generation,” according to Evans’s introduction to the anthology Writing from the New Coast (12–13). “Hatred of identity,” according to Evans, may be the chief distinguishing mark of a group too various to be defined as a group (introduction 13). This is the dilemma that Mark Wallace calls the “Post-Language Crisis”: how are the poets coming after the Language writers to identify themselves? One way is “to use techniques disavowed by language writers,” including “the formal innovations of the Beat generation and New York school,” without disavowing the innovations of the Language writers themselves. Whereas previous avant-garde movements, including Language writing, defined themselves by ruling out certain practices, such as the lyric, the new avant-garde, according to Wallace, differs from its predecessors in its willingness to explore all practices. Whether such openness in practice can retain the political edge that the Language writers sought to confer on poetry remains subject to debate. Some of the recent attacks on Language writing have been aimed from a political perspective—for instance, feminist—and New York School poetry has been used for ammunition. For example, in Barrett Watten’s condescension to the “casual ironies” employed by Frank O’Hara in his negotiation of everyday life (“Conduit” 33), the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson sees male sexist bias, feminizing irony as weak and elevating Watten’s preferred practice of fragmenting language to the status of a heroic (male) enterprise. Robertson “can’t resist” taunting Watten with a quotation from O’Hara’s “Lexington Avenue, An Eclogue” (1954): “your penis / is showing. Put that bunch of grapes / back on your lap. Just for dignity” (O’Hara, “Lexington Avenue” 137; Robertson 395). In the spirit of the new democratization of forms, however, Robertson makes it clear that she is not rejecting Watten’s method of fragmentation: “Method, whether paratactic, ironic, fragmented, aleatory, or reflexive, must remain open for use” (Robertson 396). For Steve Evans, poetic forms are to be used in a critique of capitalism. The “hatred of Identity” that he sees in recent poets is a reaction against capitalism’s commodification of identity, extending

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even to “identity politics” (introduction 14–15, 19). Thus, Evans has no doubt that experimental poetry remains political. However, at the end of his manifesto for “the new coast,” he suggests that poetry’s role in society may be superior to that of conventional politics. “If the first imperative of politics,” Evans argues, “is to seize control of potentiality, to impose discrimination between the actual, the really possible, and the merely wishful, the first impulse of poetry is to contest this imposition” (introduction 19). Evans has anticipated this conclusion in the epigraph he has placed at the head of his essay, from Frank O’Hara’s “Ode on Causality” (1959): “You think maybe poetry is too important and you like that” (Evans, introduction 12; O’Hara, Collected 302). As long as readers continue to like that, the continued importance of the New York School in the development of American poetry is assured.

WORKS CITED Allen, Donald, ed. The New American Poetry, 1945–1960. University of California Press, [1960] 1999. Allen, Donald, and George F. Butterick, eds. The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised. Grove, 1982. Ashbery, John. Collected Poems 1956–1987, ed. Mark Ford. Library of America, 2008. Ashbery, John. “The New York School of Poets” (1968). Selected Prose, ed. Eugene Richie, University of Michigan Press, 2004, pp. 113–16. Ashbery, John. “Parmigianino” (1964). Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957–1987, ed. David Bergman, Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 31–3. Ashbery, John. “Robert Frost Medal Address” (1995). Selected Prose, ed. Eugene Richie, University of Michigan Press, 2004, pp. 243–52. Ashbery, John. Selected Prose, ed. Eugene Richie. University of Michigan Press, 2004. Barnes, Brooks. “The Poet Muse of ‘Transparent.’ ” New York Times, “SundayStyles,” January 17, 2016, p. 2. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” (1968). The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard. University of California Press, 1989, pp. 49–55. Bernstein, Charles. “Introducing Barbara Guest.” Jacket, vol. 10 (October 1999), http://jac​ketm​agaz​ine.com/10/ bern-on-gues.html. Bernstein, Charles. “The Meandering Yangtze: Rivers and Mountains (1966).” Conjunctions, vol. 49 (2007), pp. 263–71. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford University Press, 1973. Bloom, Harold. “The Breaking of Form.” Deconstruction & Criticism, by Harold Bloom et al., Continuum, 1979, pp. 1–37. Breslin, James E. B. From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945–1965. University of Chicago Press, 1985. Byron, Stuart. “Frank O’Hara: Poetic ‘Queertalk’.” Frank O’Hara: To Be True to a City, ed. Jim Elledge, 1974, pp. 64–9. Corn, Alfred. “A Magma of Interiors” (1975). John Ashbery, ed. Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1985, pp. 81–9. Davidson, Michael. “Ekphrasis and the New York School.” On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics, Wesleyan University Press, 2011, pp. 193–215. Davidson, Michael. “ ‘Hey Man, My Wave’: The Authority of Private Language.” Poetics Journal, vol. 6 (1986), pp. 33–45. Diggory, Terence. “Questions of Identity in Oranges by Frank O’Hara and Grace Hartigan.” Art Journal, vol. 52, no. 4 (Winter 1993), pp. 41–50.

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DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “The Gendered Marvelous: Barbara Guest, Surrealism and Feminist Reception.” The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets, ed. Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller, National Poetry Foundation, 2001, pp. 189–213. Durgin, Patrick F. “Eileen Myles.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 193: American Poets Since World War II, Sixth Series, ed. Joseph Conte, Gale, 1998, pp. 203–12. Elledge, Jim, ed. Frank O’Hara: To Be True to a City. University of Michigan Press, 1990. Evans, Steve. “The American Avant-Garde after 1989: Notes Toward a History.” The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry in Our Time, ed. Edward Foster and Joseph Donahue, Talisman, 2002, pp. 646–73. Evans, Steve. “Introduction to Writing from the New Coast” (1993). Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s, ed. Mark Wallace and Steven Marks, University of Alabama Press, 2002, pp. 11–20. Field, Edward. The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag and Other Intimate Portraits of the Bohemian Era. University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” (1969). Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 113–38. Fraser, Kathleen. “Barbara Guest: The Location of Her (A Memoir)” (1994). Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity, University of Alabama Press, 2000, pp. 124–30. Gooch, Brad. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. Knopf, 1993. Guest, Barbara. Collected Poems, ed. Hadley Haden Guest. Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Guest, Barbara. Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing. Kelsey St. Press, 2003. Guest, Barbara. “Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious: Byzantine Proposals of Poetry.” HOW (ever), vol. 3, no. 3 (October 1986), pp. 12–13. Hejinian, Lynn. “Who Is Speaking?” (1983). The Language of Inquiry, University of California Press, 2000, pp. 30–9. Imbriglio, Catherine. “‘Our Days Put on Such Reticence’: The Rhetoric of the Closet in John Ashbery’s Some Trees.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 36, no. 2 (Summer 1995), pp. 249–88. Kane, Daniel. All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. University of California Press, 2003. Kikel, Rudy. “The Gay Frank O’Hara” (1978). Frank O’Hara: To Be True to a City, ed. Jim Elledge, University of Michigan Press, 1990, pp. 334–49. Kostelanetz, Richard. “John Ashbery.” The Old Poetries and the New. University of Michigan Press, 1981, pp. 87–110. Lamm, Kimberly. “‘One Lighting the Other, Seductively’: James Schuyler, Eileen Myles, and the Sexuality of Literary Influence.” How2, vol. 1, no. 8 (Fall 2002), https://www.asu.edu/piperc​wcen​ter/how2​jour​nal/arch​ive/ onl​ine_​arch​ive/v1_8_2​002/curr​ent/workb​ook/lamm-ess​ays.htm. Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. Doubleday, 1998. Lenhart, Gary. The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class. University of Michigan Press, 2006. Lundquist, Sara. “Reverence and Resistance: Barbara Guest, Ekphrasis, and the Female Gaze.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 38, no. 2 (1997), pp. 260–85. Mohanty, S. P., and Jonathan Monroe. “John Ashbery and the Articulation of the Social.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987), pp. 37–63. Myles, Eileen. Contributor’s Note. Out of This World; An Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966–1991, ed. Anne Waldman, Crown, 1991, pp. 662–3.

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Myles, Eileen. “I am Legion.” Interview by Abigail Meinen (2018). Sampsonia Way, June 22, 2018, https://www. samps​onia​way.org/blog/2018/06/22/i-am-leg​ion-an-interv​iew-with-eil​een-myles/. Myles, Eileen. I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems. Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015. Myles, Eileen. Interview by Edward Foster (1997). Poetry and Poetics in a New Millennium, ed. Edward Foster, Talisman, 2000, pp. 50–63. Myles, Eileen. Interview by Kimberly Lamm (2002). How2, vol. 1, no. 8 (Fall 2002), https://www.asu.edu/piperc​ wcen​ter/how2​jour​nal/arch​ive/onl​ine_​arch​ive/v1_8_2​002/curr​ent/workb​ook/lamm-interv​iew.htm. Myles, Eileen. “My Intergeneration.” Village Voice, June 20, 2000, https://www.villa​gevo​ice.com/2000/06/20/ my-inte​rgen​erat​ion/. Myles, Eileen. On Barbara Guest’s “Byron’s Signatories.” Chicago Review, vol. 53, no. 4 and vol. 54, nos. 1–2 (Summer 2008), pp. 89–91. Nelson, Maggie. Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions. University of Iowa Press, 2007. Notley, Alice. “Eileen Myles in Performance” (1997). Coming After: Essays on Poetry. University of Michigan Press, 2005, pp. 57–66. O’Hara, Frank. The Collected Poems, ed. Donald Allen, revised ed.. University of California Press, 1995. O’Hara, Frank. Interview by Edward Lucie-Smith (1965). Standing Still and Walking in New York, ed. Donald Allen. Grey Fox Press, 1983, pp. 3–26. O’Hara, Frank. “Lexington Avenue, An Eclogue” (1954). Poems Retrieved, ed. Donald Allen, Grey Fox Press, 1977, pp. 137–9. Perloff, Marjorie. Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters (1977). University of Chicago Press, 1998. Perloff, Marjorie. “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo” (1999). Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. University of Alabama Press, 2004, pp. 129–54. Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell. Cornell University Press, 1973. Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. New Directions, 1941. Rifkin, Libbie. “’My Little World Goes on St. Mark’s Place’: Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer and the Gender of an Avant-Garde Institution.” Jacket, no. 7, April 1999, http://jac​ketm​agaz​ine.com/07/rifki​n07.html. Robertson, Lisa. “My Eighteenth Century: Drafts towards a Cabinet.” Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally, ed. Romana Huk, Wesleyan University Press, 2003, pp. 389–97. Rosenthal, M. L. “Poetry as Confession.” Nation, vol. 189, no. 8 (September 19, 1959), pp. 154–5. Ross, Andrew. “The Death of Lady Day” (1989). Frank O’Hara: To Be True to a City, ed. Elledge, University of Michigan Press, 1990, pp. 380–91. Schultz, Susan. Introduction. The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Susan Schultz, University of Alabama Press, 1995, pp. 1–11. Shaw, Lytle. Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie. University of Iowa Press, 2006. Shoptaw, John. On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry. Harvard University Press, 1994. Silverberg, Mark, ed. New York School Collaborations: The Color of Vowels. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Smith, Rod. In Memory of My Theories. O Books, 1996. Vincent, John. “Reports of Looting and Insane Buggery behind Altars: John Ashbery’s Queer Poetics.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 44, no. 2 (Summer 1998), pp. 155–75. Wallace, Mark. “Emerging Avant-Garde Poetries and the Post-Language Crisis.” Electronic Poetry Center, https:// writ​ing.upenn.edu/epc/auth​ors/wall​ace/emerg​ing.html (accessed June 20, 2022. Accessed June 20, 2022. Ward, Geoff. Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets, 2nd ed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Watten, Barrett. “After Ted” (1983). Aerial, no. 8 (1995), Barrett Watten issue, pp. 104–6.

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Watten, Barrett. “The Conduit of Communication in Everyday Life.” Aerial, no. 8 (1995), Barrett Watten issue, pp. 32–8. Watten, Barrett. “The Life and the Work: Barrett Watten on Lytle Shaw’s Frank O’Hara.” (Review of Lytle Shaw’s Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie.) Artforum International, vol. 46, no. 7 (March 2008), ProQuest. https:// sea​rch.proqu​est.com/docv​iew/214334​948?accoun​tid=14637.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Jewish American Poetry and the Late Twentieth-Century Literary Canon HILENE FLANZBAUM

In the historic trial of the Chicago Seven, a group of seven radicals stood accused of conspiracy and inciting to riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The seven defendants, plus Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale whose case was eventually separated from the trial, protested American involvement in the Vietnam War; in the courtroom, however, a different battle was being waged. In a quirky accident of history, both the judge and the most vocal defendant shared a last name and a religion: both Jews, Judge Julius Hoffman and accused Yippie leader, Abbie Hoffman, squared off again and again—not only about the alleged crimes committed in the streets of Chicago, or even in the war itself—rather, they parried about the way to conduct oneself inside the courtroom. As social scientists later pointed out: “The trial provided a platform for a (very raucous) dialogue between father, son, and grandson, about the right path a Jew should choose when he joins civil and Gentile society” (Lahav 36). Although little attention was paid at the time to the Jewish background of the Hoffmans––or to the other Jewish participants, who included Jerry Rubin and Lee Weiner, defendants, and the attorneys on both sides—subsequent historians have called the trial a Jewish morality play in which the responsibilities of American citizenship had become entangled with ethnic identity and the qualities of proper speech (Rubin 74; Sloman 187–8). When Judge Hoffman reprimanded Abbie for his language, the latter replied, “Your idea of justice is the only obscenity in this court, Julie.” He then accused the judge of being so desperate for status that he had become a “Shande fur de Goyim,” which he translated as “Front man for the WASP power élite” (Lukas). I begin this essay about poetry with this political anecdote because it reveals that even half a century after the great wave of Jewish immigration to the United States, the binary between what it means to behave “Jewishly” and what it means to behave as a proper “American” is integral to providing a solid framework for the examination of the development of Jewish American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. The history of Jewish American immigration reveals that for almost a century, there were two types of Jews, the assimilated and the unassimilated, those that behaved correctly and those that didn’t, or for the sake of

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expediency—the good Jew and the bad. These classifications wielded a considerable impact on American poetry, as a whole.1 Playing off of these two types of American Jews—the good and the bad, the assimilated and the unassimilated—to make an upending comment about ethics and etiquette, Abbie Hoffman stated in 1970 during the Chicago Seven Trial, “When decorum becomes repression, the only dignity free men have is to speak out” (Cuddihy 190; Hoffman 189). The qualities that separated the good Jew from the bad rested primarily on behavioral differences, especially on those attached to communicating. Civilized Jews never yelled, interrupted, or spoke with their hands. Instead, they exercised reserve, never offering an opinion that might offend, while the unassimilated said whatever they thought in whatever way they wanted to. Loud, excitable, and unpredictable, bad Jews did not understand what decorum demanded of them.2 And it is this bad Jew that is going to make all the difference to the landscape of American poetry. In the first half of the century, literature and other media clearly document the divide between the Americanized Jew and the other. “One can laugh now,” writes sociologist Charles Silberman, “but in my childhood and youth, to be ‘nice’ was not just a matter of etiquette, it was a sacred canon” (30). Further explaining what niceness means, Silberman cites Maurice Samuel’s 1932 book, Jews on Approval, to illuminate the Jewish American belief that if Jews were to be accepted they had to “temper their voices, their table manners and their ties,” and that “if they would be discreet and tidy in their enthusiasms, unobstrusive in their comings and goings, and above all reticent about their Jewishness, they would get along very well” (quoted in Samuel 10; Silberman 30). More familiar to some might be Sara Smolinsky, the astute heroine of Anzia Yezierska’s 1925 The Bread Givers, who learns to fit in by mastering how to dress, eat, and speak correctly: “Finally, I decided on a dark blue. … For the first time in my life I was perfect from head to foot …. I, ready to be a teacher in the schools” (Yezierska 239–40). She speaks softly to her students, and will not eat herring—only American “chops” (237). Upon completing her Americanization, “a triumphant sense of power filled me. I, Sara Smolinsky, had done what I had set out to do. I was now a teacher in the public schools” (241). Other literary characters in the 1920s, like Abraham Cahan’s David Levinsky, however, are less sanguine about the costs of assimilation and anticipate the literary future. Discovering that he is worth more than two million dollars and is “recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the cloak-and-suit trade in the United States,” Levinsky finds his “present station … to be devoid of significance” (Cahan 3). Indeed, conformity, while often necessary for economic success, sits less well with those devoted to more artistic or spiritual pursuits. By the early 1950s, the pitfalls of assimilation were growing more obvious to Jewish American intellectuals, especially on the left. Art critic Clement Greenberg lamented that “Jewish life in America has become, for reasons of security, so solidly, so rigidly, restrictedly and suffocatingly middle class …. No people on earth are more correct, more staid, more provincial, more commonplace …; none observe more strictly the letter of every code that is respectable; no people do so completely and habitually what is expected of them” (Greenberg 178–9). The pressure to be accepted, Greenberg argues, drains the energy and color from Jewish lives.

his schematic may be useful in discussing assimilation narratives for other ethnicities as well. T The difference in the ways Jews communicated with each other and the way WASPS did was humorously spoofed in the 1977 Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall. An example is when “Alvy dines with the WASP-y Hall family and imagines that they must see him as a Hasidic Jew, complete with payot and a large black hat” (Brook 22). 1 2

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Greenberg’s complaints were brought to life by comedian Lenny Bruce, who built his routines upon satirizing the Jewish bourgeoisie. Poking fun at the women lunching at Schrafft’s or the elaborate bar mitzvahs in the suburbs, Bruce defines Jewishness as a category independent of background or worship. At a 1961 show at the Curran Theater he quipped, “If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn’t matter even if you’re Catholic … If you live in Butte, Montana, you’re going to be goyish even if you’re Jewish.” In Bruce’s world, Jewish sensibility had sprung loose from its origins; an attitude, a way to fight the boredom of the status quo, it wanted to shock you, to talk about sex and to reveal the id at its most primal. “Why must the least deviation from respectable conventions cause me such inner hell?” queries Alex in the once controversial, now canonical 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint. “I hate those fucking conventions! … I know better than the taboos!” he continues. Indeed, the hero’s desire to “PUT THE ID BACK IN YID” is Bruce-an and Ginsberg-ian in its expostulation (Roth 124). The presentation of the renegade Alex expands Philip Roth’s own attack against Jewish American complacency. Although in the novel Alex is a lawyer, Roth—as the writer—has one tool with which he can transgress: language. Certainly, Jewish lawyers, businessmen, teachers, and anyone else that wished to be accepted had to learn to modify habits of speech; for writers, however, such modifications cost more. Leslie Fiedler, for instance, remembers how confined he felt when Jews were force-fed a language “capable of uttering only the most correctly tepid Protestant banalities no matter what stirred in our alien innards” (2). This metaphor of imprisonment is helpful in describing how Jewish immigrants repressed a more natural mode of expression in order to take on the manners and behaviors of the ruling class. And it is precisely these adopted behaviors that will have to be cast off to write a new kind of poetry—one that had a sizable impact on readers at mid-century and beyond. To be viewed as credible, whether in poetry or lifestyle, one has to conform to normative behaviors. For poets coming of age in the middle generation,3 those norms had been largely established in the shadow of Eliot, whose Anglophilia, anti-Semitism, and love of metaphysical “impersonality” were widely accepted.4 Eliot famously found Jews unpalatable, depicting them as mercenary figures responsible for the decline of Western civilization. In the poem “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” for instance, the character Bleistein symbolizes this destructive Jewish presence: in a world destroyed by a desire for profit, Eliot tells his readers that “the jew is underneath the lot” (Poems 35).

3

The middle generation is a term that refers to the group of poets that meets the most obvious definition of “middle” … since their seasons of prime productivity fell between the 1940s and the 1970s. … Both formally and politically, their poetry constitutes the center of twentieth-century American poetry … [The] middle generation held its own on an emergent literary scene in ways that belie another connotation of its label— namely, that of second fiddle, turning in a “middling” performance after the bravura and (admittedly) the bombast of high modernism. (Haralson 1)

4

[Poetry] is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. … What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. (Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”)

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In his critical essays, Eliot was not as openly anti-Semitic, yet his recipe for good writing prescribed reserve and dispassion, characteristics that assumed a comfort and familiarity with the norms of Protestant America. In a similar vein, Eliot found fault with the nineteenth-century British Romantic poets, demoting them in favor of the metaphysicals because they excelled in dissociating thought from feeling (Selected Essays 9, 262). It was rumored that he wrote in face makeup and lipstick (McCrum); yet in public, he appeared only in a conventional suit and tie. Born in St. Louis, but having lived in England for almost forty years, Eliot spoke with a British accent. In short, Eliot sanctioned a literary tradition and form of communication that built upon the works of white European men, mostly of Anglican or Anglo-Saxon background. If one had not been fortunate enough to have been born a WASP, and raised with those right values, one could watch closely, obey the rules—imitate. Fitting into mainstream American culture, or, the American poetry canon, required mastering that Anglo-Saxon persona. For all poets, Jewish or not, content and rhetorical pitch had to be measured, formal, and most importantly “impersonal.” In 1944, Karl Shapiro, a Jewish American poet, won the Pulitzer Prize for a collection called V-Letter and Other Poems, written while he was serving in the US Army in the Pacific. Yet Shapiro does not mention his religious heritage. Instead, he foregrounds his experience as an American soldier (Shapiro 62–3). As historians have noted, the Second World War provided an opportunity for many children of immigrants to Americanize, and to be accepted as Americans after they served their country. In both film and fiction, the troops were represented as ethnically diverse, with O’Haras, Goldbergs, and Fanellis standing side by side with the Johnsons and the Armstrongs. The showcasing of such ostensible diversity, however, did not arise from respect for cultural differences; rather, it demonstrated that ethnic Americans could be just like real Americans—a supposition that Shapiro succeeded in proving.5 No less than Allen Tate, important literary critic of that time, praised V-Letter and Oher Poems for “an authentic originality not met with since T. S. Eliot” (“News Notes” 173). Jewish Americans that wanted to represent their own American experience were, at best, swimming upstream. Such a struggle reveals itself in the career of the emblematic Delmore Schwartz. Besides the obvious difficulty of having “the dictator” of literary tastes dislike those of your ethnic or religious affiliation, Schwartz faced the additional obstacle of understanding that stifling one’s personality and emotions may alienate the reader. “The morality of the poet,” Schwartz explains, “consists not in teaching other human beings how to behave, but in facing the deepest emotional and moral realities in his poems, and in this way making it possible for his readers to confront the total reality of their existence, physical, emotional, moral and religious” (Schwartz 580). But this call to passion could not have been heeded in a universe controlled by Eliot, and Schwartz, who had more in common with John Keats than he did with John Donne, was doomed to be only a minor poet while his fiction, more ethnically tinged, grew in stature. Schwartz complained bitterly about Eliot’s anti-Semitism, but only in private; he knew better than to do so in public, recalling a popular ethnic adage of the 1930s: Be a Jew at home, but a person in the streets. In this context, W. H. Auden’s praise of Adrienne Rich’s first volume and his selection of her as 1950’s Yale Younger Poet, has meaningful reverberations. Praising Rich, Auden invokes the

“The second is that World War II gave many minority Americans—and women of all races—an economic and psychological boost. … Minority workers and soldiers made unprecedented contact with other minorities as well as with whites. … In short, Takaki says, the war jump-started the civil rights movement” (Harris, “How WWII Affected America’s Minorities”). 5

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master: “In a young poet, as T. S. Eliot has observed, the most promising sign is craftsmanship for it is evidence of a capacity for detachment from the self and its emotions” (Auden ix, italics added for emphasis). He adds that Rich’s poems are “neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them” (ix). Auden’s remarks betray his anxiety about aggressive women, rather than Jews. In fact, he may not even have known that Rich was Jewish—or perhaps she would not have fit into his version of what it meant to be Jewish. In any case, Rich’s ethnicity is a complicated question to which we will return. What startles about Auden’s language, however, is how much it echoes the instructions given to Jews (and others) on how to gain entrance to the poetry canon, or culture as a whole. Only three years later, enter Allen Ginsberg: manic, loud, disheveled, and barefoot on the steps of Columbia library, he drove his mentor Lionel Trilling, the first Jew permitted to teach at that University and an on-and-off defender of the younger poet, to dismay. With Ginsberg’s publication of “Howl,” Trilling became overtly critical, finding the poem “dull, redundant” and calling it “old news” (Life in Culture 256–7). That Trilling disliked the poem put him in good company; however, his reasons differed from others, as most thought the poem anything but boring. Perhaps Trilling found it dull because emotional evocations like those in “Howl” surrounded him: at that time, Columbia had become a nexus for Jewish intellectual life and energy. Trilling, of course, was working on being a good Jew: in later decades, he would draw fire for his affected British accent and his stilted mannerisms.6 More importantly, Trilling knew better than “to press the subject of his Jewishness” (“ ‘Culture,’ and Jewishness” 106). For the many enthusiastic readers and reviewers of “Howl,” its impoliteness exhilarated, and seemed to promise new possibilities for American poetry. Breaking every rule that Eliot’s acolytes upheld, “Howl” is personal, geographically specific, emotionally intense; it is particular to its time and situation; it alludes not to Dante or Shakespeare, but to Lorca and Kerouac; it had a political agenda, too—a clarion call to resist the conformity of fifties America and to interrogate the military industrial complex. Moreover, “Howl” is a poem that asks to be read aloud—its long lines leave the reader breathless, which contributes to the poem’s sense of urgency and expressiveness. Thus, the poem was not primarily, or only, a cerebral experience. It was a communal one; it drew people to listen and to recite; it became part of a political and poetic movement, the latter labeled the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, which took poetry out of the classroom and gave it back to more general readers. Three years later, Ginsberg published “Kaddish” (1959), a poem that takes its title from the Jewish prayer for the dead. Memorializing his mother Naomi, a schizophrenic who spent her later life in mental institutions, “Kaddish” easily fills twenty pages—even longer—and transgresses more broadly than “Howl.” Discussion of gay sexual practices seems tame in comparison with Ginsberg’s description of the deterioration of his mother’s body, the “red vomit coming out of her mouth— diarrhea water exploding from her behind—on all fours in front of the toilet— … tile floor smeared with her black feces—unfainted—” (218). These images go beyond unconventionality; they challenge the reader’s conception of what poetry can and should be. At the same time, Ginsberg asks the reader to confront what is most debased about human existence—the corporeal facts of bodily decay and defecation.

6

Some defended Trilling by pointing out that his mother had been born in England.

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In a specifically Jewish American context, “Kaddish” also pushes the reader further than “Howl” by touching on the third rail of Jewish American assimilation at that time: a public declaration of a connection, biological or otherwise, with Communists. Claiming to be inspired by “Sacco Vanzetti, Norman Thomas, Debs,” Ginsberg places himself among a gathering of socialists and social pariahs (214). Taking another radical step, Ginsberg sprinkles the poem with references to the event we now call the Holocaust, a topic so tender in the 1950s that most Jewish Americans, poets or civilians, did not refer to it in public. But Naomi’s paranoia allows her to internalize the threat of Hitler, Mussolini, Buchenwald, and Zyklon B, an exercise that happy and healthy Americans had been trained to repress.7 The nature of Ginsberg’s attachment, whether to Judaism as a religion or Jewishness as a culture, has been a subject for much thoughtful critical debate. Some critics have emphasized the poet’s ostensible discomfort with Jewish identification that he expressed in interviews and his public embrace of Buddhism. In the past several decades, however, scholars of Jewish American poetry have uncovered Jewish themes, speech patterns, and motifs in “Kaddish” and other poems. Most prominently, perhaps, scholars Norman Finkelstein and Maeera Shreiber have done extensive work on the complex mechanisms of Ginsberg’s ethnic identity. Finkelstein, for instance, finds that “the intertwining sounds of the blues, the Kaddish, and Shelley’s elegy signify the cultural tensions at work in the poem: the Jewish ritual of sanctification is set against one of the most passionate embraces of death in the western canon, below which is heard the ground bass of the African diaspora wrenched into a uniquely American music” (180); Finkelstein paraphrases and quotes from a contemporary, Shreiber, who, making use of Alain Finkielkraut’s The Imaginary Jew, argues that “the guilt-ridden Jewish son turns in flight from the mother; thus ‘in Diaspora (as typically construed) forgetting or losing a primary connection to Jewishness is as necessary … as the process of individuation itself ” (paraphrased and quoted in Finkelstein 14; Shreiber 276–7). Writing before both Finkelstein and Shreiber, poet Alicia Ostriker takes a holistic approach to the question. In “ ‘Howl’ Revisited: The Poet as Jew,” Ostriker holds that Ginsberg’s most famous work is a Jewish poem because it radiates “chesed” or loving kindness, a virtue valued by many of the “Jewish atheists” that fled Easten Europe to find humanity and social justice. Here Ostriker elucidates her version of Yiddishkeit, a subject to which we will return shortly (“ ‘Howl’ Revisited” 28–31).8 Though significant, these readings are not central to my claims. For even if no critic ever found the Jewish resonances in “Kaddish” or “Howl,” Ginsberg’s significance as a cultural marker would still be worth investigating. For my purposes, it doesn’t matter whether Ginsberg thought of himself as a Buddhist, atheist, or Jew. What matters is how he is perceived and recognized by his generation. The mere fact that Ginsberg wrestles with questions of identity places him in a different category than those who came before him. When he writes emotional, excessive, and impolite poems that do not repress being Jewish, Ginsberg presents as the troublesome “other” not only to the staid Protestants of American poetry—Eliot and Auden, certainly—but also to highly assimilated Jews like

The “silence” of Jewish Americans about the Holocaust has been a subject of much scholarly interest; most recently, it has been challenged; for these purposes, however, the layman’s understanding holds. For an overview of this discussion, see Hasia Diner 365–90. 8 For another work on Ginsberg’s Jewish or hybrid identity and/or poetics, see Craig Svonkin’s “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg’s Spiritual Self-Othering.” 7

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Diana Trilling, who believed that Lionel’s association with Ginsberg would destroy his reputation and possibly cost him his job (“Lionel Trilling: A Jew At Columbia”). The late 50s break with the poetic past did not evolve solely from Ginsberg’s recuperation of his Jewish identity, nor does his work arrive sui generis: change had been brewing in the poetic soup for some time. In 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer for Annie Allen, a formalist, but political collection; the Objectivist poets were in the prime of their careers;9 and as I mentioned, Lenny Bruce was already doing stand-up. Time marches on: Eliot’s idea of poetry could not hold sway indefinitely. Yet critics have underestimated the effect that Ginsberg’s early poetics—with its public airing of mania, suffering, carnality, hyperbole, and pathos—had on poets of his generation, nor have they connected it to Ginsberg’s Jewish roots. Of this postwar period, Robert Lowell would state that “Jewishness … is the theme of today’s literature as the Middle West … and the South” were in their time. “These regions have burnt out, and now we’re lucky to have the Jewish influence” (Howard 55). At this mid-century reversal, poets began to look at their Jewish contemporaries for inspiration. As the novelist Dan Wakefield, who attended Columbia University from 1950 to 1954, quipped, “In those days, all the Jews wanted to be Protestants, and the Protestants wanted to be Jews” (Wakefield). In 1962, poet-critic Allen Grossman, writing about “Kaddish,” explained that “the characteristic literary posture of the postwar poet in America is that of the survivor— a man who is not quite certain that he is not in fact dead. It is here that the Jew as a symbolic figure takes on his true centrality” (153). Given Lowell’s radical recasting of form between Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and Life Studies (1959), we can infer that he meant to write more personally, in a style that expressed his suffering more openly. In other words, he threw away Protestant repression and reserve and began to write more “Jewishly.” He explained this change of style by observing that “the needle that prods into what really happened may be the same needle that writes a good line” (Alvarez 75). Notably, Lowell’s longtime mentor Allen Tate saw an early copy of Life Studies and suspected that the poems were only a product of mania. Tate wrote, in a December 3, 1957, letter to Lowell, that all the poems “are definitely bad. I do not think you ought to publish them” (quoted in Hamilton 237). He warned that they reflect a “lack of imaginative focus” and “are of interest only to you” (237). Tate was one of few dissenters. Accurately or not, Robert Lowell gets the credit for popularizing confessional poetry, a genre in which the poet is “unequivocally himself ” and shares with his readers “a series of personal confidences, rather shameful” (Rosenthal 109), and sometimes “unpleasantly egocentric” (Rosenthal 110). In the twenty-first century, the label “confessional” may primarily suggest diary-like confidences. Yet it is also possible to read the confessional back into Catholic tradition: “However much Lowell slackened his religious devotions, one is left thinking that his experiences inside the confessional booth influenced the stark honesty of his poetry” (“This Day in Lettres”). This anonymous critic imagined that, despite Lowell’s move away from faith, what one says to a priest provided the model for these poems. And yet, as became clear, the poets labeled as confessional, including Ginsberg, were more familiar with a therapist’s office than they were a church. In fact,

The relationship of the Objectivist poets to their religious background is a complicated question that has drawn much critical attention. Coincidentally or not, they all had Jewish backgrounds. Yet Louis Zukovsky was a follower of Ezra Pound, a notorious anti-Semite, and most had little identification with religious or cultural Jewishness. The exception is Charles Reznikoff, whom we will mention again. See Altieri (8). 9

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Lowell wrote several of the poems in Life Studies about his time in a mental institution. Sylvia Plath, another important poet of this period, also spent time in an institution, as did Anne Sexton and John Berryman.10 The allusion to Catholicism—rather than therapeutic practice—may thereby miss the Jewish or psychoanalytic possibilities: psychoanalysis, after all, had long been called the Jewish science (Kraft). Despite the previous observation, however, the notion of sin still plays an important role in the poetry of this period. These sins, however, are not religious in nature; rather they are transgressions of a Rabelaisian kind. Ginsberg’s poems reveal a series of episodes of libidinous pleasure and destabilizing pain for both mind and body—topics that are not usually expressed in what we think of as polite company (Tyler Hoffman 124–61). The speaker in “Kaddish,” as well as the imaginary Alexander Portnoy in Philip Roth’s novel, unleash the constrained and aspirational voice of the Jewish American in order to find a more primal self. It can be done through subject matter, but it is the unorthodox—even outrageous—use of language that so offends the complacent or even nervous assimilated Jews. In other words, the decision to be “the bad Jew” is an artistic one: what I have been describing is what it means to be revolutionary in the world of American poetry, circa the 1950s. Adrienne Rich’s life and work provide additional fortification for these formulations. By the laws of Orthodox Judaism, Rich, with a Protestant mother, did not qualify as a believer. Although her father was born into an observant Jewish family, he rejected all religious rituals and had a particular distaste for anything that resembled ethnic or cultural Jewishness. In Rich’s essay about her Jewish identity, “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity,” Rich explains that she was schooled in the manners of Southern Protestant gentility, in which behaving properly meant not disclosing her Jewish background. In her own words, she had to be “so ‘civilized,’ so far from ‘common,’ [and] so attractively combining southern gentility with European cultural values that no one would ever associate [her] with the raw, ‘pushy’ Jews of New York, the ‘loud, hysterical’ [Jewish] refugees from eastern Europe, [or] the ‘overdressed’ Jews of the urban South” (110–11). Still, Rich found something compelling about the Jewishness she had been instructed to avoid. For half of her life, she wrestled with what it means to be Jewish. When in 1954 Rich married an Orthodox Jew of Eastern European descent at the Hillel House at Harvard, her parents refused to attend the wedding. Her father told her she had married the “wrong kind” of Jew (114). Rich’s decision to seek out this unassimilated version of Jewish life rather than the deracinated one on which she had been nurtured was a crucial step not only in her personal life but also in her poetic evolution. Rich’s choice to live a Jewish life enabled her poetic career of dissent and difference. Auden may have been pleased with her humble, respectful Eliotic versifications, but Rich wished that she had not even published this early work. At mid-career, Rich published “For Ethel Rosenberg,” a poem that embraces aspects of Jewishness that would have driven her cautious father to tears—for clearly on the spectrum of good to bad Jews, it doesn’t get any worse than Ethel. To be a Communist or Communist sympathizer in the 1950s: could it get worse? Tellingly, history documents that the majority of Jewish Americans,

A. Alvarez wrote about the connections between mental illness, psychoanalysis, and creative expression: “The nihilism and destructiveness of the self—of which psychoanalysis has made us sharply and progressively more aware—turns out to be an accurate reflection of the nihilism of our own violent societies. Since we apparently can’t control it on the outside, politically, we can at least try to control it in ourselves, artistically” (248). 10

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desperate to be like everyone else, favored her execution. The organized Jewish community, in fact, turned their back on the Rosenbergs. But a quarter-century later, Rich finds that Rosenberg’s presence haunts her, writing, “Escaping from home I found / home everywhere: / the Jewish question, Communism // marriage itself ” (“For Ethel Rosenberg” 286). These thoughts precede the “seventeen pages / [of] finely inscribed harangues” that come from her father, accusing her of betrayal and disloyalty (286). In the poem Rich becomes Rosenberg, and she, the infidel daughter, parallels the reviled Communist. The specter of Ethel “sinks” into Rich’s soul (288): they are both “female monster[s]‌” (287). The poem then moves on to discuss more familiar feminist touchstones: all these differences—“so painful so unfathomable / they must be pushed aside / ignored for years” (288)— Jewish, female, gay, anti-capitalist: at one time liabilities, by 1980, these identities nourished the poet instead of stigmatizing her. By the mid-sixties, marginal voices grew louder and alternative identities were celebrated rather than repressed. In the words of another American poet, Ginsberg’s madness had begun to make “divinest Sense.” Eliot had lost his vise on literary tastes; Ginsberg would soon be hailed as a prophet and a savior—if not at first by literary critics, then by a wider audience for poetry than any other American poet had ever seen. Delmore Schwartz claimed not to admire Ginsberg’s poetry; on the other hand, he was relieved that Ginsberg had at least recovered the true “adversary character” of the American artist—a role that he himself was not strong enough to play (Atlas 343). Rich may have come later to her transgressive or adversarial role, but as she shed the lessons of her early teachers, she embraced the Jewish transgressor in order to recognize her female, feminist, and queer self. This did not happen overnight; Rich, of course, had been growing into her alternative poetic identity throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as American culture itself was rapidly becoming politicized. The 1960s provided space and room enough for poetry to get more personal, but also more political. Public opposition to the war in Vietnam, even arrest during protest, made some poets household names. Not only Robert Lowell and Robert Bly, but Jewish American poets like Rich and Ginsberg were joined by Alicia Ostriker and Grace Paley, feminist writers whose Jewish identity included a commitment to social activism. In her 1970 collection, The Mother/Child Papers, Ostriker expresses her anxiety about bringing a male child into a world so filled with violence. In the eponymous poem, she moves back and forth between the disaster at Kent State and the birth process, writing “The Guards … fired / into the crowd to protect the peace. There was a sharp orange-red / explosion, … a match scratching, a / whine, a tender thud, then the sweet tunnel, then nothing. / Then the tunnel again, the immense difficulty, pressure, then the head / finally is liberated, then they pull the body out” (9–11). As Ostriker found “Howl” to be a Jewish poem for its invocations to social justice, this early book as well as her many later ones surely qualify for a similar categorization.11 In the latter half of the twentieth century, as Jewish Americans increasingly became insiders instead of outsiders, their poetry began to reflect this new position.12 In the poetry of Philip Levine, for instance, Jewish identity appears as only one aspect of a complex and many-faceted American

In more recent years, Ostriker has engaged more directly with her own Jewish identity, as well as the religion. See especially her feminist The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions and For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book. In both of these collections of essays and poetry, Ostriker relies on the traditional practice of Midrash to reread the bible. 12 See Biale et al. 212–28. 11

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identity. Yet his concerns with social justice never fade. In poems like “Zayde,” Levine uses the Yiddish term for grandfather, but then goes on to describe him as a man who has fallen in love with his new county, a man who “sings out Idaho potatoes / California, California oranges” (New Selected Poems 94). Born and raised in Detroit, Levine displays a unique sensitivity to class and race issues, and especially the problems of the working man, to which he has been sensitized by his own immigrant and Jewish background. In the title poem of his collection, What Work Is, Levine writes “You know what work is—if you’re / old enough to read this you know what / work is, although you may not do it. / Forget you” (What Work Is 18). Because the 1970s were an era in which exploring one’s roots became fashionable, Jewish Americans, standing on a firmer political ground, felt free to confront the Holocaust. In 1975, Charles Reznikoff ’s long poem and book titled Holocaust broke ground with its documentary and yet poetic treatment of the event, opening the gate to a flood of American responses. And yet, eleven years before Reznikoff ’s poem appeared, a young Jamaican Jewish poet won the Pulitzer Prize for his second volume of poetry, At the End of the Open Road. Louis Simpson, who had graduated from Columbia University in 1959, the same year that Ginsberg published “Kaddish” and Lowell published Life Studies, stood at the forefront of this new generation. In “A Story about Chicken Soup,” a poem that went unnoticed in 1964 but is now widely anthologized, Simpson outlines the issues weighing upon the Jewish-American poet. First, he acknowledges the conditions of immigration. “In my grandmother’s house,” he writes, “there was always chicken soup / And talk of the old country—mud and boards.” After describing his ancestors who had not managed to get to the new country, he plainly states: But the Germans killed them. I know it’s in bad taste to say it, But it’s true. The Germans killed them all. (182) Simpson, of course, refers to the Holocaust and recognizes that he risks the standards of “good taste” by mentioning it—that is, at least some one’s standards, standards that are clearly not his own. He consciously decides that he must break the rules in order to write a more authentic poem. It is Simpson, then, and the poets like him, who locate a new road for the American poet.

WORKS CITED Annie Hall. Directed by Woody Allen, United Artists, 1977. Altieri, Charles. “The Objectivist Tradition.” Chicago Review, vol. 30, no. 3 (1979), pp. 5–22. Alvarez, A. “Robert Lowell in Conversation.” Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs, ed. Jeffrey Meyers, University of Michigan Press, 1988, pp. 74–8. Originally published in Observer, July 21, 1963, p. 19. Alvarez, A. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. Norton, 1990. Atlas, James. Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet. Welcome Rain, 2000. Auden, W. H. Foreword. A Change of World: Poems, by Adrienne Rich. Norton, 2016, pp. vii–ix. Biale, David, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel. Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism. University of California Press, 1998. Brook, Vincent. You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture. Rutgers University Press, 2006. Brooks, Gwendolyn. Annie Allen. Harper & Brothers, 1949.

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Bruce, Lenny. “In Which the Artist Discusses Critics, Definitions, His San Francisco Bust, Courts, Juries, Cops, His Philadelphia Bust, Corruption, Obscenity, and Defines Jewish and Goyishe (Live).” Track One, Live at the Curran Theater, Fantasy, recorded November 1961. Cahan, Abraham. The Life of David Levinsky. Harper & Brothers, 1917. Cuddihy, John Murray. The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity. Basic Books, 1974. Diner, Hasia. We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962. New York University Press, 2009. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Egoist, 1919, https://tsel​iot.com/ess​ays/tradit​ion-and-theind​ivid​ual-tal​ent. Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. Faber and Faber, 1951. Eliot, T. S. The Poems of T.S. Eliot: Volume 1: Collected and Uncollected Poems. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Fiedler, Leslie. “On Remembering Freshman Comp.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 13, no. 1 (1962), pp. 1–4. Finkelstein, Norman. Not One of Them in Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity. SUNY Press, 2001. Finkielkraut, Alain. The Imaginary Jew, trans. Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff. University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems, 1947–1980. HarperCollins, 1984. Greenberg, Clement. The Collected Essays and Criticism. University of Chicago Press, 1988. Grossman, Allen. The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic of the Poetic Principle. University of Michigan Press, 1997. Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography. Random House, 1982. Haralson, Eric. Reading the Middle Generation Anew: Culture, Community, and Form in Twentieth-Century American Poetry. University of Iowa Press, 2006. Harris, Michael. “How WWII Affected America’s Minorities.” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2000, https://www. lati​mes.com/archi​ves/la-xpm-2000-jun-13-cl-40272-story.html. Hoffman, Abbie. The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000. Originally published as Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture. Putnam, 1980. Hoffman, Tyler. American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop. University of Michigan Press, 2013. Howard, Jane. “Applause for a Prize Poet: Robert Lowell Takes to Playwriting.” Life, vol. 58, no. 19 (February 1965), pp. 49, 55–6, 58. Kraft, Jessica. “Judaism and Psychology.” Jewish Thought, May 7, 2007, https://www.myjew​ishl​earn​ing.com/arti​ cle/juda​ism-and-psy​chol​ogy/. Lahav, Pnina. “The Chicago Conspiracy Trial as a Jewish Morality Tale.” Lives in the Law, ed. Douglas Lawrence, Umphrey Martha Merrill, and Austin Sarat, University of Michigan Press, 2002, pp. 21–54. Levine, Philip. New Selected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1991. Levine, Philip. What Work Is. Knopf, 1991. Lowell, Robert. Life Studies. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1959. Lowell, Robert. Lord Weary’s Castle. Harcourt Brace, 1946. Lukas, J. Anthony. “Judge Hoffman Is Taunted at Trial of the Chicago 7 after Silencing Defense Counsel.” New York Times, February 6, 1970, p. 41.

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McCrum, Robert. “Revealed: The Remarkable Tale of TS Eliot’s Late Love Affair.” Guardian, May 23, 2009, https://www.theg​uard​ian.com/cult​ure/2009/may/24/ts-eliot-vale​rie-fletc​her-scr​apbo​oks. Meyers, Jeffrey. Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs. University of Michigan Press, 1988. “News Notes.” Poetry, vol. 66, no. 3 (1945), pp. 173–4. Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book. Rutgers University Press, 2007. Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. “ ‘Howl’ Revisited: The Poet as Jew.” American Poetry Review, vol. 26, no. 4 (1997), pp. 28–31. Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. The Mother/Child Papers. Momentum Press, 1980. Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions. Rutgers University Press, 1994. Reznikoff, Charles. Holocaust. Black Sparrow, 1975. Rich, Adrienne. A Change of World: Poems. Norton, [1951] 2016. Rich, Adrienne. “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity.” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979– 1985. Norton, 1986, pp. 100–23. Rich, Adrienne. “For Ethel Rosenberg.” Iowa Review, vol. 12, nos. 2–3 (1981), pp. 286–90. Rosenthal, M. L. Our Life in Poetry: Selected Essays and Reviews. Persea Books, 1991. Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. Random House, 1969. Rubin, Jerry. We Are Everywhere. Harper and Row, 1971. Samuel, Maurice. Jews on Approval. Liveright Publishers, 1932. Schwartz, Delmore. “The Literary Dictatorship of T.S. Eliot.” Literary Opinion in America: Essays Illustrating the Status, Methods, and Problems of Criticism in the United States in the Twentieth Century, 3rd ed., ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel, Harper & Row, 1962, pp. 573–87. Shreiber, Maeera Y. “The End of Exile: Jewish Identity and Its Diasporic Poetics,” PMLA, vol. 113, no. 2 (1998), pp. 273–87. Shapiro, Karl. V-Letter and Other Poems. Reynal & Hitchcock, 1944. Silberman, Charles E. A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today. Summit Books, 1985. Simpson, Louis. At the End of the Open Road. Wesleyan University Press, 1964. Simpson, Louis. The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems, 1940–2001. Rochester: BOA Editions, 2003. Sloman, Larry. Steal This Dream. Doubleday, 1998. Svonkin, Craig. “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg’s Spiritual Self-Othering.” College Literature, vol. 74, no. 4 (2010), pp. 166–93. “This Day in Lettres: 24 March (1948): Robert Lowell to Carley Dawson.” American Reader, https://theame​rica​ nrea​der.com/24-march-1948-rob​ert-low​ell-to-car​ley-daw​son/. Trilling, Diana. “Lionel Trilling: A Jew at Columbia.” Commentary, March 1979, https://www.com​ment​arym​ agaz​ine.com/artic​les/diana-trill​ing/lio​nel-trill​ing-a-jew-at-colum​bia/. Trilling, Lionel. Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. Trilling, Lionel. “ ‘Culture,’ and Jewishness.” Denver Quarterly, vol. 18 (1983), pp. 106–22. Wakefield, Dan. Personal interview. January 15, 2018. Yezierska, Anzia. The Bread Givers. Persea, 1925.

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CHAPTER NINE

The Autobiographical Prose of Poets GRZEGORZ KOSC

Many poets following the Second World War, quite across the spectrum of American poetries, turned to prose memoirs to investigate and narrate their lives and identity.1 The list of such poets includes all the poets discussed in this essay: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Denise Levertov, Tracy K. Smith, Audre Lorde, Charles Bernstein, and Ron Silliman. These poets must have found that prose was better suited for autobiography than postwar American poetry. Indeed, a memoir seems essentially a nonpoetic enterprise, at least given how the poetic has been understood. This is not to say that no autobiographies were written in poetry in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, or even that only few were. In fact, there are many, and they constitute a large subgenre of the modern lyric, including such diverse texts as Lowell’s Notebook 1967–68, Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, Derek Walcott’s Another Life, A. R. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year, John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, to name just a few. Neither is it to suggest that American poets have never turned to prose for autobiography for more subversive reasons left out by this essay—that is, for new occasions to experiment with and deconstruct the autobiographical gesture. Stephen Fredman’s analysis of Robert Creeley’s Presences: A Text for Marisol (1976) would have powerfully contradicted any such claim (57–100). That said, poetry has a way of derailing the strictly autobiographical through the imaginative freedom and formal constraints it employs. Suffice to mention the pathetic self-consciousness of Prufrock greatly exaggerating that of Eliot (his biographer Lyndall Gordon wrote that Prufrock was a “caricature” of a Henry James character rather than a version of the poet [65]). Among more recent examples of poetic autobiography are Bishop’s coded autobiography in “The Man-Moth,” Plath’s wildly imagined, indirectly autobiographical “Lady Lazarus,” Frank O’Hara’s obsessively metonymic “The Day Lady Died,” and Marilyn Chin’s mocking “How I Got That Name.” Besides, poetry makes relatively little space for the abundant material of experience and recollection. Even more significantly, it fails to sustain the expression of extended structures of logical reasoning and argument, staples of many autobiographies. Ultimately, choosing poetry for life writing apparently

This essay was developed with the support of Research Grant No. 2018/29/B/HS2/00749, from the National Science Centre Poland. 1

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feels like employing a tool to perform a task for which it was never designed. Managing the dyad of autobiographical poetry, many poets have found that they either fail to take advantage of poetry or forsake the responsibilities of an autobiographer. Sometimes, tellingly, the writing ends up failing at both ends, as seems to be the case with John Berryman’s Love and Fame (1970) or James Laughlin’s Byways (2005). As Billy Collins wrote in his 2001 critique of contemporary autobiographical poetry: If you have a memory, write a memoir, the austere advice goes; … if what you want to say in poetry can be said as well or better by some other means … by all means stop writing poems. The key risk in writing the memory-driven poem is a failure to take advantage of the imaginative liberty that poetry offers. (84) The best-known autobiography theorist, Philippe Lejeune, in “The Autobiographical Pact” (1975), goes so far as to define autobiography as a narrative in prose: “Retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his [sic] own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality” (4). Indeed, the pressure to switch to prose for autobiography has been the experience of many across America’s poetry scene, often their poetic sensibilities regardless. Genre theory is rarely of help when one tries to understand the contemporary practical advantages of prose for the purpose of memoirs. The distinction between poetry and prose is often dismissed by poststructuralists as fraught ideologically and more polarized by codes, by sets of conventional expectations, than real. Barbara Johnson, in “Poetry and Its Double,” wrote of Baudelaire’s prose poem and verse poem versions of “L’invitation au voyage” as both “pre-texts” of each other, never mind which was written first, each reciprocally mutilating and correcting the other (48). Prose poems in particular dramatize the “code struggle” between verse and prose.2 Although genre criticism has been, in Fredric Jameson’s well-known remark, “thoroughly discredited by modern literary theory and practice” (91), and the ontologist of autobiography James Olney asserts “the impossibility of … placing any generic limitations on autobiography” (237), the deconstructive approach to genres fails to explain their continuing currency in the imagination of authors who face practical choices and make them. Autobiography continues to be conceptualized as prosaic and finds in prose a natural ally.

NATURALNESS Prose has come to be seen by poets as intrinsic to autobiographical writing. The naturalness of prose for autobiography has been the byproduct of, on the one hand, postwar post-Romantic skepticism with regard to the self and, on the other, the legacy of the New Critics, in particular William K. Wimsatt, Monroe C. Beardsley, and Cleanth Brooks. They insisted that poetry does more than tell a story of the author’s life and psychology; that it is intentional fallacy to look for the autobiographical in what is invested in the intrinsic aesthetic value of the “linguistic fact” (C. Brooks 191; Wimsatt and Beardsley 477). What the New Critics saw as the strength of poetry has therefore made many poets more convinced of its awkwardness when deployed for autobiography. Tzvetan Todorov, too, wrote about Baudelaire’s prose poems as struggling with the generic distinction and ultimately deconstructing it, 61–6. 2

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Not so long ago, in a March 2007 Slate piece, for example, Meghan O’Rourke wrote that “when we read poetry, we are responding … to the fact that in writing the poem the poet has experienced the dilemma or emotion being staged.” Of course, we have come to a strange juncture because for a long time it was poetry that was seen as more directly articulating the mind, as a primary mode of expression, and, as such, arguably better suited to convey memoiristic writing. Take, for instance, Coleridge’s assertions in The Lyrical Ballads about poetry as vocalizing the mind’s inner equilibrium through meter (Wordsworth and Coleridge 183). Hence Wordsworth’s Prelude written in blank verse. Since then, the experience of the naturalness of prose in autobiographical writing has been shared by many. Robert Lowell found prose most appropriate after, as he put it in a 1971 interview with Ian Hamilton, “six or seven years’ ineptitude—a slack of eternity” following the success of Lord Weary’s Castle (Lowell, Collected 269). He had suffered a writer’s block and could not restart but by producing prose—that is to say, by beginning from the less artificed and the less affective. Writing prose, he recollects in an autobiographical fragment, was an Occupational Therapy requirement when he was treated at Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic throughout the summer of 1954. He would get going by laboriously crafting poetic lines such as these: I was already halfway through my life, When I woke up from Mother on the back Of the Hill in Boston, to a skyline of Life Insurance buildings, still in blueprint. (Lowell, “I sat” 366)3 But, as he wrote, he gradually recognized the “horrible[ness]” of the “labor, cynicism, and maturity of writing in meter.” The multilayered ironies of the poetic stanza struck him as a product of his training or overtraining, of his search for calculated effects, and as obfuscating his story. He found himself preferring “to write rapidly in prose and in the style of a child”: “name, Bobby Lowell. I was all of three and a half. My new formal grey shorts had been worn for all of three minutes. Autumn played cops and robbers over my ankles” (Lowell, “I sat” 366). The poet turned from poetry to prose because he found the latter to be less contrived. As we know, after two years of writing prose, Lowell developed the poetic mode of Life Studies (1959) in which poetry seems to have retained some of this apparent slackness; Lowell’s poetry was sparer, more direct, and metrically looser, as if it had given up on its ambition. The prose memoir of young “Bobby Lowell” was revised into the poem “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” which retains signs of its prosaic origins. Though he represents a different episteme, Charles Bernstein, too, for the purposes of autobiography, abstained from his usual way of engaging the text and switched to prose.4 Bernstein’s life writing is embedded in his 1995 interview “An Autobiographical Interview Conducted by Loss Pequeño Glazier.”5 To write it, he suspended his usual way of text-making.

The fragment, never published in Lowell’s lifetime, is included in Lowell’s Memoirs, published 2022 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc. 4 For Charles Bernstein’s criticisms of prose along the lines of the Language poets, see Content’s Dream (288, 425). 5 The idea to examine the text in this context was Marjorie Perloff ’s (Differentials 287). 3

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His 1984 poem “Dysraphism” explains how prose is a default mode for this Language poet. Prose writers “start with the world” which is given and for which they offer only adequate expression. That is, in prose you start with the world and find the words to match; in poetry you start with the words and find the world in them. (Bernstein, All 119) The poet takes on an autobiographical assignment, and looks for words to match it. Of course, Bernstein’s Language poetry works in precisely the other direction. Starting with quotations, echoes, trite verbal residues, he attends to and relishes polyphonous playful effects. One need look no further for a glimpse of this reversed mode than in the quoted lines: the enjambment, the running on of the sense in the second line into the third—“in poetry you start / with words and find the world in them”—interrupted by the break line after “start,” effectively creates the sense of expectation and wonder at what the next lines will bring. If Bernstein had attempted poetry to write autobiography, he would have risked losing sight of the autobiographical. That autobiography and poetry usually work at cross-purposes can be observed in a comparison between his representation of his father in the autobiographical interview and the way Herman Joseph Bernstein figures in a Bernstein poem. In his response to Glazier, Bernstein wrote he found his father “quite opaque”: “He didn’t seem at all introspective, although to say that is to reflect an enormous gulf between his own cultural circumstances and my own. In many ways my father seemed foreign to me” (Bernstein, “An Autobiographical” 32). One of the reasons for this intergenerational estrangement was that his father’s native languages were Russian and Yiddish which resulted, in his English, in “pervasive idiomatic insistences that come naturally from any such linguistic background and add texture and character to a person’s speech.” The son would, for example, remember his father saying “close the lights” and “take a haircut” (“An Autobiographical” 33). On the other hand, in a father poem, “Sentences My Father Used” (from Controlling Interests), one in which he says he tried to “think through” the opacity of his father’s behavior (“An Autobiographical” 32), the poet shifts his focus from Herman to what seems to be merely a certain disjointedness in language reminiscent of that which he had found haunting in his father’s odd Yiddish- and Russian-inflected English (Bernstein, Controlling 21). Remembered odd turns of phrase yield, in the poem, a new formula for a freshly poetic utterance. A different example would be Bernstein’s recollections of his childhood spent at Ethical Culture School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan compared with the poem “Standing Target” (“An Autobiographical” 37; Controlling 39). Bernstein’s prose memories of his alienation at the school are taken to an entirely different level in the poem where he quotes reports from the Fieldston Day Camp run by the Ethical Culture School. The abstract, reified language of, presumably, “pop psychology reports about your development and social integration” gets a life of its own, stands in for and displaces his childhood experience (“An Autobiographical” 37; Controlling 39). In the interview, his autobiographical writing is sober, balanced, and clearly argued, if also lively, hyperbolic and humorous. In their prose, poets rarely give the impression that they simply gave up on their ambition; rather they welcome the refreshing feeling of being able to provide an account of their lives without the agitation of poetry. The unwinding of poetry into prose in and of itself begins to hold their interest. Lowell planned a full-blown prose autobiography and eventually incorporated

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some of his prose memoir, the chapter called “91 Revere Street,” into a volume of poetry, Life Studies (1959). Elizabeth Bishop, too, recognized prose’s claim on her: she intended to publish In the Village and Other Stories and eventually placed “In the Village” itself at the heart of her third book of poems, Questions of Travel (1965) (Prose vii). In her letters Bishop even worried that her prose would be mistaken for what it was not to be—that is, poetry: “I am afraid the total effect is pretty ‘precious,’ ‘lovely, sensitive prose,’ etc.” (Bishop and Lowell 141). Bernstein included his prose autobiography in My Way (221–52), feeling, as he wrote in the introduction, that he was having it enter into a cross-generic “conversation” with speeches and poems: “There are essays in poetic lines and prose that incorporates poetic motifs, there are interviews that mime speech, and speeches that veer into song” (My Way xi). Rather than being poets’ marginal projects, prose autobiographical writings are often recognized as providing an important counterpoint to their poetic endeavors. In their career and publication decisions, poets repeatedly acknowledge the claim of prose as genuine.

EXTERIORITY What other attraction does autobiographical prose have for poets, apart from it being a mode better adapted to life writing? By turning to prose for autobiography, poets tap more of Hegel’s “prose of the world”; they get a greater share of what, according to Hegel, is afforded by prose—that is, the spirit’s externalization, the quotidian circumstances that obfuscate/bewilder the subjective vision (147–50). This is the strength of prose that shows in Bakhtin’s doctrine of prosaic heteroglossia (270–9), and in Sartre’s notion that prose is only a useful tool conveying the things of the external world (29–31). Take Elizabeth Bishop’s turn to autobiographical prose—first in “Gwendolyn,” then even more in “In the Village,” both published in the New Yorker in 1953. The latter, for instance, concerns a girl seeing her mother sink into madness (Bishop, Prose 62–78). In response to that, she deploys a defense mechanism by immersing in the world of nature and neighbors. To narrate her curious, excitable mind as a child, Bishop felt she needed prose. She produces a more inclusive text than she could have achieved in poetry. Colm Tóibín, in his excellent study On Elizabeth Bishop, writes of the girl’s investment in the things, people, places, and animals around her: “Everything that happened, everything she saw in the village, is given equal weight by the child almost as a way of avoiding the idea that her mother’s scream will not stop echoing in the landscape and in her memory” (16). Interestingly, Bishop wrote the piece while in Brazil. Finding herself far away from home, she writes a text that enables, as she wrote in 1952 to her friends Kit and Ilse Barker, a “total recall about Nova Scotia” (Bishop, One Art 249). The prose project facilitated this uninhibited, capacious recovery of the past (Axelrod 281–7, 293–4; Travisano 167–74). No wonder that, in Questions of Travel, the story “In the Village” links poems about Brazil with the section “Elsewhere” about Nova Scotia. Trying to include a broader range of subjects than is allowed in condensed poetry, Sylvia Plath wrote The Bell Jar (1963), a semiautobiographical account of the life of Esther Greenwood. To be sure, her motive to complete the project and publish it may have been more complex than just aesthetic: she had taken a fellowship from the Eugene Saxton fund, which created a pressure for her to finish what she otherwise might have abandoned. Yet she gave her aesthetic reasons for switching to prose in a BBC talk of July 7, 1962, later transcribed as “A Comparison” and published in Johnny

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Panic and the Bible of Dreams (62–4). Plath talked of envying novelists, because there is nothing for them that is irrelevant: “Old shoes can be used, doorknobs, air letters, flannel nightgowns, cathedrals, nail varnish, jet planes, rose arbors and budgerigars; little mannerisms—the sucking at a tooth, the tugging at a hemline—any weird or warty or fine or despicable thing. Not to mention emotions, motivations—those rumbling, thunderous shapes” (Plath, Johnny 62). A poem is a closed fist that “excludes and stuns”: “I have never put a toothbrush in a poem,” she said (Johnny 63). Later, in an October 1962 interview, she told Peter Orr: I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in daily life, and I find this more difficult in poetry. Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you’ve got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you’ve just got to turn away all the peripherals. And I miss them! I’m a woman, I like my little Lares and Penates, I like trivia, and I find that in a novel I can get more of life, perhaps not such intense life, but certainly more of life, and so I’ve become very interested in novel writing as a result. (Plath, Interview 171) A different aspect of exteriority can also be glimpsed in the way the novel differs from Plath’s poems that she wrote about the same time and that deal with the same subject matter. On or around May 16, 1961, in the weeks when she was developing her novel about Esther Greenwood and her vexed relationship with her mother, she wrote the poem “Widow” which is a far more bitter or cutting portrait of her mother than that of Mrs. Greenwood in the novel (Plath, Collected 164).6 Her mother, Aurelia Plath, later wrote that the portraits of Esther’s loved ones in the novel, presumably including herself, “represent … the basest ingratitude” (Ames 263), but Plath’s portrait in “Widow” should have hurt Aurelia more. Sylvia’s resentment in the novel is muted and more teenage-harmless; in the poem it is far more expressive and already fueled by Plath’s incipient Ariel poetics. In “Widow,” she is unsparing in sizing up the voids, the “great, vacant estate” of her mother’s widowhood, without revealing much about the mother’s external life (Plath, Collected 164). Preference for exteriority afforded by prose may have multiple motivations; it can be a desire to escape solipsism or a practical need for a capacious medium accommodating complex genealogies and archaeologies. The former would be exemplified by Berryman’s Recovery (1972), his last book and only novel. Barely disguising its strongly autobiographical nature, this novel shows the poet’s final struggle to apprehend his situation more soberly and less subjectively than poetry allowed him. In David Kalstone’s words, Recovery is “a turn away from the dangers and enrichments” of Berryman’s poetry (49). The critic suggested that the novel should usefully be printed in one single volume with the poems of Delusions, Etc., written in the same months as the prose, for it targets precisely the delusions of his poetry. (Kalstone had to wait only a few months for the idea to materialize in a Delta Book volume (1973)). Prose also becomes preferable for poets’ writing when its primary purposes is to record and document. Lucille Clifton’s Generations (1976), for example, is a poet’s memoir which had to be written in prose for these reasons. It is a “celebration in prose” of Clifton’s genealogy, fitted with family photographs. Her prose has the terseness of her poetry; yet its primary motive was to collect reliable records of encounters and oral accounts that helped her reconstruct her familial past.

6

For a full discussion of this subject in Plath, see Ferretter (78–86).

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The inclusivity of prose underlay Denise Levertov’s decision not to write her autobiography in verse. She began to write Tesserae: Memories and Suppositions (1995) when she knew that she was mortally ill (Levertov died of lymphoma in 1997, only two years after the memoir’s publication). As she explained in her chapter “Lost Books,” she could see the task was inappropriate for poetry: “How much of what I feel impelled to write (in prose, though not in poetry) has to do with loss! It’s the universal impulse … to set up memorials, to incise upon urns the praise of those whose ashes they hold” (Levertov, Tesserae 110). Ironically, memorialization is here said to be calling for prose, even though it is poetry that was originally a mnemonic practice—meter, rhymes, refrains, line breaks developed to assist memory. Since the printing press took care of that, the very raison d’être of poetry having been undermined since 1440, the capacity of prose to represent the objects of memory became more crucial. Levertov conceived of her last book as an assortment of little treasures, keepsakes, little precious vignettes—a bag of miscellaneous fragments. To Levertov, poetry seems to go so far heightening, isolating, dramatizing, subjectivizing, and rearranging that it loses all specific truthfulness, becomes universal and remote from her own experience. It creates its own truth. As Levertov put it, poetry’s “home base is that borderland you call ‘no-man’s land’ and which I would call ‘everyman’s land’ ” (Levertov, Conversations 70). The subjectivity of poetry generates experience that can be immediately felt and is universal; but the poet, inasmuch as she wants to engage in the memorialization of personal experience, discovers she has less and less use for it. Consider the difference between “A Doorkey for Cordova,” a poem from Breathing the Water, and “Cordova” a prose sketch dealing with the same biographic episode in Tesserae (11, 16–19). Levertov’s poem is, in the words of her biographer Donna Hollenberg, a “marvel of compression” (359), focusing only on the memory of her perception of an oblique pattern on a table cover turned into an ironing sheet; it made her connect that to a vaguely remembered casbah. By contrast, the story “Cordova” offers a rich tapestry of smells and colors accompanying that same experience; besides, it is a careful archeological investigation of her memory’s layers. The autobiography Tesserae also compels us to revisit the extreme, noir portrait of her older sister, Olga Tatjana Levertoff (1914–1964), in the “Olga Poems” of 1965: Black one, incubus—   she appeared riding anguish as Tartars ride mares over the stubble of bad years. (Levertov, “Olga” 84) The poem seems surprising given the far less tense, more lightly appreciative portrait of the sister in the memoir. In “Olga Poems,” one barely recognizes the Olga from Tesserae, shown as extrovert, sociable, and various; true, demanding for her little sister but also generous and loving (33–5). Among the more recent prose memoirs motivated by the desire to preserve the exteriority of experience is Ordinary Light (2015) by poet Tracy K. Smith (1972–). There she wrote that by acquiring her voice in prose she learned “to invest in characters, and to invite the world beyond myself ” (Smith, Ordinary 351). She followed it up with an essay “What Memoir Can Do That Poetry Can’t,” published the same year in the online journal Literary Hub. In it she justifies her turn

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to prose for the volume. Essentially, Smith argues that prose worked for her because it was usefully and engagingly “nosey,” “want[ing] to know all manner of things a poem would … never ask.” It made her personal story “public,” intelligible to others and “less hers,” fleshed it out with aspects that normally she would not have considered. Poetry, by contrast, would not have worked for her, given that poetry was not interested in telling the story. Instead, Smith argued, poetry isolates a snapshot of a memory, turning it into something else much more indirect and stranger.

DIANOIA There is another reason why prose may be preferred to poetry for the purposes of autobiography. Prose seems better suited for the logical progression and the systematic exposition of the chain of thought, for dianoia, the structured movement of the mind. Alain Badiou, in Handbook of Inaesthetics (2005), identifies this aspect of prose as follows: What poetry forbids is discursive thought, dianoia. Plato says that “he who lends an ear to it [poetry] must be on his guard fearing for the polity in his soul.” Dianoia is the thought that traverses, the thought that links and deduces. The poem itself is affirmation and delectation—it does not traverse, it dwells on the threshold. (17) This special characteristic of prose points to the historical roots of its emergence—prose’s deictic integration and formal stability. Deixis is a term comprising words that have no meaning outside the text providing the context—pronouns, words referring to location. Godzic and Kittay, in The Emergence of Prose (1987), traced the beginnings of the genre to a gradual recognition that the French jongleur’s strength lay in other attributes than had been thought. Traditionally, the jongleur made his texts mean through flesh-and-blood performances. He could evoke the past by changing his props and thus his locale; he could speak about other characters by changing masks. Increasingly, however, the jongleur also began to rely on deictic structures, spatiotemporal linguistic coordinates that allowed him to refer to the past and to people not present at the site. This deixis of the jongleur’s speech was an early augury of prose; in the long run, “deictics are the means by which language makes itself into something that can be referred to” (Godzich and Kittay 20); prose developed ways to note its progression. In contrast to poetry, prose can be easily discursive; instead of being the literature of presence and of the sensuous, it carries the narrative and the workings of reason. Mostly prose—as well as the prose element in poetry—can respond to the complaint Robert Pinsky made as early as 1975, in The Situation of Poetry, about American poetry lacking ideas, about it shunning discursivity. Any deficit of the discursive makes prose-looking texts—like Gwendolyn Brooks’s Report from Part One (1972)—sound quite poetic. Brooks’s autobiographical prose is indeed a good example: focused less on narrating her life than on summoning back the lived past with the immediacy of the present and leaving out deictic structures for concentration and selection, her memoir brings to mind her autobiographical poems like “The Anniad,” or “Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood,” in Annie Allen (1949). If Bishop and Levertov turned to prose because of its exteriority, Ron Silliman did so because of its dianoia and its deixis-based autonomy of the text and abstraction. When in 1997 Gale Research approached Silliman to solicit from him an autobiographical essay for its Contemporary Authors “autobiography” series, the poet decided to draw on a work he had done fourteen years earlier—his poem “Albany.” He used the sentences of “Albany,” as a series of spurs to expatiate

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on his past in expository prose “Under Albany.” Silliman produced a text divided into almost as many sections as there are sentences in “Albany,” with only a few omissions. Printed in italics, the “Albany” bits are followed by extended passages of one or more paragraphs each, though also with some ruptures and turns. The prose shows what is “underneath” “Albany,” the various memories, stories, extended reflections that somehow added up to have made him the author of “Albany” and bring to the present; the prose autobiography is clearly an attempt to recall, stitch together and make cohere various episodes, social arrangements, and psychological and artistic phases that had made him (Perloff 143). This deictic quality also seems to have been one of the main reasons why Audre Lorde (1934–1992) had to switch to prose to write her essays, then her Cancer Journals (1980), her “biomythography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), and later A Burst of Light (1988). Her central motive was to deploy a mode that would be more discursive; as she said in a 1987 interview, while “poetry works by feeling,” prose “engenders thought” (Lorde, Conversations 169). Poetry, she asserted, “will make you feel why I was screaming. When I am writing prose, I am trying to make you understand why I am screaming” (Conversations 169). Over ten years earlier, in 1975, she went on record as still reluctant to engage in prose: “I’m a poet not an essayist,” she wrote on June 7, 1975, refusing Ann Allen Shockley’s request that she contribute a prose text to an anthology Shockley was editing (Lorde, Cancer 92). Pretty soon, however, in 1977, she warmed to more expository prose, writing her first essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in a more “linear” style of expression. Paradoxically, the essay championed poetry as a necessarily intuitive means of selfexamination for women, sort of écriture feminine that should precede and inform action—the latter belonging, like prose, to what she called “linear power.” Cancer Journals, however, is an autobiographical text that fully relies on prose; it frames diary notations in elaborate accounts of the process by which she grew more self-aware and engaged in systematic reasoning. In her prose passages, Lorde also launches her argumentative polemic against the discourses of illness, race, and gender in the United States and against her status in the hands of healthcare institutions. She herself reflects on the argumentative and deictic nature of her personal prose by referring to her determination “to set this all down step by step” (Lorde, Cancer 25). In the words of Gabriela Ricciardi, while “the diary entries bring to the forefront the immediacy of emotions … the prose part has the function of summarizing, contextualizing, commenting on, and creating a framework for the immediacy of emotions” (75). To be sure, at the opening of the first essay of Cancer Journal, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” one does find a poem—“A Song for Many Movements” (16–17). The poem is shaped by the sense of urgency to speak out against injustice in the face of human mortality and insignificance on the cosmic scale. However, Lorde herself felt that the urgency that the poem evoked could be addressed only by prose. Cancer Journal is therefore an example of versiprosa, a text dominated by prose, in which poetry plays a subservient function (Godzic and Kittay 46). Lorde’s evolution from a practitioner of poetry alone to a prose autobiographer is my last example demonstrating that the poetic autobiography has been found internally conflicted. The emotions the genre affects strike poets as overdramatized. It also seems not capacious enough to accommodate the contents of personal memory and incapable of acknowledging more of the world outside oneself. Finally, it is not pliant enough for the careful laying out of the progression of reasoning. It can be terrific writing; but the ill-fittedness of the form and the subject matter has been experienced by many post–Second World War American poets of various persuasion. It clearly

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has bothered many of them, and it has often weighed down on the processes of both recollection and poetry-making. Some poets have produced great autobiographical poetry nevertheless. Others, however, have recognized the conflicting natures of poetry and autobiography as the two have been practiced in the Western tradition. These poets of various stripes—from confessional through projectivist to Language and feminist—have often felt compelled to switch to prose which, as we see in Lorde, can be a complement as well as a substitute.

WORKS CITED Ames, Lois. “Sylvia Plath: A Biographical Note.” The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, HarperCollins, 1999, pp. 245–64. Ammons, A. R. Tape for the Turn of the Year. W. W. Norton, 1965. Ashbery, John. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Viking Press, 1975. Axelrod, Steven Gould. “Elizabeth Bishop: Nova Scotia in Brazil.” Papers on Language and Literature, vol. 37, no. 3 (Summer 2001), pp. 279–95. Badiou, Alain. Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford University Press, 2005. Bakhtin, M[ikhail] M. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981, pp. 269–422. Bernstein, Charles. All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Bernstein, Charles. “An Autobiographical Interview Conducted by Loss Pequeño Glazier.” Contemporary Authors: Autobiography Series, vol. 24. Gale Research, 1997, pp. 31–50. Bernstein, Charles. Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984. Sun and Moon Press, 1986. Bernstein, Charles. Controlling Interests. Roof Books, 1980. Bernstein, Charles. My Way: Speeches and Poems. University of Chicago Press, 1999. Berryman, John. Delusions, Etc. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. Berryman, John. Love and Fame. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970. Berryman, John. Recovery. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. Bishop, Elizabeth. One Art: Letters, ed. Robert Giroux. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Bishop, Elizabeth. Prose, ed. Lloyd Schwartz. Chatto and Windus, 2011. Bishop, Elizabeth, and Robert Lowell. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. Harcourt, Brace, 1947. Brooks, Gwendolyn. The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, ed. Elizabeth Alexander. Library of America, 2005. Brooks, Gwendolyn. Report from Part One. Broadside Press, 1972. Clifton, Lucille. Generations: A Memoir. Random House, 1976. Collins, Billy. “My Grandfather’s Tackle Box: The Limits of Memory-Driven Poetry.” After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography, ed. Kate Sontag and David Graham, Graywolf Press, 2001, pp. 81–91. Ferretter, Luke. Sylvia Plath’s Fiction: A Critical Study. University of Edinburgh Press, 2010. Fredman, Stephen. Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. Cambridge University Press, 1990. Godzic, Wlad, and Jeffrey Kittay. The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics. University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Gordon, Lyndall. The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot. Virago, 1998. Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox. Clarendon, 1975. Hejinian, Lyn. My Life. Burning Deck, 1980. Hollenberg, Donna K. A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov. University of California Press, 2013.

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Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Routledge, 1981. Johnson, Barbara. “Poetry and Its Double: Two ‘Invitations au voyage.’ ” The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, pp. 23–51. Kalstone, David. “Recovery: The Struggle between Prose and Life.” John Berryman, ed. Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1989, pp. 49–52. Laughlin, James. Byways: A Memoir. New Directions, 2005. Lejeune, Philippe. “The Autobiographical Pact.” On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine M. Leary, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp. 3–30. Levertov, Denise. Breathing the Water. New Directions, 1987. Levertov, Denise. Conversations with Denise Levertov, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker, University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Levertov, Denise. “Olga Poems.” Poetry, vol. 106, nos. 1/2 (May 1965), pp. 81–9. Levertov, Denise. Tesserae: Memories and Suppositions. New Directions, 1995. Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. Aunt Lute Books, 1997. Lorde, Audre. Conversations with Audre Lorde, ed. Joan Wylie Hall. University of Mississippi Press, 2004. Lorde, Audre. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, 1984, pp. 36–9. Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Persephone Press, 1982. Lowell, Robert. Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987. Lowell, Robert. “I sat looking out.” Memoirs, ed. Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022, p. 366. Lowell, Robert. Memoirs, ed. Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. Lowell, Robert. Notebook: 1967-68. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Olney, James. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton University Press, 1980. O’Rourke, Meghan. “Autobiography, Narcissism, and Self-Invention.” Slate, March 2007, http://www.slate.com/ artic​les/news_a​nd_p​olit​ics/memo​ir_w​eek/featu​res/2007/autob​iogr​aphy​_and​_poe​try/autobiography_n​arci​ssis​ m_an​d_se​lfin​vent​ion.html. Perloff, Marjorie. Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. University of Alabama Press, 2004. Pinsky, Robert. The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Traditions. Princeton University Press, 1976. Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. HarperCollins, 1999. Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. Faber and Faber, 1981. Plath, Sylvia. “Interview with Peter Orr, October 30, 1962.” The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press and Ian Scott-Kilvert, ed. Peter Orr, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966, pp. 167–72. Plath, Sylvia. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. Faber and Faber, 1977. Ricciardi, Gabriela. Autobiographical Representation in Pier Paolo Pasolini and Audre Lorde. Stauffenburg-Verlag Narr, 2001. Rich, Adrienne. Diving into the Wreck: Poems, 1971-1972. W. W. Norton, 1973. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “What Is Literature?” And Other Essays. Harvard University Press, 1988. Silliman, Ron. “Albany.” ABC, Tuumba Press, 1983, n.p. Silliman, Ron. “Under Albany.” Contemporary Authors: Autobiography Series, vol. 29, ed. Joyce Nakamura, Gale Research, 1998, pp. 309–52. Smith, Tracy K. Ordinary Light: A Memoir. Knopf, 2015. Smith, Tracy K. “What Memoir Can Do That Poetry Can’t.” Literary Hub, April 2015, http://lit​hub.com/whatmem​oir-can-do-that-poe​try-cant/.

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Todorov, Tzvetan. “Poetry without Verse.” The Prose Poem in France: Theory and Practice, ed. Mary Ann Caws and Hermine Riffaterre, Columbia University Press, 1983, pp. 61–6. Tóibín, Colm. On Elizabeth Bishop. Princeton University Press, 2015. Travisano, Thomas J. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. University of Virginia Press, 1989. Walcott, Derek. Another Life. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. Wimsatt, William K., Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” Sewanee Review, vol. 54, no. 3 (September 1946), pp. 468–88. Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads, 1798 and 1800, ed. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter. Broadview Editions, 2008.

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CHAPTER TEN

Queer Poetry after 1945 LAURA WESTENGARD

In “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde frames poetry as a bridge connecting affect, imaginative world building, and political resistance: “We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared.”1 And where that language does not exist, Lorde suggests, our poetry can help to fashion it. “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before” (Sister 37–8). For Lorde, poetry resists oppressive metanarratives about the inherent value of art and literature created by those within the mythical norm, “usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure” (Sister 116). Poetry birthed by intersectionally marginalized subjects has been both a survival strategy and a vision of futurity, creating a body of poetry that one might characterize as “queer.” Originally a pejorative term referring to those whose sexuality falls outside of heterosexual norms, queer as an identity category and political orientation has been reappropriated by the community upon which it was once imposed. With this reappropriation, the definition of queer has expanded to become an umbrella term indicating those with nonnormative desires, sexual practices, and genders as well as a political orientation that coalesces around “resistance to regimes of the normal” (Warner 16).

QUEER HISTORIES To discuss queer poetry after 1945, it is important to briefly trace the development of US queer identity, culture, and thought in the latter half of the twentieth century. On June 28, 1969, a motley group of trans women of color and queers from all walks of life decided they were fed up with constant police harassment and violence.2 That night they fought back by throwing objects at the officers raiding the Stonewall Inn bar thereby sparking the multiday rebellion known as

I would like to thank Rachel Rothbart for consulting with me on the development of this article and providing valuable ideas, perspectives, and resources. 2 Aren Aizura points out the difficulty of using terminology that accounts for gender diverse experiences in a variety of contexts. They explain that the terms “Trans and gender nonconforming have recently become shorthand within North American academia and social services to describe a diverse gamut of experiences, identities, practices, beliefs, and subjectivities that are unintelligible within a logic that understands gender (or sex) exclusively as something naturally evident at birth, based on genitalia” (11), but reminds readers that the “pursuit of finding the precisely correct labels with which to identify gender nonconforming populations will always fail. Thus one has to make do with the insufficiency of language, even as one remembers the violence of that insufficiency” (12). 1

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the Stonewall Riots. This moment in LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) history has been mythologized as a turning point that brought LGBT politics “out of the closets and into the streets,” as later activists loudly proclaimed. Though there had been earlier uprisings throughout the mid- to late twentieth century, Stonewall sparked the public imagination and marked an era of increasing visibility for LGBT politics, identity, and thought. Today Stonewall is nearly universally recognized as a symbol of empowerment and pride. However, at the time not all LGBT community members supported the explosive response to police harassment. The Mattachine Society, a relatively conservative homophile organization that had existed since the 1950s, responded to the riots by posting a sign that read “We homosexuals plead with our people to please help maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the village” (Bronski 210). Those more attuned to resistance than to respectability formed the more radical LGBT activist group, the Gay Liberation Front. The split between radical resistance to heteronormative cultural ideals and a more pragmatic, assimilationist approach, between “claiming an outsider status and demanding acceptance as part of the ‘normal’ majority—has remained, in various forms, the defining division in the LGBT movement” (Bronski 181). The years following Stonewall saw the birth of several, often contradictory approaches to LGBT politics, frequently characterized in terms of assimilationist activism aimed at increasing LGBT inclusion within existing institutions such as marriage and military service or in terms of antinormative, queer resistance aimed at reimagining the structures and value systems that exclude some and reward others. Susan Stryker claims that ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a radical protest group born during the AIDS crisis, reclaimed and politicized the term queer (Stryker 134). This politicized use first appeared on flyers at the 1990 New York Pride march, and in the following years the word, “with its valences of strange, odd, and perplexing” became an umbrella term indicating a “range of nonnormative sexual practices and gender identifications beyond gay and lesbian” (Love 172). In addition to the use of queer as an umbrella term for nonnormativity and its resonance as an antinormative political stance, the term’s history as a slur points to the “significance of violence and stigma in the experience of gender and sexual outsiders” (Love 172). Driven by the devastation of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s and growing out of political groups such as Queer Nation that “took aim at the overarching social structures that marginalized the disease and its victims,” the academic field of queer studies emerged as an anti-normative and deconstructionist approach to thinking about and being in the world (Stryker 134). Queer studies applied a critical, political lens to the institutional and social structures that created heteronormative universalism on the backs of LGBTQ marginalization. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a central voice in queer studies, famously explores the use value of “queer” as a term and its possibilities of meaning in her 1994 book, Tendencies. Queer, she explains, can “denote, almost simply, same-sex sexual object choice, lesbian or gay, whether or not it is organized around multiple criss-crossings of definitional lines,” but it also can be used to figure the “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (Sedgwick 8). Queer studies reflects on the complexities of difference that exceed identity-based categories and even exceed the container of single-issue gender or sexuality analysis in favor of spinning the “term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race,

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ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identityfracturing discourses” (Sedgwick 9). Historically, those with nonnormative genders and sexualities have certainly written poetry, but it is important to be careful when ascribing contemporary identitarian terminology to historical figures whose contextual understanding of their genders and sexual desires differed from contemporary language around gender and sexuality. Following Stonewall, the split between assimilationist groups and those who framed their political intervention as more radical began to shape up as a split between gay and lesbian or LGBT and the more anti-normative queer, but until the 1990s the term queer had yet to be reclaimed from its violent uses in any unified way. With this in mind, it is somewhat anachronistic to frame poets from 1945 to 1990 as “queer,” and it also raises the question of whether contemporary poets who identify more strongly as LGBT should be included under the queer umbrella. It is easy to think of examples that push against the linear historical trajectory I have just outlined, further complicating queer poetry as a category. For example, Allen Ginsberg (anti-normative poet extraordinaire and avowed homosexual) put his “queer shoulder to the wheel” in the poem “America” in 1956, long before both Stonewall and the 1990 pride march that took up queerness as a rallying cry (156). His use of the term was likely chosen not for its meaning as an identity category but rather for championing of the abject and marginalized (not to mention its shock value). Further, could we consider Ginsberg’s formexploding poetry queer regardless of the author’s sexual orientation? What is the difference, if any, between queer poets and queer poetry? What is the role of the reader in all of this? Can certain reading practices make a poem queer? It is important to note, in line with Sedgwick’s framing of queer as an “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning,” that queerness can be a category that exceeds the social and individual meaning of gender and sexuality entirely, especially as the experience of gender and sexuality intersect with other aspects of social location (such as race, class, and ability) that place folks within or outside of the cultural mainstream. A queer approach to identifying queer poetry, then, might be to “embrace the mess” that arises from the fundamental refusal of queerness to cohere (Ghaziani and Brim 13). Perhaps it is most useful when thinking about queer poetry after 1945 to also consider “queer” as a verb. To queer something usually indicates taking a position or approach that is askew of the common or normative approach. In addition to its identitarian, political, and topical representations, queerness can be located in approaches to language and form. Poetry after 1945 has played a central role in queering both language and form, whether or not the poet identifies with or writes about nonnormative gender or sexuality, bringing us back to Lorde’s framing of poetry as a fashioning of language that “does not yet exist.”

QUEER POETS AND POETRY AFTER 1945 What follows in this section is a sketch of poets after 1945 who stretched norms around gender and sexuality in their personal or in their poetic life, often both, as well as those who queered form and language. As soon as one attempts to stitch together a narrative of poetic queerness, it quickly collapses, multiplies, and fragments—epitomizing the “mess” of queerness. Though the 1950s and 1960s were decades distinctly hostile to sexual and gender outsiders, poetry became a home for many gay and lesbian poets, some of whom wrote explicitly about sexuality and many of whom

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avoided sexual references or embedded them obliquely in their verse. Elizabeth Bishop kept the romantic details of her private life close, but she had numerous women lovers in her lifetime and many readers find it easy to locate lesbian undertones in poems such as “Insomnia” and “Love Lies Sleeping.”3 Homosexuality and its associated camp affect was central to the New York School of poets, many of whom were gay, including John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. O’Hara was certainly less guarded about his gay identity than Bishop, writing poems and collections such as “Homosexuality” and Love Poems (Tentative Title) that overtly describe gay sex and romance. James Baldwin, perhaps most famous for taking on race and sexuality in his novels and essays, reflected on the conflict between desire and shame in “Conundrum (on my birthday) (for Rico),” when he asks “Or, is it true / that love is blind / until challenged by the drawbridge / of the mind?” (Baldwin 45–6). The Beat poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, William Burroughs, Bob Kaufman, and Jack Kerouac, celebrated fluid sexuality that bucked against heteronormative social codes, often taking an overtly anti-assimilationist stance and using sexuality to signal a liberated subcultural mindset. The racial and sexual boundary-breaking that characterized Beat culture meant that even poets who were not overtly gay, such as Bob Kaufman, can be read as creating queer content. Maria Damon reads Kaufman’s “Bagel Shop Jazz,” for instance, as a poem featuring interracial homosocial triangulation between the “Turtle-neck angel guys,” the “Coffee-faced Ivy Leaguers,” and the “Mulberry-eyed girls in black stockings” (Kaufman 14–15). The poem is overtly heterosexual with a strategic absence of the literal queerness that was undoubtedly present in North Beach bagel shops such as the one described in the poem. In fact, Damon argues that the “unspeakable, queerness, constitutes the scene’s hipness” in a reversal of the Beat appropriation of blackness as a marker of cool sexuality and subcultural resistance (Damon 148). Much Beat poetry was overtly queer, however. Ginsberg became a public figure representing freespirited, bohemian sexuality, and the obscenity trial following the publication of his poem “Howl” helped define US censorship laws. In Queer Beats, Regina Marler explains that the Beats’ “candid attitude toward sex and the body” ushered in a “revolution of the flesh as well as the word” (xvi). The “revolution of the word” certainly refers to the way Beat poets queered poetic form itself, with innovations such as Kerouac’s spontaneous, improvisational jazz aesthetic and Burroughs’ “cut up method.” Ginsberg’s poetic style was indebted to Walt Whitman’s ecstatic and embodied explosion of form and celebration of gay sexuality in Song of Myself roughly one hundred years earlier. In a description of his poetic approach, Ginsberg explained, “I thought I wouldn’t write a poem but just write what I wanted to without fear, let my imagination go, open secrecy, and scribble magic lines from my real mind” (Charters 61). Ginsberg’s famous disinhibition and storied marathon, drug-fueled writing sessions, belie the sometimes years-long percolation and intentional formal structure of poems such as “Howl.”4 The Beat poets not only queered social mores around sexuality and embodiment, but they also made a huge impact regarding the boundaries of publishable poetic content and on form itself.

See, e.g., Crystal Bacon’s “‘That World Inverted.’” Some of Bishop’s posthumously published poems, such as “Vague Poem” and “Morning Song,” are more overtly queer. See collections edited by Quinn and Giroux/Schwartz. 4 Michael Davidson explains that there is record of extensive note-taking, worksheets, and drafting of “Howl,” including “forty pages of worksheets for part II” alone (66). 3

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Following both the New York School and the Beats, the Language poets’ focus on the materiality of words themselves challenges the foundational assumption that words are signifiers of meaning, instead focusing on the musicality and weight of a poem’s form. Language poetry, whose inspiration stems in part from lesbian Modernist Gertrude Stein, is characterized by a “resistance to closure” which “infused meaning throughout the poem rather than knotting it into lyrical and dramatic epiphanies,” thereby revealing the “limits of a ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ concept of poetry” (Hoover xlv). By denaturalizing the concept of poetry and meaning, the Language poets queered form and content. Lyn Hejinian’s My Life disrupts both genre and form and confounds readers with paradox and contradiction, making it an example of queer poetry without a queer poet. Balancing careful formal construction with a chaos of meaning, Hejinian subverts reductive readings, and indeed makes any single reading impossible. Lines such as “Now, bid chaos welcome. It requires a committee, all translators. Undone is not done. And could be musical if I hate it” invite chaos, contradiction, and contingency (Hejinian 26). The refusal of closure in this work exemplifies Language poetry’s emphasis on the weight of words as object, like the image of “stone eggs” that appear and reappear throughout My Life. The insufficiency of language to convey memory and meaning, and the resistance to a single, individual interpretation (“It requires a committee”) reflects what Jack Halberstam calls the “queer art of failure.” Failing, Halberstam explains, “is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well” since their existence always stands outside of normative markers of success (3). By embracing, even staging interpretive failure, Language poetry not only reimagined the meaning of poetic form, but it also adopted a queer mode—dislocated from the poet’s gender or sexuality—that paradoxically locates creativity and possibility in the “murky waters” of interpretive chaos (Halberstam 2). The feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s brought with it a political treatment of gender and lesbian sexuality with poems such as Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” which describes the work (strapping on the “grave and awkward mask”) of difficult personal and social exploration (22). Audre Lorde’s intersectional intervention into the domination of feminist discourse by a white, middle-class, heterosexual worldview comes through in poetry addressing the convergence of sexism, racism, and classism. In poems such as “A Litany for Survival,” Lorde writes for “Those of us who live at the shoreline,” on the margins of mainstream culture but also at the margins of the Women’s Movement, with its frequently narrow vision of womanhood (255). In June Jordan’s “Poem about My Rights,” the autobiographical persona reflects on the connections between sexual violence, colonialism, and the various aspects of her identity that make her “wrong”: “The wrong sex the wrong age / the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the / wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic” (309). Feminist poetry with a queer awareness points not simply to marginalization from a compulsory gender binary, but to the multiplicity of ways people are experienced as “wrong” in relation to dominant cultural norms and ideals. Denaturalization and resistance to these structures of oppression in their complexity reflect an anti-normative queer approach. The poetry arising out of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s aligns with the early politicized uses of the term “queer,” and the trauma of HIV/AIDS drove queer creative production that attempted both to grapple with overwhelming losses and to protest violent cultural indifference. Essex Hemphill’s Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men was a groundbreaking collection that brought together a “diverse mixture of personal opinions, testimony, and

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experiences” of Black gay men in response to the crisis (xxx). The multi-generic anthology includes poetry by Hemphill himself as well as other central voices in Black queer poetics. In “Commitments” Hemphill explores the complexities of being closeted to family while performing the role of an ideal child: I am always there for critical emergencies, graduations, the middle of the night. (58) The speaker is always present at family functions, appears in photo documentation, but is never fully seen (“I am the invisible son”). The tension between presence and invisibility speaks not only to the culturally contingent meanings of the closet but also to the simultaneous hypervisibility and denial of the impact of HIV/AIDS on the Black queer community. Marlon Riggs’s poem “Tongues Untied,” which is included in Hemphill’s collection, describes the violence of labeling and social ostracization that come together at the intersection of sexuality, race, and location as well as the importance of giving voice to that which society has deemed shameful. The poem begins with the silencing labels, “Punk,” “Homo,” “Muthafuckin coon,” “Uncle Tom,” and traces the chronological path of the persona as he discovers his voice (Riggs 200–1). The poem concludes with a vision of liberation through voice: I was mute, tongue-tied, burdened by shadows and silence. Now I speak and my burden is lightened lifted free (Hemphill 205) The final lines speak to the importance of representation and visibility for Black gay men, but they also speak to the horrors of public silence regarding a crisis affecting a group of people deemed shameful and unworthy of care and attention. Contemporary queer and trans poets continue to explore the complexities of intersecting and shifting identities and social experiences in the face of post/neo-colonialism, racism, and trans antagonism. Ocean Vuong’s dreamy, lyrical poems treat the oppositional pull between loneliness and human connection by centering embodiment. Vuong explicitly identifies with queerness as personal identity and as a driving force behind creation. Queerness, he argues, “begins with permission to change … it invites innovation; it is larger than sexuality and gender; it is action” (Vuong, “Ocean”). Vuong’s poems are haunted by intergenerational trauma and violence blended with romance. In “Home Wrecker,” the characters escape familial violence and obtain a claustrophobic escape with “a fifth of vodka and an afternoon in the attic.” The two establish a tentative connection in spite of the forces outside that threaten them: “We covered our ears and your father’s tantrum turned / into heartbeats.” However, their escape quickly turns into its own kind of threat as the boys’ forbidden afternoon activities threaten to contain them in smaller and smaller enclosures (“When our lips touched the day closed / into a coffin”) juxtaposed with the mind-numbing expanse of the suburban normativity where there is “always another hour to kill.” In the twenty-first century, the turn to neoliberal individualism threatens queer youth with a new kind of closet, one that

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reduces queerness to the individual and interpersonal level and that frames queer embodiment as appropriate only when contained within the privacy of the domestic space. Vuong’s poetry illuminates the violence of this containment and the ongoing threats on queer subjects from both within the space of the home and from the colonial and white supremacist assumptions structuring what it means to be “normal.” Though gender-nonconforming poets have certainly existed throughout history, there is little overt evidence of transgender poets in the existing mainstream canon. In part, this is because the language we use today to describe trans identity (transgender, genderqueer, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, etc.) is a fairly recent development, and poets of the past who had more expansive gender identities described their experience in ways that might not be recognizable to contemporary readers. The lack of representation stemming from bias and oppression, however, continues to this day. In the introduction to the 2013 anthology, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, TC Tolbert and Tim Trace Peterson express frustration at the lack of existing collections of trans and genderqueer poetry as well as anxiety around questions of identity, language, and what exactly serves as criteria for collecting trans and genderqueer poetry without becoming “gender police” (10). Erasure stemming from racialized bias means that trans and queer poets of color lack representation in anthologies as well. In the recent collection Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, Christopher Soto echoes the frustrations and anxieties expressed in Troubling the Line. Soto hesitantly claims that Nepantla is the first major anthology to bring together a range of pivotal queer poets of color, revealing a significant absence of representation in the field. Soto also questions the very terms that guide the collection by reflecting on who “constitutes as people of color” under a colonial gaze and how the word “queer” both pulls together and flattens out the identities and experiences of the poets contained within (iii). These two recent anthologies exemplify both the challenges and the necessity of representing queer poetic voices even while the very terms of what constitutes queer poetry constantly shift and evolve, raising more questions than providing definitive answers.

QUEER READING Like the term queer itself, queer reading cannot be boiled down to a specific method or approach. Indeed, the notion of methodology is generally used in quantitative fields and may seem at odds with humanistic approaches to poetry. However, in Imagining Queer Methods, Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim explore the ways method itself can be queered by queer approaches that have historically disavowed the quantitative aspects of methodology. “Methods,” they argue “are queered when we use the tenets of queer theory to tweak or explode what is possible with our existing procedures” (Ghaziana and Brim 15). They outline four hallmarks of queer studies that can be used to approach analysis and epistemology and that might, too, guide readers of queer poetry as they attempt to “tweak or explode” strategies of interpretation and analysis. They include the following guidelines: reject unchanging categories, reject impermeable categories, reject dualisms, and reject interest group politics (Ghaziani and Brim 10–12).5

The hallmarks of queer theory come from Arlene Stein and Ken Plummer’s 1994 “ ‘I Can’t Even Think Straight’: ‘Queer’ Theory and the Missing Sexual Revolution in Sociology.” 5

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Many view categories such as gender and sexuality as natural and unchanging. However, queer approaches ask readers to question the notion of stable categorization. For example, Ghaziani and Brim explain that terms like “’heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ are not ahistorical (it is a fallacy to assert that sexuality is a biological expression exempt from historical forces) or transhistorical (it is equally misguided to believe that sexual meanings are stable across time)” (10). Identity categories such as homo/heterosexuality are certainly temporally, socially, and culturally contingent, but what about other kinds of supposedly unchanging categories? Queer readers of poetry might use this hallmark to reframe an attachment to the commonly taught poetic schools, those “unchanging categories” of a linear poetic history that potentially flatten out the complexities of poetry being produced at any one time and erase the voices of those outside of that mythical norm Lorde describes. Classifying poets into schools such as “Formalism,” “Black Mountain,” and “Confessionalism,” provides a useful taxonomy and guide to characterizing certain trends and influences, but it also risks providing a myopic focus that elides other possibilities for engaging with and analyzing the poems. For example, to what degree does the category of “New York School” encourage readers to focus on the poetic ties to abstract expressionism and use of irony and wit to the exclusion of considering the role of sexuality, gender, race, ability, and class? Identity categories themselves might seem impermeable, but through a queer and intersectional methodological approach, the ability to categorize poets based on any single aspect of identity crumbles. The label “Identity Poetics,” in which queer poetry might most squarely fall, includes poetry dealing with marginalization based on identity category. If readers approach the gay New York School poets such as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler exclusively through the lens of their sexual identities, however, it can potentially limit attention to the influence of place, race, and class on their poetic production. Ghaziani and Brim both uphold and poke holes in the apparently impermeable category of sexuality by framing it as a “sedimentary formation that balances diverse elements in a ‘thinly coherent’ fashion” (12). This formulation allows us to recognize that poetry arising out of and addressing social marginalization relies on categories that are the sedimentation of lifetimes of violence, alienation, and injustice. The experience of marginalized identity has very real, very material effects. Queer method asks readers to acknowledge this while at the same time recognizing that overreliance on any single identity category as a lens for poetic interpretation may be coherent but it is “thinly” so. A more robust approach both recognizes and expands reading through the lens of impermeable identity categories, recognizing the different valences of identities as they blend and shift over time and in various contexts. A resistance to binary thinking is central to queer reading, and poetry is a genre that exceeds and challenges the impulse to binary thinking by tweaking language into new shapes and meanings, pushing past denotation into a realm that spills over the edges of conventional signification. Poetry is often inherently queer in this way, since “queer worldmaking and livability require us to embrace multiplicity and pluralism, not binaries and dualisms” (Ghaziani and Brim 12). The following description of queer method might very well be describing the radical possibility of poetics: “Because existing categories imperfectly map onto many of our lived experiences, queer methods reject a close-fit assumption across categories, identities, attraction, arousal, and sexual behavior. Multiple categories, new categories, and continua are among a number of innovative possibilities that emerge from queer methods” (Ghaziani and Brim 12). While poets offer us new and multiple categories for considering the world around us and the language we use to describe it,

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it is the queer reader’s role to remain open to the multiplicity of interpretations and the way poems exceed categorization and resist the limits of binaries and dualisms. Finally, the admonition to “reject interest group politics” might seem irrelevant in regard to any poetry beyond that which was created specifically for political intervention and protest. The danger of investing in identity politics, however, is that it tends to obscure the complexities of power. Queer readers can intervene in this limitation by “tracing how power is unevenly distributed through, not just against, categories of minority genders and sexualities” (Ghaziani and Brim 12–13). In other words, power manifests not simply from a centralized source in a top-down manner, but power dynamics exist within and across oppressed identity categories as well. To return to Allen Ginsberg’s “America,” the status of the “queer” poetic persona certainly puts him in a subordinate social location in relation to the US government, but a queer reader might go beyond this overt single-identity-focused power dynamic to locate the places in which power is unevenly distributed within other, seemingly equally oppressed categories. How, for example, does Ginsberg’s social location influence the potential violence of exploiting race-as-metaphor in his poetry at a time when racial violence was rampant in Jim Crow-era America? How does his use of racial epithets (in “America,” “Howl,” and throughout his body of work) function to perpetuate uneven racialized power relations, even as he claims affinity with oppressed racial groups? In other words, queer reading against “interest group politics” is an approach that helps theorize power from various perspectives as we encounter poems that might seem to be determined by a single political stance. These four hallmarks construct a framework for queer reading that is characterized by rejection and reading against in order to “tweak or explode” normative approaches to poetic interpretation and analysis. However, the four hallmarks outlined above are certainly not the only approach to a queer reading practice. Indeed, a queer method dominated by rejection and reading against could very well be cast as defensive and paranoid in nature. In “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” from Touching Feeling, Sedgwick cautions against paranoid reading as a queer approach that anticipates and guards against “bad surprises” and readerly mistakes. As an anticipatory approach to reading dominated by negative affect, paranoia “requires that bad news be always already known” thereby leaving no room for alternate outcomes (Touching Feeling 130). Though queer epistemology has been dominated by such paranoid orientations, Sedgwick describes reparative reading as an alternate approach in which it is “realistic and necessary to experience surprise,” both good surprises and terrible ones, as well as hope (146). Further, reparative reading reframes the idea that mistakes are humiliating and instead allows for a curious approach that “makes the making of mistakes sexy, creative, even cognitively powerful” (Litvak quoted in Sedgwick 147). Rather than shutting down possible interpretations in a self-protective mode, reparative reading is “additive and accretive,” creating an interpretive practice that is plentiful in possibility and attuned “exquisitely to a heartbeat of contingency” (Touching Feeling 149, 147). How this reparative reading approach might look in relation to poetry is, of course, resistant to any simple directive, but it offers a queer method to reading poetry infused with an openness to multiple meanings, an attunement to hope and surprise, and a willingness to view mistakes as powerful rather than simply embarrassing. Jos Charles is an emerging trans poet whose 2018 book Feeld not only queers language but also offers an opportunity for readerly surprise, mistake, and contingency. Reminiscent of—but not entirely consistent with—Chaucerian Middle English, the language in Feeld takes turns lulling readers with a nostalgic, historical tone and then wrenching them into the present with words

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and allusions that are distinctly of the here-and-now. The language is consistent across individual chapters, with words such as “whord,” “whorld,” “organe,” and “hemorage” appearing throughout the book with the same phonetic spelling. It begins to feel like a predictable lexicography, one that often requires readers to take a childlike approach by slowly sounding out the words until their unrecognizable written form snaps into place as an aural recognition. Through the historical language and nascent reader positionality, we learn to read again. Charles disrupts this past-facing orientation with contemporary phrasing and references: “i was hote shitt / amonge the downd crop off mare / mye estrogen / the urin concentrat off pregnynt mares / gendre writ then wrot in the swalow / Thomas sayes trama lit is so hote rite nowe” (11). After laboring over the type of language that readers most likely last encountered in the hallowed halls of English classrooms, the surprising irreverence and flippancy of phrases such as “i was hote shitt” and the opportunistic advice that “trama lit is so hote rite nowe” feel particularly worldly. These lines also reference oral estrogen sourced from equine urine, reminding readers of the contemporary medical landscape and the knowledges that trans folks negotiate while navigating access to gender-affirming drugs and practices. Even with the very concrete reference to Googleable facts, the lines refuse to fully settle, as phrases such as “gendre writ then wrot” leave readers without certain interpretation (“Writ” could be “write,” “writ,” “right,” or “rite,” and “wrot” could be “wrote,” “rote,” “wrought,” or “rot”) and the sense that the meaning of any phrase is contingent upon the many choices the reader must make as they trip slowly through the linguistic landscape. B. K. Fisher points to the multiple meanings evoked by the title of Charles’s book alone, providing readers with no “correct” reading but an accumulation of possibilities. She explains, “I hear in the word feeld not only ‘field’ but an alternative past tense of ‘to feel,’ as if, as the linguists say, it were a weak verb not a strong one—a deliberate skewing toward the soft” (“Synthetic”). The over- and in-determinacy of language in the title of the book is exponentially heightened by the fact that every word in every poem has a similar effect, creating an almost infinite number of readings that accumulate to produce a sense of dizzying excess. The linguistic opening up of meaning creates a distinct possibility of mistake. Fisher notes that the “orthographical queering means that the reader is assured only of getting much of it wrong—is it moth or mother, manor or manner, either or ether? feeld’s insistent both/and polysemy is understandably most fraught surrounding gendered labels for identity, and variations on the terms ‘grl,’ ‘boye,’ ‘husbande,’ and ‘wymon’ appear in many contexts.” The forced encounter with certain error means that readers are asked to get used to making mistakes, to reflect on the slipperiness of language in relation to gender and embodiment, and to be open to the accretion of meaning in which all interpretations exist simultaneously. José Esteban Muñoz describes queer reading that circulates around ephemera and gesture, an approach, like Sedgwick’s reparative reading, particularly suited to poetry. He writes in Cruising Utopia, that one way to “read queerness” is by “suturing it to the concept of ephemera. Think of ephemera as trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumor” (65). The queer trace in a poem might be a thing that is left hanging in the air because at one point in time explicit queerness could destroy lives, or at the very least, careers. This reading, however, risks returning to the metaphor of the closet, something that Muñoz cautions against. Rather than reading for traces of queerness in poems as “frightened and furtive little signs,” he suggests reading with queerness as an expectation (Muñoz 72). This attention to subtle queer gesture “challenges the reader to approach the poet with a different optic, one that is attuned to the ways in which,

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through small gestures, particular intonations, and other ephemeral traces, queer energies and lives are laid bare” (Muñoz 72). Muñoz practices this attention to queer ephemera in a reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art.” Bishop is a canonical American poet who, in Cold War Era United States, did indeed occupy a “precarious social position as a closeted lesbian in an increasingly homophobic time” (Axelrod 844). Muñoz attends to the use of parenthetical remarks in the final stanza of the poem as queer gestures that “connote a different register than the majority of the poem” and “communicate a queer trace” (71). The poem outlines a series of losses with an acceptance of the transience of things seemingly intent to go missing. The queer register inserts itself through the parenthetical additions of the final stanza: Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. (178) Muñoz interprets “(the joking voice, a gesture / I love)” as a possible reference to Bishop’s lover, Lota de Macedo Soares who died by suicide, making the parenthetical phrase an ephemeral trace of “queer content, queer memory, a certain residue of lesbian love” (72). The command “(Write it!)” functions as an imperative to document the loss and to accept it as queer becoming, for to “accept loss is to accept the way in which one’s queerness will always render one lost to a world of heterosexual imperatives, codes, and laws” (Muñoz 72–3). In “Elizabeth Bishop and Containment Policy,” Steven Gould Axelrod demonstrates an analytic attention to queer gesture by reframing Bishop’s “relatively innocuous” poems as, not closeted per se, but as ephemeral evidence of both Bishop’s queer sexuality and her political resistance (858).6 He points to a split between Bishop’s personal avoidance of charged political topics such as war, race, and sexuality and her treatment of those topics in her poetry using “an alternative language practice” in conversation with Cold War political discourse (Axelrod 850). While many scholars read Bishop’s lesbian subtext as a simple expression of her closeted sexuality, Axelrod reads a series of ten poems in the 1955 collection, A Cold Spring, as evocative of “lesbian experience and perspective,” pointing to her adept play with simultaneous exposure and concealment as an intentional subversion of the “ethos of compulsory heterosexuality and the Cold War rhetoric in which it was implicated” (858). The historical and political circumstances in which so much queer poetry has been crafted means that queerness often appears in poetry through residue, ephemeral trace, and absence. Following Muñoz’s call to read with an expectation of queerness and an attention to the subtleties of gesture is a queer reading approach that can open up poetry to nuance and complexity beyond the over simplified discourse of the closet. Queer poetry after 1945 is an impossible category, but one that does ultimately “thinly cohere” as identity, as content, and as practice. The messiness of the term “queer,” however, is also its agency and its usefulness. It reflects the nature of poetry itself as messy, expansive, shifting, and prone to redefinition, regression, accretion, and innovation. In this way, perhaps the very distinction between poetry and queerness collapses on itself. Queerness, like poetry, is not a luxury in that it

6

It is notable that Axelrod’s reading of Bishop predates Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia by six years.

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gives poets and readers alike new ways of feeling, communicating, resisting, and world-building. The poets and movements outlined in this chapter are certainly an incomplete sketch of the queer and LGBT poets and poetics that have existed since 1945, and as we turn our gaze toward the future the notion of queerness itself will likely shift and slip from our grasp, making a new “bridge across our fears of what has never been before” (Lorde, Sister 38).

WORKS CITED Aizura, Aren Z. Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment. Duke University Press, 2018. Axelrod, Steven Gould. “Elizabeth Bishop and Containment Policy.” American Literature, vol. 75, no. 4 (December 2003), pp. 843–67. Bacon, Crystal. “‘That World Inverted’: Encoded Lesbian Identity in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Insomnia’ and ‘Love Lies Sleeping.’” In Worcester, Massachusetts: Essays on Elizabeth Bishop, from the 1997 Elizabeth Bishop Conference at WPI, ed. Laura Jehn Menides and Angela G. Dorenkamp, Peter Lang, 1999, pp. 139–48. Baldwin, James, and Nikky Finney. Jimmy’s Blues: And Other Poems. Beacon Press, 2014. Bishop, Elizabeth. Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, ed. Alice Quinn. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Bishop, Elizabeth. Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz. Library of America, 2008. Bronski, Michael. A Queer History of the United States. Beacon Press, 2011. Charles, Jos. Feeld. Milkweed Editions, 2018. Charters, Ann, ed. The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books, 1992. Damon, Maria. “Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” College Literature, vol. 27, no. 1 (2000), pp. 139–57. Davidson, Michael. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century. Cambridge University Press, 1991. Fisher, B. K. “Synthetic Economies.” Kenyon Review, https://kenyo​nrev​iew.org/revi​ews/feeld-by-jos-char​les-738​ 439/. Accessed January 24, 2020. Ghaziani, Amin, and Matt Brim, eds. Imagining Queer Methods. New York University Press, 2019. Ginsberg, Allen. “America.” Collected Poems, 1947–1980, HarperCollins, 2006. Gwynn, R. S., and April Lindner, eds. Contemporary American Poetry: A Pocket Anthology. Pearson/ Longman, 2005. Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011. Hejinian, Lyn. My Life. Green Integer, 2002. Hemphill, Essex, ed. Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. Alyson, 1991. Hoover, Paul, ed. Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, 2nd ed. W. W. Norton, 2013. Jordan, June, and Jan Heller Levi, eds. Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan. Copper Canyon Press, 2007. Kaufman, Bob. Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. New Directions, 1998. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Random House, 2007. Lorde, Audre. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. Norton, 2000. Love, Heather. “Queer.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 1, nos. 1–2 (May 2014), pp. 172–6. Marler, Regina, ed. Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex. Cleis Press, 2004. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press, 2009. Rich, Adrienne. Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971/1972. W. W. Norton, 2013. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Routledge, 1994.

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Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, 2003. Soto, Christopher, ed. Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color. Nightboat Books, 2018. Stein, Arlene, and Ken Plummer. “‘I Can’t Even Think Straight’: ‘Queer’ Theory and the Missing Sexual Revolution in Sociology.” Sociological Theory, vol. 12, no. 2 (1994), pp. 178–87. Stryker, Susan. Transgender History. Seal Press, 2008. Trace Peterson, Tim, and TC Tolbert, eds. Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Nightboat Books, 2013. Vuong, Ocean. “Home Wrecker.” Linebreak, https://linebr​eak.org/poems/home-wrec​ker/. Accessed January 28, 2020. Vuong, Ocean. “Ocean Vuong: Poetry, Bodies, and Stillness: Alexandra Barylski Interviews Ocean Vuong.” Marginalia: Los Angeles Review of Books, December 21, 2018, http://mar​gina​lia.lare​view​ofbo​oks.org/ ocean-vuong-poe​try-bod​ies-and-stilln​ess/. Accessed November 20, 2019. Warner, Michael. “Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet.” Social Text, vol. 29 (1991), pp. 3–17.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

From Shingled Hippo to Gay Unicorn: Self-Othering in Bob Kaufman and Other Beats CRAIG SVONKIN

In Bob Kaufman’s poem “I Have Folded My Sorrows,” from his 1965 collection Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, Kaufman offers a metaphor for self-othering: “And in the imaginary forest, the shingled hippo becomes the gay unicorn” (3). A hippo in its gray, plodding weight isn’t typically considered the most lithe or nimble of creatures, and a shingled hippo is even more constrained. But a unicorn, especially a gay one? Kaufman’s desire for escape from a fixed, singular identity is made even clearer in the poem’s later line, “And yes, I have at times wished myself something different.” Kaufman thus attempts to queer identity, poetically sloughing off a fixed, given, unitary identity to make room for a heterogeneous, nonconformist, protean, poetic identity, or identities. The Beats have sometimes been read as white, masculinist appropriators of subaltern identities, desiring markers of difference as an escape from a postwar America found to be soulless and crippling in its conformity. Indeed, many white American writers of the mid-century, including both Beat and confessional poets, experienced mainstream white culture as claustrophobic or lacking, and imagined other, disempowered cultures and traditions to be free and open. As Steven Gould Axelrod explains, “Poets of midcentury exposed a world of sensual drift, in which deviance was no longer foreclosed and borders no longer maintained” (“Between Modernism” 3). Robert Holton writes that the Beats “explore, adapt, and establish collective heterogeneous spaces based on the examples of marginalized groups whose exclusion seemed to guarantee their immunity from the privileges and perils of mainstream modernity” (11–12). And there is a good deal of truth in that analysis, especially if we center the Beats around Jack Kerouac and On the Road. But if we re-center the Beats around a different set of poets, an even richer sense of Beat culture and poetics emerges. Let’s locate the Beat movement in such poets as the Black, Jewish, Buddhist, and surrealist Bob Kaufman; the Black trumpeter, painter, poet, and surrealist Ted Joans; the Buddhist, bisexual, politically radical Diane di Prima; and the celebrated but nonetheless marginal, gay, Jewish, Buddhist Allen Ginsberg. Then we’ll see that many of the Beats were outsiders to begin with, and that they sought additional identities as a way of rejecting any coercively unified, simplistic identity imposed on them by the dominant class. When a privileged white, male, heterosexual author adopts an alternative ethnic identity, we might call that appropriation or “margin envy” (Axelrod, “Sensual

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Drift” 28).1 But what do we call it when a Black Catholic man adopts a Jewish or surrealist identity or proclaims jazz to be his religion? Or when a Catholic, Italian American woman becomes a Buddhist Beat poet? Or when a gay Jew becomes a Buddhist seeker? And the more you dig, the more you discover additional Beat writers who refashioned themselves through a deliberate process of self-othering or subjective multiplication. In On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s alter ego, Sal Paradise, expresses his desire to be Black or Mexican or Japanese as a function of his dissatisfaction with his white, middle-class, spirituallydeficient American life: At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. … I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a “white man” disillusioned. (148–9) For a while Sal plays a romantic game of self-othering with Terry, a beautiful, small Mexican American woman from a family of migrant workers picking cotton in central California. The college student Sal pretends for a time to be one of the beatific downtrodden; he is surrounded by “Okies,” “Mexicans,” and “Negroes.” He eats grapes, lives in a tent, and sleeps with the beautiful Terry, whose body he describes as “brown as grapes” (71–81). Kerouac writes passages that romanticize otherness and the difficult life of migrant laborers and former slaves, as if Sal were living out a scene from a Southern-mythologizing, cringe-inducing variation of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: We bent down and began to pick cotton. It was beautiful. … There was an old Negro couple in the field with us. They picked cotton with the same God-blessed patience their grandfathers had practiced in ante-bellum Alabama; they moved right along their rows, bent and blue, and their bags increased. My back began to ache. But it was beautiful kneeling and hiding in that earth. (Kerouac 81) After a single day of hard work, Sal is described as sighing “like an old Negro cotton-picker” (82). For Sal, and arguably for Kerouac, this experience of crossing class and ethnic boundaries is a transpiritual, wish-fulfillment myth, a form of what Maria Damon calls “romantic Negrophilia” (Introduction 105), based on Steinbeck and old movies and stories about the purity and spirituality of the downtrodden. Jason Spangler offers the important insight that “Kerouac’s picaresque tale of mid-century fellahin hipsterdom serves … as a repository for the deep misgivings about America that the Depression sowed in the populace” (308). Spangler further asserts that “tropes of the hobo-tramp, the road, and the American Dream” are “lasting and powerful concepts in twentieth century life” (308). While Spangler views Kerouac’s stance toward The Grapes of Wrath as referential rather than nostalgic, I would argue that Kerouac’s attitude toward Blacks, Mexicans, Okies, and other Steinbeckian subalterns is founded on a problematic variant of nostalgia. As For more about margin envy, coined by Steven Gould Axelrod in “Alienation and Renewal in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar,” see his “Between Modernism and Postmodernism: The Cold War Poetics of Bishop, Lowell, and Ginsberg” and “Sensual Drift and Ethnic Longing in Robert Lowell.” For discussions of self-othering and margin envy, see also my “From Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart: Becoming the Other; Suiciding the White Male ‘Self ’ ” and “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg’s Spiritual Self-Othering.” Also relevant is the concept of “strategic anti-essentialism,” first proposed by George Lipsitz and discussed by Richard Hishmeh in this volume (pp. 383–7). 1

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Jeffrey Gray stated at the 2006 ASA conference, “The Other is always seen as more spiritualized than the self.” Kerouac’s practice of self-othering, as troubling and condescending as it may be, is nonetheless indicative of a trend in transpiritual self-othering that was wide-spread in the 1950s and 1960s. Kerouac provides us with an even more overt example of his transpiritual self-othering a bit later in the novel, when Sal, hearing that Okies are beating up Mexicans, speaks of himself as a Mexican: “From then on I carried a big stick with me in the tent in case they got the idea we Mexicans were fouling up their trailer camp. They thought I was a Mexican, of course; and in a way I am” (82). Sal’s comment—“and in a way I am”—indicates the tendency of the dominant social class to practice a form of transpiritual self-othering based on the view of the ethnic subordinate as somehow purer and more spiritual than the class in power. The Beat interest in Eastern spiritual practices, especially when limited to semi-informed dabbling, might likewise reveal only a shallow desire to play Buddhist for a day. This type of self-othering is a self-deceptive identity play performed by a privileged subject. But should we consider self-othering practices to be the same when performed by a poet who began life marginalized, or when the self-othering requires sacrifice and leads to enduring subjective change? American identities in general, and American spiritual identities specifically, were generally viewed as more fixed than fluid in the 1950s. However, American spiritualities have always been more complex and syncretic than is at first apparent. As Harold Bloom stated, “the American Religion was syncretic, from the start” (31). Even in the relatively straight-laced 1950s, more and more Americans were becoming interested in “Eastern” tropes and alternative spiritualities. These interests, there in the American culture since Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman, began to accelerate after the end of the Second World War. It is certain, whatever the roots of the trend, that the Beat writers of the 1950s were at the forefront of a movement of transpiritual self-othering that would continue to grow in the years to come. Transpiritual self-othering, for the Beats, was often focused on abandoning the writer’s endowed “Western” or monotheistic religion in favor of an “Eastern” or polytheistic religious practice, or often involved creating a syncretic new mix of the old and the new. As Hettie Jones explained in a “Women of the Beat Generation” panel at the November 2, 1996 San Francisco Book Festival, “Buddhism was very attractive to those of us who were disaffected with the organized religion we were brought up in,” especially given the perceived moral culpability of mainstream American monotheistic religions in the Cold War nuclear brinkmanship of the time (quoted in Charters 631). Erik Mortenson, in his essay “Keeping Vision Alive: The Buddhist Stillpoint in the Work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg,” offers a thoughtful explanation of Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s common but ultimately divergent sorts of Buddhist practice. Mortenson argues that Zen Buddhism, with its seeming rejection of stiff, capitalist American values, appealed to Ginsberg, Kerouac, and other Beats as “a breath of fresh air in a stultifying 1950s society” (127). Perhaps even more importantly, Buddhism promised the Beat poets “a completely new relationship to their own selves,” a relationship involving a rejection of their “smaller, more ego-driven selves in exchange for a conception of the self that expands their connection to the universe” (Mortenson 127, 128). Mortenson ultimately concludes that where Ginsberg achieved an authentic and productive, embodied practice of Buddhist meditation, Kerouac’s inability to sit still and be in his own body while meditating kept him from fully embodying Zen Buddhist practices: “Kerouac typically employs Buddhism as a means of avoidance, while Ginsberg … utilizes the Buddhist stillpoint to harness his visionary experience” (125).

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The Beats’ multiplying, expanding poetic selves may have emanated from their interest in Buddhism and other Eastern religions. Bob Kaufman’s self-fashioned Jewish-Buddhist-Black-Beat identity, Ted Joans’s Jazz religion and “Afrodisia,” Diane di Prima’s move toward a politically radical, Buddhist and bohemian identity, and Allen Ginsberg’s self-created Jewish-Buddhist identity offer examples of David L. Miller’s concept of “the New Polytheism.” In The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, Miller argues that the “multiple patterns of polytheism allow room to move meaningfully through a pluralistic universe. They free one to affirm the radical plurality of the self ” (ix). Kaufman’s, Joans’s, di Prima’s, and Ginsberg’s complication of their given monotheistic religious identity (Christian or Jewish) via Buddhism—with its polytheism and lack of connection to America’s history of racism, sexism, and homophobia—could thus be described as each poet’s attempt to move from Western spiritual limitation to a new/ancient, non-Western spiritual freedom. Perhaps the quartet of poets I am arguing we might use to rethink our concept of the Beats— Bob Kaufman, Ted Joans, Diane di Prima, and Allen Ginsberg—thus practiced transpiritual and poetic self-othering not as margin envy, but as a form of poetic self-protection and self-expansion. Kaufman serves as a particularly revealing exemplar of how this process worked. The rest of this essay will therefore focus on the nuances of his particular identity formation and voicing. Maria Damon argues that many of Kaufman’s poems “express acute dissociation and/or an intense desire to live beyond oneself ” (Introduction 107). And who can blame him for wanting to be more—poetically and personally—than what the oppressive, racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, and homophobic culture of 1950s America would allow. Mark A. Reid, in his Postnegritude Visual and Literary Culture, offers an explanation for Kaufman’s identity fragmentation and cultural appropriation that I believe could be adapted and applied to Joans, di Prima, and Ginsberg as well: “The fragmentation of monolithic forms of Negritude results in an inclusive form of Negritude. This form embraces marginal identities that blacks may share with nonblacks. I call this inclusive form of black subjectivity ‘postNegritude’ ” (53). If Black stereotypes were experienced as limiting and soul-killing by Kaufman, then perhaps Italian American and Jewish stereotypes, and traditional gender expectations, were experienced as deleterious by others. Each poet’s move to change or expand their religious, racial, and gender identifications, and each poet’s acquisition of an increasingly international poetic and political identity, may be read as an effort to escape univocal and limiting identities. These efforts reflect a mid-century faith in the power of the individual to disentangle themselves, at least somewhat, from the limitations of Enlightenment individualization, as Michel Foucault explains in “The Subject and Power.” Michel Foucault contends that with the Enlightenment came a certain kind of crushing “individualization which is linked to the state” (“The Subject and Power” 785). He further argues that we “have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries” (785). Given his wariness concerning the Enlightenment concept of an authentic, free, rational self, it isn’t surprising that Foucault began in his late writings to express an alternative concept: “the care of the self.” In “What is Enlightenment?” influenced by Baudelaire, Foucault asserts that modern man is an aesthetic dandy who “makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art” (Ethics 312). For Baudelaire’s modern man there is no deep, hidden self to discover; rather, the modern man “tries to invent himself ” and is compelled “to face the task of producing himself ” (Ethics 312). In a series of 1983 discussions with Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus, Foucault asks the question, “But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?” (Foucault Reader 350). When asked in these interviews

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how this concept of self-fashioning differs from Sartrean existentialism, Foucault responds so as to embrace what he views as Sartre’s concept of self-fashioning while rejecting what he sees as Sartre’s eventual reinscription of the logos of “authenticity”: Sartre avoids the idea of the self as something which is given to us, but through the notion of authenticity, he turns back to the idea that we have to be ourselves—to be truly our true self. I think that the only acceptable practical consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of creativity—and not of authenticity. From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art. (Foucault Reader 351) Born in 1925, Bob Kaufman grew up in the relatively, at least for the Jim Crow South, multicultural, multilingual, diverse culture of New Orleans. At eighteen he signed up as a merchant marine, sailing the world before being blackballed for communist leanings or drug use, or both. His world travels as a merchant marine, his travel to Mexico, his life in the most cosmopolitan of American cities, New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco, and his encounter with the self-othering Beats, in addition to the traumatic incentive of the toxic racism of America in the 1950s, enabled or encouraged Kaufman to attempt to move beyond the common racialist identity essentialisms of his day. While race undoubtedly continued to mark and limit the life and identity of Bob Kaufman, as his poetic references to jail and the police demonstrate, in his poetry he adopted fluid, hybridized, queer, transformative spiritual tropes and identities. One way that Kaufman did so was through his recreation of himself as a Jewish, Surrealist, Black, Buddhist, Beat poet. Kaufman told Neeli Cherkovski, “I’m Black, Jewish, white, green, and yellow with a blue man inside me struggling to come out” (108). His desire to escape his given, fixed identity can likewise be seen in his answer to Raymond Foye’s question, “Are you Bob Kaufman?” with the reply, “Sometimes” (quoted in Foye, “Rain Unraveled Tales” 216). I believe that Kaufman’s poetic, spiritual syncretism and cultural, aesthetic multeity indicates the complex nature of his self-perceived identity, but also reveals a desire or anxiety at work. If identity is “given” or “endowed” by essentialist markers like race, class, and gender, for Bob Kaufman identity also emanated out of desire—the desire to be free and changeable—and out of anxiety—anxiety concerning the real cultural and aesthetic limitations of being Black in 1950s America. In order to cope, Kaufman created an identity based as much on desire as on endowment, successfully self-mythologizing his background and history, exaggerating his ties to Jewishness by turning his mixed-race, partly Jewish but practicing Catholic Black father and his well-educated and well-connected Black Catholic schoolteacher mother into something else, something more exotic, constructed, complicated: a “German Orthodox Jewish father and Martiniquan Roman Catholic voodoo mother” (Damon, Dark End 33). Although Maria Damon dispels the myths Kaufman told about himself—that his father was Jewish and that he was raised in Judaism, Catholicism, and Voodoo—the stories continue to spread, probably due to their beautiful strangeness and mystery, as well as an emotional or spiritual truth they reveal despite their factual mythologizing. Kaufman’s friend, sometime roommate, and elegist, Neeli Cherkovski, writes in Whitman’s Wild Children that Bob Kaufman was “the son of a Creole mother from Martinique and an Orthodox Jewish father” (109); Kaufman told Cherkovski that “we were Jewish and Catholic,” and that “sometimes we went to the synagogue” (119).

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Maria Damon persuasively debunked this myth of Kaufman’s Jewish father and voodoo-practicing mother by interviewing Kaufman’s siblings, including his brother George, who confirmed that rather than their father being Jewish, it was their paternal grandfather who was partly Jewish, and their mother came from a respected Black New Orleans family, not a voodoo priestess lineage (Damon 33). Why would the Black Catholic Kaufman attempt to mythologize his past, refashioning himself into a child of Jewish, Catholic, and voodoo descent? Damon, who proved that the Kaufmans “could not be said to be Jewish in any meaningful sense” (33), argues that Kaufman may have refashioned his identity in a more radically intersectional direction out of a psychological need to maintain his difference during a claustrophobic period when political difference was being crushed in the United States. Thus, Kaufman’s successful reinvention of himself as a “half-Black, half-Jewish Beat poet with an Orthodox Jewish and ‘voodoo’ upbringing” may have been “a brilliant move of spiritual survival” (Damon, “Bob Kaufman” 63). Foregrounding, likely exaggerating, his Jewishness, and bringing other subaltern identities into his personal identity narrative, may also have been Bob Kaufman’s way of sidestepping the damaging Black and White racial binary of the mid-century, a binary that left no room for what he and many others must have experienced as an authentic, complicated, self-fashioned identity. Kaufman’s poetic emphasis of his Jewishness might also have been his way of expressing and coping with his alienated psychological state. Using Jewishness as a metaphor for alienation was a common practice in this era, as Hilene Flanzbaum makes clear in “The Imaginary Jew and the American Poet.” Flanzbaum, writing of John Berryman specifically, but of American poets of the mid-century more generally, asserts that by “discovering Jewishness,” or symbolically adopting Jewishness, the poet “finds a handy trope for imagining the suffering and marginalization he feels in America” (19). Flanzbaum could just as easily be discussing Bob Kaufman’s appropriation of Jewishness here. Kaufman’s Jewish self-othering can thus be read as a refashioning of identity founded in desire. Kaufman described himself as “the poet of the Bagel Shop” (Cherkovski 117), a reference to the important San Francisco Beat coffeehouse and hangout, but also, given its name, to a half created Jewish lineage with Allen Ginsberg written in. Jewish imagery is common in Kaufman’s poetry. And while his life with Jews in New York and San Francisco, plus his vivid Jewish family embellishments and identity desires, could explain much of this imagery, I think there is a greater Jewish family romance taking place for Kaufman, one with brother or uncle Allen at its imaginative center. In his poem “Ginsberg (for Allen),” Kaufman writes a love poem of sorts to his Jewish Beat friend, who he transforms into a brother, lover, or surreal saint: “Allen passed through that Black Hole of Calcutta behind my eyes; / … / Why I love him, though, is equatorially sound: / I love him because his eyes leak” (Collected Poems 18). In grafting Allen Ginsberg into his family tree, Kaufman creates a more intricate and nuanced lineage and identity for himself, bringing along with Allen one Gertrude Stein, a beloved, lesbian Jewish great aunt: “I have proof that [Allen] was Gertrude Stein’s medicine chest” (Collected Poems 17). Kaufman adopts Ginsberg as his Jewish poetic brother, and in so doing he borrows from Ginsberg an absurdist Jewish humor that folds two parts Groucho and Chico Marx into a batter of Lenny Bruce, Borscht Belt comedians, Chitlin’ Circuit comics, jazz musicians, European surrealism, and Buddhist or Taoist paradox. As I pointed out about Ginsberg’s use of Jewish humor and the Marx Brothers elsewhere, “A spectre of Marx, Groucho Marx that is, and of the Yiddish comedic figures who influenced the Marx Brothers, […] floated over Allen Ginsberg” (“Manishevitz and Sake” 176). We can see Ginsberg’s use of Jewish humor, in turns nonsensical,

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anarchic, and political, in poems like “America,” where he arguably plays both roles in a dialogue with America—Jewish mother and Jewish son. Using Jewish comedy to carry his political message, Ginsberg’s speaker talks to “America” at times as if he were a lower-middle class, stereotypical Jewish mother speaking in guilt-inducing tones to her wayward son—“America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing”—or, conversely, as a Jewish child talking back to overly controlling Jewish Mama America— “America stop pushing I know what I’m doing”: America when will you send your eggs to India? I’m sick of your insane demands. When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? … America its them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians. (154–5) “Benediction” demonstrates Ginsberg’s poetic influence on Kaufman. As with Ginsberg’s “America,” Kaufman’s “Benediction” involves a speaker engaging with a personified America; and like Ginsberg, Kaufman mixes comedy with angry political satire—the results being two darkly humorous critiques of American imperialism, racism, and cultural decay. Kaufman refigures Moses as a Black man and the American South as Egypt: “Pale brown Moses went down to Egypt land / To let somebody’s people go. / Keep him out of Florida, no UN there” (Solitudes 9). Just as Ginsberg shocks and mocks in “America,” so too does Kaufman in “Benediction”; Kaufman has no faith in the ability of a “brown Moses,” perhaps a reference to Martin Luther King, Jr., to let his people, or anyone’s people, go from the Jim Crow South. Without observers from an international group like the United Nations present, Kaufman isn’t very confident that America will ever stop oppressing Black Americans, at least as long as it has “real estate,” “cars, televisions,” and “mushrooming visions” to distract itself. Then, in a Black-Jewish-Ironic Jeremiad, Kaufman lists the many sins that he supposedly forgives American for, such as nailing Black Jesus to a cross, and “eating black children” (Solitudes 9). Kaufman’s Jeremiad against the horrors of Jim Crow and lynching ends with America depicted as a zombie nation: “You must have been great / Alive” (Solitudes 9). The comic undercutting of the apparent compliment with that last word on its own final line—“Alive”—is reminiscent of the childish “not jokes” popular in the 1980s. But instead of being used to insult an office friend, here the joke is used for more serious business. Alicia Ostriker describes Ginsberg’s use of Jewish, Yiddish linguistic play as a schpritzing “shamelessly alongside Henny Youngman and Lenny Bruce” and use of “a low dialect opposed to the literary diction promoted by his one-time mentor Lionel Trilling” as part of a “tribute to his Yiddish-speaking ancestors and the obscure longevity of their gift for juicy emotional tragicomedy” (Ostriker 28). But what is perhaps a bit more surprising is Bob Kaufman’s similar use of Jewish humor and linguistic play in his own poetry, a use that connects him to Allen Ginsberg, to Lenny Bruce, the transgressive 1950s Jewish stand-up comic who was influenced by the Beats, jazz musicians, and black culture, to Jewish stand-up comics in general, and to Gertrude Stein. Given Ginsberg’s and Bruce’s mutual indebtedness to Black jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker and to Black comedians such as Redd Foxx, Kaufman’s allusions to Jewish as well as to Black culture should come as no surprise. Kaufman’s crafting of a more Jewish poetic and familial lineage than he was necessarily endowed with seems akin to Robert Lowell’s psycho-poetic self-fashioning in “91 Revere Street,” Lowell’s

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prose memoir from Life Studies (1959), where he emphasizes a forgotten Jewish ancestor, Mordecai Myers, thereby adopting a subaltern predecessor and performing a psychic “suicide” of his given white, patrician self (Svonkin 102–3). But where Lowell emphasizes a Jewish ancestor so as to decenter from his patrician white lineage that he experiences as painful, Kaufman always highlights his Blackness, even while also emphasizing his Jewish poetic and familial roots. Another way that Bob Kaufman explores Jewish tropes in his poetry is via images of the Holocaust. In “Sullen Bakeries of Total Recall,” for example, Kaufman explores the horrors of the Shoah, using Holocaust imagery to explore his own psychic alienation: Sometimes I feel the ones who escaped the ovens where Germans shall forever cook their spiritual meals are leaning against my eyes. (Solitudes 42) Kaufman’s use of the Holocaust to deal with his own psychic state, something Hilene Flanzbaum’s The Americanization of the Holocaust could help us to theorize, becomes even clearer in “Sullen Bakeries of Total Recall” when Kaufman writes, “The bony oboe doorway beyond the burning nose translates me into Hebrew” (Solitudes 42). This sentence surrealistically argues that Kaufman’s own oppression as a Black man and general state of alienation or strangeness “translates” him into a metaphoric Jew. Kaufman ends the poem with an image of linked Jewishness and suicide, and with the promise that he will join a rabbi sitting across from him in suicide. This rabbi is also a firm believer in suicide. He wanted to be an actor on Second Avenue and eat dinner across from the theater and be insecure and marry an Adler and talk about Peretz and Aleichem and Secunda. … He is holy and eats very little and reads like a scholar and wants to kill himself. I refuse to tell him the time. If necessary, I will write the script and we will go together. (Solitudes 43) For Kaufman, as perhaps for Ginsberg, blurring their endowed identities may have come out of both a perception of cultural affinity and a sense, in the post-Holocaust era, of a common Jewish-Black history of oppression, rejection, and stigmatization. Is it any wonder, then, that as Kaufman performed Jewishness and Ginsberg Blackness, Lenny Bruce argued in an anti-essentialist manner that some Jews were goyish (gentile) and some Blacks were Jewish: “Now I neologize Jewish and goyish. Dig: I’m Jewish. Count Basie’s Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor’s goyish” (Dauber 38). If Lenny Bruce had met Bob Kaufman, he likely would have felt a kinship, for, as Jon Stratton explains, Bruce (like Kaufman, and, to a lesser extent Ginsberg) practiced a rebellious “Yiddish lack of civility as a tactic” to discuss taboo subjects, like “race, drugs and sex,” and to criticize “Anglo-American civility” as fundamentally “deceitful and self-serving” (298). Bob Kaufman also employs Jewish tropes in his surrealist prose poem/ faux-screenplay, “The Enormous Gas Bill at the Dwarf Factory. A Horror Movie to Be Shot with Eyes.” Specifically, he uses images of the Holocaust and pogroms to explore the history of American genocides against Native Americans and African Americans, and his own place in that history. Kaufman writes, “VISIONS OF MILLIONS OF GENOCIDED RED CRAZY HORSE PEOPLE, DEAD IN THE MAKESHIFT GAS CHAMBERS OF SUPPRESSED HISTORY” (Cranial Guitar 38–9), using “gas chambers” as a metaphor for the genocide of millions of Others in the history of the United States, and for the further metaphorical “genocide” involved in suppressing the history of those sins. Later, Kaufman writes of the death of “the last Buffalo in Nebraska” who is “dying of onesomeness, strange disease brought by the new mirror people with no sky in their faces” (Cranial Guitar 39). The poem concludes: “The eternal chorale of the breeze sings the litany of the red Phoenix … the falling waters

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chant of nations of woe, the horror song cycle … desperate retellings of the thin-lipped Nebraska pogroms” (40). Kaufman’s phrase “Nebraska pogroms” conflates the genocidal treatment of Native Americans with anti-Jewish massacres, whereas “the red Phoenix” juxtaposes the violent bloodshed experienced by Native Americans (as well as Blacks and Jews) with a hope for survival and rebirth. We are told earlier that “CARYL CHESSMAN WAS AN AMERICAN BUFFALO” (38), and while Chessman was an actual person—a convicted kidnapper sentenced to death and a rallying figure for opponents of the death penalty—, he also seems to serve as a stand-in for Kaufman himself, a brown buffalo desperately trying to avoid “dying of onesomeness.” In other words, Kaufman may have felt himself dying of an essentialist, alienating, suffocating identity, and thus attempted to escape that fate by fashioning a fiery, variegated identity that could serve as disruptive camouflage against the American Cossacks intent on his psychic destruction (Cranial Guitar 39). Bob Kaufman’s poetry borrows from both French surrealism and Black American jazz to further hybridize the already hybrid. Kaufman’s poem “Fragment,” for example, demonstrates his surrealist and Dada lineage, as well as his darkly comic, even gothic relationship to American history, in this case the history of Hollywood cinema and the looming presence of buried film stars “peanutbuttered forever”: How do they like the exclusive tombs, renaissance mailboxes, With Bela Lugosi moving around down there In his capeman Agron suit, sleepless walker, With his arms full of morphine, his eyes suggesting Frozen seesaws in cold playgrounds of yesterday. (Collected Poems 9) “O-JAZZ-O War Memoir: Jazz, Don’t Listen to It At Your Own Risk,” in counterpoint, is typical of Kaufman’s blending of jazz improvisation, surrealist imagery, and anti-capitalist irony: Busy burning Japanese in atomicolorcinescope With stereophonic screams, What one hundred percent red blooded savage would waste precious time Listening to jazz, with so many important things going on But even the fittest murderers must rest So they sat down in our blood soaked garments, and listened to jazz” (Cranial Guitar 94–5) Kaufman’s poetics, as Barbara Christian argues, “plays with word rhythms and dada images” (113) to achieve a new, freer space. Lines like these from “Blues Note”—“Ray Charles is the black wind of Kilamanjaro, / Screaming up-and-down blues, // … From his mouth he hurls chunks of raw soul” (Kaufman, Collected Poems 15)—or these from “Mingus”—“String-chewing bass players, / Plucking rolled balls of sound / From the jazz-scented night” (20)—and this concluding line from “Fragment”—“Charlie Parker was a great electrician who went around wiring people” (Collected Poems 9)—demonstrate the profound influence on Kaufman’s poetics of Black blues and jazz music. However, Christian believes that Kaufman’s poems about jazz and Charlie Parker are much more than Beat celebrations of a Black jazz aesthetic; they “expressed the alternative route that America’s outcasts could take” (110). Maria Damon likewise offers a hybridized poetic lineage for Kaufman, one that combines European surrealism and jazz: “Kaufman’s poetry shares much

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with other New World Black surrealists Aimé Cesaire, Ted Joans, and Will Alexander, as well as with the jazz-inspired poetry and fiction of LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka and Nathaniel Mackey” (Introduction 106). Bob Kaufman not only attempted to escape the identity constructed for him by family, history, and society through creating a racially diverse cultural background for himself; he also expressed at times an acute desire to live beyond or escape himself—to become anonymous or forgotten. In Raymond Foye’s editor’s note to The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–1978, Kaufman is ironically quoted as saying, “I want to be anonymous. … I don’t know how you get involved with uninvolvement, but I don’t want to be involved. My ambition is to be completely forgotten” (ix). The ironic playfulness of his statement is clear, with Kaufman’s play on the word “involved” bringing to mind those American Dadaists, the Marx Brothers, and their French surrealist cousins, especially René Magritte and his 1929 painting, The Treachery of Images, with its image of a pipe with the phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) painted underneath. But Kaufman is serious as well. It is as if, having given up hopes of escaping the monocultural, essentialist identity harpoons of 1950s America, Kaufman moves his hope to self-effacement or nothingness, to a Buddhist play on Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody.” In the seventh section of his “Jail Poems,” Kaufman writes: “Someone whom I am is no one // I am not me” (Solitudes 58). It is difficult to tell whether Kaufman is presenting this exploration of a total loss of “self ” in a tragic or celebratory way, but images of the loss of the self and the splitting of the self certainly arise again and again in Kaufman’s poems. In “Cincophrenicpoet,” for example, Kaufman plays a linguistic trick on “schizophrenic,” but the poem seems more playful than anxious about the idea of a split personality, describing how a poet with five identities called a meeting at which four of the identities expelled the fifth from the group (Cranial Guitar 114). The idea that one of the poet’s five personalities might be expelled by the other four could be read as anxious, but is also clearly comic. It reads to me as akin to the old Jewish joke about two Jews, three opinions. However, Kaufman also rejects here neat, linear concepts of identity, offering in the poem’s close the promise that the seemingly weakest, poetic self has secret “reserves,” which he uses to battle against the powerful, linear, or symmetrical selves with the spirals and swirls of poetry:         coughing poetry for revenge, beseeching all horizontal reserves to cross, spiral, and whirl. (Cranial Guitar 114) The poem therefore offers the hope of a queer alternative identity triumphing over those identities that demand rationality and straightness. Kaufman’s two types of identity transformation seen in his comments and poems may seem contradictory—his attempt to self-mythologize and refashion himself as a queer, Jewish, Catholic, Native American, voodoo, Buddhist, Black, Beat poet, as “Bomkauf,” and his seemingly opposing attempt to become invisible and forgotten—but they may simply represent Kaufman’s pursuit of two different paths toward the same goal: to remain a free agent, to escape the harpoons of racism, biography, and history. We could call this first type—his transformation from “shingled hippo” to “gay unicorn”—a self-othering desire to remain nonconforming, fluid, and free. And we could call Kaufman’s dream of a loss of self or an escape from “self ” a Buddhist desire for

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identity nothingness or nirvana. This latter move can be seen in his “Abomunist Manifesto,” where he writes: “Way out people know the way out”—and in “Unholy Missions”—“I want to be buried in an anonymous crater inside the moon” (Solitudes 80, 10). These divergent tropes seem at least in part Kaufman’s way of dealing with the horrors of racism, the horrors that he writes about in poems including “Benediction,” “The Night that Lorca Comes,” and “The Ancient Rain.” Should we read Kaufman’s emphasizing of his Jewish genealogy as an attempt to escape his Blackness? Is Kaufman putting on “Jewish-face” in a manner similar to the African American New Orleans Mardi Gras Parade Crew who adopt the American Indian identity of the Wild Tchoupitoulas? I’d argue rather that Kaufman is crafting a multivocal, intersectional identity by attempting to add lineages and personae, including some that he perhaps has tenuous claims to, but that he never attempts to erase his Blackness. For example, in his prose poem “Second April” we can see his rejection of a unitary identity and embrace of cultural and identity hybridization, or perhaps his formation of a transcultural, subaltern identity made up of various oppressed others. After establishing a complex lineage that includes Jewish, Puerto Rican, mentally ill, and queer artists and thinkers, such as Einstein, Sappho, Bob Dylan, and Rimbaud, Kaufman conflates being Black with being a Jewish Holocaust survivor: “my negro suit has jew stripes, my yarmaka was lost in a flash flood while I mattered with Navajos about peyote” (Solitudes 66). So while Kaufman may temper his Blackness with Jewishness, he never ceases to identify with the psychic trauma of being African American in 1950s America. While Kaufman rejects a univocal identity that a racist white society could hope to invent and control, and while he attempts to substitute for that unicultural, essentialist concept a multiform identity, he in no way attempts to pass. Rather, Kaufman expresses an anxiety about being defined from the outside. This anxiety is evident, for example, in “Blue Slanted into Blueness,” where he writes: “I AM NOT A FORM, / I AM ME, SACRED & HOLY (Cranial Guitar 57). Blue here echoes Fats Waller’s blues lament of 1929: “What did I do to be so black and blue” (“Black and Blue”). What Kaufman seems to be rejecting so vehemently in “Blue Slanted into Blueness” is an unchanging concept of identity as a permanent, Platonic form constructed by others. He is rejecting purely external definitions of identity, experienced as an attempt by the dominant class to impale or vivisect him, and demanding instead his right to a protean, self-fashioned identity founded on material and spiritual syncretism. Thus Kaufman’s aesthetic hybridity makes him a “quintessentially subcultural poet … at once multiply marginal and properly paradigmatic” (Damon, Dark End 36). In many of Kaufman’s poems we can see examples of his aesthetic, spiritual self-fashioning at work. For example, in “West Coast Sounds—1956,” Kaufman combines a jazz and a haiku aesthetic with a concept of the new Beat brotherhood that supplements the concept of Black family or Black brotherhood. In “San Fran, Hipster land,” he observes Allen Ginsberg “giving poetry to squares” and Corso, “on knees, pleading” with his “God eyes” (Solitudes 11). In “Tequila Jazz,” Kaufman likewise combines jazz and haiku forms: “Unseen wings of jazz, / Flapping, flapping” (Cranial Guitar 61). In bringing together an African American and an “Eastern” aesthetic, Kaufman seems to link “Zen and Eastern-transcendental spirituality” to Africa and the blues, as A. Robert Lee

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argues is the case for all three of the most important Black Beats, Kaufman, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), and Ted Joans (Lee 162). Not only does Kaufman lay claim to a fluid, multivocal identity by fashioning an aesthetically hybridized poetics, he also lays claim to a heterogeneous identity by creating alternative familial lineages—connecting himself not only to Jews, but also to the French surrealists and the queer, eccentric Beat everywhere. Kaufman connects himself to other spiritual “fathers” as well, including the High Modernist T. S. Eliot (“T. S. Eliot is my father,” he once whispered in Neeli Cherkovski’s ear (117)) and the great Spanish surrealist poet Federico García Lorca. As Aldon Lynn Nielsen explains, “Lorca is not the only modernist whose life and work finds itself recast in the funhouse mirrors of Kaufman’s revisionist measures” (142). Using “The Night That Lorca Comes” and other poems as his evidence, Nielsen argues that Kaufman creates a new, surrealist dream history where the African American–Native American Revolutionary War hero Crispus Attucks, the Spanish García Lorca, as well as other avant-garde, surrealist, and Modernist poets, such as Gertrude Stein and Arthur Rimbaud, are transubstantiated to the present via Kaufman’s poetry. Kaufman thereby creates healing balms of anti-racist, surrealist poetics. And indeed, lines like the following from “The Night That Lorca Comes” support this contention: “THE NIGHT THAT LORCA COMES / SHALL BE A STRANGE NIGHT IN THE / SOUTH, IT SHALL BE THE TIME WHEN NEGROES LEAVE THE SOUTH FOREVER” (Kaufman, Ancient Rain 60). Kaufman’s attempts to craft a poetic and personal lineage that combined African Americans, continental Africans, Jews, modernists, anti-colonialists, and European surrealists might have come out of his desire to escape the limitations and oppressions of mainstream America by aligning himself with internationalism. As Hilene Flanzbaum explains, Kaufman’s desire “to become an international figure” stemmed from his critique of American mediocrity and soullessness (26). And since the Jew was thought to be cosmopolitan, Kaufman’s feelings of connection to Jews and to European surrealism may have resonated with his desire to escape American persecution. The alternative lineages Kaufman fashions for himself are particularly evident in “Grandfather Was Queer, Too.” Whereas he first saw his grandfather “in a Louisiana bayou” where he was “playing chess with an intellectual lobster,” he now claims to have seen him “here”:        He is beat. His girlfriend has green ears; She is twenty-three months pregnant. I kissed them both. (Solitudes 13) In this poem, we can see Kaufman at work creating a syncretic aesthetic and lineage. He begins the poem in his “real” family’s “real” home: the Louisiana bayou. However, the scene quickly transforms into the surreal: “Playing chess with an intellectual lobster.” With this transformation from the factual to the surreal, Kaufman seems to be making an argument for imaginative selfcreation. It is as if he is asserting that his family history, identity, and story are his to tell as straight or queer as he wishes, and he chooses to tell it queer. In this way, Kaufman uses the autobiographical or the autofictional in a way similar to the usage of such surrealists as Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, and René Magritte. By connecting himself and his, we can assume, straight grandfather to the queer, as the title and imagery of “Grandfather Was Queer, Too” makes clear, Kaufman rejects all varieties of straightness,

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adopting an alternative sexual identity to join with the other marginal and hybrid identities so as to complicate the Black–White identity binary that his culture was trying to force on him. As Steven Gould Axelrod states, perhaps Kaufman “had an issue with identity categories altogether— fascination and rejection. Not surprising given the racism and other prejudices he had to deal with” (email). The queers in Kaufman’s poem are the subaltern in all their varieties—the intellectuals; the imprisoned; the mixed-race; the vagrants; the Beats; and the gay, bisexual, and trans. Those who choose to mate with people of other races, and those who choose to partner with people of the same gender or with people of any gender (figured by the speaker, “queer, too,” who kisses both his beat grandfather and his grandfather’s girlfriend with green ears), are enjoined in the poem to join all the other queers and freaks—the Beats, the women pregnant for transgressive amounts of time (“twenty-three months”) and of a transgressive race (“green ears”)—and to “Live happily ever after.” Kaufman’s poem, then, like his statement to Neeli Cherkovski that “I’m Black, Jewish, white, green, and yellow with a blue man inside me struggling to come out” (Cherkovski 108), indicates Kaufman’s Melvillean “Loose-Fish” theory of lineage and identity. Like Hélène Cixous, Kaufman seems to believe that the poet who wishes to remain free and unharpooned by a racist, sexist, conformist culture must remain “a fabulous opera and not the area of the known.” To resist subjugation, the subject must be “more than one, diverse, capable of being … several and insubordinable” (Cixous quoted in Glass 9). In “Grandfather Was Queer, Too” and throughout his oeuvre, Bob Kaufman does not reject his Blackness but rather adopts other lineages to go along with and complicate it. He is by turns Jewish, queer, Bohemian, Beat, surrealist, and so on. He is binding himself to chosen families as well as his legacy family: the family of the Beats, the outcasts, the jailed, the oppressed, the queer, the European avant-garde. In doing so, Kaufman attempts to escape a unicultural and univocal concept of identity, and to remain a “Loose-Fish,” swimming freely along with fellow poetic iconoclasts Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, and Ted Joans through an open sea.

WORKS CITED Axelrod, Steven Gould. “Alienation and Renewal in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.” Plath Profiles, vol. 3 (Summer 2010), pp. 134–43. Axelrod, Steven Gould. “Between Modernism and Postmodernism: The Cold War Poetics of Bishop, Lowell, and Ginsberg.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 42, no. 1 (2007), pp. 1–23. Axelrod, Steven Gould. Email. December 8, 2021. Axelrod, Steven Gould. “Sensual Drift and Ethnic Longing in Robert Lowell.” Robert Lowell in a New Century, ed. Thomas Austenfeld, Camden House, 2019, pp. 25–39. Bloom, Harold. The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. Touchstone, 1992. Charters, Ann, moderator. “Women of the Beat Generation Panel.” Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation?, ed. Ann Charters, Penguin Books, 2001, pp. 616–32. Cherkovski, Neeli. Whitman’s Wild Children. Lapis Press, 1988. Christian, Barbara. “Whatever Happened to Bob Kaufman.” The Beats: Essays in Criticism, ed. Lee Bartlett, McFarland, 1981, pp. 107–14. Damon, Maria. “Bob Kaufman.” The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, ed. Alan Kaufman and S. A. Griffin. Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999, 63–5 [Damon’s name misspelled ‘Damun’]. Damon, Maria. Introduction. Bob Kaufman: A Special Section. Callaloo, vol. 25, no. 1 (Winter 2002), pp. 105–11.

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Damon, Maria. The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry. University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Dauber, Jeremy. Jewish Comedy: A Serious History. W. W. Norton, 2017. Flanzbaum, Hilene. “The Imaginary Jew and the American Poet.” The Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Hilene Flanzbaum. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, pp. 18–32. Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self, Volume 3: The History of Sexuality. Vintage, 1986. Foucault, Michel. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New Press, 1994. Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. Pantheon Books, 1984. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4 (Summer 1982), pp. 777–95. Foye, Raymond. Editor’s Note. The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–1978, ed. Raymond Foye. New Directions, 1981. Foye, Raymond. “Rain Unraveled Tales: Editing Bob Kaufman.” Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, ed. Neeli Cherkovski. City Lights Books, 2019, pp. 216–24. Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems: 1947-1997. HarperCollins, 2006. Glass, James M. Shattered Selves: Multiple Personality in a Postmodern World. Cornell University Press, 1993. Gray, Jeffrey. Respondent. “Transnational Beat Spiritualities Panel.” American Studies Association Conference. Oakland, CA, October 12, 2006. Holton, Robert. “ ‘The Sordid Hipsters of America’: Beat Culture and the Folds of Heterogeneity.” Reconstructing the Beats, ed. Jennie Skerl, Palgrave MacMillan, 2004, pp. 11–26. Joans, Ted. Afrodisia. Hill & Wang, 1971. Kaufman, Bob. The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–1978. New Directions, 1981. Kaufman, Bob. Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, ed. Neeli Cherkovski, Raymond Foye, and Tate Swindell, City Lights Books, 2019. Kaufman, Bob. Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems by Bob Kaufman.Coffee House Press, 1996. Kaufman, Bob. Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. New Directions, 1965. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. Viking, [1955] 1957. Lee, A. Robert. “Black Beats: The Signifying Poetry of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman.” The Beat Generation Writers, ed. A. Robert Lee, Pluto Press, 1996, pp. 158–77. Lowell, Robert. Life Studies. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1959. Miller, David L. The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses. Harper & Row, 1974. Mortenson, Erik. “Keeping Vision Alive: The Buddhist Stillpoint in the Work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg,” The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature, ed. John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff, State University of New York Press, 2009, pp. 123–38. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. “ ‘A Hard Rain’: Looking to Bob Kaufman.” Callaloo, vol. 25, no. 1 (Winter 2002), pp. 134–45. Ostriker, Alicia. “‘Howl’ Revisited: The Poet as Jew.” American Poetry Review, vol. 4 (July/August 1997), pp. 28–31. Reid, Mark A. Postnegritude Visual and Literary Culture. State University of New York Press, 1997. Spangler, Jason. “We’re on a Road to Nowhere: Steinbeck, Kerouac, and the Legacy of the Great Depression.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 40, no. 3 (Fall 2008), pp. 308–27. Stratton, Jon. Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities. Routledge, 2000. Svonkin, Craig. “From Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart: Becoming the Other; Suiciding the White Male ‘Self.’” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 43 (2008), pp. 92–118. Svonkin, Craig. “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg’s Spiritual Self-Othering.” College Literature, vol. 37, no. 4 (2010), pp. 166–93.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

The National Anthology Wars and West Coast Anthologies BILL MOHR

The proliferation of anthologies featuring poets based on the West Coast during the past half century reflected a larger shift about the role that regionalism plays in canon formation. In refusing a subordinate position frequently imposed on the West Coast due to its relative lack of cultural capital, poet-editor-publishers located between San Diego, California, and Seattle, Washington, produced a series of regionally based anthologies during the Cold War and in the decades since that have yet to be fully taken account of. The hyphenated role of the instigators of these volumes, however, is more than a convenient umbrella term for individuals with a strong contumacious streak of the antinomian principle revivified on the Pacific shoreline. It in fact addresses a shift among the social relationships of author, editor, publisher, and audience identification within the encompassing discourse of book history. While this particular survey will focus on a specific subset of the production of poetry after the Second World War in the United States, the need to contextualize this eruption of anthologies has become imperative. The decimation of print culture, in particular, since the end of the last century has aroused fears that books and magazines will become peripheral players within cultural production, but the reliance on print culture as a kind of litmus test for a poem’s enduring relevance will likely persist for several more decades, if not the indefinite future. Whatever the tortuous fate of print culture might prove to be, the canon formation of twentieth-century poetry will always remain poignantly embedded in print culture, a period in which the production of anthologies accelerated decade by decade beyond anyone’s expectations. The consequences of mutating lists in the table of contents are far more complicated than commonly thought, and a reconsideration of the term “anthology wars” is long overdue. Although such contestations are almost always relegated to a flare-up of caustic animosity roiling factions of mid-twentieth-century poets, the reality is that the anthology wars never ceased. Not only should it be said that they never ceased, but the debate on the standards by which the canonical status of dozens of anthologies is determined has hardly begun. When Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) bemoaned the prevalence of anthologies, he hardly could have anticipated that it was merely the groundswell of an ever-rising tide of such volumes. In the decades since Jarrell’s comment, the variegated themes and paradigms around which the anthologies are organized have shaped their critical reception. Indeed, the very success of anthologies as a marker of literary esteem has willy-nilly forced critics to impose restrictions on their surveys of anthologies that implicitly

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designate some anthologies as major and others merely as local efforts. The problem is that this sorting erases the contribution that “minor” or issue-oriented anthologies play in instigating schools and movements that eventually prove noteworthy and influential.1 The elision of cause-and-effect results in emboldened claims for an ahistorical account of canonization in which anthologies whose very agency is often embroiled in lack of access to cultural capital are pushed aside; the consequential hierarchical ranking all too often ends up privileging writers embedded in academic institutions. While the Norton anthologies of poets, for instance, are awarded a canon-shaping credibility,2 the accumulative publications in previous anthologies that propel poets into the Norton are jettisoned into irrelevancy instead of being regarded as crucial interventions that in themselves are equally empowering markers of authorial importance. It is in challenging this disparity that anthologies of West Coast poets serve as vital testimony to the lingering presence of audiences to whom these anthologies were first directed. One fundamental issue involves not just literary ranking but social space; the goal of gay, feminist, and nonacademic poets who were fellow travelers of various literary movements was to use their poems as a way of altering relationships within socially articulated environments of friendship, love, and nurture.3 It is in these thematically embroiled engagements that many West Coast anthologies have increased the diversity of the cultural environment as an extension of what Jed Rasula has termed the “discursive momentum of [Donald Allen’s] The New American Poetry” (Rasula 392). Understanding the on-going challenge that anthologies of West Coast poetry pose to the process of canonical formation requires first a review of the trajectory of anthology production since the Second World War.4 In the decades since Grove Press published Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (NAP) in 1960, editors who have undertaken projects in a similar spirit have frequently acknowledged his influence. Allen’s prescience was not merely an instinct for fashionable poetics, however; his book remained a touchstone of required reading for a huge cohort of Baby Boomer generation poets. The extraordinary success of NAP prompted the University of California Press to make it available as a reprint, with utter fidelity to the original layout and typography, in 1999. In 2013, a volume of essays edited by John Woznicki retrospectively celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of NAP’s publication and took on the challenge of considering its manifold reordering of the cultural and social landscape in the United States. Indeed, the significant number of gay poets in Allen’s anthology along with the flagrant prominence of interdicted drugs, which several of its contributors valorized in their poems, gives NAP a proleptic aura of the culture wars of the past half-century. Jed Rasula’s exceptionally astute survey of a half-century of poetry anthologies, The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects 1940–1990, delimits itself by excluding regional or issue-oriented anthologies. Weighing in at over six hundred pages, one understands the author’s need for a synchronic tether. Even with this constriction, the parameters set up by Rasula substantiate his critique of the MFA-AWP industrial culture complex. 2 See Shesgreen 293–318. 3 The study that took the lead and remains utterly pertinent in assessing the social ramifications of community formation on the West Coast is Michael Davidson’s San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 4 For a comprehensive review of anthology production that also addresses the periods before postmodernism, see chapter one of Alan Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry. Marjorie Perloff ’s long essay, “Whose New American Poetry” examines the relationship of New American Poetry to a half-dozen anthologies published in the final decade of the last century. Two of the anthologies chosen by Perloff (Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry and Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century) include a small sampling of West Coast poets in addition to representative figures associated with the Language movement, but primarily emphasize poets aligned with East Coast publishers and literary projects. 1

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In being the first anthology to contextualize Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” within the variegated poetics of the so-called underground of American versification, The New American Poetry served as a deliberate provocation, brimming over with the exultation of the successful defense of “Howl” when it had gone on trial for obscenity. Hall, Pack, and Simpson’s New Poets of England and America (NPEA) (1957), with its roster of academically affiliated poets and its allegiance to traditional versification, unwittingly served as the perfect straight man to NAP; the sting of being consigned to dull conventionality was not borne meekly. Two of the three editors of NPEA assembled a counter-attack in a second edition appearing in 1962 that included a haughty, scornful diatribe against the poets and lifestyles of the poets in NAP. Categorized as the “anthology wars,” the confrontation of NAP and NPEA proved to be not much of a contest. For all of its bluster, the editors of NPEA were caught in cross fire of their own making. Even as they were doubling down on the importance of preserving the tradition, one of the most prominent poets in NPEA, Robert Lowell, had “defected” to the other side. The inclusion of autobiographically based material in Lowell’s poetry partially came about through the influence of poets featured in NAP, and NPEA could only hope that its readers would not raise awkward questions about which side appeared to be gaining more and more cultural traction. Both The New American Poetry and New Poets of England and America went through repeated printings in the 1960s, during which time an ever growing number of contributors to NPEA’s first edition signed on as fellow travelers of the more adventuresome anthology. James Wright, W. S. Merwin, and Galway Kinnell were all producing work by 1970 that was featured in Berg and Mezey’s Naked Poetry, a volume that included both Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell. As if attempting to broker a literary truce, anthologies that interwove the best-known contributors from both NAP and NPEA became quite popular between 1965 and 1975. Mark Strand, for instance, who would go on to become one of nation’s poet laureates, proposed a “make nice” scenario in his two-page preface to The Contemporary American Poets: American Poetry Since 1940: In fact, it is part of the character of American poetry since 1940 to have made friends with everyone. Many different sorts of poetry seem to have co-existed more or less peacefully except for a brief skirmish at the end of the 1950s when we experienced what has been glamorously called ‘the war of the anthologies’ and when it seemed that only two kinds of poetry were being written—the “beat” and the “academic’ … But that seems more a part of the sociology of poetry than an accurate description of what in fact was being written. Strand’s claim of universal amity had about as much validity as a bourgeois politician asking the American people to come together in a bipartisan coalition. Nor was the skirmish “brief.” One only has to look at James Dickey’s Babel to Byzantium: Poets & Poetry Now to ascertain the ground-level trench warfare that took place within the period that Strand cites, nor did Dickey ever let up: “I regret ever having wasted a single sentence on Ginsberg,” he wrote in the 1970s (298). In addition to Strand, there were other noteworthy efforts made to reduce the full boil to a simmer, such as A Controversy of Poets, coedited by Robert Kelly and Paris Leary, and Paul Carroll’s Young American Poets.5 As Andrei Codrescu noted in his introduction to American Poetry Since 1970: Up Late,

In a similar spirit, a relatively recent example of a mainstream anthology that tries to create a common ground poetics as inclusive as possible is David St. John’s and Cole Swenson’s American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. It asks its readers not to choose sides, but to adapt to their simultaneity in contemporary poetry, a goal that probably is more satisfying to those who only read poetry as opposed to those who both read and write it. 5

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however, “Carroll’s anthology was the first to fail in a way that has since become excruciatingly familiar: it was conciliatory instead of partisan.” Choosing sides subsequently became the table of contents rule. Instead of a placid reconciliation, a protracted, highly calibrated, and even more acrimonious set of hostilities broke out and continues to seethe in twenty-first-century American poetry. It is within this larger chronological context that an extraordinary number of anthologies began appearing on the West Coast with an uncompromising edge that almost begged to have the chips knocked off their shoulders. If one were to assign a tipping point in which reconciliation surrendered to polemics, it would be the mid-point of the 1980s during which three anthologies more or less encapsulated distinct layers of community formation in American poetry: David Bottoms and David Smith’s The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets; Ron Silliman’s In the American Tree; and my own Poetry Loves Poetry. With the exceptions of the subsequent extraordinary growth in African American poetry and a parallel effusion of slam poetry, the subsequent quarter-century largely played out the implications of this trio of anthologies, two of which are largely based on the West Coast. More so than the Morrow or American Tree, Poetry Loves Poetry: An Anthology of Los Angeles Poets (1985) was the culmination of a series of anthologies that had been published in Los Angeles between 1970 and 1980, all of which helped establish a coastline of canonical effervescence in contemporary poetry in which both San Francisco and Los Angeles served as major, though hardly the only, centers. As was the case with New American Poetry and New Poets of England and America, much of the quarrel between these three anthologies was driven by notions of institutional affiliation and counter-publics shaped by successive increments of feminism and identity-driven communities. The buildup to this tipping point has its origins in the vibrant subculture of small-press production in the 1970s, which was to Baby Boomers what MFA programs have become in recent decades. It should be emphasized that the proliferation of small-press poetry production, especially in California in the 1970s, was not completely ignored by the East Coast. Two of the poets who appeared in Donald Allen’s anthology, for instance, went on to edit their own anthologies, and it was Edward Field’s A Geography of Poets that served as the first major instance of the West Coast making a claim for a proportionate amount of space in canonical anthology formation. Signing off with a bicoastal notation “San Francisco / New York 1978,” Field’s introductory essay includes his personal testimony: Wherever I go now I come across an indigenous poetry scene with its own small presses, magazines, and poetry readings. The complaint I hear from poets everywhere is that New York publishers, editors and critics refuse to recognize what is happening. … Out of this opposition … has grown up a nationwide counterculture mentality, polarized on the West Coast [italics added] … I decided to put together an anthology giving the same space to west of the Mississippi as to east of the Mississippi. (pp. xxxviii, xli) Allocating “space,” however, turned out to be more of an exercise in juxtaposing stereotypes than a comprehensive survey of the West Coast. Whereas Donald Allen had featured poets associated with both the Berkeley Renaissance and Venice West, Field focused on the “vernacular, sassy, funny” poetry of Long Beach, California, which he contrasted with the “issue-oriented, righteous poetry of the Bay Area.” In quoting a 13 line excerpt of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Populist Manifesto,” Field revealed his limited vision of the period and regions he claimed to be surveying. By 1978, Language

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poetry was certainly prominent enough to have earned a representative “space” in A Geography of Poets, nor did Field’s anthology seem aware of the growing popularity of prose poetry on the West Coast. That Field acknowledged the importance of the Bay Area is hardly a surprise. The emergence of the Bay Area as a choice of refuge for those whose poetics pushed them away from academic careers has been recounted and analyzed often enough to accord it as the starting point for this survey. Given the head start that the Berkeley Renaissance and the San Francisco Renaissance provided Northern California, what is surprising is that the number of anthologies published in the Bay Area by 1980 was hardly more than the volumes coming out of Southern California. Beginning with an anthology called Poetry L.A. in 1960, the southern terminal of the West Coast poetry renaissance included anthologies coedited by no less a figure than Charles Bukowski. Anthology of L.A. Poets (1972), edited by Bukowski et al., was a relatively slim volume, but it served as a stepping-off point for Paul Vangelisti’s Specimen ’73, which was the first anthology to include Bukowski, Venice West poets Stuart Z. Perkoff and John Thomas, as well as Jack Hirschman, who was on the verge of ending his decade-long residence in Los Angeles and moving north. The expansion of the scene in Los Angeles by the end of the 1970s can be gauged by the fact that only one of the ten poets in The Streets Inside: Ten Los Angeles Poets (1978) appeared in either Bukowski’s or Vangelisti’s anthologies. In addition, there were half-dozen Los Angeles-based poets who did not appear in those three anthologies, but whose poems joined the company of Gary Snyder, Richard Hugo, Kenneth Rexroth, William Stafford, and many others in Lawrence Spingarn’s anthology, Poets West (1975). The Streets Inside quickly found itself old news in the Los Angeles groundswell. Perhaps, though, the most significant indication that this renaissance was more than a local reconnaissance mission was Dennis Cooper’s Coming Attractions: An Anthology of American Poets in Their Twenties. While the twenty-two poets selected by Cooper included several Los Angeles poets, such as David Trinidad, Bob Flanagan, and Jack Skelley, the book projected an overall sense of L.A. being a gravitational center of poetic production in which poets elsewhere could find themselves more than comfortably ensconced.6 If Los Angeles might be regarded in many quarters to be an upstart in this history of the anthology wars, it is even more difficult to find a word adequate to describe the unlikelihood of Fresno, California, becoming a major contributor to the insurgency posed by West Coast anthologies. A half-century ago, Fresno had nothing to brag about in regards to poetry. But by now, it is the only city in the United States to be regarded as the home base of not one but two national poet laureates: Philip Levine and Juan Felipe Herrera. That metamorphosis began with an anthology, Down at the Santa Fe Depot: 20 Fresno Poets, published in Fresno, in 1970. This anthology served as an eye-opener not just to poets outside of Fresno, but also to its local poets, who had at that point only a rudimentary sense of their potential to alter the canon of America poetry. The scene that formed around Cooper in the early 1980s at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California, was the focus of an installation by Sabrina Tarasoff for the “Made in L.A. 2020” exhibition at the Hammer Museum and Huntington Library, which barely opened in 2020 before it was shut down due to the pandemic. It reopened in the late spring of 2021. “The poet is a pirate only in so far as it has become a stock figure,” she claims in the final paragraph of her essay in the catalogue, “Fantasyworld Part 1: Captain Maudit; or, Drunk at the Blue Bayou.” Tarasoff ’s project serves to remind us of the further need to examine poetry anthologies in relationship to avant-garde developments in visual arts such as performance art. The most important magazine in that regard was High Performance, which was edited and published in Los Angeles. 6

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As early mentors, Philip Levine, Peter Everwine, and Robert Mezey had every reason to be proud of protégés such as Larry Levis, Roberta Spear, Lawson Fusao Inada, Luis Omar Salinas, Herbert Scott, Dennis Saleh, and Glover Davis. Inada and Saleh would eventually edit their own anthologies. Perhaps even more impressive was the second wave of poets who would shortly afterwards emerge under Levine’s tutelage and inspiration: Gary Soto and David St. John, who would both have fulllength books published by the end of the decade. Nor was Down at the Santa Fe Depot merely a one-hit wonder. Piecework: 19 Fresno Poets, edited by Jon Veinberg and Ernesto Trejo, appeared in 1987, followed by How Much Earth, edited by Christopher Buckley, David Oliveira, and M. L. Williams, whose table of contents added Juan Felipe Herrera to most of the above names. For a trilogy of anthologies, all published in a city of fewer than a quarter-million people in 1980, to have generated the debuts of so many poets in a collective setting is an astonishing accomplishment; and yet these anthologies are begrudged their presence in most comprehensive accounts of American poetry. Nor was Fresno the only smaller California city to join with small-press editors and publishers in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Doug Blazek’s Ole anthology represented Sacramento’s irrepressible entry into a burgeoning field, while an anthology entitled Twenty Times in the Same Place presented a score of poets working out of Santa Barbara. The most important anthology to come out of Santa Barbara in this period, however, was from Noel Young’s Capra Press, which issued the first significant anthology of Chicano poetry, Toni Empringham’s Fiesta in Aztlan (1982). All of the work in the anthologies based on specific cities in California might well have been on the margins of American poetry as it was generally being portrayed, but its free verse poetics based on the illusion of natural speech hardly bristled with antipathy towards the work of poets elsewhere, unlike the emerging coalition of poets that reinvigorated the avant-garde through a variation on Rimbaud’s call for a long, prodigious, rational disordering of the senses. The Language poets, as this loose group became best known by, could be said to have substituted the word “syntax” for “senses,” and they went at it with a thorough, relentless commitment that began to attract adherents and supporters from the purlieus of other anthologies. Attacks on Language poetry and its practitioners were as shrill as the ones that had been directed a quarter-century earlier at the Beat poets, but that only seemed to give this avant-garde more of a headwind. The Language poets based in the Bay Area almost single-handedly resurrected the fertility of Northern California’s mid-century poetry renaissance. The scope of its intellectual inquiry completely caught other centers of poetry off-guard. It was as if only Language poets took the keyword “intellectual” in Ezra Pound’s definition of an image (“an emotional and intellectual complex”) with any seriousness. Ron Silliman stated the matter bluntly in his preface to In the American Tree in describing the antagonists to Language poetry as depending on “a simple ego psychology in which the poetic text represents not a person, but a persona, the human as unified object. And the reader likewise. This, in turn, is usually called ‘communication’ or ‘emotion’ ” (Silliman xix). While this description oversimplifies the strategy of mainstream academic verse at the time, it does not miss by much; and the epitome at that time of poets turning this convivial approach into a standardized MFA pedagogical agenda can be found in The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets (1985). Hardly to be missed is the fact that a New York publishing company was the entity giving the poets in the Morrow Anthology its seal of approval, as opposed to the small press scene that enmeshed its labor-intensive, capital-poor productions in the dialogues concerning social definitions of gender, class, and race. Anthologies intended to bestow academic

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imprimatur on poets born between 1945 and 1975 continued to appear during the remainder of the past century and the first two decades of this one, almost all of them giving scant acknowledgment of any alternative canon.7 While identity politics is usually assigned to an activist agenda on the part of ethnic, racial, or gender affiliation, the Morrow anthology in its own way shimmered with identity flourishes, as it coordinated the personal characteristics of its poets in a manner that clearly emphasized class and cultural capital, and it was not shy about this privilege. The excerpt from the preface by the editors on the back cover of this thick volume concentrated on the poets’ identities, revealing them as implicitly middle- to upper-class (“suburban parents,” “one or more graduate degrees in literature and writing”) and heteronormative. Buoyed by an introduction by Anthony Hecht, this anthology made a case for poetry as a professional career. Indeed, a grant from the NEA or the Guggenheim is precisely what confirms their position as a prominent poet in what Hecht calls “an ample American canopy, sheltering a considerable crowd of excellence.” The expansion of MFA programs from a mere handful at the end of the 1970s to one of the most rapidly growing cottage industries in the United States was reinforced by a series of academic anthologies that built on Daniel Halpern’s The American Poetry Anthology (1975). In particular, The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets quickly became a kind of template for MFA success. For all the mainstream grousing about “McPoem,” the Morrow Anthology unabashedly established the parameters of a “career” in poetry that was built upon market calculations. The social aspects of this career, imbricated in its very DNA, were on display on the cover. As Andrei Codrescu noted in his preface to Up Late, “Editing by resumé became the norm …. The editing criterion is sociological” (xxxiv), and the Morrow Anthology was a Q.E.D. of C.V. streamlining. That the “anthology wars” had reached a new level of antagonism is particularly visible in the contrast of the Morrow Anthology with In the American Tree. Each is addressing an audience that has very little interest in what the other has to say. The Morrow Anthology, however, is by far the most egregious offender in failing to recognize that any kind of poetry other than its limited palette is part of the national conversation. It verges on a level of absurdity that the editors of the Morrow Anthology seem to indulge in a game of “pretend it’s not there, and it will go away.” No one remotely associated with the Language school has their passport stamped by Dave Smith and David Bottoms. For Daniel Halpern not to acknowledge the early stirrings of the Language insurgency in the mid-1970s is not surprising; that Bottoms and Smith completely ignore this movement makes them seem not only ideologically straitjacketed but almost spitefully full of guile in doing so. But it is not just the Language school that is ignored. The entire New York school of poets and the second wave of Beat poets also are bound, gagged, and led to the cellar for quarantine. What linked In the American Tree and Poetry Loves Poetry was a resistance to institutionalization. Silliman’s anthology, for instance, has proven that its multifaceted inquiry still has the capacity to sustain its relevance beyond “the moment” that it records. In part, this longevity derives from its roots in a poetics that developed in large part out of face-to-face contacts. Silliman divided his book into West Coast and East Coast, not to set up some dichotomous rivalry as if branches of Language writing were sports franchises, but to indicate how avant-garde movements benefit from A typical example of this kind of anthology would be Gerald Costanzo’s and Jim Daniels’s American Poetry: The Next Generation, which exudes the aura of MFA programs having taken intellectual steroids and attained PhD. status for creative writing. 7

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the intimate conversation about theory as well as the practice as it is embedded in a dynamic such as Edward Soja describes in the trialectics of Thirdspace. Although Language poetry is frequently taught in courses offered by departments of English in this century, it was hardly the case that the poets in American Tree were academically oriented at the time the anthology was published. This preference for working outside of institutional resourcefulness also marked the poets who appeared in my own anthology, Poetry Loves Poetry, which appeared in 1985 and Steve Kowit’s The Maverick Poets, which appeared four years later, as did Andrei Codrescu’s Up Late. This quartet of anthologies, which all gave a leading role to the West Coast poetry, featured poets who were more often than not, in one way or another, inclined to support literary centers, publishing projects, and reading series that explicitly disdained the largess of academic affiliation. Nowhere was this confrontation more visible than in Los Angeles, where a poet from the Fresno school, Suzanne Lummis, arrived in the late 1970s, and became known along with poets such Laurel Ann Bogen, Jack Grapes, and Ron Koertge as exemplary members of the Stand Up School, which had counted among its earliest members in the previous decade Charles Bukowski and Gerald Locklin. Lummis went on to edit or coedit three anthologies, including the first slim volume of Stand Up Poetry, whose other editor, Charles Harper Webb, eventually oversaw a larger edition under the imprint of the University of Iowa Press. Humor as an essential component of this verse began to complicate the distinction between “intellectual” and “emotional” in defining what made Stand Up images both tantalizing and memorable. Let this not be mistaken as a comic spirit that could be broadcast without causing sanctions on station license. Andrei Codrescu described it as “an erotic and sometimes unstoppably gruesome laughter” (xxxvii). The way in which the poets who appeared in anthologies such as In the American Tree and Poetry Loves Poetry were ahead of their time can be seen in Codrescu’s claim that “the emergence of the prose paragraph as a favorite poetic form for experimental poets in the 1980s follows directly from a continuing preoccupation with the long poem” (xxxvi). The statement is accurate enough, except that his dating is off by a decade. On the West Coast, this would have been true enough in the 1970s, and it is the anthologies I have cited that both demonstrate and encouraged that practice. The prose poem, however, was not a single generic entity within the anthology projects on the West Coast. The more conventional prose poem was on exhibit in several collections overseen by Gary Young, a poet who himself writes only prose poems. Other anthologies such as Stephanie Young’s Bay Poetics build on the prose poem as it began to develop with great dexterity in the Language movement. The anthologies published by editors on the West Coast represent not so much an implicit index of poets who have yet to be taken seriously as canonical candidates by critics and publishers on the East Coast, but the most visible layer of work done on behalf of hundreds of other poets, some of whom have a body of work needing more attention than the enjoyment of the first encounter.8 That a surprising amount of this mass of ground-level work has yet to have an initial sifting within larger paradigms is one of the perplexing deferrals that anthology production brings into question. The accounting should not be put off any longer.

For examples of such West Coast-based anthologies that need reassessment, see the volumes edited by Ishmael Reed (1979), A. D. Winans (1976), and Neeli Cherkovski (1972, 2015). 8

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WORKS CITED Allen, Donald, ed. The New American Poetry [1960]. University of California Press, 1999. Bennett, John, ed. Six Poets, 2nd ed. Vagabond Press, 1979. Berg, Stephen, and Robert Mezey, eds. Naked Poetry. Bobbs-Merrill, 1970. Bottoms, David, and David Smith, eds. The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets. Quill, 1985. Bukowski, Charles, Neeli Cherkovski, and Paul Vangelisti, eds. Anthology of L.A. Poets. Laugh Literary, 1972. Carroll, Paul, ed. The Young American Poets. Follett, 1968. Cherkovski, Neeli, and Bill Mohr. Cross-Strokes: Poetry between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Otis College of Art and Design, 2015. Clinton, Michele T., Sesshu Foster, and Naomi Quinonez, eds. Invocation L.A.: Urban Multi-Cultural Poetry. West End Press, 1989. Codrescu, Andrei, ed. American Poetry Since 1970: Up Late. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1989. Dickey, James. Babel to Byzantium: Poets & Poetry Now. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. Empringham, Toni, ed. Fiesta in Aztlan: An Anthology of Chicano Poetry. Capra Press, 1982. Field, Edward, A Geography of Poets: An Anthology of the New Poetry. Random House, 1979. Golding, Alan. From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry. University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Hall, Donald, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson, eds. New Poets of England and America. Meridian Books, 1957. Halpern, Daniel, ed. The American Poetry Anthology. Avon, 1975. Hecht, Anthony. Introduction. In Bottoms and Smith. Leary, Paris, and Robert Kelly, eds. A Controversy of Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. Doubleday Anchor, 1965. Lummis, Suzanne, Liz Camfiord, and Henry J. Morro, eds. Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. Beyond Baroque Books, 2015. Mallory, Lee. 20 Times in the Same Place. Painted Cave Books, 1973. Mohr, Bill. Poetry Loves Poetry: An Anthology of Los Angeles Poets. Momentum Press, 1985. Perloff, Marjorie. “Whose New American Poetry? Anthologizing in the 1990s.” Electronic Poetry Center. http:// wings.buff​alo.edu/epc/auth​ors/perl​off/anth.html. Accessed May 22, 2021. Rasula, Jed. The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effect, 1940–1990. National Council of Teachers of English, 1996. Reed, Ishmael. Calafia: The California Poetry. Yardbird Books, 1979. Shesgreen, Sean. “Canonizing the Canonizer: A Short History of the Norton Anthology of English Literature.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009), pp. 293–318. Silliman, Ron. “Language, Realism, Poetry.” In the American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman, National Poetry Foundation, 1986, pp. xv–xxiii. Soja, Edward. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Wiley, 1996. Spingarn, Lawrence, ed. Poets West. Los Angeles: Perivale Press, 1975. St. John, David, and Cole Swenson, eds. American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology. W. W. Norton, 2009. Strand, Mark, ed. The Contemporary American Poets: American Poetry Since 1940. New American Library, 1968. Vangelisti, Paul, ed. Specimen 73: A Catalogue of Poets for the Season 1973–1974. Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, 1973. Webb, Charles Harper, ed. Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology. University of Iowa Press, 2002. Winans, A. D., ed. The California Bicentennial Poets Anthology. Second Coming Press, 1976. Woznicki, John R., ed. The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later. Lehigh University Press, 2013.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Black Art of Confession STEVEN GOULD AXELROD

Whereas the first generation of so-called confessional poets, writing c.1950–75, created a genre without meaning to do so, the post-confessional poets of 1975 to the present understand that they inhabit and alter a space that M. L. Rosenthal in 1959 labeled “poetry as confession.” Looking back at their predecessors, the post-confessionals could see that “poetry as confession” typically centered on an interior crisis or on the recollection of childhood trauma. Moreover, the ruptures in the family are always to some degree a distorted image or signal of the violence and failures of the state. The confessional poem, as originally conceived, exposed moments of vulnerability, isolation, and existential dread, even as the subject was ensconced within a network of others and as the crisis exposed a tangle of relations to larger social conditions. The post-confessionals have written in, or often against, a genre that already had a name and a procedure. Although the most readily recognized of the early confessionals ambivalently or reluctantly identified as white and straight, there were also many less recognized poets of color and queer poets present at the creation—and, before the creation, in the prehistory of the genre. In the post-confessional generations, poets of color and queer poets predominate, and they have altered the generic expectations. If the earlier confessionals often tied their crisis poems to de-idealized life narratives of childhood, exposing family members as a source of pain, the post-confessionals are more likely to contextualize their crisis poems within the asymmetrical and iniquitous racial and gendered conditions of their surrounding social environment. Although they too may have experienced childhood trauma, they often are able to find sustenance rather than alienation in their family circle and in their community. As Terrance Hayes has said about African American poets, “Blackness is intimate and intense in these poets” (n.p.). That is to say, the movement from confessional to post-confessional has meant an evolution from an exploratory form centered on turmoil within self and family to a wide-ranging genre more explicitly focused on inequities of race, gender, and other social identifiers. The poems of post-confessionals often include at least a partial reconciliation with family elders. Instead of an oppressive or useless figure, the mother may appear as a protective figure who has tried to buffer the child from racist or sexist aggression. Rather than reproducing the patriarchal family and registering its failures, the post-confessional is more likely to explore a wide variety of racial, gendered, and sexual possibilities within the domestic sphere. The genre that earlier was often motivated by skepticism toward the parent figure, even in texts by poets of color, became more diverse in its characterizations, and more sensitive to unpredictable flows and drifts of feeling. In the African American post-confessional, for example, whatever the speaker may feel toward

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their mother, it is unlikely they would say, as Plath’s speaker does, “there is nothing between us” (Plath 226). We now live in a confessional or post-confessional culture. Christopher Grobe, in his often pathbreaking study, The Art of Confession (2017), elucidates the way confessional poetry helped generate present-day post-confessional modalities in performance art, theater, and reality TV. Like most scholars of confessional poetry, however, he assumes that the movement began as a European American phenomenon. He asserts, “the first confessionalists … tended to be white” (40). In this conception, “poetry as confession” originated with “Robert Lowell and his circle” in the late 1950s when Lowell and Anne Sexton began to talk about a hyper-personal kind of poetry, and Sylvia Plath was in the room where it happened.1 Lowell’s Life Studies appeared in 1959, Sexton’s To Bedlam and Part Way Back in 1962, and Plath’s confessional texts, composed in 1961–3, were posthumously collected in Ariel in 1966. Together with other European American poets such as W. D. Snodgrass (Heart’s Needle, 1959), Allen Ginsberg (Kaddish, 1961), and soon thereafter John Berryman (77 Dream Songs, 1964), Elizabeth Bishop (Questions of Travel, 1965), Randall Jarrell (The Lost World, 1965), and Frank Bidart (Golden State, 1973), these poets created texts that dwelt, in striking ways, on de-idealized childhood memories and present-day upheavals, all within a context of psychological unease and often disability. So the white genesis of confessional poetry has often been assumed. But what if we considered an alternative hypothesis? What if we posited that the first confessionalists were Black? It is past time to cease striking what B. J. Bolden has called “the eerie bell chord of exclusion” (79).There were actually a number of poets of color who contributed to the genre’s initial development, and such poets have played a major role ever since. Giving their works the credit that is due them changes the way the genre looks and feels. In this chapter, I will establish the presence of African confession in the founding of American poetry before looking at three important Black confessionalists in the mid-twentieth century—Julia de Burgos, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Robert Hayden—and then considering a half-dozen African American post-confessionals: Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Wanda Coleman, Tupac Shakur, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine.2 Let’s begin with an unexpected early landmark in the history of American confessional discourse: Phillis Wheatley’s “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth,” published in 1773. In the midst of a formally conventional exhortation urging William Legge, second Earl of Dartmouth, to support New England’s “Freedom,” a childhood memory, or what seems to be a hypothesis standing in the place of post-traumatic amnesia, ruptures the rhetoric and turns back time: I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate, Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:

See Spivack’s fascinating memoir of Lowell and his circle. General accounts of confessionalism that downplay the contributions of poets of color include Middlebrook (632–49) and Nelson (31–46). For an alternative viewpoint, see Axelrod (“Gwendolyn Brooks” 26–40). 2 Although this essay will focus on African American poets, a similar analysis could and should be made of poets with other racial, ethnic, and sexual identifications. For example, one could trace a pattern parallel to the one I will outline here in the history of Asian American poetry, moving from Songs of the Gold Mountain through such modernist pioneers as Sadakichi Hartmann and Yone Noguchi to such contemporary poets as Mitsuye Yamada, Marilyn Chin, Jessica Hagedorn, Li-Young Lee, Justin Chin, and Ocean Vuong. 1

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What pangs excruciating must molest, What furrows labour in my parent’s breast? Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d. Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway? (Poems 34) Here is the eruptive personal memory that marks so much of confessional poetry and performance. One might argue that Wheatley included this passage simply as an example to prove a point, but if so, it does not make the intended point about increased colonial independence but is rather a disturbance within memory that shatters the calm of the surrounding discourse, complicating the then-current thinking about “freedom,” making the drama of colonial governance appear minor in comparison to the horrors of the slave trade. In this passage, as in confessional art to come, traumatic personal memory has political resonance. The resonance, however, does not support an argument for a readjustment within colonialism but rather reveals a fundamental flaw in Western ideology itself. It is the recollection or re-creation of the kidnap and forced removal of the sevenyear-old child from the family that nurtured her but which she seems unable to remember. The passage also initiates the motif of the absent or lost mother, whose very presence is silently erased in the poem. Was the memory or lack of memory of the mother too painful for Wheatley to summon? Or did Wheatley simply make the strategic decision to focus on the father while attempting to persuade powerful men to attend to her arguments? The passage welds the painful childhood memory to a moment of current crisis, which is at once psychological and political: the Black (and newly freed) poet seeking to make her way in a grotesquely iniquitous social environment at the very moment the social compact was breaking apart with no clear present or future for its most marginal members. The poem revises Wheatley’s earliest published poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” printed when she was only fourteen, by replacing that poem’s word “mercy” with the more honest and accurate “cruel.” Beyond its self-revision, Wheatley’s Dartmouth poem forecasts a long line of confessional texts and performances to come, and is a prelude more specifically to confessional writing by Black and brown poets, who similarly highlight the interdependence of racial disparity and pain. The cruel fate suffered by the Black child is a proleptic image of the cruel violence still being perpetrated on Black bodies at the time Wheatley wrote her poem. The poem makes what Lindon Barrett called “blackness and value” a fundamental element in confessional poesis. We can trace a line of descent from Wheatley’s destabilizing confession to the sorrow songs of enslaved Africans and through to such nineteenth-century poems as Frances Harper’s “Bury Me in a Free Land” and Adah Menken’s “Myself ” and “Infelix,” and onward through such Harlem Renaissance cultural landmarks as Fats Waller’s blues lyric “Black and Blue,” Angelina Weld Grimké’s poems “El Beso” and “Fragment,” Langston Hughes’s “Desire” and “Poem” [“I loved my friend”], and Countee Cullen’s “Incident.” This legacy of Black self-exploration supported the arrival of new Black and mixed-race poets in the mid-twentieth century, such as Julia de Burgos, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Robert Hayden. Although de Burgos and Brooks published poems of memory, introspection, and psychic turmoil that slightly predated those of Lowell, Sexton, and Plath, the phenomenon only achieved recognition when the latter trio appeared on the scene. For example, the Puerto Rican/Nuyorican poet Julia de Burgos, a direct descendant of African slaves, wrote, “I seek myself ” in one of her earliest

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published poems, called “Intima” [“Intimate”] (Song 6–7). That self-exploratory motif, so central to the confessional enterprise, informs all her varied poems, from “A Julia de Burgos” [“To Julia de Burgos”] (Song 2–5), at the start of her career, to “Farewell from Welfare Island,” the Englishlanguage poem she wrote at the end of her life. De Burgos published “A Julia de Burgos” in 1937, well before any other confessional poet pursued the project, and she composed her even more specific “Farewell from Welfare Island” in 1953, the year of her death. That was also four years before Lowell composed “Skunk Hour,” a text now often accepted as the first “confessional” poem. “To Julia de Burgos” is a poem in which one part of the autobiographical speaker’s psyche (the rebellious creative side) speaks to another part (the conformist feminine side), exploring a transgendered crisis of subjectivity through the figure of the double while also referring back to a childhood memory of riding her father’s horse. “To Julia de Burgos” achieves the gold standard of confessional discourse by using accurate rather than fictionalized names, as Lowell and Sexton also often do.3 The poem vibrates between the speaker’s embodied persona of feminine compliance and her interior anger and aspirations toward masculine autonomy. The split psyche of the text, called either “I” or “you,” replicates, as nearly as possible, the poet’s own divided desires. In a similar vein, de Burgos’s last poem, the plaintive “Farewell from Welfare Island,” refers to itself as “my cry into the world,” and it is indeed her last such utterance in poetry, banking on the plurisignation of the noun “cry” as at once public voice raised in protest, fit of weeping, and sound of an animal. Perhaps it was Gwendolyn Brooks, more than anyone, who established the conflation of childhood memory, emotional crisis, and political context as the basic building blocks of a new kind of poem. Brooks first delved into her childhood memories in a long autopoetic sequence called Annie Allen (1949), and then reframed the materials as an autofictional prose text called Maud Martha (1953). Annie Allen resembles a series of snapshots of the life of Brooks, slightly disguised as “Annie Allen.” The sequence presents both the troubled scenes of early childhood and the movement toward later self-fashioning. In so doing, it foregrounds the tensions of growing up Black in a racist society. Deploying a narrative of development, while complicating it through irony, Annie Allen innovated this kind of poem a decade before Lowell’s Life Studies made it normative. Brooks’s juxtaposition of the poetry of Annie Allen and the prose narrative of Maud Martha (both are reprinted in Brooks’s Blacks) prefigures similar juxtapositions between poetry and prose found in Lowell’s Life Studies, Bishop’s Questions of Travel, Clifton’s Good Woman, and Coleman’s Heavy Daughter Blues. It’s worth emphasizing that Brooks’s “family pictures” (Blacks 481) began appearing as early as the 1940s, at a time when Lowell was still experimenting with “highly wrought” traditional verse (Meyers 146). In making his famous “breakthrough into life” (Meyers 55) in 1957–9, he seems not to have been consciously influenced by Brooks’s example, or at least he never indicated that he was. In 1961, Elizabeth Bishop recommended Brooks to Lowell, though in a condescending manner: I’m not the person to know—of course—but you might look at Gwendolyn Brooks’s last book. —I haven’t seen that either, and the one I did see [Annie Allen] was half-hopeless, but she

Elizabeth Bishop splits the difference in “In the Waiting Room,” calling herself “Elizabeth” but giving her aunt an invented Latina name, while Plath provides her mother’s name (Aurelia) in code in “Medusa” by figuring her as a medusa aurelia, a species of jellyfish. 3

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did have something occasionally, and I liked her very much when I met her and talked to her, and Negroes should be paid extra attention, anyway. (Travisano 360) Lowell did not answer Bishop’s letter, and since he never published a word about Brooks, we do not yet know whether he read her poetry at all. As for Brooks, she was a dissenting member of the committee that awarded a Pulitzer Prize to Lowell’s The Dolphin in 1974. Despite such dissonances, Lowell created a space for poetry very similar to the one Brooks had invented a decade before, as Bishop seemed to have sensed. Like Brooks, Lowell provided what I have called “a shattered image of home” (“Lowell’s Postmodernity” 251). Like her, he evoked real childhood memories and more recent emotional crises, since “the needle that prods into what really happened may be the same needle that writes a good line” (Meyers 75). And like his precursor, he used his everyday experience to suggest and interpret the political contradictions of his time. Although Lowell and Sexton were apparently not very interested in Brooks’s work, her poetry was a landmark in the confessional mode they would popularize. Brooks’s achievement is another example of African American creativity functioning as the often-unacknowledged bedrock of American culture. In Annie Allen she clearly turned her poetry into a variety of life writing that both mirrored and countered prose. Brooks used invented names instead of real ones in the first sections of Annie Allen, but the poem re-creates remembered scenes from her childhood. Brooks’s parents—unlike Lowell’s and Sexton’s—were still alive when she wrote, and she must have wanted to protect their privacy. In the later segments of the poem, when she is no longer dwelling on her parents, she drops the third-person narration and adopts a self-referential “I.” The first section of the poem, called “Notes from the Childhood and Girlhood,” portrays Annie’s mother, “Maxie Allen,” as an overbearing parent whose strengths and weaknesses correspond to the ones Brooks perceived in her mother Keziah Brooks. As Brooks’s biographer George Kent observes, the poem cuts “deeply into Gwendolyn’s personal life” (Kent 246). Maxie teaches her daughter to feel pious gratitude for what she receives, but the child, as she grows, tries to tell her mother “there was somewhat of something other” (Brooks, Blacks 84). Maxie, being maximal, cannot hear her but rather thinks “at her” with an “inner voice” that was like “an oceanic thing” (84). The mother’s thoughts concern her own complaints against going to bed “with two dill pickles”— perhaps her husband and his penis (85). What begins as a rift between mother and daughter ends as a division between mother and father as well. The theme of dysfunctional domesticity, repeated in so many confessional texts at mid-century and beyond, begins right here, in a poem that combines “universalizing form” with “black particularism” (Kent 85). The second section of Annie Allen depicts Annie falling in love, marrying, finding the marriage ruptured, and surviving. This is not only a representation of Brooks’s marriage to Henry Blakely, but also a prophecy of separations to come. In the third section, called “The Womanhood,” we see Annie reflecting on race, class, and community, and becoming increasingly perceptive about the human world around her. “The Children of the Poor” reveals her empathy for the weakest among us. She wonders what to give to children who are poor, “Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land, / Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand / No velvet and no velvety velour” (Brooks, Blacks 116). In the very next segment, Annie turns to her own young child, who, like her, enjoys the surprises of everyday life. It is a love of spontaneous events and ordinary fortitude that binds this mother to her son, and that makes life worth living for them, despite their lesions. Annie gradually moves from internalized struggle to loving awareness of self and others.

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In “The Boy Died in My Alley” (1975), one of her culminating poems in the domestic/ confessional mode, Brooks stages a memorable confrontation between the seemingly sheltered life of her home and the racial catastrophe occurring beyond her walls. Like other confessional texts to come, it suggests that the household does not stay separate, as the public violence repeatedly permeates its borders. Brooks was haunted by the stories of two Black boys, one in Ghana, a place she had visited, and the other involving Kenneth Alexander, an honors student in the same high school class as her daughter Nora (Melham 222–3). Both boys had run from police officers, and both had been shot and killed. Brooks’s poem takes the form of a confession by a Black woman whose situation is imagined (Brooks did not live next to the alley where Alexander had been killed) but whose inner monologue mirrors Brooks’s own. When questioned by a policeman about the shots on the morning after the killing, the housebound speaker comments, “Shots I hear and Shots I hear,” to imply the multiplicity of such violent deaths (Brooks, Essential 114). The news penetrates her house as ordinary urban noise but is walled away from visual contact. Yet the policeman pounding at her door, inquiring about (or covering up) the crime, reveals through his pounding both his power and the house’s fragility, and he makes the news of this particular death both visible and auditory. Rather than placing the blame on the police or a gang member, the speaker takes the blame herself, reflecting on her selfish wish to cocoon within domestic space. Although she had never met the boy, she claims to have “known” him (115), in the sense of having met many such at-risk young men and having done too little to try to save them. She says that she herself has killed him through “knowledgeable unknowing.” She imagines that he cried “Mother!” and that the cry, directed at herself, climbed up the alley unheard. She laments that the blood in the alley is “a special speech” to her. The unnecessary death, the unsolved crime, the failed protection of the young— all this penetrates her sheltered domesticity, becoming present to the senses in the bloodied alley and the boy’s re-created utterance. The poem confesses that domesticity participates in violence by facilitating willed obliviousness. Brooks’s version of the domestic/confessional explodes the domestic and turns the confessional away from personal self-enclosure toward a poetics of public engagement and mourning. Sometime between 1960 and 1962, Robert Hayden, a Black Midwesterner like Brooks, wrote a poem that easily could serve as a demonstration poem of the high confessional mode. Yet it has rarely been read that way, though it has indeed been considered a significant work of art. Published in 1966, it is a domestic memory poem, a wintry one, suffused with a sense of psychic pain and ambivalence, expressed through a style that could best be described as detached or ironic, terms that have also been used to describe Lowell’s Life Studies. And yet there is something more here, something not offered by white writing: the intimate sense of Blackness. “Those Winter Sundays” evokes the Sunday mornings when the speaker’s father woke early to light the fire that was the house’s only source of heat. Once the rooms were warm, and other household tasks accomplished, such as shining his son’s shoes, the father would wake his wife and son. What is palpable here that is absent in the poems of Lowell and Sexton is the acute awareness of race and poverty. Hayden’s synesthetic image of the “blueblack cold” echoes such blues songs as Fats Waller’s “Black and Blue” (1929), with its resonant line, “What did I do to be so black and blue?”—a question repeated in Ralph Ellison’s great novel about race, Invisible Man (1952). Hayden’s portrayed household is not simply Black but impoverished, without a heater. The father’s hands are cracked, aching from his weekday routine of manual labor.

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This poem has fourteen lines but is not rhymed as a sonnet would be. Although its tone initially suggests respect for the father’s thankless household labors, it gradually reveals the emotional violence that pervades the domestic scene. The young boy dresses slowly, “fearing the chronic angers of that house” (Hayden 41). That is, the poem reveals anxiety and trauma within the familial practice of duty and sacrifice. The son speaks “indifferently” to the father, as if protecting himself from both intimacy and abuse, and possibly to suppress his anger at the father’s abuse of the mother. And yet the poem exposes yet another secret at the end, as the son, now an adult, expresses forgiveness of the father and even guilt for his own lack of empathy. He describes the father’s domestic routines as “love’s austere and lonely offices.” There is much to unpack there: the father’s contradictory characteristics, the son’s mixed feelings, which only grow stronger through remembering, the complications of toxic masculinity and male bonding, the question of whether austere and lonely love is actually love at all, and the way interpersonal complexity reveals itself within a community that is both minoritarian and dispossessed.4 What role does white supremacy play in the suffering this poem reveals? That is a question that repeatedly arises in confessional texts by Black-identified artists, and one that is absent or tangential in poems by Lowell or Sexton. We sense similar textures of African American life in the confessional or post-confessional poems of Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, and Wanda Coleman. Clifton, for example, faces a problem endemic to African American self-representation, as identified by Lindon Barrett in regard to slave narratives: how do narrators “authenticate themselves as African Americans” without reifying “the hegemonic terms by which African American identity is construed” (137)? Clifton tackles this dilemma by continually reinscribing her troubled family relations from a myriad of perspectives, thereby replacing second-hand narratives with multiple, highly specific ones that together create a powerful aura of reality. Just looking for parental titles in Clifton’s Collected Poems, we find “My mother teached me” (49), “To Mama too late” (50), “Dear Mama” (51), “daddy” (62,), “my mama moved among the days” (67), “my daddy’s fingers move among the couplers” (68), “daddy 12/02– 5/69” (132), “if mama” (192), “forgiving my father” (226), “mother, I am mad” (260), “enter my mother” (311), “my lost father” (420), “your mother sends you this” (601), “my father hasn’t come back” (644), and “dad” (645). In a prose memoir, “Generations,” she discloses the fabric not simply of her own life with her parents and siblings but also that of six generations of her family, all the way back to the women of Dahomey (now Benin) in West Africa (Good 223–76). Her life writing provides repeated alternative images of a family struggling with circumambient and internalized racism. Rather than reflecting a Lowellian atomized self and the fear that “nobody’s here” (Lowell 192), these poems aspire to adumbrate and affirm family and communal bonds “in afrikan ways” (“the thirty eighth year,” Collected 205). Sometimes the depicted characters fail to achieve that communitarian closeness, but often they succeed. Clifton’s poem called “confession,” for example, ends with a vision of “shimmering” ancestral voices singing in the populated air (Collected 267). These yearned-for sights and sounds can be traced back through what Sterling Stuckey called “slave culture” to the belief systems and social organizations of West African culture. In this way Clifton’s verse, like some of Brooks’s African poems, enlarges the scale of confessional poetry. It reminds us of the Afrocentrism at the core of Phillis Wheatley’s moment of confession. Such poems reach A similar unpacking of the father–son relationship is invited by Yusef Komunyakaa’s post-confessional “My Father’s Love Letters” (293), which similarly vibrates between the autopoetic speaker’s past embitterment and present wish to redeem his father. 4

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backward through “other continents” and into “deep time” to evoke “a much longer history than one might think” (Dimock 2–4). Like Clifton, Nikki Giovanni probes the interconnected identities of the autopoetic speaker and her mother. For example, “Mothers” implies the pains as well as the joy of the mother– daughter relation (Giovanni 114). The poem recollects the last time the speaker went home: she and her mother kiss, exchange pleasantries but also “unpleasantries,” and settle in to read books in silence—together but apart. Yet the poem also recalls the first time the speaker “consciously” saw her mother, which suggests that the relationship changes over time, refusing to calcify or simplify. The mother read a simple poem to the daughter, connecting with her that way, and setting the daughter off on her life journey. The daughter in turn teaches the same poem to her son, who later recites it back to his grandmother. It is a moment of pleasure that the speaker reminds herself to remember, determined not to dwell only on the pain, the “unpleasantries,” but to register the full range of feeling. “Mothers” is on the move emotionally. It also specifies a Black social world. The mother’s hair is “very black” (114), just as is the family culture. The daughter encounters the mother sitting alone in the kitchen of the three-room apartment, waiting for the girl’s father to return from his night job, or maybe for a “dream” she had hoped might come true (115). It’s then that the mother recites the four-line poem that becomes the text binding mother to daughter and grandson. The speaker, who has borne the pains of the family relationship, instructs herself to “bear the pleasures” too. But the word “bear” suggests that the bitter-sweet memory of pleasures lost in time is painful as well. Wanda Coleman’s poetry is likewise filled with “Confessions Noires” (one of her recurrent titles)—life writing that refuses what Langston Hughes called “this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization” (n.p.). Her poems, stories, and essays disclose secrets of the Black psyche, of Black family life and culture. They are also a kind of “poetry noir”—texts composed of shadows, betrayals, and mourning. We see in her work a clear example of the transition from confessional to post-confessional: that is, a second-generation rhetoric of confession that is aware of earlier iterations, to which it sometimes alludes, as in Coleman’s echoes of Sexton and Plath and in her rewriting of poems by Roethke and Ginsberg (“African Sleeping Sickness (3)” and “Supermarket Surfer,” respectively). Yet, as Carol Rumens has observed, “Coleman’s fight is bigger than the struggle with inner demons: it’s fired by outrage against society’s racism, poverty and inequality, experienced at the primary personal level.” Hers is a confession of Black life under persistent racism. Therefore, it makes sense to associate Coleman with other personal/political poets of color, not only Brooks, Clifton, Giovanni, Yusef Komunyakaa, Terrance Hayes, and Claudia Rankine, but also Mitsuye Yamada, Cherríe Moraga, Justin Chin, Leslie Marmon Silko, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Marilyn Chin. And we can also see the crossover between the Confessional and Beat movements in the inspiration Coleman drew from such beats as Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Clayton Eschelman, and Charles Bukowski (Goldstein 129; Murphet 11–12). In “Dear Mama (4),” the title of which echoes Clifton’s “Dear Mama,” Coleman provides a complicated but ultimately glowing portrait of a mother who often seemed unapproachable when the speaker was growing up but who later became a beloved support. The autopoetic speaker speculates that perhaps she had to run away, take a “big bite” of the white world and “choke on it” before she could befriend her mother (Coleman 179). Now that her mother is her intimate, she is terrified of losing her. She regards the mother’s words as silver coins, “treasure to bury within”

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(in a double sense). They will preserve her when memory becomes the only coin she possesses with which to purchase peace of mind. This post-confessional poem does not dwell on unhealed resentments situated in the past, as high confessional poems often do. It signals ambivalence and then transforms it, only to invite a new set of unprocessed emotions focused on the near future— fears of being motherless and alone. Like many other African American poems being discussed here, the locus of Coleman’s texts is working-class Black life, with all of its economic stresses and racial choke-holds. The domestic geography of Blackness becomes a central space, a complicated and often redemptive site of meaning and connectedness. But Coleman’s poems that focus on psychic crisis rather than the domestic sphere, such as “African Sleeping Sickness” and “Disconnections,” explore a more unfiltered realm of disturbance, from which there may be no escape or recovery. The speaker of “African Sleeping Sickness,” like Plath’s speaker in “Poppies in October” or Roethke’s in “In a Dark Time,” asks, “who am i?” (African 215). Unlike such predecessors, however, she ultimately finds a loophole in the sustaining qualities of Black family and community. In “Disconnections,” however, the prospects are rather bleaker, the future foreseen as being “wasted. sweet as raw sugar. untasted” (Mercurochrome 47). The connection to Black maternity and sociality cannot heal every sort of damage. Interestingly, when Coleman’s fellow Los Angeles bard, Tupac Shakur, echoed Coleman, it was not to invoke her grimmest texts, but instead “Dear Mama (4).”5 His touching hip hop lyric, also called “Dear Mama,” replicates both the earlier ambivalence and the present-day gratitude evidenced in Coleman’s poem. Perhaps Shakur’s lyric is a response to his earlier “When Ure Hero Falls,” which portrays his mother, the Black activist Afeni Shakur, as a fallen hero who has left him “alone 2 deal with my sorrow.” In “Dear Mama,” Shakur acknowledges the hurt his mother’s drug use and deception have caused him, but he dwells on the love and gratitude he feels toward her. In an act of empathy, he realizes that the pain she has caused is rooted in the pain she has felt. Seeking to comfort the mother, he repeats the assertion “You are appreciated” multiple times. He speaks in two voices in the song, mostly as himself, but also as part of a small chorus that includes the voice of a woman, perhaps representative of his half-sister Sekyiwa Shakur. In a sense Tupac Shakur is his mother, reflective of her artistic and political aspirations for him and her broken dreams for herself (Guy 90–144). Despite their domestic conflicts in the past, Tupac uses his lyric to confess his affection for and identification with her. Unlike Coleman, Shakur, with his underlying conviction of doom, does not concern himself with the possibility of outliving his mother. Harryette Mullen’s “Natural Anguish” and “Kristenography” (Mullen 52, 46) expand the postconfessional genre in both novel and familiar ways. “Natural Anguish,” for example, evokes a personal crisis enmeshed with social violence, particularly the twin legacies of Indigenous genocide and Black slavery. The poem does so by employing what Jean-Jacques Lecercle calls the linguistic Since both poets lived in Los Angeles and moved in some of the same circles, and since Shakur released his hip-hop song four years after the publication of Coleman’s “Dear Mama (4),” it is plausible that he knew of the poem, or at least of the title. Yet I have found no direct evidence of a connection. Nor that he knew of Lucille Clifton’s earlier version of “Dear Mama.” Michael Dyson quotes Shakur’s friend Leila Steinberg saying that Nikki Giovanni was one of his favorite poets, along with Maya Angelou and Sonia Sanchez (96). Dyson also reports that Shakur had Erlene Stetson’s poetry anthology, Black Sister, on his shelves. Although that anthology includes a substantial selection of poems by Black women, including Wheatley, Brooks, Clifton, Giovanni, and Audre Lorde, it does not include Coleman. Moreover, the Clifton poem it reproduces is not “Dear Mama” but “my mama moved among the days.” 5

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“remainder” of delirious word play (Lecercle 5, 55–9). In one moment of relative clarity, the autopoetic speaker says, “when I saw red I thought ouch” and “when I think colored someone bleeds” (52). Later, the speaker parodies “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” in such a way that it comments on the Middle Passage: “my ebony’s” under the ocean. The poem also verges on the queer confessional, again within a texture that highlights the play of language. Mullen writes that a bulldozer can knock down “dikes,” but as yet a “bull” (dyke) hasn’t been able to dismantle the policing of minoritarian subjects. It’s the present-day threats of silencing, imprisonment, and death that produce the natural (or national) anguish (or English, Anglo-ish) of the queer subject of color. “Kristenography” revises the classic confessional site of domestic memory, but instead of finding characters who “do not do” anymore (as in Plath’s “Daddy”), Mullen’s poem discovers family members worthy of love. It praises both mother and sister (Kristen) in a way that would be unthinkable for Plath. The sisters’ “smoother was a reacher who muddied lard, learned debris, and wept them upon the prosper pat” (Rankine 46). That is, the mother was a teacher who studied hard, learned to read, and kept her daughters on the proper path. In this poem, unlike in Lowell’s or Plath’s, or even Brooks’s or Clifton’s, there is unity rather than tension between mother and daughter. Similarly, “K quirked to learn her nastier debris and lat-ter she rave burps and becalmed herself a smoother” (47). That is, the sister earned her master’s degree and became a mother. Even the divorced “handsewn farther” is treated gently (46). At the same time, by employing verbal play reminiscent of Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Melvin B. Tolson, Mullen adds discordant notes to her tribute. The “inelegant” mother is intelligent, yes, but is she also, actually, inelegant? She “muddied lard,” suggests that she studied hard, but also, perhaps, that she entered unhealthy situations. Perhaps the sister’s master’s degree really is, in some sense, “her nastier debris.” Mullen’s verbal dexterity exposes a war of signification, a landscape of contradiction. Even the seemingly happy ending of the poem, “They all loved shapely over laughter” (47) with its emphasis on love and laughter, adds a degree of ambiguity when we read the traditional fairy-tale ending it evokes through homophones: They all lived happily ever after. Superficially pretty, this conclusion may be double coded as ironic, since it is repeating an obsolete formulation based on white fantasy. The differences and similarities between Black and White confessions are entangled with the changing characteristics of the confessional/post-confessional genre itself. In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine brilliantly reshapes the post-confessional poem as a fundamentally African American, communitarian text, one that uses paragraphs more than lines, discursivity more than condensation, and “you” instead of “I.” In the first part of the poem,, Black voices speak of the racist micro-aggressions they have encountered. The pronoun used is the ambiguously plural or singular second-person, rather than the traditionally confessional first-person singular. It is impossible to tell which, if any, of these “you” voices emanate from Rankine herself. Beyond that, the degree to which each confession figures the poet’s own experience remains opaque, though the implication is evident that the confessions do so to some degree. Part II tells and reinterprets the story of tennis player Serena Williams as a paradigmatic narrative of a racist attack. Parts III and IV return to the format of “you” confessions that reveal disturbing interactions along the color line. In part V, the poem addresses the issue of its relationship to the Euro-American, male-centered poems of Robert Lowell. The poem stages a dialogue or group discussion with Lowell about the strengths and drawbacks of the first-person singular in poetry, and it’s often difficult to know which sentences are Lowell’s and which ones are not. The non-Lowell voice or voices allude

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to Lowell’s texts in the process of either arguing with or praising him—or both. The ambiguity suggests an autobiographical framework for this section. In her interview with Andrew Knightly, Rankine explains that she was initially influenced by Lowell and such successors as Louise Gluck, Frank Bidart, and Sharon Olds, but then encountered anti-confessional poets such as Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Leslie Scalapino, and Rae Armantrout, and she thought, “How do I navigate this?” (Andrew Lyndon Knighton 279). All we can say for sure is that Rankine includes Lowell in her “Works Referenced” section, so she means for us to recognize her citations. The full list of references are to Lowell’s Land of Unlikeness, Life Studies, Near the Ocean, History, The Dolphin, and Day by Day, though Rankine cites only Life Studies and For the Union Dead in “Works Referenced.” One voice says, “You said ‘I’ has so much power; it’s insane” (Rankine 71). This speaker might be Rankine, the poet who employs the second-person “you.” “Insane” is probably denigration, though it might also indicate a measure of hyperbolic admiration. Soon another voice says, “Tried rhyme, tried truth, tried epistolary untruth, tried and tried.” This sounds like Lowell summarizing his career, from his early use of rhyme to his later autobiographical free verse to his still later assemblage, The Dolphin, which included versions of his wife’s letters. Rankine or someone responds, “You really did. Everyone understood you to be suffering and still everyone thought you thought you were the sun—never mind the unlikeness, you too have heard the noise in your voice” (71). This passage refers to Lowell’s Land of Unlikeness (his first volume) and to “the noise of my own voice” in “Epigraph,” the final poem of Day by Day (his last volume). Then the same or a similar voice companionably invites Lowell to “sit down. Sit here alongside.” This voice, or an allied one, then says, “Your ill-spirited, cooked, hell on Main Street, nobody’s here, broken-down, first person could be one of many definitions of being to pass on” (73). This sentence includes three citations from “Skunk Hour” (Lowell, Collected 191–2), and one from Lowell’s acceptance speech upon receiving the National Book Award. The speaker seems possibly conciliatory, conceding that Lowell’s confessional first-person might be one of several viable poetic options to “pass on”— though, depending on which word one emphasizes, “pass on” might also mean reject rather than bequeath. Finally, the Rankine-like voice says, “Yours is a strange dream,” and the Lowellian voice replies, “No, it’s a strange beach; each body is a strange beach, and if you let in the excess emotion you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads” (73). This sentence echoes Lowell’s Near the Ocean and “Man and Wife” in Life Studies. These exchanges do not really resemble the tense Black–White conversations highlighted elsewhere in Rankine’s poem. These compose a respectful, even affectionate dialogue between two poets with interests in common but also with social positions and viewpoints that differ. For Rankine, the poetic confession is primarily social, communal, and shared. It includes race as a primary optic. Her catalogues of micro-aggressions against Black subjects are mostly or entirely based on confessions made by people she listened to. For Lowell, the poetic confession was primarily individual, a matter of one person who oscillates between domestic and political entanglement and alienated isolation. Race may figure in, but in a subordinate way; the primary optic is that of neurodiversity or social maladaptation. Lowell’s poems may speak for others, but the starting point is personal experience. Rankine’s poem speaks centrally of a community of others, though it also has personal resonances. Rankine swerves from Lowell even as she empathizes with him. This duality encapsulates the changing role of the post/confessional genre and the complicated relations between Black and White cultures as a new century unfolds.

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WORKS CITED Axelrod, Steven Gould. “Gwendolyn Brooks and the Middle Generation.” Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co: MiddleGeneration Poets in Context, ed. Suzanne Ferguson, University of Tennessee Press, 2003, pp. 26–40. Axelrod, Steven Gould. “Lowell’s Postmodernity: Life Studies and the Shattered Image of Home.” Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell & Co., ed. Suzanne Ferguson, University of Tennessee Press, 2003, pp. 251–68. Barrett, Lindon. Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity, ed. Justin Joyce, Dwight McBride, and John Carlos Rowe. University of Illinois Press, 2014. Bolden, B. J. Urban Rage in Bronzeville: Social Commentary in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, 1945-1960. Third World Press, 1999. Brooks, Gwendolyn. Blacks. Third World Press, 1987. Brooks, Gwendolyn. The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, ed. Elizabeth Alexander. Library of America, 2005. Clifton, Lucille. Collected Poems 1965–2010, ed. Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser. BOA Editions, 2012. Clifton, Lucille. Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980. BOA Editions, 1987. Coleman, Wanda. African Sleeping Sickness Stories & Poems. Black Sparrow Press, 1993. Coleman, Wanda. Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems & Stories 1968–1986. Black Sparrow Press, 1991. Coleman, Wanda. Mercurochrome: New Poems. Black Sparrow Press, 2001. de Burgos, Julia. “Farewell from Welfare Island.” https://allpoe​try.com. Accessed August 15, 2021. de Burgos, Julia. Song of the Simple Truth, compiled and trans. Jack Agueros. Curbstone Press, 1997. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton University Press, 2006. Dyson, Michael. Holler if You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur. Basic Civitas Books, 2006. Giovanni, Nikki. Selected Poems. Morrow, 1996. Goldstein, Laurence. “City of Poems.” The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles, ed. Scott Timberg and Dana Gioia, Red Hen Press, 2003, 124–42. Grobe, Christopher. The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV. New York University Press, 2017. Guy, Jasmine. Afeni Shakur: Evolution of a Revolutionary. Atria Books, 2004. Hayden, Robert. Collected Poems, ed. Frederick Glaysher. Liveright, 1986. Hayes, Terrance. “My Gwendolyn Brooks.” The Poetry Society website, poetrysociety.org.uk/the-poetry-societyannual-lecture-society-terrance-hayes/. Accessed June 18, 2022. Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Poetry Foundation website. www.poetr​yfou​ndat​ ion.org/artic​les/69395/the-negro-art​ist-and-the-rac​ial-mount​ain. Accessed June 18, 2022. Knighton, Andrew Lyndon. “Claudia Rankine” [Interview]. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Craig Svonkin and Steven Gould Axelrod. Bloomsbury Publishers, 2023, pp. 277–83. Komunyakaa, Yusef. Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems. Wesleyan University Press, 2001. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. The Violence of Language. Routledge, 1990. Lowell, Robert. Collected Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Lowell, Robert. Speech accepting National Book Award for Life Studies, 1960. https://www.natio​nalb​ook.org/rob​ ert-lowe​lls-acce​pts-the-1960-natio​nal-book-awa​rds-in-poe​try-for-life-stud​ies/. Accessed June 18, 2022. Melhem, D. H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice. University Press of Kentucky, 1987. Meyers, Jeffrey, ed. Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs. University of Michigan Press, 1988. Middlebrook, Diane Wood. “What Was Confessional Poetry?” Columbia History of American Poetry, ed. Jay Parini and Brett C. Millier, Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 632–49.

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Mullen, Harryette. Sleeping with the Dictionary. University of California Press, 2002. Murphet, Julian. Literature and Race in Los Angeles. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Nelson, Deborah. “Confessional Poetry.” Cambridge Companion to American Poetry, ed. Jennifer Ashton, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 31–46. Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014. Rosenthal, M. L. “Poetry as Confession.” The Nation, 189, September 19, 1959, 154–5. Rumens, Carol. “Poem of the week: Nocturne by Wanda Coleman.” The Guardian, June 7, 2021, n.p. https:// www.theg​ u ard​ i an.com/books/booksb​ l og/2021/jun/07/poem-of-the-week-noctu ​ r ne-by-wanda-cole ​ m an. Accessed June 18, 2022. Shakur, Tupac. “Dear Mama.” https://gen​ius.com/2pac-dear-mama-lyr​ics. Accessed September 9, 2021. Shakur, Tupac. “When Ure Hero Falls.” https://allpoe​try.com./When-Ure-Hero-Falls. Accessed September 9, 2021. Spivack, Kathleen. With Robert Lowell and His Circle. Northeastern University Press, 2012. Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture. Oxford University Press, 1987. Travisano, Thomas, with Saskia Hamilton, eds. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Wheatley, Phillis. “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth.” Poems, With Letters and a Biographical Note. Dover, 2010, pp. 33–5.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Binding Nation-States: Poetry Anthologies of Hawai‘i, 1966–2018 STANLEY ORR

The anthology form derives its name from Meleager’s The Garland, a first-century BCE collection of amatory poems and epigrams in which each poet represented is figured as a flower or fruit (Buchmann 223). Despite its belletristic origins, however, the literary anthology has often been associated with the exercise of political power. Theodore O. Mason, for example, aligns anthologies with the census, the map, and the museum: “The anthology represents and depends on the classificatory grid and represents this whole in a museum of the imagination, a museum dependent on literary representation” (193). Mason further notes that this complex, of which anthologies form one element, may be deployed by colonial powers “to establish a taxonomy of control” (191). To be sure, Mason’s primary text, The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, exemplifies a way in which the anthology form may be turned against the status quo, insofar as such texts depend “on the capacity to identify who counts in the cultural whole” (193). That said, the anthology also serves as “a first line of defense against letting most ethnic writers in the classroom door” (Lauter 20). By virtue of circular argument, marginalized writers have often been deemed unworthy of inclusion because they do not already appear in these tomes. Little wonder then that Susan M. Schultz glosses “Pacific Poetries,” a 2011 issue of the web-based journal Jacket2, with the observation, “Bound anthologies are fixed, stiffly covered, and resemble small literary nation-states; they claim authority like territories that are governed, paid fealty to, often eventually invaded.” Schultz’s formulation is especially apt, for the anthology has indeed proved a site of contest with respect to the poetries of Hawai‘i. In his 2006 study, American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination, Paul Lyons at one point pursues a “ ‘literary’ anthologies-as-litmus line” (7), suggesting that the elision of Hawai‘i writers within such collections symbolizes the islands’ suspension between the continental United States and Oceanic archipelagos to the south: “If one takes the organization of cultural production as indexical of broad national understandings, the most progressive anthology of U.S. imaginative writing, the Heath Anthology of American Literature, reflects the confusion that U.S. narratives have about how to ‘include’ Hawai‘i” (6). Lyons notes that the Heath excludes Hawai‘i writers, an omission revised only recently by the inclusion of Cathy Song. At the same time, however, Hawaiian artists were also excluded from Lali (1980) and Nuanua (1995) (the first

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poetry collections devoted to Oceanian literature). He concludes, “Islander-oriented socio-political contexts and cultural vitality routinely drop out of U.S. humanities writing about Oceania” (7). Notably, in the three-volume New Anthology of American Poetry (2003–12), Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano anthologize poems by Queen Liliʻuokalani and Cathy Song as well as anonymous Hawaiian work songs. But while continental editors and scholars look for ways to include Oceania in their various bound nation-states, the anthology form has persisted for several decades in Hawai‘i, illuminating the islands’ major poetic movements and critical debates— from Cold War cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism to “Local literature,” Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) poets, and Oceanic editors who celebrate Indigenous traditions and recover intertextual dialogues among diverse Pacific literatures and cultures. During the 1960s and 1970s, poetry anthologies of the Pacific emerged from a commitment to diversity and cosmopolitanism that has also been interpreted as an apparatus of empire. In the wake of the Second World War, the United States expanded and consolidated its presence in the Pacific by building upon its nineteenth-century colonial possessions in Polynesia to establish bases in Micronesia, the Japanese homelands, China, Korea, and the Philippine Islands. But how could the American superpower undertake continued Pacific expansion while maintaining its global image as the exceptional guardian of democracy against imperialism? This geopolitical conundrum was rendered all the more acute by Soviet claims that the United States was simply another holdover from the Victorian age of empire. In her study Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961, Christina Klein, following Mary Louise Pratt, argues that James A. Michener and other American middlebrow intellectuals responded with “anticonquest” narratives that “legitimated U.S. expansion while denying its coercive or imperial nature” (13). Throughout his many works of travel writing and historical fiction, Michener exhorted his fellow Americans to experience Asia and the Pacific not as conquerors but as tourists who might enjoy “moments of personal exchange in which traveler and host engage in some kind of verbal, intellectual, emotional, or financial give-and-take” (83). With recourse to Pratt, Klein terms these exchanges “dramas of reciprocity” (103), experiences that serve to transform Americans into broad-minded cosmopolitans capable of forging ties between East and West. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, these dramas of reciprocity emerged not only through travel writing but also through poetry written by visitors to Hawai‘i. Published in 1966, Festival: Poems from Hawaii is perhaps Hawai‘i’s first postwar poetry anthology. In her introduction to the volume, editor Phyllis Rose Thompson writes, “I have selected the best contemporary poems I could find from permanent or passing residents of this state.” She goes on to suggest that the selections, in various ways, “reflect the poet’s sense of his surroundings here—social, cultural, historical, or natural—and perhaps a sense of Hawaii’s special position in the nation and in the world.” Contending that “good poets generally have a strong and reliable sense of place where they are” (ix), Thompson integrates the belletrism of the anthology form with a concern for cultural and political geography. This position resonates with the cosmopolitan sensibility that pervaded Hawai‘i throughout the Cold War era. As we shall see, Festival nods toward diversity; but the nation-state projected by this anthology is dominated by haole (“foreign”) poets intrigued with what they see as the colorful and exotic milieu of Hawai‘i.1 In keeping with this Michenerian brand of tourism, these poets engage in moments of personal exchange and reciprocity with sights, sounds, and peoples of Hawai‘i. 1

For more on the term “haole,” see Wilson (273).

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The Thompson-edited Festival begins with Ştefan Baciu’s poem “Birthday in Hawaii.” In this piece, the autobiographical speaker casts his life as a “rollercoaster” winding from “Rumania to Waikiki” with “stops in Rio and Bern.” Baciu’s speaker wonders that he now competes with “the autumn wind of the Pacific” to “blow out 46 candles of / an imaginary pineapple cake / in Honolulu.” He muses that the rollercoaster might one day yield a birthday “on the Moon or on Mars” (1). Baciu’s speaker concludes his poem with an affirmation of his expatriotism as a vocation and way of life. Born in Brasov in 1918, Baciu spent most of his life exiled from communist Romania, including many years in Brazil and the United States. Poet, translator, critic, and journalist, he served as a literature professor at the University of Washington and at the University of Hawai‘i, Manoa, where he published the poetry magazine Mele (Hawaiian for “song”). As Yoshiro Sakamoto suggests, Baciu was an “archipelagic visionary” whose wanderings allowed him to create “his own cosmological geography through the poetic fusion of his fragmental memories of places and people” (62). Other poems in Festival persist with this dramatic situation of the Euro-American speaker creating a personal and idiosyncratic space in the Polynesian setting. William Meredith, perhaps the most celebrated poet in Thompson’s collection, contributes “Lines Written but Never Mailed from Hawaii” (1946), a meditation on “the things I could tell you about sunrise in the islands, / About the sense of summer troubling the cane, / Of flight as smooth as love above the sea at night” (3). As Richard M. Ludwig points out, Meredith, a naval aviator of the Second World War, “observes from above … as we would expect of a pilot” (74). With respect to anti-conquest gestures, one might not only recall Pratt’s notion of the drama of reciprocity, but also the “monarch of all I survey genre” in which the European/Euro-American explorer masters an exotic natural vista, “estheticizing” the scene and imbuing it with a painterly “density of meaning” in which “the landscape is represented as extremely rich in material and semantic substance” (Pratt 204). In a 1980 letter to the editor of the Honolulu Advertiser, Wayne Kaumualii Westlake argues, “Unfortunately, in the arts community of Hawaii, the missionary ideal still prevails.” He explains, “the government art ‘experts’ have deeply ingrained in their souls the ludicrous belief that the art world of Hawaii is so backward and behind the times that artists from all over the world have a moral mission to bring the saving artistic light to us pagan artists of Hawaii” (quoted in Hamasaki, introduction xxiii). As noted below, Westlake is one of the most important Native Hawaiian poets of the twentieth century. His remarks on the persistence of the missionary ideal amidst the Hawai‘i arts community illuminates the ways in which Festival not only foregrounds metropolitan poets such as Meredith, but also approaches Native Hawaiian culture in the “custodial” fashion of the missionaries. Although Festival includes a poem, “The Spider Shell,” written by an elementary school student, Tina Maule, who was likely Hawaiian, Native Hawaiian poetry emerges more evidently in the form of Alfons L. Korn’s poem “Lahilahi’s Song,” an Anglophone piece based on Hawaiian cultural material. Born in Iowa, Korn relocated to Hawai‘i after the Second World War; he served for many years as professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa. He collaborated with the famous Hawaiian scholar and kumu hula Mary Kawena Pukui (1895–1986) on the collection Echo of Our Song: Chants and Poems of the Hawaiians (1974). Within the anthological nationstate of Festival, Korn’s poem suggests that Native Hawaiian poetic traditions will be carried on by haoles; other poems in Thompson’s Festival represent Indigenous culture as a resource for these outsiders. While Marjorie Sinclair’s “Petroglyphs, Puako, Hawaii” situates the speaker as a colonial adventurer delighting in the discovery of ancient Kānaka Maoli artifacts, James. L. Allen’s

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“Surfer” finds in the famous Hawaiian sport an ordeal that might yield a sense of belonging for the settler: “To win half-hidden grins from bronze /And copper masks, and know they know / Inside you’re no outsider” (13). This lyric perfectly captures the Michenerian cosmopolitanism that pervades Festival as a whole. Allen presents a drama of reciprocity in which the speaker renders himself up to the promises and perils of island culture in hopes of gaining acceptance.2 The “verbal-ideological center” (Bakhtin 48) of Festival lies in its commitment to dramas of reciprocity; but the very cosmopolitanism of this rhetoric demands a nod to diversity. Throughout the twentieth century, Klein explains, Hawaiʻi itself emerged as a symbol of the multicultural American Dream. As early as the 1920s, sociologists extolled the virtues of Hawai‘i as a “melting pot of the Pacific” within which different races might coexist in harmony (Klein 249). Building on this mythos, postwar statehood advocates contended for Hawai‘i as an exemplum of American inclusiveness and equality—this in contrast to the unvarnished racism practiced throughout the American Southeast. Hawai‘i statehood, according to Klein, might “ease the memory of U.S. imperialism in the Pacific … by making Hawaii’s territorial status seem a temporary stage in the development toward full inclusion in the nation” (250). Such multiculturalism informs Festival insofar as the collection includes poems by several local Asian American poets, including Jean Yamasaki. Born in 1942, Yamasaki is Professor Emerita and former associate dean at University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa. A Samuel Beckett scholar, Yamasaki published the poetry collection Prepositions (2016) and contributed poems to books and journals. In her Festival poem “The Crouching Lion,” Yamasaki offers a meditation on the famous Windward O’ahu landmark—a geological formation resting on Pu‘u Manamana and also the site of a popular restaurant/bar, the Crouching Lion Inn. For Yamasaki’s speaker, the eponymous creature’s “muscles quiver but not in leaping / more in / Mixing anisette and rum” (21). The speaker here meditates upon the experience of drinking a Chichaito (the Puerto Rican cocktail consisting of licorice-flavored liqueur and rum) at the famous roadside eatery. This free-verse poem integrates Japanese waka conventions with those of concrete poetry: the contours of the poem suggest those of the Crouching Lion formation if not the Windward coastline itself. As such “The Crouching Lion” anticipates the “local” Hawai‘i literature movement carried on mainly by Asian American writers exploring connections to the region.3 Edited by Frank Stewart and John Unterecker, the anthology Poetry Hawaii carries on the Cold War cosmopolitanism of Festival while envisioning a somewhat more diverse nation-state, one that includes continental luminaries as well as local Asian American and Native Hawaiian poets. In his introduction, Frank Stewart suggests the ways in which the 55-poet anthology exemplifies the Islands’ multicultural ideal, “to achieve what all of us must learn to value—a renewed sense of grace in a profoundly disharmonious world” (xiv). Given his optimistic perspective, it is little wonder that Stewart applauds the metropolitan poets that Westlake deems missionaries: “by slow degrees into a state that in the early sixties had been that had been isolated from the revolution in poetry occurring on the mainland came a new ‘caravan’ of America’s celebrated poets” (xii). Whether missionaries or luminaries, these artists abound in Poetry Hawaii; for example, the collection

For a reading of the cultural and political dynamics of surf literature, including poets Don Blanding and Marge Lally, see Nigel Krauth and Jake Sandter, “Early Surf Fiction and the White Worldview.” 3 For more about the waka form, see Jean Yamasaki Toyama, “Intertextuality and the Question of Origins: A Japanese Perspective.” 2

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reprises Meredith’s “Lines Written but Never Mailed from Hawaii” and also includes a poem by Baciu on the cosmopolitan painter Jean Charlot. Moreover, Stewart and Unterecker’s Poetry Hawaii has several poems by W. S. Merwin, the most decorated poet to live and work in the Islands. Born in New York City and raised in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Merwin enjoyed a long and distinguished career, which included a Pulitzer Prize for the poetry collection The Carrier of Ladders (1970) and a term as Poet Laureate in 2010–11. In the 1970s, Merwin began studying Buddhism in Hawai‘i; he ultimately relocated to Maui where he and his wife Paula Dunnaway returned their pineapple plantation estate to its origins as a native rainforest. In his verse novel The Folding Cliffs (1998), Merwin offers an epic retelling of The Story of Kaluaikoolau (Ka Moolelo Oiaio o Kaluaikoolau, 1906) by Piilani Kaluaikoolau. Interpretations of this poem in some sense emerge as a referendum on metropolitan poets in Hawai‘i. While Ted Hughes recognizes The Folding Cliffs as a masterpiece of postcolonial advocacy for Hawaiians (see Palleau-Papin), Kapalai‘ula de Silva argues, “If it is a masterpiece, it is a masterpiece of literary colonialism.”4 Poetry Hawaii includes five poems by Merwin. “Mountain Day” dramatizes a hike, almost certainly a climb to the top of Mauna Kea on Hawai‘i Island. Recalling Walt Whitman’s 1867 poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” “Mountain Day” finds the speaker bypassing the observatories in favor of a more intimate experience of the cosmos: “we … lie / braided together looking up / at Cassiopeia over the foothill” (70). While poems such as “Mountain Day” resonate with the cosmopolitan “dramas of reciprocity” that pervade Festival, other selections in Poetry Hawaii reflect this anthology’s elaboration of Hawai‘i multiculturalism. Unlike Festival, Stewart and Unterecker’s Poetry Hawaii turns upon an inclusive multiculturalism that makes a bit of room for the emerging Native Hawaiian poets of the day. In “Summit,” for example, Kānaka Maoli poet and legal activist Michael McPherson describes an ascent very different from that of Merwin’s “Mountain Day,” a climb along “flat stones” to an altitude where “even / Lizards are slow.” These heights “Afford us / A clear view of nothing across the channel” (63). Commenting on his own “dense, researched” literary writing, McPherson remarks, “I stubbornly persist in the notion that if readers outside Hawaii, or new to Hawaii, want to understand who we are and what we are about, then it is their obligation to immerse themselves and learn” (McPherson 115). When Poetry Hawaii was published, McPherson was living in Maui, and “Summit” may dramatize a walk along the Kihapiilani Road, a centuries old thoroughfare, paved with flat stones (Thrum 86), that runs from the Hana Coast to Kaupo Gap on the slopes of Haleakala. As memorialized by Dana Naone Hall (née Dana Naone) in her 1985 poem “Ka Mo’olelo o ke Alanui (The Story of the Road),” the Kihapiilani Road exemplifies the way in which the ever-burgeoning Hawai‘i tourist industry threatens Indigenous cultural sites (Wilson 378). Featuring two poems by McPherson, Stewart and Unterecker’s Poetry Hawaii also includes several pieces by Naone Hall. While a number of these pieces revolve around feminist tropes and images, “Sunday Service” looks forward to Naone Hall’s later poems, which foreground postcolonial thematics.5 Beginning with the lines “The hymns we sing today go straight / into the ears of tiger lillies,” Hall’s “Sunday Service” gathers momentum as a jeremiad against the Christianity that has served as a driving force of US empire-building in Hawai‘i (75). Amidst the rustling of desiccated Sunday best, the speaker or more on The Folding Cliffs, see Kennedy (71–2). F Of note, in 2012, Naone Hall led successful activism against the excavation of ancient Native Hawaiian remains on the grounds of the Congregational Kawaiahaʻo Church in Honolulu. 4 5

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hears her father knocking at the door, waiting on the steps of the church. Holding her “book of tears,” the speaker does not answer, but responds with a glance “down the aisle of black shoes.” Amidst these somber images, the speaker indulges in a wry allusion to Rev. 3:20 (“Behold I stand at the door and knock”). In his preface to Poetry Hawaii, John Unterecker invokes the familiar notion of Hawai‘i as the “crossroads” of the Pacific (v) and points out that its poets have successfully resisted the American drive toward homogeneity (keenly felt in the wake of Statehood) to embrace not only Western but also Polynesian and Asian traditions. Stewart elaborates this idea in the anthology’s introduction, writing, “In Hawaii, where the multiplicity of cultures and languages makes one every day aware of, and sometimes almost proficient in, cultural integration, poetry of a particular sort is developing” (xiv). This multicultural impulse comes across through the juxtaposition of metropolitan and Native Hawaiian poets and is also clear in the anthology’s many poems written by Asian Americans, among them Eric Chock and Cathy Song. Chock’s prose poem “Waolani Stream, 1955/1975” exemplifies the poet’s experimentations with images of water, fish, and fishing as well as “island settings vivid with history and sentient nature” (Suzuki-Martinez 55). Chock describes the snails and crayfish he fished for as a boy as being as alive as he was: “What game is it they played, what love of risk they lived, what hunger under a breaking sky!”(16). The poem’s title is perhaps as significant as any of its lines; the Nuʻuanu Valley setting, together with the twenty-year period, 1955–75, reads as the poet’s assertion of a long-term connection to place, though one perhaps qualified by the ongoing search with which the poem concludes. In this respect, “Waolani Stream, 1955/1975” perhaps anticipates the more overt struggle of the local Chinese American poet to establish a secure place on Hawaiian land (Fujikane, “Between Nationalisms” 3). As Unterecker suggests in his preface to Poetry Hawaii, a characteristic that recurs throughout this anthology is “a kind of tentativeness, as if the poet does not have all the answers”(vi). This caution certainly informs Cathy Song’s “Remnants,” which was originally published in the journal Hawaii Review and would later be revised in Song’s award-winning book Picture Bride (1983), a lyrical exploration of her grandmother’s experience immigrating from Korea to the O‘ahu sugar plantation town of Waialua. Born in Wahiawa and raised in the Honolulu suburb of Kahala, Song questions the American Dream optimism so important to Cold War narrations of Asian American Hawai‘i. The middle-class ideal of “neighborhood yards” and “new families with their bicycled children” is at odds with images of a crumbling house that cannot even be sold, a father “condemned” to Sisyphean renovations, and the “ghost room” of an absent sister—“Her clothes left unhanging, / an abrupt departure” (101–2). In the poem’s final tableau, this family home has become an empty nest as the speaker’s father continues his repairs into the night, and her mother, “in her leaf green sweater,” probes the darkness with a flashlight. Powerful in its own right, “Remnants” also looks forward to Picture Bride, Song’s depiction of the ways in which Asian American laborers, particularly women, might be subsumed into the Hawaiian landscape dominated by larger economic forces and corporate interests (Wallace 12). Inclusions such as Song’s “Remnants” exemplify Stewart and Unterecker’s support of the incipient “local literature movement” emerging throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Wilson 126). According to Rob Wilson, the local literature movement was inaugurated by three key events: the publication of All I Asking for Is My Body in 1975, the Talk Story conferences in 1978 and 1979, and the founding of Bamboo Ridge journal and press in 1978. In 1975 Milton Murayama published All I Asking for Is My Body, a novel that dramatizes the perils and promises of Maui plantation life

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as experienced by Kiyoshi Oyama and his family on the eve of the Second World War. Written in standard English, Hawai‘i pidgin, and Japanese, this bildungsroman engages in a grittily realistic portrayal of plantation labor and exploitation as well as the pressures of negotiations of assimilation and resistance. Such thematics would become central to the “Talk Story” conferences held in Honolulu (1978) and Hawai‘i Island (1979); as Wilson has it, these meetings created a “multiethnic forum [that] served as a catalyst to theorize and fill in the lack of literature written by and for locals; the false history and fake images of Hawai‘i had to be countered by a different set of narratives and images to evoke what John Dominis Holt called ‘the unexpurgated Hawai‘i’ ” (119). The year 1978 also saw the foundation of Bamboo Ridge Press by Eric Chock and novelist/playwright Darrell H. Y. Lum. “Drawing on a racially diverse coalition of writers who met regularly,” observes Wilson, and “mostly expressive of Asian-Pacific American concerns,” Bamboo Ridge began as “a key outlet for a literature grounded in local scenery and language” (120). Brenda Kwon, a poet and scholar of Korean American literature, argues that the sometimes elusive term “Local” holds a special significance in Hawai‘i: Generally, “Local” is used to refer to anyone of Asian or Pacific Islander descent who has been in the islands for longer than one generation. Although some long-time residents of European ancestry might be considered Local, historically the term has been used to distinguish itself from “white”/ haole (“foreigner”). More politicized definitions of “Local” call for a lineage that can be traced back to the plantation labor experience of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and with this, a working-class background. Also encompassed by the term is language (Hawai‘i Creole English or HCE), as well as a set of actions, behaviors, and codes—hence the term “Local-style.” (459) “Local dress, music, and food are products high in demand: perhaps the mark of a true dependent economy,” writes Kwon (459). More than any other lifeway, food exemplifies Hawai‘i culture and serves as a trope for the “Local” as a whole. According to Kwon, The Best of Bamboo Ridge (1986) and Growing Up Local: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose From Hawai‘i (1998), coedited by Eric Chock and Darrell H. Y. Lum, serve up a “ ‘mixed plate’ of Hawai‘i’s many voices” (471). To be sure, these Bamboo Ridge anthologies, alongside Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii’s Local Writers (1978), exemplify the Local literature ethos in Hawai‘i. As Maxine Hong Kingston suggests in her forward to Talk Story, “the poets fly from place to place in time machines” (5) and, as with Murayama’s All I Asking for Is My Body, there are many visits in these collections to the past of Hawai‘i sugar plantations. In The Best of Bamboo Ridge, for example, Garrett Kaoru Hongo contributes “C & H Sugar Strike Kahuku, 1923.” As its title suggests, the 1979 poem returns to a key moment of Hawai‘i labor activism, not in terms of public moments but rather through highly suggestive impressions of daily life on the North Shore O‘ahu plantation. At one point, a “drift of incense” suffuses the workers’ Quonset huts “where you read it like / a message—The burn / has started. The strike is killed” (35). In this instance, the smoke is not literal funerary incense but rather cane-fire smoke heralding the death of hope for better living conditions. Smelling the reek of burning cane, Hongo’s speaker might well envision an unending cycle of the hard labor lyricized in Juliet S. Kono’s poem “The Cane Cutters.” Kono creates a haunting tableau in which two elderly plantation workers, husband and wife, trudge into the freshly burned canefields before dawn: “They work the tall burnt fields, / Long into the tiring hours. They sing / And they dream to the pendulum / Swing of their machetes” (47). “The Cane

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Cutters” would later appear alongside other poems about plantation life in Kono’s 1988 Bamboo Ridge volume Hilo Rains. Another Hongo poetic contribution to Chock and Lum’s The Best of Bamboo Ridge, “Ass Why Hard,” offers wisdom from the speaker’s father-in-law: “Must be like my father-in-law/ tells me, the Gospel According / to Kubota, ‘Ass why hard, / eh, Hongo? Ass why hard’ ” (34). As with Murayama’s All I Asking for Is My Body, Hongo brings HCE (Hawai‘i Creole English) into play with standard English, inscribing the HCE expression as the title of his poem and as an epigram on the challenges of escaping proletarian life in and around the plantations. While many poems in The Best of Bamboo Ridge and Growing Up Local juxtapose characters’ pidgin with standard English narration, others allow the speaker this quintessential Local voice without any need for counterpoint. With respect to Growing Up Local, Brenda Kwon notes, “Diane Kahanu’s ‘Ho. Just cause I speak pidgin no mean I dumb’ uses HCE to delve into the nature of language and translation, subverting dominant ideas of ‘literary language,’ a move repeated in other HCE works such as Darrell H. Y. Lum’s ‘Beer Can Hat’ and Michael McPherson’s ‘Junior Got the Snakes’ ”(471). The Chock and Lum edited Growing Up Local also features three contributions from LoisAnn Yamanaka, a controversial writer famous for her use of pidgin in both poetry and fiction. In “Lickens,” “The Boss of the Food,” and “Tita: Boyfriends,” excerpts from her book Saturday Night at the Pahala Theater (Bamboo Ridge, 1993), Yamanaka offers what have become some of the most iconic examples of Hawai‘i pidgin in Local literature. “Tita: Boyfriends” is especially illuminating in this respect as the speaker confides, “Richard wen’ call me around 9:05 last night”: Tink I talk to him the way I talk to you? You cannot let boys know your true self. Here, this how I talk. Hello, Richard. How are you? Oh, I’m just fine. How’s school? My classes are just greeaat. (261) These lines verge upon the self-reflexive insofar as the speaker demonstrates a tactic of codeswitching between pidgin and standard English (Zane 176). This circumspection about the uses of pidgin in and throughout the Islands’ colonialist educational-industrial complex also emerges in Darlene M. Javar’s Growing Up Local poem “Shame and the First Day of College.” Sitting in a school auditorium, the speaker finds “I no can open my mouth”: My words, My sentences, Not going make sense. Too much pidgin. Pudgy, pilipino, pidgin speaking pygmy. I no like make shame. (293) As the poem progresses, Javar’s speaker reveals that, fearful of speaking in public, she spends hours perfecting her writing, “Cause I not stupid / I just no can talk / Good English / Yet” (294). The poem’s open-ended “Yet” conclusion, which leaves us wondering about the speaker’s path, has been read as an exemplum of the ways in which the Local literature movement has foregrounded pidgin while illuminating the difficulties faced by its speakers in Hawai‘i (Eades et al. 148). The speaker’s use of the phrase “Pudgy, pilipino, pidgin speaking pygmy” indicates the oppressive damage done

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to self-esteem by racism; this painful diction harkens back to the Aeti, Tumandok, Mamanwa, and other Filipino “Negrito” peoples who were successively oppressed by colonial powers (Seijas 47). Having the speaker identify herself in this way, in opposition to her “Japanese and Haole” classmates, Javar likewise questions Hawai‘i as a multicultural Pacific crossroads that affords Asians ready access to the American Dream. Although Javar’s poem finds a place in the anthological nation-state of Growing Up Local, Filipinx writers have been marginalized within the Local literature movement as a whole— underrepresented in prominent anthologies such as Talk Story and The Best of Bamboo Ridge. Moreover, Yamanaka’s high-profile Bamboo Ridge poetry collection Saturday Night at the Pahala Theater (1993) has been castigated for its portrayals of Filipinx peoples (Fujikane, “Sweeping Racism”). According to Roderick N. Labrador, Yamanaka’s books, along with the comedy stylings of humorists such as Frank DeLima, belie Hawai‘i as a multicultural paradise by furthering racist stereotypes of Filipinx individuals as Others who eat dogs and are fit only for labor on plantations old and new (299–304). In his critique of Hawai‘i multiculturalism, Labrador quotes Elmer Omar Bascos Pizo’s 2001 poem “Black Dog [pinoy style],” in which the speaker addresses comedians De Lima and Willy K: “everytime you meet me / … you never failed to ask me/ about that Black Dog” (quoted in Labrador 298). Pizo here uses the common Local literature gesture of alluding to “extratouristic” Hawai‘i as a means of exposing the movement’s complicity with racism against Filipinx people.6 Of note, Pizo has published many poems in Bamboo Ridge Quarterly, and his chapbook Leaving Our Shadows Behind Us was published by Bamboo Ridge Press in 2019. Labrador also broaches the ways in which Hawai‘i “Localism” normalizes settler colonialism while perpetuating the subjugation of Native Hawaiians. Citing poet Haunani-Kay Trask, Labrador explains that the emergence of the Local, with its “ ‘land of immigrants’ rhetoric,” obscures the plight of Kānaka Maoli people displaced by haoles and Asian Americans alike (297). Not surprisingly, these dynamics play out amidst the geopolitics of Hawai‘i poetry anthologies. As noted above, Native Hawaiians have often been excluded from the pages of US anthologies. In Rob Wilson’s view, Kānaka Maoli writers might well regard publication in US anthologies, among them the “American fishing hole” of Bamboo Ridge Press, as acquiescence to “liberal assumptions of American acculturation” (116). To be sure, Pacific Islander artists may even forgo the anthological nation-state trope in favor of different conceits. Alice Te Punga Somerville, following Barbara Benedict, recognizes the anthology as a species of the “fanatical … collecting, categorizing, and cataloguing” fundamental to European imperial/colonial cultures; but she also acknowledges Witi Ihimaera’s characterization of the anthology as a “marae where our writing will stand, to reflect the times” and posits her own conception of this form as an ocean-going canoe: “Pacific anthologies become waka: taking on things and travelers, dropping them off in new places, accruing value and meaning from the diversity of their cargoes” (Once Were Pacific 28–9). Since the 1980s, literary anthologies have served as an important gathering place for Native Hawaiian poets, one that supports the restoration of cultural connections between Hawai‘i and other Pacific Island communities. As Wilson observes, “Hawaiian writers have become increasingly committed to the achievement of native sovereignty based on a strong ‘nation within a nation’ model” (116); this commitment

6

This reading of course assumes the comedy of Frank De Lima and Willy K. as part of or adjacent to Local literature.

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is evident in Hoʿomānoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature (1989). Edited by Joseph Balaz, this book stands as the first literary collection devoted exclusively to Kānaka Maoli writers writing in English (Balaz xv). Throughout the 1980s, Balaz edited Ramrod, a literary journal that hosted diverse island contributors, including Cathay Song, Kathryn Waddell Takara, Konai Helu Thaman, Makiuti Tongia, and Albert Wendt. Balaz also took a special interest in the work of Frank Marshall Davis, the acclaimed African American poet, journalist, and labor activist who lived in Hawai‘i from 1948 until his death in 1987. Balaz’s Ramrod was the only local outlet to publish Davis’s poems, many of which critique the depredations of capitalism and imperialism in Hawai‘i. Ramrod also features contributions by Native Hawaiian writers Dana Naone Hall, John Dominis Holt, Imaikalani Kalahele, Haunani-Kay Trask, and Wayne Westlake (Hamasaki, Singing 127). These poets also appear, alongside many others, in Hoʿomānoa. In his preface to Hoʿomānoa, Balaz provides an overview of Hawaiian cultural history in modern times. He emphasizes the ways in which centuries-old Indigenous lifeways and traditions have been disrupted by the advent of colonizers—British explorers in the eighteenth century followed by New England missionaries and businessmen, as well as the diverse Asian immigrants employed as laborers on the plantations. Amidst this “continuous foreign influx,” notes Balaz, Native Hawaiians were deprived of political self-determination; in 1893, the Western plutocrats overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy and set the stage for US annexation in 1898. As part of this devastating usurpation, the American education system supplanted the Hawaiian language with English; as “Hawaiians became assimilated into the dominant culture of the United States,” many “suffered ethnic self-rejection and low selfesteem. However, as most Hawaiians struggled to adjust, survive, and at the same time hold on to indigenous cultural values within the American system, a latent pride began to surface and assert itself ” (xiv). Balaz concludes that this tension has yielded a contemporary Hawaiian literature that, while modern and cosmopolitan, is also rooted in traditional Indigenous forms such as the chant (vx). In his review of Hoʿomānoa, Paul Sharrad notes the way in which Balaz and his contributors depart from the “happy melting pot” multiculturalism of the Local literature movement (167). Leialoha Apo Perkins’s “Plantation Non-Song,” for example, recounts “years of lung-filling dust in Lahaina”: There was time and space for a child to grow up in playing between scraggly hibiscus bushes and hopping over rutty roads that smelled of five-day-old urine. (30) A “white newcomers” paradise, this Maui plantation terrain becomes a wasteland “mediocre for most things / and superlative for doing nothing.” For this speaker, the “canefield tracks” imposed upon ground “once blanketed with warrior dead and sorcerer’s bones” (30) do not represent the linear narrative of Enlightenment progress but rather the loss of an epic Indigenous past. Wasteland imagery similarly pervades Imaikalani Kalahele’s poem “Ōpala Uka,” in which each word constitutes a line that reads from top to bottom instead of left to right. The result is a concrete poem which visually reproduces the “poured rubble” (33) mountains, the “ ‘Ōpala Uka,” that comprise Honolulu’s skyline (Sharrad 168). In “Pupule,” another of Hoʿomānoa’s concrete poems, Wayne Kaumualii Westlake likewise deploys the wasteland imagery of ‘ōpala to represent the psychic toll exacted by American colonialism in Hawai‘i. Titled with the Hawaiian word for

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“insane,” Westlake’s poem reiterates “pupule” as a chaotic heap of letters, the remains, perhaps, of an Indigenous mind traumatized by American colonialism (ho‘omanawanui 30) or, as Robert Sullivan and Katharine Luomala suggest, “litter on the sidewalks of Waikiki,” where Westlake worked as a janitor in the early 1970s. Luomala and Sullivan point out, “The scattered letters in pupule also form words for prayer (pule), guns (pu), appetizers (pupu), and … random words in multiple langs” (441). Balaz’s Hoʿomānoa also includes “Hawaiians Eat Fish,” another of Westlake’s concrete poems that turns upon repetition and polysemy. Paul Sharrad interprets this poem as an example of the collection’s main trope, the seashore, this in keeping with a “traditional island life … sustained by small-scale farming of marine resources” (167). He further suggests that “Hawaiians Eat Fish” exemplifies “the project of trying to bring into harmony the forces of land and sea, tradition and modernity, vernacular and English” (167). Foregrounding the Native Hawaiian practice of kaona (“hidden, underlying, or multiple meanings” (31)), ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui glosses the manifold significance of “Hawaiians Eat Fish,” including its exhortation for Hawaiians to maintain a traditional seafood diet in the face of a culinary imperialism that decimates native populations throughout the Pacific (29). Taken together, “Pupule” and “Hawaiians Eat Fish” capture Hoʿomānoa’s duality, its frank recognition of colonial devastation and its affirmation of Indigenous lifeways that persist throughout this onslaught. Many other Hoʿomānoa poems capture this polarity. In “Spear Fisher,” for example, Balaz’s speaker responds to the admonition of “Hawaiians Eat Fish”: In Kona a Midwest businessman     caught a marlin,      and hung it upside down       on a wharf—   At Hale‘iwa   I caught a kūmū, and I ate it (37) The confrontation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous culture also informs Puanani Burgess’s “Choosing My Name,” in which the speaker embraces her Hawaiian “piko name” (40). Other poems, such as Michael McPherson’s “Hawaiian Cowboy” and John Dominis Holt’s “Aunty’s Rocks” offer respective portraits of Hawaiian figures who, to return to Balaz’s phrase, “adjust, survive, and at the same time hold on to indigenous cultural values within the American system” (xiv). John Dominis Holt is a foundational writer who in many ways catalyzed modern Kānaka Maoli literature with his 1964 essay “On Being Hawaiian” and with his novel Waimea Summer (1976). This book, which Albert Wendt dubbed Hawai‘i’s first postcolonial novel, critiques US attempts to take Hawai‘i away from the Pacific (“Presentation”). In this context, Wendt also cited Haunani-Kay Trask’s poem “From Ka ‘a’awa to Rarotonga,” in which the speaker envisions her spirit “dreaming flight” from Windward O‘ahu to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands:             High-soaring ‘iwa               Plying the Pacific                  With Maui’s hook (Whetu Moana, 229)

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The structure of Trask’s concrete poem, with its stanzas descending from left to right, recalls the shape of Hawai‘i’s islands reaching toward Rarotonga, all of which are linked by the origin stories of Maui (“Presentation”). Wendt offered these remarks during a talk delivered in 2005 at Leeward Community College; he was speaking on the poetry anthology Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English (2003), which he coedited with Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan. In his introduction to Whetu Moana, Wendt acknowledges that while many Oceanic nations, such as Samoa and Tonga, have achieved independence, others, including Aotearoa and Hawai‘i, continue to strive for decolonization: From about 1950 Polynesians have been writing back, presenting our view of the world and placing our people and places at the centre. All these changes are evident in the poetry we have selected, which reveals an interconnected web of linguistic, thematic, and worldviews. There is a commonality in our bubbling polyglot Polynesian diversity, the commonality of the ocean, of a shared vocabulary, of our communal cultures and values, and our colonial experience. (2) Underscoring the idea of “forces that draw our poetries together” (2), Wendt contributes his own poems to Whetu Moana alongside those of Oceanic luminaries such as Sia Fiegel, Witi Ihimaera, Dan McMullin, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, and Hone Tuwhare. The anthology’s commitment to decolonization, as well as its balance between Oceanic diversity and affinity, is nowhere more clear than in the poems found in Whetu Moana written by Hawaiian authors, including Haunani-Kay Trask, Joe Balaz, ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui, Monica Kaiwi, Imaikalani Kalahele, Māhealani Kamauu, Kapulani Landgraf, Naomi Losch, and Brandy Nālani McDougall. As Wendt points out, one of Whetu Moana’s many strands is its critique of “the cardboard, plastic culture of the tourist trade” (2–3), and many of the Hawai‘i contributions interrogate island sites that have been transmogrified by tourism. Māhealani Kamauu’s poem “Calvary at ‘Änaeho‘omalu,” for example, probes the meanings of a hotel’s Norfolk Pine Christmas tree “Festooned with implements / Of Hawaiian dance”: “All gifts from an ancient intelligence, / The whole show / Razzle dazzle electric …” (94–5). In “death at the christmas fair: elegy for a fallen shopper,” Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard likewise finds in the commodified holiday season a parable of “colonial amerika.” As the speaker looks on, an elderly “island man” expires amidst “fake tapa / & hawaiian deities air-brushed on tanks & tees”: “maybe you died of disgust uncle / the sight of this expensively crafted trash” (183–4). Of course, the tawdry commercialism decried by Kamauu and Sinavaiana-Gabbard, respectively, serves and enriches the deeply rooted interests that have long worked behind the scenes in Hawai‘i to dominate the island economy. Imaikalani Kalahele’s speaker in “Ode to Fort Street” apprehends this power structure at a glance from the titular vantage point in downtown Honolulu. Here, “marble and McDonald’s / obscure the harbor,” King Kalakaua stands “frozen in bronze,” and missionary scions continue to invent history (86). Kalahele perhaps recalls the well-known observation that Hawai‘i’s missionaries “came to do good and ended up doing well”; their sons lingered to overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy and amass incalculable wealth through shipping, agriculture, and tourism. Raised in the Fort Street area, Kalahele often sees “the old world covered by the new” alongside moments of Polynesian pride and solidarity. In a conversation with Anne Keala Kelly, Kalahele reflects, “When I see one Samoan bruddah on his way to high school in the morning, wearing jeans and shiny white shoes and shirt, and he has one lava-lava wrapped around his waist, I think, yea …

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cuz that bruddah is identifying. I like when I see Hawaiians making that kind of commitment” (quoted in Kelly 17). Brandy Nālani McDougall dramatizes a moment of inspiration and commitment in “Lei Niho Palaoa,” a poem that treats museological tourism rather than the mass cultural diversions of hotel decor, souvenirs, and fast-food. The speaker here addresses a traditional Hawaiian necklace, a whaletooth Lei suspended by braided human hair: “You have lived through decades under glass, / a velvet bust replacing the one / you once held with love” (125). Here again, Indigenous material culture has been misplaced by tourism and all but shorn of its original significance; it falls to the poem’s speaker to lament this loss but to make a gesture toward restoring cultural context. She concludes “Lei Niho Palaoa” with an encouragement: “Your people will come for you soon” (125). According to Alice Te Punga Somerville, the speaker’s interaction with the Lei galvanizes her sense of community and solidarity. McDougall therefore rejects the museum’s transmutation of the Lei into an “exotic spectacle” and a “passive memento of history,” instead recognizing here an active and influential member of the Native Hawaiian community (Te Punga Somerville, Nau Te Rourou 236 n.660). In 2013, Wendt, Whaitiri, and Sullivan followed Whetu Moana with Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English, which includes many of the Hawaiian poets of the earlier anthology as well as selections by Alohi Ae‘a, Kimo Armitage, Chelsea Mana‘olana Duarte, David Keali‘i, Kealoha, Māhealani Perez-Wendt, and Wayne Kaumualii Westlake. Trans-Oceanic connections persist in Mauri Ola, especially evident in Victoria Nālani Kneubuhl’s lyrical Sāmoa-Hawai‘i journeys in “For Dotsy (Tasi)” and “Olo” and Tiare Picard’s “Friday,” with its rejection of political/ colonial demarcations: “meander, cross Roosevelt Memorial / Bridge or Ford Island Bridge, coral roads / that arc for Pape‘ete or Majuro” (158). Successive literary anthologies also describe arcs between Hawai‘i and Micronesia, among them Home(is)lands: New Art and Writing from Guåhan and Hawaiʻi (2018), coedited by Brandy Nālani McDougall and Craig Santos Perez. Building upon Te Punga Somerville’s metaphor, McDougall and Perez also envision Home(is)lands as an ocean-going canoe, a “wa‘a/sakman that gathers us together to emphasize our solidarity, mutually recognize our political and cultural sovereignty, and challenge American and Asian colonialism in all forms” (8). In their preface to Home(is)lands, the editors concisely survey the tandem histories of Hawai‘i and Guåhan (Guam), noting the ways in which Kānaka Maoli and CHamoru peoples experience imperial/colonial domination, experiences that threaten to intensify throughout the twenty-first century as the United States and China vie for Pacific hegemony (6). Whether writing in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, fino’ CHamoru, or English, the Home(is)lands contributors share a brace of interrelated concerns: “criticizing colonialism, militarism, and tourism; questioning colonial narratives and stereotypes; and articulating cultural identity, political independence, and visions of self-determination” (8). Given these thematics, it is not surprising that constructions of physical space emerge as a consistent focus of the poems in Home(is)lands. David Keali‘i’s poem “Where Are You From? (Son for the Return Home)” begins with a section entitled “Dwelling,” in which the speaker grimly surveys a “concrete kingdom” of “reinterpreted plantations” that thrives on tourism rather than produce (19). With its images of Honolulu as a detritus-ridden wasteland, Keali‘i’s poem recalls earlier poems such as Kalahele’s “ ‘Ōpala Uka” and Westlake’s “Pupule.” But “Where Are You From? (Son for the Return Home)” also resonates with other Home(is)lands pieces. In “Returning to My Mother(is)land, Returning Home,” Kisha Borja-Quichocho-Calvo posits a

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speaker who suffers “a traumatized soul / a soul suffocated by gated communities and hotels and ‘No Trespassing’ signs” (50). As Ashlee Lena Affonso writes in her poem “Hawaiian Tourism Authority,” frenzied pursuit of the American Dream leads to death rather than life: “Buried deep in the realm of capitalism, / We willingly suffocate ourselves and / Lose grasp of our culture” (72). In Affonso’s “MCBH,” however, the colonizer’s barriers have lost their democratic pretense to become explicitly military: “Staring at the back gate of the/ Marine base / Private access …. They have made me the enemy” (71). To borrow a phrase from Samoan-American dramatist John Kneubuhl,7 Affonso and other poets in Home(is)lands register a sense of being a stranger in one’s own land. In “Save Pågat,” Jay “Sinangan” Baza Pascua exhorts CHamoru readers to fight this feeling of alienation; the poem describes a jungle trek to the village of Pågat, which has been threatened with destruction as a US military test range. Feeling the presence of his ancestors, the speaker proclaims, “Face fear in the face and protect this hallowed ground” (20). Underscoring this context, McDougall and Perez relate the struggle to protect Pågat with that of Native Hawaiians who seek to restore the graves of ancestors displaced by land development (8). This crisis is addressed not only in Keali‘i’s “Where Are You From? (Son for the Return Home)” but also in Lufi A. Matā’afa Luteru’s “kawaiha‘o,” a poem on the 2012 disinterment of some six hundred sets of remains at Kawaiha‘o Church in Honolulu. Perhaps recalling Dana Naone Hall’s “Sunday Service,” Lutero turns the American Puritan genre of the jeremiad against itself; the poem’s speaker excoriates hypocritical Christians as “thieves and graverobbers” for desecrating Native Hawaiian graves and imprisoning kūpuna “in a musky basement / in a church of ‘god’ ” (103). In addition to Home(is)lands, Ala Press has published Effigies III (2019), a collection of four poetry books by No‘u Revilla (Kānaka ‘Ōiwi), Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio (Kānaka ‘Ōiwi), Kisha Borja-Quichocho-Calvo (CHamoru), and Tagi Quolouvaki (Fijian, Tongan). Here again, McDougall and Perez, collaborating with Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, anthologize major Oceanic poets as a means of illuminating historic connections between Polynesia and Micronesia. Home(is)lands and Effigies III form part of Perez’s efforts to support Micronesian literature, which, he notes, “unfortunately, has not had the same amount of resources and support to anthologize our own literature or to make major contributions to Pacific literature” (244). Perez offers this remark in his article “ ‘Towards a New Oceania’: On Contemporary Pacific Islander Poetry Networks,” an essay in which he also locates his editorial efforts within and against the editorial work of Albert Wendt and suggests additional possibilities for the Oceanic anthology form. He envisions anthologies as New Oceania maps, seagoing vessels, and even as “literary genealogies from which new generations of Pacific poets can read, learn from, be inspired by, and inherit the voices of our elders” (245). Perez helps us to understand the poetry anthology as a locus of contrasting and often clashing visions. As we have seen, Schultz’s notion of the anthology as a “literary nation-state” is perhaps the most appropriate trope for the Hawai‘i poetry anthologies of the Cold War era. Festival and Poetry Hawaii, respectively, participate in broader US anticonquest narratives within which Hawai‘i is inscribed as a field for Euro-American “dramas of reciprocity” and as an exemplum of “big tent” multiculturalism. While the former anti-conquest This phraseology recurs in Kneubuhl’s plays A Harp in the Willows (1946) and Hello Hello Hello (1974) as well as his intervention into the TV series Hawaii Five-O: “Strangers In Our Own Land” (1968). See Heim (36 n.2). Of note, Victoria Nālani Kneubuhl alludes to John Kneubuhl, her uncle, in “Ola”; “To Dotsy (Tasi)” is an elegy for John Kneubuhl’s wife. 7

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rhetoric is exemplified by cosmopolitan luminary poets such as Ştefan Baciu, William Meredith, and W. S. Merwin, the latter multicultural ethos perhaps comes across most dramatically through the writing of Cathy Song who, in moving from the pages of Poetry Hawaii on the “island edge of America”8 to the metropolitan Heath and Norton anthologies, enacts and reflexively addresses the perils and promises of the literary American Dream. Foregrounding Asian American experiences of Hawai‘i plantations, the Local literature movement reverses the polarities of Festival and Poetry Hawaii; in The Best of Bamboo Ridge and Growing Up Local, metropolitan luminaries are elided in favor of Hawai‘i poets, among them Eric Chock, Garrett Hongo, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka. The anthological nation-state concept also holds some purchase for Native Hawaiian writers, as evidenced by Balaz’s Hoʿomānoa. This pivotal collection brings contemporary Kānaka Maoli poets together to explore a range of issues, including the struggle to maintain traditional cultural values amidst the assimilative pressures of colonialism. With Whetu Moana and Mauri Ola, Hawaiian poetry is restored to Oceania and the anthology is reconceived as a voyaging canoe or a marae (Te Punga Somerville, Once Were Pacific 28–34). In Ala Press books such as Home(is) lands, Perez and McDougall continue this tradition, bringing Hawai‘i writers into dialogue with those of Micronesia. These books, writes Perez, “can be imagined as gathering places for the talanoa of Pacific writers who are spread across a vast ocean, thousands of islands, and a global diaspora” (“Towards a New Oceania” 245). The bound and binding nation-state hereby gives way to the transnational Oceanic practice of talanoa, a “process and ceremony of communal dialogue” (Perez 243).

WORKS CITED Axelrod, Steven Gould, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano, eds. The New Anthology of American Poetry, 3 volumes. Rutgers University Press, 2003, 2005, 2012. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press, 1981. Balaz, Joseph P., ed. Hoʿomānoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature. Honolulu, HI: Ku Paʻa, 1989. Buchmann, Stephen L. The Reason for Flowers: Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives. New York: Scribner, 2016. Chock, Eric E, and Darrell H. Y. Lum, eds. The Best of Bamboo Ridge: The Hawaii Writer’s Quarterly. Honolulu, HI: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1986. Chock, Eric E, and Darrell H. Y. Lum. Growing Up Local: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose from Hawai’i. Honolulu, HI: Bamboo Ridge Press, 2006. Chock, Eric E, and Darrell H. Y. Lum. Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii’s Local Writers. Honolulu, HI: Petronium Press/Talk Story, 1978. Coffman, Tom. The Island Edge of America. University of Hawai’i Press, 2003. Eades, Diana, Suzie Jacobs, Ermile Hargrove, and Terri Menacker. “Pidgin, Local Identity, and Schooling in Hawaiʻi.” Dialects, Englishes, Creoles, and Education, ed. Shondel J. Nero, Routledge, 2006, pp. 139–63. Fujikane, Candace. “Between Nationalisms: Hawaii’s Local Nation and Its Troubled Racial Paradise.” Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism, vol. 1, no. 2 (1994), pp. 23–58.

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See Tom Coffman, The Island Edge of America (2003).

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Fujikane, Candace. “Sweeping Racism under the Rug of ‘Censorship’: The Controversy over Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging.” Amerasia Journal, vol. 26, no. 2 (2000), pp. 158–94. Hamasaki, Richard. Introduction. Westlake: Poems by Wayne Kaumualii Westlake (1947–1984), University of Hawaii Press, 2009, pp. xv–xxiv. Hamasaki, Richard. “Singing in Their Genealogical Trees: The Emergence of Contemporary Hawaiian Poetry in English: Dana Naone Hall, Wayne Kaumuali‘i Westlake, Joseph P. Balaz,” MA thesis in Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai’i, 1989. Hedge Coke, Allison, Brandy N. McDougall, and Craig Santos Perez, eds. Effigies III: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing Pacific Islands, 2018. Salt Publishing, 2019. Heim, Otto. “Samoan Ghost Stories: John Kneubuhl and Oral History.” Shima, vol. 12, no. 1 (2018), pp. 35–47. ho‘omanawanui, ku‘ualoha. “He Lei Ho’oheno No Na Kau a Kau: Language, Performance and Form in Hawaiian Poetry.” Contemporary Pacific, vol. 17, no. 1 (2005), pp. 29–81. Kelly, Anne Keala. “Eyes Wide Shut.” Honolulu Weekly, vol. 11, no. 26 (June 27–July 3, 2001), p. 17. Kennedy, Anne. “Hawai‘i Poetry: A Tour.” ka mate ka ora: a new zealand journal of poetry and poetics, no. 3 (2007), pp. 58–80. Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961. University of California Press, 2003. Krauth, Nigel, and Jake Sandtner. “Early Surf Fiction and the White Worldview.” Text, vol. 25, no. 65 (2021). Kwon, Brenda. “Hawai‘i.” A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America, ed. Charles L. Crow. Maiden: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 458–76. Labrador, Roderick N. “ ‘We Can Laugh at Ourselves’: Hawai’i Ethnic Humor, Local Identity and the Myth of Multiculturalism.” Pragmatics: Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association, vol. 14, no. 2 (2004), pp. 291–316. Lauter, Paul. “Taking Anthologies Seriously.” MELUS, vol. 29, nos. 3/4 (2004), pp. 19–39. Ludwig, Richard M. “The Muted Lyrics of William Meredith.” Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. 25, no. 1 (1963), pp. 73–9. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/sta​ble/26409​622. Accessed February 15, 2021. Lyons, Paul. American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination. Routledge, 2006. Mason, Theodore O. “The African-American Anthology: Mapping the Territory, Taking the National Census, Building the Museum.” American Literary History, vol. 10, no. 1 (1998), pp. 185–98, doi:10.1093/ alh/10.1.185. McDougall, Brandy N., and Craig Santos Perez, eds. Home(is)lands: New Art & Writing from Guåhan & Hawai‘i. ALA Press, 2017. McPherson, Michael. “The Absent King Quartet.” ʻŌiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal, inaugural issue (1998), pp. 114–19. Murayama, Milton. All I Asking for Is My Body. Supa Press, 1975. Palleau-Papin, Françoise. “W.S. Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs: Epic Poetry as Postcolonial Revision.” Revue française d’études américaines, vol. 147, no. 2 (2016), pp. 27–43. Perez, Craig Santos. “ ‘Towards a New Oceania’: On Contemporary Pacific Islander Poetry Networks.” College Literature, vol. 47, no. 1 (2020), pp. 240–7. Pizo, Elmer Omar Bascos. Leaving Our Shadows Behind Us. Bamboo Ridge Press, 2019. Sakamoto, Yoshiro. “Ştefan Baciu, Archipelagic Poet from Romania.” Caietele Echinox, vol. 30 (2016), pp. 61–76. Schultz, Susan M. “Introduction to Pacific Poetries Special Feature.” Pacific Poetries Special Feature, How2, vol. 2, no. 4 (Spring–Summer 2006), n.p.

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Sharrad, Paul. “Book Review: Hoʿomānoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature.” Manoa, vol. 2, no. 1 (1990), pp. 167–9. Stewart, Frank, and John Unterecker, eds. Poetry Hawaii: A Contemporary Anthology. University of Hawaii Press, 1979. Sullivan, Robert, and Katharine Luomala. “Polynesian Poetry.” The Princeton Handbook of World Poetries, ed. Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman, Princeton University Press, 2017, pp. 438–42. Suzuki-Martinez. Sharon S. “Tribal Selves: Subversive Identity in Asian American and Native American Literature.” 2015. University of Arizona, PhD dissertation, UA Campus Repository, https://rep​osit​ory.ariz​ona. edu/han​dle/10150/565​575. Te Punga Somerville, Alice. “The Lingering War Captain: Maori Texts, Indigenous Contexts.” Journal of New Zealand Literature: JNZL, no. 24 (2007), pp. 20–43. Te Punga Somerville, Alice. “Nau Te Rourou, Nau Te Rakau: The Oceanic, Indigenous, Postcolonial and New Zealand Comparative Contexts of Maori Writing in English.” 2006. Cornell University, PhD dissertation. eCommons, https://hdl.han​dle.net/1813/2621. Te Punga Somerville, Alice. Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Thompson, Phyllis H., ed. Festival: Poems from Hawaii. Honolulu: Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, 1966. Thrum, Thomas G. More Hawaiian Folk Tales: A Collection of Native Legends and Traditions . University Press of the Pacific, 2001. Toyama, Jean Yamasaki. “Intertextuality and the Question of Origins: A Japanese Perspective.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 27, no. 4 (1990), pp. 313–23. Wallace, Patricia. “Divided Loyalties: Literal and Literary in the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song and Rita Dove.” MELUS, vol. 18, no. 3 (1993), pp. 3–19. Wendt, Albert, and Reina Whaitiri. Presentation on Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English, 2005, Hālau ʻIke O Puʻuloa, Leeward Community College, Pearl City, Hawai‘i. Lecture. Wendt, Albert, Reina Whaitiri, and Robert Sullivan, eds. Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English. Auckland University Press, 2013. Wendt, Albert, Reina Whaitiri, and Robert Sullivan. Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English. Auckland University Press, 2003. Wilson, Rob. Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond. Duke University Press, 2000. Yamanaka, Lois-Ann. Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre. Bamboo Ridge Press, 1993. Zane, Kathleen. Reflections on a Yellow Eye: Asian I(\Eye/)Cons and Cosmetic Surgery. Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, ed. Ella H. Shohat, MIT Press, 1998, pp. 161–86.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Poetics of Chicana Daughterhood: Cherríe Moraga and Lorna Dee Cervantes LISETTE ORDOVICA LASATER

Recognizing the home and mother–daughter relationships as “a legitimate site of struggle,” Chicana/Latina writers also evince the other side of the coin: the difficulties of being a daughter in a culture that privileges sons, often to the point of undermining the needs and desires of mothers and daughters (Saldívar-Hull 84). Mothers may serve as gatekeepers of patriarchy and also as a daughter’s closest female role model, and as a result, mother–daughter relationships may also be the source of deep ambivalence. Families of course exist within nation and culture; Eden Torres cites psychologist Maria Root’s idea of “insidious trauma” to describe how “historic trauma and unresolved grieving,” “the reality of ongoing socioeconomic and political inequality,” and “the consequences of imperialism” continue to impact Mexican American families (16). Writing allows for daughters to stage public conversations about trauma experienced by women, personally and historically. Writers and their readers can thus serve as critical witnesses, enabling both to “act as agents for social change” (López 63). Critical witnessing, or “engaged critical reading” of texts, further allows for “understanding, the very foundation for personal and social change” (López 64). The practice of critical witnessing is tied to testimonio or life writing; the examination and sharing of the personal creates a space for questioning cultural norms, and allows for connection with others who may have had the same experiences. Through the critical witnessing that writing and reading the work invites, Chicanas and Latinas can recognize their mothers as fully human, as women outside of the social construct of motherhood, with hopes and dreams of their own they may have never had a chance to pursue. Although language might otherwise threaten to (further) alienate a daughter from her mother, it can instead form an archive, creating “models for defying authority and subverting the dysfunction of the parents. Chicana writers are taking major steps toward recovering the lost self, or as [Gloria] Anzaldúa and [Ana] Castillo have both suggested, healing the split” (Torres 43). In this chapter I explore how poetic or hybrid texts by Cherríe Moraga and Lorna Dee Cervantes create opportunities for both celebrating and healing from mother–daughter relationships. I am interested in how the Chicana daughter’s voice is mediated through her mother. If the daughter is a witness for her mother, how do we witness for the daughter? Poetics are necessary for articulating Chicana/

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Latina daughterhood: imaginative language can attempt to articulate what our bodies know in order to heal ourselves and others. Poetry allows us to be critical witnesses to the traumas of the emotional and physical distances between mothers and daughters, and the social and cultural conditions that foster and challenge women’s relationships. Cherríe Moraga’s mixed sequence of prose and poetry, Loving in the War Years, was the first major Chicana text to speak explicitly of the deleterious effects on daughters when mothers privilege sons, while also focusing on the deep intimacy between mothers and daughters. Moraga writes more critically than almost any other author in Chicana literature about mothers and daughters, exposing the gendered and cultural paradigms that frame and contain our relationships. Moraga also connects desire and sexuality to her mother’s body as a significant part of her identity as a queer Chicana feminist. In A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, she writes of the double loss of her mother; first mentally to Alzheimer’s, then to death. The mother who once “made space for me next to her in the bed” now turns to Moraga and asks, “Do you have a mother?” (74). Mothers may “forget” they are mothers, but Moraga’s work makes clear daughters can never “forget” their roles. I am interested in how the loss of her mother impacts Moraga as an adult daughter (and mother to a son) who has spent her career writing about motherhood. As Chicana daughters age, how can we reconcile our mother’s mortality with our own? What does the knowledge of the inevitable death of a mother whose presence has emotionally shaped us, for better or worse, do for the evolution of Chicana epistemology? The poetics of the daughter’s voice in the work of Lorna Dee Cervantes likewise centers around her traumatic loss of her “imperfect” mother—in Cervantes’s case, a mother whose struggles with issues of substance use illustrates how traditional roles get reversed, and Chicana daughters act as parents to their mothers. In Cervantes I examine another kind of double absence: that of a mother who is first emotionally, and then physically, unavailable but who remains key to the daughter’s development of voice. How does the economy of language, use of imagery, metaphor, and structure that the genre of poetry invites allow for a daughter to tell both her own and her mother’s story, particularly in a mother’s absence? In Cervantes, absence is as important as presence, and poetry is a powerful means of giving shape to a mother’s absence.

CHERRÍE MORAGA Cherríe Moraga’s statement of identity through her relationship to her mother in the introduction to her foundational text, Loving in the War Years (1983), makes clear the centrality of her connection with her mother to her identity, a necessary foregrounding given the difficult conversations she will have about mothers and daughters in the ensuing pages: Todavía so la hija de mi mamá. [I am still my mother’s daughter.] Keep thinking, it’s the daughters. It’s the daughters who remain loyal to the mother, although this loyalty is not always reciprocated. To be free means on some level to release that painful devotion when it begins to punish us … . Free the daughter to love her own daughter. It is the daughters who are my audience. (xiii) Moraga, despite her history of change, remains her “mother’s daughter,” an affiliation that grounds—and sometimes anchors—her. Moraga captures the complexity of a daughter’s position and the ambivalence of mother–daughter relationships. Like Moraga, I am the daughter of a Mexican

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mother. The first time I read the words “free,” “painful devotion,” and “punish us,” in Moraga, I stopped with a shock of recognition. In my then-emerging study of writing by Chicanas/Latinas, I had never read such a direct acknowledgment of a daughter’s pain. My own research is inspired by a desire to understand the “painful devotion” through witnessing the daughter’s experiences and examining how daughters (whether biological, adopted, or transgender) use writing to free themselves while remaining their “mother’s daughter.” Here I attend to Moraga’s broader “story of change” (xiii) as represented by the mixed poetry and prose sequences, Loving in the War Years (1983) and A Xicana Codex (2011). Moraga is a prolific writer across genres, and her belief that “the personal is political” means that her work remains consistently autobiographical, giving us an archive of a daughter’s experience across decades. The anxieties expressed in her earlier works around identity, culture, and loss become increasingly complex as she progresses from daughter to mother. A codex is a body of knowledge, a history told and foretold: for Moraga, the old women of her life are her “Xicanadyke codices of changing consciousness” (Xicana 16). Moraga’s decades of work underlie my own codex as I search for answers my mother cannot give me: how can we love our mothers and also be free? How do we challenge our mother’s beliefs and practices yet still remain her daughter? Who is the daughter’s witness? After a life of struggling for freedom from our mothers, can we ever prepare ourselves to lose her? In A Xicana Codex, Moraga cites the words in her play Shadow of a Man of a mother to a father: “Manuel, existo. Existo yo” [I exist.] (44). Writing becomes not just a way for a daughter to understand herself, but also for women to articulate their identity in the world. Moraga explains: “Maybe this is the same refrain in all of my work: an insistence on a presence where the world perceives absence. Maybe this is fundamentally the project of all Xicana work: to announce our presence to one another and the world, but in our own tongue, on our own ground, brandishing our own homegrown instruments of naming” (Xicana 44). What resonates in this statement is the power of writing to enable Chicanas to connect first with each other, and then to a larger audience. “Absence” speaks to the feeling of invisibility many queer, poor, or sidelined women of color may feel in the world, as well as the literal absence of women of color in spaces of power. Vorris Nunley further develops the concept of what presence means for people of color, stating, “Form has existence, design has presence … presence is more than existence; it is to be taken into account on your own terms” (Lectures). Understanding identity as rhetorical allows us to see how the articulation of identity for Chicana/ Latina writers is indeed a constructed project. Thomas Mader argues, “Presence is that state of transcendence in which one is freed from the context of his existence and as a result of this freedom is able to act” (378). Chicanas who write recognize their subject positions are constructs of a hegemonic, patriarchal system that relies on certain bodies remaining invisible. Moraga’s call to use “our own homegrown instruments of naming” echoes Audre Lorde’s analogy, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (112). To be freed from context and to reconfigure the self is a risk, and “To risk self is to see survival in terms of change, which is the way to progress. And to conceptualize change is to give presence to the future” (Mader 379). Moraga recognizes the inherent risk in change, asking “Does change require losing all?” (Xicana 57). While writing has helped her get closer to a place of personal freedom, something has always been at stake: in coming out as a lesbian, she risked losing her family and culture. In A Xicana Codex, she fears the dissolution of the “familia from scratch” she has crafted in her decades as a teacher, artist, and activist.

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Her vision of the future allows Moraga to recognize risk—to more than recognize, but to sit with it, getting to know its origins and contours, in order to contribute to the archive of Chicana/Latina daughters who, through writing, seek to educate and enlighten, to articulate what Nunley calls an “emancipatory hope” (Lectures). Moraga’s body of work brings us closer to her vision in Loving of freeing daughters to love their own daughters, but first through loving themselves. Writing becomes a means of diagnosing and healing self, family, and culture; part of the way Chicanas use “homegrown” instruments is by recognizing the history of patriarchy, colonialism, and indigenous heritage. Writing has emancipatory potential and is a means of creating agency and community, yet it can also be a dangerous practice. Remembering “staves off cultural destruction,” but the recording is difficult because of the search for an appropriate language to communicate the writer’s insights (Brady 155). While memory can be painful, the daughter who writes risks reinscribing the Malinche myth via perceived cultural betrayal. Historian Emma Perez notes we must beware of replicating and duplicating “dominant first world methods and tools” in the articulation of a Chicano/a historical consciousness (4). Regardless, Moraga undertakes the work: She vows to “write to remember”; she creates a “rite to remember”; she believes it is her “right to remember.” (Xicana 81) In Barrio Logos, Raul Homero Villa employs Orlando Patterson’s term “social death” to examine the politics of urban space for Chicano/as (31). Patterson explains social death as the result of chattel slavery’s dehumanizing practices. In addition to the physical violence of the flesh, the practices of slavery denied the enslaved access to their social identity via bloodlines of “ascent and descent,” that is, one’s ancestors and descendants. Moraga’s drawing upon pre-Conquest and indigenous figures draws criticism; yet her linguistic word play of her “right” to “rite” and “write” suggests that writing and remembering are a means of enacting presence, of giving “presence to the future” by looking to our past. Connecting remembering to history, or what Perez calls the “decolonial imaginary,” wards off social death and creates new possibilities for being, knowing, and healing. Moraga seeks personal and collective freedom from beliefs and practices that oppress marginalized groups today. People of color remain particularly vulnerable to the effects of political inequality and the forces of neoliberalism; Nunley cites Guy Standing’s term “precariat” to describe Americans facing instability and insecurity at all levels of existence (Nunley, “Adrift” 177). Echoing Lorna Dee Cervantes’s claim, “poetry saved my life” (Gonzalez 163), Moraga writes, “Fundamentally, I started writing to save my life. Yes, my own life first. I see the same impulse in my students—the dark, the queer, the mixed-blood, the violated—turning to the written page with a relentless passion, a drive to avenge their own silence, invisibility, and erasure as living, innately expressive human beings” (Last 58). This quote helps us understand how Moraga sees being a queer daughter as another form of disadvantaging, silencing, and invisibility in Chicana/o families and larger culture. While my focus is on the daughter’s voice, clearly daughters are not the only ones creating agency through writing. We are decades from the Chicana/o and other liberation movements, yet many of the issues facing youth then remain with us in some way, and those young people continue to seek answers. Moraga’s pedagogy extends off the page into decades of work as a professor and artist-in-residence at Stanford and University of California, Santa Barbara, where she serves as a codex to those also driven to save their own lives first. For Moraga, putting self first is a revolutionary act that goes against culturally prescribed norms of women (particularly mothers) as self-sacrificing. Norma Alarcón writes of how in patriarchal cultures, a woman speaking outside of their maternal role is viewed “as a sign of catastrophe, for

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if she is allowed to articulate her needs and desires she must do so as a mother on behalf of her children and not of herself ” (“Traddutora” 63). Alarcón cites Julia Kristeva’s discussion of the woman’s place in the “symbolic contract,” observing, “The female-speaking subject that would want to speak from a different position than that as a mother, or a future wife/mother, is thrown into a crisis of meaning that begins with her own gendered personal identity and its relational position with others” (“Making” 221). Writing publicly and using the personal as a springboard for critical engagement as Moraga does also means a Chicana writer risks alienating her mother, even though she may build a bridge to reach her. Alarcón posits that daughters who write may fear “a terror of total disjunction” in that mothers, the person closest to them, will no longer recognize her as she speaks another language— both literally and figuratively. (“What” 91). But the daughter must exercise her “(w)rite;” for if she “accepted the whole of her mother’s world held in place by a discourse to which the poet has a reduced access (if any), and that further locks her into questionable, even crippling ways of being, she would end up silent” (Alarcon, “What” 92). Thus the bind Moraga finds herself in: though in her mother’s arms she is “uplifted, sustained” (Loving 94), Moraga recognizes that her identity as a Chicana lesbian and writer threatens to make her “an outsider to [her] family” (Loving xi). Yet her writing is also what allows her to come into being, to form her own identity and to explore new territory in mother–daughter relationships grounded in the body and desire. Lora Romero argues Moraga’s work demonstrates how an intellectual identity does not have to be exclusive of a communal identity (122), reinforcing Moraga’s project of criticism as an act of love, and the personal as a political form of theorizing from within.1 Claiming “existo yo” to those within the same cultural sphere remains a risky, yet necessary, project for personal and social change. * Loving in the War Years remains a standout text for its form, which combines genres of poetry, essay, and life narrative, for its insights into the Chicanx family, Chicanx culture, and Meso-American history, and for its contributions to feminist and queer studies. This work also calls attention to the necessity for daughters to ask questions about their mothers, and the difficulty of discovering the answers. Moraga’s questioning comes from a place of deep love and deep pain, and an awareness of the effects on daughters when mothers are (inevitably) complicit with patriarchy and pass on restrictive cultural norms, expectations, and beliefs, whether intentionally or unconsciously. Although Chicana mothers claim to love their children the same, Moraga argues, The boys are different. Sometimes I sense that she feels this way because she wants to believe that through her mothering, she can develop the kind of man she would have liked to have married, or even have been. That through her son she can get a small taste of male privilege, since without race or class privilege that’s all there is to be had. (Loving 94) In a flashback, Moraga recounts her own scene of betrayal in the form of a tearful phone reunion with her mother, where Moraga’s heart opens and “the feelings beginning to flood my chest. Yes, this is why I love women. This woman is my mother. There is no love as strong as this” (94). As she prepares to “speak the truth, finally,” her mother abruptly cuts her off to take her brother’s call.

Writing after Romero’s death, Moraga includes her in her list of women she mourns, commenting, “How long does it take to grow a stone of grief inside of you, how many deaths?” (Xicana 64). 1

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“Her voice lightens up. ‘Okay, mi’jita. I love you. I’ll talk to you later,’ cutting off the line in the middle of the connection.” Moraga reminds herself, “My brother has always come first” (95). The reality of being secondary to her brother reflects larger cultural dynamics. The betrayals may not always be overt, they accumulate over a lifetime, and they often continue into adulthood. A daughter cannot offer proximity to male power the way a son can, and although a daughter is generally believed to be emotionally closer to a mother, she “must constantly earn the mother’s love, prove her fidelity to her. The son—he gets her love for free” (94). Emotional or affective closeness does not necessarily result in equal power dynamics within the relationship. Her mother’s preference for her brother complicates Moraga’s feelings toward her mother; Moraga accepts “second place,” but she still desires to connect with and understand her mother. If “as a pivotal sexual person, symbol, and image in the poet’s experience, the mother is simultaneously within the poet and without, is herself and is not herself, is part of a cherished and rejected past,” then Moraga embodies the pressure felt by the Chicana daughter who dares to question (Alarcón, “Lover” 91). This is part of what compels me to examine Moraga’s work and other daughters’ voices: while most mothers love their daughters, the uneven power dynamic between mother and daughter is frustrating for me as a writer and daughter. I see it across genres and generations, on and off the page, in the stories of others and in my own story. I want Moraga—I want daughters— to demand more from the mother–daughter dyad, to get angry, to find “freedom from the painful devotion.” Yet Moraga realizes that patriarchal motherhood means the possibility of her mother prioritizing her daughter “was impossible. … You are a traitor to your race if you do not put the man first. The potential accusation of ‘traitor’ or ‘vendida’ [sellout] is what hangs above the heads and beats in the hearts of most Chicanas seeking to develop our own autonomous sense of ourselves, particularly through sexuality” (Loving 95). How does a daughter negotiate that impossibility? Moraga and other Chicana writers such as Lucha Corpi, Sandra Cisneros, and Carmen Tafolla write extensively about the historical and cultural figure of Mallinali Tenepal (commonly known as La Malinche), opposing and revising the dominant narrative of Malinche “selling out” her people. Malinche has historically been viewed as the original cultural traitor because of her roles as translator for the Spanish leading up to their Conquest of the Aztec Empire, and primarily for her sexual relationship with Hernán Cortés and their resulting mestizo child, making Malinche the mother of the Mexican race. Moraga highlights the fact that she was in such a position only because “Malinche was betrayed by her own mother” (Loving 93), who sold her into slavery so that her son (Malinche’s half-brother) would inherit their land. The myth of Malinche as the betrayer is one of many that, Moraga argues, demonstrates Mexican culture’s belief in the “inherent unreliability of women, our natural propensity for treachery” (Loving 93).2 However, like Moraga’s own mother, “Malinche’s mother would only have been doing her Mexican wifely duty: putting the male first” (Loving 93). Moraga’s situating her own relationship with her mother within a historical and cultural context demonstrates the power of remembering, and of changing the narrative of what is remembered, and of reconsidering who is authorized to write and interpret history. Although Moraga recognizes that her loyalty and love will never hold the same weight as that of her brothers, her desire for her mother never wanes—it instead permeates her work and drives her

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Sons too are impacted by these cultural dynamics, an important critical conversation beyond the scope of this chapter.

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personal relationships. Suzanne Juhasz argues a daughter’s “desire for the mother as a love object” is part of the daughter’s “own subjectivity” (158). Moraga recognizes her mother as the source of her racial identity, as the first woman’s scent she desired, and as a woman with her own unfulfilled desires. Writing becomes a way for Moraga to “negotiate and transform the relationship as it has been structured in everyday life” (Juhasz 158). Her poem, “La Dulce Culpa” asks, “What kind of lover have you made me, mother?” and it upends traditional familial roles. When she was a child, her mother drew her into bed with her as if our bodies still beat inside the same skin as if you never noticed when they cut me out     From you. (Loving 8) As Norma Alarcón observes, “Due to the intimate relations between mother and daughter, their relationship is as fraught with strife as that with lovers, male or female” (“What” 93). Although Moraga must claim the race of her mother in order to exist, she also must cleave from her in order to not live the same life as her mother, one with a man who refuses her desire and instead holds it “in the palm of his hand” (Loving 9). She uses what she has witnessed as her mother’s daughter and, in “What is Left,” vows to whip the world into shape, a contrast to the earlier image of her mother beating her with a belt. At the end of the poem, Moraga promises she “will fight back,” but instead of using violence she will Strip the belt from your hands and take you into my arms. (Loving 10) In Moraga’s work, images of domestic violence are juxtaposed with those of intimacy. She recounts an early childhood memory of her mother’s illness and hospitalization to articulate her deep connection to her mother and her love of women. Moraga writes of how she and her siblings were primarily cared for by her aunt during the mother’s illness, and of her awareness of how her father merely “played” a parent. When she is allowed to see her mother again, her aunt exhorts her not to cry, but Moraga has an embodied response to the woman in the hospital bed she at first does not recognize. After running into her arms, Moraga recalls: My tia had not warned me about the smell, the unmistakable smell of the woman, mi mama … And when I catch the smell I am lost in tears, deep long tears that come when you have held your breath for centuries. (Loving 86) While Moraga writes in the epigraph to her play Shadow of a Man, “Family is the place where for better or worse, we first learn how to love,” it’s clear that by family, Moraga means “mother” (39). As an adult, Moraga seeks to (re)create home, “driven by this scent toward la mujer. … With this knowledge so deeply emblazoned upon my heart, how then was I supposed to turn away from La Madre, La Chicana?” (Loving 86). Moraga’s same-sex desire allows her to recognize her mother as a woman with her own desires, but whose complicity in patriarchy created an emotional

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gulf between them that Moraga continually attempts to narrow. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano argues that “the intensity and importance of the ‘real bond’ between mother and children (blood being thicker than water) is shown in Moraga’s writing to be matched only by its potential toxicity” (143). Domestic violence is not only physical but emotional, and perhaps the emotional is even more difficult to heal. Moraga alludes to the cycles of violence and the mediations of power in an aside: “Daddy, you did not beat me, but every blow I took / from the hand of my mother came from a caress / you could not give her” (Loving 3). The daughter acts as a witness for her mother, and Moraga (w)rites to make meaning of their experiences. Moraga’s mother confesses she finds her husband “so soft, not very manly,” adding that he may be “different like you … I know what it’s like to be touched by a man who wants a woman. I don’t feel this with your father” (Loving 5). Moraga’s response is to take care of her mother’s need, and “it takes every muscle in me not to leave my chair, not to climb through the silence, not to clamber toward her, not to touch her the way I know she wants to be touched” (Loving 5). Her response is grounded in desire, situated somewhere between a sexual and an emotional desire for closeness; a daughter’s desire to be recognized for what she can provide, to seek a deeper intimacy where the mother can recognize the daughter’s devotion, a desire for connection and intimacy that may be based on the sexual but is distinguishable from it as well. Mary Pat Brady writes that Moraga’s impulse “signals a daughter’s desire to care for her mother, a care that cannot be entirely divorced from erotics” (163). Thus far Moraga has used language to try and connect with her mother, yet what her mother seeks cannot be found on the page. No amount of written words can fulfill desire for physical connection; Roland Barthes tells us writing “compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing” (100). Recognizing the role of desire was a key part of Moraga’s coming to consciousness, as she writes that it wasn’t until she confronted her own lesbianism that her “heartfelt identification with and empathy for my mother’s oppression—due to being poor, uneducated and Chicana—was realized” (Loving 44). Women’s desire under patriarchal motherhood is conscribed by men’s needs, and there is no cultural model under that paradigm where a woman with desire is not viewed as selfish or aberrant. For Moraga, recognizing the importance of her mother’s desire is a means of recognizing her presence; but what she wants from her mother—to put her first—remains impossible. Like her writing, Moraga’s knowledge of the role of the body in healing is a language that her mother can’t comprehend. Instead, all Moraga can do is respond “Yeah, Mamá, I understand,” reinforcing the cycle of a daughter’s role of carrying the knowledge of her mother’s struggles along with her own (Loving 5). Her mother’s confession confirms Moraga’s suspicion that her mother is not fulfilled in her marriage, emotionally or physically. Her daughter’s devotion and desire for connection mean that she has been her mother’s primary emotional caretaker. Her claiming the position of “my mother’s lover. The partner she’s been waiting for” is a way to subvert the limits of the patriarchal, heteronormative family (Loving 26). In her recognizing her mother’s sexual needs, “Moraga constructs her desire as a response to love and as a refusal to conspire with patriarchal oppression” (Brady 162). In response to her mother’s tearful assertion, “No one is ever going to love you as much as I do,” Moraga responds, “I know that. I know. I know how strong your love is. Why do you think I am a lesbian?” (Loving 129). Moraga’s identity as a writer, daughter, lover, and mother is grounded in her relationship with her mother, in all its pain and joy. In A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, Moraga’s lifetime of anxiety around loss comes to a head as she faces her mother’s impending death, and reflects on how her own death will

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one day impact her son. Echoing Eliot’s “Prufrock,” her anxiety increases as she ages; when she was a child she stood fearless before the ocean, but “Today I do not venture beyond the wave’s breaking point at shoulder height. I do not venture deeper than I can touch bottom. I do not venture” (Xicana 58). She cites lessons learned from witnessing the loss of lovers and family, from the slow deaths of those without health insurance, the suicides and violent deaths of fellow Chicana scholars and female friends. Although she accepts “there is no permanence, only change, only loss and found and loss again,” fear returns: “Fear of losing all I love. Home, familia, sanity, my mother” (Xicana 57). Her mother’s silent companion, Alzheimer’s means she “continues to change into a woman I have never met, but must quickly learn to know. … She is a deep bruise in my heart” (Xicana 11–12). Moraga’s work is an archive of a daughter attempting to understand her mother. For her mother to change mentally and physically—to age and to die—upends any sense of security or parity Moraga may have reached in their relationship. Can a child ever accept the death of a parent? There was not a map for much of the ground Moraga navigated in her work, first as a queer daughter, then again as a queer mother. Yet through these navigations she had her mother as an anchor and ballast; what does her future without her mother look like? In a poem set during an evening ride with her family in a convertible, Moraga’s mother, almost ninety, asks her “Do you have a mother?” At the realization her mother does not know her: My heart quickens at the prospect of my sudden orphanhood. But Elvira is not afraid from where she sits behind the sun-glassed desert of her own Tucson girlhood, she remembers being nobody’s mother. (Xicana 74) In this moment when she is not recognized as her mother’s daughter, Moraga embodies the “terror of total disjunction” that Alarcón writes of. Only it is not language that has alienated her from her mother, but the ravages of age on her mother’s mind. In her innocent question, Elvira temporarily makes Moraga an emotional orphan. And while Elvira forgets who her daughter is, it is not a moment of full amnesia—her identity prior to becoming a mother remains, reminding us that motherhood is but one part of a woman’s identity in the story of her life. This fact is further reinforced by Moraga’s introduction of her mother’s name—thus “my mother” becomes instead “Elvira,” a specific person versus a possessive title. The switch stands out, especially considering the linguistic habit of siblings conversing in Spanish about their parents with each other using the singular possessive pronoun: instead of “I spoke to our mother today” one normally would say “I spoke to my mother today.” Using her mother’s first name is a means of recognition, of acceptance, and of letting go—of putting some distance into the sometimes suffocating mother– daughter dyad. Yet it has taken Moraga decades to achieve this recognition: how might their relationship have been different if in Loving in the War Years Moraga had instead been able to write, “I am still Elvira’s daughter”? Moraga responds to her mother’s question, “Do you have a mother?” by telling her “Yes … she’s you,” but her mother only laughs, so Moraga laughs too (Xicana 74). The space and tools of poetry allow Moraga to articulate what she wishes she had done before: grabbed Elvira’s hand, pointed to the sky and had her look at “those scattered stars of memory” (Xicana 75).

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Moraga’s turning to the sky speaks to how both women are daughters of a larger, cosmic, maternal force. In another realm, they can connect as women, not conscribed by the patriarchal mother–daughter relationship and its accompanying power dynamics. The celestial realm also serves as a place for female connection in Lorna Dee Cervantes’s poem “Pleiades from the Cables of Genocide,” which is dedicated to her grandmother (Cervantes, Cables 43). In the poem, Cervantes writes of the “Seven Sisters” the “only constellation / my grandmother could point out with the punch / Of a heart” in a sky where her grandmother “uplifts / Into heaven” (44). Whereas earlier in the text Moraga stood at the shore in fear of loss, she has come to terms with the inevitability of loss, accepting “that prayers do not ward off death; prayers simply bear witness. And death happens,” and she is comforted by the idea of a deeper connection with her mother in another realm (Xicana 196). Moraga’s role as a mother means that she must also consider her own mortality and her anxieties about the impact her death will have on her son. She recalls a moment shortly after her mother’s death, when she feels her son in the room behind her: I stand at the sink in the full weight of motherhood. I am someone’s only mother, as my mother was to me … the space that my body occupies, that physicality, is what most matters, that I am not gone, that I have returned, that I will most likely return again after long walks with the dog in the rain. And this is what I miss most about my own mother; that she will not return to me, embodied in this way. (Xicana 197) The focus on embodiment is key to understanding Moraga’s sense of the world. Her writing since the beginning has been from a place of embodied experience in the world, pathos as a means to logos. The impact of a mother’s body invites comparison to an earlier scene from Moraga’s life, that of seeing her mother in the hospital after a long absence in Loving. In that moment, she was pulled toward her mother’s body, made familiar by scent, allowing her to recognize her mother as her source of female love. Here, she is on the other side of the transaction. Though her son does not approach her, and she does not turn around to see him, she is aware of how her body represents stability and security for him. It is a weight she carries, a weight she must not let subsume her in order for both of them to be free. “If my mother’s last years in the awe of Alzheimer’s taught me anything, it was the necessity to love without holding on” (Xicana 198). Loss happens, but from the “change and transformation” we can “make meaning from loss” (Xicana 198). Moraga’s writing, with its attention to the lived experience of a woman’s body, of a daughter’s body, helps me remember the need to love without fear, without pain. And whether daughters become mothers or not, Moraga has taught me that loving one’s self is the starting point for healing cultural and familial legacies of pain. Moraga offers critical frameworks that illuminate several interrelated issues: a mother’s body as a source of both comfort and pain; the lifetime role of a daughter; the necessity of understanding our mothers as women; and the power of writing for healing and agency.

LORNA DEE CERVANTES Cervantes’s poetry introduces the scenario of early traumatic loss, and asks us to consider how a daughter constructs her identity through a mother’s absence. Cervantes is part of a poetic legacy of daughters writing poetry as a means of writing “self ” into textual being, and though she writes of a distinctly working-class Chicana experience, her work has resonances beyond that social world,

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enhancing our sense of how daughterhood impacts a female poet’s voice and development. Much of Cervantes’s work examines herself through and against her mother, and while it incorporates genres including confessional poetry, testimonio, and autobiographical prose, I find Steven Gould Axelrod’s categorization of Plath’s “Daddy” as a domestic or family poem a useful parallel. The Cervantes poem I examine in depth, “Striking Ash,” falls within the tradition of the domestic poem, which Axelrod defines as “one that represents and comments on a protagonist’s relationship to one or more family members, usually a parent, child or spouse,” and is also a “poem of development, which emphasizes the child’s maturation and separation from the parent as well as ambiguities in the parent’s character and in the child’s feelings” (59). Cervantes further complicates the idea of poetic legacy and genre through her thematic engagement with canonical male poets, particularly T. S. Eliot’s musings on time and loss. A focus on her early work in Emplumada helps set the stage for an analysis of the evolution of the poetic daughter’s voice shaped by loss, which comes to a crescendo in Drive (2006). While the reader may not be a daughter, it is Cervantes’s starting point to invite the reader into considering loss, and how “subjectivity can come from loss as well as presence” (Rodriguez y Gibson, “Imagining” 31). Cervantes writes that her mother wasn’t a usual “mother” and she herself never really “felt the way a daughter feels” (Cables 15). A “derelict’s kid” Cervantes has spoken about how her grandmother stood between her and her mother being homeless (Drive 84). She follows the tradition of Adelina Anthony, Cherríe Moraga, Dulce Maria Solis, and Sandra Cisneros, among many other Chicana/ Latina writers who delve into their mother’s histories as a way of trying to understand them. When a mother is physically gone, this exploration becomes even more fraught. Moraga, whose body of work also illustrates her development as a daughter, spent a lifetime asking questions of her mother in her presence; Cervantes spends a lifetime asking questions in her mother’s absence. In A Xicana Codex, Moraga writes that the elder Chicanas are her codex, a reference to Mayan historical manuscripts, a “history told and foretold” (Xicana 17). Losing one’s mother, conversely, leaves the daughter without a map; the daughter now must draw it herself. When Cervantes seeks a map she finds ash, smoke. Cervantes’s poetry is a record of a daughter navigating the world haunted by loss, covered in a thin layer of ash. My reading of Cervantes is informed by existing feminist literary scholarship of intersectionality, to which it adds the social and gendered identity of “daughter.” I’m therefore proposing that we consider her work at the crossroads of race/class/gender/poet/daughter. Cervantes scholar Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson argues that Cervantes’s work situates poetry as a theoretical site and places the “voice of a working-class Chicana feminist at the center of our discourse (“Poetry” 151). Cervantes’s work is imbued with loss prior to her mother’s death: the loss of innocence through sexual violence (“Lots I and II” (Emplumada 8–9)), the loss of her Mexican culture and language (“Refugee Ship” (Emplumada 41)), the loss of her city streets (“Freeway 280” (Emplumada 39)), and the loss and recovery of her Chumash heritage (“Poem Para los Californios Muertos” (Emplumada 42), and “For My Ancestors Adobed in the Walls of the Santa Barbara Mission” (Drive 5)). These losses situate the mother–daughter relationship at the heart of a legacy of colonialism, social dysfunction, and institutional violence. I do not mean to argue that that the mother–daughter relationship is necessarily more fraught for Latinas, though it will necessarily have a different history and set of valences. I believe Cervantes adds to and complicates existing female poet narratives about mothers, particularly through her theme of traumatic loss within a Chicana cultural context, or what Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson calls a “poetics

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of loss” that “transfigure[s]‌meanings of historically devastating experiences” (“Tat” 141). We know the world through our bodies: poetics give us another language for articulating what it feels like to live in the world in bodies conscribed by gender, ethnicity, and class, and through subject positions that historically have struggled for agency and voice. Different genres ask us to witness in different ways, and Cervantes’s prolific body of work allows us to trace the evolution of a daughter’s voice and witness, and asks us to be critical witnesses ourselves from her first text (Emplumada, 1981) to her recent (Sueno, 2016), or from youth through adulthood. Jeanette Calhoun Mish identifies Cervantes’s work as a form of storytelling, a contemporary poetic practice, lyric-narrative, a “hybrid poetic,” and “witness poem.” She continues, “The hybrid lyric-narrative form is commensurate with the twin goals of poetry as witness and poetry as art” (“Poetics” 68). Cervantes describes it as “docupoetry … documenting my personal history, as a participant in the women’s movement, holding the absolute belief that the personal is political and it is absolutely personal when it comes to women’s bodies” (“Conversation” 101). My focus on witnessing Cervantes’s poetic voice is another means of reclaiming the daughter’s voice, historically maligned or disregarded as Malinche’s was. Whereas Malinche juggled several languages to translate for others, I want to consider how Cervantes creates her own distinct voice, translating her own worldview to make meaning from loss. Literary influence is another layer to consider when examining Cervantes’s place in poetic tradition. Axelrod considers Plath’s creative acts in the context of other creative acts by women to understand how Plath “lays claim to her matrilineal inheritance” (83). Plath was not just the “madwoman in the attic” who desired to steal male language, “she was also a woman residing in a house built by other women” (Axelrod 81). This echoes Cervantes’s opening to her poem “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway”: “We were a woman family” (Emplumada 11). When none of the available female roles fit her speaker, she “turns to books, those staunch, upright men” (11). Who then, was Cervantes’s literary family? Does Cervantes have a “poetic” mother? I wish to consider how literary influence might mean something different for Cervantes than it did for Plath: while she may have also thought of language as controlled by males, she was not plagued with exactly the same anxieties Plath had toward male authority or female precursors. If “literary influence retraces the outlines of the initial parent-child bond” and “writing unconsciously reproduces the writer’s developmental history while at the same time seeking to correct, to avenge, and to supplant that history” (Axelrod 83), how do we understand Cervantes as a poet given what we know about her ambivalent early relationship with her mother and the trauma of the mother’s sudden death? Cervantes has spoken of her mother’s influence on her writing, which she describes as “ironic”; her mother “read poetry, and she read a lot. She was very literate. But she was very bitter” (Gonzalez, “Poetry” 169). A high school dropout, her mother: had bought into the whole thing of the woman’s place is in the home and marrying. And then, she gets divorced, and then, no future. And so, she would punish me for reading books. I had to read books under the covers. … Because if she would see me reading a book, she would say: “The only thing you are going to be is a maid. It’s the best that you can get out of this life. So you better make sure that you know how to clean the toilet, ’cause no one is ever going to pay you to read books.” (Gonzalez, “Poetry” 169) Cervantes’s father remained present in her life, yet as early as Emplumada, Cervantes refers to herself an “orphan” (“Refugee Ship” 41), and later she describes herself as a “derelict’s kid” (“California Plum,” Drive 84) who has “never felt the way a daughter feels” (“For John,” Cables 15). Instead of

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feeling anxiety or competition, I argue Cervantes “corrects, avenges, and supplants” her unstable upbringing by embracing her influences, and collecting literary family members she can draw upon at will to serve her own poetic development. Her body of work is rife with both overt and subtle homages to poets of both genders and across a variety of ethnicities and poetic traditions. Cervantes has said of her influences: “I have this common debt … I think that it’s very different than the ‘anxiety of influence.’ It’s more in a sense of mothering, than of killing the authoritative father” (Gonzalez, “Poetry” 177). “Mothering” suggests the creation and caring for of a child, and it is interesting that Cervantes would use this metaphor given her mother’s challenges in life and the emptiness left behind by her death. While Cervantes does share thematic interests with other Chicana/Latina writers, it is important to note that many writers she admires, including Moraga and Sandra Cisneros, are Cervantes’s contemporaries. These women were in the first wave of Chicana authors coming out of academia and publishing creative work. Granted, Cervantes also sought out earlier cultural figures with Spanish surnames, such as Gabriela Mistral, Sor Juana, and Pablo Neruda. She dedicates From the Cables of Genocide in part to Frida Kahlo and Violeta Parra. She also notes how as a young woman she discovered African American poets—for example, Maya Angelou, June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, and Gwendolyn Brooks—and “then suddenly, for the first time, I realized that it [poetry] was not a class-bound thing. … So I’ve always wanted to write a poem called ‘On thanking Black Muses,’ because I’ve said often that poetry saved my life, on a literal level as well as on a figurative level” (Gonzalez, “Poetry” 165). She has also spoken eloquently about her affinities with other women poets of color, such as Wendy Rose, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, Paul Gunn Allen, Alice Walker, Ana Castillo, Helen Maria Viramontes, and Evangelina Vigil (Ikes 30–4). Her female influences also include Sylvia Plath (one of the dedicatees of Cables) and Elizabeth Bishop. Drive features a poem titled “In the Waiting Room,” which is a “deconstructive exercise” based on Bishop’s similarly titled poem. In addition, Cervantes turned to some white male poets: in “For Virginia Chavez” the speaker reads her pregnant friend “the poems of Lord Byron, Donne, / the Brownings” (Emplumada 17). Drive features several epigraphs from T. S. Eliot; the text’s organization of multiple books in one volume, as well as its thematic focus on time and loss, also connects Cervantes to Eliot’s modernist tradition. Drive alludes to William Carlos Williams’s Paterson as well. Recalling her statement about poetry “saving her life,” we can see that her nurturing, rather than competitive, attitude toward other poets frees her to obtain healing from words. By publicly acknowledging and praising her poetic influences, Cervantes displays a comfortable relationship with her predecessors and peers. In an interview with Gabriela Gutierrez y Muhs, Cervantes states there is no need to annihilate the literary father. Instead, “For us [Chicanas], it’s the opposite. We are never in competition with one another. It’s all about mothering the text. It’s all about the culture. It’s all about mothering each other. When one succeeds, it adds to the creation, which makes us better.” (192). This perspective illustrates Cervantes’s Chicana feminist consciousness. I attribute Cervantes’s ability to support and find support in other poets of both genders and various ethnicities, classes, and stylistic traditions to the idea that “women are able to disrupt poetical norms with an irreverence unencumbered by any nostalgia for a tradition which has ignored them” (Dowson 17). Instead of competition, Cervantes creates her own literary “familia” from scratch. The term is adopted from Cherríe Moraga, who uses it to describe how queer individuals who become estranged from their families due to their sexual orientation must then create new families for

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support and survival. In creating her own familia, or what Svonkin and Axelrod term “metafamily,” which implies “a new kind of family, and a new way of thinking about family” (150), Cervantes enacts a form of Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness. Women who live in the material or ephemeral “borderlands” between two or more opposing forces learn, as a matter of survival, to operate “in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else” (Anzaldua 100). This “something else” is powerful poetic voice. Anzaldúa describes the mestiza consciousness as “a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts” that is born of “intense pain … . Its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm” (101). This description captures the power I see in Cervantes’s poetic voice, a voice that is informed by trauma, but that uses the creative power of words to both express pain and create beauty in an attempt to heal wounds that open over and over again. Cervantes’s work is an example of mediation. Her privileging of the Chicana/Latina experience as a site for examining family and culture firmly roots her in a Chicana/Latina tradition, yet she also uses Afro-American and Anglo-American poetic legacies to build her own literary presence. Her creation of the daughter’s discourse revises the mother–daughter relationship: although Cervantes never “felt like a daughter,” she is mothered by other writers and further, mothers other writers in turn. Drive (2006) is dedicated to Cervantes’s mother, Rose, and opens with the closing line from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “the fire and the rose are one.” Cervantes uses quotations from Four Quartets to start each of the books within Drive, a fitting thematic tribute or parallel to Eliot’s musings on time, as Drive illustrates how a journey through the past can be an attempt to understand who we are in the present. Fire is a visceral reminder of the violence of her mother’s murder. Fire and rose, destruction and beauty: the two are always tied up together for Cervantes. Eliot asks in Four Quartets, “But to what purpose / disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves / I do not know” (Eliot 3). For Cervantes, disturbing the dust may be an attempt to find something new in the familiar place of grief, but I also want to consider what is at stake in remembering, and the role of memory in healing. Survivors of trauma may not always remember by choice; Sonia Gonzalez notes how Cervantes writes about the past as a “carnivorous animal in relentless pursuit of its prey,” and of how “traumatic memories … emerge time after time until the survivor can consciously grasp the original event. In the act of writing the poetic persona can stay present with the past” (“Narrating” 170). By staying “present” with the past, Cervantes creates an opportunity for us to critically witness for her and her mother; we cannot afford to forget Rose’s violent death. Her life is worth remembering, as it reminds us how women everywhere still struggle with the same issues of poverty and violence, and love and love-lack. In the major poem “Striking Ash” Cervantes addresses her mother and tells the reader a story that shifts between her experience as a grieving daughter and her mother’s life. It is an illustration of the process of “making meaning from loss/absence” that Rodriguez y Gibson discusses. In this poem, the mother has been gone longer than she was alive for her daughter. Cervantes mourns not just the loss of her mother, but also the limited opportunities of her mother’s life. The daughter lives in grief and mourning, but is able to strike ash and dust off her memories in an attempt to reveal/discover who her mother was. The poem opens with imagery of distress and unrest; the textual daughter is not at rest, and can barely sleep. When she does manage to sleep and dream, it is not a means of escape but a space where her mother’s absence becomes present: “the utter / silence

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of you gone / gushes out” (Drive 254). The poem juxtaposes silence and absence with “gush”; there is a sudden overflow of absence, of quiet. In the speaker’s dreams the sentries who guard the past ignite previously silent birds into “flutterings” of love (254). This passage revives the trope of birds in Cervantes’s work; being emplumada empowers her through language. Yet the past is guarded; access isn’t a given. A sentry is a guard who denies access to those who aren’t authorized. Who is allowed to remember? By remembering, Cervantes can turn overwhelming silence, figured as mute birds, into something productive, the “flutterings” of love being the tender memories of her mother. Birds in the poetics of Lorna Dee Cervantes sing their heart out, caw warnings, call out thieves, flutter in her heart. In this poem they are mute, but they make sounds through their motion. The poem shifts to the first of several italicized lines: “Love is the standard key to open any lock” (254). Love will allow her to move past silence and pass through the door of memory. Cervantes then muses about death being a “bludgeon” (Drive 254). These lines introduce images of unexpected violence and weight that leave behind fragments. While others may have time to grapple with their mother’s aging and death, Cervantes only has pieces she must weave together—a photo, a report, and soot. The poem’s abrupt line breaks mimic the disjointed feeling in the aftermath of trauma, and its lack of punctuation throughout mimics the way traumatic memories may flow relentlessly.3 Her mother did not go gently, but instead a “mean luck wrenched you from my hands” (255). Death is inevitable, yet the means of death aren’t; violent death leaves survivors with a different set of questions that they may revisit over and over in an attempt to make sense of what happened. The survivors of the dead must then live in a world where the unthinkable can happen. Cervantes mourns the life her mother was never able to lead; not in terms of future potential, but in terms of the limited life she was born into and trapped in. Cervantes circles the remains of their home, and her body mirrors the house: it is “slack” while the house’s frame is “spent” (Drive 255). Both have succumbed to the forces of grief and loss. She addresses her mother directly: “as you mother / dreamed of somebody / you could be” (255). Notably, this is the first time she has addressed her mother directly in a poem since before her death. While Rodriguez y Gibson notes how the apostrophe in general creates a “deferral of meaning” and is a means of “connection” with the reader, Cervantes’s shift from “you” to “you mother” grounds the poem in her personal loss (“Black Holes” 144). Cervantes builds upon the recurring theme of home as a formative space where lessons are learned, and as a place of containment. Images from her mother’s youth contradict the “woman family” of her adulthood in “Beneath the Shadow” (Emplumada 11): as a child her mother resided in her father’s “depression house” (Drive 256). Taught there to remain submissive, she was never allowed to “come down hard on the key / that would open your life” (255–6). Cervantes extends and juxtaposes the imagery of the bludgeon: while death is a bludgeon, so is love: “love is the common bludgeon to jimmy any window” (257). Slowly, Cervantes builds layers of the complicated meaning of love: a key’s intended function is to open a lock, while a bludgeon would shatter, rather than force open, or “jimmy” a window. A window allows the inhabitants to see out and also lets others see in. What side of the window is Cervantes on here? Daughters appear to be on the inside, yet are still vulnerable to unwelcome visitors. Grief comes to your house and peers “through the curtains” like an uninvited social worker checking to see if you deserve benefits

3

Many thanks to poet Sonia Gutierrez for her reading of the poem and her sharing of this observation.

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(257). It appears that her mother is trapped in the house and wants out. Her dreaming daughter is outside now, but was once inside, too. Although she has escaped the fate of the house that would contain her, the daughter is still linked to her mother. Though gone, the mother is still “dragging me with you” (Drive 258). Her mother takes her on a strange subterranean journey, but the daughter then gives her permission to “usher me anywhere.” The movement imagery of “drag” and “usher” illustrates two poles of connection with the mother: to be “dragged” is to be unwilling, but to be “ushered” is to be escorted, or directed in a mutual understanding of movement. Either way, Cervantes appears helpless against a force that moves her. She is not the one “driving”; her mother is the one who leads. Her willingness to be led at this moment is a reminder of the often tempting pull of grief and memory. For survivors of trauma, grief can be a familiar place, something you knowingly dive or slide into. If Cervantes is at the wheel of our reading experience, where does she drive our attention? I return to the critical witnessing goal of “generating a level of emotional response that leads to personal and social change” (López 178). Cervantes reminds us of the power of memory and loss, and that sometimes time does not heal but instead “cuts the cord” (Drive 258). Yet we return again and again to where the dead would pull us: I learn why we come here striking ash off what we’ve loved. (Drive 258) Ash gets into the cracks, into your mouth and ears and hair and lungs, and can threaten to choke you. Once it settles, it obscures the object it lands upon. If left long enough, it solidifies and take on the shape of what it covers, like the tortured bodies of Pompeii. Ash solidifies into a mold that must be broken to reveal treasure beneath. Her mother exists beneath the ash, and the writing of memory is a way to recognize the substance of her absence. Ash merely obfuscates her, much like the adobe walls of the Santa Barbara Mission that hold her ancestor’s bones (“For My Ancestors,” Drive 5). The umbilical cord that binds mother and fetus must be cut for the infant to live. If time doesn’t heal but instead cuts “the cord,” it replicates the child’s first separation from her mother. Time thus leaves us to become ourselves “absent from the source / a fish in air,” or something outside of its element struggling to survive (Drive 259). This is what it feels like to be a daughter whose mother was violently killed. This is how survival feels. Cervantes then poses key questions: “Did we love our mothers enough,” and then, “did I love you enough” (259). Cervantes first asked this question in “On Speaking to the Dead” in Cables: “Did you love them enough?” (33). What does it look like for a daughter to love her mother “enough?” Her mother had an “infant wanting” all of her life, one that her daughter recognized, but could never love her enough to fill. Moraga also writes of desiring to give her mother the love she recognized her father couldn’t provide. This shared desire, like that in Moraga’s texts, speaks to the intimacy and complexity of mother–daughter relationships. For Cervantes in this poem, love is a key and a bludgeon; a tool and a weapon. She thus speaks to the possibilities and dangers of loving our mothers, and of the “cure” of words—the daughter remains a “child-scribe” for her mother, and even in her absence must work to make sense of the world through language. Her mother’s presence is fleeting, a brief and welcome “gift” (Drive 259). Yet Cervantes can never really find her mother, only “evidence” of her. Her presence is in imagery of fire and ash,

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but it isn’t the renewing cycle of a phoenix. Instead, ash is a stain that demands she remember, like the marks on a forehead on Ash Wednesday. Ash here is a private mark that symbolizes her grief. In Four Quartets, Eliot writes: “We shall not cease from exploration” (39). What does the Chicana/ Latina daughter-poet learn from her exploration? In Moraga and Cervantes we witness daughters reckoning with how a mother’s absence is as powerful as her presence—and with the possibilities for healing often fraught relationships both when they occur and after they end.

WORKS CITED Alarcón, Norma. “Making familia from Scratch: Split Subjectivities in the Work of Helena María Viramontes and Cherríe Moraga.” Chicana Creativity and Criticism: New Frontiers in American Literature, ed. María HerreraSobek and Helena María Viramontes, University of New Mexico Press, 1996, pp. 220–32. Alarcón, Norma. “Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism.” Cultural Critique 13 (Autumn 1989), pp. 57–87. www.jstor.org/sta​ble/1354​269. Accessed February 14, 2010. Alarcón, Norma. “What Kind of Lover Have You Made Me, Mother? Towards a Theory of Chicanas’ Feminism and Cultural Identity Through Poetry.” Women of Color: Perspectives on Feminism and Identity, ed. Audrey McCluskey, Indiana University Press, 1985, pp. 85–110. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1999. Axelrod, Steven Gould. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Brady, Mary Pat. Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space. Duke University Press, 2002 Cervantes, Lorna Dee. Drive: The First Quartet. Wings Press, 2006. Cervantes, Lorna Dee. Emplumada. University Pittsburgh Press, 1981. Cervantes, Lorna Dee. From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger. Arte Publico Press, 1991. Cervantes, Lorna Dee. Sueno. Wings Press, 2013. Cervantes, Lorna Dee. From the Cables of Genocide. Arte Publico Press, 1991. Dowson, Jane. “ ‘Older Sisters Are Very Sobering Things’: Contemporary Women Poets and the Female Affiliation Complex.” Feminist Review, vol. 62 (1999), pp. 6–20. ww.jstor.org/stable/1395641. Accessed May 31, 2009. Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1943. Galarte, Francisco J. “Transgender Chican@ Poetics: Contesting, Interrogating, and Transforming Chicana/o Studies.” Journal of Chicana/Latina Studies, vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring 2014), pp. 118–39. González, Sonia V. “Narrating Traumatic Memories in Letters to David.” Stunned into Being, ed. Rodriguez y Gibson, Wings Press, 2012, pp. 155–76. González, Sonia V. “Poetry Saved My Life: An Interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes.” MELUS, vol. 32, no. 1 (2007), pp. 163–80. www.jstor.org/sta​ble/30029​711. Accessed July 30, 2014. Gutiérrez y Muhs, Gabriella. Communal Feminisms. Lexington Books, 2007. Ikes, Karin Rosa. Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers. University of Nevada Press, 2002. Juhasz, Suzanne. “Towards Recognition: Writing and the Daughter-Mother.” American Imago, vol. 57, no. 2 (Summer 2000), pp. 157–83. DOI: 10.1353/aim.2000.0011. Accessed March 2, 2019. López, Tiffany. “Critical Witnessing in Latina/o and African American Prison Narratives.” Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States, ed. Daniel Quentin Miller, McFarland, 2003, pp. 62–80. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Crossing Press, 2007. Mader, Thomas. “On Presence in Rhetoric.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 24, no. 5 (1973), pp. 375–81. www.jstor.org/sta​ble/357​192. Accessed March 6, 2012.

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Mish, Jeanetta Calhoun. “A Conversation with Poet Lorna Dee Cervantes.” Stunned into Being, ed. Rodriguez y Gibson, Wings Press, 2012, pp. 196–209. Moraga, Cherríe. The Last Generation. South End Press, 1993. Moraga, Cherríe. Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios (1983). Rpt. South End Press, 2000. Moraga, Cherríe. “Shadow of a Man.” Heroes and Saints & Other Plays, West End Press, 1994, 39–86. Moraga, Cherríe. A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000–2010. Duke University Press, 2011. Nunley, Vorris. Lectures on Rhetoric. University of California, Riverside, January–February, 2010. Nunley, Vorris.“Adrift in Precarity: The Post-Family in a Neoliberal Era.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 53, no.2 (2018), pp. 175–80. www.jstor.org/sta​ble/10.5325/pacic​oasp​hil.53.2.0175. Accessed March 2, 2019. Orr, Gregory. Poetry as Survival. University of Georgia Press, 2002. Perez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Into History. Indiana University Press, 1999. Rodriguez y Gibson, Eliza. “‘Tat Your Black Holes into Paradise’: Lorna Dee Cervantes and a Poetics of Loss.” MELUS, vol. 33, no. 1 (2008), pp. 139–55. www.jstor.org/sta​ble/30029​745. Accessed July 30, 2014. Rodriguez y Gibson, Eliza. “Imagining a Poetics of Loss: Notes Toward a Comparative Methodology.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, series 2, vol. 15, nos. 3/4 (2003/2004), pp. 23–50. www.jstor.org/sta​ble/20737​ 213. Accessed July 30, 2014. Rodriguez y Gibson, Eliza. “‘The Poetry of Improbability’: Lorna Dee Cervantes’s Global Chicana Feminism.” Stunned into Being, Rodriguez y Gibson, 2012, pp. 136–54. Rodríguez y Gibson, Eliza, ed. Stunned into Being: Essays on Lorna Dee Cervantes. Wings Press, 2012. Romero, Laura. “‘When Something Goes Queer’: Familiarity, Formalism, and Minority Intellectuals in the 1980s.” Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 6, no. 1 (1993), pp. 121–41. Svonkin, Craig, and Steven Gould Axelrod. “Introduction: The Metafamily.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 53, no. 2 (2008), pp. 145–54. www.jstor.org/sta​ble/10.5325/pacic​oasp​hil.53.2.0146. Accessed March 2, 2019. Torres, Eden. Chicana without Apology: The New Chicana Cultural Studies. Routledge, 2003. Villa, Raúl Homero. Barrio Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture. University of Texas Press, 2001. Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga. University of Texas Press, 2001.

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PART TWO

Interviews with Poets

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Mitsuye Yamada INTERVIEWED BY STEVEN GOULD AXELROD, CRAIG SVONKIN, AND TRAISE YAMAMOTO

Mitsuye Yasutake Yamada was born in Japan in 1923 to Japanese American parents and raised in Seattle. She has had a distinguished career as a poet, prose writer, feminist activist, and Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) advocate. Having received her BA from New York University and her MA from the University of Chicago, she taught for many years at Cypress College and the University of California, Irvine. As Traise Yamamoto has written, Yamada’s poetic project involves both “reclaiming denied subjectivity” and enabling a “collective recovery.” Her poems provide a vivid sense of life in Camp Minidoka, where she was interned for two years during the Second World War, and a moving exploration of public and personal issues from the 1940s to the present day. Along with Nellie Wong, she is the subject of a PBS documentary called Mitsuye and Nellie: Asian American Poets. Her poetry appears in Camp Notes and Other Poems (1976), Desert Run (1988), Camp Notes and Other Writings (1998), and Full Circle (2019). This written interview was conducted in 2021. When asked if she would be willing to answer some of our written questions in 2021, Yamada wrote, “These are interesting/hard questions! I will try to answer them the best I can.” Yamamoto: Can you say something about how your family and immediate community viewed your politics and art? Even for me, in my generation, I got a lot of puzzlement and pushback about being politically vocal and, of all things, an English major who wrote poetry. So can you tell us how you found your way through that? Or would you prefer to talk about where your impulses towards a radical feminism/politics and where your art came from? Yamada: I am very fortunate to have chosen my family well! My late husband Yosh, my brothers, my four children and their spouses, my grandchildren, all have been very supportive and have always encouraged me with my writings as well as my numerous activities with Amnesty International USA.     I grew up with three brothers. Originally, they reacted to my early feminist assertions with good-natured amusement. “Yuk yuk, isn’t that cute?” In time, they followed the lead of my oldest brother, Mike, who was a human rights activist himself. They were very proud of my published writings as well as of my activism. I should mention that my brother Joe became very active in the Japanese American community in San Jose. He helped build the JAMSJ museum there. Svonkin: Memory plays a major role in many of your poems—the need to remember, the pain of memory, and the problems of forgetting. Can you discuss your thoughts about memory and how memory or forgetting or being forgotten plays out in your poetry?

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Yamada: One remembers the most salient details surrounding one’s traumatic experiences. No matter how much time has passed, one sees these images in one’s mind’s eye in living color. The poet simply “records” these images in words, I think! I kept rambling notes when I was working the night shift at the Minidoka Camp hospital in Idaho (where my family was “evacuated” to from our home in Seattle, Washington, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor) during the Second World War. They were written in newsprint tablets with a pencil. When Alta Gerrey (of the Shameless Hussy Press) asked me about them thirty years later, the newsprint was falling apart and the writings were almost illegible. The poems that became my first book, Camp Notes, were prose writings that were reworked into sparse poems from these writings and from my memory of those years. Axelrod: Who are the poets or other writers who influenced you? Are they generally American or of other nationalities? Who do you read or think about today? Yamada: My father, a senryu poet, showed me by example during my childhood that writing poetry was fun and perhaps even necessary for one’s survival. A Stanford graduate (1918), he was fully bilingual, but preferred to write his poetry in Japanese. He would organize a Senryu Kai, a Senryu Club, among immigrant Japanese men no matter where he lived: many years in Seattle before the Second World War, a few years during the Second World War with fellow Japanese prisoners in POW camps in New Mexico, and finally in Chicago where he worked as executive director of a social service agency. Senryu is, like haiku, a seventeensyllable poem in Japanese. but unlike haiku, which is refined and often abstract, senryu is more elemental and personal. For years before the Second World War during my childhood, his fellow senryu poets used to meet every first Sunday of the month in our dining room in Seattle while my mother served them sushi and tea. They would spend an hour or so to talk about what transpired in their lives since the last meeting, another hour to compose their poems, and the last hour reciting their poems while the calligrapher brushed their poems in fluid Japanese script onto a large roll of butcher paper that was tacked onto the wall. I understood perhaps only about ten percent of the spoken language, even less of the written poems, but the whole process thoroughly fascinated me.    A non-sequitur: My father also loved to recite Hamlet’s soliloquy when he had a little too much to drink.     When I was twelve years old, my father told me that the first book that was ever written was by a Japanese woman, and gave me the newly translated copy of Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, which I read from cover to cover. I became an avid reader of novels, but hardly read any poetry except in my English classes in high school. I remember being very impressed by Christina Rossetti and memorizing her poem (“When I am dead, my dearest, / Sing no sad songs for me”), because she was the one woman poet among male poets in our English book. Yamamoto: I wonder about your relationship with other Nisei writers, artists, and activists—both during and after incarceration. I particularly wonder about your relationship with Hisaye Yamamoto, who was much less vocal than you, but whose heart, I believe, was in a similar place. And Wakako Yamauchi? Isamu Noguchi? Yamada: The first time I met Hisaye Yamamoto was at an event which I think may have been in LA. She was with Wakako Yamauchi.     Hisaye and I met again after that at various events or when we were featured on the same conference panels. Eventually, we shared the same publisher, The Kitchen Table Press, and

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since we both released books around the same time, we ended up doing a number of readings together. We were very different from each other, but we became quite close. We talked frequently, mostly by phone. We found ourselves chatting often about our kids and families.    I remember once we had a conversation about our writings. She complimented my poems, and I replied that her prose was very poetic, and I complimented her on it. If you know Si, you know she was a very humble person, and she had a hard time accepting compliments. She deflected the compliment, saying she didn’t consider herself a poet. But truly, her writing captured beautifully and poetically the pathos of the Issei woman of that time. She told a story that needed to be told.     Isamu Noguchi and I met when we did a reading together in Hawaii. We were not yet acquainted with each other, personally, but I had admired his lamp designs for many years. I was tickled because he was very effusive and complimentary about my writings. Axelrod: Marilyn Chin speaks of you as a great influence and support. Have you read her poem “For Mitsuye Yamada on Her 90th Birthday”? Yamada: Marilyn did send me that poem! That was already seven years ago! She gives me too much credit. She is a dear friend and a hugely talented poet, and I am flattered. Axelrod: I’ve noticed that the reportorial style of most of the “Camp Notes” poems (such as “Evacuation” and “Block 4, Barrack 4 Apt C,” etc.) contrasts with the greater complexity, and even the enigmatic quality, of the family poems in other sections of Camp Notes and in Desert Run. Can you tell us about your aims or style in “Camp Notes” as compared to your other poems? Yamada: There was no “aim” in “Camp Notes” originally. The journal I kept in camp to while away my time during slow nights at the hospital was rambling, at times repetitious, at times cryptic, hastily scribbled, often fragmented. I pieced together parts that were legible and eliminated the excesses. I was quite astonished when it was so well received. I was lucky. It could have been a disaster. Axelrod: My students (and I) especially love “Cincinnati” (in Camp Notes). It speaks deeply to so many of them and to me. It seems to tell us something about ourselves, but also something specific to you. It reveals a painful experience we ourselves haven’t had, though some of us remember analogous experiences. Can you tell us how you came to write it, and what you most value in it today? Yamada: “Cincinnati” expresses the shock of suddenly being thrust out into the “real world.” At age three, I had pleurisy and pneumonia and “almost died” after major surgery according to my mother. A story I heard many times. I was therefore sheltered and pampered during my early years. One of my brothers once called me “a hothouse plant.”     I was unable to read this poem publicly for more than ten years after “Camp Notes” was first published. The experience was just too painful. Axelrod: Another poem my students love, especially students of color, is “Mirror, Mirror.” They’re moved by the relationship between son and mother, and by the bold redefinition of the word “American” in terms of diversity. Is there anything you would like to say about this poem, or about ethnic and gender diversity in America today and tomorrow? Yamada: “Mirror Mirror” is an actual conversation I had with my son. Kai was perhaps about ten years old, and it broke my heart. I felt a helplessness, the same feeling I had when my younger brother Joe said he wanted to be white because it was “too hard being Japanese.” “Diversity

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in America” is still a dream, unfortunately. As I said in the film, Mitsuye and Nellie, American still means white American. If you instruct someone to draw a picture of an American, it will be a white American male. As they say, we still have a long way to go. Axelrod: Students are drawn to “Drowning in my Own Language” (in Desert Run) as a kind of moving feminist anthem. It means a lot to them, and they find support in it. Can you say what this poem means to you? I’m also wondering if you’d like to say something about your other woman-centered poems, such as “Masks of a Woman.” Yamada: When you are out there in the wide open ocean, literally drowning and screaming your head off, no language is the right language if you are not taken seriously! This happened in Japan when I went back for a visit one summer. I was eleven years old. I went to the beach with three of my cousins. Fumiko was “in charge” because she was the oldest. She was twelve, and her two brothers were about seven and eight. It was very low tide, and the water continued to be knee deep, no matter how far out we walked, so we decided to go back when the tide turned, and we found ourselves in deeper waters, and suddenly plunged into water over our heads. It turned out that I was the only one among the four of us who knew how to swim, but with three pairs of hands groping me, I was as desperate as they were. There were people walking close by still in knee deep water who obviously thought we were just horsing around. Finally, two teenage boys came to rescue us and carried us back to shore.     I’m so happy your extremely astute students get this poem. They understand the maddening feeling of not being listened to even when you think you are screaming or worse still, being listened to but not being taken seriously. Axelrod: I recently taught your work, along with Robert Lowell’s, in a course in “Life Writing.” Can you talk about your texts as a kind of life writing? I’m thinking of your poems such as “A Mother’s Touch” and “Prayer for Change” (in Desert Run), and of your wonderful short story “Mrs. Higashi Is Dead” (in the same collection). Yamada: Yes, most of my writings, both poetry and prose, would fall into the category of “Life Writing.” Both “A Mother’s Touch” and “A Mother’s Prayer” [sic] just about summarize a changed relationship between my mother and me through many years. She was very bitter about having to leave her large family in Japan when she married my Dad and having to raise four children in America “with no help.” (Her family in Japan owned a lumber company, and she grew up with many servants.)     “Mrs. Higashi Is Dead” describes almost literally what happened when I was home, sick, and the difficulties of communication between Mother and me.     My mother and I were never close during my childhood years. She was a stern taskmaster and perfectionist, always with me, but never with my three brothers because they were boys. She imposed strict Japanese manners, values, and customs on me while my brothers were free to do whatever they pleased. All four of us were taught a very formal polite form of Japanese, which I had to unlearn when I went to Japan when I was eleven years old. She was determined that I grow up to become a very proper Japanese lady. (It didn’t work.)     During those years I don’t remember her ever hugging me, or speaking to me in a normal tone that she used when speaking to my brothers. I drove her crazy, because I was always reading instead of helping her with housework. I therefore kept a safe distance from her whenever possible! My father, who worked as an interpreter for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Seattle for twenty-three years until the outbreak of World War II,

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was an easy-going, gentle soul. My brothers and I were able to communicate with him more fully because he was bilingual. So I spent my younger years more connected to my father.     But I came to know and understand my mother relatively late in life. She was widowed at only fifty-four years old. A few years after my father’s death, she came to live with me and my husband Yosh. She would go on to live with us for seventeen more years. During this period, my mother and I found the next chapter of our relationship. She helped me through the births and care of my children, and helped in the care of my household, especially after I went back to full-time teaching. She was a beloved presence who my children grew to love and respect. I grew to appreciate my mother as a strong, resourceful woman who adapted and survived. So that stiff tether that kept us apart, but also kept us connected, softened as we aged and turned into a silken strand. Svonkin and Axelrod: We were wondering about how writing a poem about Minidoka recently (in Full Circle) differs from writing about it when you were young (in Camp Notes). Yamada: I wrote “Camp Notes” when I was actually in camp. You must be asking this question because you feel a certain lack of immediacy in the poem “Minidoka, Idaho.”     I agree. Svonkin: In your poem “Abject Lesson” (in Full Circle), I am fascinated by the lines: “We wore our / bad conduct ribbons / forever after with / pride.” There seems such an interesting rebellion, such a fascinating rejection of shame, such a powerful subversive quality in those lines. Can you discuss that rejection of shame and the role it plays for you in life and poetry? Yamada: Shame, “haji” in Japanese, I write about this in “Mrs. Higashi is Dead” too.     Rejection of shame, chief among them, rejection of being ashamed of being Japanese.     Unlike my three brothers who were American-born citizens, I was born in Japan when my mother returned to Japan to attend to an ailing mother. I was an “enemy alien” during World War II. My parents and I became eligible for US citizenship in 1953 when the Walter McCarran Act was passed. By then, my father who worked as an interpreter for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, had been living in the US for forty-five years. Svonkin: In your poem “In Some Countries” (in Full Circle), you juxtapose countries where “writing poetry is deadly business” with the US, where many poets “are ignored to death.” Can you talk about this desire to be paid more attention to as a poet—to be more central to the cultural conversation? Yamada: Isn’t it ironic that in the countries where poetry is taken seriously, there are political consequences because the poets tell the truth? Svonkin: Your poem “Father” (in Full Circle) is so interesting in that it explores the child’s relationship to both parents in a complex way. The speaker’s relationship with her father shapes her relationship to her mother. Would you like to say a word about the autobiographical nature of this poem—and perhaps others, such as “Mistress,” “Papa’s Naga Uta,” and “Warning”? How much is remembered, and how much crafted? Do you ever worry about being too revealing? Yamada: My charismatic bilingual father was universally loved by both the Issei and Nisei communities (first- and second-generation Japanese). He had many close friends among his co-workers at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Seattle who remained loyal to him when he was arrested by the FBI and held in prison for three and a half years during World War II. My brother Tosh used to say, “He could charm the pants off a cold fish.” No matter where he lived, people were attracted to him and would seek him out for advice about

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small and great matters. My mother resented this because she felt this took him away from spending time with us, but at the same time, she seemed to be proud that he had so many admirers.     Years after his death, I learned of his long-term relationship with his mistress and how unhappy my mother had been for many years. I realized why she so often talked about her friend who had committed suicide, killing herself and her children, and why I had childhood fears that some day I might not find her alive when I came home from school (see the poem “Homecoming” in Camp Notes). I truly came to understand my mother and her suffering alone for many years.     Am I worried about revealing too much dirty laundry about my own family? No, not really. These are very human stories. Warts and all! Svonkin: I am very fond of your latest poems in Full Circle that explore aging with a sense of humor, tough resilience, and a striving for some hope. Are humor, resilience, or hope central to your poetic or personal voice? Is there any advice you’d like to give us? Yamada: I am going to be ninety-eight years old in July [2021]! On my way to 100, if I live that long!

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Marilyn Nelson INTERVIEWED BY CRAIG SVONKIN

Marilyn Nelson is Professor Emerita at the University of Connecticut and the former poet laureate of Connecticut. She is noted as a poet, memoirist, and writer for children and young adults. She earned her BA from the University of California, Davis, her MA from the University of Pennsylvania, and her PhD from the University of Minnesota. The recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the NSK Neustadt Prize, and the Frost Medal, Nelson is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Among her many books are The Homeplace (1991), Mama’s Promises (1985), The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997), Faster Than Light: New and Selected Poems, 1996–2011 (2012), and a verse memoir, How I Discovered Poetry (2016). Her children’s and young adult books include Beautiful Ballerina (2009), A Wreath for Emmett Till (2009), My Seneca Village (2015), Mrs. Nelson’s Class (2017), and A Is for Oboe (2022). Svonkin: In your poem “The House on Moscow Street,” from The Homeplace (1990), you write of your family’s home: “It’s the ragged source of memory.” Preceding the poem, you include a photograph of the house and one of your great-grandfather, Rufus Atwood or “Pomp.” Often in your books of poetry, such as in Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), American Ace (2016), and your sonnet-series memoir, How I Discovered Poetry (2014), you include photographs, of family members and others. In Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem (2004), you included historic maps, embroideries, a silhouette, photographs, paintings, museum exhibits, and photos of Fortune’s actual bones. History—family and otherwise—plays an important role in your poetry. Can you discuss the role of memory in your work, and how photographs and other mnemonic objects serve as inspirations for your writing, or how they play, perhaps, a role of some import for your readers? How are these visual inspirations “ragged source[s]‌of memory”? Nelson: In each case you mention, the addition of photographs was a decision made by the publishers after the poems were written. I usually have nothing to do with it, except in The Homeplace, where I asked the publisher to use family photos to divide sections. (The photo showing a group of Tuskegee Airmen getting into a plane came to me as a lovely little miracle: I wrote a poem about that, that’s in another book. Can’t recall which book, or the title.) But history does play an important role in my work, not because of mnemonic objects, but because of remembered or found information.     It’s hard to make generalizations: each poem is different. “Daughters, 1900” from The Homeplace, for instance, started with a little torn piece of an old photograph I came across while doing family research. In the photo scrap was the front of an old car, parked in front

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of the porch of a house, with two women on it. The photo was very tiny, but somebody had saved it. I thought the house was probably the homeplace, and I imagined the women on the porch, too small to be recognizable, might have been a couple of the Atwood sisters. The poem is an act of imagination, written to give a sense of what I think my great-aunts must have been like when they were young. I just imagined them sitting together on the porch on a beautiful day. Other historical poems have had similar genesis, but most of my historical poems start with—instead of a scrap of a photo—a piece of information, and then inventing a character or voice who can convey it. There’s no reference in the poem to the photograph. Research has included traveling (for The Homeplace I spent several days at the family homeplace in Kentucky; for Carver I went to the National Parks Service museums at his birthplace in Missouri and at Tuskegee in Alabama; for Fortune’s Bones I went to the Waterbury, Connecticut, museum to see Fortune’s skeleton) and lots of book research (for How I Discovered Poetry I read through ten years’ worth of Life magazine and Ebony). But writing is an act of imagination. Svonkin: Can you discuss your creative practice, with reference to specific poetic projects, whether current or completed? Nelson: Right now, I’m working on a commitment to write about the lives of four individuals who were enslaved in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is part of a larger project in the state, called Witness Stones, in which Connecticut towns remember people who were held in slavery within their boundaries. I was invited to write, and I extended the invitation to three friends who are African American women poets living in the state. Each of us has agreed to write about four individuals. We are guided by a brilliant professional historian. I’ve so far written three (out of four planned) poems about a woman named Temperance, the daughter of a Narragansett woman and an enslaved African, who, in about 1729, agreed to sell herself into slavery, apparently because she was in love with an enslaved man whom she could not marry unless she, too, was enslaved. Five years later, she tried to sue for back wages, but of course she lost the suit, first because she was a married woman whose husband had to speak for her, and second because her husband was a slave. A few years after her attempted law suit, their owner sold her, her husband, and their youngest child, while retaining ownership of their other four children. My first poem is about her decision to sign her X on papers agreeing to be a slave for life. I don’t believe she understood what she was doing. After I’ve written about her, I’ll move on to write about my three other people.     As to a completed project, how about my book, Fortune’s Bones, a sequence of persona poems centered on the true story of an eighteenth-century Connecticut physician who prepared the skeleton of his long-time slave, Fortune, after Fortune’s death, and hung the skeleton in his home to serve as a medical exhibit, even while Fortune’s wife and children were still held in slavery in his home. In this case, the historical information was presented to me by the historical museum which has owned this skeleton for c.60 years and only recently discovered its history. Svonkin: It seems to me that ethical, moral, and spiritual issues permeate many of your poems, but often in quite complicated ways. In “Queen of the Sixth Grade” from How I Discovered Poetry, the questions of whether trauma must necessarily be met with counter-trauma, and whether retribution can ever justifiable, seem central to the poem’s power and complexity.

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Likewise, in the title poem of your verse memoir, “How I Discovered Poetry,” the philosophical/ spiritual question of whether psychically negative experiences, like the racist humiliation you depict in the poem, while clearly traumatic might sometimes become the stuff of transformative life lessons almost (but not entirely) worth the pain? In The Fields of Praise (1997) and The Baobab Room (2019), we find some of your most overtly spiritual poetry. How do moral, ethical, or spiritual issues play out in your poetry, and can you point to a specific poem or two as an emblematic example? I’m particularly interested in how spirituality informs your poetic practice (like in Fortune’s Bones or The Baobab Room, for example). Nelson: Oh, wow: this question is very speculative. For me, “Queen of the Sixth Grade” is a poem about how Ellie Mitchell and I broke Jamie Crowl’s arm, and “How I Discovered Poetry” is about how I discovered the potential power that words can have. I wasn’t thinking in terms of ethical, moral, or spiritual issues or trauma and counter-trauma. The Baobab Room was actually written by my friend Father Jacques deFoiard Brown (“Abba Jacob”). My part in it was mostly pushing him to write down something he had told me about, and then going through it with an editorial red pen. “Abba Jacob” has been my spiritual guide for some years, ever since I found him again after having lost him for twenty years, twenty years during which he had received the call to the monastic life, and then to the priesthood. I have had the great blessing of having been able to visit his hermitage and ask him questions, of having his deeply thoughtful guidance on many issues I was struggling with. I am immensely grateful for this gift. Svonkin: From what I understand, your sonnets in A Wreath for Emmet Till were originally written for adults, but later published for children. Is that true, and if so, could you talk a little bit about that shift in audience? Also, “How I Discovered Poetry” was published first in The Fields of Praise (1997), a poetry collection for adults, before becoming the title poem for How I Discovered Poetry (2014), a book published as a children’s or YA memoir. Do you know as you begin to write a poem whether it is a children’s or adult poem (or do you even think about your poetry in those ways)? Nelson: No, those sonnets were commissioned by a publisher who dreamed of publishing “a book about lynching, for children.” She asked me to do that, but told me to write whatever came to me. So I knew from the outset that the first audience for the poems would be young readers. I did, however, write the first half of my Carver book as a general book of poetry. Then a publisher friend who published only books for children and young adults said he’d like to publish the book. So the second half of the book was written with the knowledge that the book would be published for younger readers. I don’t think there’s any difference between the first and second halves of the book. The poem “How I Discovered Poetry” was written as a one-off poem about a memory, with no particular attention given to a potential audience. When I decided, some twenty years later, to write a memoir-ish book about the Fifties, I remembered that old poem and basically built the rest of the book about it. I don’t believe the poems in the book are particularly aimed at younger readers; I hope there are enough layers in each poem in the book to be interesting and insightful and entertaining for older people. I don’t usually think of those issues when I begin to write, and—to tell the truth—when I have started with the thought of writing for children, the work I produce is usually unpublishable garbage. Think about the best children’s literature—The House at Pooh Corner, for instance, or The Little Prince, or The Velveteen Rabbit, or Frog and Toad—don’t they contain enough wisdom and delight to be important to adults, too?

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Svonkin: In your poetry works for children and adolescents, you’ve dealt with some very troubling and painful topics. Are there any topics, in your opinion, that are off-limits when writing for children? If not, are there some “rules” for writing difficult poetry for children? Nelson: I didn’t think lynching was a topic for children, frankly. There are other topics I don’t touch, because I just don’t want to write about them for any audience. Other writers may, but I don’t want to write about sex or abuse, etc. for any audience. But I don’t think there are any “rules.” Svonkin: Who were the poets and what were the poems that made you want to become a poet yourself, or that influenced the type of poet you’ve become? Who are some of your favorite poets for children or adults, and what are some of your favorite children’s or adult poems? Are there poems you think would be well-received by children that weren’t necessarily written for them? Nelson: I started reading poems in the Childcraft set of anthologies selected and illustrated for children. Among the poets included were first-rate poets who wrote for children and first-rate poets who wrote for adults. Milne, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Hughes, Housman, Masefield, Longfellow, Kipling, Dunbar, Teasdale … There were no little signs saying “written for children” or “written for adults.” I graduated from Childcraft to anthologies my parents had kept from their college days, and then to anthologies of “Negro” poetry. Svonkin: What do you think scholars of your poetry should pay more attention to when reading, discussing, or analyzing your poetry? Nelson: Hmmm … Reclaiming received European forms. Inventing new ways of dealing with form. Allusion. Science. Forgiveness. Svonkin: Humor, admittedly sometimes of the painful variety, plays a bigger role in your poetry than critics tend to acknowledge. Can you talk a little bit about the role that humor plays in your verse, with perhaps an example from one of your poems? Nelson: One semester years ago, Seamus Heaney allowed me to audit his graduate workshop at Harvard. One day, as we were all walking to the bar where we drank beer after class, Heaney confided to me that he felt his role in this workshop of Harvard grad students who took themselves very seriously was to be a clown. My friend “Abba Jacob” has sometimes preached homilies wearing a clown nose. Sacred clowning. That’s not far from the role of the poet, is it?     I wrote “Women’s Locker Room” in The Fields of Praise at a time when “Black Women’s Rage” was very much part of the Zeitgeist; you could hardly pick up a newspaper or magazine without seeing a headline about it. I started writing that poem as an exploration of that subject, and how I had felt it. My then husband was a good reader of poetry, glad to be my first reader and happy to offer his critique. For this poem, each time he read it, he said, “I know it’s not what you’re reaching for, but I think this poem wants to be funny.” I kept re-writing it, in each draft turning up the volume of rage, then showing it to him again. He said the same thing every time: “I think it wants to be funny.” Finally, after many drafts, I just gave up and let it be what it wanted to be. I wrote it many years ago, so I don’t remember what it was originally like, or what I changed to let the humor in. But every time I’ve read it to an audience, people have laughed.     I hope this will do.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Rae Armantrout INTERVIEWED BY STEVEN GOULD AXELROD AND CRAIG SVONKIN

Rae Armantrout was born in 1947 in San Diego. She grew up in a working-class neighborhood and then received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with Denise Levertov and became a friend of Ron Silliman, one of the founders of Language poetry. She received her MA from San Francisco State University. Moving back to San Diego, she and her husband had a child, and for many decades she taught creative writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is now living in Seattle with her family. Armantrout has won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2010. Alluding to Lewis Carroll, she describes her work as “a Cheshire poetics, one that points two ways then vanishes in the blur.” Among her volumes are Veil: New and Selected Poems (2001), Collected Prose (2007), Versed (2009), Partly: New and Selected Poems 2001–2015 (2016), Wobble (2018), and Finalists (2022). Armantrout completed this written interview in January 2021. Axelrod: Silence has been seen as an important feature of your poetry, perhaps as a way to interrupt the habitual flow of words that adhere to a patriarchal logic, or perhaps reflecting other motives. Ron Silliman analyzed this feature of your work in terms of “segmentation,” “a jagged indeterminacy,” and a process of “holding meaning back.” Hank Lazer has pointed out a peculiar “mode of swerving” or a change of direction that characterizes many of your poems. How do you account for your uses of “swerving,” “indeterminacy,” or silence, or perhaps we should say the many different ways silence interrupts and informs your poetic utterance? Armantrout: I think, in part, this reflects the habit of after-thought. I often, for example, think or say something and then, a second later, hear the strangeness, sometimes the falseness of it. This may happen with common phrases such as, let’s say, “Not as yet.” We all know what that means, but if you listen again, in a different way, you may wonder what that “as” is doing there. “As” can mean simultaneous with or it can mean instead of. This little phrase is tricky. It may seem to mean that “not” is masquerading as “yet.” I seem to have a habit of estrangement, of looking at things (and words) askance. To do this in writing, and take a reader along, requires space for the double-take to occur. Sometimes a line break suffices; sometimes I want to move on to another idea, another stanza or section. If I am “holding meaning back,” it’s to show that there is more meaning or a different meaning in the words than might at first appear. This is one way the “swerve” occurs. Or it may happen when I want to move fast and don’t want to carry the usual baggage. I developed this technique as early as the poem “Context” in Necromance (1991). I don’t want to quote the whole thing, but I suggest you look at it. In the first section there is a “cluster’ of berries at dusk, seen in the (merely) possible context of arrangement.

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In the second section there are “desultory” puddles or “drops,” clearly unarranged, and so described as “lonely.” In the third section an “old woman” (really my grandmother) is tracing circles with her fingers on the “nubs” of her chair arms. There are no explicit connections made between these sections beyond the word lonely so we might look for other “contexts.” I think the “circles” traced on the chair arm can be seen (or at least inferred) in all three parts. Due to the laws of physics a raindrop on a window or a puddle on asphalt will be more or less (not perfectly) round. The same applies to a “cluster” of berries and to the shape of the berry itself. The circles the old woman’s finger traces are the same except empty. The loneliness in the gesture can be assumed. She is both doing something natural (apparently), creating circles, and doing something that comforts her. I hope not only the loneliness but the circles and the comfort (or need for comfort) are implicit in all three of those sections. I am making an analogy of sorts without using “like” or “as.” If you fail to trust the analogy, the sections can stand separately without it. You might say the analogy “has deniability.” In the fourth part, perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, someone—either the old woman or the writer—“waits for the word to come/to her, tensed/as if for orgasm.” Thought circles the right word, perhaps, as a finger circles a nub. Or not. By making connections implicit I make them optional and I can make them quicker. I also bring the reader’s imagination and consent in play. Axelrod: Can you say something about your process of writing? How do you go about composing a poem? What roles do randomness and conscious intent play? Armantrout: I think there is a lot of randomness in my process, but perhaps not quite in the way you imagine. I want to leave the door open to what happens next in my work. That could be a bird flying by or a thought. It could be a thought occasioned by the bird flying by. We seldom think deliberately. Most of the time, ideas come from nowhere, just as dreams do. Thoughts think themselves. When we are awake, they are followed immediately by a judge who says, Poppycock! or Interesting! If the thought is deemed somehow promising by the automatic judge, I write it down. I can then deliberately give my attention to that idea for a while and see if it contains more or if it reminds me of something else. We can let our attention roam freely or we can choose to constrain it for a period of time. I do both when I’m writing poems. I’ll follow one path with concentration for a bit then I will want to look around and see what else is going on. A poem can take shape over the course of several days using that process. It’s what we can make of the random that matters. Svonkin: We are wondering about your use of the personal in your poetry, despite the conventional but perhaps outmoded binary between linguistically/structurally experimental poets and confessional poets. Are we right in thinking you bring what might be akin to life writing into many of your poems, such as “Asymmetries” and “I and I” from Wobble? Armantrout: Yes. Really I always have. Usually my life appears in brief flashes and as one element among others. When I was younger, my father and mother made appearances in my work. Sometimes such appearances are unannounced, in that I might not make introductions. For instance, in “Like,” from Versed, the first section considers the things my mother brought to my attention and, perhaps more importantly, the things she didn’t. I don’t remember her ever, for instance, pointing out a beautiful sunset—which seems strange. That didn’t occur to me until I began this poem. I use the pronoun “she” instead of saying “my mother” probably for sonic reasons, but I don’t think her identity is hard to figure out. The second section is about me—well sort of:

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“What’s it’s like to be me.” Where watch out and report back cross— a stubborn eddy.    What is it like to be someone? That is a strange question, though one we are always asking. In my poem, it’s a bit like being a sentinel, perhaps. Is this particular to me. I doubt it. Perhaps to some extent. How could I ever know. The poem mixes personal memory with epistemological speculation.    One of the poems you mention, “Asymmetries,” is a bit unusual in that the whole thing is centered on what is obviously an intimate relation. People who know me would know I’m talking about my husband, Chuck. I mean, he does do a lot of sawing, and he does (tunelessly) hum. That said, if I thought I was writing about something unique between us, I wouldn’t publish it. When I write, “But I don’t know / the man you picture when you see yourself walking around/the world inside your head,” I assume I am talking about a limitation common to us all. We can know our spouse and yet not know how that person sees or imagines himself. We can’t know what the world as they imagine it contains. We get occasional hints, of course. Glimmers. But, for the most part, these private imaginary worlds are places we don’t know how to ask about and our partners are unlikely to volunteer. I’m interested in the different layers of representation and access too. That’s why the sentence structure in the poem is so recursive. And I think the speaker in the poem, the “me” character, is a little too pushy. She wants to know everything and that is, I assume, impossible. I think others find themselves in this same position—at least that’s my bet. So, this poem lets in quite a bit of my life, but I think it’s more epistemological than truly personal.    The issue of how much of my family life to represent has intensified since I’ve become a grandmother. My son and his wife are very private people. For instance, they don’t like me to post pictures of the twins on Facebook. But the girls come into quite a few of my more recent poems. Whatever interests me gets into my work. Or, I could say, whatever generates both feelings and ideas gets in. The girls are about to turn four. It was so fascinating to watch them become linguistic beings. And it is interesting to see how they individuate, especially since they are twins. How can I not write about that? I have done a bit of conventional autobiographical writing in the book True (Atelos, 1998). Actually, I’ve just started a prose memoir today, perhaps inspired by answering your questions—but I don’t plan to publish it. Svonkin and Axelrod: At the beginning of your career, your poems often seemed to return to the narrative of intersubjective failure or communication denial. Do you feel that is true? How would you characterize your present work in terms of intersubjectivity? Armantrout: Hmm. I hadn’t really considered “intersubjective failure” as an early theme in my work, not in so many words—but I don’t think you’re wrong. Before I can answer, I need to decide what counts as “early.” I imagine I am classified as a twentieth-century poet, yet I published two books in the 1970s, one book in the 1980s, and three books in the ’90s for a

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total of six. Since the turn of this century, I have published eleven. Can I count anything before the turn of the century as “early?” I’m glad you said “intersubjective” not “interpersonal.” It’s not always clear what constitutes a person in my work. But there is often a communication problem at the heart of it. Messages misfire. “Language of Love” (also in Necromance) begins, There were distinctive dips and shivers in the various foliage, syncopated, almost cadenced in the way that once made him invent “understanding.”    My interest there is really in proto-language and in how language began. I’m also interested in what might be imagined to constitute a message. What was there for intelligent creatures to imitate before language developed? Cadence and syncopation are linguistic as well as musical elements. And really they are all around us in the natural world. Someone receiving them might feel addressed. I admit I do. But you would be crazy to think you were being addressed by the foliage. The “him” in the poem invents “understanding” on the basis of an error. It could have been a “her.” Perhaps I spitefully wanted to associate a male with error. Perhaps he decides he is loved on the basis of this pseudo-message. From there the poem broadens out into all sorts of attempted and perhaps mistaken communications. The line “He stroked her carapace/with his claw” was lifted from a Nature program involving crab sex. This is how the male communicates that he intends no harm. It’s a very mediated overture because they’re both so armored up—and it’s not always well received. It would be a mistake, by the way, to assume that I was only interested in the crab caress as a symbol for a less-than-intimate exchange between humans. I find undersea life quite interesting in itself. Was I interested in hinting at love problems or was I engaged by the development of communication and the variety of ways messages could be conveyed? Hmm. Maybe both?    The poem “Pretty Little” in Conjure addressed this question directly. It begins: I’m not lonely because I have secrets; I’m lonely because words can’t bring the past into the present (which amounts to the same thing).    In that passage there’s an implied intersubjective failure that is attributable to an inherent failure of language—and the nature of time. You may want to tell your new friend or partner who you are. Good luck with that if you are a mature person. The past is so wide and wild; the present so narrow. I think intersubjective failure and communication difficulties are still themes of mine. Svonkin: One of the things we like the most about your poetry is your bringing together the philosophical, the spiritual, nature, science and medicine, folk tales and childhood materials, and images or ideas from popular culture, high culture, and scientific discourse, and mixing

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these in such fascinating ways in many of your poems. Is this intentional, does it come out of the materials that you encounter in everyday life, or does it result from some particularities of your writing practice, perhaps? Armantrout: It’s not exactly intentional, though I like doing it. I was raised with Judeo-Christian folk tales (i.e., Bible stories). There’s nothing wrong with that, but my mother wanted to insist those were the only sources of truth—which, of course, left me feeling constrained. As soon as I was able, at age twelve, I started finding parallel origin stories. We had a unit on Greek myth when I was in sixth grade, for instance. I could see the parallels (as well as the differences) between those stories and the ones I’d grown up with. It was freeing. When I was in my midteens I started to go to the local library and find books on cosmology. That, of course, provided another account of the Beginning. I became an agnostic, but that’s not what’s important in this context. What matters is that I saw how one story could be laid over another, how each could bring out new meaning in the other. I’ve used that combinatory method in all sorts of ways. Speaking of pop culture references, in “The New Zombie,” from Itself, I insert a description of the genome into a poem otherwise about the zombie trope in media: Viral relics in the genome? Genes that switch themselves off and on, unthinking but coordinated?    So that poem mixes pop culture with biology. I do like to make unlikely combinations. The poem “Work Songs” from Conjure began when I heard about a (racist) road rage incident in which a White driver shot a Black girl because she had allegedly cut him off in traffic. I put my rage, his rage, and the popular music I imagined playing in his car into the poem: “The Emperor’s a Pig and So Are You” starts up again. It’s called freedom. In a song, I turn my power on …    I think it’s clear that the lines above in quotes are never likely to appear in a real popular song, but snippets of real songs do come into the poem as it goes on. I don’t think this is surprising, any more than quilting, or recordings in which hip-hop DJs splice various tracks together. I’ve said this before, but I’ll run it up the flagpole once more, I think compartmentalization is the enemy of creativity.

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Svonkin and Axelrod: At the 2019 PAMLA conference, you spoke about folly, and read poems related to it.1 Can you speak a bit here about your thoughts on folly and why this concept interests you? Does the presidential administration that is now ending play into this? Armantrout: How does folly differ from mere stupidity? Stupidity is out in the open, embarrassingly so. It can’t hide. It is punished by family and friends. Folly has its disguises. It is often connected with revelry and indulgence. The Parisian can-can shows were called “follies.” I suspect that “fool” and “folly” share a common root. You can fool around without necessarily being dumb. The court fool could get away with a lot. Folly is not punished immediately. As I said in my talk at the PAMLA conference, two of the most common uses of the now antiquated word are in phrases like: “Someday she will rue the folly of her ways” or, “It was the height of folly to shoot the albatross.” Later you’ll find out why. Folly is a mistake not caught at once; it’s a funeral disguised as a birthday party.     Many of my poems deal with folly; to be more specific, they deal with the ways we fool ourselves, the dangers and tragedies we refuse to see. One quick example would be the beginning of the poem “Enclosures” in Conjure. “Human interest//Patrolling the border/on four legs.” I wrote “Enclosures” when I was still living in San Diego, on the Mexican border. I’m positive I didn’t invent that quote. I imagine it was a teaser for a local news story. The border patrol does use dogs, and many people love dogs. It appears this story (which I didn’t watch—or read) wants viewers to warm up to the use of dogs to find migrants hidden in the trunks of cars at checkpoints or struggling on foot through the desert. I’m sure that, when they aren’t lunging at migrants, many of these dogs are charming. But it seems like folly to focus on the helpfulness of canines instead of the suffering of people while the Trump administration treats migrants barbarically. They say that magic succeeds by using misdirection. If so, this story is simple magic. When we as individuals or as a community allow ourselves to be fooled, that’s folly.     I have written a few poems specifically in response to Trump, not many. His evil clown act (if that’s what it is) is always in our face. It’s almost too obvious to make me want to write about it. Still, there are two Trump-related poems in Conjure: “Where Will You Spend Eternity” and “Holding Patterns.” In “Holding Patterns” the second section begins with a quote from one of his speeches: “Unlike many of us, no one has seen anything like what’s going on right now,” you say to the cameras you’ve managed to capture.    Knowing Trump, as we’ve all come to, I have some idea what he meant. He was probably complaining that he was being treated in an unprecedentedly bad way by the media. Notice, though, how much I have to guess to come up with that translation. I wasn’t interested in Rae Armantrout’s talk and poetry reading regarding folly at the 2019 PAMLA Conference is scheduled to be published as part of the special “Send in the Clowns” issue of Pacific Coast Philology, 56 (2) (2022), ed. Stanley Orr. 1

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what he intended anyway. Focusing on what he actually said, you can hear the howling emptiness of it. Surely, if this sentence exemplified the contents of your mind, you would feel lost—unable to distinguish “many” from “no one.” Clever Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his name is “No One” so that, after he blinds him while making his escape, Polyphemus calls for help by yelling “No one blinded me!” Who fooled Americans into voting for Trump in 2016? How? There are several answers to that—but, whatever else it was, it was Folly. I guess I could have written a whole book of poems just echoing the nonsense he spouted. I preferred not to. Now that (thank the gods) his presidency is coming to an end, I will be so happy not to have to hear his voice.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

Lorna Dee Cervantes INTERVIEWED BY STEVEN GOULD AXELROD AND CRAIG SVONKIN

Lorna Dee Cervantes was born in San Francisco in 1954 and grew up in San Jose, California. She received her BA from San Jose State University, and did graduate study in the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. After decades of teaching Creative Writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder, she returned to the Bay Area, and more recently has moved to Washington state. Her poems reflect her Latinx and Indigenous identities, and they explore the intersections of personal and political, memory and observation, feminism and language play, and traditions emanating from US, Mexican, South American, Native American, and other world cultures. Her books include Emplumada (1961), From the Cables of Genocide (1991), Drive: The First Quartet (2006), Ciento (2011), Sueño (2013), and April on Olympia (2021). Cervantes completed this written interview in March 2021 in Seattle. Axelrod: In your volumes, you’ve alluded to such celebrated poets as William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop (“In the Waiting Room”), Pablo Neruda, and Sylvia Plath. Do you see something of yourself in these poets, or do you see something absent in these poets as a generative space for you to fill? Cervantes: Yes, and yes. Particularly when teaching women’s literature, and in lectures and panels, I speak about “mothering a text” as opposed to the Modernist Oedipal project of annihilating the father, one’s predecessor. Ezra Pound’s declaration of “Make it new” is rather fascist in impulse, and an impossible chore when it comes to practicing the art of language: poetry, which is, as language, both personal and private at the same time, is social and communal; and as an art there are no absolutes. That is the only absolute—as absolute as the fact of conception and birth, and as mysterious.     Poets who have written before us have the capacity to mother a text in us, to birth a new poem through our bodies. This is another way to conceptualize “influence” (although in this list I do have a main and lasting influence, Pablo Neruda). All are poets I read as a child, out loud, as a preadolescent discovering the world by forming a world, and discovering how one is simultaneously formed by the world—by forming “informis,” as My Teacher, Robert Hass, once wrote in an early and influential poem, “Songs to Survive the Summer”: “Don’t / take any wooden nickels, / kid, and gave me one // The squalor of mind / is formless, / informis, // … It’s all in / shapeliness, give your / fears a shape?”     Of these poets, T. S. Eliot is the one most illustrative of the latter (absent thus generative) option, the earliest poet I read at my youngest with whom I felt I had the most connection prior to Neruda. I identified, somehow, as a Coker brat myself—in the middle of “war time,”

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in the mid-1960s, and in the middle of a “center” that could “not hold.” A lot like identifying with John Wayne, as me, an Indigenous American woman.     My literary pentych, Drive: The First Quartet, is nothing but my way to write myself back to that, in bridging by dissolving racial, class, social, economic, and sexual/gender divisions in order to reconcile back to that early, unworldly, connection. Not a matter of seeing absences, but more like a cultural squint where instead of seeing the image in light as processed and fixed, you present the shadows, the same image but as a negative—to be replicated, and altered, but the same. I consider the book, and the poems that allude to these poets, to be a homage, a form of rewriting. It’s an act of love. In the case of Eliot, sometimes you can be in love with someone but not like them very much. (This makes me laugh.) It’s a complicated relationship, like with the mother who bore you (in my case).     My favorite poets, though, on the other page, are not as problematic so I don’t allude to them, like Robert Hass, Marge Piercy, Dylan Thomas, and Sylvia Plath, among others. So, yes, and yes. Svonkin: In your poetry, we often see an interactive binary theme at work: on the one hand, the need for communication and memories of the traumas of the past; on the other hand, the dangers of remembered pain—namely the psychic dangers of renewed trauma via memory. Does poetry help the poet achieve psychic health or endanger the poet’s mental equilibrium? Cervantes: I like the term, “interactive binary.” It’s accurate and appropriate, the measure of a good image. This is not just a theme, it’s the principal force to the creative/critical process that is poetry, leading to the symbolic: that always shifting realm of negative and positive, held together in impossible check, and balance, by the power of the poetic symbol. For example, how is it that one can love and hate their mother? Or their father? When it comes to trauma it often whittles down into one stark phrase, one poetic symbol. The poem can get you there, for the writer as well as for the reader and experiencer.     It’s like a psychic old school pinball machine, a game of being launched by, bounced off of, reacting to, being repulsed by, being supercharged with, and eventually going down the w/hole of that interactive binary and the multitudes of oppositions, contrarieties, clashes, contradictions, and ironies generated by the */− and ∔∔/− − positioning (like from being a person of color, a “person of experience” in “America,” and a poet).     I would draw this on the board when I talk about it in class. I splay out the phases of the process into a semiotic square with opposing arrows indicating the creative tension, and draw in the mediating symbolic resolutions beginning with the biggest opposition and lived contradiction of all, Life/Death (and all the corresponding lovely “L” words and all the dismal “big D” words like “depression,” which is silence, and the death of the poet herself). Not unlike the phases of the grieving process.      We can look at it as those “upper surface” areas of the quadrants: Self and one’s body on the one side, say the left, versus on the right, the Other and the experience of one’s body (acted upon or mirrored) through Other/s; especially when that Other messes with your life by presenting the option of your very private and personal death—based on what you represent to them. There is a human need to communicate, to truth-tell, to recount the memories of the body, your body, to others (like earthquake talk—the urge to recount where, how, when, and what one was doing and thinking when The Big One hit).

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   On the other hand, that Big D position down the lower middle is not a hole one wants to fall into. With some students, I advise writing about flowers. Or go dancing, stop the language function completely, pull the plug, empty the cache. Let something emerge from the duende. Others I might assign a poem with the working title, “My Father’s Shoes,” as I did with the student who couldn’t write because his father, with whom he had a “complicated relationship,” had just passed, and he found he couldn’t cry at the funeral. Then he comes home and opens the closet and there are his father’s “stupid shoes” which somehow stand for everything he feels about his father, the good and the bad, and he shrivels into a pool of tears at the sight and smell of them. It’s like those old maps of “the New World”—there is always a place, uncharted, that simply reads, “There be Demons here.” That’s the place you have to go, to “dive into the wreck” for the jewels, as influence and ally, as Adrienne Rich described it in her poem [“Diving into the Wreck”], in order to get to “the new.” Or, renewal.     As for the art of it, it’s a dance, the closest art to poetry I can think of, besides photography. It’s hard to get the grandeur of the canyon without the bush in the way, or the wee wilted flowers. It’s a matter of perspective, and framing, and knowing when to back away. And sometimes you have to pull back hard on the bow in order to get the arrow into the heart of the matter.     So, yes, and yes. When I say, “Poetry saved my life,” this is what I mean. Axelrod: Can you talk about how you see the relations between the personal voice and the communal struggle for social progress and justice? Does your poetry aim to achieve a Chicanx poetics or even a transnational poetics? Cervantes: This is related to my answer to interactive binaries at play in poetry. Poetry is the art of language and as the art of language it is always already personal and private at the same time it is social and communal. Poems have the function of mitigating the axis/axes/access. In a great poem, by Neruda for example, how the personal is political, for one, is revealed, and resolved, symbolically. This is what gives great poetry its power. The poem guides the reader’s consciousness through the process from (usually) contradiction to conviction, different from an essay. It re-presents experience on the page (or out loud) by presenting lived contradictions, and their symbolic resolutions in the poem.     This is why writing good political poetry is so difficult—when you come at it from a state of conviction. You leave the process out of the poem. So that by the ending those big abstract words poets always want to get at like “Justice” and “Freedom” become like water off a duck’s back; they just roll off, meaningless, without the nails of imagery (phanopoeia), musicality, and sound-sense (melopoeia), and without subverting the dominant paradigm, those metaphors we live by, and advertising slogans (logopoeia) to freely quote again Ezra Pound on the three ways language is charged in poetry. (I love quoting fascists, especially in relation to Chicana/o poetry and Latinx poetics.)     I always find it useful to think in terms of literary strategy and strategies, certainly rather than approach it from concepts of literary style/s, movements, and schools. (As I like to tell my poetry students, “Competition’s for horses and schools are for fish.”) “Poetry is an exercise in Freedom” is one of my earliest sound bytes in answer to the very broad question, “What is poetry?” As a poet, the better question is, “What’s at stake?”     Poetry, with a capital P, as poesis, as an ecopoetic consciousness, a “building” consciousness, as our literal “home-work,” is liberatory by virtue of itself. Poets question authority. That’s why Plato banned them from the Republic. Promoting freedom from absolutes, and the

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absolute freedom from the “tyranny of a single idea,” to quote Stanley Kunitz (not a fascist), poems are quintessentially antifa. Rhetoric, the palette of poetry, is the language of the Slave Class. That’s how I identify.     The relation between the personal voice (complicated for a XícanIndia) and the communal struggle for social progress, and justice (another form of truth), is always, and has always been, the project of poetry. That’s where language as words figures into the equation. Words bear their history, culture, their own traumatic residues, or resolution. Like with chess, it’s the play of words, “the right words in the best order” as Coleridge said, which makes the poem, and you “win” with “good” poetry—and public policy changes, for example. Constitutional Amendments happen.     I’m never conscious of achieving a poetics, Chicanao, LatinX, or otherwise; certainly not transnational, not consciously. As a Chicana poet coming of age into a dearth of Indigenous American, Chicano, or Latino poets, much less Chicana or even Spanish surnamed or women, and as a wide reader of international poetry in translation, I was always conscious of building the road as I traversed it. I think for any poet that should be the case. Machado said it best. When it comes to the critical consciousness, I don’t think you should apply it to your generation, or age, or language. I was and am always conscious of mothering the literature, the text, for others. Identity, as with poetry, is a process, not a product.     I have always said that the world calls me out, I choose the tag for myself: I am a Chicana poet. ¿Y qué? XicanX, XícaIndX, a ChícanIndex (“Walking Encyclopedia”). I’ll go with that. Méxica. It means “The People” from this “land between two great waters.” Self-definition IS self-determination. No matter how shifting the terms, the transnational politics and economics have not. Uncovering that, poetically, and in my day-to-day actions and choices, is what I aim to achieve with my work.     I leave my poetics for the critics to deduce, poem by poem, because each is different, and unique, like all of us. Preferably in another age; ideally when English is a dying language. (Although I am writing a book now on craft and ecopoetics, with the working title, GANESHA’S TUSK.)     As for a transnational poetics, I call her The Muse. (The Muse is Mother Earth with a voice.) Axelrod: Which poets do you consider influences or allies in your quest to create a new, living poetics for our time? Cervantes: Besides Neruda (always and all ways Neruda since I was fifteen years old) and the fore-mentioned poets, I have to say, unfacetiously, that all poets I’ve ever read (a lot) are influences and allies. Poetry, like an aspen grove or an underground mushroom, is the largest family on Earth. I certainly have tried to answer that question through the poets I published as Founding Editor/Publisher of MANGO Publications (with the exceptions of Ana Castillo, who was publishing herself then, and Gloria Anzaldúa, who sent me a manuscript right after my mother’s murder when I closed the press).     Besides writers in my communities I have to think of my teachers as major influences and allies; foremost, Robert Hass, My Teacher, “My (Poetry) Guru,” and the one I studied with the longest, for years after I heard him at the Foothill Writers Conference the summer after high school and I wrote (he mothered) the poem, “Poema para los Californios Muertos.” It was mid-reading, and I thought, “That’s who I want to study with—where does he teach?” Turns out he taught a Tuesday night class at San José State, just blocks from my home “beneath the shadow of the freeway.” I was barely out of high school, not enrolled in college, but when I

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showed up the first day of Poetry Workshop and I wasn’t on the roll sheet, Bob just shrugged and asked me my name. Eventually I did register, and graduated with high honors.     My first teacher, Virginia de Araujo, was a former ex-pat who spent decades in Brazil, had translated the great Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and was a doctoral literature student at Stanford, taking poetry workshops with the formidable Yvor Winters (as had Bob Hass). Virginia de Araujo ran a Sunday night poetry workshop out of her homestead in the Santa Cruz hills, at London Meadow (reputedly Jack London’s old spread.). There I cut my poetry teeth and developed a lifelong thick skin when it comes to workshop critique. Someone would inevitably cry. Virginia taught me how and what it is to be a woman poet, a feminist poet, and a scholar—how to be capable in mind, body, and spirit. She was capable, like my grandmother. She was larger than life. I always imagined her over six feet tall, and big. The last time I saw her I was shocked to see it wasn’t so by any means, even as people shrink when they age. She was a woman of stature, that’s how I saw her. It gave me much-needed self-confidence to be accepted into the workshop. “Virginia doesn’t take any no-talent bums.” At least I wasn’t a no-talent bum. I admired her enormously for her fierce intellect. Sadly, she passed before publishing her first book, or the book of translations.     My two “institutional” teachers: the first being at San José “City” College (where I am about to present a reading as Outstanding Alum for their 100th Anniversary and Women’s History Month celebration so I’m thinking of her), Rose Higashi, currently living in Hawaii. She also taught cross-cultural literature, specifically Japanese and Asian. I am indebted to my educational path that first led me through SJCC where she, and my best teachers, laid an early firm foundation for me as a poet, and (my true “quest”) as “A Man of Letters.”     The other early teacher, influence, and ally was Naomi Clark at San José State; also passed. More than anything she taught me how to “be” in the world as a poet, how to make community around poetry. She founded the San José Poetry Center (now the Center for Poetry and Literature), and I was an intern under her in my work, supported by state grants, organizing events and programming with El Centro Cultural de la Gente. She brought consistently outstanding poets to San Jose. (My first public reading, in the United States was with Gwendolyn Brooks when she picked me out of the student open mic event to read with her.) Naomi “gave” me William Everson/Brother Antoninus by introducing me and taking me to his house near Davenport, California. He was influential as a printer and independent press person, besides poet and essayist. Naomi was the yin to Virginia’s yang. She never made anyone cry. Virginia could be a harsh, and even cruel, critic (for your own good), whereas Naomi’s way of mothering was to nurture and foster. All of these teachers were simultaneous with My Teacher Bob’s Tuesday night Poetry Workshop every semester.     I’ve spoken of the word “influence”; as for “ally” I think of Joy Harjo. I was nineteen when we met at a Floricanto in Albuquerque, featuring Indigenous American and Chicana/o poets; it was a marathon reading among marathon readings. We were both at the end. She may not have been twenty-one yet. We were both debuting our most anthologized poems, my “Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent Well-Read Person, Could Believe in the War between the Races” and her “She Had Some Horses” which knocked me out. It blew the top of my head off, as Emily Dickinson said good poems do. Afterwards we were both still up front, and we gravitated toward each other, magnetically, and hugged each other, telling the other how much we loved the other’s reading. We would keep in touch at

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readings and conferences through the decades; ha, now on Facebook, but I read her and listen to her and she always mothers a poem in me. I think of her “work” amid “mad love and war” as an influence, and of her personally, as US Poet Laureate, as an “ally” in “The Quest.”     “First thought, best thought,” my gra’ma always said. My first thought as to the “poet I consider an influence and ally in (my) quest to create a new living poetics for our time” is Stanley Kunitz, lifelong; though I know that would surprise some people. I won’t say more because it would be a book. Read his A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly.     As to the poet who most likely literally saved my life, it would be Diane di Prima in San Francisco. I met her when I was sixteen, sleeping under a pyracantha bush in The Rose Garden and cutting school to hang out at SJ State where she was reading that afternoon for the Poetry Club (with Victor Hernández Cruz, another influence). It was awesome, my first live poetry reading. She was reading from the first section of Loba, which she had just started. To say it resonated with me is an understatement. Usually shy, I went up to her and gushed about it. She talked to me like an equal, though I know I likely looked about twelve. She treated me like a fellow poet.     She then invited me to a “poetry happening” in a loft warehouse in San Francisco that weekend. I went and it was all night, and nights thereafter, of constant poetry, films, readings, performances, improvisations. It was like, to me, an enormous crash pad. Everyone was nice to me. I could crash there and the families living there fed me. A young welfare-class girl alone on the streets … who knows? We were friends since, especially in the twenty years I taught at CU Boulder, and summer classes at Naropa where she taught. If we were together we hung out. In the early years she would invite me to her house off Page with other poets like Michael McClure and Miguel Algarîn who I already knew. I don’t know if she ever knew my circumstances back then. Sadly, she’s passed now, but I told that story to her son and he said, “That’s just like her!” Working with “at risk youth” and street kids was one of her later joys and passions. She must have known by just looking at me. I was hungry. The beat goes on.     (I thought this answer would be as short as the question.) Axelrod: In your early poems one might see a subject searching for herself or contending with a confusing sense of split identity (e.g., “Freeway 280,” “Visions of Mexico While at a Writing Symposium”), whereas in your later poems one might posit a more confident assertion of social, personal, and figurative identity—a more certain sense of the self ’s boundaries and complexities. Does such an (over) generalization make any sense to you? Can you say something about the journey of your poetic “I”? Cervantes: Ha! You haven’t read my next two (unpublished) books yet!     Over-generalization or not, this makes sense to me. So much is just a consequence of age, and aging. In my old age I aspire to the voice of Wendell Berry, actually; I identify with the poems of the late Amiri Baraka. (I used to be “LeRoi Jones” if that makes sense.) Who knows?     What I do know, sense, is that the journey of my “poetic I” is more a matter of actual geography. As Coleridge said, “Poetry is the pleasurable activity of the journey itself.” However, as any Chicana knows, sometimes the journey is not so pleasurable, depending on where you are, who you’re with, how much you have, and what you look like; too often you look like The Enemy. “But they are not shooting at you.” San José, México, Washington, Provincetown, the Bay Area, Santa Cruz and Pacifica (the ocean), CU Boulder, Isla Mujeres, Houston, San Francisco’s Mission District (my birthplace), and now back to Washington:

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activist Olympia, an organic home farm in teeny tiny militiaville, a “cabin in the woods” and finally, Seattle. Am I a different person under each tack on a map? Am I a different poet everywhere I write? Identity, suggests Michel Foucault, is forged in resistance to the repressive force against it. Am I different person, this same body on a journey, when seen by others? Do I write differently because of it? Yes, and no. I don’t know. All I know is that all my life, beginning with my first years, someone else in power has tried to define me, to the detriment of my body. Thank Poetry.     “Learn the names of things,” Bob’s beginning advice. As I go, the names keep changing; my poetry reflects that. Svonkin: In “Drawings: For John Who Said to Write about True Love,” you wrote, “Is there some library where you’ll find me, smashed / on the page of some paper?” In “Ode to a Ranger,” the speaker asks, “Am I your sudden accident? / Or paperwork undone?” These lines make us wonder about your thoughts about identity, and how the poet’s identity is perhaps formed through her poetry, but also separate from her poetry; perhaps embodied in both her physical body and on the page. Cervantes: Yes. I call it the Me and the Not-Me of Poetry. Don’t believe everything you read, it’s all true. There are a lot of lines like that in Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems, my disembodied courtship book. (First time I called it that.) Axelrod: “For My Ancestors Adobed in the Walls of the Santa Barbara Mission” is a remarkable and moving evocation of your Chumash heritage. Can you say more about this poem, how it came about, and what it means to you now. Cervantes: I owe this poem to Hopi/Miwok poet Wendy Rose, who was then a graduate student in the Anthropology Department at UC Berkeley—because she was compiling a comprehensive bibliography of American Indian writers/writing, which at the time wasn’t considered literature, or English. She was with a group of students called to help examine, repair, and renovate the Santa Barbara Mission (after quake damage as I recall). They were called in because they had discovered the skeletal remains of Chumash, presumably worked to death building the same walls they were entombed in as rebar, and/or the remains of Chumash slaves who had died of small pox and other foreign diseases. My ancestors were literally holding up the mission my half-Chumash grandmother so loved. An entire wall full, maybe all the walls, and by extension presumably in all the missions up and down the “Pacific” coast there are the bones of the Natives who built them, on their own stolen land. There was nothing to be done, but re-adobe the walls around the people (The People); and keep quiet.     Except Wendy, the only Indigenous person in the department, and a woman. She knew my family history; so sworn not to tell (or write about it), she told me. I did not swear to silence. So I did tell. I wrote what I knew. Right after writing it, at a reading at UC San Diego, an old friend from San Jose, a Native man, gifted me with a Chumash rattle made of deer hide and seeds in the shape of a condor, like the staff “with a large bird” that The People greeted the invaders with in Monterrey, Mexico, in a procession led by a woman. I decided to read the poem that night, even though it’s a little controversial for a Catholic (she types wryly), with the rattle, which came out in this slow three-beat rhythm (corresponding to some Oshún in the Afro-Caribbean tradition) between the stanzas, ending in the long rattling sound of a hissing rattlesnake. I always read it that way since. I never read it without the rattle. It’s a poetry of witness, to use the words of another early influence and ally, Carolyn Forché.

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    Since I am alive because my grandmother’s mother’s family escaped after the Chumash Revolt with a tiny band into the rugged mountains of Montecito (now a billionaire community on my great grandmother’s land), it is very likely that my own actual ancestors are adobed in the walls of the Santa Barbara Mission. I feel them feeling me when I read it out loud.     What it means to me now? Thank you for reminding me. I should read it more often. I was never really sure if it was a very good poem. Svonkin: I was struck by what seems perhaps a new spiritual contemplation in the face of loss and mortality in a number of your poems in Sueño. For example in lines like “Be ceremony. Be a lit candle / to what blows you” from “First Thought,” or “I breathe in the smell / of my name in the wind, succumb to something / smaller than myself ” in “The End of the World As We Know It.” Or in “Resurrection”: “Fingers of saplings / stroke the sudden blooming. A new light / flickers in the leaving. On and on, the rising: / the poor, the dejected, the rejected rise. Anew.” Can you discuss your direction in Sueño, and whether you agree that it is a spiritual direction, And if so, of what kind? Cervantes: Poetry is a calling. it’s an avocation, not a career (contrary to the moving and shaking of po’biz). I married The Muse in the same way a priest marries Jesus, but without the ring. In my case, there was an actual ceremony at seventeen, but written in my notebook. Poetry has always been a spiritual path. It’s a Spirit-to-All occupation, a practice, a praxis and the theory. It sheds Light. This is what I think of when I think of “in-spirit-ation” and what it means to inspire, as a poet and as a teacher. (My students, the best ones, are all influences and allies; at best, co-inspirers/co-conspirators.) Inspired in the literal sense, via shared breath of language and spoken word. The Muse is the Spirit That Moves (me), ever since I first started writing poetry at age of eight. Poetry has always been at the center of my life. That is a constant. I consider the “political poetry” or as I refer to them, the politically engaged poems, the long docupoems like “Bananas” and “Coffee,” for example, to be my most overtly spiritual.      Sueño is an interesting book. They are all spontaneous poems with given titles, written in seven minutes or less, with no revision except for punctuation. It’s a sort of Zen practice based on the concept of “centering.” Most were written daily in April, for NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), over many years, except for a section of thirty poems arranged chronologically as written in a single April, “the cruelest month.” Most from prompts from a modified exercise I do with my students from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. I find, in my later years, anything to make it “play” again. I find the challenge in each liberating, to not have to “make a poem”—especially not a “good” one, but to have the poem find me; and through me, find you.     It’s called Sueño in every meaning of the Spanish word: dream, sleepy, exhausted, hope. (Indigenous words usually have four, sometimes opposing, meanings to the same word.) It’s to designate that dreamy half-state between waking and deep REM dream-sleep. Not exactly unconscious; unscripted like a dream. With given titles I never know what will come out of the hat, my mind or quite literally as the titles/words/phrases are scribbled down on scraps of paper my students pull out a hat, and we all have seven minutes to write a poem about it. Like riding a word rollercoaster, there’s no time for filters. We read what we write out loud “as the Spirit moves us,” no exceptions, no comments. Then we go again. And again … Like a dream, everyone’s words, themes, subject matter, imagery, stories start mingling. Voices change. The

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conscious and the subconscious combined. It’s personal/private/social/communal all at once. An exercise. An exercise in Freedom.     I often say that as a poet, “I am not in charge.” The Muse drives.     And like a rollercoaster, it’s both fun and terrifying. “The End of The World As We Know It” comes out of the hat, y PÚM, I have seven minutes to write a poem with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. My gray matter offers up Anne Sexton, another early influence, and a problematic mother, and I’m suddenly writing a poem about suicide / and not writing a poem about suicide, but writing survival—from another’s perspective, now mine. The difference between riding a rollercoaster and writing a spontaneous unedited poem is that you’re building the turns as you twist in them as you ride/write/right.     It’s my most personal and autobiographical book, after Emplumada which was personal by strategy—because there are no filters. When a stranger brutally murders your mother, and you’ve had a lifetime of tragedy, trauma, loss, and grief, it’s no wonder that when allowed the chance one contemplates one’s own mortality.     The poem leads to discovery. I uncover what I think, what I believe, what I see and sense. It’s a lesson. Every poem is a lesson. Svonkin: In Sueño there are some lovely allusions to other poets or authors. For example, the final “that awful rowing towards God” from “The End of the World as We Know It” borrows from Sexton. Or your powerful “The Latin Girl Speaks of Rivers,” your response poem to Langston Hughes, and perhaps also to Walt Whitman. Can you talk a bit about quotation and response in your poetry? Cervantes: It goes back to my comments on poets mothering the text. It goes back to my earlier statement that, “Poetry saved my life.” I wrote of Anne Sexton and a line of hers in my earlier answer about the poems in Sueño. Much different in composition than “The Latin Girl Speaks of Rivers,” my homage to Langston Hughes, as all these “rewrites” are homages. I have more of an affinity with Sylvia Plath than I do with Sexton. I have the same affinity for Hughes, yet another early influence and “ally” in the struggle, La Lucha. The rewrite is a form of literary criticism. The “poem” is the homage. In the same way “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is Langston’s homage to Walt Whitman, a leaf of grass.     It’s interesting that you pick these two poems, and their quotes, to compare and contrast. They are both the same poem in many ways, besides subject matter: suicide; and rare at that.     “The Latin Girl Speaks of Rivers” was originally written as the only poem to serve as the preface to a collection of critical essays on my work, Stunned into Being (“I am not so much inspired by art as I am stunned into being by aesthetic experiences”). Mostly on grief and trauma theory or autobiographical writing. (It includes a long interview with me and Jeanetta Calhoun Mish.) Needless to say, reading the book was traumatic, it was retraumatizing. I remembered a skinny thirteen-year-old dark girl, a rape survivor, reading that poem over and over at the top of her lungs, all booming like Paul Robeson, all eighty-seven pounds of her reciting the lines of a poem over and over until her mother would pound on the walls and yell, “SHUT UP!” I could feel my deep and sonorous voice in my bones, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” That meant something to a thirteen-year-old girl, a survivor, a hero who engaged the enemy—and won. Somehow I forded—I wrote it for the next thirteen-year-old. So it had to be a good poem. Axelrod: What, for you, is the biggest takeaway from Ciento? Does the sequence suggest that the interest in word play and constrained form which appeared in your work before (e.g., in your

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“Deconstruction Exercises”) has now become even more focal? Or should we take the volume as another example of the centrality of love in your work? Cervantes: As I wrote and realized earlier in answering these questions, Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems is my disembodied courtship book.     I am totally delighted you know and mention my “Deconstruction Exercises.” (!) With too many physical moves, I have manuscripts not yet published of those and “flarf ” that I consider “real” poems. I rewrote all of Emplumada, in order, as cut-ups, rearranged all of the words in each poem—making new poems out of their “bodies.” Real poems. Same poem, but different. I used all the same words except for a few do-nothing articles now that I didn’t need for the beat. I really liked those.     For the flarf poems I used a now defunct Google search computer app/site that would generate a poem to form (sestina, sonnet, villanelle) using random lines from the search results from a given string of words. That book went to astounding places, politically, arbitrarily, randomly, by chance as well as by design. Through search and select repeated, I would end up with random strings of given words such as “eugenics” and the ones I used to find my female blues subject, and my grandmother’s mother, in the census; words I can’t and won’t use here, but they’re in the manuscript. I really like those poems too, totally different from Emplumada, my first book, which was personal and accessible by design and literary strategy. I think only one of any of these poems is published, outside of my old blog which you’re free to give a Google.     It’s actually nothing new at all. In ’80–’82, while writing the poems in Emplumada, I had an early programmable Apple II, and an electric typewriter that was an early word processor with memory. I would sit there for hours day after day and generate reams of poetry with the same principle: enter a string of words and generate random lines. Select. Regenerate. Repeat. The Muse likes random. Spirit speaks by chance. She was constantly delighting me. I kept nothing, just the joy, and interest. Sometimes when I write, or try to write, it’s like opening the door to a party and no one’s home. She’s a fickle mistress. I call it “courting The Muse.” You have to be “engaged,” I tell my students. As with any fiancée, you have to keep her happiness in heart, and as Rilke said of the best marriage, you have to “declare yourself the guardian of the other’s solitude.” You have to be ready to drop anything when She comes over. I constantly have to court her. Like any grrrrl, She just wants to have fun (to paraphrase another good poet, Cyndi Lauper).      Ciento was fun. I wrote the poems weekly, also with given titles (except for the last), and they are arranged chronologically, 100 weeks. I wrote and posted them anonymously on a dating website group blog. Someone would post the word of the week and the rule was that you had to use that word and it had to be 100 words. Most wrote journal or blog entries. Since I was a poet, unbeknownst to them, I wrote a poem. Since it was a dating site I decided it had to be a love poem, no matter what the word (like “Google”), to make it extra fun, and challenging, and Play (the title of a whole book of seven-minute poems in Drive).     Throughout the entire process I wasn’t actually in love. I started thinking of it as my book of “love poems to strangers,” as one of my fellow bloggers called it. (In yet another unpublished manuscript, while writing Ciento I was busking actual love poems to strangers, charging $5–$20 for a love poem. I wrote love poems to grandbabies, cats, for a couple’s fiftieth anniversary—rhymed in Spanish, that was hard, and gathered them into a manuscript, Love Poems to Strangers. There’s what I think are some really good poems in there. I wrote an

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elegy for Liam Rector, who was no stranger, on the occasion of his death—on what was the hottest day in recorded history—a love poem for Tree Swenson, who was an actual stranger. That’s the only one I wrote without busking, but I did meet her later in NYC, and she thanked me for poem, and paid me, so it goes in the book. It’s the opening poem. I also wrote a poem for my best friend, the late poet Francisco X. Alarcón, who was more than an ally, and his husband for their anniversary. That was for a fundraiser for a writer friend whose apartment had burned down. I raised over $200 for him that night. The only rule was: no poem for anyone I actually had a crush on.)     I got up to about sixty, enough for a book, so I decided to print them out and read them like a book, in the order they were written, and really liked them. It was a really fun book to prepare for publication. The order was chronological (unlike Drive, five full books in one volume to arrange separately and then together—ay yay yay); and it had a set page length. I knew when it was done; I even opted to choose the word for the week of the last poem, “Last,” to which I wrote “At Last,” after, and in homage to, Etta James.) I could tell my publisher, “I’ll have the manuscript finished in six weeks,” and I did.     I read them like tarot cards. The audience shouts out a number and I read “their” poem. Like with tarot cards, it’s spooky how accurate the poem and imagery is, based on the receiver’s response. It’s fun.     But at no time are they actually “love poems.” Except for the elegies (the dead don’t count), there’s no actual “You.” I might have had a couple of people in mind in certain lines, like an ex, but if so I steer the poem back to the disembodied stranger. I expected, assumed there would be an actual “You” the book is dedicated to “at last” by the end; and there was, sort of. I call it “Bob’s Curse.” After From the Cables of Genocide: Poems On Love and Hunger, Hass said, “Well, you know, the problem with dedicating a book of love poems to someone is that by the time the book is published, the relationship is over.” So be it. You dumped me on Valentine’s Day. He was so NOT a poet.   They’re like finger exercises—haha—if you were planning to seduce your piano teacher.   So, yes, and yes. Yes, love. Why not?   (Beats death, the only word that doesn’t deconstruct.) Axelrod and Svonkin: Is there anything more you’d like to say about the “voice” or “voices” in a poem, in your poems? Cervantes: I am a trained philosopher, an axiologist (the study of value/s), a semiotician. I’m interested in the fractures in the text, the fissuring, the semiotics, those smallest units of meaning that have nothing to do with words; that moment of Derrida’s “stammer” [in Of Grammatology], when words fail, and something instantiates from the text; there’s a shift of levels, a leveling. (You can read in Fra Diego de Landa’s Yucatan: Before and After the Conquest. He accounts for the atrocities of the day, physical and moral, by recounting, re-membering the dismembered. There’s a break in the text. He “realizes.” He beseeches “My God” and speaks directly to Him, who directed him there. He says, more or less, perhaps we were wrong. Perhaps the demons are us … It’s a section alone. Without punctuation.) Another voice emerges from the depths. There’s rupture. Like in The Three Faces of Eve, that point in the movie when another character within Eve takes over, changes the tone, and even looks different, really, and starts speaking in another voice. A child’s voice.

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CHAPTER TWENTY

Marilyn Chin INTERVIEWED BY STEVEN GOULD AXELROD AND CRAIG SVONKIN

Marilyn Chin was born in 1955 in Hong Kong. She migrated to the United States with her family and was raised in Portland, Oregon. She received her BA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her MFA from the University of Iowa. A resident of San Diego, she taught for many years at San Diego State University, where she is now professor emerita. Chin writes with verve, wit, empathy, and presence. Despite her trademark humor, she has commented that her work “is seeped with the themes and travails of exile, loss and assimilation.” Her early poems were collected in The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty (1994), and Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (2002). Her more recent books include a novel, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen (2009), and two volumes of poetry: Hard Love Province (2014) and A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems (2018). She serves as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Axelrod: What do you think it means today to have a “global consciousness”? Is it to be aware of cultural contradictions and frictions—of mimicries, inequities, and losses—or to aspire to a kind of “raza cósmica” beyond race and nation? Can you talk about how your poems may contribute to some form of emerging global consciousness? Or does your making fun of “a post-identity, post-racial, post-feminist era” suggest that any kind of utopic vision is impossibly far away? Chin: I was born in Hong Kong after a bloody civil war and raised in Portland, Oregon, where there were perhaps five families of color in the entire high school. My undergrad degree was in classical Chinese literature, I try to read poetry in six different languages. I travel all over the world to bring the good news of poetry; I see myself as a goodwill ambassador of poetry. I have always written with a global consciousness. There are many millions of short, darkhaired Asian women who look like me, spread across the world. I write my poems for Chinese American readers like myself, and I also write poems to represent something larger than self: family, neighborhood, tribe, city-state, nation, race, gender, globe, galaxy. We should not need a visa to roam the imagination.     I am influenced by everybody and nobody. I honor multiple sides of my poetic heritage. Perhaps there is authenticity to just being alive with all my senses blaring. Global consciousness also means to know the history of war and peace—from the Shang dynasty to the communist revolution—to the women murdered in the Atlanta massage parlors in 2021 to the women murdered in Nanking in 1937, to the devastating centuries of wars across the planet. I write especially for women and girls, for I believe that they are the most vulnerable people in the world.

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    I am short, brownish, with straight black hair. I look like a woman who works in a maquiladora in TJ [Tijuana] or in a sweatshop in Guangzhou. A girl like Malala was shot in the face, just because she wanted to go to school. I feel so privileged to be able to have a career at all, much less a career in poetry. I spend my life reading and writing poetry. What a blessed life! It could have been otherwise. As I travel, people can see that I am quintessentially American: in my swagger, in my obsession to achieve the American dream—so that my ancestors who suffered before me would not feel disappointed.     Adrienne Rich once wrote about “the poetry of the possible.” Living in California, in such a rich, diverse place, one could see the possibilities of a glorious multicultural world. The heterogenous nature of my poetry that thrives on cross-fertilization, on the intersections of different cultures of past and present, speaks to the rich diversity of human endeavor. The pandemic should remind us that we can all thrive or die together! It’s just that terrifying and simple. Axelrod: “How I Got That Name” has become something of a signature poem for you. It has a wit and thoughtfulness that seems forever fresh and, despite the poem’s sadness, liberating. How do you think about that poem now? Do you think of it as life writing/confessional poetry, a meditation on Chinese American ethnicity, an “essay in assimilation,” an elaboration on your “passport identity,” or something else entirely? Why do you think those last two lines, especially “all that was taken away,” land so hard, and endure in the mind? Chin: Thanks to scholars, editors, and teachers like yourself, Steve. “How I Got That Name” seems to have survived the test of time. It has now been taught and read for over three decades. It began as a dramatic monologue: can you hear Shakespeare, Browning, and a bit of “Prufrock”? It’s a poem meant to be spoken as well as relished on the page. It’s a speech act of sorts; a coming out party for this small Chinese girl in front of you, asserting and inserting herself, her personal, familial history, into the poetry world! The contemplation of how my name Mei Ling was transliterated to Marilyn, referencing a tragic, gorgeous American icon, is ironic, of course—this is what happens to the American dream, happy assimilation, and you might make the American dream end up a star who dies of an overdose.     It’s a one-off poem. Nobody else could have written it. And I can’t do it again. The personal details open up to a larger universal canvas. It’s personal and political. It’s also an “essay” poem. Believe it or not, I love Pope’s “Essay on Man”; I love Marianne Moore’s essay poems on poetry and marriage, weird poems. I don’t know what in hell they mean … but nonetheless, I felt I needed to write an essay poem. Perhaps a lyric poem can’t sing the full immigrant’s story, it has to be a “speech act”!     I memorized “How I Got that Name,” and I recite it as an Asian American anthem. In fact, audience members come to the reading just to hear that poem. And would get upset if I don’t read it. “All that was lavished upon her and all that was taken away.” The process of assimilation only goes one direction. I will lose the language and religion, the culture of my birth country. My identity is not static, and I will morph, shape-shift into a new American/ global being. That is both a sad and joyous line, ‘lavished” as an American in all the wealth and hopefulness of the American dream.     At seven years old, I moved from a shattered nation after a long, bloody civil war to come to a “lavish” American dream. How grateful am I that I get to participate in this interview and to be “seen” as a poet and to be in the American literary discussion. But as someone who

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has been both a migrant and an immigrant, I know the American dream is fragile. “All that was lavished upon her, and all that was taken away” is Chinese parallelism. In this case it’s antithetical parallelism. We must lose parts of our “selves” to assimilate into the new culture. We could fail, lose everything in a flash. Perhaps the ambiguity of that last line should be savored as the clear, unvarnished truth that only a poem can offer. Svonkin: Humor plays an important role throughout your poetic career, from the early “We Are Americans Now, We Live in the Tundra” to your “How I Got That Name,” to “Why Men Are Dogs,” to your recent satiric prose poem sequence, “Poetry Camp” [in A Portrait of the Self as Nation]. It seems to me at first that you use humor as a counterpoint to pain, or as a satiric method that hides anger or makes it more palatable, or as a spoon full of sugar to help the political commentary go down. Can you discuss your use of humor in your poetry, where it comes from, and to what ends—aesthetic, rhetorical, or otherwise—you use it? Chin: Yes, your explanations are spot on. Do you notice that most poets take themselves too seriously? My favorite comics—such as Margaret Cho, Richard Pryor, and Dave Chappelle— are political, and had painful lives. And the structure of a joke is very smart. The punch line can hit you in the gut or between the eyes. And can speak the brutal truth. It could be a passive-aggressive way to critique the world. We should get the news from SNL, the jokes are not factual but truthful.     My humor got more trenchant after I wrote my fiction book, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen (2009). I feel untethered by poetry’s decorousness when I write fiction. Humor is about revenge. Most of my work is about how my father destroyed my mother. What great fun to argue against the patriarchy and my father, by making him slip on a banana peel and break his leg.     In person, I am too slow in repartee to sling jokes and insults. But I love to use vivid invectives in my poems. A sneaky way: the Chinese poets would make an allusion to mock and impugn the current emperor by mocking or impugning emperors of the distant past. I’m sure that the court poet/jesters have been sentenced to death many times for their fooltomery.     It is very difficult to write funny poems. The sonic parity of “impotent” and “important” in “We Are Americans Now” took a long time to muster up, and in a poem about Panda-mating! Seems effortless, but it’s not. The punch line must be perfectly placed. A good poem and a good joke need perfect timing.     The funny meter can go from silly, goofy, cornball, raucous, mean-girl antics, sexual punny raunchiness, off-colored, to political satire, to insider immigrant humor. I’ve also written scatological pieces, and humor so sharp and dark that the edge might cut your throat. Only another Catholic Buddhist could understand. A little absurdist drama is good for the soul. A poet must be very smart to wield humor and satire. But the possibilities are great, and humor can open up the poem to a different register. It’s important for me to have some funny bones in the toolbox. Most funny people are actually depressives. But beware, not everybody gets the jokes! Axelrod: “Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44)” alludes, as you explain, to Jueju poems of the 7th and 8th centuries, but they’re written in “Chinese-American quatrains” while providing sardonic commentaries on such topics as gendered behaviors, the complications of being Chinese American, and what sound like family stories. Is this a mash-up of Tang dynasty poetics and confessional poetry that becomes something new, a pearl necklace of a poetic sequence? Can you say something about this mysterious, beautiful poem?

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Chin: Indeed, I’ve been cultivating the Chinese American quatrain all my life. I love how you call it a “mysterious, beautiful poem.” I string beautiful, sometimes strange images together to make a stunning necklace. I believe in beauty in poetry. I am in quest of writing the most beautiful poem in the world.     I began and continue to challenge my cray-cray uncle Ezra Pound, and declare myself to be his “imagist” progeny, whether he wants to include me or not. T. E. Hume said the images in poetry are “not merely decoration, but the very essence.” For example, the jueju, Chinese quatrain, in the Tang dynasty. But I’ve also read Western ballads from Anonymous to Dickinson. I link the jewels to make a larger story, personal and political. The image is loaded, even “weaponized,” to espouse my political and philosophical ideas.     Karen Horney’s idea that it’s all about “the mother.” The Woman in Tomb 44 is about my mother’s sad life. My father was a bigamist, a gambler, an abuser. The aeroplane is shaped like a bird Or a giant mechanical penis My father escorts my mother From girlhood to unhappiness    “Penis” rhyming with “unhappiness” is funny, profane, and within the first quatrain, the reader knows that this is a doomed marriage and a doomed immigrant family. A dragonfly has iridescent wings Shorn, it’s a lowly pismire Plucked of arms and legs A throbbing red pepperpod    The second quatrain alludes to Basho’s gorgeous haiku, “Pepperpod / add wings / dragonfly”— deconstructs it, makes the iconic image painfully grotesque, tearing apart this beautiful poetic insect. The shape of the aeroplane, the shape of the pepperpod, the clustering of color, shapes, oppositional forces, “iridescent/pismire” disarming the phallocentric symbol—these reconfigure the classical Chinese/orientalist poem as imagined by Pound and other modernists. In “weaponizing the imagery” I create a feminist reckoning. An image that is as beautiful as it is frightening. The reader is implicated and, I hope, cannot look away.     The constant shape-shifting between beauty and rage is my authentic vision, written in my DNA and bearing witness in this world. My feminist activism is deeply engaged in all my poems, but in these quatrains in particular, it is the compressive force. Each quatrain works as a compressed, beautiful painted jewel, and strung together, the sum is greater and more impactful than the parts. The ending: Discs of jade for her eyelids A lozenge of pearl for her throat Lapis and kudzu in her nostrils They will rob her again and again    Pictures of the preserved mummies of empresses, with their orifices laden with jewels, only to be continuously desecrated by the tomb robbers. The murderers and thieves of history, of past, present, and future will rob her of eternal peace and equanimity.

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    History is treacherous. The woman, the empress, my mother, by extension other women, will be continuously plundered. Their beauty and brilliance can’t be preserved or protected against the eternal cycles of suffering. Ultimately, this aims to be a beautiful but pessimistic poem. Just now, rereading it, I realize how pessimistic I truly am! Axelrod: “Bamboo, the Dance” is a gorgeous and sad poem about the death of a woman, with discernible echoes of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, and with a marking of the liberation of Nazi death camps. Yet it’s a mysterious poem withal. Can you say something about it, perhaps about its imagery and its repetitive qualities? Chin: Let me offer some notes on “Bamboo, the Dance,” one of my favorite poems that I’ve written recently. It was written for the Terezin Music Foundation on the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps.     This is one of the most complex forms I’ve ever attempted. Although it took me several months to refine, I am very proud of this poem. After recently rereading it, I felt that all my creative force and poetic mastery had come together in its composition.     I have loved Bach’s fugues all my life. So first I decided to pin Paul Celan’s masterwork “Death Fugue” (“Todesfugue”) on the wall for intensive study and then to try my own version of a fugue. In music, a fugue is a contrapuntal, polyphonic composition, in which a theme is introduced, followed by rounds of variations. I heard different voices—alto, soprano, tenor, and bass—singing in parts, creating a complex round, the fugal song. It’s difficult to pontificate about my own poems, for explication takes away the magic of the process. Who knows how the muse interacts with the poet’s intelligence to create a gorgeous monster? However, as for the form, in this poem, “Bamboo, the Dance,” the melodic lines offer the theme and variations. The theme is violent death!     Variation 1: We begin with bamboo, lush, growing, growing, thriving and yet menacing.     Variation 2: A woman dancing is murdered, her black hair ensnared by the bamboo, her body fallen to the earth, seeking the roots of the bamboo. Variation 3: The dead doe, a theme that comes from the Shijing, the book of Odes, the oldest anthology of Chinese poetry, dating back to 1100–600 bc. The dead doe represents the loss of virginity, in this case by rape and murder. She is hunted down, slaughtered, and tied to a bamboo pole for the market.     The poem also implies “shadow” variations: (1) my father’s sacrifice of my mother’s life, (2) the murders of the women in the maquiladoras, (3) an homage to Paul Celan’s haunting poem, and (4) my desire to honor and remember the victims of the Holocaust. I sought to create a polyphony of voices: ancestral singers, ghostly singers, layered in rounds, reiterating the poem’s major theme: systematic murder in an unjust world.     The melodic lines: Recurring images are also bolstered by repetitive sounds and rhymes: the echoing of the long oi of joy, oil, toil, soil, etc. I also drew on dance, imagining a dance like the Tarantella, the dancer’s gown unraveling, with its silks and bamboo sheath; the different variations merging to create a large resounding whole.     The woman’s murder merges with and evokes the murders of millions of Jews that Paul Celan mourns in “Death Fugue.” But this poem is above all personal. All my poems are about my mother, about my feeling that my father and the Confucian family system destroyed her. We watched her unravel in an unsightly bloody dance … my grief is inconsolable. Personal, political, formal, historical, oracular: I felt physically sick after completing this poem.

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    No pontification or analysis can properly describe the impact of this poem on me. It may be one of the best poems I’ve ever written. The dead spoke through me in a baroque vocal composition, in echoes, echoes, echoes.     It took me months to finish this poem. I knew that it was special. No amount of exposition can wholly describe this poem: it must be read out loud to be felt in one’s heart and vitals. In it lies our devastating, horrific, and shameful histories. It is a poem that transcends the self—and cries out into the darkest hours of the universe, a poem that is totally necessary. Yes, this harrowing poem came out of a formal exercise on the fugue, and of an allusion to Paul Celan, the true master of the form. The best way to praise the master is to answer with a masterful poem.     But voices of the murdered spoke to me, they sang and danced and spun this poem together. I felt like a vessel for their song. This is the poem in which the poet brings all her training and skill to the task, while stepping out of the muse’s way to let the dead speak.     This month, as we learned of the murdered Asian American women in Atlanta’s massage spas, “Bamboo, the Dance” again became relevant. I tried to read it out loud at a solidarity Zoomreading for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, but I began to sob and couldn’t complete the video. I had to replace it with another poem. Perhaps someday, I will recite it, without sobbing. Axelrod: “For Mitsuye Yamada on her 90th Birthday” strikes me as exuberant, witty–“pussy Jeoffry,” a joke about Christopher Smart!—and filled with cultural life. On the one hand, it strikes me as exemplary of an emerging genre I’m calling the “friendship poem,” perhaps related to confessional poetry and to Coleridge’s “conversation poems.” On the other hand, it’s like a mini-history of Asian American women’s poetry in the last fifty years, and especially its alliance with Black art and culture. Do you think these are valid ways of seeing this poem? I know it took you a long time to complete. What does this poem mean to you? Chin: You must be telepathic, Steven, Mitsu just called me last week and said that she will be turning 100 in 2023 and that I should get a head start on my new poem to celebrate her centennial. She remembered that it took me two years to finish the poem for her ninetieth birthday. So, now I need to best this one. I’m up to the challenge. I told her that I might really embarrass her this time by writing 100 erotic puns.     Yes, in her ninetieth birthday poem, I wanted to pay homage to Mitsu as well as other Asian American women writers who have nurtured me through the years. I also wanted to sprinkle in other historical figures and how I was misbehaving last century. The poem is a nostalgic romp.    Friendship poems are a time-honored tradition. O how I love those famous Chinese friendship poems Li Bai wrote to Du Fu, Li Bai wrote to Wang Lun. Wang Wei exchanged poems with Pei Di. The act of writing a poem for a friend soothes the soul. Musicians have always connected through jamming together. Poets write, each in their solitary corners. I have friends all over the world! I ask, “Why “Zoom” when we could “poem”?     This poem is also a love rant to California!—and it bespeaks my love-hate relationship with this state that simultaneously nurtures me and erases me with her blinding existential shallowness. Yes, I purposefully included a mini history of Asian-Am poetic history in California. I believe that the literary powers in NYC have mostly ignored the great literary history in California. The gold rush and Angel Island detention poems, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats … Asian American literary history has deep roots here. I also want the world to remember how Mitsu’s family suffered through the internment camps. This poem

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uses a biblical catalogue strategy in the spirit of a Ginsbergian howl or a Whitmanesque yawp. It names and catalogues the heroes as well as the injustices of the past!     Just a nostalgic glimpse: I remember in the ’80s Robert Hass and Poetry Flash organized a killer reading at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco—with performers of the likes of Czeslaw Milosz, Thom Gunn, Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, Brenda Hillman, et al. Ginsberg himself showed up. I believe that I was the youngest reader. The event happened shortly before Ginsberg’s death. I remember that Uncle Allen planted a wet kiss on my lips. To me “Howl” is just as important as The Waste Land. I hope that scholars, poets, and readers will remember the rich literary history of California. Svonkin: Black culture and Black poetry pop up in a lot of your poetry, from the earliest to the most recent. Can you discuss the importance of Black culture and Black poetry to your own poetic voice? Chin: During the pandemic: I listened to my fave musicians, which includes the divas: Aretha, Ella, Billie, Whitney, Nina, Lauryn, Diana … I know their work so deeply that I dare to call them by their first names. I play their songs over and over. I watched Tina Turner’s Wembley performance on YouTube: she was almost seventy and she was killing it on stage. These divas taught me how to perform. Essentially, I am shy and introverted, a poetry nerd who sat in the first row of class but near the corner. But when I listen to the divas, I feel empowered. Performing my poetry is a high energy, vivid enactment that brings the page alive. This is why People should come and hear me read my poems in person while I still have legs! (Zooming, just won’t do it, I’m afraid).     I also love female rappers: they are as outrageous and nasty as the men, with an edge of dangerous street “feminism.” This year, I listened to Missy Elliot, Nicki Minaj, Foxy Brown, Cardi B and others … their fast beats pump me up! They take me to the edge of danger! The problem with the poetry world is that it is too decorous and well-behaved. To be a true artist, you gotta go “out there.” Get out of the comfort zone.     One must absorb African American culture to be a true American poet. As an American artist I feel that I am a descendent of the great European and Chinese traditions. However, I believe that I would be a lesser poet had I not immersed myself in Black poetry in my formative years … I’ll list some works that impacted me deeply:

• Bessie Smith’s recordings taught me how to write a blues poem.



• Margaret Walker’s “For My People” taught me how to write an anthem.



• Toomer’s Cane showed me how to write a novel in poems.



• Alice Walker’s The Color Purple taught me how to write the epistolary sequence.



• Ethridge Knight and Sonia Sanchez reinvented the haiku. Who knew that the ancient Buddhist haiku could be a tool for social justice? (Sonia Sanchez, oh goddess of mercy, I read with Sonya and she blew me away with her performance! I had to immediately up my game!)



• Derek Walcott’s oeuvre showed me formal beauty and versatility and not to be afraid of rewriting the Western canon.



• I consider Robert Hayden’s “Night Blooming Cereus” one of the most beautiful poems ever written, and I challenge myself to live up to that ideal.

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• June Jordan’s “A Poem about My Rights” taught me how to be unapologetic, in-your-face!



• Kamau Braithwaite’s one-, two-, three-beat skinny lines taught me how to listen to a poem in a new compelling way.



• Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah is a model of a perfect narrative sequence.    I’m just listing some works that I read in my younger years that informed my muse. At first, I was looking up to Black poets in solidarity. After all, I saw myself as an activist, a young revolutionary fighting against racism and injustice. As with other minority writers, I looked to Black radical thinkers and civil rights leaders for sustenance. But Black artists and poets intersecting with Tang Dynasty poets intersecting with the great western canon was the trifecta, the dynamic mix that gave me confidence and that edge of badass-ness that help maintain my “voice” through the years!     Black poets have always been very kind to me: both Rita Dove and Natasha Tretheway invited me to read at the Library of Congress. Quincy Troupe and Margaret Troupe have fed me lots of dinners and LOL, got me dates. June Jordan invited me many times to her Poetry for the People class to talk about Chinese poetry; and she protected me like a big sister. Gwendolyn Brooks used to send me notes on blue stationary to cheer me on! Kevin Young anthologized me. Elizabeth Alexander invited me on a reading tour of Germany. Svonkin: I’m interested in your creation of a poetic voice or identity. You often use “Mei Ling” in your poems, but it seems not to be exactly autobiographical when you do so. Rather, it seems like you are using it as something of an alter ego, perhaps to explore the personal, but with some distance. Do you agree? Can you discuss your creation of a poetic speaker in your poems, and how close that speaker is to you and your own viewpoint and voice? Finally, could you discuss your exploration of some of these issues in your “Postscript: Brown Girl Manifesto, One of Many” at the end of A Portrait of Self as Nation? Chin: I’ve said that the “I” in my poems always represents something larger than the self. I began my career as a “lyric” poet. I am also mainly an autobiographical poet, informed by the confessional movement in poetry. Readers expect the “I,” as in “How I Got that Name,” to be Marilyn Chin, the poet. And they believe that I have suffered every tawdry love poem that I’ve ever written. Although many Lit teachers have told the reader to separate the writer from their work, most readers want to feel close to the poet and make assumptions about the poet’s life through the work. I don’t mind these assumptions and expectations. And even if I say, “That’s not me, I don’t wear red lipstick,” they would love me to wear red lipstick anyway. So, I enjoy the reader taking power and interest in the life of poet Marilyn Chin. And Mei Ling—indeed is a creative construct and is my alter ego, she can be anything: a shy poetry nerd, a ballet russe, a Shaolin assassin, a gorgon slayer … She might be Baby Yoda, a polymath dream girl, or your worst living nightmare …     Having said all that, I shall include this passage from my “Brown Girl Manifesto,” which I wrote to mock the lineage of other poetry manifestos. “Long Live the Vortex!” in Blast. Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto!” Pound’s various dicta on imagism. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and so forth.    A performative utterance: each utterance of the first-person “I” as the speaking subject combats the history of oppression which extends to me. Through the spoken word, the “I”

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critiques, questions, corrects, annotates, examines, mocks, derides, offends, and talks back at the prevailing culture.     When I perform my poetry, the “I” speaks not only as the “poet” but also through enacted “difference”—through a body inscribed by historical determinations: brown (dirty), immigrant (illegal alien), girl (unwanted, illegitimate). An “I” as the brown-girl body who faces her audience stands there vulnerable to the perennial history of the pre/mis-conceptions, racism, and hatred. (If we think the brown-girl figure is no longer viewed by historical determinations, then we are in denial of our role in her existence in the global situation.)

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Geof Huth INTERVIEWED BY JOSEPH T. THOMAS, JR.

Geof Huth (born 1960) is a poet, visual poet, and essayist. His creative work focuses on text, and he writes theoretically on visual poetry. He creates visual poems in many forms, including as handwritten or typed pieces, sewn collages, sculptures, paintings, and poems written into sand, snow, accumulated pollen, and the condensation on bathroom mirrors. His books include Lines of Thought: Fidgetglyphs (Compass Rose Books, 2021), In Chancery (Redfoxpress, 2021), The Anarchivist (AC Books, 2020), Longfellow Memoranda (Otoliths, 2008), and texistence (cowritten with mIEKAL aND, Xexox Sutra Editions, 2008). Thomas: Of the poets working during the period covered by this volume (1945 to the present), who has the most to teach us about the visual dimension of the linguistic arts? Which of their works resonate most profoundly with you, and what in particular is striking about their approach to design, their strategies for making language and the stuff of language into poetry? Huth: I cannot believe it possible to identify a single individual who represents the height of talent in any one field, so the best answer to this is likely a digression that returns us eventually to the quandary of making a selection of eminences. I will start by noting I would not call visual poetry a linguistic art. In my cosmography of the arts—for I certainly do have one— literature and the visual arts are both separate from but related to the verbo-visual arts, which combine the former two in different ways and to differing degrees.     If I consider the novel Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, I call that literature. If I see Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World,” I understand it as visual art. Each of these two exemplary works operates wholly within the boundaries of a specific mode. One is about words made of letters, and the other concerns the visual. The verbo-visual arts combine these two modes into one. In Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, we see the insistent imposition of the visual in a textual work. Typefaces change to identify who is telling us the story at any point within it. The story itself is interrupted by footnotes that festoon the work; blocks of text break into windows and columns as three or more parts of the story occur simultaneously across a single page spread; text appears before us upside down or mirror-reversed; individual words or a handful of them appear upon pages free of other text beyond page numbers; text sometimes appears in color; one page appears primarily in printed braille; textual and verbo-visual collages inhabit the ending pages; and the word house is printed in blue whenever it appears to distinguish it from every other word in the text. I might still call this novel literature and its author a writer, but it carries the DNA of the visual arts as well. It exists in the borderblur between two disciplines.

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    In the world of visual arts, we find many examples of famous visual poems never identified as such because the field identifies these works as paintings, sculptures, installations, or text art. The last term merely rephrases the concept of visual poetry, by switching text for poetry and visual for art, demonstrating why most creators toiling in the dry soil of visual poetry remain nearly unknown while the visual poets who call themselves artists number among the most famous of their kin from the latter half of the last century: Cy Twombly, Jenny Holzer, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Indiana, and Basquiat.     Twombly’s work demonstrates two modes of contemporary visual poetry: the incorporation of text within a field of non-textual visual elements and the bare presentation of unreadable text, often in the form of circulating scribbles that exist in a state between drawing and writing. The same hand and processes are employed to produce both. His monumental sequence of paintings “Fifty Days at Iliam” essentially reinterprets The Iliad via scraps of handwritten text (sometimes in pencil) accompanied by generally cryptic visual elements. These motions represent the hand and eye and intent of a visual poet, whose concern is not the clear understanding of a textual landscape but the presentation of inchoate textualized beauty open to interpretation. In a visual poem, the interpretation of the poem by the reader/ viewer is more essential than in the reading of a textual poem.     When we consider the work of Jenny Holzer, we see another set of intentions focused on text as the essential medium of her work. Her early texts were dry apothegms, their hackneyed quality being their point. These works telegraph that the spouting of words, those carriers of meaning from one body to another, is an empty act in many contexts—yet their visual presentation (which ranges widely across Holzer’s career) gives them heft, exaggerates their value, and once again undermines their value as messages. She presents text to question it, to question the entire process of communication. In the latter part of her career, she demonstrates how she values the word by inserting the words of others, including the texts of poems, into her work.     Our society commonly deprecates the term poetry when it refers to poetry itself and gives it the sense of “thing of exalted beauty” only when employing the term to describe anything not actually a poem. We cannot expect the art world to embrace the term visual poetry, despite its applicability to many works in the field, which does not negate that we could accurately define many works of soi-disant visual artists as visual poems.     To return to your question, I will defer a direct answer again. I experience and evaluate visual poems through three modes: the poet’s pen, the painter’s palette, and the printer’s pfist (the last word originally spelled without a p, but the need for this silent p eventually became essential). The poet’s pen represents a focus on the word, the choosing of words, the presentation of writing in a visual poem. The use of whole words in visual poems has diminished in the twenty-first century, these replaced by fragments of words, isolated and individual words, or simply letters or fragments thereof. The word remains important because the visual poet’s use of text telegraphs the deep value of text as message, even if that message is incomplete in the poem itself. The word—even if broken into pieces or absent—remains vital to the poem. We need to consider the poet’s stance on the word, their connection to the poet’s pen, whenever we view a visual poem.     The painter’s palette refers to the visual poet’s command of the mise-en-page, how they arrange elements upon a page to please the eye and how that presentation heightens the

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FIGURE 1  Geof Huth, “jHegaf:” (2008)

viewer’s appreciation of the poem. This palette is the presentation of color and shape. Since visual poems must be visible, this skill is essential to the visual poet’s success at their craft.     The third necessary skill of the visual poet is the printer’s pfist, and this skill is a hybridization of the first two—yet it was probably the first term of this triad I created, because it is the essential skill. The visual poet must be sensitive to the use of words and characters, even when those characters are unique creations of theirs. The form of their letters and other characters must radiate meaning, even if inchoate; they must be makers of visual beauty in text and creators of semiotic meaning, even when there is none of the latter. Even fauxtext, characters constructed outside any writing system, must be poetically meaningful. Even the non-word and the un-text must communicate something, must reveal a connection back to some visual and textual form in the past.     In the end, I answer your question, though in answering it I will note that my answer must indeed be wrong, because there is no true answer. I usually try to avoid seeing the practice of evaluation of any art as the identification of the great work or the great artist. I think within the muddiness of things. I can identify artists whose works I enjoy, but I rarely can identify a work that is a favorite. I have never identified a visual poet whose work I most enjoy, probably because it seems that doing so may shut off my acceptance of the work of others into my experience. I want the flood of information and the muddiness left around me after it subsides.     I can say Nico Vassilakis has focused assiduously on all three required skills of the visual poet. His visual poems take many forms and display varying characteristics, but he is best known for extravagant visual poems that pile letters upon letters or words upon words. These works often employ vibrant colors and dramatic letterforms, sometimes in efflorescent italic type. In these works, his printer’s pfist is a bouquet of trumpeting flowers. These ornate works highlight the beauty of text (of both the Latin and his ancestral Greek alphabets), and his focus on the visual elements of text is a good example of someone who understands the essential value of visual and textual beauty in visual poetry.     Even more effective are Vassilakis’ visual movie poems, which he creates via the same digital process of layering letters upon letters, text upon text. In these cases, the viewer sees

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him imbricate letters in one color, followed by letters in another, adding enough swirling layers of letters to bury the opening of the poem under successive strata of text, as he also modifies the patterns of his layering, the colors of his letters, and the forms and placement of those letters. These short-film poems allow us to understand his mania for beauty and his central focus on the letter as the essential element of his form of visual poetry. The addition of movement and time into his works extends their beauty, maybe only because we stare at them longer to see what they are and what they will become. Thomas: Many of your projects resist conventional understandings of poetry and the poem, are embodied in ways that might confound those who assume poems are exclusively linguistic artifacts that can be printed on a page and read aloud, like a script. Describe one or two of your works that complicate or contradict that assumption (poems that exist only as ideas, for instance, or visual poems that cannot be easily read, or poems that may have legible titles but are made out of unusual materials—river rocks, say, or glass bottles), then help us understand why it’s interesting to refer to them as poems despite their unconventional embodiments. Huth: Counterintuitively, I see almost all my works as poems. My personal essays and those on archives are poetic and emotive in intent. I see even my textless visual poems as poems because, even without text, they insinuate textuality or its absence. My extemporaneous glossolalic songs are meant to remind listeners of the poem’s original intertwinement with music. I even create abstract visual works without any obvious references to text that I identify as forms of poetry merely because the medium I paint onto balsam is ink, not paint. I identify as poems most of my creations that are literary, textual, or incantatory. It’s a broad reach, and it might suggest an inclination to lump unlike things together.     In fact, I base my consideration on making ever smaller, ever more precise, distinctions, even as I live in a world of poetry where I see all these types of work as forms of the poetic drive in the human enterprise. Precision leads to revelation. I conglomerate types of poetic expression from a desire for the heightened experience the poetic represents and the idea that human life may extend the boundaries of simple existence to encompass the world of our potential. I live my life as if everything is poetry, so I create my art—in whatever forms—to demonstrate how the made things of the human hand and mind are expressions of the poetic in all of us.     I gasp upon seeing the smallest beautiful thing. Because I feel the poetry in it.     Most of my sculptural works take the form of verbo-visual collage. I bring (often incongruous) pieces of the world together to create a whole that is both disjunctive and harmonious. Many of these I create from tiny fragments of paper sloughed off the pages of brittle archival documents. I combine these inside bottles with other discarded pieces of ancient recordkeeping: cloth tape (often in the form of the red tape that inspired the concept of government inefficiency) and twine used to hold folded documents together in bundles, fragments of ribbons and wax seals used to assert the authenticity of the records they were once attached to, fragments of leather from rotting volumes, even the occasional carcass of a moth found dead among these records. What makes these accumulations poems for me are the incomplete texts within them, even though all the text of such a poem is rarely visible, much of it left hidden among a gallimaufry of fragments. These partial texts pulsate with meaning, and the reader must examine these pieces of words for the accidental and aleatory poetry they provide. I assume many people, upon seeing these poems, merely glance at them, but I design them for consideration, for meditation. They are textual objects of contemplation. I

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see the text of these poems not simply as the actual text, the letters and words within them. I see every string, hardened rubber band, and cigar butt as part of the text. Every object carries a message, and we can read each. The reader merely must decide how.     Most visual poems I create are textual, but only in the sense that I write them with a pen out of characters of a language that does not exist. Sometimes, I intersperse text in English or other languages into these pieces, but they remain textual to me, even though I call their text fauxtext. These pieces are asemic poems in the visual poetry tradition. They vaguely resemble the “logograms” of Christian Dotremont from the 1970s and Mirtha Dermisache’s works from the 1960s to this century, but I didn’t know of their work in that field until I was deep into the creation of these myself. My influence comes from the blossoming of asemic writing across the globe near the outset of this century.     People generally recognize Dotremont and Dermisache as artists, rather than poets, even though their methods and creations follow the same patterns as contemporary asemic poetry. Dotremont applied ink to surfaces to create texts that seemed to be asemic but were readable texts in French, and Dermisache mimicked rather than created texts.     When I assert that my works are poems, I diminish their value and acceptability in the greater world, while asserting my contention that to better understand these we must see them as poems. My dense fidgetglyphs of textlike characters are expressions of language, not a knowable language, not one we can interpret directly, but one we can use to consider how the entirety of all written and spoken language is fraught with the vagaries of encoding followed by decoding. As young children, we slowly ingest the spoken code of our mother tongues into our bodies. Before a child comprehends language, they hear their parents speaking to them and feel the meaning of their voices, but they do not understand the undecoded sounds entering their ears. This same process recurs when the child must learn the code of their written language—a code that operates entirely differently, though we blithely accept the spoken tongue and written text as somehow identical. Asemic poetry, intentionally or not, always refers to the issue of interpretability and meaning in text. In this way, we more properly should treat them as works of poetry—not literary poetry, but visual poetry—because poetry is of the realm of text and language.     I see my asemic poems as specific messages for the reader, but my only message is that language is slippery and inaccurate, that we cannot perfectly interpret any message sent via text or voice. The entire system of meaning-making we employ daily is imperfect, and those imperfections allow us the possibility of poetry. In poetry, we have a means to provide messages that are inscrutable or uninterpretable yet still allow the aura of awe to inhabit the mind and body of the listener, the reader, the viewer. Because poetry specifically concerns the transmission of messages, I see these wordless poems of mine as exactly that. I create them out of the body of languages I have learned over my life. I create them out of my intense interest in text and in the writing systems of the world. This is the work of a poet. Maybe the poet is also an artist, but the poet is who is responsible for this work. Thomas: You’re known for your challenging yet entertaining performances of your works—some of which, as we’ve discussed, resist conventional “reading.” At most poetry readings, both the poets and their audiences privilege the “written” text—the words printed out on the page of the book from which they read. However—as you know—the writers associated with Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism, along with their Fluxus progeny and, more recently, those poets

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participating in the various sound, conceptual, and slam poetry scenes, have taught us that there are many other ways to approach the performance of poetry, ways that challenge the easy relationship of “poem” and “performance.” For instance, one could consider the performance an inextricable part of the poem; or one could imagine it as a fragment of a larger work consisting of the sum of all performances. Or each performance could be a unique work, one distinct from other performances and even from the “poem” that you’re performing. With this in mind, tell us about one or two of your performances, outlining how you put them together, and how you figure the performance in relation to the piece you perform. Huth: Poetry is the presentation of the body in various forms.    A human exists only as a living being within a body that wholly contains them. I live in a world of thinking, but much of which for me is the thinking of hands, my hands, that have learned, along with me, how to make things, but which seem to know more than I. My fingers typing right now are an example of this idea: certainly, my brain is telling my fingers how to type out these words, but they do it without my experiencing a sense of control. They have learned how to operate almost outside the bounds of my power. Since we are bodies, we exist in space and we present ourselves and our creations to the world from and through these bodies of ours.     For this reason, I do not “read” poems in my performances. I act them out. I feel them hard enough (or so is my intent) to make the audience feel them. Depending on the poem, my affect may present a deadened voice or one active, fast, on the run, and expecting the audience to feel the weight of the poem in their chests rather than their ears. What I have learned from giving decades of presentations is that attention is the only currency a performer can accept, and the performer must earn it by demonstrating how their body is the one true performance space.     My performances conform to certain rules. They have titles, they include a handout for the audience that includes the text of all or most of the poems I will present, and I perform any poem of mine only once in public. I almost always perform one or more visual poem, often object poems, and I usually include an extemporaneous spoken or sound poem. The set for the performance I create ahead of time, and I follow that plan. In the week before the performance, I practice often to identify and correct what I am doing wrong and to ensure my timing is right. At the end of a performance, I leave the room immediately to undercut any urge of the audience to applaud.     Here are scenes from a few of my performances:      Koivu • Maito • Kuu [Finnish for Birch • Milk • Moon], Turku, Finland, 2009: I am the thirteenth of thirteen readers late at night. When the ringmaster, Karri Kokko, mentions my name in Finnish, I stand up, steal his chair, place it in the middle of the stage, and sit on it, though I never sit in a performance. He asks me if I have anything to say about my work, and I show the cover of my reading handout, which everyone in the audience has at hand. I move the microphone stand off the stage so I can move across the stage as I perform. I never stand in one place. I always move. As I finish reading each sheet of a poem in my hand, I crumple it and drop it onto the floor. I end with a plaintive and dramatic poemsong, sung with pain and passion. I crawl across the floor as I sing part of it. I stand up, still singing, and collect all the sheets I have crumpled during the singing of the song. The performance ends when I stop singing, which happens after I have collected and flattened all my sheets of paper.

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FIGURE 2  Geof Huth, “Stoen 87: u u” (2021)

     The Disappointments of Language, St. Catharines, Ontario, 2011: I perform a long prose poem that is also a review of both a book of photographs of Cucamonga, California, and the movie Super 8. As I perform the poem (which makes references to Wise Blood, The Simpsons, Amores Perros, and the musician John Lydon), a glossolalic poemsong by me plays in the foreground. The time it takes me to read the poem is exactly the time it takes for the poemsong to play. I read nine short visual poems, eight pwoermds (one-word poems), and two very long poems, one putatively about the angel Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life. I end with what I call a spokepoem, an extemporaneous poem that is spoken, not sung, but this one is a short play with two characters, who speak in an unknown language and cause the audience to laugh, as I jump and dash across the stage.      Baxtered, Bothered, and Bedeviled, Portland, Oregon, 2017: This performance occurs outside at night at a private party with about two hundred people talking loudly to each other, making it a great test of my power to gain and hold attention. No one introduces me. This house includes a full-size playground. I walk up the chute of the very tall slide and stand almost a story over the audience. The space always affects a performance, so I must perform to and with that space. This space requires me to declaim loudly over the raucous audience in an unknown language but with words that compel their attention, that quiet their voices, that command their eyes and ears to watch and hear. When they become silent, I read two brief poems to them. I end, as I usually do, by singing to them in the same language I employed when I began my performance, but now my voice soft and aching. As I sing, I slip slowly down one of the buttressing poles

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of the slide to the ground, allowing myself to slip too fast for a second, causing the audience to gasp, before continuing in a gentle descent, sliding onto the grass, continuing my singing as I walk into the darkness of the bosque at the far end of the yard until I have disappeared from view. I remain there, alone, until the voices return to their chatter.     My performances do not always succeed. One very difficult one, requiring eight different instances of extemporaneous poetry making I wrote up as a failure of my ability to handle that volume of uncertainty. Usually, people feel something during my performance, they understand the power poetry is supposed to have, they realize they do not quite know what is happening as the poet speaks, but they decide to listen. Thomas: I often think about the first edition of Stephen Crane’s The Black Riders and Other Lines, in which every letter of every poem is capitalized, printed in stark, black ink. Similarly, when Ron Padgett edited Joe Brainard’s I Remember, he transformed the hand-lettered, misspelled, and all-capitalized manuscript into the typeset and “clean” copy that was eventually published. The published version, with its regularized font and margins, became, in effect, something radically different from the manuscript, just as more recent editions of The Black Riders differ in important ways from the first. Most poets and their publishers assume that font, kerning, leading, tracking, paper, ink color, et cetera, are extra-poetic afterthoughts, that any poem can be printed in any typeface on any surface and the poem itself remains unchanged. Talk a little about why such considerations might be more aesthetically significant than most assume, how these factors can be important to the thematic and aesthetic effect of a piece of poetry, pointing to some specific works—of your own or by others—that use these elements in striking ways. Huth: In visual poetry, of course, the letterform matters. The concrete poets almost uniformly worked with lowercase letters and preferred the austerity of Helvetica over serifed typefaces. Their goal was simplicity and cleanness, though this wasn’t a uniform goal among them. Even in mid-century, some poets practiced dirty concrete poetry. This paring-down of the letter to its frillless essentials coincided with an attenuation in the standard affordances of text: the use of normal syntax, the inclusion of punctuation to indicate pauses and gaps, and the use of capital letters to announce beginnings or importance. This rejection of the ornate and bloated (and, to be sure, the clarifying) grew out of design movements that identified beauty in the austere. These changes in the use of visual language communicated that these poems were, especially, poems to look at, rather than merely poems to be read. They announced the requirement that the reader read differently and see more.     Even in my textual poetry, the visual matters. For this reason, I’ve frequently designed my own books. In one small book of 366 tiny poems based on the work of Longfellow, I chose an ornate typeface, full of unusual ligatures. I saw the design of the book, even at the level of the typeface, as a way to reflect the qualities of poetry from the nineteenth century. These typographic affectations were an essential part of the book, helping emphasize the timeframe of the inspiration, the heightened state of poetic language at that time, while still producing a book contemporary in all the ways that matter.     In visual poetry—and, as we might say, in print and post-print digital advertising—the entirety of any presentation of text is important; we cannot excise or modify one element without undermining the whole. Visual poetry operates best when it operates with an eye to the meaning inherent to or insertable into the visual. The way a visual poet develops a

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FIGURE 3  Geof Huth, “Anatomy. Myology. Plate XV.” (2012)

superstructure to hold a visual poem aloft is via a concept I call Qage, which I see as essential to the success of a visual poem. I devised this term from the four letters in English I find the most beautiful: the capital Q (blessed with allographic fecundity) and the lowercase a, g, and e. Each of these, in most of their forms, have some grace, some visual beauty that transcends their mere encoded meaning. Qage also encompasses a larger sense, one demonstrating that the shapes within certain typefaces are particularly beautiful, as are the shapes someone makes of a letter with ink and a pen. The shape of a letter and the distortion of that shape for vispoetic effect are essential to the success of a visual poem, because in a visual poem the visual is everything— some of it textual, some of it painterly or calligraphic. For that reason, whenever I handwrite a visual poem with characters that carry no meaning, I try my hardest to draw the character right, because all the meaning it holds is given to us via the shape of its lines of ink. Thomas: What does lyricism mean to you? How does it figure in your work? Huth: My poetics is cerebral, but tactile and emotional, yet I rarely perform a poem that perfectly represents the lyric tradition as we now practice it. There may be an “I” in my poems, but it might not be me, or it is a heightened version of me, me as Odysseus or the Green Man or a poet—speaking in lines that swirl off the page—about being of the eighth generation of the New York School of poets.     I will note the lyric poetry I am most likely to encounter appears inside the subway cars of Manhattan, where posters illustrate small and pointless poems verging nearly on the emotional and revelatory, but which surprise me most by how well they bore me.

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    When I write lineated poems, they are often lyric, poems emanating from a speaker who, as John Berryman said of the speaker of his Dream Songs, is “not the poet, not me,” when, of course it was always him. If I read, as I am most apt to do, Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, or Ron Silliman, I hear the voices of these poets, even under the carapace of intellectualization, the cutting-away of psyche, the washing-away of personality. They still directly or indirectly transmit not merely their carefully wrought thoughts, but the emotions that infuse and interpenetrate their intellectual selves.     Christian Bök does a good job stripping away the emotional and laying bare the intellectual and procedural by focusing on rigid rules that guide the construction of his poems, such as using only one of the five standard textual vowels in English in the construction of a long poem. This constraint is so difficult to employ, especially with the other constraints in these poems, that emotions almost naturally fall away. His resulting poems, still, can be so beautiful that they literally incite emotion within the body of the reader. Even the exclusion of emotion can foment it. Maybe the exclusion of emotion is merely the image of that emotion reflected in a mirror.     I most frequently create poetry focused on sound, especially on the pun, which I call the highest form of literature. (I say this honestly, because a poem written with puns operates properly only in one language, or sometimes in a closely related language, since it cannot be accurately translated into another language, thus such poems work as hard as possible to use the resources of the poet’s target language.) Such poems of mine illustrate—thousands of times by now—how any piece of language may misdirect the reader or listener, how perfect communication is impossible. Every one of these poems is simply an example of the aporia of the text, how a text always fails to adhere to its underlying argument—except in those cases, where a faux aporia shows how the text can avoid this internal contradiction by actively embracing it as the point of the poem itself. Puns proliferate in my work, unilingual and multilingual ones, obvious and hidden ones, because I am a worker in language and to work well in anything one must know the tools of that trade.     The dichotomy between the emotion of the lyric and the intellectual exercise of the contemporary conceptual poem seems to me false. Until I was about ten years old, I believed humans were machines and distinguishable from animals because of this. One day, while walking across the field of Mapps College on Barbados (such a college being an institution a ten-year-old would attend), I saw two toads mating in the grass. At that moment, having read much about the mating habits of animals but only just then seeing it for the first time, I realized humans must also reproduce in such a way, that we were not special machines but mere animals. At that moment, I began to accept the validity of my emotions, which I had always tried—unsuccessfully, I should note—to hide from others, to erase from myself. I eschewed and despised the emotional because that was who I was, just as much as I appreciated the intellectual part of myself I favored and honored.     I hear the lyric mode in the printed voices of poets who deride the lyric as emotional and not serious enough for poetry. I see the presentation of the poets’ inner selves in the words they use to prove they do not reveal anything of themselves, would never deign to present their cloistered selves to the world, or confess anything to strangers via queer markings on a page. I sometimes see my own lyric poems as lyric poems 2.0, because they are pseudoautobiographical: I hide myself behind another character; I don’t represent the facts of my life

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but merely the way my life feels as it courses through my veins. If I read most of the essays I write, I see how they are merely lyric poems demonstrating how a life of the mind is the life of a person filled with an exhilarating and debilitating stream of emotions. The intellectual and the emotional are one. I learned that at the age of ten, and I have been trying to teach myself why I must believe that ever since.     The lyric is important to me as a poet because blood streams through my body and that blood sometimes spills out of me onto the earth. Thomas: Tell us a little about your poetic practice, rooting your answer in specific projects—one completed and one on-going. Huth: Calm mania is my practice. Daily is my practice. The constant search for inspiration is my practice.     I frequently write yearpoems, which are poems I take a year to write, usually by writing one poem for every day of that year. These poems represent the regimentation of inspiration. If I must write a certain type of poem every day, then I must find the something to show me how to write.     An example of a yearpoem is my poem of 366 poems, Longfellow Memoranda. Initially, I wrote the poems of this book by hand onto the pages of a tiny book I had ordered online to serve as my diary for 2007. What I needed was a blank or near-blank journal whose structure coincided with the days of the year 2007, and this offering was from 1917, a year meeting those requirements. Once I had the book in hand, I realized the four short lines allowed for each day would not serve me well as a diarist. The book was primarily a place to note the birthdays of important people in one’s life, with an extract, facing each day’s entry, from the pen of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Noting this, I spent 2007, coincidentally the 200th anniversary of Longfellow’s birth, creating a poem for each day of the year inspired by the bits of Longfellow’s verse facing me on that day. My goal was to use his archaic poetic diction, and the British spelling of the book, to create modern poems with a scent of the past.     Located inside this book were little bits of inspiration, in the form of fragments of poems, which I used to create another poem. The connection to Longfellow in the resulting poems is often hard to hear, because I often used only individual words as the first bricks for the wall of a small poem. I found much of Longfellow dry or pompous, even though I could recite by heart the first stanza of “The Village Blacksmith.” Some days, a poem would come quickly to me, upon seeing a congregation of but a few words. My year went slowly as I awaited the writing of the poem for the next day. This quotidian practice kept me within the language of Longfellow enough to ensure some of his poetic DNA infused my poems, even if I wrote them in ways antithetical to his own practice.     The poems in the book are process poems, meaning I designed a process to follow and I followed it through for the required number of steps. I design processes to tell me what to do and guide me toward inspiration, because waiting for inspiration to hit is erratic. I need a steady stream of inspiration to refresh me.     When I concluded the book at the end of 2007, I began to revise the poems for publication, and I found a publisher, but I designed the book myself to ensure the design of the book incorporated the esthetic I believed it required. I used a typeface that mimicked the serifed type in my little book of inspiration, but I also added section breaks for the first day of every

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month, each of which included an example of one of the drafts of my poems, written by my hand. A Canadian woman originally used this book to record birthdays of family members and other short notes, so I included that information in an appendix, to show how the book and my poems intersected, and to demonstrate how this project was both poetic and archival in nature.     A huge part of my poetic and artistic practice focuses on endurance. I develop rules to follow and see how well I can adhere to them. These practices can be quite severe and physically demanding.     My current project is a congeries of projects begun on March 16, 2020, and continuing at least through May 24, 2021. Both dates carry personal significance. The most challenging part of these projects is the month of April 2021, when the highest number of these projects converge.     On March 16, I descended into a lockdown that endured for 105 days, before I could return to my office, part time. For those days, I could not cut any hair on my body, a process designed to measure the duration of time during this pandemic isolation. Unlike most of my projects, this one took little effort except to take a photograph of myself and describe the day’s growth of hair on my body.     On March 17, I began my daily practice of assembling extant documentation of my life into a large relational database. I started on this day not because it was St. Patrick’s Day and the birthday of a nephew of mine who would not live to his next birthday. I began this then because I was not allowed to work for the first few weeks of pandemic isolation, so I had the time to focus on this huge project that will take up the rest of my life. Every day, until late at night or early into the next morning, I organize the pieces of my life—my activities—in as much detail as the records I have allow, which sometimes means I can document how long I had dinner at a restaurant a decade ago and who was with me. Every day I focus on the day at hand, so on March 17, 2021, I focused on all the March 17ths I had data for.     On May 25, I turned 60, and I renewed a practice from a decade before. For a project I call 365 ltrs, I began to write a poem every day to someone I know. Because I turned sixty on that day, each poem would be sixty lines long. I create these poems in stanzas of twenty lines, in a twenty-line verse form I call the vigesimon. Each poem I write includes three stanzas of vigesima, because that ensures the number of lines in each poem equals the number of years of my life. Some of these are visual poems and some textual, but they all require considerable effort to create each day. This project ends once I write the poem for May 24, 2021, the last day I will be 60.     I am now writing inside April 2021, during which time I have many additional procedures to follow. I write a daily illustrated essay of fifty words or less on archives and I post it to various venues. I decided I would make a handmade version of each essay and photograph this year, so in the evening I draw the day’s photograph into a little book and I handwrite the text of the nanoessay.     In my poetic life, to the degree I am known, I am recognized as the popularizer of the pwoermd (the titleless one-word poem). Aram Saroyan probably wrote the best of these in the 1960s, but I have given this poetic form a name and encouraged people to create such poems. I have also designated every April, the cruellest month, as International Pwoermd

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Writing Month. Every year, I give myself different goals for this month. For every day of this month this year, I must create one textual pwoermd (made only of text), one asemic pwoermd (created out of fauxtext and carrying no true meaning), one Unicode pwoermd (employing only characters in non-Latin writing systems), one icepwoermd (created out of letter-shaped ice cubes), one photopwoermd (a type of adamic pwoermd in which I give a name to something visual), one object pwoermd (one in a three-dimensional form), and a nanoessay reflecting poetically on the concept of the pwoermd.     The month of April is not one quarter finished, and I am already tired, but fomenting inspiration and meeting a goal are important pieces of my practice. The endurance required is considerable. I see all these projects as poetic acts, as ways of defining myself through the practice of presenting words and images for people to consider. I see my life as the practice of poetry, maybe as the simple practice of how a body makes meaning another person may understand. Thomas: We’re including four of your visual poems alongside this interview: please tell us a bit about them. Huth: The first of these is your favorite of my works, and one of my best known, probably because it appeared in Poetry magazine. In my cosmography of visual poetry, “j(Hega)f:” is a typoglyph, a study of typographic form, rather than the presentation of words or meaning. I mean such pieces to entice the eye and allow the reader to interpret what they see in whatever way they desire. Note that the j that begins the poem is a mirrored and turned form of the f: that ends it.     The poem “Anatomy. Myology. Plate XV.” is an exercise in pun and color providing no clear order for reading its text. I expect the reader to stop where the eye is most engaged and flit from bone of the body to another bone or word—yet the piece is broken into three marked stanzas, the beginnings and ends of which are completely clear. My handwriting changes from cursive to printing in the poem to suggest changes in the meaning of the text.     Many of my poems—985 at today’s count—are sculptural. I create these by applying words or letters to the surfaces or interiors of objects (stones, bottles, wooden boxes, animal skulls), thus encumbering them with text. In “Stoen 87: u u,” I present a rock I found on a beach in Maine, to which I have fastened four pieces of ribbon once used to certify the authenticity of court records and the tiniest fragment of text displaying two u’s, one over the other, allowing the viewer to read the u’s or merely imagine what they once were.     “The Weight of Thinking” is one of hundreds of fidgetglyphs (extemporaneous handwritten visual poems) I created during the 2020–21 coronavirus pandemic, and it appears in my book lines of thought: fidgetglyphs (2021), itself a selection of those hundreds. These poems were rarely directly about the pandemic, but the isolation and dread caused by that event filled my thoughts and drifted into my creation of these abstract pieces. These poems suggest words or characters, but they are essentially drawings of what I was thinking and feeling. Out of the 100 poems in the book, only eight include any recognizable alphabetic characters, and only two any words in a human language. I want to make poetry strong enough to survive without words.

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FIGURE 4  Geof Huth, “The Weight of Thinking” (2020)

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Juan Delgado INTERVIEWED BY CRAIG SVONKIN

Juan Delgado is a Southern California poet of free verse, narrative poetry, and mixed poetry/image texts. He is an emeritus professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino. Delgado was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, coming to Southern California at the age of five. His collections of poetry include Green Web (1994), chosen by poet Dara Weir for the Contemporary Poetry Series Award from the University of Georgia; El Campo: Poems and Paintings, with images by Simon Silva (1998); A Rush of Hands (2003), telling stories of urban life; and Vital Signs (2013), a collection of poems with photographs by Thomas McGovern, about the working-class Latinx communities of San Bernardino, and winner of the American Book Award, given by the Before Columbus Foundation. Svonkin: Many of your poems, including “Visiting Father,” “He Took Her Away,” and “Earache” from Green Web, and “The House in El Monte” from A Rush of Hands, seem to be personal, perhaps even autobiographical. Do you consider yourself to be a confessional poet, à la Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath? And if so, can you talk a bit about what that means to you? Delgado: Thank you for these questions; they are a good way to start. In the past, I have been asked to describe myself as a Chicano poet and even a Catholic poet. Two of the four poems you cite take place in a religious setting or allude to a biblical story. “Earache” has details that did happen, and my father expected for me to be cured by holy water, but I was really interested in dramatizing a kind of disillusionment and silence: “I knew you were relieved, / thinking my pain was gone, / so I hid it from you / and sang along with you, … / I wished for silence, / for the tent to be His ear.”     “He Took Her Away” is like a parable, a reworking of the story of Lot’s wife. I don’t recall too many details from when we first crossed the border. In the States, we grew up in our mother’s Mexico, her stories. I created the fictional moment when my mother’s gaze turned back and envisioned when her exile began: “Through a car door bound / from swinging open by rope,/ Mother saw an oil-soaked road / streaming backwards to Mexico.//… and looking back / she glistened, a pillar of salt, / but the yellow line tugged him on.” Though I refashioned the story of Lot’s wife, I wasn’t critical of her turning back and becoming a salt pillar, which I dramatized through colors of yellow. My mother was crucial in providing us with a spiritual upbringing. Due to her, I think about the ideas underpinning liberation theology and community activism and how they are in the forefront of my career. My mother saw me as her educated son who happened to be a poet, and she was curious about how I was using my learning to support my local community. I learned from her that the “self ” is situated in something larger than “I.” Does this make me an outsider to confessional poetry?

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    I relate to confessional poetry in a basic way—we are the storytellers of our daily selfportraits. We construct stories about ourselves, making daily sketches of how we see ourselves and how we want others to see us. We probably retell key stories and essential experiences that are foundational for us to understand and see ourselves. Some of my narratives are autobiographical, but there are several important questions that I ask: How do I come to occupy those self-portraits? Also, in sustaining my self-portraits do I run the risk of fossilizing in my own self-images? What are the good portraits of myself that I should aspire to? I admit that there are a couple of poems written by confessional poets that I find difficult to re-read because of their self-destructive portraits, and the theme of self-victimization is complicated.     Anyway, the confessional poets are directly linked to the modernist poets. I also group with confessional poets a wave of contemporary poets who were connected to my teachers. I read so many different poets concurrently. As a Mexican national, I had a sense that the confessional poets were part of an American patchwork, stitched by the strands of American individualism, which are insightfully described in Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart. To reveal oneself was part of America’s Protestant tradition, especially evident in the works of the wonderful Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet. Besides the religious connotations, to confess implies a privilege that sprouts out of such concepts as self-worth or what Tocqueville describes as “self-interest.”    Sometimes, I occupy the position of an immigrant, trying to describe my own status in America, certifying my forms of belonging. Maybe for people of color, autobiography shifts in focus to a historical perspective, as they have to give witness to what has not been recorded or documented enough. I think of books such as Charles Mingus’s Beneath the Underdog, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. These texts shaped my way of seeing my personal history. Would a poetry book such as Martin & Meditations on the South Valley by Jimmy Santiago Baca be considered part of the traditions of confessional poetry? If so, then maybe my own Green Web can be included because I write about my family experiences. However, not everything I write is straight from my past; sometimes, it’s more allegorical.     Some readers might see a poem like “The House in El Monte” as fitting into the genre of autobiography. I did grow up in abject poverty when we immigrated to the States and settled in the city of El Monte in LA County, living in a converted chicken coop with an outhouse in the back. That unlit shed still appears in my nightmares: “The stains on the ceiling grew into islands,/ And the lumpy raft he shared with his sisters / Drifted while roaches squirmed around them.” As a child, I was ashamed of inviting school friends to our house. On the way home, I would look over my shoulder after the school bell rang, hoping no one had spotted me entering our house. As an adult, I returned once to the childhood house to see if it was still standing. It had been leveled, and the area was converted to a parking lot near the train tracks that paralleled the I-10 freeway. I feel poverty is a trap that keeps clamping down on a part of me, even though I have escaped it. The stigma of being poor hurts like the scarred tissue of a deep bruise. I wrote “The House in El Monte” to imagine what it would be like to appear in front of one’s childhood house and knock at the door in order to confront what is perpetually on the other side of the threshold and embedded in memory. In the poem, a young man knocks at the door, and a woman answers. She scrutinizes his face and holds him with suspicion, while she tries to understand what in him has and has not changed since he stepped out of his own particular poverty. Imagine if, like him, you held up a photo of

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your younger self, hoping to be acknowledged and let in. This particular encounter never happened in downtown El Monte, but the cycle of poverty remains an encounter with the other side of a threshold I can’t walk away from.     For me, the word “confessional” is also connected to classic texts such as Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. I recall in Boethius’s despair, a woman appears to him and a dialogue between him and Lady Philosophy unfolds. This was the first time I started thinking about the dialogue that can exist between me (the author) and my persona. Anyway, I love how Boethius dramatizes the divided self. This conflicted self also reminds me of what George Santayana describes as the uncensored-self in “The Censor and the Poet.” It’s an interesting essay, describing how our censors are restricting us (poets) from exposing the “whole truth” because we would “offend the public.” He is describing ourselves as estranged from our own feelings. Santayana is implying that writing candidly about our passions will force us to break out of our conventions and our sense of reason in order to find and use the most expressive, unique, and colorful metaphors, especially when we are writing about the most demanding of themes such as mental illness. Plath and other confessional poets were superb in this area, and they are models to learn from.     You cite my poem, “Visiting Father,” which is autobiographical in that my father did suffer from mental illness and was in and out of institutions. I recalled in the poem the first time I was allowed to visit my father because I had turned eighteen. Though I was considered an adult, I was not prepared for what I would witness in his mental ward. The poem is not chronologically correct because I chose to dramatize how a young person can cross a threshold into a world that he is not prepared for, and after experiencing a traumatic situation, he begins “rehearsing what [he] will retell.” Being frank is difficult, especially when you grow up in a family that does not have a language or a way of talking to others about a loved one’s illness. In Santayana’s essay, the speaker writes that our censor imposes “silence” on us and keeps us “from attempting the impossible.” But art allows us to go beyond our silence and attempt the unlikely by providing us with ways to publicly represent the intractable aspects of our lives. This could make us outcasts in our own families, especially if they maintain a silence about the disturbing periods in our shared lives. With that in mind, I studied Lowell’s poems such as “Middle Age” where he writes, “Father, forgive me // my injuries // as I forgive // those I have injured!” This stanza has echoes of The Lord’s Prayer, and I understand the speaker’s plea for forgiveness. I wish I had had the chance to ask my father for forgiveness for the ways I did and did not deal with his mental struggles. Svonkin: Does the personal element in your poems preclude, in your opinion, the crafted or fictional? Delgado: I ask myself how personal narratives are part of their particular historical, intellectual, and moral contexts. For me, testimonials are situated in the public spheres of their times. Boethius’s internal struggle is grounded in his public and civic life. I am also reminded of St. Augustine’s Confessions, and his ability to dramatize his older and younger self, a shifting self. I often think how a persona can be on a spectrum of evolving mental states. In Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son,” the first-person speaker shifts between the Christian reasoner and the lamenting father. Anyway, St. Augustine was also aware of his didactic purpose, his effect on his audience and how his autobiography provided a way to convert others to his faith. What

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is my aim in writing a testimonial embodied by some aspects of my personal past? When I construct a speaker, I think about a wide range of ethical and aesthetic issues.     I don’t want to romanticize the notion that my personal past or that of my speaker are complete representatives of a larger group of people such as Mexican immigrants; it’s the difference between saying, “I experienced this and I am not sure if it is similar to or different from your experience” versus saying “my experience is similar to yours, so let me speak for us.” There is no escaping that writing about the “self ” is linked to the creation of a fictional other, to past and present communities, and to networks and their systems of thoughts and beliefs and to public and private relationships with others, animals, and landscapes, etc. For me, a speaker or persona is a mask made from the stuff of our lives, a tiny globe of sensibilities. Anyway, we can agree that a persona is a literary device, and that our language is not transparent. Let me explain a little more.     Regardless of whether or not I ground my character in autobiographical details, a naturalistic setting, or an articulated continuum resembling my sense of time, I am still constructing a fictional person. I know that we also equate a persona to the self, and I guess that I don’t believe in the sovereignty of the “self ” because the self is fastened to others in knotty and intricate ways. I see writing about the “self ” as an act of constructing the “other,” a projection made of words, a looming presence, shadows tethered to other texts and people. Words are symbols that don’t quite house our ideas and feelings. Writing is the art of the clue. To describe is to encode an object with your particular ways of seeing and to embed certain values in it. Writing is a way to ponder how you take in or filter others and your world.    Is there an authentic self? I am not sure, but I have cultivated a creative practice that allows me to consider and retain and shape what are the most important aspects of my life. When I am constructing a persona, I am also creating a critical detachment between me and my character. Language allows me to have this distance or critical awareness. What shall I do with that awareness?     St. Augustine in his Confessions is entertaining in the ways that he recounts his drunken, rock-and-roll days of sin and vice, but his aims are to convert his audience to his religion. He depicts his life as prototypical, especially for the young men who he is eyeing to recruit into the fold. His “I” breathes within a theological framework that he wants his readers to inhabit. He strikes me as an author who is quite aware how to use a persona to persuade; however, I don’t want to reduce his text to a recruitment manual because there is still so much to learn from it. I am using St. Augustine to focus on a key question that concerns me: What kind of framework am I scaffolding around my “I”? I think about creating a context or staging for my personae in the way Samuel Beckett gives stage directions to an actor about performing something like “Not I.” What props will I give my character in order for him or her to stand on the floor? For Beckett, it can be as stark as a pair of lips and a hole in a theater curtain. I depend on a balance between my craft and experiences from poem to poem. Svonkin: On the other hand, like Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell, you often seem to take on the personae of characters that are clearly not you, or write in third-person about figures outside of yourself. In poems like “Sisters,” “Mrs. Lucy Rivera,” “Ofelia’s Dream,” and “Flora’s Plea to Mary,” your speakers are women. “Flavio’s New Home,” and other poems, seem to be dramatic monologues rather than confessional poems. Do your many poems written from the point-of-view of, or about, migrant workers, women, or others who are not yourself nonetheless

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feel personal when you write them? Are they likewise somehow “confessional” or examples of life writing? Delgado: Several of the poems you cite were based on my mother’s Mexican past and her oral stories. Sometimes, I find it difficult to separate her voice from her way of telling the story. Her accent was a key part of the event of listening. So for me, it becomes a translation challenge, trying to move from an aural experience to a written script. Maybe the different voices or characters represent an uncertainty in me, the doubt that I have when I try to represent an aural episode that seems to be bound to her because she is the source, but it’s independent of her like a sound wave that is interacting with other bodies, changing and fleeting. Perhaps my personae are more like the distorted sound waves of meaningful events that I am trying to bring near me again. I understand sounds, objects, and characters better when they interact, so I concern myself with these interactions, and it requires me to read a book as a fragmental poem with the possibility of becoming a chorus of voices.     Anyway, in my first books, I acknowledge my mother’s narrative talents in poems such as “Grandma Taught Me to Respect You,” and “My Mother’s Stories,” which dramatizes a scene not unlike what happened with my mother: “Mother read us the Bible and when we were bored she made up stories.” My mother’s versions of biblical stories were vivid and spoke to me because they were a transfusion of old and new blood, in the way you make a myth live on and have relevance to your life.     As for the range of characters, I am a student of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In fact, I hired a private tutor for over a year, so I could read Ovid in Latin. I admire the fluidity of his storytelling and how he takes us gracefully from one story to another. My mother had this skill too. In “My Mother’s Stories,” I tried to dramatize this feature by beginning with the image of a cross made with palm leaves that quickly shift to a woman “loosening her ankle straps” in a plaza, then it becomes a girl with a wooden crutch, and later the image turns into a woman crossing a muddy river, and finally it turns into the portrait of a soldadera with a rifle planted in front of her while she extends her elbows, forming a cross again. This kind of narrative metamorphosis is something I think about when I am putting together a book of poems, and how best to arrange the poems, wondering how one story can shift into the form of another story.     I imagine a book of poems as a single narrative arc, and on top of that arc there are miniarcs that keep the overall arc from collapsing. One of those mini-arcs can be the diction I use throughout the book, and another mini-arc can be the poetic forms or literary devices I employ. Each of these mini-arcs creates tensions and subplots. So, yes, I do use dramatic monologues as one of my mini-arcs. “Flavio’s New Home” is based on one of Ovid’s poems about exile, about a lover missing home, his country. The woman, Luz, represents the speaker’s home country, which he fears has forgotten him: “Luz, how easily you forget me here. / I am still your Flavio, the Flavio / who, when I couldn’t use my brother’s car, / rode his ten-speed through the dangerous shoe district / just to see you.” Recall that exile was even a worse fate than death for poets like Ovid.     My discourse is less about confessional poetry and more in the spirit of a play with constructed subplots. I like to dramatize a group, a community of voices, and their different points of view. In a poem like “Diapers” from A Rush of Hands, I think I dramatize around eight or nine points of views on an INS raid on undocumented workers. I don’t know if this

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is an example of life writing or an example of a dramatist struggling to find a way to reveal some of the social, political, and cultural complexities of a violent act. Svonkin: You seem to enjoy working with visual artists. El Campo juxtaposes your poetry with paintings by Simón Silva. And Vital Signs juxtaposes your poetry with Thomas McGovern’s photographs of murals found on buildings in San Bernardino, California. Can you tell us a bit about your practice of working with visual artists or other creative artists? What role does collaboration play in your creative process? Delgado: Too much of my formal schooling narrowed the areas of knowledge into eighteenthcentury understandings of fields of study and fostered hierarchies and academic binaries. However, I don’t see words as being separate from images. Words are tethered to certain images and vice versa. When I say the word “Verdolagas,” a wide clothesline of images appears to me such as the asphalt cracks in a parking lot where they would sprout. I see egg yolk mixing with dark leaves in a frying pan. When I see the photo image of my mother’s hands, a mélange of words surrounds the image. For me, images are inseparable from words. Before I published my first poem, I studied drawing in high school, and when I went to college, I had the opportunity to showcase my paintings, drawings, and sculpture at a gallery. The artwork was a fusion of words and images.     I was influenced by all the street art around me. I studied Paul Klee’s On Modern Art and Francisco Goya’s “Los Caprichos” while I created images with poetic captions. So working with a painter and photographer was natural and allowed me to learn how creativity can be a collaborative process, a process where meaning is constructed within a partnership and where learning is a team effort. This kind of approach to my art allows me to see how images, words, signs, and sculptures can be part of my garden in the ways Ian Hamilton Finlay created art for his “Little Sparta.” In short, my collaborations have taken my poetry off the 8” by 11” page. It has been a joy to situate my poems in a state park’s orange groves and in abandoned storefront windows.     Street art is important to me, especially signage and graffiti, because they affirm the union of word and image. Thomas McGovern and I view our work as photo-poetic, a marriage of poetry and photography. We are consistently exploring ways to use the digital arts and rethink the ways we approach calligraphy and typography. Our artistic collaborations have pushed me to reimagine the scale of our artistic performances and productions. With Simón Silva, I did El Campo, a book where we focused on issues such as child labor, which deeply affected us while growing up. We studied books such as The Sweet Flypaper of Life and talked about the aesthetics of La Frontera and Rasquachismo. The production of artistic collaborations has led to wonderful conversations that have lasted for decades.     I can’t stress enough the importance of these informed conversations for my growth. I continue my studies in Náhuatl language, especially in the area of diphrases. One of my longest artistic friendships has been with Ernest Siva, who is one of the last remaining speakers of the Serrano language. Ernest has been the main artist and respected elder for our Native Voices: Poetry Festival, which I co-developed several years ago. This is another wonderful collaboration mostly taking the form of live performances. You really see how art is communal when people sing and dance together. From him, I have learned so much about the Serrano and Cahuilla people, the native people of the region where I live. Over the years, listening to Ernest’s storytelling, Bird Songs, and flute playing has re-awakened in me my love

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and respect for my grandfather’s native past and Huichol yarn paintings. Now, it’s hard to imagine poetry without thinking about collaborating with another artist. Svonkin: I’m interested in the question of influence, both in terms of the influence of one poet on another, and influence more broadly considered. Which poets or prose writers most profoundly influenced your poetry, your poetic voice? And how does influence work for a poet, or for you as one poet, at least? Delgado: I want to approach your questions of influence by focusing not only on individuals, but on activities, on particular settings, and on a cultural environment that cultivated my creativity. First, my beloved mentor, Cal State San Bernardino professor and poet Larry Kramer, gave me license to carry on and provided me the intellectual space to roam. I am reminded of the saying that a little tree thrives at first near a big tree, but then stops thriving later as it tries to grow on its own. Even at the graduate level, I had a strong sense that my mentors were not trying to convert me to their style of writing. At UC Irvine, I had several nationally and internationally known critics and poets as my teachers. For instance, Louise Glück, who recently won the Nobel Prize in Literature, was one of my teachers.     There’s not enough time for me to talk about the influence of my extraordinary teachers, so instead of focusing on individuals, let me focus on the activity of reading. I took a graduate seminar on James Joyce, and I admired how each of his books was different, how he moved from a kind of realism found in Dubliners to the mythological world found in Finnegans Wake. My classmates were heavily influenced by the writings of Jacques Derrida, who gave talks at Irvine and eventually became a professor there. I could relate both to Derrida, who was pulled out of school for being Jewish in his home country of French Algeria, and to Joyce, who lived in exile but was consistently returning to confront the harsh complexities of his Irish upbringing. I started thinking about my “outsider-ness” and how to confront it in my life. It’s funny, this is how I first met Gary Soto because he was the first Chicano poet to graduate from Irvine’s MFA program; I heard I was the second or third. I recall calling Gary when he was teaching at UC Berkeley and asking him for advice on how to live in a place where I was repeatedly being pulled over by the cops for being a Mexican in the “wrong gated community.” I recall a cop once told me to hold my car keys outside the window as a sign that I hadn’t stolen the car. He left, saying, “It would be safer for you that way.” At this point, I started thinking about the benefits of writing about my realities as if they were personal fables. It gave me a distance and gave me a way to step out of my anger and explore thematic issues that were too close to me.     I think back at how Langston Hughes was introduced to me as a folk poet; he was not talked about enough as an innovative poet who was experimenting with forms and styles in wonderful works such as Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods For Jazz. I want to stress the importance of experimenting and how it drives me to keep learning and falling under the influence of others who can help me with my uncertainties as a poet and as a person. This drive to move toward what I don’t fully understand is not easy. What is easy is to repeat yourself in your poems or artwork. Maybe this would be an example of fossilizing in your own self-image. Perhaps all of my personae are about my doubts and my fear of becoming less capable of change. Even now, I find it crucial to keep going against the grain of what people expect from me.     I think of poets like John Clare who was labeled a “peasant” poet, but whose descriptions of nightingales go beyond the scope and intelligence of his more “learned” contemporaries.

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He was another poet who dealt with poverty and mental issues, being institutionalized for a substantial part of his life. John Clare was a self-taught poet, and reading was probably the most important learning activity besides his long nature walks. He’s another outsider that I admire greatly. He is the “badger” being besieged due to his personal eccentricities and strangeness of thought. Reading must have been a taxing experience, given his circumstances. I am sure that reading was not something Clare took for granted. I believe that critical reading is not just a practice of surviving but of thriving. I read writers such as Richard Wright who dramatize how reading is a practice for risk-taking, endurance, tolerance, and resistance.     Let me talk a little about the climate and setting of my reading when I was in my twenties. I was lucky it was a time when independent bookstores were flourishing. For instance, I would drive to downtown Long Beach and roam for hours the shelves of Acres of Books, one of the largest second-hand bookstores in California. In my local communities, there were dozens of thrift shops and bookstores where one could buy a book for under a dollar. I picked up books because of their titles or the artwork of their cover jackets. I dug through books in boxes and stood in front of stacks with reverence; books that had a life were the best, books that were signed and dated by their owners, books with marginal commentary, books that had become diaries, books housing personal bookmarks and postcards, books with drawings and doodles, and books that were the best examples of life writing.     A book is a gallery of the glimpses of its readers. Books are multitexture with living imprints. They are the worthy subject matter of poets such as Edmond Jabès. Recently arrived books hiding in boxes were a treasure, a currency for present and past worlds. I roamed past books loosely arranged in headings such as “Spiritual” or “Drama and Literary Theory.” I was surrounded by categories and shelves of books that made me aware of a creator’s assortment, a person’s constructed ark of texts. I walked around thinking that indexing could be an interesting art form. Once I reached the poetry section, I would find a chapbook from Gerald Locklin, a local poet who I knew, next to a leather bound copy of Eugene Onegin, and so on. I read a good ten pages of each book before buying it. I would leave with a bag of books. Once I reached the exit, I turned to view the shelves and realized that the books were a part of a three dimensional montage, a heterogeneous mixture. I think this activity and this vision of books have had a profound effect on how I interpret texts and how I see myself as a poet and in my relationship with other writers. Maybe in my books I am trying to give the reader a montage of personae, a community of people, and divergent depictions.     I reject the term “Latin American” because of my sense of “Mexican-ness” or “Chileanness,” which has shaped my identity as an artist. An interdisciplinary artist such as Violeta Parra is in my ear when I write. Her life story is a model for me. So maybe my first persona narratives are more aligned with the lyrical approach of protest songs in the tradition of Nueva Canción and with singers such as Víctor Jara and Mercedes Sosa and with a group like Inti-Illimani. It is so easy now to listen to these wonderful voices on the web, but back then these recordings were not as accessible, so we had bootleg recordings that we shared. And of course, I found recordings of poets in thrift stores, too. I still wish I had my own vinyl records of Richard Burton Reads the Poetry of John Donne, Jorge Luis Borges: por él mismo sus poemas y su voz, Gil Scott Heron’s Nothing New, and Shakespeare’s sonnets read by John Gielgud. I loved the cover art of records, and these voices still hover over my pages. I want to stress that hearing John Gielgud’s version of sonnets changed the way I read and write.

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I still hear their personal and regional accents and smile. Listening to poetry helped me as an artist to understand the importance of the plurality of experiencing a text. Poets talk about the importance of the typewriter, but for me the audio aesthetic of bootleg tapes profoundly changed me and further connected me to my mother’s spoken stories. Anyway, I never could afford recordings from the Caedmon poetry series, but I came upon many bootleg tapes of these performances. Maybe I am more comfortable being called a bootleg poet—a poet of the unsanctioned.     While I was buying these tapes, I was exposed to a wonderful private library, a novelty in my life. My creativity is also grounded in physical spaces such as my studio and personal library. I learned the significance of these spaces from others. The father of my girlfriend and soon to be wife, Jean, had a substantial personal library. Walter Douglas, a literature and philosophy teacher at the local college, was a great father-in-law who had a special interest in existential philosophy and medieval Catholic theology, and who was an expert in the philosophical works of George Santayana, whom he had met during the war. To this day, I re-read some of the books I inherited from Walter; the works of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Tillich are testimonials to the conversations I had with him. His ideas of accumulating a private library live in me and enable me to envision my own space. He had gone to Columbia University on the GI bill, receiving two graduate degrees. One of his theses was on Meditations on First Philosophy. One day, after dog-earring the pages of his copy of The Sense of Beauty, I discovered The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, a signed copy, and inside there were photocopies of two letters, also signed. I knew he didn’t care for Pound’s work. Walter didn’t talk much about World War II, but I discovered that he and another soldier named John J. Gruesen were Pound’s jailers at the Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa. More than once, Walter stressed that he did not set foot off a train traveling through Germany after the war, and Jean’s mother, Fernanda, was a survivor of Mussolini’s brutality, losing her only brother and her grandfather who was run over by a German tank.     I mention these details because the war and fascism became tangible to me, shaping the questions I had about Pound. The war gave me other ways to think about poetry. For instance, I revisited William Carlos Williams’s “The crowd at the ball game,” where the speaker is describing a crowd that “moved uniformly // by a spirit of uselessness” and can turn “deadly” and “terrifying.” Though Williams’s poem was written before the Second World War, I thought of Walter’s friends when the speaker writes, “The Jew gets it straight.” How a poet situated himself or herself ethically during a time of violence was a central question I began to explore.    During the Second World War, Robert Lowell served several months in a federal penitentiary because of his conscientious objection. I was interested in how poets confronted the profound challenges of their lives, and I learned that my intensive confrontation with pressing issues is an ongoing process. My dependence on others keeps growing as I try to entangle and understand the different strands of my life and the world, especially during these difficult times, due to the pandemic, political unrest, and economic and ecological crises.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Claudia Rankine INTERVIEWED BY ANDREW LYNDON KNIGHTON

Claudia Rankine was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and immigrated with her parents to New York City when she was seven. She received her BA from Williams College, where she studied with poet Louise Glück, and an MFA from Columbia University. Having taught at Pomona College and Yale University, she is currently teaching at New York University. Rankine’s books of poetry and mixed genres include The End of the Alphabet (1998), Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), and Just Us: An American Conversation (2021). She’s written three plays, including The White Card (2019), and has edited or coedited numerous books, including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (2016). She cofounded The Racial Imaginary Institute in 2016. Rankine has received numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, and the NAACP Image Award. This interview was conducted on February 25, 2021, on the occasion of Rankine’s reading in the Jean Burden Poetry Series at California State University, Los Angeles. The event was hosted online by CSULA’s Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Knighton: I would like to start with a couple of questions for you about the selection of poems that you read tonight and specifically some themes in this grouping. The question I’d like to start with has to do with love, which you invoke throughout, and specifically with the way that your second poem [“The Health of Us”] refers to Cornel West’s dictum that justice is the way that love shows itself in public. When I have been sitting with that line of late, I’m struck by the sad reality that our culture seems more inventive about publicly displaying hate than love. Do you think that that is a problem stemming from the inability of whiteness to properly understand the meaning of love, or a problem of whiteness being unable to navigate the gap between the public and the private—in other words, to translate a private love into a public demonstration of love? Rankine: That’s a great question. Well, I think that when we talk about whiteness, people as individual people have the capacity for everything. But I do think that white supremacy as a foundational, shaping mechanism in this culture has collectively turned whiteness into a commitment that includes in it the elimination of other people. I’m going to say anti-Blackness, but we unfortunately also have to think about Native Americans. We also have to think about how the long legacy of white supremacy in this country has worked to disenfranchise, erase, eliminate access to justice. And what’s one of the soul-killing moments for me recently is watching how our justice system has treated white nationalists involved in the insurrection, after January 6. You know, allowing them to go off to Mexico to conferences and treating

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the entire thing like it was a bit of fun for white people. And so the immense failure of our institutions to mete out justice in any way that resembles equality and equity is soul-killing, and even under our present administration, which is sort of the best chance we’ve had in the last four years for anything. So that’s not really an answer, but it circles an answer. Knighton: Maybe I could follow up by asking you to say a bit more about your recent studies in whiteness, the courses that you’ve been teaching, and how you locate yourself within the tradition of critical studies of whiteness more generally. What findings has that study led you to in your most recent book, Just Us, but also in developing illustrations of the way that whiteness is, in your words, “weaponized”? Rankine: I think that the most relevant example of it right now is the number of states that have new legislation towards voter suppression, all in service of stopping Black and brown people from voting, and without any attempt to mask that that’s what it is. So, we have multiple, multiple examples. But in terms of teaching the class, I think it’s important, when we invoke whiteness, to not lose its connection to white dominance and white supremacy. Because that is really the legacy. And the KKK and white nationalist groups are a kind of overt manifestation of it. It is inside the laws. It is inside the culture. It is.     And we—I mean, I’m not going to speak for you—but I think that I myself am culpable in terms of my history of teaching, where I, in the early days of my teaching, did not put enough pressure on the texts that I brought in to class. Because I think when we look we see how whiteness is being centralized. And it’s a very different thing to read a text knowing that whiteness is centralized, and pointing that out in the way that one might point out patriarchy or anti-Semitism, and another thing to accept it as just the text. And so I think that one of the ways that I’ve become a better teacher since teaching the whiteness class is not that I’ve gotten rid of any of the texts. I’m still teaching the texts that I want to teach. But part of teaching them is to point out what their investments are based on who wrote them and based on the times in which they were written. And there’s so much information that was collectively ignored in the teaching of things. Like that Walt Whitman was an abolitionist and was antislavery, but he was an incredibly racist person. And all you have to do is open the archives and there it is. I’m thinking, “How did I get through undergraduate and graduate school without ever noticing those things?” Yet they never came up in the classroom. Which is not to take away from what is good in Whitman’s work, you know? So I feel like I’ve become a better teacher as I have been able to hold the realities fully and bring the whole story to my students. Knighton: Yes, that is a profound answer and it resonates for me as someone who also teaches that tradition and has, I think, only just begun to think more effectively about the complicity that those texts invite in us. Returning to the poems that you read earlier, I wanted to lift up a question from the Q&A—from Craig Svonkin, who is a Cal State LA alum and also the head of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association. Even before you read the section from Citizen, Craig was asking a question about your use of “you,” and then your reading perfectly focused in on the intensity of that use of “you.” So I want to ask you about your choice to use “you,” and then piggyback on that with a question of my own about the way that your work consistently, over a number of different texts, has interrogated the problem of the “I”—the practices, whether they are practices of confession or biography or of storytelling, that enable us to stitch together fictions of selfhood and to imagine ourselves as “I.” My question is really

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about the relationship between those two words, “you” and “I,” and the way that you’ve navigated it in your work. Rankine: That’s a great question. You know, when I was an undergrad I studied with our now Nobel poet Louise Glück, and she came out of a tradition of the use of the “I” as a confessional tool. And so you had Louise Glück, you had Frank Bidart, you had Sharon Olds. You had all of these writers who were using the “I” from that position, and they had been influenced by Robert Lowell, who had taken the mantle from Eliot and Stevens and all of those people. And so I’m in graduate school and right at the same time the Language poets have arrived. By them, I mean Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Leslie Scalapino, Rae Armantrout, that school of poets. And so there was a back and forth about whether or not using the first person limited your ability to see. That the move is inward and the world disappeared. So the Language poets came in, influenced you know by the French theorists at that time, and they were like, “we don’t care about these ‘I’ driven poems. We want poems that see how language is being controlled by power, by politics.” So they wrote a very different kind of poetry. And here I was, you know, a young woman in my late twenties trying, reading both groups, and thinking, “how do I navigate this?”     From that point, the pronominal space in my books became a site of investigation. And it no longer had to do with speaking from my voice, “I, Claudia Rankine.” Rather, from the space of the “I,” what could be achieved? And if you move the first person into the second person, what have you done? Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a book that many people thought was a story of my life because it uses the first person. But I only meant the first person as a gear shift; it allowed the breadth of the book to be stitched together from one worldview, the worldview of post-9/11 New York. And the stories were lifted from people around me. Everything in the book is true, but it’s not all my story.     With Citizen, I had collected many of those stories, and I didn’t want people to get pissed at me again for using the first person when I had collected stories. So I thought the second person allowed the reader to step in and decide who they were in that piece. Were they the person inflicting the pain or receiving the pain? You decide. You decide how it is that that “you” relates to you. And once I figured that out in Citizen, the pronominal space really became a site that activated the participation of the reader. So that’s how we got from the “I” in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely to the “you” in Citizen.     As to the idea of the fiction of selfhood, I really don’t think I was ever really interested in fictionalizing self, but more in almost archiving and documenting time periods. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely really was about “how do you capture the feeling of New York post-9/11?” And then Citizen, how do you bring forward the history of anti-Blackness inside a world where you’re just trying to live your life? And how are the murders tied to the comments that you are not even sure you heard? “Did he say that? Is that really what he said,” you know? How is that tied to what happened in Katrina? How is that tied to George Floyd’s murder? How is it really just incremental activity along the same trajectory? Knighton: Thank you for that amazing answer. I was thinking specifically about Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and the way that the “I” is thematized there. The book is, I think, very consistent in challenging that autobiographical notion, and that’s what brought the question out for me in the first place. I don’t see how there is a danger in thinking that book autobiographical. Rankine: Some people did.

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Knighton: Yes, apparently. I wonder, in reading Just Us, about a similar dynamic: there you’re writing in the first person, and yet the effort to demonstrate the collectivity of the project and to introduce other voices in really substantive ways is foregrounded throughout, and that transition seems like something you might say a bit more about. Rankine: Yes. I think in my entire writing life, Just Us is probably the first time I’ve stepped into the “I” as me. And I did that because I was—the book was, in a way—making an ask. It was asking, “What does it mean for us to show up fully vulnerable, willing, open to conversation in a time when fake news, lies, divisiveness, cancel culture, all kinds of things are just whirling around us?” I felt like I can’t make that ask if I don’t myself come forward. And so that was the choice for this book: to bring myself and all of my associative capacity—in terms of what I know, the pedagogy that has shaped me—to the page, and to create a dynamic that allowed one to go from articulated thought to associated thought, almost to the drop-down menu of articulated thought, you know? And I wanted to do that in order to say, “We bring all of ourselves to each other in these moments: our frustrations, our past angers, our present aspirations, love, disappointment, hope. And we’re never going to get back perfection, but we might get back engagement.” That might be, you know, okay—to get back reciprocal recognitions, to use Frantz Fanon’s term. So the book to me was supposed to be a kind of invitation to try it out for yourself: “Why don’t you go have a conversation and see what archival world you can build around that?” Knighton: In that answer, you’ve been alluding to a theme raised by two students from Professor Karen McDermott’s course—Julianna Estopin and Brian Soto—who wondered about how your intent as an author has run up against different interpretations among readers, and, I would guess probably in the course of much of your writing about race and social justice, has run up against often willful mis-readings or subjective interpretations on the part of your readers. Julianna in particular wanted to ask how you maintain motivation and optimism as a writer in the face of those misfires, which sometimes risk generating backlash, criticism, and hatred when they involve such flashpoint issues? Rankine: Well, I try not to attach to either the praise or the criticism. I feel that the journey in the writing for me is the thing. I am trying to do my best. With each book I learn more. I don’t think any of my books on their own can stand. Citizen has managed to hold up in a way maybe that is surprising even to me. But I think that the books are me saying and doing what I mean at the moment in which I am making them. They go out in the world and bring back what they bring back, and Just Us certainly has had a lot of disagreement—well, some, not a lot, but some. That’s interesting to me. I’m interested in people, and the questions around what disappoints people. What were their investments? What did they want from a book like Just Us that they didn’t get? And then for other people, they felt Just Us was the best book of the three in the American series. So, if there’s something I can take and learn from any of the criticism I try and take it. Otherwise, I leave it all. Because the next time I sit down, none of those books are going to help me.     We all know as we write, you sit down, and it is incredibly daunting to make something from nothing. And you have to just … Maybe the fact that I have made things in the past makes me know that I can do it, if I stay with it. But while maybe somewhere in me, attached to some nerve ending, is some of that criticism, I really don’t keep it active. Because I think that people come to books and to the project and their ability to read them when they do.

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Not necessarily at the time when it’s published. And Just Us was a book that was competing with its moment. It came out and we were in the middle of a protest moment and people wanted, they wanted solutions. They wanted protests. They wanted … And here is this book saying you know we need to be quiet and listen to the person across from us. And they were like, no, that’s not what we want [Rankine laughs].     And right then it might not have been what they needed. So, I just try and learn. I’m in a big reading-listening moment right now. You know, I think a lot of people are doing a lot of good work. There’s a lot of push towards shifting the language along with the attitudes, and I feel like every day I’m learning something new. And it’s a humbling moment for all of us if we actually take it all in. Knighton: You invoke this present moment and it calls to mind another question from the Q&A, which I’ll try to recontextualize in a slightly narrower context. Many of us attending this online event right now are in Los Angeles. Yesterday, California reached 50,000 deaths from Covid19; 20,000 of those are in Los Angeles County, and our neighborhoods that connect to Cal State LA in one way or another are among the most densely impacted, and so I think it’s safe to say that many of us are experiencing very profound feelings of fear and loss, abandonment and loneliness, at this moment. This leads to a couple of questions. One, echoing the question in the Q&A, is “what is going to be the impact of this moment on the way that people express themselves in poetry?” Secondly—and this is more my part of the question—has the experience of isolation and loneliness attendant to the Covid era informed your thinking about loneliness, which has been a theme that you’ve worked with extensively over the last decade and a half? Are we discovering a new kind of American loneliness right now? Can we explain some of these current phenomena using the findings from your past work? Rankine: One of the things that I would say about this moment is that everything has managed to come together. It’s almost like something that is folding in on itself and opening out at the same time. And so the idea of comorbidity among African Americans being the thing that makes them most vulnerable to Covid—and so that their deaths are sizable whether you’re in Los Angeles or California or in New York—is also tied to the weathering and stresses of living in an anti-Black nation. And so, suddenly the pandemic and the isolation has laid bare the extreme positions of Black people in this country. And white people are dying, too … and Native Americans are also impacted. But there’s something about the way in which the virus, the pandemic because of the virus, and then the police violence in spite of the pandemic, and then the rise and activation of white nationalism, and the comorbidity all unfolded this arithmetic around anti-Blackness. And that’s been really interesting to watch. And while that’s happening you have Black Lives Matter. And you have this amazing moment where you have grassroots organizations led by people like Stacey Abrams doing the impossible: getting two Democrats to win elections in Georgia, of all places. So it’s a really interesting time of intersectionality when you look at those protests and who’s there. And community, despite the fact that we’re also isolated. And then we’re in a position where suddenly our own livelihood, health position is dependent on the behavior of others. And their livelihood is dependent on our behavior. Are we going to wear masks? Are we going to, you know, keep family members, neighbors, others safe as well as ourselves? So it’s been a really fascinating moment to look at loneliness up against community … the fragility of the “we” as a nation and the number of counter-publics that exist. So this is not a clear answer. But, for me, it’s been incredibly

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dynamic that one makes possible the other. You know the pandemic made possible the Black Lives Matter protests in a way because everybody was home. We watched. We took it in in real-time, George Floyd’s death twenty-four hours after Amy Cooper tried to kill Christian Cooper in Central Park. Everything was in slow motion, and people began to see that the treatment of Black people was also the treatment of them. So for the first time, I think white people were coming out not as allies to Black people, but they were coming out because they began to be to understand, to conceive, to recognize that this country, if it went down the road it was going, was bad for them as well. And so it really was an incredibly, I’m going to use “dynamic” for now, a dynamic moment, where loneliness made possible community. Knighton: And certainly it’s the case that, to invoke one of the pieces that you read tonight, it revealed some of the shortcomings of the ways in which we live in the “with” of our being, and the necessity to develop new ways of being with each other. At least in the logic of Just Us, that seems to be the first step towards actually creating a life that’s built with others, for others, and thus there is some hope in this moment. Have you time for a couple more questions? Rankine: Yes, yes. Knighton: Both of these questions are related to each other in a way, and I think this will be a nice way to conclude our evening together. We’ve been talking with many new readers of poetry on our campus about what it means to read poetry and what’s in the act of reading for them. One of the tools that has been useful is getting new readers of poetry to recognize that it is sometimes just as resonant to find a single line or a particular perfectly compressed passage that echoes something in them, more so than learning how to perform an analysis of an organic whole, or knowing technical terminology about poetry, criticism, or whatever. Students will find those moments that they can make their own and carry with them as a kind of caption or an idea that inspires them. And I was wondering if you have lines like that—a particular phrase in another poet’s work or a particular passage, where, in its perfection, you find something you carry with you as a guide or a caption for your life. Rankine: You know, I do. There are lines that come to me all the time, but they’re not very uplifting. [Rankine laughs.] I think I should warn you. I mean, you know Emily Dickinson has a line: “There is a pain—so utter—/ It swallows substance up.” And that line will just pop in my head when I read something in the newspaper sometimes. Or César Vallejo [from his poem “The Black Heralds”]: “There are blows in life, so ….” Now I want to say “so utter” because the Dickinson is in my head. But it’s something like that: “There are blows in life, so horrible … I don’t know!” And then he has this amazing image in that poem where it’s as if your soul backs up like a bath, you know like a toilet [“as if before them, / the undertow of everything suffered / were to well up in the soul”]. That image has always been interesting to me—that the body could get to a place where it was so backed up by the blows of life that it would just flood itself. So those are the two that come to mind right this minute. But the beauty of having these lines is that even though you can’t always recall them on demand, they come to you when you need them. There are others … there’s a Wordsworth one: “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; — / Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” That’s one that comes up sometimes. You know, sometimes somebody is talking to me and I’ll think, “you have given yourself away, a sordid boon.” [Rankine laughs.] You’re having these internal conversations, but the internal conversations will be just a line of poetry that comes forward.

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Knighton: That was an extremely generous answer in light of me putting you on the spot to remember a bunch of poetry. [Laughs.] Also related to some of the challenges of teaching poetry and thinking about how to read it, I was struck by a moment in your recent interview with Spokane Public Radio, where you spoke briefly but beautifully about what education has meant to you both as a student for much of your life and also as a professor for much of your life. Earlier in our conversation you spoke about your experience as a teacher and how that has been an occasion for growth and reflection. I wonder if you would say a little bit more about your experience as a student—and specifically what it has meant to you to be a firstgeneration college student, an experience you mention in Just Us, and how that has shaped your experience of the world. What do you carry from that with you today? Rankine: One of the things that I think being a first-generation college student did for me—I’m sure it’s different for everyone—but it meant that many of the things that I acquired in books were mine only. I could share them, and I did … you know, I might give my mother a poem that I liked or something, but they were really mine. And I don’t mean that in a selfish way. … You know, with my daughter now we have a give-and-take around books. I’ll say something to her and she’ll bring me a passage from a book that she thinks relates to something I’m reading, and I’ll give her passage. And we’re passing books back and forth in our household and taking photos of a page and sending it off if we think the other person might find something interesting. So there’s a constant conversation around books and about authors. But growing up in my household because my parents, you know, hadn’t gone to … I think in Jamaica they might have done some high school but not completely. So there wasn’t that same give-and-take. You had friends who you shared stuff with, but in your family life you didn’t really. It was really yours. It was your thing. I never really thought about it before.     There’s a poem (“El Buen Sentido”) by César Vallejo, again, with the first line something like “there is a place in the world called Paris. A very big place. My father’s wife is in love with me.” His mother is taking him in as a man of the world suddenly, and she is no longer his mother; she’s his father’s wife. She’s seeing this guy who has seen the world in a way that she hasn’t seen it. I think as a first-generation college student, there was a bit of that feeling of going back home and sharing what I had taken in, but then I was also building on a different kind of knowledge, so that you end up with two educations: the kind that you’re getting in school and the kind that these people who have immigrated out of their culture into another culture to raise you are also giving you. So you have learned the world in this one way, and then you’re getting this other thing. You end up coming forward doubly educated in a way. Knighton: Professor Rankine, it’s been a great honor to share this conversation with you. I appreciate your profound reading of your work for us tonight, and thank you very much for being here. Rankine: Thank you, thank you for having me, and everybody stay safe. In the world of the “we,” let’s all take care.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Crisosto Apache INTERVIEWED BY CRAIG SVONKIN AND STEVEN GOULD AXELROD

Crisosto Apache—Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné (Navajo) of the ‘Áshįįhí (Salt Clan), born for the Kinyaa’áanii (Towering House Clan)—is a poet originally from Mescalero, New Mexico, growing up on the Mescalero Apache Reservation. He earned an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Apache’s poetry has been published in Black Renaissance Noiré, Yellow Medicine Review, Denver Quarterly (Pushcart Prize Nominee 2014), Hawaii Review, Red Ink Magazine, Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life, Christopher Felver’s Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits, and Joy Harjo’s When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. His debut collection GENESIS (Lost Alphabet, 2018) explores issues of identity through questions of language, gender, tradition, and embodiment. Svonkin: In your “Foreword” to your poetry collection GENESIS, you speak about how many of your poems are inspired by “the symmetrical construction in textile weaving from the Diné (Navajo) weaving process and lore,” including the “whirling log” story and design. Can you discuss the influence of your Mescalero Apache and Diné (Navajo) cultures on your poetry’s themes and forms? Apache: Identity and memory are two main ideas interwoven within my book GENESIS. I wanted to explore how identity pertained to my history. The forms within the book experiment with the “X” concept. “X” is a symbol used throughout GENESIS, which can be interpreted in many ways. “X” is used as a mathematical analogy that signifies an unknown, as in an algebraic equation. The human genome retains complex genomic information which contributes to the genetic intersection or genesis concept in the identity of “X,” as in the “Y or X” chromosome. X also evokes the Marvel comic, The X-Men, a team of mutant superheroes and outcasts. One embedded theme is the story of the Whirling Log, tsin nei’ołi, similar to the flood stories told in many ancient cultures. The symbol for the Whirling Log is the inverted swastika or “hooked cross,” a sacred X-like symbol in many global cultures hijacked by the Third Reich. The symbol in my book is a reclamation because the whirling log story is a genesis story. The redaction strikethrough line through the book and poem title—GENESIS—is to disassociate the concept of the Diné (Navajo) flood story from other stories or titles.     The specific thematic connection to the Whirling Log story is the emergence of an identity through adversity and purification. The story begins with a rainstorm lasting months, leaving “the people” climbing to higher ground due to rising waters. Stranded on a mountaintop, one of the men chops down a large tree, crafts a large canoe, and sets sail across the vast

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waters. With no land in sight, a whirlpool develops, and the man descends into the center, into darkness. While inside the whirlpool the man is visited by the Holy Ones, who offer him songs and prayers with instructions to return to “the people” and teach them the songs and prayers. Later, the man wakes on a beach and seeks out and reconnects with “the people.” These songs and prayers are still used to this day in ceremonial practices. The emergence through birth and the body of water is the genesis concept found in my book. The intersection of consciousness and life through water. I knew I was going to use the symbol of “X” to signify many moments within the book. Svonkin: How do these Mescalero Apache and Diné (Navajo) cultural forms interact with the more personal and familial history in your poems? Apache: At the time I was working on my book, I was also reading a book on Navajo rug weaving, where the artist was explaining the weaving process from the beginning to the finished product. There are many steps in constructing a rug. After the loom is threaded the weaver looks at the loom in equal quarters, so as to decide how the design will transpire and symmetrically mirror each quarter. The quartered sections reminded me of the Cartesian graph for solving Algebraic equations. Making the association with the weaving process, I saw that the design decisions were mathematical. Thinking about how the vertically oriented threads were holding the structure of the rug led to the concept of the nine-month gestation between the umbilical cord and placenta while in utero creating the bond between mother and child. The umbilical cord binds us to identity much like the design about to be developed by the weaver. Considerable attention is transferred through the two events where the natural outcome is beauty.     The weaver makes a conscious decision while weaving where mistakes are acknowledged and forgiven. An intentional mistake is sometimes added so as to make clear the rug is handmade, with the weaver allowing the mistake to exist. The mistake is an inherent characteristic in humanity. In my book, in the poem “Collapse,” there is an intentional stroke leaving a way for mistakes to exit and exist. Just as mistakes exist in handmade rugs, mistakes exist in my book. Before the weaving concept came to me, I remembered conversations with my mother about nine months before my birth. Maybe the idea for the thread was subconscious but the connection to my mother’s stories seemed appropriate. The stories took place when she spent time on my father’s reservation. The small village was named Tó hajiilee, meaning where the water comes from, and the village was located about thirty-six miles west of Albuquerque. There she stayed with my grandmother who was weaving rugs in a small hoghan (home).     The thread of the book, where each month is sectioned, indicates those nine months of gestation. Wondering how I was going to construct the nine sections, I contemplated major events happening in the world and started researching major events occurring between November 1970 and August 1971, the period I was in utero. At first, I used the Apache names for each month along with their meaning. During the final revisions, I considered the audience for my book. I decided to take out the Apache names but kept a loose poetic translation for the definitions of each month, thus forming short poems for each month. I inserted summaries of each monthly event into each of the monthly poems, thereby creating a timeline of my mother’s experiences during her pregnancy with me, framing the small home space with the cosmological space. Many of the events happening between November 1970 and August 1971 were associated with nuclear testing or lunar launches.

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Svonkin: Many of your poems are experimental. For example, “Collapse” spreads words and images across the page, thereby challenging the reader to figure out how to read it. You experiment with dramatic use of white space, strikethrough or erasure poetry, concrete poetry, and other avant-garde techniques. Can you discuss the allure of experimental poetry, and how your use of avant-garde techniques relates to your often apparently political or social topics (for example, in poems like “Treaty x”)? Apache: “Collapse,” which I agree experiments with language, technique, and format, came to me in a dream where I witnessed words and phrases falling from the night sky. As each word and phrase fell, they uttered in various volumes from whispers to shouts. When I woke, I quickly wrote down each phrase I could remember. The opening for the poem pairs the Apache and English languages, both stating, “this was said a long time ago.” The phrase is often used in ceremonial prayers and songs acknowledging their existence as “time immemorial,” and also referring to the Whirling Log story. The evolution of languages stems from a place of “time immemorial.” The pairing of the two languages was to demonstrate how languages interact with one another, and the cognition experienced in both modes of communication as they interact. The experience of cultural code-switching is something I have experienced throughout my life: going between two cultures and languages. By this I mean that visiting with my family and participating in cultural events on the reservation, then reintegrating myself back into Western culture, was difficult. Switching from one culture to another was always an acclimation in language, thought process, and comportment.     “Collapse” utilizes the field of the page to incorporate spacing in the poem, which creates an awareness of breath and of time. The purpose is to focus the reader on the transference of identity, achieved by slowing the poem down, thereby representing the movement between the two cultures. Charles Olson’s concepts of “composition by field” and “kinetics,” as well as use of “sonic” effects, influenced my poem. Many of the concepts for “Collapse” exemplify the awareness of presence and place. Because many Native American tribes do not acknowledge time as linear, the poem offers differences in interaction and concept. Throughout my life, moving between two spaces was exceedingly difficult for me. The switch from experience to experience is not so extreme for me now. Over time, I have gotten used to the adaptation of thinking in Apache and moving into the Westernized world. The poem’s structure is designed to mimic the falling image seen in my dream. As the cascading words move toward the end of the poem, the languages begin to fuse and align with meaning moving toward the phrase, “it was said a long time ago.” The huge silence and white space on the final page are meant to build anticipation. Much like the final fall of rubble from a collapsing building. The phrases and words carry the weight through time, waiting to be uttered, or not (silences)—indicating the loss of language, the loss of identity. Existing cognitively in this fashion, moving between these spaces, impacts identity, affecting how an individual might view their environment.    At least this was my experience, having to exist in two dramatically different environments. The longer I remain away from my culture and language the more I begin to lose the original part of me which is Apache & Navajo. The indigenous language dissipates along with a solid sense of “self.” I experience this identity of dislocation or vertigo even more when those who are culturally significant die off. My mother was an immense part of my Apache and Navajo language development, but now that she is deceased, the ability to speak and to hear the

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language spoken has decreased. “Collapse” is a reminder of how many walk a dual lingual existence.     My identity is political. My existence is a residual of political history. Fortunate to exist is something I always think about. I could easily not have been should a family member not have survived the adversities of our history. The Apache people—or Ndé (meaning “the people,” pronounced “An-day,” a term for the Mescalero Apache)—endured the longest historical conflict with the US government before their surrender and relocation to St. Augustine, Florida. Remaining in captivity for many years, and enduring the harsh unfamiliar environments of Florida, they were finally released. On their return west, some of the remaining Apache died and were buried in a small cemetery in Mobile, Alabama. The Apache were never allowed to return to their ancestral homeland in southern Arizona but instead were offered residence in Oklahoma among the Kiowa, and in Fort Sill. Some were able to join other Apache societies. A small group of Chiricahua Apache joined the Mescalero Apache on their reservation in New Mexico, settling in a small region of the reservation called Whitetail. It is from those Chiricahua who returned to that part of the reservation my identity derives. The poems “Treaty x,” “Treaty xx,” and “(X) ARTIFACTS [on broken treaties]” are influenced by The United States Treaty with the Apaches (Treaty of Santa Fe, July 1, 1852). The redaction for each treaty excerpt—with lines through the treaty language—is an attempt to take back the meaning and language contained within the treaty documents and nullify the historic text as a form of protest. Svonkin: Gender, sexuality, and Native LGBTQI and “two spirit” identities seem to be important themes in many of your works, including “Ndé’ isdzán” [“two of me”] from your book GENESIS, with its bowl- or U-shape and epigraph of “-my note to selves.” Can you speak a bit about this poem and others and how they approach gender and sexual identity issues? Apache: The idea of gender and sexuality are represented in the book by experimenting with the letter “X” as a symbol and intersectional reference. There is so much attribution to the letter “X.” Now, the letter is used as a self-identifying representation for a person who is nonbinary. I have grappled with my sexuality and gender my whole life. I have also filled the specific “roles” meant for women and meant for men. I have always seen myself moving between these two spaces, but the cultures have never crossed. My identity has always been fluid. As a young individual, I was always conflicted with my expression because of the stigmas associated with my form of expression. It was not until I was in college that I found the “two-spirited” identity was regarded as a positive concept within many traditional tribal communities. I was seventeen when I came out to my family as gay. My family was fine with my identity. However, something was still missing. The concept of gay was not enough for me to realize my sexuality; a greater part of myself was still absent.     After I discovered the term and concept of the “two-spirited” identity, I paused to think. Through research, I discovered the Navajo concept for “two-spirited,” which is the nádleeh (always changing, pronounced “knod-glay”), and my identity became apparent. Upon visiting my reservation again and having a conversation with my mother, I began to explain to her my knowledge about the Navajo tradition for the nádleeh. I realized what was missing within my cultural identity. My mother and I had many conversations where she told me many stories about people on our reservation who identified and expressed themselves as “two-spirited.” It was not until many years later I came across the term Ndé ‘isdzán (a man who is like a woman, pronounced “in-day is-dz-un”). Understanding more about my identity and how I expressed

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those qualities throughout my life contributed to much of my work in GENESIS regarding gender and sexuality. For a long time, I was unsettled with my identity and was not sure where I stood, but through the language of poetry, I can feel more connected. Axelrod: Which poets have influenced you the most, and how so? Apache: Starting, of course, with the classics. William Blake, John Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dante, John Donne, Christina Rossetti, and such. I still refer to the classic from time to time just to remind me of formality and measure. I would list Shakespeare, but I’m not as moved by his work as I am by many other poets. When it comes to more contemporary poets, my work is highly influenced by the Black Mountain Poets, Beat Poets, San Francisco School, and the Confessionals.     The poets who have influenced me the most stem from the postmodern era of literature. These various schools developed a variety of forms and aesthetics in the discourse of poetics. There are so many poets and writers who influence my work. For GENESIS, I read Simon J. Ortiz’s from Sand Creek, d. g. okpik’s Corpse Whale, Jean Valentine’s Break the Glass, James L. White’s The Salt Ecstasies, Dan Beachy-Quick’s North True, South Bright, and Pura López Colomé’s Watchword, among others. Many of these writers, who are contemporary writers, have made an influential mark on my book GENESIS. There are many elements I drew upon, and because the content was becoming increasingly complex throughout my collection, I decided to use experimental forms to compose the poems with the hope the use of the page and the emphasis on spacing would help unpack the difficult themes. The poems have gone through a strenuous revision process. Many of the poems I drafted at the beginning of the project did not make the final cut. I still have those poems stored away in a file on my computer. I think one day the rejected poems might fit another project. Axelrod: Which of your own poems are you happiest with, and what are you working on now? Apache: In GENESIS there are two poems I am happy with. The first is “K’us tádini tsąąbi +2: [38 necks + 2],” which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the Denver Quarterly; and the second is “Of Thunderous Blood Storm,” first published in the University of Connecticut’s Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life.     I have several projects going on. It is always a wonderful feeling to have something in the works. I am currently working on two poetry manuscripts, called Ghostword and Isness. Ghostword is sort of a conversation with or response to Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s A Fool’s Life, a work introduced to me by Artur Sze back in 1991 while I was attending the Institute of American Arts. Publication of the various poems in Ghostword can be found online. Isness is another collection of poems where the ideology or philosophy of “being” existing through art is the focal point. Many of the poems in this collection embrace the postmodern avantgarde concept of “aboutness,” where the poems exist within themselves as meaning. E. E. Cummings’s A Miscellany Revised is a text I always refer to. Inspiration has always stemmed from the avant-garde in my poetry. The “literal” always muddles the poetic meaning and the interaction with the audience because people choose not to think beyond the literal meaning; they like the subject to be stated and obvious. My mind does not work that way. Svonkin: I was struck by your poem “37 Common Characteristi(x)s of a Displaced Indian with a Learning Disability,” with such powerful, funny, poignant lines as “x  he spells phonetically, his teachers do not realize it is a pow-wow song” and “x  he has poor memory about proper table etiquette, and overeating” and “x  he cannot grasp the importance of math, only what

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has been taken.” Can you talk about this poem, and whether and to what extent we should read your poems as confessional or personal? Apache: There was a time my spouse and I were raising two of my nephews, ages ten and eleven. One of my nephews began exhibiting complications in school. After months of testing he was diagnosed with a learning disability, a mild form of dyslexia. Observing him through this period I began to think how many times his mannerisms and behavior were misconstrued as discourteous behavior. Earlier in this interview, I spoke about cognition and code-switching. With his disability, I began noting some of the behavioral situations and wrote them into a poem. I found my nephews condition significant because I had just finished Sherman Alexie’s novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. While writing the poem, “37 Common Characteristi(x)s of a Displaced Indian with a Learning Disability,” I started thinking about cognition. Living with us for several years was my nephews’ first experience living off the reservation, away from cultural stimulation, and in an urban environment. School for my nephews was stressful because the school was much larger than they were used to. Living in an urban environment was strange and unfamiliar to them. They acclimated after a time. I hadn’t considered their reservation experience and Native American culture as significant, but they were.     Finding myself in my work has taken more than half of my life. When I was a teenager, a pastor who worked on my reservation, and who I shared earlier works with, told me, “there seems to be a lot of searching in your poetry.” I never forgot those words. In many disparate ways, I have tried to archive many parts of my life: holding on to personal old items; gathering and collecting significant familial items; and recording many conversations through journal writing, video, pictures, voice recordings, and in my poetry. Because my life now does not exist on the reservation I was born on, I try to take these various things with me as a reminder of where I originate. For me, my past is important to hold on to while sifting through a future of displacement. The ending phrase in the poem, “Collapse,” is my memorial or my point of origin, and is a place where I will return to.    —daa ‘ik ł’ idá ‘ádaajindi / this was said a long time ago

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza INTERVIEWED BY STEVEN GOULD AXELROD AND CRAIG SVONKIN

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza was born (in 1987) and raised in Riverside, California. She received her BA from the University of California, Riverside. Her poems have appeared in such publications as Poetry Magazine, PEN America, and H. Melt’s collection, Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation. Espinoza’s books include There Should Be Flowers (2016), Outside of the Body There Is Something Like Hope (2018), and I’m Alive. It Hurts. I Love It (2nd edition, 2019). Axelrod: In “My First Love” (in There Should Be Flowers) the speaker comments, “I built myself from scratch / and no one listened.” Yet the speaker also talks about loving silence. Can you further develop these themes of withholding words and perhaps enjoying the privacy silence made possible? Yet perhaps wishing for self-disclosure too? Espinoza: I have a lot I can say about that poem, and those lines; today, a couple days after the annual Trans Day of Visibility, I am thinking about silence as a form of safety, as opposed to the danger that comes along with being visible as a trans person. Erasure is its own kind of pain, with its own set of consequences for the erased person, but when the only other option is to be seen and heard by a world that doesn’t want you to exist, there is a power in embracing your invisibility. There is room to build a self that no one can comment on or add to. This poem represents the period of time in which I created myself out of sight from everyone else. It speaks to how self-disclosure can be intentional and strategic, and how naming myself was ultimately the epilogue to one story, and the prologue to another. Axelrod: Are there other poets that influenced you in your career or whose presence felt supportive? I’m thinking of personal, confessional or what is now being called queer confessional poets (e.g., Sexton, Plath, Lowell, Bidart, Henri Cole, etc.), Beat poets (e.g., Ginsberg, John Wieners), queer poets (e.g., Rigoberto Gonzalez, TC Tolbert, Fabian Romero), trans poets (you mention Jayy Dodd, Venus Selenite, and Manuel Arturo Abreu in Subject to Change), or Latinx or BIPOC poets. This question has gotten too long and specific! Can you mention a handful of poets from whatever era whom you might consider allies or influences? Espinoza: My work definitely would not have received the exposure it has without support from people I consider my poetic heroes, including, but not limited to Morgan Parker, TC Tolbert, Danez Smith, Christopher Soto aka Loma, Melissa Broder, and many others who have responded to my work with love, and have gone out of their way to give my voice exposure. All of these writers have inspired my practice in various ways as well. Some other inspirations include Tommy Pico, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Dorothea Lasky, Eileen Myles, Donika Kelly, Sara Borjas, and so, so many others.

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Axelrod: In “Like a Good Woman,” another poem in There Should Be Flowers, you write, “We are all approximations of what we are,” which seems profound to me. Can you say more about this idea and how it shapes your writing? Espinoza: That line speaks to the idea that the process of “becoming” doesn’t really have an endpoint, and that language, as well as the categories we uphold with language, tend to fall apart under scrutiny. This is especially true when it comes to gendered categories. No one performs their gender perfectly; no one is the platonic ideal of their gender. All of us identify as things we can only approximate, and often this frustrates and disappoints. Poetry is the only space where I’ve found an experience of hyper-approximation, of being not less than the thing I claim to be, but more. Axelrod: In H. Melt’s anthology, Subject to Change, you described yourself as “scared” at the beginning of the Trump era. Now that he is just “the previous guy,” and we’re in a new historical era, how are you feeling? Espinoza: Scared. Nearly one hundred anti-trans bills have popped up around the United States in just the first couple months of the new administration alone, and those currently in power seem happy to make empty statements of support, rather than provide any actual protection or care for trans people. Liberals and so-called leftists who are still deeply invested in this system were glad to throw trans people under the bus once we ceased to become a useful talking point to prove how tolerant they are in contrast to the right. It is becoming increasingly clear that the cultural visibility trans people have gained in the past five years has not come with an interrogation of the ways in which transphobic ideology undergirds nearly every aspect of our lives. Instead, this increased visibility has represented a further dehumanization of trans people, and the reduction of our experiences into fodder for a culture war. This is not progress. Being granted access to participate in the death machine that is the US military is also not progress. Trans people don’t need Democrats to stand up on a stage and repeat “Trans women are women” while refusing to understand what this actually means. Trans people need housing, health care, the destruction of white supremacy, and the end of capitalism. Svonkin: Reading your poetry, I was struck by how your poems often seem to bring together humor (if often dark humor) and pathos or strong emotion, in ways that create an indelible aesthetic effect. Poems such as “Birthday Suits” (in Poetry Magazine) and “The Moon Is Trans” (in There Should Be Flowers) are two that I would describe in that way. Is this “gloomy-jolly” aesthetic something you strive for as a poet, something key to your own persona or voice? Espinoza: I love the phrase “gloomy-jolly.” I used to write very serious poems because I thought poetry had to be deadly serious. The humor began to work its way in once I let go of expectations of how one should be a poet, and began to allow my poetic voice to become more aligned with my actual voice. Humor has been an ever-present coping mechanism for me, so it only seems natural that it would appear in my writing. I’ve also long been of the belief that poetry and stand-up comedy are not extremely dissimilar from one another. At the same time, I definitely try to aim for a balance—the humor should ideally serve to draw the reader in and heighten the emotions around it. Humor for its own sake can work great for some, but for me, laughter must always come with stakes. Svonkin: Some of your poems seem to verge on the surrealist in their imagery and narrative direction, such as “Sometimes in a Moment of Déjà Vu” (in I’m Alive and PEN America). In the opening lines of this poem—“Sometimes in a moment of déjà vu / I forget where I am and my hands bleed / into the bed and the bed bleeds into the wall”—the shocking imagery of the

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speaker’s hands bleeding into the bed and the bed bleeding into the wall seems at first like the images of a gothic nightmare, a Bunuel movie or Dali painting, or a Henry Fuseli painting, perhaps. But when the poem is reread, it seems more personal than simply surrealist. Can you discuss your use of fantastic or surrealist imagery in this poem, or in your poetry in general? Espinoza: I’ve never tried to intentionally engage with surrealism as a practice, and I know almost nothing about the historical surrealist movement; I was honestly surprised after my first collection was published and I started seeing that word used to describe my work. I just write the way I think. I had a very rough childhood, and when a young, preverbal mind is disrupted during its formation, this can lead the disrupted mind towards an atypical experience of reality and self. A specific example of this is the fact that as babies, we tend to see ourselves and the world around us as entirely one object. We bleed into the world and the world bleeds into us. Our brains are supposed to learn, over time, to distinguish between self and parent-figure, self and chair, self and bed, self and wall. Sometimes, a disruption or series of disruptions can cause a part of the self to splinter away and continue to identify as everything around her. When I get overwhelmed, I become that part of myself. I return to a state of radical superimposition in which everything layers upon everything else, and I have to work hard to prevent myself from experiencing a deep sense of empathy for a doorknob, or crying because the roll of paper towels “looked sad.” Axelrod: In I’m Alive. It Hurts. I Love It you write, “It was strangeness, distance, and misrecognition that offered safety.” Perhaps the poem does all the talking necessary, but I wonder if you’d like to say more now, several years later, in an era of pandemic and climate change, about the shelter provided by strangeness, the multiplicity of identity, the process of “endless shedding,” and the way everything “just becomes something else.” Espinoza: Safety is such an interesting word, because it is always relative, and the more marginalized you are, the more you are forced to invent new and interesting definitions of it. The need for safety also implies a threat. What does it say about that threat if to be distant, alienated, and inarticulable is to be safe? Inaccessibility can become a form of safety when the thing you cannot access wants to kill you for trying to access it. During the pandemic, we have all needed to make ourselves inaccessible to the very air of the outside world. This is the lifelong experience of many trans and gender nonconforming people. The threat against us is both invisible and too visible, and is suffused into everything. Svonkin: On your Twitter, you have written the following Tweet: me: the notion of a collective womanhood is fraught w disparities in power/privilege  me drunk in a bar bathroom: all women ever are perfect  First off, I really love the humor of the assertion and then the counter-assertion of this tweet. It seems like a thesis, and then a drunken antithesis, with the reader having to somehow create their own synthesis. This tweet seems both a lovely introduction to an unfinished syllogism, a drunken koan, and, just perhaps, your own poem about identity. But since Tweets are often not considered “proper” spots for poetry or art, I imagine that my reading of your tweet as a poem might be unusual? Other tweets by you also seem like poems (perhaps conceptual poems), jokes (Mitch Hedberg or Steven Wright-style), haikus, koans, or poignant/humorous/philosophical maxims or aphorisms or epigrams. E.g.:

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 god is my favorite gay person  just hanging out and casually reckoning with the void,,, how’s everyone else’s Saturday going?  And:  i may not have a gf, but what i do have are deeply entrenched trust issues along with an inability to believe that anyone else could truly love me, so,,,  So, my question is do you think of some of your Tweets as being poems, and if so, what sort of poems? Queer Confessional? Comic? Epigrammatic? Or, if you don’t think the tweets are poems, or the same as your poems, how do you find the forms to differ? Espinoza: I view my tweets as a kind of workshop space, a chance to test out different versions of my voice, and to play with various concerns. Tweeting absurd or funny ideas that come into my mind and seeing the immediate reaction helps me understand the parts of my brain other people connect or don’t connect with. When tweeting, I almost never intentionally think of it as a poem; sometimes it’s just a passing thought, other times it is something that has been running on a loop in my head for a week. I feel much more precious about my poems than my tweets. Hitting send on something like “the moon is my gay himbo dad” feels a lot more low stakes than writing a developed poem that explores family, gender, and the mysteries of the natural world. At the same time, tweets that tend to attract attention usually contain something I can point towards as poetry-adjacent, whether it be compression and layering of thought into a short amount of characters, rhythm/meter/musicality, expressing a truth in a new or interesting way, and, of course, surprise and astonishment. Many of the elements that make poems work also make tweets work, in my opinion. I feel like a tweet can be a great form to explore humor, rhetoric and poetics, and it can be fun to push the form in order to see what it might be capable of allowing you to express.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

A Conversation with Stephanie Burt CRAIG SVONKIN AND STEVEN GOULD AXELROD

Stephanie Burt is a distinguished scholar and an influential critic of contemporary poetry as well as being a notable poet herself. She is a professor of English at Harvard University. Among her books of literary criticism and literary history are Randall Jarrell and His Age (2003), The Art of the Sonnet, with David Mikics (2005), The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence (2007), Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (2009), and Please Don’t Read Poetry (2019). Her edited books include Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden (2005) and The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (2016). Among her four volumes of poetry are Parallel Play (2006) and Advice from the Lights (2017). This conversation was conducted by email during the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2021. Svonkin: Over the years, Randall Jarrell’s reputation has arguably diminished (perhaps not so much as a critic, but as a poet), while Bishop’s and Sexton’s and Plath’s reputations have improved. Perhaps it is because I’m interested in childhood and children’s literature, or because I love the sound of Jarrell’s poems, or because poets who use personae as protective masks (assuming they are masks—perhaps something more complex is going on when Jarrell writes poems with older female speakers), but I still find Jarrell to be one of the most interesting and moving of American poets of the mid-twentieth-century. Do you want to offer your own defense of Jarrell as an important poet and critic both (I hope so, although defenses are always a bit sad)? Burt: His best lines are his best defense. “I go over, hold my hands out, play I play-- / If only, somehow, I have learned to live! / The three of us sit watching as my waltz / Plays itself out a half inch from my fingers.” “I think of that old woman in the song / Who could not know herself without the skirt / They cut off as she slept beside a stile.” “And stroked all night, with a black wing, my wings.” And, of course, “I move from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All.”    He’s often treated either as a Second World War writer, or as a kind of vade mecum to Bishop (whom we love now) and Lowell (whom we don’t—alas). Neither treatment does justice to his most powerful and moving work, almost all of which came after 1950. He’s still my favorite poet from his era, though I wouldn’t call him, or Bishop, or anyone, the single best (I no longer think that kind of label has meaning). If you want compassion, voice, empathy, reflection, interiority, retrospect—or if you want to see how gender and age both shapes and traps us all—he’s still the modern poet you need to read.

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Svonkin: In Don’t Read Poetry, you argue that we shouldn’t “assume poetry ever means only one thing,” explaining that “there is no one purpose to all poetry; there are only poems, lots of them, memorable and ridiculous and calm and volatile and heartbreaking and fascinating poems.” While you have the poets and poems you love, and you share that love and try to explain how the poems work to affect you, you seem loath to criticize any poet, even some I find quite boring or clichéd, viewing, it seems, even “bad” poetry as serving some cultural or psychological purpose for some readers. I therefore think of you as a “big tent” critic, one who loves a wide variety of poets and styles or genres of poetry, and who is interested in aesthetics not as a way to tell readers which poets have written the best that has been thought and said, but rather in aesthetics as a means for exploring how a particular poem works, or affects, or moves. Do you mind talking about what you see as your role as a poet, poetry critic, and teacher, and why you, assuming you agree with my portrait of you, are interested in doing what you do and why you are not so interested in aesthetic judgment or canon formation or reformation? Burt: I’m super interested in aesthetic judgment! I’m just no longer interested in claiming my judgment, or anyone’s judgment, can be entirely separated from its circumstances, or from my backgrounds and identities. I show you what I like and try to show you why, in the hopes that you might like, or take an interest, or learn from the thing I like too. Jarrell was on this one: “No critic can ever prove that The Iliad is better than ‘Trees.’ All a critic can do is persuade—but persuade covers everything from a sneer to statistics.” Also—as Jarrell learned about halfway through his own career as a critic—sneers don’t work. And most bad poets aren’t worth my time.     Sometimes I’m a DJ, juxtaposing the familiar and the unfamiliar in hopes of introducing and framing a new poem you’ll like. Sometimes I’m framing and explaining, like somebody hanging pictures in a gallery. Sometimes I’m telling a story about the poems, like somebody captioning a comic. And sometimes (this analogy comes from G[erard] M[anley] Hopkins via Helen Vendler) I and any other reader for any poem are like singers, deciding how to perform a piece of vocal music, and deciding whether we like it enough to sing it at all.     Also I’m a werewolf: poet and critic but not at the same time. I am not a vampire: I don’t pretend to be a human (critic) in order to suck your blood (promote my poems). And like a werewolf, I don’t get enough sleep. Svonkin: While I love some poets who my students have heard of (Frost, Dickinson, Plath), I particularly enjoy introducing them to poets they have never heard of or encountered. To use an American poet outside of the period of this book (1945 to the present), I love introducing my students to the poetry of Adelaide Crapsey, or to use a Canadian children’s poet, I love introducing them to JonArno Lawson’s poetry. Who are some of the American poets of the twenty-first century you think we as lovers of poetry should be introduced to, and why? Burt: I wrote a whole book about this (The Poem Is You, 2016)! Rosa Alcalá, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Angie Estes, Ross Gay, Laura Kasischke, Allan Peterson, Melissa Range, Brandon Som, Monica Youn … each with their own aesthetic and their own accomplishment and their own potential audience.     If you like elaboration and ornament and beauty and European art along with strong feeling (and very American origins) get yourself an Angie Estes book. There’s no one in my generation smarter than Monica Youn, and no one better at devising new poetic forms to face

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tough truths—about how power works in families and in societies, about Korean American identity and anti–Asian American racism, about adult embodiment and the ways that our bodies can let us down. Allan Peterson is always looking hard at the world and doing the weird science: I’ve been yelling about how much I like his work and how underrated it still seems to be for almost my entire adult life. I could go on. I must go on. Svonkin: In The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence (2007), you argued that a great deal of contemporary American poetry is connected, in a variety of ways, to adolescence: “The association of poetry itself with adolescent subcultures … becomes both a way of depicting energetic flux and a response to all the cultural changes … that have made youth seem more valuable, maturity less so.” Do you still, in the twenty-first century, see American poetry as tending toward a celebration of childhood or adolescence? Has this American poetic tendency toward nostalgia or rebellion continued on without a change? Burt: I love that question! Or rather that pair of questions, since I’m gonna answer yes to the first and no to the second: things have changed. The constellation of styles that often embodied adolescence for poets, not only but especially white ones, in the 1990s—constantly veering away from, then back towards, prose sense; excitedly distractable; assembling fragments, avoiding wholes; picking up tactics from an avant-garde whose strategies it refused—is still around (it’s in the very influential Kaveh Akbar, frex), but it’s far less important, and less common.     Instead we have a new generation of poets coming out of performance, out of a youth spent with YouTube, a generation that heard contemporary poems before reading them. That’s going to affect what’s in their first and second and third books! There’s something tied to the energy and the constant challenge of youth culture—and of course to Black American cultures (plural)—in Danez Smith, and I can’t imagine a poet like Danez Smith coming up much earlier than they did. (This is a Black thing but not only a Black thing. I think.)     That’s also the generation and a half of poets who grew up with Tumblr and (before that) with constant presence in online forums (anybody else remember LiveJournal?) and with oversharing and with the millennial expectation that nobody has any privacy, and with the claim (I sympathize) that many previous standards of privacy and decorum functioned as locks on various closet doors. This is the generation of Patrica Lockwood and Morgan Parker, in the United States, and of Hera Lindsay Bird and Essa Ranapiri in New Zealand. I don’t know how long this poetry of oversharing will last but I like it.     I should add that at some point—and maybe that point arrived long ago—readers should stop listening to me about what’s coming, what’s new, what’s now, what’s up. First books of poetry are appearing now, good ones, by writers who are half my age. (But I am reading and liking them.) Svonkin: In Advice from the Lights (2017), you’ve written quite a few poems that seem confessional, quite a few about your childhood experiences of identity. But where some of the poems deal fairly directly with the pain of being a transgender child, others, like “Hermit Crab” and “To the Naked Mole Rats at the National Zoo” (the title an allusion to Jarrell’s “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” perhaps?), seem to use animal figures as stand-ins for writing about yourself. Is this substitution—seen in lines like these from “Hermit Crab: “That shell is pretty, but that shell is too small for me. / / Each home is a hideout; each home is a secret …”—something that offers psychic or aesthetic space for dealing with difficult or painful

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material? Or, is there something else taking place here? Do you mind speaking a bit about your poems about childhood? Burt: Thanks for asking. Of course this audience will notice the Jarrell in those mole rats—and thank you for reading that poem (which is, also, about science fiction conventions)! The animal speakers and the inanimate speakers (stapler, flashlight, etc.) of course let me speak about feelings that would feel too odd or too painful or too specific or too hard to pin down, were I to try to write about them in propria persona. (That’s what Jarrell did in “The Black Swan” I think, and certainly Bishop in “Rainy Season, Sub-Tropics,” a triptych that follows me wherever I go.)     That said, I’d like to push back against the idea that autobiography, writing in propria persona, is or should be the default mode, and persona poems a second choice, an escape or a last resort. Maybe I just like pretending to be a ferret. Maybe pretending to be a flashlight, or a ferret, or a Marvel Comics mutant, just is me being me. (If you’ve never tried being somebody else, why not try it?)     Adolescence is endlessly fascinating to me—I write books about it and I read lots of YA [Young Adult literature]—in part because it’s a stage of life that resists the imposition of tragedy: YA novels can end in many ways, but they don’t end with resigned and defeated protagonists hopelessly trudging on into the post-Beckett horrorshow that is life under capitalism (or maybe just life). They show how people, given time and opportunity, can often grow and change. (George Eliot, who usually wrote about adults, showed how adults can do this sort of thing too—but she was George Eliot.) I also … understand something about adolescence because I was fortunate enough to have one? A weird one but a real and fortunate one?     Childhood is … IDK, I think I didn’t get one? My experience of childhood was like if you go to a restaurant and ask for risotto and the adults around you keep giving you hamburgers and fries, and the hamburgers are very high quality but that’s not what you want? I played with a lot of Star Wars figures with my one friend who would play with Star Wars figures and I read a lot of comic books, some of which hold up now and some of which don’t, and I learned a lot about chemistry and biology, and I … didn’t really understand how to be a kid, partly because I didn’t know I was a girl, or that I was supposed to be a girl? The kind of girl who gets to wear big fluffy taffeta pink princess dresses while defending the kingdom from her magical enemies and transforming into a shining, auburn-haired mermaid with combat skills. You know. That kind of girl. I get to be one now. Would you like some risotto? Axelrod: In your new essay on Elizabeth Bishop’s influence (in Elizabeth Bishop in Context), you focus on a variety of very different poets ranging from Lyn Hejinian to Shane McCrae to Kate Colby, Patrick Morrissey, and David Baker. Without limiting yourself to those five, or even necessarily mentioning them, I’d like to ask you who are some of the poets, or what are some of the movements, that seem to you to be making a significant impact today and that will possibly have an “influence” on the poetry of the future. Burt: That Colby book is amazing and I want everyone to read it. Also: Terrance Hayes, Robin Schiff, Danez Smith, Monica Youn. But not all my favorite poets are influential. Not all of them represent possible futures. Some just write good books. Axelrod: A corollary question, if you wish to address it, is what role racial, ethnic, gender, class, or geographic identity plays in the poetry arising today? If political demography is diversifying, and thereby changing our politics, isn’t it likely that poetic demography is changing as well, and

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changing poetry as well? Would you like to say something about identity poetics, or perhaps social media poetics, or specifically one or more Asian American or Pacific Islander poets, African American poets, Native American poets, Latinx poets, queer poets, trans poets, Muslim poets, or poets with a debility or some other social or cultural identification? Do social identity issues inspire poets to write in novel and distinctive ways? Burt: Taking the last question first: of course they do. Identities—which can include everything from Puerto Rican American-ness to Deafness to introversion and shyness (an important identity, along with Southernness, for A. R. Ammons, e.g.)—aren’t just subjects: they’re sources of style, in ways that may be indirect for some poets (e.g., Ammons and shyness and Southern whiteness) but that become very clear for others. If you’re Chicano/Chicana/ Chicanx you may have access to sounds and modes of feeling and rhythmic devices and entire fields of allusion that come, let’s say, from norteño music, which I can look up but can’t use in my own poems, because I’m not inward with it. It’s not about me.    It’s no coincidence that new demographics, new or newly visible identities, often drive new styles and new literary movements: that’s happening now, especially but not only around African American poetics, and it’s about time. And, again, the strongest and most visible social identities in America have to do with race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, sexuality, and disability, but they are not the only ways in which poets can identify ourselves, and not the only social sources for our styles.    For a long time more than half of the poets we got in American poetry courses, in American poetry anthologies, in lists of the good and the best, were cis white dudes, and if they were gay they were semi-closeted, and if they had disabilities they concealed them, and if they didn’t grow up speaking standard mid-Atlantic white English they wrote as if they did. And if you were a woman you might not want to be discussed as a woman (waves distantly at Bishop) because then you’d get discussed apart from the men. That was some BS: I hope that era is over.    And one consequence of our new era—our better era, in that respect (not in all respects)— might be this: poets known for a particular identity don’t get shoved in a box with other poets known for that identity, segregated from everybody else. Lucia Perillo was one of our great twenty-first-century poets of disability. And of sexuality. And of comedy! And of nonhuman nature. All those things. Also a poet of conversational tones, long lines, juxtaposed anecdotes (she has two poems about the artificial insemination of large mammals, and they’re both terrific; also at least one poem using the plural for Elvis impersonators, “Elvi”). Emotions and tones and stylistic choices make up identities too. We are all many things! We are all more than the labels the Bureau of the Census allots us. But if we try to ignore those labels we end up perpetuating ableism and sexism and white supremacy. Nobody wants that. At least nobody I trust.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Ecopoetics: In and against the American Grain JAMES MCCORKLE

When a colleague asked about what I was writing, I responded that I was working on essays on ecopoetics. “Everything could be ecopoetics now,” she retorted. Indeed, ecopoetics could be seen as a vessel that holds almost anything—a voguish critical term that is neither descriptive nor productive, and, cynically, an attempt to be relevant in alluding to the unfolding environmental conditions the planet faces. But Rob Wilson, writing of nuclear terror, has argued, “The hope of … cultural work, it seems to me, is that by employing the means not of technological production but of semiotic (re)production, the poet can offer symbols of discursive resistance” (241). Offering examples of Bob Perelman’s “language-defamiliarizing poems or the sentence-massiveness of Ron Silliman’s Ketjak,” Wilson suggests that poetry can destabilize “the business-as-usual language of the ‘modern administered world’ ” (241). Quoting Seamus Heaney, he proposes that it can warn of “our inability to trust too far a language of continuity: words, especially hallowed words, can now turn into weightless chimeras” (quoted in Wilson 231). Wilson’s meditations on technology and the limitations and subversion of the sublime raise the issue of saying the unsayable. Lynn Keller, responding to Frederick Buell, carries Wilson’s meditations into contemporary ecopoetics: “While Buell urges abandonment of apocalyptical discourse in favor of writing that emphasizes ongoing crisis, I contend that actively ‘dwelling in crisis’ … does not preclude anticipation of dramatic catastrophe on top of the creeping degradations one already inhabits” (“Making Art” 22). If language, or more precisely poetry, is limited, in what ways can it address the subsuming environmental crisis? Nuclear terror belongs in the genealogy of the technologies of dismemberment and alienation, which have cumulated in the environmental crisis—not to be glib, but nuclear terror, both in the production of the materiel and its (possible) use, represents the longer, more intimate environmental catastrophe that has been unfolding. It is indisputable that human activities are bringing about the sixth mass extinction as, for example, Elizabeth Kolbert has reported. In the most general terms, we have gone from defining ourselves as passive observers or perhaps celebrants of nature, to realizing ourselves as species within nature and deeply implicated in the transformations of multiple ecologies.1 Shifting

I use the pronoun we with hesitation—there is a difference of scale among populations, for example, from 1850 to 2011, the United States accounted for 27 percent of all carbon emissions, the European Union another 25 percent according to the World Resource Institute (http://www.wri.org/blog/2014/11/6-gra​phs-expl​ain-world’s-top-10-emitt​ers). On the basis of 1

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baselines, the plasticity of certain species, and the loss of habitats and species map our unfolding conditions. Dismissing the deniers of climate change or the effects of human predation in the environment, we confront a scale of destruction and anticipatory history that cannot easily be quantified or knowable. It is simply in the process of arriving, and as such how exactly can we write it or write of it? The environmental philosopher Thom Van Dooren writes, “The scale of this loss is unknown and unknowable with any real certainty. Biologist Richard Primack estimates that the current rate of extinction is likely 100 to 1,000 times greater than would be expected as a result of normal ‘background extinction’ ” (6). We face the horrific spectacle—an apoca-lyrical prospect—of writing our own elegies as well as elegies for much of the life on the planet, as David Baker writes in the title poem of Scavanger Loop: I am looking  at trees  they may be one of the things  I will miss  most from the earth (Baker 82) Baker’s elegy echoes W. S. Merwin’s often anthologized “For a Coming Extinction,” from The Lice (1967), which opens with a direct address, to the gray whale, acknowledging that “we are sending you to The End,” concludes with the anthropocentric declaration, “it is we who are important” (68–9). Merwin reveals the hubris of the human, in that the speaker does not deign to address the divine directly, but tasks those who are about to vanish to speak of their own extinction. The speaker declares that humans are distinct, made on a different day, that all other species and thus, implicitly, not subject to the creator, and in fact, usurps the very powers of the divine by claiming to have invented forgiveness and refusing to exercise it. Merwin’s critique centers on the excess of power: as in the opening of “The Last One,” he observes, “They’d made up their minds to be everywhere because why not. / Everywhere was theirs because they thought so” (10). Obliquely referencing the colonial project of the extraction of resources, Merwin condemns the unreflective capitalist and colonial grounding in the foregrounding of property, ownership, and seizures. Merwin’s poems, particularly in The Lice, signaled an explicit engagement with the environmental movement as it evolved from the earlier conservation policies, federal land management, and the establishment of national parks. Merwin’s work, allied with the antinuclear and anti-war movements, clearly established a human moral failing that evades a totalizing claim, but is self-accusatory as it bears witness on our behalf. In contrast to the central witnessing lyrical I/eye of a poet, the interrogatory poetics of Rae Armantrout has emerged as yet another form of response to the inevitability of the global climate crisis. In her collection Wobble, the title itself suggests the imbalance the earth is undergoing. In “Revisions” she uses a compressed form, which, while a distinct element of her poetic composition over the decades, eschews excess and thus stylistically comments on planetary/ human excess: Armantrout’s poem thus conserves while also generating its own sustaining energy. The poem interrogates itself on its poetics and by implication on the ability of poetry to address meaningfully the conditions of a rapidly degrading planet. Environmental disaster is implied in

CO2 emissions in 2011, the top three were Canada, the United States, and Russia, followed by Japan and the European Union. In terms of cumulative emissions from 1990 to 2011, of the top ten countries, the United States and China had the most emissions, with a combined percentage of 31 percent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which equaled the combined total of GHG of all the countries except those of the top ten emitters.

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the elliptical conclusion in which “whatever was killing / the birds” is replaced by “whatever // is killing / the bees” (Armantrout 44–5). The use of clichéd or repeated words, such as “whatever,” implies both the degradation of language, but also the reuse and recycling of words. In other parts of the poem the language field seems to be depleted through a rhetorically overdetermined excess. The environmental crisis becomes flattened through a chain of substitutions: “whatever was killing / the birds” is replaced by “whatever // is killing / the bees.” The lines become variable even as the components are exchangeable. So much depends upon variability, as Williams teaches us, and so much depends upon the “birds and the bees,” yet our cynicism—or is it fatigue?—drains the resources of our language so that we resort to “whatever” as metonymic for an explanation. Perception and knowledge have become commodities, as exchangeable as carbon-trading; and language, as Armantrout indicates, is both evidence and a mode of production for this capitalist intervention: “Humans / photo-bomb the planet, // pop-up everywhere” (Armantrout 4). These lines near the end of “Speech Acts” draw comparisons between militarism—whether carpet bombing Southeast Asia or the Middle East or sequestering hundreds of thousands of acres for bombing ranges in Nevada—and intruding into and thus contesting the space of a photograph. The photograph as an idealized presence becomes compromised; humans become invasive. The poem closes on, or dis-closes, the anonymous but trend toward possessive surveilling, the acquiring of knowledge about others. This ominous warning doubles back upon itself for not only are we “humans” surveilled, but the planet itself is under constant scrutiny, whether in terms of the annual rise in global temperatures, loss of rain forest, the retreat of polar ice, or diminishing populations of species. Poetry, like the climate sciences, has become a form of human accounting of crisis. Ours is clearly an anthropogenic extinction event brought about by human dispersal across the planet resulting in the exploitation of apparently isolated species to human productivity, whether producing and discarding plastics, the burning of fossil fuels, or, for example, the expansion of monocultural agribusiness. The effects of such evidence also act on a similar scale on our social consciousness, as Roy Scranton writes: “Whether we retransmit or react, we reinforce channels of thought, perception, behavior, and emotion that, over time, come to shape our habits and our personality. As we train ourselves to resonate fear and aggression, we reinforce patterns of thought and feeling that shape a society that breeds the same” (79). Ostensibly, the role of poetry from the Romantics on has been to provide a resistant pressure against certain political realities, as Wallace Stevens argues in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words”: “A possible poet must be a poet capable of resisting or evading the pressure of the reality of this last degree with the knowledge that the degree of today may become a deadlier degree tomorrow” (27). Stevens’s comments, written in 1942 with the backdrop of political, military, and genocidal violence, are applicable to the “slow violence,” to use Rob Nixon’s term, which describes the various forms of exploitative violence brought about through the rapid industrialization of human societies. The environmental crisis, brought on by industrialization and capitalism, built on the shared foundation of authoritarianism, describes this slow violence and the destruction ranging across the spectrum of species and temporalities. This chapter will consider the ecopoetic projections from the mid-twentieth century to the first decades of the twenty-first century. Yet, the intention of the chapter, is also to argue that ecopoetics has been in the American grain; furthermore, ecopoetics occupies a critical role in the exposure and critique of systematic oppressions and exploitations. Thus, central to the project of ecopoetics is the question of who is human—which has historically been the fundamental political issue since the arrival of Europeans in the so-called New World and the consequent genocide of Indigenous Peoples

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throughout the Western Hemisphere. That and our “peculiar institution,” slavery, challenges what constitutes being in the American grain. Among the areas of consideration is what Charles Altieri considered “the scenic”—a poetics of description, of landscape, of observation. Such a poetics was anchored in an aesthetic of the self, the recognition of nature outside of, but witnessed by the poet. Jorie Graham’s poem “I Won’t Live Long,” from Runaway, invokes this lyric centeredness, but is simultaneously an elegy to it and world, as the title segues into the opening lines, “enough to see any of the new/ dreams the hundreds of new kinds of suffering and weeds birds animals shouldering their / demise without possibility of re- / generation” (50). The right-justified lines re-shift the process of reading, as Graham concludes, asking us to remember “the earth is your / home. No matter what they tell you” (51). The recognition of the environment as inclusive of the human, the human as subject to predations parallel to those inflicted on nature, signals a shift in environmental poetics. This shift, or expansion, parallels the expansion of the environmental movement to include by now such obvious concerns as environmental racism. However, a third shift of environmental poetics occurs in tandem with the rise of the term Anthropocene and the recognition of human disruptions reshaping the physical (and spiritual) geographies of the planet. As Lynn Keller writes, from the Anthropocene emerges certain “scalar dissonances” (“TwentyFirst-Century Ecopoetry” 49)—ranging from which populations, human and nonhuman, will be most affected by human activities, the dynamic scale and rapidity of change, and the question of human agency or the apparent ineffectiveness of the individual in global economies. An ecopoetics moves to dis-solve, as Evie Shockley suggests, the dichotomization of the “inextricably related categories” of the political and the aesthetic. Ecopoetics may be said to subsume earlier thematic concerns (scenic, nature, environmental, landscape); however, ecopoetics, perhaps by sheer historical circumstance, offers approaches to thinking about the conditions of human disruption of/in nature. Since Wordsworth, poetry is claimed to offer a fusion of language and perception as well as of mind and nature, each re-envisioning the other, as the poet writes in the 1800 “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, where he “considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting qualities of nature.” Poetry, Jonathan Bate argues in his Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, is found in both language and nature; it is a form of verbal communication within a social community, say of Grasmere, but also exists in the communicative relationship between humans and nature, or as John Clare’s poem “Pastoral Poesy” describes it, in “a language that is ever green” (17–18). Yet we seem to have reached a condition of impossibility: “It’s hard to be anything / / but a pessimist” (74), Tommy Pico writes at the close of his book-length poem, Nature Poem. Pico eschews the poetic line for a prose line throughout the text, as though to emphasize the problematic of a “language that is ever green” or one that is regenerative and transcendent. The opening line, “The stars are dying,” sets into play a sense of cataclysm that is undercut, briefly, with the follow-up “like always, and far away, like what you see looking up is a death knell / from light, right?” Pico collapses scales of destruction, moving from the galactic and abstractly inevitable, to the globally topical and personal:                 Massive deaths. When I try to sleep I think about orange cliffs, bare of orange stars. Knotted, glut. Waves are clear. Anemones n shit. Sand crabs n shit. Fleas. There are seagulls overhead. Ugh I swore to myself I would never write a nature poem. The sand is fine. They say it’s not Fukushima. I feel fine, in the sense

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that I feel very thin—I been doin Tracy Anderson DVD workouts on YouTube, keeping my arms fit and strong. She says reach, like you are being pulled apart. (Pico 1) Pico’s assertion, “I can’t write a nature poem / bc it’s fodder for the noble savage / narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face, / I say to my audience” (2), folds into the discursive field the histories of racism and genocide, the incursions of technology, and the global threat of nuclear annihilation. Pico, as his biographical note indicates, is originally from the Viejas reservation of the Kumeyaay Nation, part of the Hokan culture that has lived in the alpine San Diego region for over ten thousand years. Do we assume special knowledges that Pico may have as a Native American without reflecting on our assumptions or, indeed, the radical possibilities other cultural practices might hold. Pico suggests that we are all being “pulled apart”—dismembered and un/re/membered— whether it is on the level of the human body, cultural bodies, or the bodies of ecosystems. Pico also replicates and critiques the disembodying semiosis of our narrative attentiveness as in the string of disconnected assertions in the line, “The sand is fine. They say it’s not Fukushima. I feel fine.” The rhetorical compartmentalization isolates, for example, the nuclear contamination to an event, a locale, and finally to the abstraction of a name. The disengagement of responsibility—the vague “They say” standing for unaccountable and unnamed authorities—undercuts the personal assertion “I feel fine” and the seeming non-sequitur “The sand is fine.” The nuclear and material contamination from Fukushima stretched across the Pacific, with cesium being detected from Japan to the Aleutians to the California coast.2 The contaminants are in fact in the sand, in the grain of living bodies. Pico’s commentary may illustrate Sarah Nolan’s “unnatural ecopoetics,” which draws on Donna Hararway’s “new materialist concept of ‘naturecultures’, which [Haraway] explains as the ‘implosions of the discursive realms of nature and culture’, and builds on material ecocriticism’s proposed breakdown of recognizable boundaries between natural and human spaces, objects, thoughts, and agencies” (4). Later in Nature Poem, Pico states, Body All of yr flecks, flakes n gurgles? Ew. I sweat. I tell myself it’s just what bodies do. I have chicken fingers for breakfast. My cousins have cirrhosis. Body I am not my body. Get me out of here. (Pico 38)

See, for example, The Fukushima Project http://www.fukule​aks.org/web/; or more specifically, sea plume modeling and monitoring of cesium contamination at http://www.fukule​aks.org/web/?page​_id=9971 (accessed August 12, 2018). The initial event on March 11, 2011, at the TEPCO Fukushima plant, resulting from an earthquake-generated tsunami, continues from 2011 to the present with leakages, problems with clean-up and disposal, and continued dispersal of original contaminants. 2

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The action of a consumer-driven culture that promotes junk-food economies (from the agribusiness to chain-store consumption, to medical-industrial complexes focused on managing diabetes, heart disease, and obesity) parallels the historical addictive economies that result in elevated rates of cirrhosis, depression, and cancer among Native Americans. As surely as the seizures of land and bounty-hunts, these economies have dispossessed Native Americans of their own bodies. The body has been historically linked to “nature” (as opposed to the intellect), a means of deploying coercive identification (through racialization), sexual oppression and exploitation (the closeting of the homosexual body), and mythologizing (the Noble Savage, for example). Thus, how one, or if one, possesses one’s own body, particularly if brown, Black, female, or queer, forms a central ecocritical question as the space of one’s body is consistently as transgressed as any other space. While Pico writes out of his own locale and identity, the ubiquity of these economies—their global slow violence—define and affect us all. Environmentally engaged poetry, and indeed ecologically engaged composition, has always been part of the American grain—so much so, as Juliana Spahr writes in “Brent Crude” (in her That Winter the Wolf Came), that I have just finished a collaboration with a friend and I want to get his tongue out of my hand and so I fill my hand with tradition. My collaborator has said to me several times that we don’t need another BP poem. The Brent Crude Oil Spot price was 127.85 when we began the collaboration; 112.5 when we ended it. (20) In what ways do we need environmentally engaged poetry, or how might engaged poetry look and in fact address the precarities of resource depletion, rising sea levels, extinctions, extreme weather events, and human dislocations that are part of the climate crisis brought about by human action beginning, arguably, with the advent of industrialism and capitalism, which required the industrialized economy of permanent enslavement? Like Pico’s complaint against the “nature poem,” Spahr’s collaborator expresses an exhaustion with the topical poem—“another BP poem,” as he refers to the April 20, 2010, Deepwater Horizon explosion and ensuing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Spahr’s collaborator implies that an environmentally engaged poem may simply be a subgenre of political poetry. Yet as Spahr suggests, we are fully complicit in the carbon economies for our time, we are marked by the capitalization of oil: “The Brent Crude Oil Spot price was 127.85 when we began the collaboration; 112.5 when we ended it.” The positions that Pico and Spahr stake out are certainly a response to poetics based on image and description. Arguably an environmentally engaged poem most certainly emerges from naturewriting; indeed, the engagement with nature, our composing nature through the production of images, might be as essential a human activity as any, a form of ecologically sacred technology, as Clayton Eshleman speculates in his Juniper Fuse: “What we call image-making and, consequently, art, was the result of the crisis of the separation of the hominid from the animal to the distinct but related classification of the human and the animal” (29–30). As humans disengaged themselves from the animal, they simultaneously enacted a re-engagement, in fact, as Eshleman notes, “Upper Paleolithic space appears to be multidirectional, not only a world of broken interrelation where everything is in association, but also a world that is not partitioned from its material by a frame or some other boundary device” (34). Furthermore, “there seems to be no evidence for distinguishing sacred space from secular space in Upper Paleolithic imagination” (34).

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Gary Snyder enacts this lack of separation in an early poem, “Nooksack Valley,” from his collection Riprap, & Cold Mountain Poems, which begins with a survey of the land he is in immediate contact with, after reaching “the far end of a trip north,” a cabin and muddy fields (15). Snyder’s poetry is one of ecological witness, or the demonstration of attentiveness to the momentary and transient “Watching the dark sky darken, a heron flaps by” (15). The compression of image-making, as in “the dark sky darken,” heightens the doubled sense of the moment and of movement through time. This is not only a temporal effect, but also spatial. Snyder compresses the scale between the local and the global, narrowing the distance between fields close at hand and “cloudy mountains,” and comparing the domestic with a vast natural cycle or the rhythm of human chores of “feeding the stove” to the natural cycles of steelhead runs (15). Snyder’s observational stance translates into a notational process: “a week and I go back / Down 99, through towns, to San Francisco / and Japan” (15–16). He moves us through rings of human relations, beginning with a localized center, “a berry-pickers cabin” (15), to Japan, whether Japan is in the imaginary, or a further destination. Everything, Snyder implies, is transient—but, with an economy to position oneself in the present moment that sustains itself through perception. Snyder achieves this through his versions—or inhabitations—of the T’ang dynasty poet Han-Shan, which complement or correspond to his own poems in Riprap. Snyder compresses the temporal scale so that Han Shan’s attention to the world overlays his own receptive attentiveness. In #19, Snyder describes their shared anti-method method of composition: “No more tangled, hung-up mind. / I idly scribble poems on the rock cliff ” (55). Here, Snyder/Han-Shan propose an ethics of process and economics—it is as much that of Thoreau as it is of modernist poetic practice focused, arguably, on the economy of the image. While examples could be drawn from Pound, H. D., or Lorine Niedecker, for example, turning to William Carlos Williams’s 1923 Spring and All is instructive for linking Eshleman’s sense of the image as a primordial creative force, Snyder’s placement as an iconic voice of twentieth-century environmentally conscious poetry, and the immersion of the observant human into a humanconstructed landscape: By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the waste of broad, muddy fields brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen patches of standing water the scattering of tall trees (Williams 95) Williams portrays northern New Jersey in the mud-season, the beginning of spring, with no sentimentality or transforming nature into the subject of sublimity. Dormancy and wastage seem to define the landscape, with the looming presence of the “contagious hospital” shadowing the entire poem, as would the 1918 global influenza epidemic. Williams introduces into a “nature poem”—for what else could a poem about spring be?—a natural disaster that affected specifically

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humans. While Williams argues for the transience of all things—“The volcanoes are extinct. Coal is beginning to be dug again where the fern forests stood last night” (94)—so much depends, as he will write later in the sequence, on each action and object. These lines perform that interdependence, where the severe enjambment allows no pause, or enforces a critical engagement with the system that implies particular ways of reading/knowing: the line endings of “blue,” “the,” “the,” “fields,” and “fallen” are hinges or linkages from one line to another. The poem’s topography, in other words, maps an environment, or an ecological vision, of interdependence. Williams, and later Niedecker and Snyder, exemplifies a shift in ecopoetics from the (Whitmanian) space of the landscape to the locale, or as Linda Russo writes, an emplaced poetics: Place differs from space in an implied specificity. Space is an abstraction, something we might experience or desire as a concept; a place a spatial location; it is arrived at or returned to. One inhabits, experiences and so owns sensually the sounds, textures, smells, of a place. Further, the concept of place is multifaceted; as Lawrence Buell has noted, it points in three directions, at least: “toward environmental materiality, toward social perception or construction, and toward individual affect or bond” (Buell 63). Thus addressing place, and more specifically the ‘being located’ or localism that is central to environmental writing, enables consideration of the material “emplacement” or “environ-ment” of the writer, of language as a perceiving and constructing tool, and of connection (affect, bond) in many senses. (Russo 2) Eleni Sikelianos’s The California Poem, C. S. Giscombe’s Giscome Road, and Juliana Spahr’s That Winter a Wolf Came all establish a materiality of place through various forms of assemblage. The reassembling of a temporal history in The California Poem takes the form at one point as a timetable, which includes the year the Santa Barbara Song Sparrow went extinct (1967) and the death in 1965 of “Mary Yee, last fluent speaker of Chumash, dies” (81). No longer appearing as a poem, the “Timetable” interrupts yet also is yet another “document,” that includes notes, postcards, photographs, and later a listing of (known) endangered and extinct species (165– 7). In its oblong shape, the book as an object contains a sprawling universe of information, where “the ovicidal moonfish slips / into Sirius, Canis Major-bright my words, dive- / bombing swallows … slip / new gods /into the sky” (139). Through this sprawling accumulation, the poem becomes an archive of a “place” or bioregion within which she/the poet/Eleni Sikelianos locates herself (“I name it / and name it / in each tiny eye / of the cell” (39)) and all the materials she has gathered. As archive, the poem provides a witnessing of the place-ness and its slippages, whether of tectonics or of language, and it shifts the scalability from abstraction to particularity. Yet to consider Sikelianos’s work as an archive—albeit resistant to functions of retrievability— suggests a form of continuity, or that the archive moves toward a benediction: California   keep on, beneficient as the sun and sea, I ask you leave to roll on the first inch of its shady territory, I believe a hundred dollars and a year would support me     in California The rest I would pluck from the avocado & lemon tree & sea (189)

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Is such a sense of fecundity possible? Writing this after two summers of the worst and longest fire seasons recorded in California—as of 2018—there is a sense that Sikelanos’s tentative optimism of a decade and half ago, while noting the extinctions also expresses an expansive, cosmic, continuity. The sense of place, emplacement, or grounding, as Russo argues, is distinct from a surveying of space. Arguably, since the European incursion, North American writers have always explored and sought to define the environments they came in contact with; primarily their process of description parallels the project of desire and occupation and is conveyed less through what is deemed literary, but through report, sermon, history, diary, or tract. The varied cosmologies of First Peoples have typically been defined within an environmental frame and an understanding of the sacredness and interconnectedness of the environmental; the current challenges to such incursions as the Dakota Access Pipeline exemplify these ongoing traditions. The particular agricultural knowledges that West Africans brought with them as enslaved peoples were appropriated by their masters and, like themselves, exploited.3 Leaving aside guiding cosmologies or theological structures, which seek to contain experience within a known design, the meditation on place and matter, I argue, is an unfolding eco-poesis, or a form of generation and making. Hubert Zapf argues that since the Big Bang—the complex self-organization of molecules on the subatomic scale to the geologic and cosmic scale—“creativity is a feature not only of cultural evolution or of the biotic sphere of living nature, but the world of nonliving matter itself, which is not merely inert or passive but dynamic and agentive” (52). Matter, Zapf continues, then is “an indispensable part and medium of ecosemiotic and ecocultural processes” (52). Even the accounting reports of the earliest Europeans in North America such as Gonzalo Fernández di Oviedo y Valdés’s 1526 Natural History of the West Indies or John Smith’s 1616 A Description of New England, each with their descriptive catalogues and lists, attempt to convey the matter of place. That space, defined as a field of matter, of fecundity, and of generative value, is intrinsic to the initial experiences of the so-called New World to late twentieth-century descriptions of poetics as a spatial, generative, and projective field. Jean Ribaut in his 1563 The Whole and True Discovery of Terra Florida, for example, locates an aesthetic value within a field of abundance: We entered and viewed the country thereabout, which is the fairest, fruitfullest and pleasantest of the all the world, abounding in honey, venison, wildfowl, forests, woods of all sorts, palm trees, cypress, cedars, bays, the highest, greatest and fairest vines in all the world with grapes accordingly, which naturally and without man’s help and trimming grow to the top of oaks and other trees that be of a wonderful greatness of height. (Branch 42) The very sentences accumulate objects through Ribaut’s panoramic survey. Likewise, Smith suggests the fecundity of the place through his Orphic-like lists: “Moose, a beast bigger then a Stag; deer, red, and Fallow; Beavers, Wolves, Foxes, both black and other; Aroughconds, Wildcats, Bears, Otters, Martins, Fitches, Musquashes, and diverse sorts of vermin whose names I know not” (Branch 53). Abundance is mirrored in the lists of fish, trees, animals, birds, fruits as well as material places such as mountains, bays, rivers, and estuaries. Abundance is also suggested by Smith through the ease with which humans may sustain themselves: “If a man work but three days in seven, he may get more than he can spend, unless he will be excessive” (55).

3

See, for example, Carney and Rosomoff (2009).

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While Smith’s catalogues act as tracts extolling New England by linking liberty with fecundity, his is also a vision of relationality, abundance only exists if one is not excessive; human liberty is equated with moderation. But abundance is also intended for human use. For Smith, the richness of the material world seems impossible to diminish as it is enfolded and contained in the anthropocentric world. Discovering a language adequate to place and circumstance often is constrained by convention and social oppressions—Phillis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1773), written from the position of enslavement, from the necessity of proving oneself human within a neoclassical poetic idiom, and yet also placing oneself in a continuum between the natural, economic, and spiritual worlds, illustrates this problematic. Wheatley reflects in her brief eightline meditation, that Blacks and nature are subject to the same pressures; punning on Cain/cane and diabolic die/indigo, both the human world and the natural world are subjected to an unnatural process of refinement and cultivation: ’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there’s a God, that there’s a Savior too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. Some view our sable race with scornful eye, “Their colour is a diabolic die.” Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train. (10) Wheatley challenges the industrial regime that depends on the entwined conditions of enslavement and environmental exploitation by suggesting that if mercy motivated whites, their actions have failed them. Wheatley’s poem—situated between the political reality of North America as a site of a colonial scramble for control and the emergence of the self-contradictory liberation ideology of a slave-holding United States—underscores the various forms of oppression slavery instituted and how, in part through the emergent Enlightenment science of race and nature, the environment was subject to predations motivated by the same exploitative ideology. A contemporary of Henry David Thoreau, Charles Ball, in his 1836 narrative Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man, and later, W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, note the intimate connections between the conditions of African Americans and the land they have been forced to cultivate under the regimes of enslavement and sharecropping. Ball, as he is sold from master to master, notes the depleted condition of agricultural land reflects the decline of economic conditions the further southward he is transported. Ball’s attention to the material detail of the landscape—“The ground over which we had travelled since we crossed the Potomac, had generally been a strong reddish clay, with an admixture of sand, and was the same quality with the soil of the counties of Chester, Montgomery, and Bucks” (38–9)—underscores Ball’s understanding if not an observant intimacy with the landscape. Ball continues, noting the fertility of the landscape, and the subsequent slow violence of depletion: “regardless of their true interest, they [the slave-owners] valued their lands less than their slaves; exhausted the kindly soil, by unremitting crops of tobacco, declined in their circumstances, and finally grew poor, upon the very fields, that had formerly made their possessors rich” (39). Filled with commentary on the conditions he witnesses, in part to provide

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himself with a mnemonic mapping of the landscape to aid his eventual escape, Ball’s involuntary travels parallel that of Frederick Law Olmstead and later, Du Bois’s journey into the Black Belt after Reconstruction, where he too finds the wastage of humans and the land due to slavery’s exploitation: “then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell. The red-clay sub-soil already had begun to peer above the loam. The harder the slaves were driven the more careless and fatal was their farming” (Du Bois 86). Neither Ball nor Du Bois is included in Bill McKibben’s canonizing work, American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (2008), which maps a particular intellectual terrain and seeks to establish a conservationist position as definitive of environmental writing.4 In Thoreau’s essay “Huckleberries,” included in McKibben’s anthology, Thoreau notes that he came across “a whole family, father mother, and children, ravaging a huckleberry field” which then, in its proximate violence and witnessing, surfaces his memory of gathering huckleberries as a child, and Thoreau considers “what a sense of freedom and spirit of adventure I used to take my way across the fields with my pail … Liberation and enlargement—such is the fruit which all culture aims to secure” (McKibben 27). In this reflection, the desire of emancipating thought intersects with the differing experiences of being in the landscape. The “ravaging” of the field—environmental destruction on a localized scale—contrasts with Thoreau’s expansive memory combining innocent play and nature as sustaining and expansive. Given the temporal structure of this reflection, it is difficult to resist allegorizing: the nostalgic and fecund past and the rapacious present of the nation-state. Thoreau’s vision of the environment, however, is distinct from that of Ball. Thoreau’s ambling through the fields contrasts with the prohibitions of movement that Ball and enslaved Black Americans experienced—and indeed continued to experience during Reconstruction, segregation, and what now is the period of the New Jim Crow. Ball’s landscape, and this is made clear as he flees northward in his escape, is spatially defined, where wilderness is seen as both a wild-land but also a refuge, where space is physically marked as both property, a container of property (a field of cotton for example), and boundary. The landscape, in other words, must continually be reinterpreted for sheer survival, whether it is capable of providing the sustenance (in the form of slave gardens) that plantation owners would not provide, or fraught with dangers (whether white patrols or wild animals).

Interventions through the production of anthologies of ecopoetics have occurred, but they have continued to center on two of the three categories mapped out by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street in their Ecopoetry Anthology: poems descriptive of the “natural” world and politically centered poems. The third category they point to is that which challenges the lyrically centered self as the subject of the poem, that is the human as the witnessing center of the poem and of the poem’s ecology. Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary intervenes in the production of the descriptive, but human-centered, lyric. (This anthology includes work by 126 poets such as Will Alexander, Rae Armantrout, Mei-Mei Berssembrugge, Laynie Browne, Jane Hirshfield, John Kinsella, Petra Kuppers, Ruth Lepson, Michael McClure, James McCorkle, Peter O’Leary, Harriet Tarlo, Brian Teare, and Jeffery Yang; such an extensive list indicates a sense of crisis as well as engagement in the healing of the planet.) In this way the anthology as a whole swerves from the poetics—albeit offered as a historical continuum—of such anthologies as McKibben’s American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau or Camille Dungy’s Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Here one can sympathize with anthologists as the number and approaches to ecopoetics exceed the limitations of publication—here, too, in this essay the inclusion of particular poets is intended to provide a rough mapping, not a canonization, bearing in mind, as C. S. Giscombe’s work indicates, mapping privileges particular epistemological approaches and erases others. Thus this essay is at best a reading during (the first decades it should be noted) the deepening awareness of the global climate-crisis the scale and extent is still unknown except that every indication confirms the dire condition of the planet due to exploitative human actions. 4

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Furthermore, Charles Ball and all Blacks, enslaved or not, had to confront the race science and metaphysics that termed them as brutes or chattel, that subjected them to the sort of physical inspections cattle and horses underwent, and were defined as having a destiny only to labor, as South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond stated in 1861: In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. (Higginbotham 14) Hammond’s statement foregrounds scientific racism that sought to establish that Blacks were in essence, or biologically inherently, lacking the civilizational capacities and thus as a class—using that term in the Linnaean and biologic sense and in the socioeconomic sense—belonging to nature and not to the human. Scientific racism, aligned as it is with slavery and then colonization, corresponds to the systemic exploitation of the landscape. Kimberly K. Smith, in her African American Environmental Thought: Foundations, argues that Du Bois and other Black theorists, turned the tables on white supremacists using natural sciences to maintain oppressive and exploitive systems: “If creative energy is derived from nature … only a people with an intuitive connection to the natural world can develop a folk culture sufficiently vital to inspire a great civilization” (98). Systems that privileged autochthonic belonging and Romantic views of nature as sublime, for theorists such as Du Bois, provided the language to overturn the claims argued by “scientific racists … that black Americans had no capacity for cultural creativity at all and therefore lacked the ability to forge a meaningful connection to the American landscape” (99). The very system of exploitation had explicitly condemned Black Americans to the landscape, to the condition of animals, to the intimate labors of the fields—if not Blacks, who could, among the new Americans, claim such close, but fraught, bonds with nature and the very ecology? It would be important to contrast the portrayal of the landscape and those living in it that Ball and Du Bois confronted with the visual contrast of Hudson School of painters, such as Thomas Cole and Asher Durand, and especially those of the second generation such as Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church. The Hudson River school and those that followed, celebrated the American landscape as it came to be possessed and nationalized as a secular, but messianic, vision. The fecundity and limitless democratic vistas created by these painters certainly recall some of the earliest European descriptions of the North American continent, however, Bierstadt and Church in particular, imbue their landscapes with a complex sense of the pristine, the sublime, and the belief that the destiny of the landscape belonged to those now beholding it, namely European arrivants, as though for the first time in human history. This strand of the landscape as a source of contemplation and the sublime is carried into the mid-twentieth century visually through the works of Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and Georgia O’Keefe. Poetic analogues could be found in the work running from Walt Whitman to Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder. Opening his 1874 “Song of the Redwood Tree,” Whitman writes, A California Song, A prophecy and indirection, a thought impalpable to breathe as air, A chorus of dryads, fading, departing, or hamadryads departing, A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky, Voice of a mighty dying tree in the redwood forest dense. (Whitman 151)

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As Whitman extols the redwood tree, he concludes by envisioning a “new society at last, proportionate to Nature, / In man of you, more than your mountain peaks or stalwart trees imperial, / In woman more, far more, than all your gold or vines, or even vital air” (154). The sublime landscape, then for Whitman, destines Americans to begin “clearing the ground for broad humanity … To build a grander future.” The sublime landscapes thus form a didactic vision of perhaps a “broad humanity,” one of political and social inclusiveness, but also a literal “clearing” of the landscapes for the “modern” or “new world.” Darwin, of course, was only a few decades earlier, and with Darwin and Georges Cuvier, the idea of extinction and the finitude of resources and species were just beginning to be considered—a strand of thought in direct contradiction with the American expansionist vision. But also the ahistorical vision of the infinite vista contrasts with the rooted histories found arguably in such works as Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921): I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. (Hughes 23) Hughes provides a map of a pan-African world through an overlaying of the Euphrates, Congo, Nile, and Mississippi. Not only geographical, Hughes creates a temporal compression; as an ecopoetic process, Hughes creates a correspondence between the natural world and Black civilizational history. By recalling Lincoln, and evoking the Mississippi, Hughes suggests a teleology of emancipation. Hughes’s vision corresponds to Du Bois’s redemptive and expansive history, and as Du Bois writes in the chapter “The Sorrow Songs” in The Souls of Black Folk, “Like all primitive folk, the slave stood near to Nature’s heart” (172). Hughes’s poem represents nature and the human, specifically the Black human, as resonant, and that the human migrates through a natural world accruing histories, yet the natural world and the materials of those histories remain locked in a binary relation. Hughes evokes and re-centers the sublime on a panorama of the African diaspora: the scales, in both time and space, of African presence is vast, and yet held by each. Hughes’s poem establishes the centrality of the lyric “I” as experiencing the landscapes of the diaspora as well as Blacks’ autochthonic and spiritual

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presence in the landscape. C. S. Giscombe’s Giscome Road unfolds Hughes’s mapping of histories and landscapes in materially explicit forms. Quite literally, Giscombe includes reproductions of maps, including a topographical map that is folded into the book. History is a series of ecological cosmologies, Giscombe suggests as he includes not only a variety of contemporary mapped forms of an area of British Columbia where his putative Jamaican relative John Robert Giscome settled in the 1860s as part of the Black diaspora but also a mapping of the cosmos of the NLak ˙aʹpamux or the Thompson River Indians and their graphemes (35). As Giscombe seeks to recover the history of John Robert Giscome, he also reifies the movement of the landscape as in the opening lines of “Sound Carries,” the opening section of this book-length meditation: The song’s a commotion rising in the current, almost an apparition: or the shape rises—oblivious, river-like—in the blood (in the house that the blood made) & goes on, is the fact of the “oldest ancestor,” in whose name etc description itself persists on out, not like some story, into the uplands, on into the stony breakdown, no line an endless invisible present going on,    a noise (with nothing at the other side of it) (Giscombe 13) The flow of the Fraser River, where one of the portages is named after Robert Giscome, parallels the long lines of the poem; yet these lines are also genealogical lines connecting Giscombe homophonically to Giscome; yet also to the racial lines that define or deny citizenship and the color line that Du Bois describes that sequesters not only Blacks but First Peoples; and the lines that denote the intervention of colonial ideas of property. The river is a song and a commotion—“an endless invisible present going on.” The ecology here is porous for it absorbs the human histories and incursions marked as they are through namings and re-namings: “The past is a skein of rocks. / The past is watery. / The past is tree’d” yet also, “the past names nothing anyplace: / sites got preempted” (22). The poem’s deep ecology of time implies that the very process of human intervention is elusive and illusory. Naming or the giving human presence to place is anchored in time, but like the physical scales of space and how to map those spaces, time is also scalar: “the field name verges on the day name” describes frames of human time that are distinct from the “skein of rocks” or the succession of “tree’d” environments. If deep time—whether of the landscape or of music—describes one process of an ecopoetics of time, it is to be understood through human diasporic knowledges: the rootless surname up on the river names rocks & water up there, the beauty of apparitions is broken down & inflected both, the old Islands name, the name that came & comes from the Islands, the arrival, w/ John R, Giscome, of the blackest name’s edge (& its variations & the effaced speaker’s own name & parentage, AfroCaribbean, the spiral of announced approaches, of descent & association, the long heart’s most basic necessity out where ambiguous fields meet the rim of houses, something presignified, uninhabited—  (Giscombe 17)

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Not all naming processes are equal; what is signified carries power and submerged, subaltern histories. The environmental crisis we find ourselves confronting is the accumulation of human histories, particularly those that emerged through the history of the Atlantic slave trade and the acceleration of the exploitation of human and natural resources. The poem thus becomes a series of origin myths—that of a particular place (Fraser River), of particular ancestry, but also of colonial drives into interiors (whether of the colonial hearts of darkness or British Columbia) and the question of who is civilized given the incursions by colonial powers and later capitalist economies. Giscombe, in this book-length series of meditations and improvisations, offers a locally encyclopedic and material ecopoetics. The poem enacts a proximity in time and space while also suggesting a cosmological endlessness: “(the endless description) / the endlessness of the story breached / at the foot finally / at the root of trees” (34). Elemental signifiers (roots, trees, water, rock) comprise anchors to a language that is provisional and whose descriptions of place are temporary. Giscome Road is less a direct address of scale of disaster—as Pico, Spahr, Merwin, or Armantrout in their varied approaches undertake to describe—rather its ecopoetics defines the locale of material human histories. If Giscombe offers a material mapping of human locality and localness and how interwoven human presence is within ecologies and materialities, Jen Bervin’s book-length Silk Poems extends that materiality; as she writes in the “Project Note”: As an artist and writer, I often take a research-driven approach to create interdisciplinary works that combine text and textiles. When most people think of textiles, they think of clothes. But textiles can cross boundaries: my first weaving teacher created woven designs for heart valves. … The form of the poem strand is modeled on silk at the DNA level—the six character repeat in the genome is the basis for the six letter enjambed line of the strand reflects both the filament pattern silkworms enact when writing their cocoon, and silk’s beta sheet, which forms like the weft thread in a weaving. (Bervin 167–71) Like the book-length poems of Sikelianos and Giscombe, Bervin’s work moves across different temporal and spatial scales; the very composition as book-length implicitly invites movement across and inclusion of differing discourses, hence differing bodies of knowledge, in comparison to a more conventional lyric, such as those of Snyder, Merwin, Lucille Clifton, or Linda Hogan. Bervin’s poem spools out the 5,000-year history of human interaction within the ecologies of silk, as told through the voice of a silk worm as she mates, lays eggs, and spins silk. The poem is composed in 151 unnumbered sections, with all the lines uniformly capitalized, thus spinning out a single, but varied, line of silk. Words fuse with other words, or single words compose a single line. Much as liquid silk is compatible with our own bodily tissues, there is a melding of differing bodies, suggesting an interdependency between species at the level of interdependent communication, as when Bervin notes that ancient Chinese oracular script’s writing style was “CALLEDBIRDAND / WORMSCRIPT” (54). The intimacy of “SILK / LANGUAGE” (145) reflects and embodies cosmologies infinitely larger than intention or fixed taxonomies. Bervin reimagines the poem as having multiple forms: as voice, as a woven form on a silk film, and as a text/book artifact. Like Giscombe, Bervin conceives of a compression of temporal and spatial scales. Human culture is intrinsically bound with nature especially in the sense that the preservation of human culture depends upon an understanding and integration of the natural world into human teleology:

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ASILKMANUSCRIPT FOUNDINATOMB INMOUNTAINOUS HUNANPROVINCE   (76) Bervin’s meditation unspools to note that this is the oldest record of the book the I Ching, thus silk not only preserves the past but also projects into the future. Bervin, of course, moves across differing scales, whether of time or size, or interiority and exteriority, “INMYOLDSKIN // INSIDEIT / MYNEWSKIN” (101). Silk preserves human thought and procedures for the practice of life; it is also a textile, as Bervin notes, that we wrap our dead in and that we use in surgery as a replacement for tissue. Giscombe and Bervin offer, to some degree, a counter to the lyric of despair or condemnation that marks much of poetry that addresses the environmental crisis. Instead of human hubris, as in Merwin’s “The Last One,” where “they cut everything because why not. / Everything was theirs because they thought so” (10), ecopoetics may also be recuperative and resituate humans within temporal and spatial ecologies. As we enter into an epoch of “surplus people” and “developmental refugees” (Nixon 151–2) as well as crashing populations of snow buntings, red knots, or cerulean warblers, or the imminent collapse of the Great Barrier Reef, the scale of environmental change resists full accounting. Thom Van Dooren insists, correctly, on rejecting the notion of human exceptionalism as we try to understand the entanglement of biological communities. Our obligations to the vanishing of whole species are not yet articulated, nor do we acknowledge the extent to which these extinctions remake who we are as we disrupt our ecological codependency (Van Dooren 4–5). Ecopoetics offers a history—within the American grain as well as transnationally—of human entanglements with nature as well as propelling us toward political and communitarian engagement.

WORKS CITED Altieri, Charles. Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 1984. Armantrout, Rae. Wobble. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2018. Ball, Charles. Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man. Pittsburgh: Shryock, 1853. Baker, David. Scavenger Loop. W. W. Norton, 2015. Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. Routledge, 1991. Bervin, Jen. Silk Poems. Nightboat, 2017. Branch, Michael P., ed. Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing Before Walden. University of Georgia Press, 2004. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism. Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Carney, Judith A., and Richard Rosomoff. In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World. University of California Press, 2009. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford University Press, 2007. Dungy, Camille, ed. Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. University of Georgia Press, 2009. Eshleman, Clayton. Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld. Wesleyan University Press, 2003.

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Fisher-Wirth, Ann, and Laura-Gray Street, eds. The Ecopoetry Anthology. Trinity University Press, 2013. Ge, Mengpin, Johannes Friedrich, and Thomas Damassa. “6 Graphs Explain the World’s Top 10 Emitters,” Writers’ Organization, November 25, 2014. http://www.wri.org/blog/2014/11/6-gra​phs-expl​ain-world’s-top-10-emitt​ ers. Accessed August 6, 2018. Giscombe, C. S. Giscome Road. Dalkey Archive, 1998. Graham, Jorie. Runaway. Ecco, 2020. Gray, Jeffrey, and Ann Keniston, eds. The News from Poems: Essays on the 21st-Century American Poetry of Engagement. University of Michigan Press, 2016. Higginbotham, A. Leon. Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process. Oxford University Press, 1996. Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad. Vintage, 1995. Hume, Angela, and Gillian Osborne, ed. Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field. University of Iowa Press, 2018. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann, eds. Material Ecocriticism. Indiana University Press, 2014. Keller, Lynn. “Making Art ‘Under These Apo-Calypso Rays’: Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics.” Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, ed. Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne, University of Iowa Press, 2018, pp. 19–41. Keller, Lynn. “Twenty-First-Century Ecopoetry and the Scalar Challenges of the Anthropocene.” The News from Poems: Essays on the 21st-Century American Poetry of Engagement, ed. Jeffrey Gray and Ann Keniston, University of Michigan Press, 2016, pp. 47–63. Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Henry Holt, 2014. McKibben, Bill, ed. American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. Library of America, 2008. Newell, Mary, Bernard Quetchenbach, and Sarah Nolan, eds. Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary. Delaware: Dispatch Editions, 2021. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011. Nolan, Sarah, Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces in Contemporary Poetry. University of Nevada Press, 2017. Pico, Tommy. Nature Poem. Tin House Books, 2017. Russo, Linda. “Writing Within: Notes on Ecopoetics as Spatial Practice.” HOW2, vol. 3, no. 2 (2008). Website. https://www.asu.edu/piperc​wcen​ter/how2​jour​nal/vol​_3_n​o_2/eco​poet​ics/index.html. Accessed June 21, 2022. Scranton, Roy. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization. City Lights Books, 2015. Shockley, Evie. Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2011. Sikelianos, Eleni. The California Poem. Coffee House Press, 2004. Smith, Kimberly K. African American Environmental Thought: Foundations. University of Kansas Press, 2007. Snyder, Gary. Riprap, & Cold Mountain Poems. Four Seasons Foundation, 1969. Spahr, Juliana. That Winter the Wolf Came. Commune Editions, 2015. Van Dooren, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. Columbia University Press, 2014. Wheatley, Phillis. Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta. Penguin, 2001. Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. James E. Miller. Houghton Mifflin, 1959. Williams, William Carlos. Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott. New Directions, 1970. Wilson, Rob. American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre. University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Zapf, Hubert. “Creative Matter and Creative Mind: Cultural Ecology and Literary Creativity.” Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, Indiana University Press, 2014, pp. 51–66.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Economies of Scale: Contemporary Poetry and the Marketplace ANN KENISTON

It is unsurprising that poets and the poems they write (or, to adopt economic terms, produce) tend to be ambivalent about economics. On the one hand, poetry has traditionally been understood as antithetical to economic pursuits; in poet-scholar Allen Grossman’s view, poetry transcends “our insatiable hunger for money and things, credit and cattle” (quoted in Lerner 22), instead providing a “value … beyond price” (Lerner 53). But poetry, especially recent American poetry, also participates, at times antagonistically, in the workings of economic life. In 1956, insurance executive and poet Wallace Stevens famously asserted that “money is a kind of poetry” (905), although it is probably more accurate to claim, as Ron Silliman did in 1987, that “poems both are and are not commodities” (20), objects that can be bought and sold. Certainly a diverse group of post-1960 American poets have grappled with the vexed relation between poetry and not only money and commodities but more complex (and more recent) financial instruments. This chapter explores the ways several contemporary poems express this grappling in terms of subject matter and form. One of its main claims is that recent poems often refuse to occupy a fixed position in relation to economic forces and tendencies. Occasionally, their speakers attempt to stand outside the logic of economics, directly condemning, for example, the human costs associated with the bottom line (or, in more contemporary parlance, stock price and market share). But more often, recent poems mimic or, perhaps parodically, celebrate economic logic, or at least acknowledge the impossibility of escaping it. In recent poems discrepancies of scale recur. Such discrepancies are especially evident when protagonists or speakers get entangled in vast but invisible market forces, in situations including indecisiveness at unending choices at the supermarket, attempts to grapple with the scale of recent factory closures, and euphoric (but also terrifying) considerations of abstract global capital flows. Such shifts in scale recall tendencies often associated with lyric poetry as a genre: lyric poems are often understood as miniatures that “distill” (to adapt Emily Dickinson’s term) the vastness through what is sometimes called “verbal economy” (Carson 78). In recent poems, disjunctions between the tiny and the immense reveal the individual’s position within an indifferent, inescapable, but also compelling marketplace. *

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The increasing number of poets writing about economics, especially since the turn of the last millennium, corresponds to what several commentators have called increasing evidence of economics in “daily life” (Martin): it seems inarguable that the logic of the marketplace currently informs elements of culture that once seemed outside it, from higher education to self-improvement to sex and love to medicine, to say nothing of politics and jurisprudence. Several scholars have dated the simultaneously aesthetic, ethical, and economic meanings of terms including value, responsibility, trust, and debt to the eighteenth-century rise of the market economy (Poovey 7; Guillory 322, 324). But the tensions implicit in these punning terms are especially evident in contemporary American political and ethical discourse, which may be why such puns recur in recent poems. Something else has changed over the last half-century: the economic and cultural situation of poetry has generally come to be understood as bleak. Of course, poets have always stood outside the marketplace: unlike filmmakers, painters, musicians, or novelists, poets don’t have—and have never had—a shot at making millions from their art. Pierre Bourdieu claimed in 1983 that poets have always earned “virtually zero profit” from their poetry (47–8). Instead, as Bourdieu and others (including Grossman, cited above) have argued, poetry’s value or “cultural capital” has generally been understood to be antithetical to monetary profit. But this situation has changed, especially since university creative writing programs began proliferating in the 1980s. Such programs are sometimes blamed for forcing poetry to conform to market conventions, partly by converting it into a teachable and therefore marketable “craft.” While poetry itself still mostly doesn’t pay, it can be exchanged, critics note, for academic promotions, as well as fellowships and awards that are often directly translatable into or manifest in monetary terms. But while some complain that poetic production has been commodified in recent decades, others argue that creative writing programs have undermined the “natural” laws of economics. Poets in the academy are regularly accused of kowtowing to their employers—mostly university administrators— while ignoring their readers, especially “common” or nonacademic ones; the poems generated by both the faculty and graduates of academic writing programs have been condemned for their lack both of the ambition and the accessibility nostalgically associated with earlier poems. Businessmanpoet Dana Gioia compares contemporary poetry to “subsidized farming”; both emphasize “the interests of producers” rather than “consumers” (8). That many poets have adopted compositional techniques from contemporary business practices further complicates poetry’s relation to the marketplace. Conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith, for example, has compared his writing process to both corporate “information management” (“Conceptual”) and waste[d] time” (Wasting). And because it mostly repackages extant texts, his work also challenges both traditional notions of poetic labor and copyright. The Flarf poets of the early 2000s, who composed poems during work hours using language from the internet, offer an even more extreme example of the poetic co-option of business language and practices, as Jasper Bernes has demonstrated (Work 157–61). The arguments of Gioia and others have sometimes been read as articulations of neoliberal ideals of self-regulating markets and individual responsibility. Most economists concur that a post–Second World War boom characterized by a robust welfare state—a series of government-funded provisions for the needy—preceded the neoliberal era, whose beginning is usually dated to the early 1980s. At that time, US president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, among others, reduced government support to the needy, instead advocating government “austerity” legitimized partly through the logic of “trickle-down” economics, which held that increased corporate profits would ultimately benefit all citizens (Brown 213). Critic Wendy Brown has defined neoliberalism as

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the replacement of “a democratic with an economic vocabulary and social consciousness” (20–1), the latter of which affirms “free markets” while “[disseminating] the model of the market to all domains and activities—even where money is not at issue” (31). (Such notions can be identified in Gioia’s reference to poetry’s “producers” and “consumers.”) Neoliberalism thus redefines the human as what Michel Foucault called “homo oeconomicus” (quoted in Brown 31), a being whose quantifiable, financialized “value” results from judicious “investment” (Brown 33). Brown also observes that neoliberal logic contains individuals within a larger economic system, although David Harvey has noted that neoliberalism emphasizes individual freedoms rather than the collective interests of the state (Brief 7). More recent changes associated with what is generally called financialization, often defined as the making of money from complex financial instruments with little relation to physical labor or commodity production, are often understood to be extensions of neoliberal emphases on the economic basis of all experience, as well as tensions between the needs of a sometimes personified “market” and those of actual people. Certainly there is ample evidence of the increasing dematerialization of money. In 1989, Jean-Joseph Goux concisely exemplified this pattern by tracing the shift from US consumers’ use of “cash” to “check” and then to “charge” (“Cash”); subsequent “paperless” banking and app-driven financial transactions, to say nothing of computer-initiated buying and selling of securities and the rise of complex financial instruments, have intensified this trend. Americans’ private finances have also grown increasingly dependent on global market forces: in the last few decades, “investment based retirement funds” have largely replaced “defined benefit plans” or guaranteed pensions (Carrns n.p.), and since the 1980s Americans have held increasing amounts of market-sensitive debt (including credit-card debt, home mortgages, and student loans). But the contemporary financialized market is also increasingly unstable—as evermore-frequent and severe “corrections” and market “crashes” reveal (Harvey, Enigma 6–8). Financialization is also evident in the move of much commodity production from the Global North to countries with lower wages and taxes, as well as in Western corporate efforts to open up “new markets,” generally in the Global South. Several readers have also noted a shift from the production of material commodities to “deindustrialize[ed]” (Bernes, Work), “immaterial” (Hardt and Negri 29), and often information-based modes of labor, a situation associated with the rise of a “flexible” or “freelance” workforce that is also increasingly “precarious,” that is, lacking traditional job security and benefits (Neilson and Rossiter). Digitization has also blurred once-clear distinctions between work and leisure and between “creative” and money-making activities, tendencies that Sarah Brouillette and others have argued have been exploited by corporations. A number of recent political events and social trends echo and perhaps intensify the dematerialization often identified with financialization. These include the shadowy nature of the enemy and methods associated with the post-2001 “War on Terror”; the post-9/11 blurring of patriotism and consumerism; the rampant speculation in and complex repackaging of home loans prior to the 2008 collapse of global housing and financial markets; and increasing tensions between the essential capitalist precept of infinite growth and the environmental damage that it continues to cause. The connection between such trends and concerns with scale, as well as scarcity and inclusion, is especially evident in ongoing debates about immigration and the mass US incarceration of African Americans. Awareness of the distinction between the wealth controlled by the top 1 percent of Americans (40 percent of all wealth as of 2017, according to the Washington Post; the top 20 percent of Americans control 90 percent of the wealth (Ingraham)) and that controlled

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by the remaining 99 percent, first articulated by the 2011 Occupy movement, has led many to see societal disparities in explicitly economic terms. * Given the increasing imbrication of ordinary Americans in global economic dynamics, it is perhaps unsurprising that many recent poets have written about this topic. In ways consistent with recent attempts to redress what John Marsh calls a “dreadful” critical failure to discuss economics in modernist American poetry (121)—itself perhaps an example of a post-McCarthy-era tendency to avoid politically informed readings of this poetry (Filreis 509)—several recent scholarly studies have considered the ways that mid-century poetry, especially that associated with the New York School of the 1950s and 1960s, depicts both labor (a frequent topic in recent criticism) and consumerism. Both Bernes and Christopher Nealon, for example, have written on John Ashbery’s 1956 “The Instruction Manual” (5–8)—which describes an office worker’s elaborate fantasies about the music, characters, and events in “Guadalajara!”—in terms of what Bernes calls the “doubleness of whitecollar work” (Bernes, “John” 518). Ashbery’s friend Frank O’Hara’s 1964 volume Lunch Poems has been read by several recent critics as an account of the pleasures of mid-century consumerism. What Nealon calls “a benign meeting with capitalism” (21), poet-critic Joshua Clover identifies as “put[ting] the commodity fetish on parade” (“A Form” 331), and Michael Clune calls a challenge to a “rigid mechanical model” associated with “liberal free market discourse” (192). Ashbery and O’Hara’s work is sometimes read as anticipating 1970s language poetry, whose “poetic techniques,” in Nealon’s terms, were “designed to keep pace with a surfeit of commodity and image production” (Nealon 33) while offering positions from which to interrogate it. Some readers of post-1960s American poetry have emphasized an activist strain that straightforwardly interrogates existing power structures, including economic ones. A short list of such poets, most writing between the 1960s and the 1990s, might include Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Amiri Baraka, and Denise Levertov, as well as poets sympathetically depicting working-class experience, including James Wright and Philip Levine, among others. Other readers have located a different relation between the ideology underlying neoliberal economics and post-1980s aesthetics and literary theory. Clover, for example, has argued that the apparently radical aesthetic associated with postmodernism—a movement associated with instability and flux, which often interrogates the possibility of straightforward critique—shares qualities with both “neoliberal globalization” (“Autumn” 38) and financialization (“Value” 113). In ways that indirectly support Clover’s claims, critics in the humanities have often described economics in terms drawn from (loosely postmodern) literary criticism. Economics has been called “fictive or constructed” (Woodmansee and Osteen 14), as well as symbolic, metaphorical, unfixed, and abstract (see Goux, Symbolic; La Berge, Scandals 192). These and related claims suggest that economics may be a compelling topic for poets partly because, to recall Stevens, money paradoxically resembles poetry. Certainly, recent poets are interested in the capacity of both poetry and economics to be simultaneously material (as in paper money or printed poems) and symbolic (as in the notion of credit that underlies an individual’s capacity to get a loan or the intangible concepts to which poems sometimes refer). This doubleness has been especially generative to poets writing during and after the 1990s, as several critics have noted. Concerns with labor, including “wageless life” (Ronda) and workingclass experience (Tiffany), are evident in poems about factory and office work, including those in recent anthologies edited by Peter Oresick and Nicholas Coles as well as recent collections

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focusing on factory closures (Mark Nowak) and globalization (Myung Mi Kim). Other poets focus on consumerism, especially the sometimes problematic identification of American women with the things they buy (Mary Ruefle, Harryette Mullen, Robyn Schiff). Still others consider more abstract manifestations of money, including gambling (Denise Duhamel), debt (Susan Wheeler), and “monetiz[ation]” (Alyssa Quart). And yet others consider the market itself (Jena Osman, Susan Briante), including its capacity to convert entities generally understood to be outside financial concerns—from human lives (Marlene Nourbese Philip) to hitherto natural phenomena (Timothy Donnelly)—into investment opportunities. These and other poems about economics are formally diverse: they range from the accessible to the opaque, the funny to the elegiac, and the expansive to the compressed. Some seek to objectively describe a situation (a mode sometimes identified with documentary), while others adopt more subjective, ironic, or critical positions. The remainder of this analysis considers two groups of poems that demonstrate the diversity of post-1960s American poetry about economics while exemplifying the general claims above. Written more than forty years apart, the first pair—Elizabeth Bishop’s 1972 “Poem” (36–9) and Joshua Clover’s 2015 “Long-Term Capital Management”(“LTCM”) (66–7)—consider the relation between paper currency and artworks, and by implication the economic status of artworks, including poetry. Juxtaposing them helps reveal key differences between the pre-neoliberal moment in which Bishop was writing and the financialized, globalized one to which Clover directly refers. The essay’s final section turns to three volumes written in the early 2000s that explore the status of vulnerable bodies within a contemporary financialized economy. In these poems—by Kenneth Goldsmith, Rae Armantrout, and Claudia Rankine—tensions between documentary and critique and between depersonalized and subjective modes of speech foreground the exploited human body in ways that recall a tension Bernes identifies as central to capitalism (532), that between what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called the “personification of the thing” (quoted in Bernes, “John” 532) and the de-animation or “reification of the person.” * The subject of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Poem,” published in her final volume, Geography III (1976), is a miniature painting or more exactly “a sketch done in an hour” by the speaker’s great-uncle, formerly hidden in “a trunk” and subsequently “looked at … sometimes” or not at all. The painting is thus outside economic exchange, as the speaker makes clear early on: it “has never earned any money it its life” or even been for sale, instead functioning as “a minor family relic.” Instead, whatever value it possesses is personal and sentimental, with perhaps a tinge of the religious: the painting depicts a “place” that the speaker first identifies based on the color and shape of its houses, then midway through “recognize[s]‌,” identifying or at least “almost remember[ing]” individuals who once lived and worked there. That this scene has now been “dismantled”—or at least the depicted “particular geese and cows” and “elms” have—affirms what economics typically disregards: through the unquantifiable workings of memory, the poet reveals the affective value of what, though objectively worthless, was “loved.” Yet the poem is also concerned with the relation between personal and economic value. The painting is, the first line indicates, “about the size of an old-style dollar bill.” While this bill is removed both from circulation (it is “old-style”) and fixed valuation (it is either “American or Canadian”), the comparison nonetheless implies that the painting has a particular value, one that would be different if it were compared to a thousand-dollar bill. Later, “Poem” describes the

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painting in terms that have both economic and noneconomic meanings. The claim, for example, that the painting has been “handed along collaterally” primarily means that it has been passed between family members. Yet collateral also has a financial meaning: it refers to “a property pledged by the borrower to protect the interests of a lender” (“Collateral” n.p.). The late reference to “the little” that is “our earthly trust” similarly evokes not only faith and confidence but the holding of property. The early assertion that the painting is “useless and free” also complicates the poem’s repudiation of the commercial. Its “useless[ness]” seems to derive from its status as an artwork, a nonfunctional object. But the meaning of “free” is more complex: while it here seems to allude mainly to the existential rather than the economic sense, the term is used in a primarily economic way later in the poem when the speaker extols “the little that we get for free,” that is, the little that is outside market logic. The repetition suggests that the painting is both literal and metaphorical, simultaneously reliant on and able to transgress economic modes of understanding. In this context, it is significant that in several letters, Bishop associates the painting described in “Poem” with her desire to buy a house in her native village, though, she also claims, she has much less money than her relatives suspect (quoted in Millier 347–8). In “Poem,” then, the financial exists as a trace: economic exchange offers a partially concealed motif or implied metaphor in a poem that seems to disavow it. The painting described here is, like Bishop’s poem about it, emphatically “minor”: it seems to lack both aesthetic and monetary value. Yet the poet’s insistence on a different, personal idea of value lets her reflect on something associated with a much larger scale, though “Life / and the memory of it” (36–9) are depicted as “compressed.” Joshua Clover’s 2015 “Long-Term Capital Management” (66–7), the final section of his sixpart sequence “LTCM,” explores related concepts to quite different ends. Clover, like Bishop, disavows the conventional correlations between paper money and fixed ideas of value, but Clover’s focus, as the poem’s title indicates, is on the effects of the titular hedge fund. Whereas Bishop’s aesthetic object is mostly untainted by monetary concerns, Clover focuses on the ways that paper money gains aesthetic value in the era of financialized global trading. (Clover has considered the connection between financialization and aesthetics in several articles, some referred to above.) And while Bishop mostly insists on the miniature and, with some measure of irony, on the insignificant, Clover is directly concerned with scalar discrepancies between global forces and the tactile form of cash. “LTCM” is structured as a catalog of different forms of Asian currency. Several of its sentences, including the first one—“The Thai baht glows briefly”—identify a currency’s name, the country with which it is associated, and the verb “glows,” sometimes followed by an adverb, mostly “briefly”; most also describe the appearance of the currency. This structure emphasizes both visual spectacle and transcendent awe (suggested by the term “glows”). As Bishop’s meditation on a miniature painting ultimately considers what “abid[es]” amid what has been “dismantled,” Clover emphasizes the brevity of what has been “now-destroyed.” But while Bishop looks back in time, Clover anticipates a future “end to beauty.” As Bishop’s poem is concerned with the painting’s capacity to evoke invisible memories and truths, Clover uses the catalog format to explore the slippage between money’s appearance and its symbolic meaning. The poem depicts currency as both material (“The South Korean won 10,000” includes “moiré on watermark and intaglio latent image” (66)) and a marker of national identity, as

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is evident in its depictions, variously, of political figures (“a friendly picture of Soeharto with open collar” (66)), emblems of modernity (the “Soekamo-Hatta Airport” (66)), national artists (“the disgraced historian who first translated Dante into Spanish” (67)), and, most often, natural scenes (as on “the humble kuai note[,]‌with its orchid watermark and Three Pools Mirroring the Moon at West Lake” (67)). The title of “LTCM” indirectly explains the reasons for the poem’s rhapsodic descriptions of currency. The “LTCM” hedge fund traded in global, especially Asian, currency markets in ways that exemplify financialization’s abstraction of money from production and consumption: the fund, that is, used currency to generate profits rather than to purchase actual goods. Like all hedge funds, it also made money by betting on future market values, often attempting to derive profit—as it did successfully during the 1997 Asian currency crisis—when the value of its investments weakened in value, in this case partly due to over-investment by funds including LTCM. But hedge funds are by definition high risk, as was especially evident in the fund’s 1998 near-collapse, precipitated by the 1997 Russian currency devaluation and subsequent bond default. The fund was bailed out by the US Federal Reserve, which determined that its failure would set off a global financial crisis; the precedent set by this bailout arguably encouraged the even-more-risky investments that led to the 2008 global financial crisis (Amadeo). “LTCM” doesn’t include this background information, but the brevity with which these currencies “glow” implies the long-term effects of risky speculation in foreign currencies. Paper money as a physical object was always distinct from the workings of “LTCM” funds. But the fund’s collapse transformed currency from a means of exchange to what is often called “worthless paper.” (The Indonesian rupiah, for example, one of the currencies mentioned in Clover’s poem, lost 80 percent of its value in the months following the currency crisis). In this way, Clover’s depiction of currency’s beauty along with his implied condemnation of the global flows through which it can be devalued offers a striking update of Bishop’s poem. Bishop conveys a mode of personal memory that remains mostly continuous over generations, but Clover emphasizes a different chronology, one in which an apparent concern with the “longterm” has devastating short-term effects. While Bishop reveals how something seemingly small can become vast in significance, scale in Clover’s poem is more complex: the workings of an unspecified “System Entire” manifest a “most tangled complexity” that also enables “moments of great intimacy.” Yet Clover’s poem is anything but intimate; it adopts a stance of mock—and by implication ironic—praise, which evokes the slightly hyperbolic tone of some of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, on which Clover has commented. Clover thus reveals not only, as in “Poem,” the pleasures to be gained from the miniature but also the limitations—or perhaps obsolescence—of this mode of aesthetic valuation in a globalized, financialized era. The artwork in “Poem” is small and amateurishly realized, but it is a painting. But beauty in “Long-Term Capital Management” exists only as a by-product of something created for another purpose entirely. * Concerns with scale, value, and materiality are evident in many other poems about economics written since the turn of the millennium. While a comprehensive discussion exceeds the parameters of this essay, the three poets’ works discussed below hint at recent poetry’s formal and tonal diversity. They also highlight two recurrent, related features of contemporary financialization in recent poems. The first involves a disjunction between surplus and scarcity, especially between

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contemporary surpluses of information and traditional poetic compression. The second concerns the effect of impersonal, globalized economic forces on human bodies. Bodies in these poems are often exploited, contaminated, or de-animated in ways that recall the Marxian concept of commodity fetishism (47–51), in which capitalist commodities are imbued with the attributes of living beings, which effectively conceal the human labor involved in their production. Kenneth Goldsmith’s 2013 Seven American Deaths and Disasters emphasizes both these tendencies in the context of an overload of mediated information. The volume compiles transcribed radio reports that immediately followed a series of twentieth- and twenty-first-century assassinations and other public disasters. Goldsmith seems to dispassionately document these events, although he has also confessed to using “idiosyncratic and personal” processes of transcribing and editing his source material (Seven 174). He has also associated the volume with Guy Debord’s “famous dictum,” paraphrased by Goldsmith, “that spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images” (171). The relation between what Debord calls “spectacle,” “capital,” and “images” is especially evident in Michael Jackson, the volume’s final section (157–66), which, Goldsmith explains, “amalgamat[es] … several radio broadcasts” describing Jackson’s 2009 hospitalization and death (175). Jackson was famous for his physical and musical self-reinventions; cultural critics have identified his capacity to refashion his body in ways that both affirmed and challenged dominant (white, and also capitalist) values and aesthetics. For example, Judith Hamera has read Jackson’s “motor”-like (760) dance moves in conjunction with a larger cultural “tension between the seeming fixity of industrialization [and] the neither-here-nor-there fluidity of neoliberal globalization” (751), while Harriet Manning sees in the same moves an internalization of racist stereotypes essential to the tradition of African American minstrelsy. These readings suggest that Jackson’s performances both attempted to escape and reinscribed a position of bodily subservience that Hamera associates with an American economy built “on the exploitation of black workers” (757). Jackson’s identity as “the King of Pop” combined with his wealth also signals another kind of subjection: created for and by the media, his body was, in Debordian terms, an “image” deriving from and enabling Jackson’s “accumulat[ion]” of “capital.” (The “image part” of Jackson’s life and career is mentioned several times in Goldsmith’s account (164, 165).) Jackson’s body is thus both physical and symbolic; neither wholly autonomous nor wholly manufactured, it was both a commodity and, in Bishop’s terms, “free.” Jackson’s simultaneously evasive and confined performing body recalls the instability of both laborers and consumers in the contemporary financialized economy. According to Goldsmith’s account, Jackson’s wealth was both a marker of surplus and of Jackson’s bodily limits. Jackson is described as an artist of immense fame and wealth, but his “increasingly reclusive and bizarre behavior—along with his reported multiple plastic surgeries, [which] made tabloid headlines surpassing his sales” are also noted. The commentary also refers to his reported payment of “millions” to settle molestation charges (163). Money is thus linked both to Jackson’s outsized talent and to his aberrant behavior, which left “his image … in tatters” (164). The transcript’s last sentences, attributed to critic Robert Thompson, reframe these contradictions in ethical terms. Echoing an earlier claim that “there’s been a kind of tragic aspect to … Jackson’s life,” Thompson calls Jackson’s life “really one of the great American stories of what [the negative aspects of] celebrity can do to a human being” (165). The fact that Jackson’s “celebrity” kept him “almost free”—in the existential, rather than economic, sense—“to live in a world invented by himself ” renders his life “a really almost Greek-tragedy-like story” (166).

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This summary is rendered ironic by the discrepancy in scale between the petty particulars of Jackson’s behavior and the timeless values associated with Greek tragedy. Also ironic is the reporters’ inability to acknowledge their own role in constructing Jackson’s “story,” even after his death. This sense of complicity also extends to Goldsmith, who arguably speaks through the words he cites. Like Jackson, though on a far smaller scale, Goldsmith is a celebrity; he is one of the few contemporary American poets to have appeared on The Colbert Report. Financialization is often associated with the absorption of the non-financial—including, in this case, national tragedies— into its own logic. Goldsmith not only participates in this process but arguably profits, at least at the level of his reputation, from his conversion of bodily tragedy into textual spectacle. But Seven American Deaths also raises questions about scale, as well as scarcity, by juxtaposing Jackson’s death with six other events, which flattens the distinctive features of each. Instead, Goldsmith’s volume highlights the newscasters’ repeated, often inane attempts to interpret the scale and significance of tragedies as they are unfolding, a process that emphasizes improbable analogies—as when Jackson is compared to Farrah Fawcett, who died the same day—and clichéd or hyperbolic statements. Such statements contrast with Jackson’s mostly passive body, which is described as ill and dead but also the site of “remarkable dance skills” and “multiple plastic surgeries” (Goldsmith, Seven 163). The disturbing, and indeed racialized, aspect of this passivity is intensified when this final Death and Disaster is juxtaposed with Goldsmith’s March 2015 public reading of “The Body of Michael Brown,” which he has called “the eighth American disaster” (quoted in Wilkinson 30). This more recent piece differs from those in Goldsmith’s book by reproducing not news reports but the autopsy report of the unarmed African American shot in 2014 by Ferguson, Missouri, police. It thus emphasizes not only Brown’s “body” but the dismantling of its integrity, a feature that has certainly contributed to the performance’s near-universal condemnation: critics have claimed that Goldsmith used an actual physical body in symbolic and violent ways that evoke the history of African American bodily subjugation. While Jackson’s actual body is less directly evoked in Seven American Deaths, reading Michael Jackson alongside the Michael Brown account reveals the ways the white Goldsmith has exploited not only Jackson’s story but also his already objectified, commodified body. Jackson’s dead body is real, if not directly depicted, but poems in Rae Armantrout’s 2011 volume Money Shot depicting money as a “needy,” “sexy,” “hot” woman don’t describe real women at all. Instead, human bodies stand in for abstract ideas. And unlike Goldsmith’s redacted news accounts, which mimic but don’t comment directly on dynamics associated with financialized spectacles, Armantrout’s poems more incisively—if still indirectly—critique contemporary capitalism’s reliance on objectified, unreal bodies. Armantrout has indicated that many of the poems in Money Shot were written in response to what she calls the “financial debacle” of 2008 (quoted in Suarez); decontextualized buzzwords and phrases recur throughout the volume, including “availability bias” (4),“IndyMac” (5), “Ponzi scheme” (25), and “heavy / trading” (47). The poems “Soft Money” (37–8) and “Money Talks” (73) emphasize money’s materiality but also its abstraction by personifying these financial concepts. “Soft Money,” for example, literalizes this phrase through a depiction of apparent sex workers who engage in performances that spectators find “hot” and also “sweet” due to the women’s “needy” and also “degrade[d]‌” bodies. Whereas Marxian commodity fetishism attributes qualities of living beings to inanimate commodities, Armantrout depicts the fetishistic ways that money itself is

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animated in contemporary financialized society. And whereas Marxian fetishism affirms an illusion of wholeness, Armantrout emphasizes the unstable, even expendable, position of actual humans within the financialized economy in ways that comment both on the exploitation of female sex workers and on the ways idealized representations of money conceal the bodily damage suffered by actual people. As in “LTCM,” and “Michael Jackson,” Armantrout’s money poems insist on the discrepancies in scale between material and abstract understandings of money. The poems often personify the market (as, e.g., “vigilant,” “spooked,” and capable of “dictating” and “decid[ing]” (Bineham)). “Money Talks” takes this convention further by literalizing its title phase, which is generally understood to be idiomatic. “Money,” the poem begins, is “talking / to itself again”; in the last line, it speaks to others as well, “admonish[ing] / ‘Shut up and play’ ” (Money Shot 73; Partly 162). Money also has a set of clothes (it is “wearing this season’s / bondage / and safari look”) and attributes: it is concerned with its appearance (it is wearing “this season’s / … / … look”) but thrifty (it’s gotten its clothes on “closeout”). Associated with subterfuge (it “pretend[s]‌/ its hands are tied” when they aren’t), money is in “bondage” but also able to defy its apparent captors, though it is unclear whether this defiance (its final vocalization, for example) has been coerced. When money talks, it seems, it adopts a position of powerlessness that disguises its power. Or the reverse is true, since money doesn’t actually talk at all and thus has no agency. Or maybe, more simply, money is depicted as powerless because the actual humans who manipulate it want it to seem friendly, feminine, and, in the terms of “Soft Money,” both seductive and easily dominated (Money Shot 37–8; Partly 153–4). In this context, the compression of Armantrout’s poems reveals another discrepancy: these poems use relatively few linguistic resources to make claims whose ramifications require many words to gloss. The result is a slippage between concision and excess that echoes the ways that money in these poems is both heavily controlled and out of bounds. The fact that currency is, as in Clover’s “LTCM,” the material representation of something abstract (the concept of wealth, power, or luxury, for example) furthers the sense of slippage. Armantrout depicts money as virtual, accessible only when a computer “refresh button” is “hit.” But it is also visible, the poem’s second section indicates, on a (physical, noninteractive) “billboard by the 880” freeway. This late reference further de-animates and defeminizes money: the implication is that the poet is describing an image of the kind of sexy woman used on advertising billboards, especially for casinos, which is probably why she is saying “Shut up and play.” Like Michael Jackson, “Money Talks” at least partly implicates the poet who, in personifying money, aligns herself with those who manipulate and are aroused by their manipulation of it (the “we” of “Soft Money”). Poets always manipulate and control their poems, even though they may pretend, as money does, that their “hands are tied.” In this way, “Money Talks” suggests that, notwithstanding its implied critique of the feminization of money, the poet can’t occupy a position entirely outside the situation she describes. There is, that is, no outside to economics from which an actual person (the poet as “I,” for example) can comment; instead, real people remain subordinated to the concepts they stand in for. Goldsmith is sometimes called a documentary poet, whose poems repackage an extant reality by recycling existing language. But Armantrout’s money poems also document the inescapability of the logic, language, and visual effects of financialization, which even the poet’s ingenuity can’t entirely mitigate. Claudia Rankine’s 2004 prose sequence Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (subtitled An American Lyric) is also in some ways documentary; it describes information obtained from the media, in this case

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television. Yet the sequence’s aims differ from those of Goldsmith and Armantrout. Rankine depicts not only spectacularized or figurative bodies but the ways actual human bodies—including that of the speaker—respond to biological and psychological toxins, pharmaceuticals, and representations of mutilated or murdered bodies. While economics is not as explicit as in Armantrout’s poems, Rankine’s sequence links bodily violations to a financialized economy in which, as Rankine notes at different points, the self must be understood as “a product, or … like a product” (93), “the value of [the speaker’s sister’s] dead children’s lives” must be “assess[ed]” for insurance purposes (77), the availability of life-saving “antiretrovirals” in South Africa is dictated by drug companies eager to ensure their continued profits (117), and questions about purchases and investments replace the existential ones posed by Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “To roll over or not to roll over that IRA? To have a new iMac or not to have it? To eTrade or not to eTrade?” (91). Rankine’s volume also juxtaposes notions of “uselessness” and “usefulness” (129) in ways that recall Bishop’s “useless and free” painting. But the desire to be useful—or at least to feel less useless—here articulates the speaker’s ethical and also bodily struggle, as is especially evident in her attempt on facing pages (56–7) to “take responsibility” for the police brutalization of two Black men she does not know personally. The poet begins by admitting her inability to cry the kind of tears that “express emotions, that recognize and take responsibility for the soul” while watching a television appearance by Abner Louima, a Haitian man who in 1999 was “sodomized with a broken broomstick while in police custody”: Louima is on television following the announcement that “the city and the police union” have agreed to “a settlement … for 8.7 million dollars” (56). Instead of responding emotionally, the speaker develops bodily symptoms, including “a sharp pain in my gut …, just a feeling of bits of my inside twisting away from flesh.” This bodily enactment of emotion, she suggests, represents a failure to take ethical responsibility; though it echoes Louima’s earlier bodily pain, it is useless, perhaps because it is small-scale or because it evokes the body rather than “the soul.” But Louima’s response to the settlement also represents a kind of failure— or rather a refusal—of the financialized logic by which monetary settlements absolve government organizations of moral responsibility. Asked “how it feels to be a rich man,” Louima claims simply that he feels “not rich … Lucky, lucky to be alive.” Here the poet’s inability to cry signals her inability to take ethical “responsibility” for, and also to adequately respond to, what occurs to other people, a failure also evident in Goldsmith’s appropriation of the language in which Brown’s dissected body was described. But on the next page, not only the emotionally sympathetic response represented by tears but also the larger-scale intellectual act of “valu[ing] each life” are described as “wasteful” and “sentimental, or excessive” (Rankine 57). Here the speaker attempts to respond to the news of the 1999 death of Amadou Diallo, who died after being shot “forty-one” times by New York police, in a way that repudiates both excessive emotion and the logic of remuneration. The speaker’s recollection that the poet Myung Mi Kim “did say that the poem is really a responsibility to everyone in a social space” offers an alternative that disavows the “excessive” as well as the speaker’s earlier inability to “take responsibility.” Poetry, Kim implies, takes responsibility by situating the individual within “a social space,” a larger context or community. Unlike the more ambivalent representations of art and performance expressed by Goldsmith and Armantrout, Rankine, or at least Kim, affirms the ethical work that art—especially poetry—can do. But Kim also affirms the value of the kind of individual bodily responses for which Rankine’s speaker has until now castigated herself, including “cramp[ing]” and “fold[ing] at the gut.”

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On these two pages and throughout Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, the body is present in ways that it isn’t for Goldsmith or Armantrout. Yet Rankine suggests that to acknowledge the injuries inflicted on African American bodies “as something physical” is inadequate because it doesn’t fully recognize social-economic disjunctions of scale, including the consensus, as she earlier notes, that “billions of lives never mattered” (23). Unlike the poem, which is legitimized by being placed within a larger “social space,” these lives are expendable because they are contained by an indifferent and depersonalizing system. Or rather, these and the other victimized Black men Rankine depicts are both individuals and statistics; represented within the volume in photos that include the edges of the television sets that contain them, their bodies are also uncontained, as the poet’s sympathetic bodily suffering demonstrates. Rankine doesn’t enumerate the economic and social conditions that led to Louima and Diallo’s injuries. But the sequence’s preoccupation with what is “useful” and “valuable” reveals the imbrication of ethical with economic notions of worth and productivity, as is evident in Rankine’s use of the ethical-financial term responsibility. While the actual human body is central to Rankine’s sequence, the speaker’s body and those she depicts are also symbolic, though their meaning is contested. While Rankine considers ethical questions more directly than do Goldsmith and Armantrout, her volume, like theirs, refuses to offer a dispassionate, rational response (much less a solution) to the economic and racial dynamics responsible for bodily violence. That possibility is precluded by the poet’s simultaneous entrapment within her own bodily reactions and her at-times paralyzing identification with the suffering bodies of others. In quite different ways, then, these three poets explore tensions related to scale, containment, and the body that are central to the logic of financialization. For Goldsmith, Michael Jackson’s body is indistinguishable from the excesses of celebrity and wealth that both freed and entrapped him. This sense of bodily subjugation—it can also be called precariousness, in ways consistent with Hamera’s identification of the increasingly “precarious” position of industrial laborers (757)—is even more explicit in the other poems considered here. Armantrout’s poems explicitly focus on money’s ambiguous relation to the subjugated bodies whose performances her speakers celebrate. Violent acts of subjugation precede Rankine’s poems, which repeatedly consider the extent to which a human defined as a “product” (93) can occupy a position free from objectification. That at one point Rankine’s speaker fantasizes about finding a “replacement mourner” of the kind “hired” at Chinese funerals (122) signals that even the rawest grief can’t be dissociated from the marketplace. This marketplace is for all three poets refracted through media that range from radio news reports to billboards to televised spectacles. Read together, these poems imply that contemporary experience can’t be dissociated from preexisting language or from the economic principles that contemporary media both confirm and conceal. Contemporary poetry is often understood in terms of its disavowal of originality, lyricism, and emotion. But this tendency can also be read as an expression of recent—especially twenty-first-century American—poets’ awareness of the challenges of locating a position outside the ubiquitous global forces that arguably define what we think of as our personal values. Contemporary poems are sometimes condemned for their difficulty, which is often evident in emotional inconsistency, distancing, or tonal or logical incoherence. But this essay has suggested that contemporary poetry’s difficulty also signals the often violent ways excess and scarcity combine within a financialized logic that rewards both inhuman, unstable capital flows and individual responsibility.

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Recent poems about economics may often seem stuck between mimicry and critique; they simultaneously adopt the stance of helpless outsider and avid participant. But perhaps they can be forgiven for these positions since, among other things, they reveal the intensity of their creators’ attempts to detach themselves from a ubiquitous, and perhaps inescapable, financialized logic, one that is continuing to increase in both size and scale.

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Dickinson, Emily. “This Was a Poet.” The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, ed. R. W. Franklin, Harvard Belknap, 2005, p. 206. Donnelly, Timothy. “The Cloud Corporation.” Cloud Corporation, Wave, 2010, pp. 28–37. Duhamel, Denise. Ka-Ching! University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. Filreis, Al. “The End of the End of Poetic Ideology, 1960.” The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 507–29. Gioia, Dana. “Can Poetry Matter?” The Atlantic, May 1991, www.thea​tlan​tic.com/magaz​ine/arch​ive/1991/05/ can-poe​try-mat​ter/305​062/. Accessed June 3, 2018. Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Conceptual Poetics: Kenneth Goldsmith.” Poetry Foundation, June 9, 2008, www.poetr​ yfou​ndat​ion.org/harr​iet/2008/06/con​cept​ual-poet​ics-kenn​eth-goldsm​ith. Accessed June 3, 2018. Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Goldsmith on Poetry & Copyright.” Poetry Foundation, May 30, 2007, www.poetr​yfou​ ndat​ion.org/harr​iet/2007/05/goldsm​ith-on-poe​try-copyri​ght. Accessed June 3, 2018. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Seven American Deaths and Disasters. PowerHouse, 2013. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Wasting Time on the Internet. Harper, 2016. Goux, Jean-Joseph. “Cash, Check, or Charge?” The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, Routledge, 1999, pp. 114–27. Goux, Jean-Joseph. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud. Cornell University Press, 1990. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. University of Chicago Press, 1993. Hamera, Judish. “The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dancing Work.” PMLA, vol. 127, no. 4 (October 2012), pp. 751–65. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2000. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2011. Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford University Press, 2010. Ingraham, Christopher. “The Richest 1 Percent Now Owns More of the Country’s Wealth Than at Any Time in the Past 50 Years.” Washington Post, December 6, 2017, www.was​hing​tonp​ost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/06/ the-rich​est-1-perc​ent-now-owns-more-of-the-count​rys-wea​lth-than-at-any-time-in-the-past-50-years/?nor​edir​ ect=on&utm_t​erm=.bd113​0c79​f9a. Accessed June 3, 2018. Kim, Myung Mi. Dura, 1st ed. Sun & Moon, 1998. Kim, Myung Mi. Penury. Omnidawn, 2009. La Berge, Leigh Claire. Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s. Oxford University Press, 2015. Lerner, Ben. The Hatred of Poetry. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017. Manning, Harriet J. Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask, 1st ed. Taylor and Francis, 2016. Marsh, John. “Hired Men and Hired Women: Modern American Poetry and the Labor Problem.” The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 120–42. Martin, Randy. Financialization of Daily Life. Temple University Press, 2002. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, www.marxi​sts.org/ archive/marx/works/download/ pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf. Accessed June 3, 2018. Millier, Brett Candlish. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. University of California Press, 1995. Mullen, Harryette. S*Perm**K*T. Singing Horse, 1992. Nealon, Christopher Shaun. The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century. Harvard University Press, 2011.

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Neilson, Brett, and Ned Rossiter. “From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks.” Fibreculture Journal, no. 5 (2005). Nowak, Mark. Shut Up Shut Down: Poems. Coffee House, 2004. Oresick, Peter, and Nicholas Coles, eds. Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life. University of Illinois Press, 1990. Osman, Jena. The Network. Fence, 2010. Philip, Marlene Nourbese. Zong! Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Poovey, Mary. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. University of Chicago, 2008. Quart, Alissa. Monetized. Miami University Press, 2015. Rankine, Claudia. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Graywolf, 2004. Ronda, Margaret. “ ‘Not Much Left’: Wageless Life in Millennial Poetry.” Post45 Contemporaries, 2011. Ruefle, Mary. My Private Property. Wave, 2016. Schiff, Robyn. A Woman of Property. Penguin, 2016. Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. Roof, 1987. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Library of America, 1997. Suarez, Ray. “In ‘Money Shot,’ Poet Armantrout Reacts to Financial Crisis in Verse.” PBS.org, PBS, January 27, 2012, www.pbs.org/newsh​our/show/in-money-shot-poet-rea​cts-to-financ​ial-cri​sis-in-verse#tra​nscr​ipt. Accessed June 3, 2018. Tiffany, Daniel. “Cheap Signaling.” Boston Review, July 15, 2014. Wheeler, Susan. Ledger. University of Iowa Press, 2005. Wilkinson, Alec. “Something Borrowed: Kenneth Goldsmith’s Poetry Elevates Copying to an Art, But Did He Go Too Far?” New Yorker, vol. 91, no. 30 (October 5, 2015), pp. 26–32. Woodmansee, Martha, and Mark Osteen. “Introduction: Taking Account of the New Economic Criticism.” The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, Routledge, 1999, 3–49. Woodmansee, Martha, and Mark Osteen, eds. The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. Routledge, 1999.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Contemporary Children’s Poetry: A Colloquy CRAIG SVONKIN IN DISCUSSION WITH MIKE CADDEN, RICHARD FLYNN, MICHAEL HEYMAN, KRYSTAL HOWARD, MICHAEL JOSEPH, JONARNO LAWSON, LISSA PAUL, AND JOSEPH T. THOMAS, JR.

Mike Cadden is Professor Emeritus of English and a former president of the Children’s Literature Association. His most recent book is At Arm’s Length: A Rhetoric of Character in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (2021). Richard Flynn taught poetry and children’s literature at Georgia Southern University for 30 years. He is the author of Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood (1990), as well as many essays. In 2020, he became Professor Emeritus of English. Michael Heyman is a professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he teaches courses on Children’s Literature, Poetry, Monsters, and Arthropodiatry. He is the head editor of The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense and This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse. Krystal Howard is Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at California State University, Northridge, where she teaches children’s and adolescent literature. Her research focuses on form and cultural studies in literature for young readers, and she serves as The Lion and the Unicorn Poetry Award Editor. For more information, visit www.krysta​lhow​ard.com. In 2020 Michael Joseph retired as Professor Emeritus from Rutgers University where he had been the Rare Books Librarian. He resides in New York where he writes poems, edits The Robert Graves Review, and plays clarinet. Recent authorial exertions include three poems in Books 2.0 (Spring 2022), and “How British Lyric Poetry Came to Be Angry after Three Hundred Years of Stiff Upper Lips” in Emotions as Engines of History (2022). JonArno Lawson, recipient of multiple awards including The Lion And The Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry, has published many books for children and adults including children’s poetry such as Down In The Bottom of the Bottom of the Box (2012), scholarship including But It’s So Silly: A Cross-cultural Collage of Nonsense, Play, and Poetry (2017), and wordless picture books including Sidewalk Flowers (2015, with illustrations by Sydney Smith). Born in Hamilton, Ontario, and raised in nearby Dundas, Lawson now lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with his family.

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Lissa Paul, a Professor at Brock University in Ontario, Canada, is the director of the PhD Programme in Interdisciplinary Humanities. Her most recent monograph is Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist (2019). She is a co-editor, with Philip Nel and Nina Christensen, of Keywords for Children’s Literature (2021). Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. is a poet and scholar. He’s a professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, where he teaches American poetry and children’s literature. Thomas has published numerous essays, poems, and two books, Poetry’s Playground (2007) and Strong Measures (2007). He can be found on Twitter @josephsdsu. In 2021, Craig Svonkin asked a number of esteemed children’s poets and scholars questions about contemporary North American children’s poetry. Here are their responses, divided into five thematic sections.

I. THE STATE OF CHILDREN’S POETRY NOW Svonkin: As a form, how does contemporary North American children’s poetry differ from contemporary North American poetry for adults? Krystal Howard: Marketing. There also seems to be more of a focus on verse narratives and illustrated or picture book poetry for young readers and less of a focus on poetry collections that are not illustrated. Some recent poetry collections for young readers that have pushed against this distinction include Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond’s Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience and Naomi Shihab Nye’s Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners. I was also particularly excited to see that for the first time ever, the March 2021 issue of Poetry magazine was guest edited by Margarita Engle, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Jacqueline Woodson, past Poetry Foundation Young People’s Poet Laureates, and was dedicated to poetry for young people. This intervention is an important step in bridging the gap between poetry for children and poetry for adults. JonArno Lawson: This is a question I find harder to answer as time goes on. Maybe the biggest difference in terms of contemporary English language poetry is that poets who write for children tend to avoid deliberate obscurity. When I write a poem now, I don’t think about the intended audience as being a child or an adult, but I used to. When my kids were small and a lot of my daily conversations were with them as babies, toddlers, or small children, then I did think more in terms of the little phrases and word combinations I thought they might get a kick out of. I was writing for them—engaging as much as I could with what interested or entertained them. But beyond that, if I was just sitting down and writing, I tried to write what was interesting and entertaining to me, though often what set a poem in motion for me was still wordplay. Noticing something like “clam” and “calm” having the same letters rearranged, and playing around with that. Svonkin: What do you see as the state of poetry for children by North American poets, and who are some of the key contemporary poets for children we should be looking at? Richard Flynn: Back in 1993, in an essay titled “Can Children’s Poetry Matter?” and in a number of subsequent essays, I lamented the narrow range, “the circumscribed notion of poetry,” reflected particularly in popular anthologies of children’s verse. Along with others, I have

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also been perennially suspicious of the “verse novel,” which often seems unsatisfactory as poetry. But I am more optimistic these days. Putting aside the writing by children, so deftly explored in Rachel Conrad’s book, Time for Childhoods, I am heartened by the number of excellent poets writing for young people today: to single out just a few, I would name Marilyn Nelson, JonArno Lawson, Helen Frost, Jacqueline Woodson, Calef Brown, Nikki Grimes, Jorge Argueta, Kwame Alexander, Elizabeth Acevedo, and Margarita Engle, among others. There is a diverse and distinguished group of contemporary North American poets who write for young people. They possess a deep knowledge of poetic traditions, and the craft and care with which they make their poems demonstrates respect for both poetry and its audiences. Michael Joseph: The Canadian American poet JonArno Lawson deserves high praise. Indeed he is undisputed singing master of the line in North American children’s poetry. I would also like to insist that Marilyn Nelson deserves the honor of being read en toto as well; and recommend in particular her A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005), which is perhaps the most powerful book of children’s poems written in English in the last quarter century. I will also particularly recommend her How I Discovered Poetry (2014). While it is a memoir and not a critical work, the origin stories of poets who write for children can be penetrating (as this book indeed is) and challenge preconceptions about child readers in ways that scholars ought to consider. And that observation will enable me to recommend Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming (2014). And although I’ve already directed young scholars to read everything by him, I want to conclude by suggesting that JonArno Lawson’s picture book, Over the Shop, with illustrations by Qin Leng (2021), has something important to say to scholars, new and old. However, except for the paratext, there are no words in the book; nonetheless, I would argue Over the Shop is not only a wordless picture book, it is also a wordless poem, and in that regard possesses a theoretical dimension of importance to scholars studying poetry in North American books for children. JonArno Lawson: Some of my favorite poets for children include John Agard, Grace Nichols, Carol Ann Duffy, Jeanne Steig, Philip de Vos, Charles Causley, Ted Hughes (in particular his poem “An Otter”), Pam Mordecai, X. J. Kennedy, Marilyn Nelson, Dr. Seuss, Richard Wilbur, and James Berry’s When I Dance. But song lyrics held most of the early magic for me as far as poetry went, with songs like Sheldon Harnick’s “The Shape of Things,” Stephen Sondheim lyrics for “Gee, Officer Krupke,” Yip Harburg’s lyrics for “If I Only Had a Brain,” the Spiderman theme song by Paul Francis Webster, and Jim Copp and Ed Brown’s Gumdrop Follies album, as well as the anonymous “The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night” enchanting me. Those were brilliant songs (and brilliant lyricists) that made language come alive for me.    Other works not intended for children can also work for children. I’ve used poems from Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions many times when doing workshops with kids. Each line of every poem is written as a question. I also would suggest riddles of any kind. For example, Sirandanes—this is a kind of riddle, but you’re given the answer as part of the riddle. I talk about this form in But It’s So Silly. It comes from Mauritius, so at the moment it can only be found in French (aside from the translations I put in my book). Finally, I’d suggest that religious texts from many traditions are often written in a way that children can understand and enjoy them. If you can share some with kids outside the context of their purpose as religious texts, there’s a lot to work with there. A lot of it addresses things kids worry about as much as adults.

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Svonkin: Why do you think so many more scholars study children’s fiction rather than poetry for children? Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.: Simply put, too many people think poetry is hard. They’re afraid of it. By way of answering your question, let me quote a bit of an essay by Karen Coats. She calls it “The Meaning of Children’s Poetry: A Cognitive Approach” (2013): Whether it deserves it or not, critical discourse about poetry often has an aura of elitism surrounding it; it’s a game for gifted intellectual athletes that can be beautiful and thrilling to watch but might be bruising to enter, and is certainly not for those who have not married rigorous, targeted training to already exceptional talent and insight. For instance, I often find myself wincing as I read the annual essays celebrating The Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry, not because the essays aren’t brilliant, but because they make me feel like a dolt for liking some of the poetry they reject as facile, or for not knowing what they know (and what I must then need to know) about the long history and current movements of poetic culture in order to understand and appreciate the poetry the way they do. (128)    This attitude isn’t rare, even if it is perplexing. Coats is an admired theorist in the world of children’s literature, well known for her Lacanian insights into children’s culture (her most celebrated work: Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature (2007)). The essay from which I quote employs “cognitive poetics” to derive “the true meaning of children’s poetry” (133). Neither Lacanian psychoanalysis and its literary/cultural applications nor the linguistic elaborations on cognitive science are less demanding than the “long history and current movements of poetic culture” (128), yet one of children’s literature’s most compelling and rigorous theorists feels compelled to ascribe to the latter “an aura of elitism” (128). Differentiating an iamb from an amphimacer hardly requires intellectual athleticism. The ability to recognize the influence of the New York School, detect the trace of Dada, a hint of Fluxus; to see in a poem the legacy of the midcentury pastoral, the impact of “urchin verse”; to know what Myra Cohn Livingston means by “garbage delight,” her term borrowed from Dennis Lee’s 1977 children’s poetry book of the same name, and see its DNA in a contemporary collection of children’s verse isn’t inherently more demanding than appreciating the distinct traditions of Jungian psychoanalysis and meat-and-potatoes Freudianism. Yet again and again I see my otherwise brilliant colleagues wince at the suggestion that they should spend a long weekend acquainting themselves with the scholarship surrounding children’s poetry or spend a semester’s sabbatical exploring the history of prosody. In other areas of study, simply lamenting that one doesn’t know “what they know (and what I must then need to know)” (128) just isn’t acceptable. Some stuff needs knowing. If I want to publish on Beowulf, I better be conversant with its history; I need to know Anglo Saxon; I should have some familiarity with accentual verse. One doesn’t write about postmodern film without knowing more than a bit about film and a good deal about postmodernism. What’s so different, then, about children’s poetry? There’s something about the subject that both seduces and frightens prospective scholars (I wager the latter is the poetry and the former is the children’s). It emboldens some to engage without due diligence while frightening others away prematurely. And that’s a shame. There’s so much more to learn, so many wonderful texts to explore, so many more connections to excavate.

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II. THE QUESTION OF NONSENSE Svonkin: JonArno, what is nonsense poetry, and what isn’t? JonArno Lawson: It’s a puzzle. Sometimes nonsense really makes no sense. Then it’s often a case of just enjoying the oddity of the language, and the surreal images that are conjured up. The mind, in its earliest state (babyhood), is trying to make sense of what sounds like nonsense— but even as infants we realize it’s probably meaningful noise. In a way, a person’s spiritual quest might follow a similar trajectory. We look for meaningful signs in a world that seems random a lot of the time. At other times what sounds like nonsense actually does make sense. The confusion happens because the sound of the words seems to spiral in on itself, but if you listen carefully (and several times over) you realize what you’re listening to makes sense after all. Like Danny Kaye’s verbal gags in The Court Jester (1955), or Dr. Seuss’s Oh, Say Can You Say (1979) or Fox in Socks (1965), or “The Lonely Goatherd” song in The Sound of Music (1959). Svonkin: Do you consider yourself a nonsense poet? JonArno Lawson: Maybe a wordplay poet? I’m very driven by audio associations between words—so if it ends up being nonsense sometimes, that makes sense! But if it ends up being more philosophical, that also makes sense, because I’ve always been drawn to philosophy and to religious stories, and to the ways we learn (or never seem to learn) to live well. There’s a lot of humour in that (when it doesn’t end up being tragic). Svonkin: Joseph, is nonsense poetry inherently anarchic, disruptive, subversive, or offensive? Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.: No. Svonkin: Anti-mimetic? Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.: No. Svonkin: Anti-bourgeois? Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.: Sometimes. Svonkin: Carnivalesque? Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.: It depends. Svonkin: If anarchic, do you think it actually can lead to social change, or does it rather simply help to release tension and thus inadvertently support the status quo? Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.: It’s not inherently anarchic, but it can lead to social change just as it can help to release tension and thus inadvertently support the status quo. It’s weird that way. Svonkin: Michael, is nonsense poetry more game-like or writerly than other poetic texts? Michael Heyman: I’m glad you ask if nonsense is more game-like than non-nonsense, since words used as art are always a game, a shift from utilitarian paint gun-metal gray to portraiture, from a fog horn to “Take Five.” Pleasure, whether in experiencing joy or sorrow, is intrinsic to our receptivity to and participation in art. Nonsense, being a distinct type of art (an unexplored Indian rasa, according to Sukumar Ray; a “fine art,” according to Edward Strachey), participates in the levels of play accorded to art in general, but it also takes participatory play to the next level. Nonsense, in short, delights in messing with us. It playfully obstructs meaning-making by, among myriad methods, creating logical “gaps” in meaning (to borrow from Iser) that a reader must fill to proceed, or playing games with the syntactic matrix—more of a Chomskyan joint—all the while luring us with the promise of sense. It beckons us will-o’-the-wispishly into the muck, taunts us to find our way out of a

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fractal, and marches us to dead-ends that transform into Ed Dends, our neighbor who builds questionable scoubidou sculptures in his garage. As for the muck: nonsense draws us into it, if I may mix muckaphors, by the kind of juggling of meanings in the reader’s mind that I mention in This Book Makes No Sense, so that the meanings, things we tend to consider Solid and Useful, are just playthings, the props enabling the reader’s action of juggling, which is the real purpose. The nonsense game is not the game, but the playing of it, just as it doesn’t matter too much what we juggle (balls, pins, poodles, chainsaws [okay, it might matter a little]), but juggling is juggling because of the juggling. You stop juggling, and there you stand, holding an angry poodle and a chainsaw. If we have survived such an experience, we may reflect on the shift in importance from meaning to process, and how nonsense reveals to us that we are always juggling, even when we don’t realize it. Svonkin: Do you think nonsense poetry is connected in some way to language anomalies or “errors”? And does that connection make young children, new language learners, and multilingual speakers the nonsense poet’s natural allies? JonArno Lawson: Yes! Children and people learning English as a second language make amazing discoveries when they make what sound like errors. Or when they construct sentences in a novel way, or use words in unexpected ways. Even adults who speak English as a first language make great slip-ups (Freudian and otherwise), but we tend not to pay attention to them. They’re often wasted by those who discover them, because they’re treated as errors, corrected, and/or dismissed. Michael Heyman: Those who are most deeply concerned with language, including learners of all ages, do tend to be allies of nonsense. Kornei Chukovsky leans into this assumption in From Two to Five (1928), which argues that children of that age are natural nonsense masters (and thereby natural Communist comrades), as a result of their language learning proclivities. There is also the famous example of Eugene Ionesco writing The Bald Soprano (1949) with his absurdly banal English-language learning books in mind. Even in these examples, however, the source of the nonsense is not so much in any anomalies of language. Nonsense can play off of certain anomalies, but this kind of play tends to be the lowest level of nonsense functionality. Homonyms and puns, for instance, play a role in nonsense texts, but their status as nonsense is questionable. I tend to agree with Wim Tigges on this and see common puns as having so little tension between meanings as to be ineffectual as nonsense: when something is punny, it’s a pun and it’s funny. Minimal tension, maximal boredom. True nonsense puns, on the other hand, where the two or more meanings are less certain, or their contextual role is less certain, are much more rare. Edward Lear’s monstrous “Seeze Pyder” comes to mind, where we get the “Sea Spider” part, and the homophonic “seize” part, considering the beast seizes and chomps down the travelers’ ship, but that leaves “pyder,” a sense outlier.     Nonsense tends to function most effectively when it moves beyond anomalies. To be more precise, it’s not the anomalies that are the problem with language, but rather the elements that we don’t question, that don’t seem strange to us. Language, at its root, is a broken cypher whose flaws are hidden by the self-enclosed system from which it is impossible, perhaps, to escape. But because it manages to keep getting us shelter, jobs, sex, and tea, it fools us into believing that it makes sense. This is where Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (1969) comes into play, to uncover from a logical and linguistic standpoint the impossibilities of sense. From a more philosophical perspective, Alan Watts, in his book Nonsense (1967), uses it

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to expose language for the fraud that it is, a human fabrication that fashions boxes to hold limitlessness (a theme revisited in his many books and lectures). Nonsense shows us that language itself is the problem. Svonkin: Is nonsense poetry (for children) a different sort of animal than humorous poetry (for children)? Michael Heyman: Can I tell you a joke?     So there are two polar bears taking a bath together in a big polar bear bathtub. They are scrubbing away at their paws, their fangs, making sure to get behind their ears. At one point, one polar bear says to the other, “Could you please pass the soap?” The other polar bear looks over and says, “Don’t you mean the radio?”     At this point, in the normal telling of this “joke,” the teller bursts out in exaggerated guffaws, doubles over in hyperbolic wheezes of delight, as might the plants in the crowd who already know the ruse. The poor schlub being told the joke tends to see the demonstrated universal hilarity and will laugh along, not wanting to betray their inability to get the punchline. But when they start to laugh, the jokester sobers up immediately and asks, “Wait, why are you laughing?” The schlub then spends what might seem an eternity, desperately trying to torture some logical punchline out of what can only be called a non-sequitur. The schlub is then exposed for their schlubness, not being able to explain what has no explanation. The joke is on them, for faking laughter, for faking a logical explanation, for faking their whole useless, pointless, and stupid life, or so they might think in that moment.     The joke here is no joke. In fact, it’s funny because it’s not a joke. Jokes makes sense. That is, we laugh because we understand the humor. We “get it.” Nonsense is funny because we don’t. In a contextual vacuum, this is a more “pure” kind of nonsense—but one should never trust vacuum-packed nonsense. The polar bear joke, in addition to being funny for its non-sequitur punchline, functions within a performative social context, the true source of its “sense.” It’s a tool of ridicule, of defining an “in” and “out” group. But the “in” group is based off of an intellectual premise. The kids who perform this act of nonsense humor probably go on to become Monty Python fans, enjoying the All-England Summarize Proust Competition.

III. GENRES AND TOPICS Svonkin: What do you think of the children’s/young adult verse novel and its seeming rise as a popular form? Mike Cadden: The verse novel is a fascinating form because of how it makes people uneasy with its mixture of forms. By “people,” I mean critics. Readers seem to like it pretty well. Certain readers. And like most forms, it attracts those who respond to the special rewards that it offers. People who study poetry want it to be poetry; people who study prose want it to be a traditional novel. The verse novels that have elements of drama may make the playwrights unhappy as well. No form purist is happy with it. The criticism is that it isn’t one clear, assessable form with a history that allows critics to measure it against a tradition, and its older incarnation from centuries past is too far removed from its current iteration and audience to be usefully compared. It’s the platypus of forms. I suppose the platypus makes biologists unhappy. They went to all the trouble of deciding that mammals don’t lay eggs, and there’s this little jerk messing up their classifications. The verse novel isn’t just a weird form, it’s age

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specific. It has been much more popular in its form for young readers than for adults. So, it’s also on the margins in that way. You’d think a form that odd and only for young readers wouldn’t be able to make it, but it has.     For me, then, the most interesting verse novels show an awareness of the need to hold a narrative together in a variety of ways. This can be done through section markings or entry/poem headers, but it is usually more interesting to create cohesion through the form of the poems themselves. For instance, Marilyn Nelson’s self-imposed format of poems in her novel American Ace is fascinating. Each entry is a twenty-four-line poem comprised of two twelve-line stanzas. It becomes a discipline Nelson challenges herself to maintain, but it also provides a sense of expectation and consistency for the narrator’s voice. Jen Bryant uses form to identify different speakers in her historical verse fiction; each speaker has a different and consistent layout on the page. Jacqueline Woodson offers up haiku as a punctuation of sorts throughout Brown Girl Dreaming.     The verse novel is ascendant because it offers readers a new way to experience language and consume story both at the same time. Just as graphic narrative has provided, in its expansive palette of forms, ways for readers to experience visual and written narrative in a spectrum of ways, the verse novel offers to the ear and eye another spectrum of options within a form that rewards a particular interest and value on the part of the reader.     The 2018 special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn on the verse novel, edited by Michelle Ann Abate, would be a good place to find a variety of competing concerns about the form and its future. Krystal Howard has been a professional steward of the form, and her website The Verse Novel Review is the place for someone to start investigating the critical voices in the area, including other blogs and websites. She has a link called “critical perspectives” that has just about everything you need to get started. I found Joy Alexander’s “The Verse-novel: A New Genre” to be an especially useful early discussion of the phenomenon of voice in the form. Richard Flynn’s work on the verse novel is informed by his lifelong work in poetry, and he’s a good source for considering aesthetics and a standard for the poetic in the verse novel. Wendy Glenn’s “Form Follows Function: The Relationship between Structure and Content in Three of Karen Hesse’s Novels” would be a good place to consider the relationship so important to the verse novel: form’s relationship to content. Donelle Ruwe’s “Dramatic Monologues and the Novel-in-Verse” is a good resource for a historical consideration of the form and what it owes to its predecessors. Krystal Howard: What I find most exciting about the contemporary verse narrative is that it has the capacity to ignite in young readers a love of poetry that can hopefully be sustained into adulthood. I am most intrigued by the way that many contemporary poets for young readers use their writing backgrounds and the influence of poets for adults to help them craft their verse narratives. The emergence of the verse narrative as a significant publishing trend in the young reader market from the 1990s through to the present speaks to the ways that poetry is becoming relevant for young people. I am also particularly interested in the ways that poets for young readers play with form, whether it be free verse, the haiku, the golden shovel, the tanka, or other poetic forms. The best verse narratives are those that pay attention to formal concerns (whether they use open or closed forms), utilize poetic craft (imagery, lyricism, language play, music), and call back to poetic influences. Those verse narratives that do not consider these elements do not resonate with readers or critics.

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Some of my favorite verse narratives include Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X, Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, Nikki Grimes’s Garvey’s Choice, Margarita Engle’s The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist, and Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover. In particular, Acevedo, Woodson, and Engle’s works are most interesting to me because they are künstlerromane, artist’s coming of age narratives. These works follow protagonists who aspire to be writers, and as such, the poems within them are often as much concerned with the narrative thread as they are with the developing craft of their poet-protagonists. Because of this focus and the balance that the authors create, the poems are much stronger and the language is more at the center of the work. Svonkin: What topic or issues in the study of contemporary children’s poetry do you think are underrepresented or offer space for new research? Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.: The verse novel gets a disproportionate amount of attention, likely more for the novel than the verse. But you’re not interested in what lies in the limelight. You ask about that which lurks in the darkened corners of the discipline. And that’s nonsense, and to a lesser degree, light verse. There’s a growing body of theory and criticism surrounding nonsense, but like most disciplines, nonsense studies largely ignores children’s poetry, aside from that produced by Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Michael Heyman does his best—along with Kevin Shortsleeve—to remedy this neglect, but they desperately need assistance. The problem is simple: nonsense is a fairly new area of study. The enigmatic Wim Tigges crafted the twin pillars of nonsense theory: Explorations in the Field of Nonsense (1987) and An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense (1988), work building on, of course, Susan Stewart’s more well-known Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (1978, 1979). However, a study of nonsense rooted in the poetry of childhood has yet to be produced. [Editor’s Note: For Michael Heyman and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.’s take on this subject, please see “On the Theory and Praxis of Nonsense Poetry as Dialogic Scrum, or the Poetical Hermeneutics of a Retro-Teleological, Post-Diegetic Transom (Notes towards an Investigation),” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 56, no. 2]. It’s needed, this study, as nonsense reigns supreme in children’s poetry, so much so that the study of adult nonsense spends much of its time insisting that it’s not all child’s play. Light verse for children is another area that deserves rigorous treatment. A great deal of energy is spent by those studying children’s poetry reminding readers that children’s poetry operates in multiple registers, that it’s not all jokey trifles. To which I say, even the jokey trifles aren’t all trifles, jokey though they may be. Light verse can be serious business, and it deserves serious study. There’s too little of it.     Too little attention is likewise paid to poetry’s place in the lives of actual children, especially children predisposed to the linguistic arts. We have Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (1970) and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children (1973), as well as Myra Cohn Livingston’s two-part essay “But Is It Poetry?” (1975, 1976), a critique of Koch’s claim that children are “natural poets” and thus have a natural connection to poetry (a critique she later developed into The Child as Poet: Myth or Realty? (1984)). There’s been a real dearth of attention paid to this area—and the related area of children’s folk poetry—in the years since. I have a chapter on childhood folk poetry in my monograph Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry (2007). It’s hardly the last word, but as of yet no one has developed my initial forays into the subject.

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Krystal Howard: One of the most underrepresented issues within the study of contemporary children’s poetry is how adult poetry influences writers for young readers. I am interested in what works contemporary poets for young readers are reading themselves because these shape their writing choices. The two fields are very much linked, but children’s poetry often gets pushed into its own corner and cut off from the rest of the field. Another underrepresented topic is how writers of color use poetry in innovative and exciting ways. This is a genre many contemporary African American writers (Kwame Alexander, Jacqueline Woodson, Nikki Grimes, Marilyn Nelson) turn to again and again to tell their stories and to reach out to young readers—whether through the verse narrative, the picture book, or collections of poems. Michael Heyman: Few studies of US nonsense, as distinct from the UK-variety, exist. And yet some of the most distinctive and delightful nonsense has come from Americans. Phil Nel has more recently given us some admirable work on Dr. Seuss, and a few studies have popped up, but on the whole, little attention has gone towards distinguishing American nonsense. One of my favorites, and something that has received shockingly little attention, especially considering the source, is Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories (1922), Rootabaga Pigeons (1923), and Potato Face (1930), three volumes of lyrical vignettes following a host of folksy characters in a nonsensical American Mid-West. Surely the champion of the most American “City of the Big Shoulders” would shed some light on what kind of nonsense the “Hog Butcher of the World” would create. Not even Sandburg can emerge fully from the shadow of our colonial nonsense forefathers, but his work, like America, is hybrid: within, you’ll find American folk culture including, for instance, tall tale in the vein of Paul Bunyan, alongside Native American origin stories for natural phenomena. Does he write prose, poetry, prosepoetry, poetic prosicles? Who cares? And if Sandburg isn’t enough (and, well, he is), we might point to Edward Gorey, who only seems British, but whose fascination with dreadful and anachronistic pop culture eccentricities betrays his Americanness. If by “lyric” we include music (and we should), there is They Might Be Giants, whose children’s albums sometimes dive deep into a distinctive New York snarky-nerdy nonsense style. The California-raised, Berklee-educated, Americana-and-metal-playing Rushad Eggleston wields his elf-hatted cello to bounce out wild tunes and tales from the Land of Snee, navigating between nonsense lyric and pure sound poetry. The list goes on. Lissa Paul: This seems a very good time to address spoken word/poetry slam/rap/hip-hop/dub (and other oral traditions of verse) in the context of nursery verse, epic oral poems, and songs. Marina Warner has just published a lovely essay, “Out Loud: The Experience of Literature in the Digital Space,” for Book 2.0, and thus opened up new space for this topic. It might also be a good time to think about the way the standard-English diction of children’s poetry has been revitalized by the changed rhythms and diction of Caribbean, Latina/o, African American, and Indigenous poets.

IV. ASK A POET Svonkin: JonArno, where do the ideas for your poems or poetry books come from? How do you decide to write about idea A instead of idea B? JonArno Lawson: It seems to be pretty random, and based on emotion and current circumstances. It can take a long time to finish something for that reason. If the mood of life changes

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suddenly, it isn’t always possible to continue with what I was working on. Though it might make possible starting or finishing something else. Most of my ideas are autobiographical— they’re taken straight from life, and sometimes left pretty much as they were, but more often altered according to the need of the poem or story, or song. Svonkin: In your book But It’s So Silly: A Cross-Cultural Collage of Nonsense, Play and Poetry, you write that many of your poems are responses to your children’s concerns and thoughts and linguistic play: “My kids keep returning me to the fundamentals” (12). You also write about the value of cross-cultural study of nonsense and poetic play. Why do you think interactions with children and cross-cultural interactions are of value? JonArno Lawson: Maybe it’s that the oddities spring naturally out of life, out of an actual conversation or attempt someone’s made to communicate something. So you’re grafting onto something that sprang up naturally. It means the root is likely to have some strength to it. And cross-culturally, sometimes the concerns of one culture are completely different, and other times they’re the same, but the common strategies for coping with those concerns are different. So you can encounter something entirely new, or something old through new eyes. I find that when I’m reading about a subject I know nothing about as well—suddenly there are new terms and new ideas taken for granted. Or reading a book that was written a hundred or two hundred years ago—you come across great words sometimes that aren’t used (or used much) anymore, but are still understandable. So cross-cultural can also be earlier versions of our own culture (and linguistic usage)—reading Middle English is wonderful that way. Especially if you read it out loud. I’m not saying I do that a lot! But when I do, it’s always funny. Svonkin: Do you know as you start a poem what sort of poem or work you’ll be writing? JonArno Lawson: I don’t! And I don’t know how long something’s going to take either. The “Shade Garden” section of Enjoy It While It Hurts was assembled out of a group of poems which I noticed one day all had plant imagery. I had been talking with another writer about how funny it would be to write a book of poems where people you knew were disguised as different plants—this was around the same time. But that’s not what I was doing, or ended up doing. I still think that might be fun to do. Old MacDonald Had Her Farm was a little more deliberate because I’d already written a book of lipogram poems which took more planning than I was used to doing. It created a vowel-pattern focus for me that I’ve never completely lost. One day hearing E-I-E-I-O, I suddenly realized it was a vowel chorus! And it was easy to switch it to A-E-I-O-U because you needed exactly five letters for it. Then the rest fell into place quickly. Over the Rooftops evolved strangely because it was supposed to be a wordless book. Very late into making the book the publisher decided it had to have words, but the words I’d written for the illustrator were a visual guide, not a text for publication. It was a nightmare. For a while I couldn’t get it right. Then I went on vacation and I realized I had to forget about my original intentions, and just write a text for the pictures as they existed, pretending I was seeing the pictures for the first time. That worked! The publisher edited that, and the illustrator made some changes after too, but pretending I was seeing the pictures for the first time helped a lot. I still have some regrets about it though. It was supposed to be wordless, and there’s something about the rhythm between the words and pictures that gets lost for me somewhere just beyond the middle. It recovers in the end, but I think we should have worked harder to fix that, or maybe the text should have been placed a bit differently on the pages.

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Svonkin: You sometimes write metrical verse, JonArno, but at other times free verse. Robert Frost famously called writing free verse like “playing tennis without a net.” But T. S. Eliot wrote that “no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.” How do you decide whether to write a metrical or a free verse poem, and what do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of each? JonArno Lawson: I like both. It really depends on how the poem emerges. If it starts out as one I’ve never been able to switch it to be the other. Once I was asked to do that (for the book Leap!—when a now defunct British publisher took an interest in it—in the end they turned it down). I was asked to make it non-rhyming, so that it would be easier for them to sell translation rights. For fun, I gave it a try. It came out very badly. Metrical/rhyming poems are sometimes taken less seriously, which is a disadvantage. But they’re often easier to remember. Free verse poems allow you more freedom to explore an idea and to find ways of expressing it that are more in keeping with (and growing directly from) the idea, maybe, with less attention having to be paid to the mechanics of form. But there still has to be some music in your mind for it to come across as poetic. It’s just harder to define or categorize what that is. A good critic can often explain it though! Svonkin: I’m struck by the problem, especially with free verse, of where to put the line break (or the page break, in the case of a picture book poem, like your Over the Rooftops, Under the Moon). Can you discuss how you think about line breaks and page breaks as you write. Are line break choices as difficult and important as I imagine them to be? JonArno Lawson: Line breaks and page breaks really are important. I think that was exactly what worried me with Over the Rooftops. The text, somewhere in the middle, gets stretched too far (for my liking). Some of the pictures should have been removed, or the text I’d written for the pictures should have been left more intact. When the publisher edited the text just as it was, not yet put to the pictures, I thought it was fine. I liked it. But then the pacing issue became apparent when they were put together. The publisher had stopped listening to me by then, and I was worn out with the process (we’d done at least four different versions over two years). I don’t mean to sound negative—I’m proud of the book, I think there’s a lot about it that’s great, but on the issue of pacing and breaks, I think there should be another line after “and something changes again”—I think four pictures in a row that aren’t clearly connected creates a flow problem.

V. THE FUTURE OF CHILDREN’S POETRY Svonkin: Is it time for us to broaden discussions of North American children’s poetry so as to encompass Canadian and Mexican children’s poetry? Or perhaps even think more transnationally than that? Lissa Paul: Yes, especially as the borders (despite current Covid restrictions) seem more open. A Canadian publisher, Groundwood, publishes Spanish/English collections for children. Canadian poets were also disproportionately recognized for the Lion and the Unicorn award. Somehow, the smaller presses seem more flexible, more willing to take risks. If the L&U submissions were of any indication, American publishers favored the familiar (reissues of the same old, same old) and anything that would fit into the curriculum mandate (math poems, Black History month poems). As a Canadian, I was always conscious of the way

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American perspectives seemed (with apologies) self-centered. On at least a couple of occasions I was criticized for not having enough African American content. When I explained that I had Caribbean, African Canadian, and African British (so conscious of African-diasporic traditions) representation, it was not considered a satisfactory answer. With luck, more access to non-American cultures, cadences, rhythms, and histories would make “others” seem less “foreign.” Or to put it in a more positive way, there would be more of belonging to a more plural—more nuanced—community. JonArno Lawson: I think your question about how we view North American children’s poetry is a great one. Ideally it would be amazing to include poems from Canada, the United States, Mexico, all the Latin American countries down through Panama, and all the Caribbean island countries as well. And beyond that, all the Indigenous nations existing in all of these countries too. There are so many communities, and so many versions of English, and then all the other languages beyond English, Spanish, and French. I don’t think a children’s poetry anthology like that has ever been done. Svonkin: What advice might you offer scholars wanting to join the discussion of North American children’s poetry? Lissa Paul: It’s a tricky question, one that partly depends on what the new scholar already knows and the kind of teaching that scholar is doing. Teaching—as I’ve just done—students who are preparing to be early childhood educators generates one kind of list. Teaching graduate students in English literature programs generates another. In order to generate knowledge about contemporary children’s poetry books and the critical language involved, perhaps a new scholar should start with Poetry for Children: The Signal Award 1979–2001, as well as The Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry essays, beginning in 2005. Because children’s poetry is so rooted in traditional verse, I’d also include Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.’s Poetry’s Playground, Morag Style’s From the Garden to the Street, Michael Heyman on nonsense, and Beverly Bryan and Morag Styles’s Teaching Caribbean Poetry. Other works I’d include are Randall Jarrell’s The Bat-Poet, of course, Ted Hughes’s Poetry in the Making, and JonArno Lawson’s But It’s So Silly. In my list of contemporary poets to teach, I’d include John Agard, Grace Nichols, Marilyn Nelson, JonArno Lawson, and Jacqueline Woodson. Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.: Children’s poetry is the shabby step-daughter of the children’s literature discipline, and to those who study poetry for adults, it’s the miller’s third son’s cat (and before he got those big buckled boots). As a result, children’s poetry hasn’t gotten much critical attention over the years. One new to the discussion can and really should read just about every major study in the area over a long weekend before tapping at the keyboard. We’ve only three monographs tackling the subject, two of which I highly recommend: Morag Styles’s From the Garden to the Street: Three Hundred Years of Poetry for Children (1998) and Angela Sorby’s Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 (2005). Two edited collections readily spring to mind: Morag Styles, Louise Joy, and David Whitley’s Poetry and Childhood (2010) and Katherine Wakely-Mulroney and Louise Joy’s The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry: A Study of Children’s Verse in English (2018). They’re both worth the price of admission. Anita Tarr and Richard Flynn edited a special issue of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (27.1) back in 2002 that’s definitely worth a look, especially their introduction, which gives a brief but useful, top-down look at the field.

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    We also have the indispensable (but hard to come by) Nancy Chambers-edited Poetry for Children: The Signal Award 1979–2001 (2009), a collection of annual award essays published in the much-missed journal, Signal: Approaches to Children’s Books. Couple that with the un-collected and on-going Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry essays, and you have a topographical map of contemporary children’s poetry unlike anything in the world of literary criticism. The L&U Award was founded by Lissa Paul in 2004 (the first essay published in 2005). In consultation with the founding judges (Richard Flynn, Kelly Hager, and I), Lissa designed it to be the Signal Award’s spiritual successor. Both the Signal and the L&U essays not only discuss the most aesthetically compelling collections of children’s poetry published in a given year, they also contrast them with the less successful, providing readers with an articulation of the everchanging roster of judges’ aesthetic values. That’s over forty years of criticism (with a small gap between the shuttering of Signal in 2001 and the founding of the L&U Award in 2005). I should note: while the Signal award largely focused on British verse, the L&U Award exclusively treats North American collections. The UK has been much more interested in and supportive of children’s poetry than the United States, a difference we hoped the L&U Award would help to ameliorate.     One last thing about the L&U Award before I move on: a list of its judges is a veritable cheat sheet of the major voices in the world of children’s poetry studies: we have Lissa Paul, who in addition to founding the thing served as a judge for five years; Richard Flynn, a founding judge who contributed to the first three essays, returning for a final three years in 2016; Kelly Hager, a third founding judge (who served for one year); JonArno Lawson (one year); Angela Sorby (four years); Michael Heyman (four years); Michael Joseph (three years); Donelle Ruwe (two years); Craig Svonkin (three years); Kate Pendlebury (two years); and Krystal Howard (who now edits the award). Track down their other work on children’s poetry and you have the makings of a fine graduate seminar on the subject.     I’d also recommend June Jordan’s Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood (2001), an absolutely brilliant childhood memoir focusing on Jordan’s developing poetic sensibility. Pair it with Jordan’s Who Look at Me? (1969), and you have a brace of books as relevant to the study of children’s poetry today as they’ve ever been. Lyn Hejinian’s My Life (1980) is also worth looking at in this context, as it’s another indispensably rich portrait of the poet as a young person (I prefer the first edition, but the revised editions are compelling extensions of the original). Richard Flynn: Like many senior scholars in the field, I did not receive specialized training in children’s literature and culture, and in some ways, I believe this is an advantage. Studying “adult” poetry as a reader and a writer prepared me to become a critic of poetry for young people; indeed, much of my interest in the field centers on poets who are “cross-writers”: Randall Jarrell, Gwendolyn Brooks, and June Jordan, as well as poets who concern themselves with children and explore child perspectives in their work for adults, including Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Furthermore, the critical approaches to children’s literature prevalent since the mid-1980s have focused on narrative fiction, excluding other genres. In particular, the child constructed by the still-influential theory Jacqueline Rose proposed in her 1984 study, The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, appears to lack agency; in Rose’s famous formulation, “children’s fiction sets up a world in which the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product receiver), but where neither

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of them enter the space in between” (1–2). While this theory served as a necessary corrective to the naïve and belletristic criticism then typical in the field, it ultimately contributed to a critical climate that privileged ideological analyses and questions of power at the expense of other concerns, including the aesthetic. As Joseph Thomas observes, “The neglect of sustained, theoretical inquiry into the aesthetics of children’s literature is a symptom of our discipline’s history” (“Aesthetics,” 4). Rose’s depiction of the child constructed by children’s fiction as lacking agency is particularly inadequate when one considers children’s poetry, which often depends on the adult and child entering “the space in between.”     I believe that a deep interest in poetry and a thorough understanding of the history of Anglo-American poetry, regardless of the age of the intended audience, is crucial for anyone interested in North American children’s poetry. The best critics are well versed in literary history as well—both the history of poetry for adults and the history of poetry for (and by) children; with the exception of a few recent critical studies, much of the best work about post1945 North American children’s poetry has taken the form of literary and cultural history, such as Joseph Thomas’s indispensable Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry.     Debbie Pullinger’s From Tongue to Text: A New Reading of Children’s Poetry (2017), while it focuses on poetry by well-known British children’s poets, proposes an approach to children’s poetry that is relevant to the study of post-1945 North American children’s poetry. While I remain somewhat skeptical about Pullinger’s reliance on currently fashionable cognitive approaches to literature, her discussion of the difference between the lyric and narrative modes is important. The lyric’s reliance on “musicality and interiority” (20), she writes, encourages the child to inhabit the voice of the poem: [T]‌he relationship between adult writer and child audience must be subtly different from that constructed by other forms of children’s literature. In narrative, in particular, the adult author speaks to or for a child audience; a children’s poem, however, extends an invitation to the child to read with, or to “read as if.” (25)    Of course, there is such a thing as narrative poetry for children, but its musicality and memorability distinguish it from children’s narrative fiction. Likewise, the book-length verse narrative (often a verse novel) composed of individual lyric poems must succeed both as lyric poetry and as a narrative across those individual lyrics.     Rachel Conrad’s groundbreaking study, Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency (2020), takes up the relationship between the work of young poets and their temporal positioning, what she calls their “temporal agency.” In her conclusion, Conrad notes, “For adults to recognize the temporal priorities of children requires that they decenter their own temporal desires and ideas—for instance, not to see children as figures from a fondly remembered or longed-for past or hoped-for future, but to acknowledge them as full persons standing in the present of their own time, with their own desires and plans” (164). The adult facilitators of young poets’ work she discusses—Gwendolyn Brooks, Naomi Shihab Nye, and June Jordan, among others—succeed in fostering that work by taking children seriously, by assuming not their limitations but their competency.     These approaches complement my suggestion, made in a 2016 essay for Jeunesse, that we should pay

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attention to children’s competence and capability as social actors … [by] looking at the life course as a continuum—there are, after all, both adults and children of varying ages, competencies, and capabilities—and recognizing the intersection of the natural and the cultural and of modes of being and becoming that persist throughout our lives. Not only do adults form intersubjective relationships with children, but also they have an intrasubjective relationship with childhood. (“What,” 262–3)    The young poets Conrad discusses have to battle “developmental judgments about children as ‘less’ (capable, logical, thoughtful) than adults” (Conrad, x). All too often, so do the intended audiences for commercially published children’s poetry. One thread that runs through The Lion and the Unicorn Award essays (2005–the present) is praise for poets and poems that respect children’s competence and capabilities and disdain for those that disrespect that competence and condescend to their potential readers. For instance, in the 2016 essay, the judges wrote of the work of cowinners Calef Brown and Marilyn Nelson: “One thing that these very different poets have in common is their love and respect for their audience and for language. Along with their admirable conviction that the lives of young people will be richer if they can embrace and inhabit poetic language, they promote meaningful literacy by thinking of children as capable. They don’t condescend” (Flynn et al., 343). Michael Joseph: I think reading poems carefully would not be time badly spent. An English children’s literature scholar whose name will be familiar to most people reading this book argues that children’s poems are precisely those poems that have no value to adults. He is not ridiculing children’s poetry but suggesting that adults and children have incompatible worldviews that are resistant to external rational assessment. What is good for one is bad for the other. I want to point out why this may not be so.     Mapping the process of reading poetry to the scientific method of inquiry—a method described by science writer Samantha Jones in the April 10, 2021, issue of Quillette as a system “guided by intellectual humility, skepticism, careful observation, questioning, hypothesis formulation, prediction, and experimentation”—I want to consider that the method of reading we critical readers know and love not only should be the reading methodology of the young but offers a way out of the relativist trap of the binary of adult/child. This is because close reading doesn’t achieve “unshakable truths,” but rather potentiates creativity and selfexpression, as well as collaborative insights. And it can be a veritable clown car of fun.     This should be quick and painless: 1. Intellectual Humility    One begins to read a poem with an openness to a different intelligence or to different worldviews, language, modes of expression, intensities of feeling, to those one is familiar with or already embraces. Obviously, that doesn’t mean one has no starting point. I’m not seeking to rehabilitate the tabula rasa reader. There is always an initial position. Nor does it mean that everyone reading a poem is the same—has the same knowledge or reading needs or powers of concentration, prejudices, etc. And it certainly doesn’t imply that in order to interpret a poem one is or need be in perfect agreement with the poet, or one must abandon oneself and simply prepare to be seduced. (No need to smuggle aphrodisiacs into the library.) One merely

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should suspend disbelief, be receptive and open-minded, unafraid and alert to clues that will help one determine what the poem is and does. 2. Skepticism and Careful Observation    The reader then proceeds with due deliberation to read and reread, making sure they register and understand as much as they can, or the lines say or imply as much as possible. By skepticism here, I want to say, one should not jump to any hasty conclusions.      “Skepticism” modulates into the broader phase of “questioning” and “hypothesis formation.” 3. Questioning and Hypothesis Formation    I conceive of “questioning” and “hypothesis formation” as two parts of one step or if you will, a kind of dance—a hermeneutic circle dance—an intensification of the interrogation part of information gathering, a deepening of interpretation, not only decoding but sussing out patterns of association and meaning.     A reader can strive to guess what a poet might intend, but close reading allows one to consider not just the first idea that comes into one’s head, but all interpretations not inescapably contradicted by the most logical expression of the text.     So, let me begin the inevitable parade of corny examples: let’s say the poem we are reading happens to be Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” a poem my colleague Rachel Hadas has been immortalized by the Wikipedia for having once called “rather slight.” Perhaps for being “rather slight,” “Trees” is often included in anthologies of children’s verse. The opening couplet is universally known: “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.”     One is generally given to assume the poet is merely postulating that he will never see a poem as lovely, though he may actually be lamenting the fact: Alas, I think that I shall never …. He (Joyce Kilmer) may instead be confessing a sad suspicion he has a cognitive impairment: unlike other men, he is incapable of conceiving or believing in the existence of a poem, even in potentia, that is lovely as a tree (the emphasis falling on the second “I”). In this reading, he may be allowing for the possibility that poems might be just as lovely, or might be lovelier in other ways: just not in the manner of a tree (here the emphasis falls on “as.”) He may even be signaling for the alert reader that he is about to uncork a poem that is far lovelier than all trees or far lovelier than a specific tree, the tree outside his home on Airmount Road that, because of its accessibility, may not really be comparably that lovely. It may merely be a tree of convenience.      None of those interpretations are actually contradicted by the text, though many interpretations will be. For example, a reader cannot assume the poet is declaring he thinks he has seen many poems lovelier than every tree.     One can be optimistic that one’s reading is reasonable and interesting, but also be careful and question one’s initial intuition: to doubt one’s impressions, to test their logic and consistency as one proceeds. For example, how logical is the conventional interpretation? Is it reasonable for someone, particularly a poet—a person intensely engaged with verbal representation and likenesses—to doubt that a poem can be as lovely as a tree? Isn’t the exact opposite more probable? Having conceived of the analogy, hasn’t the poet tipped us off to the fact that he

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does believe poems are as lovely as trees, and perhaps shocked by the revelation, asserted the opposite out of a sense of humility?     A reader must ponder the implications of what one is reading, and one’s inferences. For example, to choose something rather obvious, a reader questions the form of the poem, the line breaks and stanza breaks (or lack thereof), as well as meter and rhyme.     So, if the poem’s first four lines are set in iambic tetrameter with a rhyme scheme, a reader should probably start to ask if the poem is in accentual verse, or accentual syllabic verse, and then if there is a poetic form that defines this structure: might it be a sonnet, a ballad, a blues song, etc.     The visual display of the poem might be helpful in this regard, or it might not. Kilmer breaks his lines into couplets. The display might be deliberately misleading (an incognito, undercover sonnet), and if so, that transgression is something else to ponder. The whole field of the poem, the visual, phonological, and timbral qualities, as well as the semantic, are open to interpretation.     If, following on the first two couplets, which we are provisionally considering a formal quatrain, the next two lines were uneven—unlike the poem we had been considering, Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” Say lines five and six were in dimeter (a line of two beats) followed by lines of six and ten beats—so that the poem now seems to be happening in free verse—the reader might ask how the poetic structure relates to the text: for example, is the poetic structure emphasizing a loosening of constraint or rising line of action in the narrative, or setting traditional form against modern for another purpose: whether there is an idea being expressed, or the poem is just being naïve or stupid or behaving randomly.     If this poem were a draft of “Trees,” we might wonder if Kilmer had been attempting to replicate a “sweet disorder,” like, for example, Robert Herrick’s description of Julia in “Delight in Disorder.”     Everything may not immediately lend itself to interpretation. We know that the absence of a period at the end of an early printing of Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” was due to a dropped type in the printing process; but the final comma in Robert Graves’s “Leaving the Rest Unsaid” represents a deliberate poetic move.     How do we know? The conventional wisdom is, err on the side of caution; but wherefore caution? Is it better to derive too little meaning from a poem than too much? William Carlos Williams famously wrote in his poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”:             It is difficult to get the news from poems          yet men die miserably every day                for lack of what is found there.    Williams did not write: “Men die miserably every day from a surfeit of what is found there.” William Blake wrote, “Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.” Was he preaching moderation or was he extolling the inexhaustibility of feeling in the inexhaustible medium of poetry?     But, while pondering the implications of one’s reading and forming hypotheses about the text, of course, be skeptical. Of course, doubt your interpretation—but also doubt your doubts: what is to say that your oddball, counterintuitive reading is wrong?

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    Counterintuitive readings do not violate the methodology of close reading. Let’s have a look at our wrongheaded reading of “Trees” once again: Kilmer follows his first declaration about poems and trees with a couplet: “A tree whose hungry mouth is prest / Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast.”     A young reader might ask, what the heck kind of tree is this? And so, critical reader, might you. We could wonder together: Is Kilmer actually looking at a tree? A real tree? Seems more like an etching by Blake or a drawing by Arthur Rackham, Kilmer’s older contemporary. Consider that in the following stanzas, the poem alludes to “leaf arms,” “hair,” “bosoms,” and intimacy. And consider the casual similarity between Kilmer’s “A tree that may in Summer wear / A nest of robins in her hair” and Robert Herrick’s “A lawn about the shoulders thrown / Into a fine distraction.” Is it not more reasonable to think that like Herrick’s, Kilmer’s poetic imagery is going out of its way to call attention to itself, and thereby to the realm of imaginative recreations, to move us to sensual and erotic delight in the plasticity of poetic language and the imagination rather than garden variety woody perennial plants?     But let’s further postulate that our newly recovered draft of Kilmer’s “Trees” with its erratic structure had been titled “A Playground Tree”: the reader might similarly ask whether the poem’s formal unpredictability is evidencing the playfulness of poetry, suggesting the playground tree is a metaphor for the opportunities resident in the relationship of reader to poem, or readers to poetry. As Joseph Thomas slyly suggests in the wonderful title of his book Poetry’s Playground, poetry’s playground is criticism, is close reading. Unlike prose, poetry tends to be formally self-referential, to point at itself as poetry, and to point at the process of reading; so might not that be what this poem’s shape-shifting is about?     If the draft had been titled “My Mother the Tree,” the reader might ask if the poem is replicating the inconsistency or else the nurturing quality of mothers, or about the way the specific child persona might perceive their mother, but again expressing how the plasticity of a poem, its form and music, might convey an idea. If the draft had been titled “Trees: A Loss,” the swerve in, or abandonment of, form might imply something different, sadder, darker, or even consoling—thus offering as well the consolation of poetry, the beating heart and root of language.     If Kilmer had been an avant-garde children’s poet (someone like Gertrude Stein), he might have titled the draft “Study in White” or “3.14,” which have their own patterns of associations and pleasures. Even the absence of a meaning might on a metatextual level possess a meaning. Or, again, it might not. Or it might and might not. Why not and why not not? If we were to persist in our reading of Kilmer’s actual poem, would we be violating the tenets and purpose of poetry or would we be honoring and fulfilling them? My point is, critical reading allows for both possibilities, sense and nonsense together, and that “questioning” and “hypothesis formation” is not a narrow dangerous path for adults only. 4. Prediction    Prediction has several analogies to reading poems. Comes the time a scientist can claim they have gained a particular knowledge (or have identified a range of values that, with a certain degree of probability, contain the parameter indicated by etc., etc.). They have gained a justified true belief that something is knowledge; but their knowledge is still “provisional,” and subject to subsequent—perhaps even inevitable—disproof.

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   So, a reader will also arrive at a point at which they are prepared to articulate conclusions about the nature of the meaning of the work. Having worked out our reading of “Trees,” we can draft a final copy: “Thirty-Five Ways of Looking at ‘Trees’: Joyce Kilmer’s Post-modern Renaissance Poetics,” which trails into the final element of our process, “experimentation.” 5. Experimentation    Winding back to phase one of the process, “experimentation” has a twofold application. Within one’s own studiolo, experimentation means that one reads further and presumably builds on and refines one’s understandings in subsequent iterations of the process. If one is active in an academic discipline, experimentation includes sharing one’s conclusions in public forums, popular and academic, for continued reflection. Submitting work for publication means that other readers will test one’s work for accuracy and importance. (Just as I am submitting to you my critical reading of close reading.) Publication assumes that other readers repeating our reading process will be likely to arrive at the same insights and conclusions and recommends that they adopt our work for their own experimental purposes.     Here, let me say it would be a mistake to assume I am implying the values of a poem are self-sufficient or that engagement ends with interpretation. Obviously, understanding, or as Peter Kivy might say, the performance of a text, is just a start. Arguing with poems or with the poem’s ideological context or cultural orientation is as legitimate as critiquing a poet’s craftsmanship or a poem’s aesthetic qualities. But ideological responses must follow interpretation. To read against a poet’s personal or cultural beliefs and assumptions or against a poetics, one must first be sure of what they are. One simply cannot read against a poetics in any sustainingly meaningful way without a deep understanding grounded in a close reading of the text. Close reading does not import any hierarchical values. It is not set up against theoretical interrogation; it is a method of inquiry and the basis for any useful, which is to say communicable, work. That is the sentence here I wish to mark with the “Text Highlight Color” tool.     Furthermore, if we consider close reading essential in our work, we should not be hesitant to affirm its relevance to anybody including children, or blithely condemn children to reading poems we think are awful precisely because we think they’re awful, because they’d fail our close reading. Because, as I’ve attempted to demonstrate, with intellectual humility and inappropriate humor, close reading can and should encourage creative nonsense, or creative hermeneutics, or poetic nonsense.     I want to finish by encouraging critics of children’s literature working in other literary genres and critics of American poetry not marked for children to give children’s poetry a try. I believe they will find it intensely rewarding both as critics and readers. There are some very fine poets around. We continually rediscovered this happy fact on The Lion and the Unicorn poetry award jury and I suspect my colleagues Lissa Paul, Richard Flynn, Joseph T. Thomas, Jr., Craig Svonkin, Michael Heyman, and others will mention it in other sections of this colloquy. I want to echo it here: echo in anticipation. I send a shout out to JonArno Lawson and Marilyn Nelson. There are other wonderful American poets and books of poetry that deserve recognition; Nikki Grimes, Susan Blackaby, Paul B. Janeczko, Nan Forler, Marvin Bell, Arnold Adoff, Michael Heyman, Helen Frost, and others have written terrific poems for

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children that deserve more thoughtful attention. Academic critics engaging with their work would broaden, deepen, and diversify the discourse in American children’s literature and in American poetry. But, in this, the twenty-first year of the twenty-first century, one has to read them first: please read carefully.

WORKS CITED Abate, Michelle Ann, ed. The Lion and the Unicorn, special issue on the verse novel, vol. 42, no. 2, April 2018, pp. v–237. Acevedo, Elizabeth. The Poet X. Quill Tree Press, 2018. Alexander, Joy. “The Verse-novel: A New Genre.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 36, no. 3 (September 2005), pp. 269–83. Alexander, Kwame. The Crossover. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Bryan, Beverly, and Morag Styles, eds. Teaching Caribbean Poetry. Routledge, 2014. Chambers, Nancy, ed. Poetry for Children: The Signal Award 1979–2001. Thimble Press, 2009. Chukovsky, Kornei. From Two to Five, trans. Miriam Morton. University of California Press, [1928] 1968. Coats, Karen. “The Meaning of Children’s Poetry: A Cognitive Approach.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 6, no. 2 (2013), pp. 127–42. Conrad, Rachel. Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency. University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Columbia University Press, [1969] 1990. Engle, Margarita. The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. Engle, Margarita, Naomi Shihab Nye and Jacqueline Woodson, guest eds. Poetry. Special issue on “Young People’s Poetry,” vol. 217, no. 6 (March 2021), pp. 579–602. Flynn, Richard. “Can Children’s Poetry Matter?” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 17, no. 1 (June 1993), pp. 37–44. Flynn, Richard. “What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Agency?” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 8, no. 1 (Summer 2016), pp. 254–65. Flynn, Richard, Lissa Paul and Kate Pendlebury. “The Quick and the Dead: The 2016 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol 40, no. 3 (September 2016), pp. 329–46. Glenn, Wendy. “Form Follows Function: The Relationship between Structure and Content in Three of Karen Hesse’s Novels.” ALAN Review, vol. 31, no. 2 (2004), pp. 27–32. Grimes, Nikki. Garvey’s Choice. Wordsong, 2021. Hejinian, Lyn. My Life. Burning Deck, 1980. Heyman, Michael, ed. This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse. Scholastic, 2012. Howard, Krystal. The Verse Novel Review. http://verse​nove​lrev​iew.blogs​pot.com/p/about-krys​tal-how​ard.html. Accessed November 23, 2021. Hughes, Ted. Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from Listening and Writing. Faber & Faber, 1967. Jarrell, Randall. The Bat-Poet. Macmillan, 1963. Jordan, June. Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood. Basic Civitas Books, 2001. Jordan, June. Who Look at Me. Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969.

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Koch, Kenneth. Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children. Vintage Books, 1973. Koch, Kenneth. Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry. Chelsea House, 1970. Lawson, JonArno. But It’s So Silly: A Cross-Cultural Collage of Nonsense, Play and Poetry. Wolsak and Wynn, 2017. Lawson, JonArno. Enjoy It While It Hurts. Wolsak and Wynn, 2013. Lawson, JonArno. Old MacDonald Had Her Farm. Illustrated by Tina Holdcroft. Annick Press, 2012. Lawson, JonArno. Over the Rooftops, Under the Moon. Illustrated by Nahid Kazemi. Enchanted Lion Books, 2019. Lawson, JonArno. Over the Shop. Illustrations by Qin Leng. Candelwick Press, 2021. Livingston, Myra Cohn. The Child as Poet: Myth or Reality? Horn Book, 1984. Nelson, Marilyn. American Ace. Dial Books, 2016. Nelson, Marilyn. How I Discovered Poetry. Dial Books, 2014. Nelson, Marilyn. A Wreath for Emmett Till. Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Nye, Naomi Shihab. Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners. Greenwillow Books, 2018. Pullinger, Debbie. From Tongue to Text: A New Reading of Children’s Poetry. Bloomsbury, 2017. Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan; or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Macmillan, 1984. Ruwe, Donelle. “Dramatic Monologues and the Novel-in-Verse: Adelaide O’Keeffe and the Development of Theatrical Children’s Poetry in the Long Eighteenth Century.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 33, no. 2 (April 2009), pp. 219–34. Sorby, Angela. Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917. University of New Hampshire Press, 2005. Stewart, Susan. Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Styles, Morag. From the Garden to the Street: Three Hundred Years of Poetry for Children. Cassell, 1998. Styles, Morag, Louise Joy, and David Whitley, eds. Poetry and Childhood. Trentham Books, 2010. Tarr, Anita, and Richard Flynn. “ ‘The trouble isn’t making poems, the trouble’s finding somebody that will listen to them’: Negotiating a Place for Poetry in Children’s Literature Studies.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 1 (2002), pp. 2–3. Thomas, Joseph T., Jr. “Aesthetics.” Keywords for Children’s Literature, 2nd ed., ed. Philip Nel, Lissa Paul, and Nina Christensen. New York University Press, 2021. Thomas, Joseph T., Jr. Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry. Wayne State University Press, 2007. Tigges, Wim. An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense. Rodopi, 1988. Tigges, Wim, ed. Explorations in the Field of Nonsense. Rodopi, 1987. Vecchione, Patrice, and Alyssa Raymond, eds. Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience. Seven Stories Press, 2019. Wakely-Mulroney, Katherine, and Louise Joy, eds. The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry: A Study of Children’s Verse in English. Routledge, 2018. Warner, Marina. “Out Loud: The Experience of Literature in the Digital Space.” Book 2.0, vol. 10, no. 2 (December 1), 2020, pp. 245–55. Watts, Alan. Nonsense. Dutton, 1977. Woodson, Jacqueline. Brown Girl Dreaming. Nancy Paulsen Books, 2016.

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CHAPTER THIRTY

Multilingual American Poetry and Poetics MARIA LAURET

In 1913 Apollinaire called for “polyglottisme” in poetry, and in the interwar period Eugène Jolas envisioned a language made up of “American English but enriched by sounds and meanings of other languages” particularly suited to creative, rather than communicative, purposes.1 In their desire for a multilingual poetry, Jolas and Apollinaire thus turned “the negative model of Babel into a positive one,” as K. Alfons Knauth writes (8). Following Jolas, various modernist and avant-garde poets in the Anglo-American tradition have written multilingual poetry, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound chief among them, even if they always had English as their matrix language (Perloff, “Language in Migration” 730). Since the 1970s, however, a different sort of bi- or multilingual poetry has emerged, one in which English is no longer in charge and the other languages used are not necessarily there as allusions to other written sources. Inspired by the Black Arts Movement, feminism, and American Indian and Chican@ activism, this poetry came to the world’s attention with Gloria Anzaldúa’s manifesto Borderlands/La Frontera of 1987. Anzaldúa’s multilingual path had been cleared by earlier Chican@ poets and by Alurista and others associated with the Nuyorican Poets Café in the 1970s.2 Anzaldúa used English, Spanish, Spanglish, and some Nahuatl as well in her poetry and theory, insisting on their equal treatment in coming out from under the oppression of American “English-only.”3 Poetry in English with other languages included thus comes largely from two directions: high modernism, on the one hand, overwhelmingly written by white poets, with occasional words and phrases in French, German, Italian, Latin, and sometimes other languages; and post-1970s minority poetry, on the other hand, in English and heritage languages, with these languages earning more equal billing.4 Whether these two directions parallel a “bookish” versus a “lived” multilingualism, as

pollinaire, “l’Antitradition.” For Jolas, see Kelbert (51) and Perloff, “Logocinéma.” A For a history of Chican@ poetry, see Arteaga’s “An Other Tongue”; for more about Nuyorican poets, see Noel Urayoán’s “Counter/public Address: Nuyorican Poetries in the Slam Era.” 3 English Only is the name of a movement to make English the official language of the United States. It was particularly vociferous during the 1980s, when Anzaldúa was writing. See the website of sociolinguist James Crawford for history and analysis: http://www.lan​guag​epol​icy.net/archi​ves/engo​nly.htm. 4 Dorothy Wang argues in Thinking Its Presence that “the categories ‘experimental,’ ‘innovative,’ and ‘avant-garde’ are often implicitly coded as ‘white’ ” (31). 1 2

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Tino Villanueva has argued, and whether they in turn evince an avant-garde versus a socially engaged aesthetic, as Marjorie Perloff asserts, are complex questions I shall address below.5 Other, simpler ones present themselves too. Is multilingual poetry always written by (im)migrants exploring their acquired English from the perspective of their mother tongue, as Villanueva does in “Convocaçion de Palabras”? (Villanueva quoted in Shell and Sollors 680–1).6 Does multilingual poetry serve to preserve or even forge transnational ties, or is it, to the contrary, bound by the Tongue Ties of living and working in two languages, as the Cuban American poet Gustavo Pérez Firmat believes? What if the mother tongue is absent, or not legible to the poet and her readers, as in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, or almost lost, as in the work of Irena Klepfisz and Diane Glancy? And we should ask a broader question still: are all languages equal in a multilingual poetics, and if not, how can they “ ‘dance and sing’ ” (Jolas quoted in Kelbert 51), as Jolas wanted them to do, or even just work and play together in an American poetry that is always, already infused with the unequal power relations of their history on American soil? Native American poets tend to be deeply engaged with these questions of power, as are Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, Gloria Anzaldúa, Harryette Mullen, and a host of other, younger poets. Working in the high modernist vein, French-born American poet Anne Tardos’s multilingual poetry, by contrast, “has no conscious political intentions”; instead, Tardos believes multilingualism helps her to pursue, as Jolas did, “some deeper truth than if I were to remain within the confines of a single language” (“How Not to Teach” 7, 3). Reading Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Anne Tardos, Tino Villanueva, Alurista, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Irena Klepfisz, Diane Glancy, Craig Santos-Perez, Julien Talamantez Brolaski, and Harriet Mullen, we thus discover the complexity of bi- and multilingual poetic practices and a variety of poetics in which languages clash, meet, mingle, or merge. But before we analyze how languages-at-play in a multilingual poem demonstrate varying degrees of interaction with each other, from conflict or contrast to dialogue or full-on fusion, we should first consider what it means to speak of ‘bi- or multilingual’ poetry, and wonder who can read it. Using K. Alfons Knauth’s definition, poetic bi- or multilingualism “refers to the more or less extended mix of two or more languages in the same text [poem], entailing a cross-cultural or experimental effect” (1), or both, as we will see later. In this essay, we are not concerned with multilingual anthologies or collections, but with poems in more than one language. Second, since for all intents and purposes the practice of reading bilingual or multilingual poetry is the same, I shall use “multilingual” from now on. And third, I will require English to be one of the languages used in all of the poems analyzed, so that we will have a starting point of intelligibility (however defamiliarized) from which we can then work with translation and other techniques of poetic meaning-making.7 But what if you do not know the other languages used, you may ask. Who can really read multilingual poetry, or is it, by definition, legible only to those who fully master the languages in question? Marc Shell has argued that, of course, no one can read all languages, so any reader of multilingual poetry is likely to come up against opacity and incomprehension. For Shell, the

See Villanueva’s “A Brief History” (708–9) and Perloff ’s “Presidential Address” and “Whose New American Poetry?” For a spirited critique of Perloff that moves this long-standing debate in poetry criticism forward, see Wang, Thinking Its Presence, pp. 1–47 and Epilogue, pp. 302–5. 6 For a reading of this poem, see Lauret, Wanderwords, pp. 216–23. 7 See for this defamiliarization Neigh’s “Dreams of Uncommon Languages” and Spahr’s “The ’90s.” 5

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ideal reader “knows some other non-English language” and therefore “will realize something of what she is missing” when faced with a text in a language she doesn’t know (690). In this model, English monolinguals are at a disadvantage. The monolingual reader can understand what is said in multilingual texts through translation, but they cannot read multilingually, that is: with the awareness that how the what is said matters and also with a sense of what is missing, lost, distorted or destroyed, invented or found in translation.8 The ‘missing’ element is important, because it is precisely the gaps in meaning that allow space for creativity and active reading. In what follows, my aim is not to present a history of American multilingual poetry since 1945, but to highlight the different ways languages interact in such poetry. In doing so I am mindful of Yasemin Yildiz’s caveat that many people in the world do not have a “mother tongue,” and that the sentimental overtones of the “mother tongue,” moreover, work to disguise its ideological force in tying “the one ‘true’ language … to an exclusive, clearly demarcated ethnicity, culture and nation” (2). Besides, “the ‘mother tongue’ can be a site of alienation and disjuncture,” Yildiz writes, just as “a foreign language [can be] a gateway to liberation and pleasure” (204). Different languages, in different situations, for different poets and people carry very different personal, political, and social meanings and may serve different functions, in which histories and contexts of inequality matter. This is the difference between “[a]‌multilingualism that uses the languages of empire and a multilingualism that uses at risk or marginal languages,” in Juliana Spahr’s words (‘BREV’). And with that insight, we can begin.

FIRST LANGUAGES: JUANITA PAHDOPONY AND DIANE GLANCY When thinking about endangered or at-risk languages, the first languages that come to mind are the First Languages of the Americas: Nahuatl, Narragansett, Cherokee, Dakota, Choctaw, Cree, and a hundred more. They are rarely the poet’s first languages, however; the bitter legacy of European imperialism is that, as the case of Narragansett demonstrates, many indigenous tongues are now extinct, so that Native poets today, such as Joy Harjo, Simon Ortíz, and Linda Hogan, are more likely to write in English.9 When heritage language(s) are used, “opacity” or “missing something” does not begin to describe the reading experience if, like most readers, you do not know the language in question. Without translation, multilingual poems in the anthology Sing!, for example, would be completely inaccessible. With a translation at hand and reading aloud, however, it is possible to hear and see in Juanita Pahdopony’s “Taa Numu Tekwa Huruunu” (“The Loss of Our Language”) the repetition of “Numu” and “Tekwa/i” and variations on those morphemes, which I assume refer to the Comanche language. If this is right, then “Comanche language” is more central to the original poem than to the English translation, where it only appears once. The English thus enacts language loss even as

We need to be aware of the simplification entailed in the term “monolingualism”: all languages are multilingual in the end, as words and grammar are imported from other languages through contact. But porous language borders do not mean absence of border control; in my working definition “bi-and multilingualism” refers to languages that are not mutually intelligible (without familiarity or study) and are in that sense distinct. 9 While my claim holds, it is important to note that Ortíz credits his first language, Acoma, for making him a poet (188). Additionally, interest in indigenous languages is reviving among non-native and Native poets: Rosmarie Waldrop and James Thomas Stevens both published poetry in 1994 using the Narragansett of Roger Williams’s A Key into the Language of America (1643). 8

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it enables us to understand that the poem is about that, but the poem and translation combined paradoxically also bring Comanche back into circulation as a language for poetry.10 For an outsiderreader this poem thus works to make a point, although obviously I am largely missing how “Taa Numu” works as a poem because I have no sense of the language, prosody, or tradition. “When you take a man’s language, you take his meaning,” Diane Glancy writes in her poem on this theme, “Death Cry for the Language” (Lone Dog’s 52)—but you take its rhyme and its rhythm too. “Death Cry for the Language” is part of Glancy’s Lone Dog’s Winter Count, in which each of seventy-one poems responds to a pictograph, drawn by Lone Dog in circular shape on a buffalo robe, chronicling the years from 1800 to 1871. Voiced by three generations of women, this long poem, with dramatic, multilingual, experimental sections, opens with a list of Cherokee words with English translations, headed “Grandmother” and set out in two columns spaced wide apart, dictionary-style. In subsequent sections those words recur in context. Here is part of the final section (headed “The Granddaughter”) showing how the forced migration of the Trail of Tears changed Cherokee life forever and caused language attrition: Now I am left with hollow words which have no meaning. Hi: yatsitu’hi: hi:’yo. Rifle-barrel whiskey-bottle closed-off throat— The narrow passages from this world. (55) In an earlier section of “Death Cry for the Language” also titled “The Granddaughter,” about the hooting of an owl, “WHO WHO WHO HI:YATSITU’HI:HI:YO” appears, but its onomatopoeic effect beyond the “WHO” sound is hard to hear or imagine (51). Instead, we read language loss here: “I heard Grandmother talk—/ She spoke so softly I could hardly hear her” (51). “WHO” still knows this language? For the granddaughter, Cherokee words are indeed “hollow” or have become mere sounds, while loss of land, racism, violence, poverty, and alcoholism threaten the throat and throttle Native speech in modern America.11 Glancy’s “Death Cry for the Language” moves around in time and history to counter the sixteenth-century colonial account of “the people of thys lande” who “lyven lyke bestes without any resonablenes” (45). As a mixed-race Cherokee and as a Christian, Glancy sees a parallel between the suffering of Christ and that of the American Indian, and affinity between Indian-ness and poetry as both have been “rejected by society and [are] not at home here” (“Two Dresses” 172). Even so, Cherokee is not her mother tongue but her great-great-great grandfather’s, which Glancy has “to leapfrog back to retrieve … through the creative imagination” (“A Conversation” 657), and in that sense her poetry is a kind of research. Glancy acknowledges the inevitably mixed nature of Native cultures and sees Cherokee identity not as something fixed in tradition, but as a matter of identification, “a ‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process” (Hall 110).

Pronunciation guides and other resources for Comanche can be found at http://www.nat​ive-langua​ges.org/coman​che. htm#langu​age. 11 I have not been able to find translations for Glancy’s Cherokee, perhaps because of a difference in transcription of the Cherokee syllabary writing system from that on the web. See http://www.chero​kee.org/About-The-Nat​ion/Chero​keeLangu​age. 10

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It follows that she does not use Cherokee to signify “authenticity”; instead, her languages take the reader to quite different worlds that can be radically at odds with each other, yet still coexist in the contemporary United States.12

TRAUMA’S TONGUE: THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA AND IRENA KLEPFISZ Loss of language is also a prominent and traumatic theme in the work of two otherwise very different poets: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Irena Klepfisz. Trauma, by its very nature, is a hidden cause of “an affect that has an enduring, if chronic, psychic resonance” (261), as Geoffrey Hartman explains; such affect cannot be rendered whole, but requires the distressed word and disturbed sound we find in Cha’s Dictée (1982). Dictée defies categorization in terms of the binary Marjorie Perloff and others have outlined between aesthetic innovation and political engagement. Perloff argues in “Whose New American Poetry?” that “many of these [late twentieth-century minority communities’] poetries were … quite conservative so far as form, rhetoric, and the ontology of the poem were concerned” (118). And Julianna Spahr has written about poetry that uses marginal languages, asserting that “much of this work tends to be explicitly political and uses clear and conventional language despite its multilingualism” (“BREV”). Neither of these judgments apply to Dictée: Cha’s use of French and English in what look like translation exercises, combined with classical references (the Muses from Greek mythology, Latin from Catholic liturgy) and exploration of signification itself, put this work firmly in the modernist, linguistically experimental tradition, while its feminist yearning for the maternal bond and land and language invoke Korean nationalism—the partition into North and South haunts Dictée. Furthermore, Cha’s attention to all kinds of borders (screen and veil as well as the violent rituals of border patrol) anticipates Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, as does her critique of imposed imperial languages (here, Japanese). Cha’s trauma-aesthetic is, in Hartman’s words again, an example of “the eloquent stutterance called poetry” (264) and comes from necessity, not choice. The poetic voice of “a depersonalized ‘diseuse’ ” (Dowling 11) is a feminist one: in Dictée “stutter” aligns with “utter” and, via the homophone “udder” in American English, also with the mother’s milk (“The thickness. … Hers bare. The utter” (Cha 5)). Before we are confronted with a medical drawing of the vocal apparatus (Cha 74), we find French and English poems ostensibly mirroring each other on facing pages: Plus d’organe.               No organ. Anymore. Cris.                   Cries. Peu à peu. Les virgules. Les points.         Bit by bit. Commas, periods, the Les pauses. Avant et après. Après avoir été.         pauses. Before and after. Tout.                         After having been. All. Avant avoir été.                        Before having been. (Cha 72–3)

Only very rarely do the languages mingle as in Glancy’s “Poem # 2”: “tiny hoof-prints of prehistoric horses / prancing under the walnut trees. / Whee hay/they whinny,” which is pleasingly playful (“Two Dresses” 173; slash between “hay” and “they” in original poem). 12

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The English poem looks like a translation of the French but is not quite—as is clear if you know both languages. If you do not, you might still detect difference, for example in the fifth line which has four English words to the French “tout” (meaning “all” when referring to things, or “everything”). It is also visible in the “pauses” in both languages: in English the pause is enacted through enjambment, in French it isn’t. Further, relating to the image of the voice box on the next page, the mention of “organe” and “organ” looks like simple translation, but in English it can also mean church organ, while the French “plus d’organe” can mean “no organ anymore” but also “too much organ.” Ambiguity is thus exploited in both languages, so that “cris/cries” can signify both: you would cry if you had lost your organ, but the noise of plural “cries” can also hurt as “too much” voice. This ambiguity is fitting, because French in Dictée is very much the language of regimentation, of Catholicism and catechism and language learning—and of the female body. Above, “virgule” looks like “virgin,” which is then cleverly echoed in the “period” (menstruation) of the English poem (translation of “les points” is “periods,” plural). Then there is also play on the commas and full stops: “les virgules full stop. Commas, period, comma”—read out loud they sound like oral instructions of a dictation exercise. What we see in Dictée is thus an interplay of the visual, aural, and semantic dimensions of languages, but not a mixing of them: English and French signify on each other, but they remain resolutely separate. Sarah Dowling has argued that “multilingualism is fundamentally historiographic” in contemporary poetry and that multilingual poets “turn to other languages to depict their objects of mourning” (iii); this certainly seems true of Cha’s Dictée. It also applies to the Yiddish/English poetry of Irena Klepfisz, for similar reasons; as Cha mourns the mother, her language, and an undivided Korea, so does Klepfisz’s work mourn the loss of European Jewish life, language, and culture due to the Shoah, or der khurbn, Klepfisz’s preferred Yiddish word for the Holocaust.13 Her interest in Yiddish is motivated by historical resonance and her practice of it tends to be accompanied by English translation, which makes her work significantly more accessible—and more didactic—than Cha’s. Like Cha, Klepfisz is concerned with “the mother tongue,” but that phrase proves to be deceptive because Yiddish is neither Klepfisz’s first language nor does she idealize it. Klepfisz spoke Polish to begin with and only learned Yiddish in the United States, where she found refuge as a child survivor of the Shoah.14 For Klepfisz, neither “refuge” nor “home” provided the safety and comfort such words usually connote. In part four of “Di rayze aheym/the journey home,” the Shoah survivor’s world is “A beys-oylem / A cemetery”: Der moyer                the wall oyf der zayt                                 on this side un oyf der zayt As Klepfisz explains, she preferred the term “der khurbn,” for, “unlike the term Holocaust, it resonated with yidishe geshikhte, Jewish history, linking the events of World War II with der ershter un tsveyter khurbn, the First and Second Destruction (of the Temple)” (quoted in Rich 14). 14 Klepfisz learnt Yiddish at the Workmen’s Circle Shule in the Bronx (Hedley 40). The Workmen’s Circle (Arbeter Ring) is a progressive, socialist-leaning, pro-labor mutual aid society founded in the United States in 1900. 13

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                                and on this side Oyf beyde zayten                     on both sides. Oyf der zayt a keyver                    on this side a grave                    oyf der zayt                                   a vistenish on this side                                          a wasteland. Der moyer a beys-oylem oyf der zayt                                   un oyf der zayt.    (A Few Words 219) This poem is like a translation exercise, taking readers through the Yiddish word for word, so that by the final four lines we can read Yiddish without English. The wall between English and Yiddish is figured as a white space—a silence, perhaps, or an ocean that separates the “grave” of post–Second World War Europe from the “wasteland” of refugee existence in the United States. At the same time, of course, the “wasteland” references T. S. Eliot’s vision of the Western world after the First World War, as Laurence Roth notes (273–4). Even when the languages switch sides temporarily, the “grave” on the Yiddish side and “oyf der zayt” oft repeated on the English, there seems little to choose between them. “Though I’m not a Zionist,” Klepfisz has written, “I do feel that I am in goles / exile (the Yiddish version of the Hebrew galut), that I’ve lost my home, been torn from my roots—not the Bible and Israel, but yidishkayt and Eastern Europe” (“Di Mames, Dos Loshn” 16). Yiddish, often referred to by Jews as the mame-loshn or mother tongue, is a conduit for Klepfisz to the secular Jewishness that is yidishkayt, sometimes defined as a Jewish essence or way of life, and its role in her poetry is to create a living cultural memory of Jewish worldliness. As we will see later in Anne Tardos’s work, Jewishness often entails multilingualism, but Klepfisz’s work shows Yiddish mame-loshn is not necessarily imbibed with the mother’s milk.

SPANISH-BORN, SPANISH-BRED IN THE UNITED STATES: TINO VILLANUEVA, ALURISTA AND TRACIE MORRIS In his “Brief History of Bilingualism in Poetry” Tino Villanueva makes a useful distinction between “bookish” (modernist) and “lived” (minority) multilingualism (709), roughly corresponding to the two traditions of multilingual poetry in the twentieth century I outlined in my introduction. In addition, he analyzes the different functions several languages in a single text might serve, including providing interlingual sound effects (alliteration and assonance); supporting puns, wordplay, and other modes of experimentation; and according “fidelity to the persona of the poem” or posing “cultural, sociological and political” challenges to the dominance of English in the United States (693–7). Villanueva’s essay delves deeply into the history of multilingual (or “macaronic”) poetry

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in Europe and the United States, emphasizing that the territory of what is now the United States was always multilingual and remains so. As a native-born Texan, Villanueva’s first language is Spanish, but he has published in English (So Spoke Penelope) and Spanish-only (Crónica de Mis Años Peores), as well as in both (Shaking Off the Dark).15 Placing himself in a long line of American writers whose first language was not English, including Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, and Phillis Wheatley, Villanueva observes that to live in multicultural America is “to live in bilingualandia” (“The breath is alive” 169). In Villanueva’s first volume, Hay Otra Voz: Poems (1968–1971), “Day-Long Day” is a migrant worker poem of pioneering importance, combining English and Spanish from the farmworker’s point of view: sun blocks out the sky, suffocates the only breeze. From el amo desgraciado, a sentence: “I wanna a bale a day, and the boy here don’t haf ’ta go to school.” … “Estudia para que no seas burro como nosotros,” our elders warn.   (38–9) Here, the Spanish is mimetic (the elders’ voices saying in Spanish, “Study so you won’t be a stupid donkey like us”) to “grant fidelity” to the agricultural workers, and bitterly ironic (“el amo desgraciado” is “the disgraced soul” of the boss or landowner). But some of the English is mimetic too: what the boss demands of a child laborer is rendered in non-standard, accented English, whereas the elders speak in standard Spanish (albeit italicized for their “foreignness”). “Day-long Day” thus documents Chican@ working conditions, but it is also a political poem about education. As such it functions highly economically without direct protest, using only the heat and the “rowtrapped” bodies and the work—and the repetition of “pisca” (“harvest”) in the epigraph from Genaro Gonzales’s “Un hijo del sol.” “Que Hay Otra Voz,” another poem by Villanueva about farm labor, is in Spanish with occasional English words, all of which are about commodities and work and all of which are italicized: “a los beet fields de Colorado” (Hay Otra Voz 34). A list of crops set out in columns (“chopping plucking / soybeans cebollas”) shows the work never ends, that you have to eat, and that there are always bills to pay: “hay que comer, hacer pagos, sacar la ropa / del Lay-Away” (35). Here the transition to English “Lay-away” works well with its internal rhyme and the three a’s that chime with those of “sacar la ropa.” With its direct address to Chicanos later in the poem (“Tú / cómotellamas, mexicano, latino, Meskin, / … skin / Mex-guy, / Mex-Am”—note the politics of the italics (35)), “Que Hay Otra Voz” combines several of the formal features Villanueva identifies for bilingual poetry, including the political imperative of using that “other voice.” Equally innovative were the poets of the Nuyorican Poets Café of the 1970s who, in the wake of the Beats and inspired by the Black Arts Movement, articulated a hybrid Puerto Rican/New York Villanueva has, however, had difficulty getting his bilingual poetry published in the United States, so his decision to write in one language or the other has been largely pragmatic (“The breath is alive” 170). For his occasional use of Spanglish, see Stock. 15

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performative poetry, a poetry that later evolved into a multicultural poetics infused with punk and hip-hop influences (Noel 43). This poetry has an oral quality: the Spanglish that is so distinctive of barrio speech becomes a language fit for poetry in Nuyorican café culture, as its name already indicates and its location in “Loïsaida” (the Lower East Side) confirms. Poets involved with the Café riff on the interplay of languages, probing them for new meanings, as in Alurista’s “Foolish Rituals”: dawn is near, como los esta dos uni dos      equality is far, as far    as dios, dos      the u.s. of a. has       bullets or bread god has only questions. (175) There are no italics in Alurista’s lines, no “foreign” words, as Spanish and English are treated equally. Instead, Alurista defamiliarizes both languages to reveal their secrets, so that in Spanish the United States are divided (“esta dos uni dos” translates as “it is twofold”) and there is inequality between Anglos and Latin@s. Neither is the United States “one nation under [one] god,” since god is also split or doubled (“dios, dos” “god, two”) and has no answers, “only questions.” Contrary to what we might expect in the political culture of Nuyorican poetry, Spanish does not always indicate the poet’s identity. Miguel Algarín writes of “the fearlessness with which young African-American poets are now confronting languages other than English” (20), referring to poets like Tracie Morris and Ntozake Shange who use Spanish as an acquired, adopted language. It has nothing to do with their “heritage” but is part of their present context: Shange writes “Porque No Estas Conmigo” as a “song” for the Puerto Rican salsa singer Héctor Lavoe and adapts her idiom accordingly.16 Morris accentuates her kinship with Latinas in the African diaspora in her poem “Morenita”: … Morenita, morenita men have named you … Not Latina. Morenita. Negrita chiquita de Estados Unidos. … Not negrita, the Loot, same boat. Das Boot, Root of all evil. (Quoted in Algarín and Holman 102) “Morenita” reveals the dark side of American popular culture by using Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa” to explore racism and sexism against Black women everywhere, in Spanish and English. Both are evident in “negrita” and its qualifier, “chiquita” (“little,” but also a familiar brand of

See Spyra for Shange’s multilingualism.

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banana), whereas the wordplay that turns “loot” into “boat” and “boot” evokes the violence and exploitation of the slave trade.17

MIGRANT LANGUAGES: GUSTAVO PÉREZ FIRMAT AND ANNE TARDOS So far we have surveyed a range of poems in which the non-English languages are desired for their connection to the past, or claimed for the multicultural present, and in most cases they kept their distance from English, both on the page and in their signification. Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s Spanish, by contrast, is neither simply nostalgic nor does it lay claim to US soil or agency. In Tongue Ties, Pérez Firmat explores his attachment to Spanish, which he brought with him when he migrated from Cuba to the United States, and reflects on the ambivalence—“Bilingual Bliss, Bilingual Blues” (1)—his Spanish produces toward English. Like Yasmin Yildiz in my introduction, Pérez Firmat too finds that, although languages can inspire loyalty, “they also provoke fear, hatred, resentment, jealousy, love, euphoria …. Mother tongues are forked or folded into father and sister tongues, spouse and lover tongues, friend and enemy tongues” (3). Pérez Firmat’s Spanish, in its encounter with English, evokes mixed feelings of resentment and accommodation, as seen in the title poem of Bilingual Blues. Like Morris’s poem “Morenita” discussed above, Pérez Firmat’s “Bilingual Blues” quotes popular English-language songs, including George and Ira Gershwin’s “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off ” (1937), to satirize their cultural assumptions, countering genteel concern with Anglo-American differences in pronunciations of “tomato” and “potato” with the vernacular disrespect in Spanish of “tu madre” (“yo mama”) and “Pototo.” The absence of italics in “Bilingual Blues” suggests English is not on top: Spanish here signifies on English, as when in the next few lines “whole” and “thing” (playing on the “let’s call the whole thing off ” from the Gershwin song) are sexualized to become a “hole” (“hueco”) penetrated by “a cosa” (“thing”): Let’s call the hole un hueco, the thing a cosa, and if the cosa goes into the hueco, consider yourself en casa, consider yourself part of the family. The result is a home (“en casa”)-coming and family-making in lines taken from another popular song, Lionel Bart’s “Consider Yourself ” from his musical Oliver! And the inter-lingual fun doesn’t stop there, nor does the music: punning continues in “puré” (“mash”) and “impurezas” (impureties) and in “Rubik’s Cuba” (after the Rubik Cube puzzle) until the poem ends on a “Chacha-chá,” suggesting it never really had the blues of its title. “Bilingual Blues” is thus a playful literalization of what Pérez Firmat terms “logo-eroticism,” by which he means the various affects produced when languages touch in multilingual writing (Tongue Ties). These affects include anger and aggression; in light of the history of battling empires in the Americas, Pérez Firmat considers Spanish and English to have been “consistently hostile to each other” (20), with such hostility evident in his poem.

See Zapf for a more detailed reading of this poem and Shange’s.

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(Im)migrant languages are never just (im)migrants’ languages—they are those of refugees, forced migrants, would-be Americans, or, as in Pérez Firmat’s case, exiles. And this makes a difference for the way languages work in poetry, as he explains in an NPR (National Public Radio) interview: “exiles hold onto their language as the one … portable piece of their homeland” (“For a Bilingual Writer”). For Pérez Firmat, therefore, Spanish equals Cuban (in the poem, “Ajiaco” = a Cuban soup) and is as such a language-in-exile, with US sanctions against it, even if its intelligibility to other Spanish-speakers of the Americas ensures his work a broad readership. Unlike Villanueva’s rooted bilingualism, Pérez Firmat’s is conflicted, which is why his poems often reflect metalinguistically on the “Vexed” and “hyphenated, oxygenated, illegally alienated” (Bilingual Blues 28) condition of living—and writing—in two languages. Logo-eroticism also describes the multilingual poetics of Anne Tardos, but this is where the similarities end. Her cosmopolitan practice of “neolingual composition” made up of English, French, Hungarian, and German fragments, the languages of her life to date, is more experimental than the practices of any of the poets discussed so far, both “bookish” and “lived.” Tardos’s poetry is less immediately accessible and yet paradoxically more open. In the collection Uxudo—itself a mot trouvé (found word) as the result of a printer error (13)—Tardos’s multilingual poems are printed with images, which are stills from her videos of friends and family. Blurry and vague to the point of abstraction, these images add another layer of polysemy to the already multi-interpretable wordart presented here. There is help for the reader in the translations, transliterations, and phonetic transcriptions of “foreign” words provided on the verso side for the poems on the right-hand pages, but often these only increase the effect of defamiliarization (“vanity = vanité = Eitelkeit = hiábavalóság” (70)) and the sense of being caught in an endless circle of signs. They do, however, identify made-up words (“miamander = miamander = miamander” (60)). Reading Tardos therefore takes work and feels like an experiment, since there is no clear measure of “getting it,” let alone getting it right. “Toowomba 3” and “Toowomba 8” are three-line poems that appear to be related; the images printed with them are time-stamped to show they were taken one second apart. They show the left part of the face of a woman in blurred features and then a close-up of the right eye area with strands of hair, almost as an abstract image. The poems are short and enigmatic, with untranslated phrases, sometimes coined, translingual, or nonsensical rather than from any particular language, like this closing phrase from “Toowomba 3”: “Allerschwab miamander touffenade gelinkami pensura” (61). In Tardos’s Uxudo, there are eight three-line poems titled “Toowomba,” which is no known word but may be derived from the name of the press (Tuumba/O Books) that published Uxudo, or may designate a new kind of poem (“Toowomba” has “womb” in it, after all). With my knowledge of French, German, and English, what sense can I make of these poems? In “Toowomba 3,” “Na endlich,” meaning “well, finally” or “at last,” is usually said with a sigh of relief: something seems to have been found, a way of framing an idea, organizing thought maybe. With the French “Le cadre de l’idée,” “cadre” and “framing” refer to the visual frame of the still image as well, and “thought” might link with “pensura” (“weighing” in Latin, but here more reminiscent of French penser (to think)) at the end of the poem. Then I am stumped: since most of the words in the final line have no discernible meaning—even if their form looks German (“Allerschwab”) or French (“touffenade”)—, it would seem this poem tracks the evanescence of meaning-making (“categorizing thought”) itself: now you see it, now you don’t, like the blink of an eye that may just have been caught on camera in the image below this poem. In “Toowomba 8,” what might be a photographic close-up of an eye blurs almost into abstraction, just as the language of the poem moves from the initially

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barely intelligible German “Versprechungsschaum” (or promise foam?) to the alluringly allusive and elusive “magidé” (71). The first line exploits the synthetic nature of German word formation to produce the—indeed unique—neologism “Versprechungsschaum,” which is so hard to say that it also enacts the other meaning of “Versprechen”: to mis-speak (and perhaps to produce bubbles). In line two I draw a blank with what look like Nordic or maybe Russian words (“blensk”) that do not exist. But the alliteration of “bliskily” in line three and the three dactyls that end the poem get me back on track. “Magidé,” after all, reminds of the “thought” of “Toowomb 3,” but in combination with “vanity” and the blissful-sounding “Bliskily,” reminiscent also of “briskly,” signals the fleeting nature of this magic idea, coming round again to the evanescence of “Versprechungsschaum” (promise foam) of the first line, thereby revealing the insubstantiality of promises, perhaps. Anne Tardos says of these poems that “they were written by letting one word lead me to another, by way of some sort of association,” as in a “liminal” state of consciousness (Uxudo 13). This suggests a deeply personal process that is impossible to trace for the reader, perhaps turning any search for meaning, such as mine above, into a wild goose chase. Then again, the opposite may be true: psychoanalysts Jacqueline Amati-Mehler et al. argue that it is the task of the multilingual artist “to unveil the sonority of … the different languages that, because they are suffocated by everyday use and by habit, can be rendered speechless” (162). In this light, Tardos’s work may offer an ideal opportunity for reading multilingually to uncover some linguistic unconscious—as shown above—because her poetry has no particular designs on the reader, beyond the desire to let her languages breathe. And she can write in this way, unbound by the need to make conventional sense, because there is no unitary “mother tongue” in her migrant experience, which took her from her parents’ French and German in childhood to Hungarian and Russian at school in Hungary and then to English in the United States.18 “Never having had the opportunity to attach myself to any of these languages,” Tardos writes, “I discovered ways to conglomerate them by allowing words and phrases to cross boundaries, breaking down the boundaries of the established tongue” (“Multilingualistic”). She calls this crossing or breaking of linguistic boundaries a “liberation; a democratization” (“Multilingualistic”), a gift we can claim for ourselves in reading her work.

NEITHER/NOR AND BOTH/AND: HARRYETTE MULLEN, JULIAN TALAMANTEZ BROLASKI, AND CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ If we now revisit the questions posed at the beginning of this essay, about the role of the mother tongue, the differences between “bookish” and “lived” multilingualism, avant-garde versus socially engaged poetics, and the power-relations between imperial and at-risk or minority languages, it would seem that none of the poems and poets discussed so far quite answer to the agendas these binary divisions suggest. Twenty-first-century American poets who write in more languages than English-only actively seem to refuse polarities of aesthetics/politics, modernist legacy/minority activism—often fusing them instead. As an example, Harryette Mullen, inspired by Gertrude Stein and French experimentalists of the Oulipo group, clearly works in a (post)modernist tradition that foregrounds artifice and formal constraint. She is not known as a bilingual poet, Elsewhere Tardos adds “when writing poetry, I don’t necessarily make a point of noticing which language I’m writing in” (“How Not to”). 18

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yet attributes her poetic practice— in terms that instantly remind us of Gloria Anzaldúa—to “the linguistic, regional, and cultural differences marked by Southern dialect, black English, Spanish and Spanglish” (Looking Up 22) of her childhood in Texas. In its humor and playfulness Mullen’s poetry could hardly be more different from Anzaldúa’s, but her political critique is no less searing. In Muse & Drudge (1995), Mullen’s fourth book of poetry, republished as part of her 2006 Recyclopedia, she writes eighty sections, each section containing four quatrains. In a section all about skin-whitening creams, the first quatrain ends with “hechizando con crema dermoblanqueadora,” Spanish meaning “bewitching with skin-whitening cream.” The second quatrain begins with “what we sell is enlightenment” (Recyclopedia 132). Using advertising slogans in Spanish and English, Mullen thus covertly parallels “whitening” (of the skin) with “enlightening” (of the mind) in a send-up of the Western episteme of rational thought as white thought, a racist slippage dating back to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, thereby exposing its racism in the process. In the final quatrain of the section Mullen gets under the skin of English too: color we’ve got in spades melanin gives perpetual shade though rhythm’s no answer to cancer pancakes pale and butter can get rancid (Recyclopedia 132) In Mullen’s virtuos@ wordplay on race (“color,” “spade(s),” “melanin”), the Black vernacular (to verbally fight back as throwing “shade”) and stereotyping (“rhythm” and the image of Aunt Jemima on boxes of pancake-mix) are funny and deadly (“no answer to cancer”) serious at the same time. And it is a bilingual sensibility underlying Mullen’s endlessly inventive poetic method that shows here how English can abuse (“spade”)—but also fight back (throw “shade”).19 Jennifer Andrea Reimer thus rightly observes that “Mullen’s poetic language both enacts and theorizes the multiplicity from which it is created” (153); as she flips the script of standard English with Spanish and African American vernacular, new language generates new thought and “shifts the brain into high gear,” thereby “putting the ink in think” (Mullen, Looking Up 39). Julian Talamantez Brolaski’s transgender poetics is another exemplar of twenty-first-century writing traversing traditional divisions and schools of thought. In Of Mongrelitude, Brolaski at once signifies on Joan Retallack’s multilingual Mongrélisme and Mina Loy’s “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” that preceded it, as well as, of course, on the paradigm of racial/linguistic purity Gustavo Pérez Firmat satirized earlier in his poem “Bilingual Blues” (“un puré de impurezas”). Most of all, his work writes the mongrel body, enacting and theorizing its multiplicity like Reimer says about Mullen’s work above, but more so. His poetic language incorporates—without italics—sprinklings of ancient Greek, Spanish, and indigenous languages like Tahitian, Yavapai, and Inuktitut, as well as various kinds of slang and neologisms in unorthodox spelling as a matter of course. Here, for example, is an economical statement of transpoetics from the title poem, “of mongrelitude”: “Where I am told first the one and then the other bathroom is the wrong one. Madame, c’est là! and then o monsieur! Je me suis tromper!” (25). By switching to French the poem references Lacan’s famous illustration of how the signifier conditions the signified with two identical drawings of a bathroom A bilingual sensibility is not the same as being bilingual; Mullen herself has explained that although she grew up around Spanish and took Spanish classes she is not a Spanish speaker (“A Conversation”). 19

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headed “Dames” and “Hommes” (151), forcing everybody to choose sides. Brolaski’s sexual/textual practice does the opposite and creates a mongrel mix of languages resulting in a trans-valuation of everything. Finally, in the work of Craig Santos Perez, we return to the indigenous languages found at the beginning of this essay, but here no longer mourned as (nearly) lost but rather become an integral part of a decolonizing poetics that uses Chamorro and Spanish as well as English. Perez’s lines range all across the page and are interspersed with intra- as well as inter-lineal blank spaces, while square brackets, italics, dashes, and quotation marks further break up the flow. This makes for strong visual impact: each page reads like a map with islands and waves of words in a sea of blank space. Paul Lai explains how Perez uses the long poem for decolonial purposes, with “critiques of US militarization, a cartographic reading of words on the page, and environmental metaphors of colonization” (2). In “from Achiote,” for example, indigenous use of the achiote plant for healing various conditions acts as a chorus in a poem about the violent colonial history of Guam (“ ‘Marine Drive’ now renamed ‘Marine Corps Drive’ ” (5)). But colonialism, which might have stamped out the indigenous culture and language completely, has not—as the many uses of the achiote remind us. Chamorro is here shown to be a living and mutable language, as the poem traces the change in meaning of “mata’pang”: derived from the name of a chief who defied the colonists, formerly meaning “proud and brave,” it came to signify “ ‘silly’ or ‘rude’ or ‘misbehaved’ or ‘uncivil’ ” generations later, shadowing the degradation of the Chamorro people under Spanish, US, and Japanese rule (5). In this poem, as in others, it is by no means always clear which of the Chamorro words are translated into English and which are left to speak for themselves, which enhances the feel of a living and breathing language that “resists erasure and domination,” as Lai writes (5). Following Pound, Zukofsky, Olson, and Williams, poets he admires, Perez’s long-form poems do not yield up their meanings easily. Like Brolaski’s, Perez’s poems reject easy categorization as they require and then reward slow, careful, recursive reading. Dorothy Wang has convincingly argued that “all writing is situated in both aesthetic and social realms” (xxii), and therefore any criticism of multilingual poetry has to take both dimensions into account. How poets mobilize their languages’ feel on the tongue, to the ear and the eye, and the echoes of poetry past, depends not only on individual talent but at least as much on the history and current prestige of such languages and the extent to which poets dare trust or risk their multifarious significations with their readership. Since nobody can know all languages, to read multilingually is to read with attention to sight, sound, semantics, and interplay of the languages all at once, as well as with awareness of what we may be missing—or gaining—in such creative endeavor. As Carolyn Bergvall writes, “only the precision of such divided attentions can carry off the emotive and psycho-social genealogies which the plurilingual text is interjecting into the overall cultural body” (8–9), thereby exploring and enriching it at the same time.

WORKS CITED Algarín, Miguel. “The Sidewalk of High Art: Introduction.” Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, ed. Miguel Algarín and Bob Holman, Henry Holt, 1994, pp. 3–28. Algarín, Miguel, and Bob Holman, eds. Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Henry Holt, 1994. Alurista. “Foolish Rituals.” Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets’ Café, ed. Miguel Algarín and Bob Holman, Henry Holt, 1994, pp. 175–6.

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Amati-Mehler, Jacqueline, Simona Argentieri, and Jorge Canestri. The Babel of the Unconscious: Mother Tongue and Foreign Languages in the Psychoanalytic Dimension, trans Jill Whitelaw-Cucco, International Universities Press, 1993. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Apollinaire. “L’Antitradition Futuriste: Manifeste-synthèse.” Manifestes du Mouvement Futuriste. Bibliothèque Française Nationale (BNF) Gallica, http://gall​ica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6​k704​94p/f5.image. Accessed September 30, 2021. Arteaga, Alfred. “An Other Tongue.” An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, ed. Alfred Arteaga, Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 9–33. Bergvall, Carolyn. Foreword. Uxudo, by Anne Tardos, Tuumba Press, 1999, pp.7–9. Brolaski, Julian Talamantez. Of Mongrelitude. Wave Books, 2017. Crawford, James. “The English Only Movement.” Language Policy Website & Emporium. http://www.lan​guag​ epol​icy.net/archi​ves/engo​nly.htm. Accessed September 2021. Dowling, Sarah. “Remote Intimacies: Multilingualism in Contemporary Poetry.” 2012, University of Pennsylvania, PhD dissertation, https://sea​rch.proqu​est.com/docv​iew/101​8699​939. Accessed September 30, 2021. Glancy, Diane. “A Conversation with Diane Glancy.” By Jennifer Courtney Elizabeth Andrews, American Indian Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 4 (2002), pp. 645–58. Glancy, Diane. Lone Dog’s Winter Count. West End Press, 1991. Glancy, Diane. “Two Dresses.” I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, University of Nebraska Press, 1987, pp. 169–83. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Padmini Mongia, Arnold, 1996, pp. 110–21. Hartman, Geoffrey. “Trauma within the Limits of Literature.” European Journal of English Studies, vol. 7, no. 3 (2003), pp. 257–74. Hedley, Jane. “Nepantilist Poetics: Narrative and Cultural Identity in the Mixed-Language Writings of Irena Klepfisz and Gloria Anzaldúa.” Narrative, vol. 4, no. 1 (1996), pp. 36–54. Kelbert, Eugenia. “Eugene Jolas: A Poet of Multilingualism.” L2 Journal, vol. 3, no. 1 (2015), pp. 49–67. Klepfisz, Irena. A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New (1971–1990). Eighth Mountain Press, 1990. Klepfisz, Irena. “Di Mames, Dos Loshn/the Mothers, the Language: Feminism, Yidishkayt and the Politics of Memory.” Bridges, vol. 4, no. 1 (1994) pp. 12–47. Knauth, K. Alfons. “Literary Multilingualism I: General Outlines and Western World.” Comparative Literature: Sharing Knowledges for Preserving Cultural Diversity, ed. Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Paola Mildonian, Jean-Michel Djian, Djelal Kadir, Lisa Block de Behar, Alfons Knauth, Dolores Romero Lopez, in Volume 3 of Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, Developed under the Auspices of the UNESCO, Eolss, 2007, n.p. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan. Tavistock, 1980. Lai, Paul. “Discontiguous States of America: The Paradox of Unincorporation in Craig Santos Perez’s Poetics of Chamorro Guam.” Journal of Transnational American Studies, vol. 3, no. 2 (2011), pp. 1–28. Lauret, Maria. Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature. Bloomsbury, 2014. Loy, Mina. The Autobiography of Mina Loy: Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose and Colossus. Exact Change, 1999. Mullen, Harryette. “A Conversation with Harryette Mullen.” Interview with Farah Griffin et al., 1997, http://writ​ ing.upenn.edu/epc/auth​ors/mul​len/interv​iew.html. Accessed September 30, 2021. Mullen, Harryette. Looking Up Harryette Mullen: Interviews on Sleeping with the Dictionary and Other Works. By Barbara Henning. Belladonna, 2011.

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Mullen, Harryette. Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge. Graywolf Press, 2006. Neigh, Janet. “Dreams of Uncommon Languages: Transnational Feminist Pedagogy and Multilingual Poetics.” Feminist Formations, vol. 26, no. 1 (2014), pp. 70–92. Noel, Urayoán. “Counter/Public Address: Nuyorican Poetries in the Slam Era.” Latino Studies, vol. 9, no.1 (2011), pp. 38–61. Ortíz, Simon J. “The Language We Know.” I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, University of Nebraska Press, 1987, pp. 187–94. Pahdopony, Juanita. “Taa Numu Tekwa Huruunu.” Sing! Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, ed. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, University of Arizona Press, 2011, p. 158. Perez, Craig Santos. “‘from achiote’; ‘from tidelands’; ‘from The Micronesian Kingfishers.’” Journal of Transnational American Studies, vol. 3, no. 2 (2011), pp. 1–14. Perez, Craig Santos. “Whitewashing American Hybrid Aesthetics.” Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation, 2010, https://www.poetr ​ y fou ​ n dat ​ i on.org/harr ​ i et-books/2010/04/white​ w ash​ i ng-ameri​ c an-hyb​ r id-aes​ t het​ i cs. Accessed September 30, 2021. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. Bilingual Blues: Poems, 1981–1994. Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1995. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. “For a Bilingual Writer, ‘No One True Language.’ ” 2 Languages, Many Voices: Latinos in the U.S., NPR, October 17, 2011, www.npr.org/2011/10/17/141368​408/for-a-biling​ual-wri​ter-no-one-truelangu​age. Accessed September 30, 2021. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature. Palgrave MacMillan, 2003. Perloff, Marjorie. “Language in Migration: Multilingualism and Exophonic Writing in the New Poetics.” Textual Practice, vol. 24, no. 4 (2010), pp. 725–48. Perloff, Marjorie. “ ‘Logocinéma of the Frontiersman’: Eugene Jolas’s Multilingual Poetics and its Legacies.” Kunapipi, vol. 20, no. 3 (1998), pp. 145–63. Perloff, Marjorie. “Presidential Address 2006: It Must Change.” PMLA, vol. 122, no. 3 (2007), pp. 652–62. Perloff, Marjorie. “Whose New American Poetry?: Anthologizing in the Nineties.” Diacritics, vol. 26, no. 3 (1996), pp. 104–23. Retallack, Joan. Mongrélisme. Paradigm Press, 1999. Rich, Adrienne. Introduction. A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New (1971–1990), by Irena Klepfisz, Eighth Mountain Press, 1990, pp. 13–25. Reimer, Jennifer Andrea. “Disordering the Border: Harryette Mullen’s Transaborder Poetics in Muse & Drudge.” ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 45, no. 3 (2014), pp. 151–83. Roth, Laurence. “Pedagogy and the Mother Tongue: Irena Klepfisz’s ‘Di Rayze Aheym / the Journey Home.’” Symposium, vol. 52, no. 4 (Winter 1999), pp. 269–78. Shell, Marc. Afterword. The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations, ed. Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, New York University Press, 2000, pp. 684–92. Shell, Marc, and Werner Sollors, eds. The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations. New York University Press, 2000. Spahr, Juliana. “BREV.” Interview conducted with nypoesi, June 7, 2006. Spahr, Juliana. “Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry.” The Cambridge History of American Poetry, ed. Alfred Bendixen and Stephanie Burt, Cambridge University Press, 2014. Spahr, Juliana. “The ‘90s.” boundary 2, vol. 36, no. 3 (2009), pp. 159–82. Spyra, Ania. “Ntozake Shange’s Multilingual Poetics of Relation.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 54, no. 4 (2013), pp. 785–809. Stevens, James Thomas. Tokinish. First Intensity/Shuffaloff, 1994.

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Stock, Ann Marie. “Talking Back, Looking Ahead: The Revisionist Cine-Poetry of Tino Villanueva.” Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe, vol. 23, no. 3 (1998), pp. 237–47. Swann, Brian, and Arnold Krupat, eds. I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. University of Nebraska Press, 1987. Tardos, Anne. “How Not to Teach Multilingual Writing.” annetardos.com. https://www.ann​etar​dos.com/essa​ys_p​ dfs/howno​tto.pdf. Accessed 30 September 2021. Tardos, Anne. “Multilingualistic Existence.” NY website en tijdschrift voor literatuur, kritiek & amusement, May 13, 2011, https://www.ny-web.be/artik​els/multil​ingu​alis​tic-existe​nce/. Accessed September 30, 2021. Tardos, Anne. Uxudo. Tuumba Press, 1999. Villanueva, Tino. “Brief History of Bilingualism in Poetry.” The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature, ed. Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, New York University Press, 2000, pp. 693–710. Villanueva, Tino. Crónica de Mis Años Peores, 3rd ed. Editorial Verbum, 2001. Villanueva, Tino. Hay Otra Voz: Poems (1968–71), 3rd ed. Colección Mensaje, 1979. Villanueva, Tino. “ ‘The breath is alive / with the equal girth of words’: Tino Villanueva in Interview.” Interview by Robert A. Lee. MELUS, vol. 35, no. 1 (2010), pp. 167–83. Villanueva, Tino. Shaking Off the Dark, 2nd ed. Bilingual press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1998. Villanueva, Tino. So Spoke Penelope. Grolier Poetry Press, 2013. Waldrop, Rosmarie. A Key into the Language of America. New Directions, 1994. Wang, Dorothy J. Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry. Stanford University Press, 2014. Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. Fordham University Press, 2012. Zapf, Harald. “Ethnicity and Performance: Bilingualism in Spanglish Verse Culture.” Amerikastudien/American Studies, vol. 51, no. 1 (2006), pp. 13–27.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Claiming Their Place: Contemporary Arab American Poetry and Poetics RICHARD HISHMEH

No student of contemporary Arab American poetry can do without two essential anthologies: Sharif Elmusa and Gregory Orfalea’s Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry (1988), and Hayan Charara’s Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry (2008). Separated by twenty years, these two volumes offer a comprehensive look at what might be considered the Arab American Poetry canon to date. The former volume reaches further into the past, anthologizing the Mahjar (diasporic) poets born in the late nineteenth century and writing in the early part of the twentieth century. As its title betrays, the second volume includes exclusively contemporary poets, writing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. To understand these later poets and the field more broadly, both volumes are necessary. Perhaps more than any of the other ethnic American poets writing today, Arab American poets have the double burden of justifying themselves on both sides of the dual modifier. First, they must demonstrate how and to what extent they are an Arab; then, they must justify how, given the presumed mutual exclusivity, they are American. Whereas the grammatical function of the implied hyphen is to join, the dual modifier in “Arab American poetry” underwent even more of a threat of erasure in the post-9/11 political landscape than that to which it was already accustomed. In the face of proclamations such as that by then-president George H. W. Bush, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” the genre effectively became “Arab Poetry ≠ American Poetry.” Such is Maha El Said’s claim in her essay, “The Face of the Enemy: Arab-American Writing Post 9/11.” As El Said claims, “the attack that brought down the World Trade Center labored to increase the height of the wall that separates ‘Self ’ from ‘Other’ ” for Arab Americans. She goes on to write, “This division was enforced by the simplistic view expressed by the U.S. foreign policy, where the world is divided into ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘with us’ or ‘against us,’ ” and she concludes, “In the midst of this new schism, Arab-Americans … become trapped in an attempt to redefine their identity, and reconstruct a hybridity that seems impossible in a world that is divided into ‘us’ and ‘them’.” (El Said 201). Indeed, a broad survey of the field of Arab American poetry reveals that in their efforts to redefine their identity and to renegotiate their relationship with the dominant culture, Arab American poets have relied on at least three strategies in their works. They compose poems that are

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overtly political; poems that are intentionally apolitical and/or quotidian; and poems that evoke a prophetic style reminiscent of both their Eastern and Western forbearers. Steven Salaita’s 2005 essay, “Ethnic Identity and Imperative Patriotism: Arab Americans Before and After 9/11,” offers a good overview of the political landscape within which contemporary Arab American poets write. Salaita’s topic is not poetry, but his analysis of Arab American identity before and after 9/11 provides a useful lens for looking at the political events that inform the overtly political poems of Arab American poets. Salaita glosses these events as such: Nothing has been of more concern to Arab Americans since 1967 than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although Iraq has also been pivotal since 1990. … Ultimately, though, it can be said that no single event shaped the destiny of Arab Americans more than 9/11. After 9/11, the Arab American community, which consists of approximately five million people, was thrust into the spotlight. (Salaita 150–1) This sudden shift into the spotlight had immediate consequences for Arab Americans. In Salaita’s words, “Arab Americans suddenly were visible, and because of the pernicious intentions of various law and intelligence agencies, that visibility was not necessarily embraced. Indeed, it was often feared and deplored” (149). For Salaita, this new visibility acted as a catalyst for a paradigmatic shift in Arab American scholarship, a shift equally evidenced in post-9/11 Arab American Poetry. Suheir Hammad’s poem “First Writing Since” is a good example of overtly political contemporary Arab American poetry, and it evidences the kind of ambivalence and fear surrounding the sudden post-9/11 visibility of Arab Americans described by Salaita. Born in 1973, in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugees, Hammad was raised in Brooklyn, New York, where she and her family moved when she was five. Most noted for her role in “Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam on Broadway,” Hammad is a well-known artist in New York’s spoken word poetry scene. In addition to her own publications—a book of poems, Born Palestinian, Born Black, and a memoir, Drops of this Story— she is prominently featured in Listen Up! An Anthology of Spoken Word Poetry. As a poet and activist, she has received numerous awards including the Audre Lorde Writing Award from Hunter College, the Morris Center for Healing Poetry Award, and a New York Mills Artist Residency in Minnesota. Hammad’s poem “First Writing Since” is divided into seven parts. Early in part one, Hammad pleads: first, please god, let it be a mistake, the pilot’s heart failed, the plane’s engine died. then please god, let it be a nightmare, wake me now, please god, after the second plane, please, don’t let it be anyone who looks like my brothers. (112) While it may not yet be clear if what is happening is a mistake, a nightmare, or an inexplicable reality, what is clear is who will be made to answer, who will be held to account. Those who look like the speaker’s brothers will become hyper-visible, but the spotlight will blur, rather than distinguish, their differences. It will indiscriminately discriminate. Part one of the poem ends thusly: “The most privileged nation, most americans do not know the difference / between indians, afghanis, syrians, muslims, sikhs, hindus. / more than ever, there is no difference” (113). As Hammad’s poem and other overtly political poems on the topic of 9/11 make clear, the horrific acts of terror on that

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day further entrenched and amplified the East/West, us/them binaries that Edward Said so clearly articulated in his seminal work, Orientalism: “For Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’)” (43). Throughout its seven parts, Suheir Hammad explores the tension of this binary, attesting in one stanza to the shared traumas faced by all New Yorkers, and in another stanza to the compounded trauma of those unfairly implicated in the atrocity. Consider the tension in the juxtaposition of the following two passages, the first in the conclusion to part three of “First Writing Since”: we are searching for priti, last seen on the 103rd floor. she was talking to her husband on the phone and the line went. please help us find george, also known as adel. his family is waiting for him with his favorite meal. i am looking for my son, who was delivering coffee. i am looking for my sister girl, she started her job on monday. (113–14) The collective “we” at the beginning turns to “I” in the final lines, reminding readers of the real individuals included in the collective pronoun. The actions of the collective “we” and subjective “I” in the stanza are the same: everyone is looking for someone; everyone is stunned with grief and loss; as the enjambments make clear, everyone’s normal has been irrevocably disrupted. Compare, then, the efforts to find connection in that passage with the opening lines of part five of the poem: “one more person ask me if i knew the hijackers. / one more motherfucker ask me what navy my brother is in. / one more person assume no arabs or muslims were killed” (“First Writing Since” 115). Here and in other places throughout the poem, the speaker is affronted by the fear with which the poem began. The speakers and those like her will be made to demonstrate their loyalty to the collective; they will be guilty until proven innocent; they will be “they.” This us/them tension carries on throughout the poem until its final lines: “affirm life. / we got to carry each other now. / you are either with life, or against it. / affirm life” (117). These lines read as a prayer for a collective solution that avoids more killing. The revision here of the president’s infamous with us or against us binarism writes out Bush’s implicit call for immediate retaliation against foreign nations and, as the speaker knows, innocent Arab Americans. Instead, as the repeated lines plead, we and they together must “affirm life.” Attempts to validate the implied hyphen in “Arab American” poetry are similarly achieved in works that are deliberately apolitical, works that evoke the quotidian in an effort to demystify and destigmatize Arabic culture and identity. In their own ways, these works “affirm life” for Arab Americans. In the introduction to his indispensable anthology, Inclined to Speak, referenced above, Hayan Charara claims that to some degree, all Arab American poets set out to correct the negative and misinformed stereotypes of Arabs that persist in contemporary American culture. Charara writes, To a degree, all the contributors to this anthology, through poetry, are doing just that. Each poem, in its own way, is an act of invalidating an image that is at best misguided; each contests an uncritical representation, even in the absence of an apparent “political” reference. (xvii) A good example of a poem that, in fact, thematizes a deliberate attempt to remain apolitical in an effort to “fit in” is the poem “With New Englanders” by Sharif S. Elmusa. Elmusa was born in

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1947 and grew up as a Palestinian refugee in Jericho, in what is now known as the West Bank. His biographical statement on the website for the Institute for Middle East Understanding, IMEU. Org, a useful resource for such profiles of Arab Americans, relates that his family were among the 700,000 Palestinians displaced during the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948. “A self-described poet from birth” as his profile tells, Elmusa has taught Political Science at the American University in Cairo as well as other universities. In addition to his own poetry, Elmusa is coeditor, with Gregory Orfalea, of the anthology, Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry, mentioned earlier. “With New Englanders” is included in Elmusa’s own collection of poems, Flawed Landscape: Poems 1987–2008. The poem takes place in that most quotidian and relatable, and yet unnerving, of spaces, his Boston dentist’s chair while awaiting a filling: before injecting the Novocain into my anxious gums, he paused (Elmusa 15) These simple declarative statements seem benign, even matter-of-fact, but they do the important work of establishing the speaker as a Bostonian, an American. Just like any American, the speaker becomes anxious at the dentist’s office and must undergo the same procedures as anyone else. We all have teeth, after all. As the title tells, he is one “With New Englanders.” The dentist’s pause, however, is followed by a potentially dangerous question, a question about the speaker’s origin. As every Palestinian can relate, this question is always fraught; the answer always forces one to take a political position. The speaker in the poem reports, “From Palestine, I answered” (15). The line ends with a hard stop, a period, forcing another uncomfortable pause. What will the dentist say next? Where will the conversation lead? The anxiety of the impending Novocain shot transforms into a different kind of anxiety related to identity and place, and the desire for a kind of numbness, a political numbness, takes hold. The speaker/patient is spared. The next line of the poem reads, “How is the weather in Palestine?” As any polite etiquette book might tell, when all else fails, talk about the weather. Avoid politics at the dinner table and in the dentist’s chair; keep things civil. All but the final two lines of Elmusa’s poem constitute banal, pleasant, and deliberately objective descriptions of the weather in Palestine, including the mundane fact that the weather is “temperate” and the soil made up of red clay. The objectivity of these lines normalizes Palestine, making it just like any other place, even a place one might want to visit. Like Boston, it too has recognizable weather. As described, Palestine is made to sound like an agreeable retreat from a Boston winter. Of course, the topic of weather also anesthetizes the conversation, keeping it apolitical. As the final lines tell, much is intentionally left unsaid: “With New Englanders / you muffle the sandstorms” (Elmusa 16). As the dentist’s Novocain does for the patient, this muffling numbs and masks the potential for pain a different conversation might bring. The speaker succeeds in his efforts to remain normal, “with New Englanders,” by representing his place of birth and, by his extension, his Arab identity in the plainest, apolitical terms possible. In a broader context, the whole of the poem might be seen as an argument for the Arab American poet’s ability to write in modes other than the overtly political. Elmusa’s implication: just as there is no homogeneous form of Arab American poetry, there is no homogeneous Arab American identity.

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Considered together, Hammad’s and Elmusa’s poems offer a good example of the range in Arab American poetry from works that are overtly political to those that deliberately, even self-consciously, appear to be apolitical and quotidian. Poems that engage the prophetic tradition of poetry represent a third kind of work prevalent among Arab American poets, and these poems similarly serve the purpose of helping Arab American poets redefine and renegotiate their identities within the dominant culture. Two theoretical lenses prove useful in considering how the prophetic voice is evoked in Arab American poetry. The first is found in George Lipsitz’s persuasive cultural studies work, Dangerous Crossroads, and the second is found in José Muñoz’s monograph, Disidentifications. Both Lipsitz’s concept of “strategic anti-essentialism” and Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification” offer a backdrop against which to read Arab American poetry’s engagement with the prophetic. Lipsitz’s and Muñoz’s concepts make it possible to see the prophetic trope in Arab American poetry as something more than a mere attempt to mimic Western authors, such as William Blake and Walt Whitman, or, conversely, as doing more than playing to Western stereotypes of exoticized, mystical Arabs. Rather, these theories attest that marginalized groups, like Arab Americans, often survive, or resist, through calculated and complex intersections with dominant, mass culture. In a chapter of Dangerous Crossroads called “ ‘The Shortest Way Through’: Strategic Antiessentialism in Popular Music,” Lipsitz astutely observes: When people confront obstacles to direct expression of the aspirations and interests, they sometimes take a detour through fictive identities. These may seem escapist. They may involve the appropriation, colonization, or eroticization of difference. But appearances of escape and appropriation can also provide protective cover for explorations of individual and collective identity. Especially when carried on by members of aggrieved communities—sexually or racially marginalized “minorities”—these detours may enable individuals to solve indirectly problems that they could not address directly. (62) Building on Gayatri Spivak’s notion of “strategic essentialism,” Lipsitz labels the process described above as “strategic anti-essentialism.” Noting that in Spivak’s model, an individual or group may wish to ignore issues of cultural heterogeneity, asserting their cultural commonalities in pursuit of collective aspirations, Lipsitz suggests instead a process by which marginalized figures or groups disguise or indirectly communicate their uniqueness in identities not their own. In doing so, Lipsitz argues, these figures or groups are able to “highlight, underscore, and augment an aspect of [their] identity that [they] cannot express directly” (62). He concludes: The key to understanding each of these groups is to see how they can become “more themselves” by appearing to be something other than themselves. Like many members of aggrieved populations around the world, these strategic anti-essentialists have become experts in disguise because their survival has often depended on it. (63) Perhaps the most famous, and certainly the most commercially successful, Arab American poet Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) provides an early twentieth-century template for how contemporary Arab American poets might evoke the prophetic to these revisionary ends.1 As the body of Gibran’s work demonstrates, writers can play to Western conceptions of the East as a place of mystical For a more specific discussion of Gibran’s impact on contemporary American poetics, see Hishmeh, “Strategic Genius, Disidentification, and the Burden of the Prophet in Arab-American Poetry.” 1

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wonder in order to highlight their own cultural uniqueness. At the same time, however, Arab American poets can be seen stepping out of these essentialist roles to engage the dominant culture more directly. Gibran’s monumental 1923 work, The Prophet, offers the best example of his visionary poetics, as well as his poetic debt to Walt Whitman. In lines like, “And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge, / And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge” (33), Gibran directly echoes Whitman who in “Song of Myself ” decrees, “Urge and urge and urge / Always the procreant urge of the world.” A few lines later, Gibran writes, “But I say, not in sleep, but in the overwakefulness of noontide, that the wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all the blades of grass; / And he alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving” (Gibran 28). Echoing any number of lines from Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” these lines most clearly evoke Whitman’s own title: Leaves of Grass. By participating in Western poetic traditions and tropes, Gibran and a number of contemporary Arab American poets who follow him evoke the visionary poetics of those such as St. John of the Cross, William Blake, and Walt Whitman, in a process akin to Lipsitz’s strategic anti-essentialism. Thus, it is via a combination of essentialist and anti-essentialist strategies that Arab American poets negotiate the dominant culture. José Muñoz’s notion of disidentification provides a second theoretical model that can be usefully applied for understanding Arab American poetry, as it is particularly useful in demonstrating the ways in which marginalized groups negotiate the market from within institutions of power in order to assert their own cultural and historical validity. Muñoz’s concept of disidentification revises the psychoanalytic concept of “identification,” defined by Diana Fuss as “the detour through the other that defines a self ” (2). In order to explore the opposite notion of identification, Muñoz proposes “disidentification” as a process that simultaneously accepts and rejects dominant modes of identification. In his introduction, Muñoz writes the following about disidentification: Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture. (31) Here, and throughout his work, Muñoz demonstrates how marginalized groups are able to work with, on, and against mainstream culture in order to assert their own identities. He argues that the process of disidentification is neither wholly aligned with, or against, the mainstream, but is rather an attempt to transform the mainstream by operating within the mainstream’s codes, institutions, and assumptions. Through this delicate negotiation, minority groups are often able to achieve specific cultural agendas. Essential to Munoz’s theory is his idea of counterpublic narratives. Muñoz defines counterpublics as “communities and relational chains of resistance that contest the dominant public sphere,” and claims that “counterpublicity is disseminated through acts that are representational and political interventions in the service of subaltern counterpublics” (146–7). Muñoz illustrates the ways in which subjects use mainstream discourse to undermine mainstream values. Arguably, Arab American poets, beginning with Gibran, participate in processes similar to Muñoz’s counterpublic politics as

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well as Lipsitz’s strategic anti-essentialism in order to find their place within mainstream culture; in doing so, these poets call for significant reappraisals of mainstream values and attitudes that relate to all Arab Americans. A good example of how the prophetic voice might be deployed to these ends can be seen in the works of Lawrence Joseph. Joseph was born in 1948 among the large population of immigrant Arabs living in Detroit around that time. A descendant of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants, Joseph produced a first collection of poetry, Shouting at No One, that was awarded the Agnes Lynch Starret Prize of the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1982. In 1984, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Award, and in 1988 he published a second collection of poems, entitled Curriculum Vitae. His most recent volume is A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (2020). An attorney by trade, Joseph appeared before the Michigan Supreme Court, and he has taught law at both the University of Detroit Law School and St. John’s University School of Law in New York City. As is the case with many Arab American poets, Joseph has been able to successfully work within systems of power to bring attention to Arab American minorities and the issues that concern them. Joseph’s use of the prophetic voice is evident in a number of his poems, including, “That’s All.” This poem begins as follows: I work and I remember. I conceive a river of cracked hands above Manhattan. No spirit leaped with me in the womb No prophet explains why Korean women thread Atomic Machinery’s machines. (246) The enjambment between the first and second line of this poem creates a strong emphasis on the poet’s role as one who conceives. Consistent with notions of the poet-as-prophet, the poet’s ability to conceive does not emanate from external sources but does so from within the poet. Thus, in the next two lines, the poet reiterates his individuality, perhaps even his own godliness, by insisting on his isolated nature. In the womb, there is no external spirit, but there is very certainly a “me.” Likewise, if there is no external prophet, as indicated in the fourth line, understanding and prophecy must emanate from the speaker himself. As indicated by the first line’s thrice-repeated “I,” a central concern in this poem is the maintenance of, and insistence on, an individual, unique self. Later in the poem, Joseph writes, “Truth? My lies are sometimes true. / Firsthand, I now see the God” (246). Here, Joseph’s prophetic voice is elevated, and it becomes apparent that, through this prophetic voice, the speaker seeks to assert a sort of legitimacy. Determinations about truth and self are not to be written onto the speaker, but instead are to be written by the speaker. This anxiety about controlling truth and the self manifests most clearly towards the close of the poem: I don’t deny the court that rules my race is Jewish or Abyssinian. In good times I transform myself (247)

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This is certainly the voice of the prophet speaking, but it is not entirely the voice of Gibran’s prophet. More than an evocation of Western stereotypes about Arab mystics, Joseph’s use of the prophetic voice is an essential part of controlling his own identity. Subverting the court that seeks to control his identity, the speaker in Joseph’s poem reclaims the authority of the prophet-visionary, and “transforms” his identity to match his own desires. No study of Arab American poetry can avoid mention of the poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Nye is perhaps the most noted name in Post-1960s Arab American poetry. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1952, to a Palestinian father and a European American mother, Nye lived briefly in Jerusalem between 1966 and 1967, but was primarily raised in Texas. Her second and most noted collection of poetry, Hugging the Jukebox (1982), was selected for the National Poetry Series and was an American Library Association Notable Book in 1982. In 1988, W. S. Merwin chose Nye for the prestigious Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book is Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems (2020). In addition to writing her own poetry, Nye has played an active role in the Project of Translation from Arabic (PROTA), successfully translating a number of Arabic-language poets into English. Since 1974, Nye has worked as a “writer-in-the-schools” for Texas’s Commission of the Arts. She has served as Holloway Lecturer of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a poetry lecturer at the University of Texas, Austin. All of these positions demonstrate Nye’s ability to work effectively within institutions of power while simultaneously producing a counterpublic narrative that brings attention to Palestinian oppression and Middle East politics more generally. Nowhere is this more evident than in Nye’s work with the United States Information Agency’s (USIA’s) “Arts America” program. As part of this program, Nye has presented her poetry in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Jordan, the West Bank, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and India. Given that much of her poetry is openly critical of United States foreign policy in the Middle East, particularly regarding Palestine, her work for the USIA may seem surprising. Nye’s body of work often encompasses all three modes of Arab American poetry discussed throughout this essay, sometimes within a single poem. In her poem “Lunch in Nablus City Park,” for example, Nye is able to subtly criticize the lack of any United States intervention in the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank without directly engaging either the United States government or any other overtly political topic. The poem describes a café lunch in Nablus, a Palestinian town in the occupied West Bank that recently experienced war. The speaker, seemingly a Palestinian American visiting Nablus, pays particular attention to the pastoral ambience of the city park where she eats with a group of friends. Surrounded by an otherwise war-ravaged town, the speaker is still able to observe the mundane sky and plump birds, symbols often of peace or truth, somehow blind to the recent war; they “must have seen nothing of weapons or blockades” (Nye, “Lunch” 273). Without mention of either the United States or Israel, the poem chooses instead simply to show how the occupation of Nablus violates nature. Indicated by the failure of the sky “to mirror” the war and by the failure of the birds to see the weapons and blockades, the poem insists that the occupation of Nablus is outside of nature’s logic. The most poignant critique of Israeli occupation and Western complacence in the poem, however, focuses on individual residents of Nablus. When a woman sitting across from the speaker at the café whispers that she cannot take it anymore, the speaker replies that people in places as distant as the Himalayas are praying for the woman (273–4). To this, the woman responds, “Lady, it is not enough, then what?” Here, the poet indirectly critiques Western, and specifically US, inaction

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regarding the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. It is possible to read the “prayers” in this passage as the meaningless good intentions that characterize the promise of a Palestinian State in much of the empty political rhetoric of US officials. By assigning these prayers to people in the Himalayas, the poet underscores how lofty and distant such promises are as well as reiterating the absence of an effective, felt Western role in these matters. This reading is substantiated in the next section of the poem, where Nye embeds particular political critiques in lines that are primarily descriptive. One resident of Nablus is overheard relating that he has been homebound for a month and that the University of Texas might as well be Mars to him (274). As a microcosm of the United States, the University of Texas is a place where Palestinian oppression is likely theorized and discussed.2 Such discussions, though, have no real impact on people like this overheard Palestinian man or the disfigured beggar who shows his deformed leg, likely as a means of survival. Like the Himalayas or Mars, they are distant and inconsequential. For the housebound man and the beggar, the only US presence in Nablus is that of capitalism and profit, symbolized in the poem as “men’s shoes with air-vents” (274). For the man who can’t leave his house for a month at a time, or the nearly legless beggar, this US presence in the West Bank is really nothing more than another form of absence. By identifying with complacent Westerners through the voice of the speaker in this poem, Nye enacts what Lipsitz might call an act of strategic anti-essentialism. That is, by choosing to identify with a culture not fully her own (that of mainstream America), Nye is able to “solve indirectly problems that [she] could not address directly” (Lipsitz 62). She is able to critique mainstream attitudes toward Israeli occupation by positioning herself as part of the problem. In the poem, therefore, it is only the speaker’s table at the café that “sends laughter into the trees” (274). Like those she wishes to accuse, the poet is also unworried about the injustices and atrocities that very obviously surround her as she vacations as a tourist in war-torn Nablus. It is only in retrospect, as she is writing the poem, and when the voice in the poem shifts from that of the observer to that of the prophet, that Nye is able to separate herself from these mainstream ideals. It is through this complicated and subtle process of identifying with, and disidentifying with, American culture that Nye is able to broach the sensitive issue of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Had Nye taken this issue on more directly, she would have risked creating an even more reluctant audience than the one she already has. The final lines of this poem are where the prophetic voice that often appears in Arab American poetry is most clearly heard: For you who came so far; For you who held out, wearing a black scarf to signify grief; For you who believe true love can find you amidst this atlas of tears linking one town to its own memory of mortar   (274)

The University of Texas Press, in fact, is a prominent publisher of works related to the Palestinian Diaspora and Middle East issues more generally. Two titles published by UT Press, for example, are Giving Voice to Stones: Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature by Barbara McKean Parmenter, and Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland by Juliane Hammer. Such titles are only a small sampling of an otherwise expansive catalog. For example, the UT Press also published Gregory Orfalea’s influential work on Arabs in America: Before the Flames: A Quest for the History of Arab Americans. 2

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The anaphoric, biblical cadences of these lines place Nye firmly within a prophetic tradition of American poetry that Whitman initiates, and that Nye, directly or not, inherits from Gibran. There is also in the closing lines of the poem—“and someone with sky and birds in his heart / said this would be a good place for a park”—an unyielding optimism that aligns her with these figures. Like Whitman, who prophesized the perfection of the Union, and Gibran, who prophesized man’s eternal righteousness, Nye prophesizes an autonomous Palestinian community. Lamenting the destruction of Nablus by Israeli occupation, Nye chooses to end her poem by remembering the optimistic vision that saw a potential community for Palestinians on the West Bank. For the visionary Nye, all hope is not lost. Enacting the role of the poet-prophet, Nye calls for future generations to imagine a community of Palestinians living outside of the horrors of war and occupation. The three characteristics of Arab American poetry discussed herein are by no means exhaustive; they are intended only as a framework for what one finds in the genre. As one should expect, the field is as various and diverse as those working within it. This is the point made by Lana Barkawi and Moheb Soliman in their “Introduction to Arab American Poetry.” Students of the genre will find this one-page introduction useful if only because it will make them aware of Mizna, the critical body that publishes the journal, Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America, as well as producing the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival. Written on the heels of Donald Trump’s ascendency and in light of his administration’s controversial, Islamophobic Muslim travel ban, the authors make the following point about the field of Arab American poetry: It is vast, rich, dynamic, and inventive. There are poets like Philip Metres, who is writing polyvocal poems and weaving redacted text into his writing; Fady Joudah, who has written a book of “textus,” poems limited to 160 characters, haikus for the text and tweet era; and Marwa Helal creating a new poetic form that has the reader approach the text from right to left, as one reads Arabic. …; and the masterful Rabih Alameddine, whose rich novels convey narratives of his multiple identities: Arab, American, gay, artist, self-described misanthrope. (42) Near their conclusion, Barkawi and Soliman offer this gloss of Mizna’s mission: As a platform for Arab American art, Mizna seeks to strike this balance between needed public representation of a vilified people group, and simply presenting its breadth of narratives, cares, histories, and futures with a forthright disregard for the flattening that comes with attempting to present a united front. (42) Compare this to the mission statement of RAWI, Radius of Arab American Writers, another indispensable resource for students of the genre: RAWI is committed to a hospitality that comes from a belief that our bayt [house] is large. We are committed to creating a safe community space that opposes empire, white supremacy, racism, Zionism, patriarchy, homophobia, and all repressive ideologies that diminish the great breadth of human and creaturely being. We are committed to nurturing writers to create works that aim for our liberation, resisting the orientalizing impulses of American and Western political and literary culture. (n.p.) Such aspirations, goals, and proclamations inform many of the ethnic genres of American poetry, but at this particular cultural moment in the United States the stakes are especially high for those

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identifying as Arabs.3 Such urgency courses through the veins, sinews, and verses of Arab American poetry. The genre is sometimes political, sometimes quotidian. It is sometimes self-consciously ethnic, sometimes colloquial and plain spoken, and sometimes prophetic. At times it is experimental, breaking new ground; at other times, it is deeply engaged with the traditional American canon. Arab American poetry is Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Saudi, Jordanian, Iraqi, Kuwaiti, and North African. It is the work of immigrants, of natives born of immigrants, and of natives born of natives born of immigrants. It is hard to say anything definitive about Arab American poetry. As Walt Whitman would have put it, it is full of contradictions; as Henry James would have said, it is a complex fate. It is American; its greatest theme and object of exploration is this assertion.

WORKS CITED Anglesey, Zoe, ed. Listen Up!: An Anthology of Spoken Word Poetry. Bt Bound, 2001. Barkawi, Lana, and Moheb Soliman. “Introduction to Arab-American Poetry.” North American Review, vol. 302, no. 2 (Spring 2017), p. 42. Charara, Hayan, ed. Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry. University of Arkansas Press, 2008. Elmusa, Sharif. Flawed Landscape: Poems 1987–2008. Interlink Books, 2008. Elmusa, Sharif, and Gregory Orfalea, eds. Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry. Interlink Books, 2000. El Said, Maha. “The Face of the Enemy: Arab-American Writing Post 9/11.” Studies in the Humanities, vol. 30, nos. 1–2 (2003), pp. 200–16. Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers. Routledge, 1995. Gibran, Jean, and Khalil Gibran. “The Symbolic Quest of Khalil Gibran: The Arab as Artist in America.” Crossing the Waters: Arabic-Speaking Immigrants to the United States Before 1940, ed. Eric J. Hooglund, Smithsonian Institute Press, 1987, pp. 161–71. Hammad, Suheir. Born Palestinian, Born Black. University of Arkansas Press, 2010. Hammad, Suheir. Drops of This Story. Writers & Readers, 1996. Hammad, Suheir. “First Writing Since.” Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, ed. Hayan Charara, University of Arkansas Press, 2008, pp. 112–17. Hammer, Juliane. Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland. University of Texas Press, 2005. Hishmeh, Richard E. “Strategic Genius, Disidentification, and the Burden of the Prophet in Arab-American Poetry.” Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature, ed. Layla Al Maleh, Rodopi, 2009, pp. 93–121. Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU). “Sharif S. Elmusa: Poet and Environmental Scholar,” September 24, 2014. Website. https://imeu.org/arti​cle/sha​rif-s.-elm​usa-poet-and-enviro​nmen​tal-scho​lar. Accessed March 15, 2021. Jayyusi, Salma K., ed. Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature. Columbia University Press, 1992. Joseph, Lawrence. A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

Suggested further readings for those interested in Arab American identity and culture are Jean and Khalil Gibran, “The Symbolic Quest of Khalil Gibran”; Salma K. Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature; and Andrea Shalal-Esa, “Arab-American Writers Identify with Communities of Color.” 3

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Joseph, Lawrence. Curriculum Vitae. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988. Joseph, Lawrence. Shouting at No One. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. Joseph, Lawrence. “That’s All.” Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry, ed. Sharif Elmusa and Gregory Orfalea, Interlink Books, 2000, pp. 246–47. Lipsitz, George. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place. Verso, 1994. Minza. Mission [Statement] 2021. Website. https://mizna.org/about/. Accessed March 15, 2021. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Nye, Naomi Shihab. Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems. Greenwillow Books, 2020. Nye, Naomi Shihab. Hugging the Jukebox. Dutton, 1982. Nye, Naomi Shihab. “Lunch in Nablus City Park.” Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry, ed. Sharif Elmusa and Gregory Orfalea, Interlink Books, 2000, pp.273–4. Orfalea, Gregory. Before the Flames: A Quest for the History of Arab Americans. University of Texas Press, 1988. Parmenter, Barbara M. Giving Voice to Stones: Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature. University of Texas Press, 1994. RAWI: Radius of Arab American Writers. Welcome to RAWI, 2021. Website. https://arab​amer​ican​writ​ers.org. Accessed March 15, 2021. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage, 1979. Salaita, Steven. “Ethnic Identity and Imperative Patriotism: Arab Americans Before and After 9/11.” College Literature, vol. 32, no. 2 (Spring 2005), pp. 146–68. Shalal-Esa, Andrea. “Arab-American Writers Identify with Communities of Color.” Aljadid: Review and Record of Arab-American Culture and Arts, vol. 39, nos. 42–3 (2003), pp. 24–6. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” In Other Worlds. Routledge, 1988, pp. 197–221.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The Rise of Award-Winning Black Poets HOWARD RAMBSY II

In 1987, when Rita Dove was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her volume Thomas and Beulah (1986), she was only the second Black poet to receive the prize since Gwendolyn Brooks was the recipient in 1950. Fortunately, there would not be another thirty-seven-year wait until the next time a Black poet won the award. In 1994, Yusef Komunyakaa received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (1993). Brooks, Dove, and Komunyakaa were the only three Black poets to earn Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry in the twentieth century, but by 2020, five additional African American poets won the coveted prize. During the first decades of the twenty-first century, unprecedented numbers of Black literary artists received distinguished prizes, fellowships, and special appointments such as endowed professorships and Poet Laureate of the United States. In short, there was a rise of award-winning Black poets. Contemporary African American writers have undoubtedly made outstanding creative contributions in verse. They composed inventive poems. They produced conceptually fascinating volumes of poetry. They offered creative interpretations of history. They accomplished numerous poetic innovations. No wonder they were bestowed with prestigious accolades. Yet, the style and quality of their poems alone does not fully explain the proliferation of award-winning Black poets in the twenty-first century. Several important shifts, including changing societal views on the value of diversity, a larger number of diverse judging committees for awards, an upsurge of published African American poets, and the development of supportive, professional networks, all significantly contributed to the expansion of opportunities for recognition available to Black poets. Incremental changes begot larger changes. Dozens of contemporary African American poets are employed by or attending prestigious MFA programs, which in turn confer crucial non-financial assets also known as cultural capital. The relationships between money, politics, power, and literary prizes involve, scholar James English has keenly observed, “questions of cultural status or prestige” (3). Furthermore, the willingness of institutions to diversify their award recipients, who have historically been white, benefitted African American poets in ways that would have been far less likely in the past. Literary histories and biographical sketches on poets often mention awards in passing, as if earning accolades are merely the results of outstanding artistic output. Yet, in many instances, fellowships and prizes precede the completion of major works, and the honors facilitate career

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advancement and heightened visibility. The time period between when Dove earned a Pulitzer in 1987, and when Jericho Brown won the prize in 2020 constitutes the most concentrated period of public and institutional support offered to Black poets in literary history, especially the twentyfirst-century portion of that span of time. Book awards have been consequential to the production of literary art and to professional advancement for several poets. Despite the expanding numbers of prize and fellowship recipients, not all kinds of poets and poetry have received widespread or substantial support. An examination of the rise of award-winning Black poets also means acknowledging the emergence and development of barriers for many writers who do not win. The first section of this article presents an overview of the unprecedented Black poetry winners in the twenty-first century. Even a relatively brief tally brings the expansive, understudied big picture of winning African American poets into sharper focus. The second section explains how the landscapes of contemporary literature, shaped in important ways by the growth of MFA programs, evolved in beneficial ways for talented, optimally positioned Black poets. Those same shifting landscapes, though, have created prevalent obstacles for multitudes of poets who are less well positioned. The closing section thus highlights the losses and debts incurred by large numbers of African American literary artists seeking entry into the competitive field of contemporary poetry.

A CATALOG OF CONTEMPORARY DECORATED POETS At the outset, we should acknowledge that the awards earned by African American poets remain small in comparison to the countless honors bestowed on white poets over the past 100 years. While eight African American poets—Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Trethewey, Tracy K. Smith, Greg Pardlo, Tyehimba Jess, and Jericho Brown—have been awarded Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, more than eighty white poets have received the prize. The discrepancy between African American and white American recipients persists across many other prizes, awards, and fellowships, including winners of the National Book Award for Poetry, Guggenheim Fellowships, Whiting Writers’ Awards, National Poetry Series, and so forth. Whereas the focus of this article is on Black poets, keep in mind that white poets remain the central and most pervasive winners, judges, recipients, and beneficiaries. Acknowledgments that African American poets have been “the first” to win an award are integral components of the coverage of those writers. Steven Schneider opened an interview with Dove in 1989 by posing the question, “How does it feel to be the first Black woman poet since Gwendolyn Brooks to win the Pulitzer Prize?” The late writer Ai is often acknowledged as the first African American poet to win the National Book Award for Poetry. In 2005, Jay Wright was recognized as the first African American winner of the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. Hilary Word notes that Margaret Walker won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1942, and “it would be 74 years until another Black person,” Airea D. Matthews, won the award in 2016. Quiet as it’s kept, the histories of African American firsts indicate the nature of white exclusivity. We celebrate breakthroughs among Black poets in part because of the historical and ongoing dominance of white poets. Whatever the case, African American poets have been recipients of a variety of honors—book prizes, fellowships, lifetime achievement awards, and special appointments. Book prizes and awards are based on juried selection of a manuscript or volume of poetry in a given year. In some cases, a

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single judge, often a poet, chooses a winner, and in other cases a small group of three to five writers make selections. The National Book Award for Poetry is perhaps one of the most prominent of the honors. Since Ai earned the National Book Award for Poetry in 1999, six other Black poets have earned the award. The Kate Tufts Discovery Award is designated for first books by poets, while the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award is awarded to volumes by established poets. Recipients of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award receive $100,000 and $10,000, respectively. Thirteen Black poets have won the two awards since 2000. The National Poetry Series encourages poets to submit unpublished manuscripts, and the winners are selected by established poets. The winners receive book contracts to publish their submitted manuscripts. The National Poetry Series has served as a pathway to publication for several poets, including Sterling Brown, Cyrus Cassells, Thylias Moss, Kevin Young, Patricia Smith, Marcus Wicker, and Joshua Bennett. Like with other honors, most National Poetry Series awards were granted to Black poets during the twenty-first century. African American Winners of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award since 2000 2002: Carl Phillips 2014: Afaa Michael Weaver 2016: Ross Gay

2017: Vievee Francis 2018: Patricia Smith 2019: Dawn Lundy Martin

African American Winners of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award since 2000 2000: Terrance Hayes 2008: Janice N. Harrington 2014: Yona Harvey 2016: Danez Smith

2017: Phillip B. Williams 2018: Donika Kelly 2020: Tiana Clark

Cave Canem, a poetry organization founded by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady to support Black poets, facilitates three poetry prizes—the Cave Canem poetry prize, the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, and the Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. An established African American poet selects the Cave Canem book prize recipients, and the winners receive a book contract to publish their manuscripts. The first prize was established in 1999, and Trethewey was selected by Dove as the inaugural winner. The Cave Canem poetry prizes have been important avenues to publication for dozens of African American poets. The prizes were granted early in the careers of recipients such as Trethewey, Major Jackson, Tracy K. Smith, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Rickey Laurentiis, all of whom went on to receive various other accolades. For their annual Image Awards event, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) honors creators in music, film, television, and literature. As a subset of the literature category, the organization selects poet finalists and an eventual winner. Some of the winners, such as Dove, Terrance Hayes, and Claudia Rankine, have earned recognition from formal literary institutions, like the National Book Award and Pulitzer Foundations. However, the NAACP also bestowed poetry honors to Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and Alice Walker, none of whom are backed by primarily white-run poetry organizations, networks of MFA programs, and/or Cave Canem. Many of the nominees for the NAACP Image Award for Poetry overlap with various other competitions, but several of the winners do not.

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In 2011, Nikki Giovanni received the NAACP Image Award for Poetry for an edited collection, 100 Best African-American Poems (2010). Prominent, white literary institutions do not award Black poets for editorial projects that showcase works by multiple writers. The Pulitzer, National Book Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, and many other honors reward single-authored works. Those awards have varying criteria, and collectively, they concentrate on literary artists whose works reflect formal modes of writing. Put another way, those organizations have not rewarded and celebrated Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker like the NAACP Image Award for Poetry. Overall, awards and prizes are consequential. According to Jennifer Szalai in an article in the New York Times, “a literary prize can act as a kind of megablurb, one that blares, ‘If you read only one book this year, you’d better make it this one!’ ” Poetry is a densely populated field with hundreds of poets and thousands of volumes of poetry vying for our attention. Award-winning poets have an edge in such a crowded marketplace. The prizes they receive serve as filters, alerting reader-customers that the winning item stands out among all the rest in a given year or group.

Cave Canem Poetry Prize Recipients 1999: Natasha Trethewey 2000: Major Jackson 2001: Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon 2002: Tracy K. Smith 2003: Kyle Dargan 2004: Amber Flora Thomas 2005: Constance Q. Bridges 2006: Dawn Lundy Martin 2007: Ronaldo V. Wilson 2009: Gary Jackson

2010: Iain Haley Pollock 2011: Nicole Terez Dutton 2012: Dexter Booth 2013: F. Douglas Brown 2014: Rickey Laurentiis 2015: Donika Kelly 2016: Natalie J. Graham 2017: Julian Randall 2018: Malcolm Tariq 2019: Chekwube Danladi

Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize Recipients 2009: Indigo Moor 2010: Vievee Francis 2012: Reginald Harris

2014: Jonathan Moody 2016: Laura Swearingen-Steadwell 2018: Tsitsi Jaji

NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry Recipients 2007: Maya Angelou 2008: Nikki Giovanni 2009: [No winner announced] 2010: Nikki Giovanni 2011: Nikki Giovanni 2012: James Golden 2013: Truth Thomas

2014: Frank X. Walker 2015: Claudia Rankine 2016: Terrance Hayes 2017: Rita Dove 2018: Patricia Smith 2019: Alice Walker 2020: Reginald Dwayne Betts

Lifetime achievement awards represent another category of recognition, which provide poets with considerable symbolic and financial rewards. These awards are given to poets based on a body of work produced over time. Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Michael S. Harper, Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Nelson, and Kamau Brathwaite, for example, are recipients of the Robert Frost Medal, which recognizes distinguished lifetime service to poetry. Initially titled the Gold Medal

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for Distinguished Achievement when it was established in 1930, the award was later renamed to honor Frost, and was first bestowed on an African American poet, Brooks, in 1989. The other Black poets received the award during the twenty-first century—additional evidence about growing acknowledgment of African American poets over the last two decades. The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, another award that recognizes lifetime accomplishment, is directed by the Poetry Foundation and provides recipients with $100,000. Established in 1986, “the prize is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets,” note officials from the Poetry Foundation on their website (“Foundation Awards”). All five of the African American winners— Komunyakaa, Clifton, Nathaniel Mackey, Ed Roberson, and Marilyn Nelson—earned the award during the twenty-first century. Among the twenty-seven poets who received Wallace Stevens Awards, four have been Black poets. The rarity of African American poets earning a distinct recognition increases the symbolic value of that award for those non-white recipients. The few Black poets to receive a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Wallace Stevens Award, or a Pulitzer must be exceedingly accomplished, so the thinking goes, to earn accolades typically granted to white poets. While not promoted as a lifetime achievement award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, nonetheless selects established poets who have produced a large body of works. So far, six of the twelve total recipients of the prize are Black poets. Administered by Poets & Writers, the Jackson Poetry Prize provides recipients with $60,000.00, and “honors an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition” (“Jackson Poetry Prize”). Those who created the prize in 2006 apparently viewed an award that provided considerable financial rewards to poets as one approach to addressing the inadequate acknowledgment that their works received. At the times when they are announced each year, recipients of the Jackson Poetry Prize, Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and Robert Frost Medal receive coverage in various news outlets. Later, references to the awards become elements of the biographical sketches for the poets, enhancing the overall prestige of the writers. Jackson Poetry Prize 2007: Elizabeth Alexander 2010: Harryette Mullen 2014: Claudia Rankine

2016: Will Alexander 2017: Patricia Spears Jones 2020: Ed Roberson Robert Frost Medal

1989: Gwendolyn Brooks 2001: Sonia Sanchez 2008: Michael S. Harper

2010: Lucille Clifton 2012: Marilyn Nelson 2015: Kamau Brathwaite Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

2001: Yusef Komunyakaa 2007: Lucille Clifton 2014: Nathaniel Mackey

2016: Ed Roberson 2019: Marilyn Nelson Wallace Stevens Award

2011: Yusef Komunyakaa 2018: Sonia Sanchez

2019: Rita Dove 2020: Nikky Finney

In addition to prizes and awards for previously produced work, poets have earned fellowships designed to support the creation of future publications. Fellowships are, in some cases, competitive

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and based on applications and recommendations for proposed future works. The financial resources that come with fellowships allow poets to devote significant amounts of time to thinking and writing without the labor or distraction of full-time employment. The Guggenheim Fellowship is one of the most recognized and prestigious opportunities that literary artists seek. Nearly three dozen Black poets have earned Guggenheims since 1937. Most of those recipients earned the fellowship during the twenty-first century. The Poetry Foundation sponsors the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships. The fellowship is for poets between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one and currently provides recipients with $25,800.00. The fellowship is competitive. Poets submit applications that include an introduction to their work and ten pages of poems. About a dozen Black poets have earned the fellowship since 2013. Unlike the Guggenheim and Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships that have formal application processes, various other fellowships are based on non-disclosed nomination processes. The MacArthur Fellowship, also known as “the Genius Grant,” has a secretive evaluation process where the nominations are taken and then the MacArthur Foundation solicits a series of assessments by specialists in given fields about the nominee. Since its founding in 1981, the fellowship has gone to historians, photographers, lawyers, scientists, painters, mathematicians, journalists, and activists, among many others. The fellowship currently provides recipients with $650,000.00. At this point, six Black poets have received the MacArthur. It is one of the only major awards that has awarded more Black poets in the twentieth century than in the twenty-first century. Like the MacArthur, the Lannan Foundation and the Whiting Writers’ Award do not have formal, public applications. Instead, the organizations administer awards and fellowships by taking nominations from select writers and editors who serve in anonymous capacities. The Lannan Foundation administers awards and fellowships for poets, with the award being more lucrative and selective. The Whiting Writers’ Award typically supports poets toward the launch of their formal publishing careers. Founded in 1985, the Whiting has been awarded to approximately sixteen Black poets since 2000. Since 1936, the Academy of American Poets has offered a fellowship for poets. The winners are selected by the Academy’s Board of Chancellors. Robert Hayden earned the fellowship in 1975, Jay Wright in 1996, and Gwendolyn Brooks in 1999. Since 2005, six Black poets, including Carl Phillips, Harryette Mullen, and Natasha Trethewey, have received the $25,000.00 fellowship (“Academy of American Poets Fellowship”).

Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship since 2000 2005: Claudia Rankine 2006: Carl Phillips 2009: Harryette Mullen

2014: Tracy K. Smith 2016: Natasha Trethewey 2017: Ed Roberson Guggenheim Fellowship Recipients since 2000

2001: Marilyn Nelson 2002: Elizabeth Alexander 2003: Natasha Trethewey 2003: Kevin Young

2015: Rowan Ricardo Phillips 2015: Thomas Sayers Ellis 2016: Jericho Brown 2016: Ed Roberson

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2004: Toi Derricotte 2005: Harryette Mullen 2007: A. Van Jordan 2008: Reginald Shepherd 2009: Terrance Hayes 2010: Nathaniel Mackey 2012: Kwame Dawes 2013: Ross Gay 2013: Major Jackson 2014: Patricia Smith 2014: Adrian Matejka

2017: Ishion Hutchinson 2017: Gregory Pardlo 2017: Claudia Rankine 2017: Afaa M. Weaver 2018: Reginald Dwayne Betts 2018: Tyehimba Jess 2019: Cyrus Cassells 2019: Camille T. Dungy 2019: Robin Coste Lewis 2019: Shane McCrae 2020: Janice N. Harrington

Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships 2008: Roger Reeves 2011: Marcus Wicker 2013: Phillip B. Williams 2013: Harmony Holiday 2014: Danez Smith 2015: Nate Marshall 2015: Safiya Sinclair 2015: Jamila Woods 2016: Angel Nafis

2012: Reginald Dwayne Betts 2012: Rickey Laurentiis 2016: Alison C. Rollins 2017: Cortney L. Charleston 2018: Safia Elhillo 2019: Justin Phillip Reed 2020: Luther Hughes 2020: Cyrée Jarelle Johnson 2020: Darius Simpson Lannan Literary Award for Poetry since 2000

2000: Jay Wright 2014: Claudia Rankine 2015: A. Van Jordan

2016: Tyehimba Jess 2017: Shane McCrae 2019: Evie Shockley Lannan Literary Fellowship

2005: Frank X Walker 2014: Jamaal May 2014: Adrian Matejka

2017: Rickey Laurentiis 2017: Shane McCrae 2020: Hanif Abdurraqib Whiting Writers’ Award since 2000

2000: Claude Wilkinson 2004: A. Van Jordan 2005: Thomas Sayers Ellis 2005: Tracy K. Smith 2005: John Keene 2006: Tyehimba Jess 2009: Jericho Brown 2011: Shane McCrae 2013: Ishion Hutchinson

2013: Rowan Ricardo Phillips 2015: Aracelis Girmay 2015: Roger Reeves 2016: LaTasha N. N. Diggs 2016: Safiya Sinclair 2017: Simone White 2017: Phillip B. Williams 2018: Rickey Laurentiis 2019: Tyree Daye

Along with awards and fellowships, poets often receive special appointments, which are typically based on their previous achievements. In many cases, those special appointments include invitations to serve as keynote speakers or visiting professors at universities. Colleges and universities also select award-winning poets for endowed professorships. In 2015, Elizabeth Alexander was appointed as the inaugural Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry when Yale University established the professorship based on the gift of a donor. When Alexander left the position, Claudia Rankine,

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who received widespread attention for her book Citizen (2014), was appointed as the Frederick Iseman Professor in 2016. The abilities of poets to earn awards and other literary honors influence officials in selecting the writers as poet laureates of cities and states. Most notably, decorated poets are appointed as the Poet Laureate of the United States. As a sign that prestigious awards often lead to special appointments, Rita Dove, Natasha Trethewey, and Tracy K. Smith were appointed US Poet Laureate not long after they earned Pulitzer Prizes. The many successes of those three poets suggest that fellowships and awards can lead to additional fellowships and awards and special appointments. There is no single unifying thread binding award-winning volumes by African American poetry. Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006) includes poems that recall memories of her mother and experiences growing up in Mississippi, as well as a series of poems representing the life of a Black Civil War solider. In Life on Mars (2011), Tracy K. Smith considers space travel, explores sci-fi themes, and celebrates David Bowie. In Digest (2014), Gregory Pardlo channels and represents ideas from a variety of writers and thinkers, including Greek philosopher Aristotle, French philosopher Louis Althusser, and novelist Gayl Jones. Tyehimba Jess concentrates on the challenges confronting Black entertainers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in his book Olio (2016). Jericho Brown considers intimate relationships and the implications of state-sponsored violence in contemporary America in his volume The Tradition (2019). Several winning poets write most of their poems in free verse, while others incorporate poetic forms. Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard, Patricia Smith’s Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), and Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split (2011), to name a few, contain sonnet sequences. In Olio, Tyehimba Jess presents what he refers to as “syncopated sonnets,” poems that blend two poems into one. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014) is composed of prose poems or lyrical essays. These and other volumes offer a glimpse of the variety of writing styles and approaches. The collective accomplishments of the literary artists explain the rise of award-winning Black poets in the twenty-first century.

MAINLY WHITE READING ROOMS AND BLACK POETS In their article “The Program Era and the Mainly White Room,” Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young chart the pervasive nature of whiteness in literary culture in the United States. They specifically highlight how the profession of poetry showcases white people in ways that are not “in any way reflective of the diversity of American culture.” MFA programs, Spahr and Young note, have not kept pace with the diversity taking place in other disciplines. “While the racial identification of degree recipients in higher education in general has over the last 20 years begun to resemble the racial identification of the nation at large” (n.p.), they write, “that of creative writing program recipients have not.” Spahr and Young refer to mainly white rooms such as MFA workshops and reading series. However, we might also note the rooms occupied by the editorial staff of publishing companies and literary journals, officials at award-granting institutions, and university hiring committees. The occupants of those rooms are mainly, though not exclusively, white. In 2016, Lee & Low Books published survey results about American publishers, confirming that the industry “suffers” with a “lack of diversity problem” (Low). Nonetheless, several contemporary Black poets are

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quite successful. So we might ponder: how did they gain access and thrive in mainly white reading rooms? For one, people needed to be made aware that Black poets and poetry were worthy of greater recognition. In addition, someone needed to publicly and relentlessly critique the exclusive practices of white publishing institutions. Consequently, during the Black Arts era of the 1960s and 1970s, large numbers of artists and cultural workers asserted the significance of Black poetry and the problems of racial bias and white supremacy in fields of literature. African American artists and cultural workers often communicated their ideas and critiques in Black-owned publishing venues. The viability of Negro Digest (later renamed Black World), The Journal of Black Poetry, Broadside Press, Third World Press, and other publishing outlets empowered major Black poets to circumvent or essentially boycott many white people and organizations. The advocacy, organizing, and creative output of African American literary artists created opportunities for subsequent generations of poets. “By the time I started to write seriously, when I was I was eighteen or nineteen years old,” observed Rita Dove in an interview with Charles Rowell, “the Black Arts Movement had gained momentum; notice had been taken. The time was ripe; all one had to do was walk up to the door they had been battering at and squeeze through the breech” (715). Dove and many other poets became beneficiaries of the efforts of Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, and dozens of others. It took exceptional creative and critical work to expand American literary landscapes to embrace Black poetry and thus ensure greater access for African American poets. Another major development, which in turn eventually led to more access to poetry awards and fellowships for many Black poets, was the growth of MFA programs. As Spahr and Young point out, degrees in creative writing began to really accelerate during the 1990s. During the 1980s, about one thousand people earned degrees in creative writing each year. During the 2010s, between 3,000 and 6,500 people were awarded degrees from the programs each year. The majority of poets, from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, who pursue and earn creative writing degrees do not win awards or attain faculty positions. Furthermore, the significant financial debts that come along with earning creative writing degrees are quite troubling. Despite these problems, large numbers of African Americans attended and graduated from MFA programs. The programs facilitated entry into the broader field of creative writing, providing participants with the resources, information, and privileged connections necessary to effectively pursue professional careers as poets. In a field as crowded and competitive as poetry, associations with elite universities and prominent faculty bestowed select poets with crucial cultural capital and advantages over many others. The professional successes of Kevin Young and Tracy K. Smith, for instance, are linked to their backgrounds as undergraduates at Harvard University and then later as graduate students from Brown University and Columbia University, respectively. There was a time when the majority of established African American poets did not hold MFA degrees, but that is no longer the case, especially for contemporary awardwinning poets. The rise of MFA programs, including growing enrollment and racial diversity, has expanded chances for recognition for several Black poets and diminished opportunities for many more. It is of course worth repeatedly noting that African American poets from privileged backgrounds typically fare better than, say, those from low-income and first-generation families. Coverage of Black poets is too often silent about these kinds of intra-racial, socioeconomic differences.

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The expansion of MFA programs guaranteed employment opportunities for dozens of African American poets, especially at universities that sought at least some racial diversity among their mainly white creative writing professors. Black poets now hold faculty appointments at New York University, the University of Virginia, Washington University, Emory University, Princeton University, Columbia University, and Indiana University, to name just some. Never have so many Black poets been employed by universities with established creative writing programs. Employment at wellresourced universities allows, among other benefits, poets to financially sustain themselves while pursuing creative and professional activities. Overall, a relatively small number of Black poets are employed by university creative writing programs, but they nonetheless account for a large number of the prize and award recipients. Black poets regularly and understandably express their concerns about their isolation in the mainly white reading rooms of MFA workshops, conferences, and other professional gatherings. Addressing those circumstances led Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady to cofound Cave Canem, an organization that offers retreats, workshops, a sense of community, and other opportunities for Black poets. Since its creation in 1996, Cave Canem has come to serve as an indispensable source of support for hundreds of Black poets. The organization also enhanced the possibilities of many Black poets securing various accolades and special appointments. Similar to successful MFA programs, Cave Canem provides its core participants with information, resources, and privileged connections so essential to success in the field of contemporary poetry. This Black poet organization, as previously noted, consistently bestowed honors on poets early in their careers, paving the way for them to later receive additional recognition. Natasha Trethewey and Tracy K. Smith were among the earliest winners of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. They would of course go on to become two of our most decorated poets. Between 1999 and 2018, the organization awarded twenty-four additional poets with the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize. The initial support that Cave Canem provided poets was crucially important for what they could achieve later in their careers. Early support intrinsically provided emergent poets with boosts of confidence, and externally made them more widely known in the field of poetry. Indeed, in several cases, success with Cave Canem anticipated, if not leveraged, the access and success that some Black poets would have with major white institutions and funding agencies. There are, no doubt, many disadvantages to being one of the few Black poets in the mainly white reading rooms of American poetry. Countless African American MFA students and graduates have noted that they must contend with isolation and micro-aggressions. They are required to participate in workshops where students and professors undervalue or are unaware of important aspects of African American knowledge and culture. They pursue curriculums that uncritically privilege white or Eurocentric people and values. Professors in MFA programs have apparently advised poets to “avoid composing political poems” and basically turn their backs on rich Black poetic traditions (Smith n.p.). The disadvantages of minority status within the field of poetry certainly persist. Those disadvantages carry weight. At the same time, those Black poets with increased access to powerful white people and institutions typically possess more professional advantages and prestige. Black poets from privileged backgrounds or associated with elite universities are thus more likely to attain accolades than those Black poets who have no affiliations with prestigious MFA programs, powerful institutions, or active well-resourced organizations, including Cave Canem. Enrollment

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at well-known creative programs can serve career-launching pads for some, while failure to gain access to such programs operate as barriers for others. Finally, there are simply more viable opportunities for winning literary honors in the twenty-first century than in previous decades for Black poets, especially those with significant cultural capital. Those viable opportunities include an increased number of available options for competing and winning. Just as important, the number of white institutions willing to embrace racial diversity has expanded. Because awarding agencies often choose previous winners as judges, we now have more Black poets than ever before serving on the juries for the National Book Award for Poetry, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Academy of American Poets, and various other committees. An increase in the racial diversity of committees likely heightens the chances that the works of Black poets will be considered. Often, access and success are dependent on the compatibility of Black poets with mainly white reading rooms.

LOSS, DEBT, AND BLACK POETS In 2011, the Riverfront Times of St. Louis, Missouri, ran an article noting that poet Carl Phillips was “Running to Become Susan Lucci of Poetry World.” The article humorously linked Phillips to Lucci, who was repeatedly nominated “for best actress for her work on All My Children every year for eighteen years, and she never frickin’ won,” until 1999. Phillips was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry on four occasions, but not a winner. He has nonetheless earned various other distinctions, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, an Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Since 1994, Phillips has been a professor of poetry at Washington University, and he has served as a teacher to many emergent writers, including three award-winning Black poets: Rickey Laurentiis, Justin Phillip Reed, and Phillip B. Williams. Therefore, on a range of measures, Phillips has attained incredible success over the course of his career. The article by the Riverfront Times points, though, to the possibility of tracking award losses—an inevitability in the increasingly competitive field of poetry. For the most part, the attention placed on African American poets over the last two decades has concentrated on winners. National news publications showcased poets who won awards or earned special appointments. In 2018, four of our most prominent award-winning contemporary poets— Terrance Hayes, Rita Dove, Tracy K. Smith, and Claudia Rankine—were the most frequently referenced Black poets in the New York Times (Rambsy). Award-winning poets or poets with newly released books with reputable publishing companies were regularly invited to share their works for reading series for mainly white reading rooms. Fellowship winners were acknowledged in press releases and publicly congratulated. Obtaining information on the latest winners is somewhat easy. By contrast, it would be difficult to adequately account for the many losses and debts that Black poets incur while pursuing MFA degrees, awards and prizes, fellowships, publication in prestigious literary journals, book contracts, employment in creative writing programs, and special appointments. Moreover, the sizable financial debts that emergent poets accumulate while obtaining graduate degrees in creative writing are worrisome. Students can owe as much as $100,000, if not more, at the time of graduation. Spahr and Young began referring to many graduate programs as “debt generators” because of how expensive they were for students. In addition, they noticed that “the large numbers of students who graduate from debt generator schools tend to be more female

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and less white than graduates of fully funded programs” (n.p.). In other words, the financial tolls on women and students of color seeking degrees in creative writing programs can be particularly high. Contemporary poets without MFA degrees from graduate programs remain at a competitive disadvantage when vying for manuscript awards and fellowships. A lack of those honors and opportunities diminishes the odds that the poets will earn book contracts with established publishers. Consequently, many programs require poetry job applicants to have an MFA or PhD in Creative Writing, along with at least one volume of poetry published by a nationally recognized press. Foundations that distribute prestigious prizes and fellowships do not explicitly require recipients to be employed by universities and have memberships with well-known organizations, though, in many instances, award-winning poets do have those affiliations. Accordingly, poets without such affiliations, which is to say, those with comparatively little cultural capital are at a loss, facing considerable barriers for professional progress in the field. The significant barriers and debts that define the lives and careers of many Black poets receive little specific attention. That lack of attention is curious since the troubles of pursuing MFA degrees and attaining faculty positions have received widespread notice in recent years. A chorus of commentators have highlighted how creative writing programs contribute to debt generation while providing students with small and sometimes negative returns on their investments. Those commentators, though, rarely detail the dilemmas of aspiring Black literary artists. Instead, the coverage on African American poets almost exclusively concentrates on good news that privilege announcements, profiles, and interviews with award winners over those who struggle in the field of poetry. The topic #BlackExcellence clearly has more appeal than the more pervasive reality of Black financial debt. The field of contemporary poetry is highly competitive, bestowing big wins on some, while creating barriers to access and success for others. We have an abundance of information about award-winning poets. Their accomplishments deserve our continued recognition. But we can also do more. We have much to learn by considering those African American poets who have lost and gone into debt pursuing their artistic dreams. The practice and price of the profession of poetry are perhaps not always as lovely as the lines of verse that poets compose.

WORKS CITED “Academy of American Poets Fellowship.” Academy of American Poets. https://poets.org/acad​emy-ameri​can-poets/ pri​zes/acad​emy-ameri​can-poets-fel​lows​hip. Accessed June 19, 2022. English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Harvard University Press, 2005. “Foundation Awards.” Poetry Foundation. www.Poetr​yfou​ndat​ion.org. “Jackson Poetry Prize.” Poets & Writers. www.PW.org. Levitt, Aimee. “Carl Phillips in Running to Become Susan Lucci of Poetry World.” Riverfront Times, November 17, 2011. Low, Jason. “Where Is the Diversity in Publishing? The 2015 Diversity Baseline Survey Results.” Lee & Low Books, January 26, 2016. https://blog.leeand​low.com/2016/01/26/where-is-the-divers​ity-in-pub​lish​ing-the-2015divers​ity-basel​ine-sur​vey-resu​lts/. Mendelsohn, Daniel, and Jennifer Szalai. “Whom or What Are Literary Prizes For?” New York Times, November 19, 2013.

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“Mission & History.” Cave Canem. www.cav​ecan​empo​ets.org. Rambsy, Howard II. “Black Writers Covered in the New York Times in 2018.” Cultural Front, December 3, 2018. Rowell, Charles. “Interview with Rita Dove: Part 2.” Callaloo, vol. 31, no. 3 (2008), pp. 715–26. Schneider, Steven. “Writing for Those Moments of Discovery.” Conversations with Rita Dove, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll, University Press of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 62–73. Smith, Tracy K. “Politics & Poetry.” New York Times, December 10, 2018. https://www.nyti​mes.com/2018/12/10/ books/rev​iew/politi​cal-poe​try.html. Accessed June 19, 2022. Spahr, Juliana, and Stephanie Young. “The Program Era and the Mainly White Room.” L.A. Review of Books, September 20, 2015. https//lare​view​ofbo​oks.org/arti​cle/the-prog​ram-era-and-the-mai​nly-white-room/. Accessed June 19, 2022. Word, Hilary. “Black Genius: A Q&A with Airea D. Matthews.” The Lighthouse | Black Girl Projects, December 6, 2017.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The Fourth Wave in Native American Poetics1 ERIKA T. WURTH

In 2003, Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui’s collection of poetry Shapeshift was published. Only two years later, Assiniboine/Sioux poet M. L. Smoker’s Another Attempt at Rescue was released. These two voices were the beginning of what can now certainly be called a Fourth Wave in Native American poetry: a group of voices speaking from a wide range of aesthetic, tribal, and experiential perspectives. After Smoker’s book, mine, Indian Trains, was published, then Cherokee poet Marianne Broyles’s The Red Window came out, followed by Cherokee poet Santee Frazier’s Dark Thirty, Comanche/ Southern Arapaho poet Sy Hoahwah’s Velroy and the Madischie Mafia, Diné poet Orlando White’s Bone Light, and Creek poet Jennifer Foerster’s Leaving Tulsa. In my original article, “The Fourth Wave,” published in Waxwing, about this movement, I had no idea how far the next few voices would bring Native American poetry. With Layli Long Soldier’s (Lakota) heartbreaking, brilliant Whereas, Tommy Pico’s (Kumeyaay) funny, sharp, Native-language and pop-culture inspired tetralogy, IRL, Nature Poem, Junk, and Feed, and Natalie Diaz’s (Gila) lovely, searing When My Brother Was an Aztec, Native American poetry fully entered the mainstream of American poetry readers. Especially heartening—and timely for that matter—being that two of these voices also brought issues of Queer Indigeneity to the fore. I don’t think that Native American writing had been talked about much in terms of “waves” until my 2015 article—the only term that I can find is the one coined by Kenneth Lincoln, the “Native American Renaissance,” in his 1983 book of the same name.2 By “Native American Renaissance,” Lincoln seems to mean what I indicate with the term “the Second Wave,” and he includes in this Renaissance such writers as Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, and Louise Erdrich. We are now many, many writers past that movement. Through my investigation into the newest wave, and in looking at the previous Native writers (and more specifically in this article, poets) that have come before my generation, what emerged were fairly distinct waves of Native American poetry, dating from far

This article is an expanded, revised version of my earlier essay, “The Fourth Wave,” from Waxwing, no. 7, 2015. Most Native poetry anthologies, such as Joy Harjo’s When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020), Native Voices: Indigenous Nations Poetry, Craft, and Conversations (edited by Cmarie Fuhrman and Dean Rader, Tulepo Press, 2019), New Poets of Native Nations (edited by Heid E. Erdrich, Graywolf Press, 2018), Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by Native Americans (edited by Kenneth Rosen, Arcade Publishing, 1993), and Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas (edited by Allison Hedge Coke, University of Arizona Press, 2012), instead of “waves” tend to use region (plus loose chronology) as an organizing principle, region being the key. 1 2

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before the Native American Renaissance. In order to fully contextualize what I was seeing in the newest wave, I wanted to go back and define the First, Second, and Third Waves. What I found in looking at these waves was that there was indeed something unique about the Fourth. Briefly, as the focus of this essay is Native writing post-1945, the First Wave would be anything written by a Native person after 1492 and prior to the Native American Renaissance. In searching for single-author Native American poetry written in this time, what we mainly see are writers of prose emerging, writers like Zitkala-Ša—whose fiction has been diligently unearthed and is now being taught by scholars of Native American Literature across the country. The issues that the poets and writers of the Native American Renaissance approached are also the primary issues for those in the First Wave. Identity, nature versus modernity, authenticity, reservation versus nonreservation culture, sovereignty/land issues, racism/internalized racism, cultural/tradition recovery, history, and language are core issues. The difference is in audience. The majority of poetry— unlike prose, and unlike much of the post-First-Wave work—was published almost exclusively in Native American school newspapers and magazines, making their audience an almost exclusively Indian audience. The recently published Changing Is Not Vanishing, edited by Robert Dale Parker, is the most comprehensive anthology of First Wave Native American poetry, and it makes three imperative issues clear. The first is that, as stated, the primary audience for First Wave writers was Native American. Unlike First Wave prose, and unlike any kind of writing in the Second and Third Waves, the writers of poetry in the First Wave were under no pressure to write for a Non-Native American audience. The second issue is that “American Indians have written poetry in English or Latin for about as long as Euro-Americans” (Parker 4). The general perception of single-author Native American writing is that it is fairly recent. The fact that it has been a long-standing American tradition changes the relationship of Native American writing to American writing significantly. The third issue is that while early Indian poetry … received little attention, a great deal of writing from before 1930 has been published and discussed as Indian poetry, even though—strangely—it is not poetry or was not written by Indians. The oral portions of many Indian rituals or songs were transcribed and translated (not always well transcribed or translated) for anthropological purposes. Later a bevy of white poets retranslated these texts without knowing the original languages, arranging them in “lines” and often rewriting them extensively. (Parker 8) Native American poets have been writing for almost as long as Non-Native American writers, and what most anthologies have come to see as Native American writing, isn’t. Additionally, there are poets from the First Wave writing in a “variety of styles, forms, ideas, regions, cultures and purposes,” which makes them the most prolific poets until those of the Fourth Wave (Parker 3). There are poets like Lynn Riggs, born in 1899 in Indian territory, who might rival any celebrated American imagist poet of the period. In “A Letter,” from 1930, we can see a strong use of language, and perfect control of the line via enjambment and end-stop. The poem opens with the seemingly indifferent letter writer’s declaration that they don’t know why they should write to us or anyone, and ends with their declaration that the “pride of Lucinda” is nothing to them—a humorous case of the speaker perhaps protesting too much: Nothing to me is the pale pride of Lucinda Washing her hair—nothing to anyone:

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Here in a black bowl are calendulas, In my neighbor’s garden, sun. (quoted in Parker 346–7) The Second Wave writers, many of whom are in Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry (1988), are what would be called the writers of the Native American Renaissance: writers like Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, and Louise Erdrich (though many voices emerged at this time), heralded by the appearance of N. Scott Momaday’s novel House Made of Dawn. This is undeniably the most important wave, as they are the Native poets that are the most well-known for their work to this day, a fact punctuated by Joy Harjo’s recent appointment as the Poet Laureate of the United States. The issues at hand for Second Wave poets were multiple, but primarily about being heard. The Second Wave is when the Pan-Indian issues listed in the first part of this essay became the main issues for Native American writers and critics (and Pan-Indian issues are the ones that Native American writing becomes known for). When looking at poets like Ortiz, Harjo, and Erdrich, these issues predominate conceptually in their work. In Simon J. Ortiz’s “Spreading Wings on Wind,” phrases and words like “Eagle,” “Mountain,” “and the Earth’s People—all of it, / the Feather in a prayer,” “East, West, North, and South,” “cornfood,” “Sometime before there were billboards,” proliferate, ending with “What the hell are you doing to this land? / My grandfather hunted here, prayed.” (85–7). The themes of tradition in relationship to nature, and in relationship to recovery versus modernity, are abundant. History as a theme pervades Joy Harjo’s “I Give You Back,” where the third stanza relates: “I give you back to the soldiers / who burned down my home, beheaded my children, / raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters. / I give you back to those who stole the / food from our plates when we were starving” (73). In “Family Reunion,” Erdrich writes of “one mysterious brother / who stayed on the land when Ray left for the cities,” beginning an investigation of reservation versus non-reservation identity. She also uses a mix of English and Anishinaabe—an attempt to illustrate a recovery and use of traditional languages—with the word “Metagoshe” (16–18). Although all of these poets work within the Second Wave tradition differently, there is an overall sense of Indian identity being formed. An identity that does reside, if uneasily, in the twentieth century. This is fundamental because the concept of Native Americans for the larger culture was, and still is in many ways, formulated by Non-Natives in such a way as to deny even the very existence of Native Americans in the twentieth century. For many folks, the very word(s) “Indian” or “Native American” conjures up images of a Pan-Indian past. What the poets of the Second Wave accomplished was a sense of being alive, existing—and existing artistically, as any poet does—in the twentieth century. The Third Wave is made up of Native writers, such as Sherman Alexie, Tiffany Midge, and Eric Gansworth, working after the Renaissance and before the new millennium. In many ways, the issues that were raised in the Second Wave are still the big issues. The difference is in the greater desire to specifically locate the work in terms of individual tribal identity and politics (although this certainly exists to a degree in the Second Wave). Additionally, there is a kind of gritty, detailed realism in much of the work, and an increased interest in contemporary Native culture and life. Issues of history, language, and identity are used mostly in terms of backdrop. Irony, humor, and sarcasm enter the picture and are used in an almost postmodern/self-aware way. For example, in Tiffany Midge’s “Highway Robbery,” from her poetry collection Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of

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a Mixed-Up Halfbreed (1996), she speaks sarcastically in section 5 of “self-proclaimed shamans, plastic medicine men, Indian spirituality processed in K-mart variety packs” (67). In “Weeds,” Midge locates her work in a tribally specific manner, while also illustrating the gritty, detailed, and very contemporary aspect of Native life: “Our grandfather fed us a rich diet of leather-bounded / bible stories, displayed toothless grins at his own jokes, / his tonic of reservation humor, / recited prayers in Sioux when we were sick” (26–8). This tradition continues in Eric Gansworth’s collection Nickel Eclipse: Iroquois Moon (2000). In his “My Hair Was Shorter Then,” he writes, with postmodern self-awareness and sarcasm, of telling the story to his American Literature students of nearly being run over by an aggressive driver: “having never learned / to braid my hair, looking more / like Jerry Garcia than Geronimo // … a blonde haired young man in the front // … informed me it had to be one / of those crazy ass drunk Indians from down the road” (67). Gansworth is also tribally specific, with titles like “Iroquois Backboard Rebound Song (III): The Art of Guarding,” and the labeling of Skywoman as specifically Onondaga in “Song for a Snapping Turtle Rattle” (62, 84). Sherman Alexie likewise makes use of humor, as is seen in his “Dead Letter Office,” from his collection The Business of Fancydancing (1992). Alexie writes, I get a letter, written in my native tongue, but I don’t understand it, so I spend the night searching for a translator, until I find Big Mom in the bar. She speaks the language, but I have to fancydance for her, in blue parka and tennis shoes, circling the jukebox, while all the other Skins fall back …, calling me by a name I recognize but cannot be sure is my own. (36) The Fourth Wave begins with the release of Sherwin Bitsui’s 2003 book, Shapeshift. It marks a large departure, based on the intense interest in contemporary poetic aesthetics that has arisen from this wave. Many of the writers of the Fourth Wave sought degrees either at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where so many Native artists have come from, and/or advanced degree programs in creative writing. When I was a visiting writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts—from which several of the poets mentioned above graduated a few years before I spent my year there—there was one thing that I heard over and over, which was the aching desire to be allowed to write without the traditional burdens of Native American literary politics. The young writers there were utterly exhausted with the issues that a great majority of writers and critics had brought to the table, and simply wanted to do what every young writer wants to do: pour themselves out on the page. Issues the First, Second, and Third Waves of Native American writers were so invested in only brought tired sighs. When pressed, a great majority of my students would say that our predecessors had covered these things, and that it was our great privilege to have inherited the lack of these burdens. I understood. I’d read every poet from T. S. Eliot to Sherman Alexie and had eventually decided that their jobs were the same: to poetically render what they knew. After reading Langston Hughes’s “The Negro and the Racial Mountain,” first published in the Nation in 1926, I finally felt that I had found what it was I had been trying to voice for years: We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves. (694)

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To translate Hughes’s expression of the Black poet’s self-assurance into the Native American writing experience, the feeling was that if the art came from a Native person, it was by default Native American art, and that to worry conceptually about identity issues and politics was to distract ourselves from becoming better artists. At the Institute of American Indian Arts, I cited the Hughes essay a lot. And I often talked about poetic form. Metaphor, sound, image. These were words I used over and over, so that students had the tools to choose whatever way they wanted to render their lives, their thoughts, their words. For years, Arthur Sze, a deep image poet, had taught at the Institute and allowed students to simply fall in love with the word. I also introduced poets like M. L. Smoker, who, much like myself, wrote lyric and prose poems. We talked about poets like Sherwin Bitsui, a more experimental/deep image/epic poet, and argued that his work was Diné in form, not just content/concept. In his prose poem “The Northern Sun,” from his collection Shapeshift, Bitsui writes, “Find me on the hood of a car racing through stars, on the velvet nose of a horse seeking its dead master waiting with saddle and bridle” (16). In this poem, the images melt quickly into one another. Certainly, this is the way in which poetry works through metaphor. However, much like many Native languages, Diné is a highly verbed language, unlike English, a language where nouns dominate. In Diné living things are imbued with a kind of dynamism, so that one thing turns easily into another. In the poem “The Sun Rises and I Think of your Bruised Larynx” Bitusui writes: I think of your cupped hands tucked into the petals of a mud-caked sun. The raven browned by winter moon’s breath releases its wings, … resembles for a second the silhouette of a horse’s head carved from the nugget of coal found in your grandmother’s clenched fist. (26–7) Native identity does not necessarily have to be overtly stated in terms of content/concept, over and over on the page. If one trusts one’s audience, it’s possible to look back at the images, sounds, languages, and locations of our communities, and to poetically render what we know. Two of the writers coming out of the Fourth Wave, Marianne Aweagon Broyles and Santee Frazier, often write what could be described as narrative poetry: poems that move forward in terms of progression in time throughout the poem (although I would say that Frazier also writes almost equally in prose form). Tragically, narrative has ended up with a bad rap in contemporary poetry circles, perhaps due to the seeming ease of the form. Poet Dana Levin notes in her article “The Heroics of Style: A Study in Three Parts”: Open many of the books published by younger poets since the late nineties and you will find much to delight the eye and tease the palate … [but w]hat I can (and often do) admire about such poems—lingual beauty—doesn’t linger long after turning the page.   I’ve been wondering for a while how much of the poetry of my generation got into such a state of affairs. (45) Both Frazier’s and Broyles’s work absolutely lingers long after turning the page. But as narrative poets, their work is not work that merely topically dazzles, as Levin notes about so

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many contemporary poets above; it’s work that quickly draws you into a story. Narrative is a form that’s one of the most misunderstood, difficult, and beautiful forms of poetry because of its seeming ease. Both Broyles and Frazier paint excruciatingly lovely portraits of people from their lives within this form, and I don’t believe the poems could have been written effectively in any other. Take, for example, Marianne Aweagon Broyles’s poem “Mohawk Horse Breaker” from The Red Window (2008), about an old man dying in a hospital bed with his cowboy boots still on, a sign “of his unbroken will.” As he approaches the end, he thinks back to his youth spent breaking horses, and the same kind of sigh exhausted Pintos must have let go under his craggy weight. … I sure do love them horses, he declares, and closes his eyes so he can rejoin the world he knew before. (9) In this piece, Broyles progresses forward in time—which is the definition of narrative. However, there are images, sounds, and a lack of autobiographical fetishization of the narrator of the piece, or as Levin would put it: The decadence of the Confessionalist movement, which has informed much contemporary poetry for the last fifty years [immediately prior to the poets Levin described above] … Lowell’s revolutionary decision to “tell what happened” had splintered into little camps of disclosure. What the poems of these camps—poems of identity-politics, poems of familial violation and abuse … —had stylistically in common was a narrative autobiographical approach where exposition of subject matter often took precedence over imaginative shaping of language and form. (45) The poets of the Native American Renaissance fit into the framework and definition of the American Confessionalist movement. Although there is the argument by many Native writers and scholars that content-driven Native work is Native in origin, it is in many ways Anglo-American in origin, depending on how one utilizes a poetic form. Take, for example, Santee Frazier’s “Mama’s Work,” from Dark Thirty (2009), a poem from a speaker about their mother, a woman who has sex to feed her family. The poem’s empathy and perspective are with the Native “barefoot and brown” mother, not the white farmers who pay her to have sex in their barns on the hot days “when locusts launch themselves out of thickets” (7). “Mama’s Work” presents all of this matter-of-factly and, it seems, lyrically, lovingly: I stare down Dry Creek Road looking for her wrist and hip, her splayed hair and small toes walking out of a pone-colored dust. (7) As is the case with Broyles’s poem, Frazier’s “Mama’s Work” does not fetishize the autobiography of the speaker, nor ignore the beauty of the potential of poetic form, specifically narrative-free verse. In both poems there is a phenomenally orchestrated progression of events, united through poetic language, including intensely beautiful and unique images, culminating in powerful endings,

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and resulting in pieces that are wonderfully tender portraits of lives. I can’t imagine them in any other form. They’re fresh, lovely, and unexpected. As a poet in academia, I’ve thought a lot about why it is that narrative has garnered less respect than lyric or language poetry in poetry circles in recent years. A great majority of young Native and Latino writers have become increasingly invested in experimental poetry, though they often seem loath to label their work in any way. While I was at the Institute, there was a lot of conversation about the influence of Sze. There seemed to be an emotional consensus that experimental poetry allowed a disruption of all of the politics of the past. If there was an exclusive investment in language, poets could run from the dirty, dogmatic, content-over-form work that they found themselves so tired of. Lyric and narrative poetry had become equated with the fetishized confessional poem, wherein the author didn’t poetically render a series of events, culminating in a moment or portrait of a person, as is the case with Broyles or Frazier, but instead dogmatically pursued an historical or personal concept, primarily for—though seemingly opposed to—a white audience. This is what I had been interested in as a graduate student: the idea that Native writers in the past had been burdened with the task of explaining all Indians to all whites, resulting in a schizophrenic feeling of never allowing the poetic self to turn inward, or to imagine what one’s own family, or community, would think about one’s work. Many of the Native writers, filmmakers, and artists of different kinds that I’ve encountered over the years would say, “Look. I know where I come from.” Which is to say, I don’t need to do a lot of identity exploration, or historical digging, I am what I am, and I’m from where I’m from, whether that means that self is a full-blooded reservation Navajo, or a mixed-blood, multitribal Urban Indian. There was a genuine disinterest among Fourth Wave Native poets in proving the “authenticity” of their Indian self to a white audience; instead, there was an investment in the increasingly diverse, fascinating conversation that was happening in the Native art world, as well as a strong investment in the different kinds of aesthetics they could explore in doing so. At times, this reaction felt extreme, as there are many Native American writers from the First, Second, and Third Waves who not only transcend any kind of label, but are lovely, phenomenal artists in their own right. Artists I’d taken great inspiration from, who were in many ways the reason I’d felt that what I had to say—and how I said it—was valid. In addition, it’s clear that labeling is something that happens to every writer, no matter how hard one struggles against it. Our jobs are to accept labeling and move on in a way that doesn’t compromise the artistic vision that is uniquely ours. If one is to produce art in any public sense, one will never escape this dynamic, especially if one is part of a minority group in any way, because the industry of art is one that is, in the majority, white, male, and straight. More specifically to art that is Native American, if one is darker skinned and/or from a reservation, that artist will be asked to represent a kind of strange, “Pan-Indian,” anti-individual aesthetic; and if that artist is lighter skinned and/ or not from a reservation, one would always be labeled as “not looking Indian/not being Indian enough,” whether Natives write about identity issues in the most blatant sense or choose to write pretty, light verse about flowers. In Orlando White’s Bone Light, we see a voice that could be described as language-driven, or experimental, as there is a lot of use of space on the page; short, enjambed lines; and a move away from heavy-handed, content-driven work. Throughout, there is a deceptively playful use of punctuation, wherein the letter “i” becomes personified as a man, and “j” a woman. In “Analogy,” White writes, “See them on the white bed of a page, how they hyphenate, / how they will create

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language together” (47). This is funny, sexy, and ultimately fun. It goes right back to what William Carlos Williams said of poetry, that there should be pleasure there.3 For years, I’d taught classes where the students came in the first day looking like I was going to electrocute them, especially after using the dreaded word “poetry.” But when I began teaching books that were smart, but also fun, and didn’t ask them only to talk about content and analysis, they opened up and laughed and spoke about what they liked or did not like about the books— something it seemed they had never been allowed to do before, which saddened me greatly. Specifically, when it came to the students I had taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts, I thought about how much they wanted to have fun. To play. To write and fall in love with that act. And I thought, it’s OK to have fun. We’re learning to have fun. This is not to say that the Fourth Wave isn’t very much engaged in language, or issues of land, and the many issues that spring from these things. In fact, as to Orlando White’s work, his desire to look at the basics of the English alphabet began in a very personal place, as exemplified in his narrative poem “To See Letters” at the beginning of his book Bone Light: Everything I write requires this: Alphabet. / … / I always called my step-dad, David … / He tried to teach me how to spell. / … / He shouted out, ‘Spell them out you little fucker! I am going to hit you if you don’t.’/ … / When David hit me in the head, I saw stars in the shape of the Alphabet. Years later, / my fascination for letters resulted in poems. (13–14) So, the issues, the same issues, remain. In this sense I could understand why experimental—or, in the world of fiction, postmodern— aesthetics have become so appealing to young Native American artists.4 In any case, even though it is yet another form arising from White Academia, it is one that buries the identity markers as deeply as it can, so that those who would tear our work apart so as to make cohesive, solipsistic, academic, reductive, content-driven arguments will find themselves without the traditional markers that academia has become so comfortable with when it comes to writing by Native Americans. Even so, as we can see by Orlando White’s narrative in the beginning of his collection, even when we aesthetically move, in terms of form, if the reality of our lives remains a certain way, it will slip through our subconscious cracks—whether we choose narrative, lyric, experimental, prose, or some other stylistic form. So, where are we to take this? Do we live under the radar, in a sense, with experimental/language poetry, or do we make it loud and proud with content-driven confessional poetry? All of these forms, it could be argued, do not come from us. However, if you look at the poets coming out of this newest wave, you can see that they are beginning to use poetic form thoughtfully, and not as a crutch: narrative poems are not just confessional blathering—they are image-driven. Language poems are not just clever ways of playing with words on a page—they are carefully wrought sentences, which add up to a bigger, beautiful sensory experience. There are still hogans, and sweetgrass, and rez cars—but, they are there not to just showcase the authenticity of the poet, but

William Carlos Williams stated at a 1951 reading at Harvard for the Poetry Room: “If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem” (quoted in Nguyen). 4 This is a subject I’ve written on—this dynamic in Native fiction—via a companion piece, “The Fourth Wave in Native American Fiction,” in The Writer’s Chronicle. 3

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there when they actually add to the beauty of the poem. Take, for example, M. L. Smoker’s “From a Tin Box” from Another Attempt at Rescue (2005): In my uncle’s old army chest the teeth of an elk rattle—a full-grown elk who gave up his life one November. The chest is standard issue, safe at the side of my uncle’s bed. Every morning his toes touch down, four inches from the metal, from the strong ivory-tinted teeth that listen for this awakening. He smiles at this. He calls the teeth a shelter, a low ridge sprouting new grasses. My uncle opens the chest and gathers them into the shadow of his thick, cupped palms. He confides in them a dream from the night before, ever careful to listen for its meaning as the teeth click quietly together and sing. (39) There is no sweetgrass, no mention of the word “rez,” no historical reconstruction, no fetishization of the speaker of “From a Tin Box,” no discussion of racism/internalized racism, no issues of blood quantum/enrollment; this is prose poetry and narrative, and in that way, might even be viewed as experimental. But I will say that despite the lack of all of these things, because Smoker wrote it about someone she knows, and let the little, tender parts of this tiny bit of his life come into the poem naturally, the thing that should be in every poem—the bits and pieces that escape even the best critics, the tiny, in-between-the-lines stuff, the beautiful, intangible mysterious thing—is there. And that adds up, in Smoker’s case, to a portrait of a Native man where she comes from. The way she sounds, the images, it comes from her—she is not trying to push an agenda; Smoker is, cliché as this sounds, just writing about what she knows. That’s it. And it’s all that’s needed, just like Langston Hughes said, nearly eighty-three years ago. There are also poets from the Fourth Wave who carry much of the interests of the Second and Third Waves, in terms of a more conceptual and content-driven poetics. For example, poet Sy Hoahwah, whose poetic form seems only to fit under the rubric of free verse, uses terms like “powwow,” “drum,” “Indian,” and “coyote” freely, much as poets of the Second Wave had; and his poetry is tribally specific, like poets of the Third Wave. In “Madischie Mafia,” he writes of a number of young Native people, including Dee, who is “Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Comanche, / Kiowa, and Fort Sill Apache,” yet who cannot enroll into any tribe, but he can grass dance, bump and grind … Stoney has four wives, Indian way. He has ghost medicine And carries a small white ball of clay. He sells peyote and coke to the white boys. (2) The enjambments and end-stops in Hoahwa’s poetry seem subservient to the overall political point. There is nothing in terms of form that seems to dominate throughout this poem or the collection. There is, however, some kind of postmodern self-awareness, as there is in the Third Wave, and a definite investment in history, language, and identity, as with the Second Wave. In stark contrast to Hoahwah’s poetry is Jennifer Elise Foerster’s. Her work, although also not easily fitting within distinct contemporary forms, is definitely of the Fourth Wave, leaning towards deep image. Her poems are crisp and lovely and full of descriptions of the landscape of Oklahoma, and of the desert Southwest. They are free verse, but sing with the dramatic tension of images

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caught in sharp, directed lines and stanzas. There is distinct structure, and occasional attention to sound through end- and internal-rhyme schemes. Though there are a number of words that an outside audience might recognize as Native American, there is a gentle resistance to anything that said audience could easily recognize as such. Take, for example, “Pottery Lessons I” from Leaving Tulsa (2013): hokte  hokte  honvnwv*5 begin here with the clay she says under her breath   a handful of earth from silt-bottomed streams loosens between fingers   water echoes in an empty bowl   hokte     hoktet hecet os* I was birthed of mud  blood And bone (Foerster 13) Foerster’s poem begins in Creek/Muskogee, which is something that might potentially alienate an audience only looking for a simple connection to something Native American. Words like “powwow” or “corn” easily conjure up what people think of in this country as Indian. But if one is to begin a poem with a language that isn’t English, then that poem is telling you that its ideal audience is an insider. Then there are the lovely line breaks, which make every stanza short and tense. Additionally, the images are spare and yet rich, and the whole piece adds up to a collage, which gives us a sort of impressionistic feeling that what is being talked about in the poem is a memory, one that can only be expressed through flashes of image. In this way, the content of the poem is subservient to the overall feeling of the poem, and the images are what we take away with us rather than a statement on Native Americans in general. I would like to return to Layli Long Soldier, Tommy Pico, and Natalie Diaz, the three voices that have nearly defined Native American poetry in the last few years, beginning with Layli Long Soldier. Whereas (2017), though extremely experimental in form, is deeply sincere in content, and in that combination reminiscent of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014). It looks at the history of the treatment of the Lakota, mirroring the treatment of all Native people in this country. It is this dynamic, a connection to the past and the particular way it speaks to the future, that makes Long Soldier’s work stand out. Particularly genius are the poems that look at Obama’s apology to Native America, bending that language back on itself, redacting or repeating certain words and phrases to reflect not only the shallowness of the apology but also the legal language that has been used to justify various atrocities against Native people for over five hundred years: Whereas the Federal Government condemned the [     ],    [      ], and [      ] of Native Peoples and endeavored to assimilate them by such policies as the redistribution of land under the Act of February 8, 1887 (25 U.S.C. 331; 24 Stat. 338,

Foerster uses the asterisk to indicate a footnote with translations of Mvskvke (Muscogee) words, such as hokte meaning “woman,” honvnwv meaning “man,” and hecet os meaning “to see.” 5

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c­hapter 119) (commonly known as the “General Allotment Act”), and the forcible removal of Native [      ] from their [      ] to faraway boarding schools where their Native [      ] and [      ] were degraded and forbidden; (83) Turning to Tommy Pico; much like Bitsui’s work, Pico’s springs from a tongue that began with his native language—but a queer, funny, wonderfully weird tongue that bites back at America in lovely, rippling, and disturbing waves of metaphor. Why Pico has been such a defining, important force in Native literature is that his poetry is wonderfully irreverent—and reverent—at the same time. Without overtly trying, the work illustrates a Native tradition that was organically inclusive of a number of genders and sexualities, work that is playful and perverse, work that revels in the junk of the world and, at the same time, laments what the world has become. Simply put, Pico doesn’t care what perceptions people have of Native Americans—all is fodder for metaphor—or a wonderfully timed joke: Pendleton blankets around our legs while watching Ghost Adventurers, Hoarders, tip-toe our tongues around the past few months. Shorter hair. Sighs. …         Alan says snuggle and Daniel says cuddle n I don’t traffic in euphemisms for fuck so, stop. (Pico 56, 59) Though much more confessional or “Third Wave,” on the surface, when compared to Pico and Long Soldier, when given closer scrutiny, the work of Natalie Diaz proves to be as innovative, wellcrafted, and as much of a departure from the poetics of her predecessors—with a strong sense of their legacy, however—as her peers. With the eye-catching title When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), Diaz’s gripping, precisely crafted book of poetry about being a queer woman, about living on—and off—a reservation, about basketball, and often about American racism, captures the hearts and minds of the poetry-reading public. What’s wonderful about Diaz’s work is that it immediately captures you with its narrative— without compromising on the level of form or content. Her work gives us stark portraits of very human beings, while at the same time allowing for an organic passageway into the darkest parts of Native American history. Diaz’s is, in short, a lovely, strong voice, packing a meaty, bloody punch with every word—every syllable. It’s more than clear why, after listening to her read, how profoundly she has captured the American poetic imagination. From “Hand-Me-Down Halloween” in When My Brother Was an Aztec: The year we moved off  /  the reservation  / a /   white /   boy up the street gave me a green trash bag fat with corduroys, bright collared shirts

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& a two-piece  /  Tonto  / costume … the color of my grandmother’s skin /   reddish-brown / my mother’s skin /   brown-redskin / My mother’s boyfriend laughed said now I was a / fake / Indian … All them /   whites / laughed at me /  called me half-breed  / threw Tootsie Rolls at /  the half-breed /  me   (6; slashes in original poem) What strikes me about the Fourth Wave—and why I think that it has gone a step further than the previous waves—is that it has found its freedom; its fun; its big, beautiful poetic license. There is little interest in authenticity, or concept—that will come naturally. And this certainly welcomes in an Indian audience, and audiences of all kinds. Because of the diverse and skilled aesthetics of the Fourth Wave, there is a wonderful grace, which speaks full-circle to the way in which the First Wave was able to ignore the demands of a larger audience and simply write for the skill and joy in that skill. The majority of the Fourth Wave poets I’ve spoken about in this essay are doing things with form that I haven’t seen before; they have indeed inherited something very good. They are invested in the way that experimentation in form can simultaneously express individual poetic interest, and look to expressing the sounds and images that they as Native American poets are uniquely able to render in poetry. Something is happening, something big, or as M. L. Smoker puts it in her poem in the epistolary form, one that is written to Richard Hugo: “There’s just something about the remissible wave of a cast which feels like the biggest commitment of all” (64).

WORKS CITED Alexie, Sherman. The Business of Fancydancing. Hanging Loose Press, 1992. Bitsui, Sherwin. Shapeshift. University of Arizona Press, 2003. Broyles, Marianne Aweagon. The Red Window. West End Press, 2008. Diaz, Natalie. When My Brother Was an Aztec. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2012. Erdrich, Louise. “Family Reunion.” Original Fire: Selected and New Poems, HarperCollins, 2003, pp. 16–18. Foerster, Jennifer Elise. Leaving Tulsa. University of Arizona Press, 2013. Frazier, Santee. Dark Thirty. University of Arizona Press, 2009. Gansworth, Eric. Nickel Eclipse: Iroquois Moon: Poems and Illustrations. Michigan State University Press, 2000. Hoahwah, Sy. Velroy and the Madischie Mafia. West End Press, 2009. Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The Nation, vol. 122, no. 3181 (June 23, 1926), pp. 692–4. Levin, Dana. “The Heroics of Style: A Study in Three Parts.” American Poetry Review, vol. 35, no. 2 (2006), pp. 45–7. Lincoln, Kenneth. Native American Renaissance. University of California Press, 1983. Long Soldier, Layli. Whereas. Minneapolis, MN: Greywolf, 2017.

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Midge, Tiffany. Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary Of A Mixed-Up Halfbreed. Greenfield Review Press, 1996. Niatum, Duane, ed. Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry. Harper San Francisco, 1988. Nguyen, Sophia. “Poetry, Voiced,” Harvard Magazine, July–August 2017. https//www.harv​ardm​agaz​ine. com/2017/07/poe​try-voi​ced. Ortiz, Simon J. “Spreading Wings on Wind.” Going for the Rain: Poems. Harper & Row, 1976, pp. 85–7. Parker, Robert Dale, ed. Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of Early American Indian Poetry to 1930. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pico, Tommy. IRL. Birds, LLC, 2016. Smoker, M. L. Another Attempt at Rescue. Hanging Loose Press, 2005. White, Orlando. Bone Light. Red Hen Press, 2009. Wurth, T. Erika. Indian Trains. West End Press, 2007. Wurth, T. Erika. “The Fourth Wave.” Waxwing, no. 7 (2015). https//wax​wing​mag.org/items/344.php. Wurth, T. Erika. “The Fourth Wave in Native American Fiction.” Writer’s Chronicle, vol. 48, no. 5 (2016), n.p.

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Recent Trends in Jewish American Poetry NORMAN FINKELSTEIN

Here is a brief section of “Notes on the Spring Holidays” by Charles Reznikoff that appears in his Inscriptions: 1944–1956 (1959). The section is subtitled “Hanukkah”: In a world where each man must be of use and each thing useful, the rebellious Jews light not one light but eight— not to see by but to look at. (242) An entire essay could be written about these brief lines, but as an introduction to recent trends in Jewish American poetry, they encapsulate for us some of the most salient tensions in the field. Reznikoff (1894–1976), one of the most important Jewish American poets of the twentieth century, has the modernist talent for condensing complex ideas into brief, epigrammatic verses, part haiku, part comic one-liner. The holiday of Hanukkah celebrates “rebellious Jews,” and the poet relates this rebelliousness to the Jewish tendency to resist conformity and instrumentality, the view that “each man must be of use” and “each thing useful.” That resistance, which we would usually associate with politics (in this case, the Maccabees’ successful revolt against the Seleucid Empire), is ironically presented in the poem as an aesthetic gesture. The lighting of the menorah, which memorializes the miracle of the oil that lasts for eight days, is traditionally seen as a sign of divine grace and support for the Maccabees’ military victory. But for Reznikoff, what distinguishes the menorah’s light is that it is beautiful—it is something to “look at”—and therein lies its rebellious power. It is a work of art, not a useful thing, but paradoxically, it is in its aesthetic qualities that its usefulness may be found. Yet as Reznikoff knows full well, the menorah is a symbol of Jewish faith in redemptive history, and in that respect, it also serves a very important religious and social function. And so, by extension, does his poem. This tension or paradox strikes me as crucial to the Jewish American poet’s search for meaning. As in the case of Reznikoff ’s menorah, what sort of light does a Jewish American poem cast? Is it something to see by or to look at? Does it illuminate Jewish experience? American experience? Jewish American poets are acutely aware of being in diaspora, but at the same time largely at home in American culture. They understand that their poetry, as Alan Grossman writes about Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, is a “mixture of nationalism and ethnicism” which “represents the peculiar

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position of the American Jewish poet who regards himself as simultaneously native and, in a special sense that always pertains to the Jew, alien” (155). But they also understand about Jewish American poetry, as Grossman concludes, that “the only significant Jewish poetry will also be a significant American poetry” (158). As American works of art, the poems that many of these poets have to offer are also insistent on their Jewishness. As another important poet-critic, Michael Heller, puts it in “Diasporic Poetics,” “What is religious, after all, are the very things that question the boundaries of our being, which enable a traverse of psychic chasms, of difference and otherness” (227). This statement appears in an essay that pursues the secular and the religious aspects of Objectivist poetry such as Reznikoff ’s—a pursuit through the streets of New York, America’s greatest city, which, not accidentally, is also a center of modern Jewish life.1 Likeness and difference, the secular and the religious, American experience and Jewish tradition, homeland and diaspora: these are the palpable tensions that inspire and define so much Jewish American poetry. Consider “New York Notes,” a twenty-first-century poem by Harvey Shapiro (1924–2013): 1. Caught on a side street in heavy traffic, I said to the cabbie, I should have walked. He replied, I should have been a doctor. 2. When can I get on the 11:33 I ask the guy in the information booth at the Atlantic Avenue Station. When they open the doors, he says. I am home among my people. (221) In what respects is this a Jewish poem? It is certainly a New York poem, and the characters (in every sense of the term!) on whom it focuses are real New York types. But are the wise-guy cabbie and man in the information booth Jews? There’s no reason to assume so, given the ethnic diversity of modern New York. Their aggressive repartee, however, partakes of a certain kind of Jewish humor (I’m reminded in particular of comic Jackie Mason), and it is precisely this attitude with which the poet identifies. Stuck in the cab or waiting for the train, Shapiro knows he is “home among my people.” Arguably, Jewish and New York identities overlap through a style, an affect, that has its origins at least partly in the world of Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Through the palpable Jewish influence upon a great American city, a double sense of self, edgy, syncopated (Shapiro was a great jazz fan, and we feel it in his cadence), but oddly comfortable, emerges. The tensions I identify with Jewish American poetry (which extend, of course, to Jewish American literature in general) become more overt in “A Response to Jehuda Halevi,” Philip Terman’s (b.

For more about these issues, you may wish to read my Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination (Hebrew Union College Press, 2019). 1

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1957) decidedly Jewish American response to the great medieval Sephardic poet and commentator. Terman opens his poem quoting Halevi’s rhetorical question before responding: “Is it well that the dead should be remembered, And the Ark and the Tablets forgotten?” Yes, Jehuda, I would rather recall the business cards of my father’s used car lot than the five books and all their commentaries, the recipe of my grandmother’s kuchin than the Kabbalah and its interpretations, her delicate matzo balls than all of the much-sought-after mystical masterpieces (96) Here, the American lives and memories of earlier post-immigration Jewish generations take on a kind of sanctity, which outweighs the religious inheritances we, along with Halevi, would assume to be fundamental to religious faith. Terman’s autobiographical speaker risks sentimentality by mentioning his grandmother’s “delicate matzo balls,” but he negotiates the apparent opposition between lived experience and traditional belief with great skill as he acknowledges the dead, “whose words accent my speech, / whose motions choreograph my gestures” (96). As Terman realizes, it is difficult to draw the line between genetics and culture in these matters of inheritance; likewise, in the even more nuanced conclusion of the poem, he declares that the souls of the dead are more present than the things of this world “which, like the ark and tablets, / hold their form in bodies of beauty / then dissolve, indistinguishable from the dust” (96). The spiritual power of the ark and the tablets (which I take to be metonymic for the religious authority of Torah) is equal to the spiritual power of the poet’s dead. Both “hold their form in bodies of beauty.” It may well be that Terman’s poem in itself becomes another such beautiful form, enfolded in Jewish tradition while at the same time renewing and revising it. Jewish American poetry in the twenty-first century becomes a revisionary practice, drawing on but also challenging the breakthroughs and accomplishments of twentieth-century Jewish poets both in America and abroad. For example, Chana Bloch (1940–2017), throughout her career, writes ironic feminist poems that engage Jewish customs and beliefs, rethink episodes from the Hebrew Scriptures in a style reminiscent of Midrash, and lovingly play with the tensions between Old World Jewry and post-immigration culture. “The New World,” for example, wreaks havoc with nostalgic Jewish American myths of shtetl life in Russia and of success in America, yet also manages to convey the poet’s love and respect for both. The poem is about her Uncle George, who “killed a man and was proud of it” (163). When someone came at him with a knife in Flatbush, her uncle knocked the man to the ground and the hard street “finished the job.” Yet Old World Jewish life was even more dangerous. George as a boy watched a Cossack chase his father with an ax (163). Did life improve for Uncle George when he emigrated? Of course it did. Bloch describes an Americanized Uncle George as “a good-looker in a pin-striped suit / and wingtip shoes” (163).

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Yet there is something unsettling about Bloch’s understated, matter-of-fact tone that leads us to question the standard, idealized narrative of Jewish immigrant life. Despite Uncle George’s patriotic American axioms, he has learned the necessity of meeting violence with violence; if not quite Isaac Babel’s Benya Krik, he is certainly one tough Jew. Bloch celebrates his manly strength, and seems to accept the appetites and opportunism that enable him to thrive in the New World. There is a kind of hard-headed Jewish realism here that Bloch makes her own. Bloch’s Uncle George seems at home in America. Taking advantage of what it has to offer, especially compared to the Old World, he is comfortable in his success, relatively assimilated, and hardly conscious of being a Jew in diaspora. But the existential or spiritual condition of diaspora often weighs heavily on Jewish American poets; it suffuses many of the poems of Henry Weinfield (b. 1949), as in his beautiful elegy for his father, “My Father Was a Wandering Aramaean”: You shall make this response before the Lord your God: “A wandering Aramaean was my father; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.” (Deuteronomy 26:5) My father was a wandering Aramaean, Bordering upon the Gentile and the Jew. The promised land was never his to stay in, He had no church or synagogue to pray in – Music was the religion that he knew. My father was a wandering Aramaean, Enlightened by the darkness that he found. He never lifted a triumphal paean: No one is chosen—Hebrew, Greek, or pagan— The self-same cloud encompasses us round. My father was a wandering Aramaean, Not reconciled or reconcilable. Whether in Egypt or the deep Judaean Plain, or Sheol where the shades complain, The rigor of his refusals rings out still.  (Weinfield 1) Note how a single rhyme sound, the feminine rhyme on “Aramaean,” controls the sonic structure of the poem: each of the three five-line stanzas has the same first line and is rhymed x/a/x/x/a. The rhymes on “Aramaean” resonate with a bittersweet melancholy. Resigned and mournful, the music of the poem, with its long vowel sounds and slow, measured cadence, subtly imbues us with an understanding of the historical vicissitudes that have shaped Jewish life for thousands of years, but which also make this, paradoxically, an intensely personal poem. In the foreword to A Wandering Aramaean, his book of Passover poems and translations in which the elegy appears, Weinfield notes that “My Father Was a Wandering Aramaean” “came directly from the verse in Deuteronomy that forms the poem’s epigraph,” though it only dawned upon him as a poem that had to be written when he was at a friend’s Passover seder (xiii). He continues:

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The line, “My father was a wandering Aramaean,” has a double meaning in the poem, and it was probably this that was initially so compelling. If “father” is a metaphor (as it is in the biblical text), then “Aramaean” has a literal meaning; if “father” is taken literally, however, then “Aramaean” becomes a metaphor. The poem is, among other things, an elegy for my own father. (xiii) Arguably, much of the Passover celebration and seder ritual are contingent on one fundamental biblical commandment: Remember. Jews are commanded to remember how the Lord freed them from bondage; they remember the Exodus; and they remember all that God did for them in bringing them to the Promised Land. The appearance of the verse from Deuteronomy in the Passover Haggadah begins an interpretive recitation of the Hebrews’ experience in Egypt, including their enslavement and subsequent liberation. The Jews of the Bible are not usually referred to as “Aramaeans,” who may indeed, as Weinfield would have it, be understood as “bordering upon the Gentile and the Jew.” Weinfield’s own father, Mortimer Weinfield (1912–1987), was an assimilated, highly cultured, music-loving Montreal attorney, and thus, from a traditional Jewish standpoint, bordered somewhat differently between Gentile and Jew. We are dealing here, then, with the modern question of Jewish Enlightenment, which entails a loss of religious faith and observance and its replacement (or at least, displacement) by Western culture. This secularization and aesthetization of faith accounts for Weinfield’s declaring that “Music” was “the religion” that his father knew. His father, in short, was a modern secular Jew. But the dialectic of Enlightenment (to borrow the phrase of Adorno and Horkheimer) inevitably leads to an understanding of darkness—the darkness of modern Jewish history. This darkness is inextricably entwined with the post-Enlightenment bourgeois Jewish love of Western culture, however much anti-Semites, claiming to be the true representatives of Western culture, expressed (and still express) disdain for intellectual, art-loving, assimilated Jews. The knowledge of the modern “Aramaean,” therefore, is precisely what Weinfield has repeatedly insisted upon: “No one is chosen—Hebrew, Greek, or pagan— / The self-same cloud encompasses us round.” The same ambivalences, the same contradictions, manifest themselves when Jewish American poets turn more directly to matters of religion. In “At the Wailing Wall,” a sonnet by Jacqueline Osherow (b. 1956), the poet takes her daughters on a visit to Judaism’s holiest site, expressing a range of mixed feelings, attitudes, and beliefs: I figure I have to come here with my kids, though I’m always ill at ease in holy places— the wars, for one thing—and it’s the substanceless that sets me going: the holy words. Though I do write a note—my girls’ sound future (there’s an evil eye out there; you never know)— and then pick up a broken-backed siddur, the first of many motions to go through. Let’s get them over with. I hate this women’s section almost as much as that one full of men wrapped in tallises, eyes closed, showing off. But here I am, reciting the Amida anyway. Surprising things can happen when you start to pray; we’ll see if any angels call my bluff. (62)

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The charm of Osherow’s off-kilter sonnet, with its extensive use of slant rhyme, and frequent drifts away from the standard iambic pentameter, obscures the speaker’s really penetrating religious doubts and equally strong affirmations of her faith. A modern feminist, she bridles against the traditional separation of men and women worshipping at the Wall, and the men’s piety, which she sees as an affectation. Her other issues are perhaps even more profound: the long history of political violence at holy places, especially in Israel, in addition to what she calls “the substanceless” of “the holy words.” I take this to mean the abstraction of the language of prayer, and the rote manner of its recitation, which is in ironic contrast to the most concrete evidence of Jewish faith, worship at the one remaining wall of the Second Temple. Nevertheless, Osherow is willing to go through the motions: following tradition, she inserts a note in the Wall, a request for “my girls’ sound future,” half-seriously concerned about the “evil eye.” Furthermore, she recites the Amida, the central prayer of the Jewish liturgy, which praises God’s power and love, and includes individual and communal requests for aid and sustenance—and as she does so, the reader has to wonder whether the poet is merely going through the motions as she claims. The sonnet’s sestet is particularly revealing in this regard. At the volta, Osherow declares “Let’s get them [the motions] over with.” She rhymes “section” and “men” (lines 9–10), and then “off,” “anyway,” “start to pray,” and “bluff ” (lines 11–14). The only full rhyme is lines 12–13: But here I am, reciting the Amida anyway. Surprising things can happen when you start to pray (62) Not accidentally, this is the fullest, least ambivalent expression of faith in the poem. The last line, “We’ll see if any angels call my bluff,” with “bluff ” an off-rhyme of line 11, describing the supposedly pious men “showing off,” reiterates the poet’s doubt. If any angels call her bluff, will she be revealed as an agnostic, a doubter at the Wailing Wall? Is her appearance of faith any different from the show of the men “wrapped in tallises”? As is so often the case with modern Jewish poetry, we leave the poet suspended between doubt and belief, modernity and tradition. A more esoteric poem that presents this same in-between state is “Song of the Shattering Vessels,” by Peter Cole (b. 1957). The title refers to the mystical theory of creation propounded by the sixteenth-century Kabbalist Isaac Luria. As Cole writes in his note to the poem, “in order for God to create the universe, He first had to open a void within Himself to make room for creation. He then sent light through that void into vessels He’d prepared to channel the divine emanation. The light proved too powerful, however, and some of the vessels shattered—scattering sparks of divine light throughout the cosmos” (116). According to Lurianic Kabbalah, it is the task of humanity to gather up the sparks in order to move the world toward a state of restoration or reintegration, and as Cole tells us, “This dynamic of contraction and expression, rupture and restoration describes not only God’s primordial creation, but all acts of ongoing creation.” It also serves as an apt image for the work of the modern Jewish poet. “Song of the Shattering Vessels” itself consists of seven rhymed quatrains, all but the first ending with a two-line refrain that uses the phrases “coming together” and “falling apart.” Here are the first four stanzas: Either the world is coming together or else the world is falling apart—

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   here—now—along these letters,    against the walls of every heart. Today, tomorrow, within its weather, the end or beginning’s about to start—    the world impossibly coming together    or very possibly falling apart. Now the lovers’ mouths are open— maybe the miracle’s about to start:    the world within us coming together    because all around us it’s falling apart. Even as they speak, he wonders, even as the fear departs:    Is that the world coming together?    Can they keep it from falling apart? (25) In addition to the Lurianic myth of the shattering vessels, Cole also invokes Kabbalistic beliefs in the primal creative power of the alphabet and “the likening of speech to a kiss” (116). Erotic desire, expressed in either the lovers’ spoken address or in their kiss, has the potential to bind the world or to unbind it. In the abstract, we may understand the divine rhythm of “rupture and restoration” as a law that governs the cosmos, but for the individual, and for the human couple, this dynamic can bring us together or wrench us apart. In the rest of the poem, The image, gradually, is growing sharper; now the sound is like a dart:    It seemed their world was coming together,    but in fact it was falling apart. That’s the nightmare, that’s the terror, that’s the Isaac of this art—    which sees that the world might come together    if only we’re willing to take it apart. The dream, the lure, isn’t an answer that might be plotted along some chart—    as we know the world that’s coming together    within our knowing’s falling apart. (25–6) Whether the world of the lovers is coming together or falling apart, what seems to be most important is taking the risk, terrifying as it may be, of losing love, of the vessels shattering—“if only we’re willing to take it apart.” Cole names this “the Isaac of this art” (26), referring to Isaac Luria, the revered rabbi who first posited this mystical rhythm within the Godhead, but also to the biblical figure of Isaac, implying the nightmare or terror of sacrifice, again an awful risk. The poem itself

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must be willing to fall apart, as if its very art is being offered up on the altar in the hope of universal restoration, of tikkun olam, which indeed can’t be plotted on any chart. In pursuit of gnosis, this esoteric knowledge, again we find ourselves caught between doubt and belief, anticipating catastrophe while hoping for renewal, both cosmic and personal. The weaving of the spiritual and the erotic is a familiar theme in many poetic traditions, and as Cole, who has produced a magnificent volume of translations of Kabbalistic poetry, knows full well, it is fundamental to Jewish mystical literature. Ilya Kaminsky (b. 1977) handles the theme somewhat differently, setting love and spirituality at odds in order to arrive at a transgressive but deeply illuminating vision of modern Jewish life. Kaminsky, who emigrated from Ukraine in 1993, has a more troubled sense of Jewish identity, and offers a different narrative from Jewish poets who are second- and third-generation Americans. In the sequence “Natalia,” from his book Dancing in Odessa, Kaminsky ponders a secular love affair in contrast to Jewish religious practice and belief: “On the night I met her, the Rabbi sang and sighed, / god’s lips on his brow, Torah in his arms. / —I unfastened her stockings, worried // that I have stopped worrying” (31). The Rabbi’s love of God is expressed in erotic terms (the divine kiss, the embrace of the Torah), and coincides with the first encounter between the poet and his lover, who leaves “her slippers in my shower, in my Torah, / her slippers in each sentence I spoke” (31). Conversely then, as his lover enters his life, it is as if the mundane items around him become Holy Writ, and whatever pertains to her mystically enters his speech. The poem ends by emphasizing the opposition of the sacred and the profane, as well as their ineluctable reciprocity: A serious woman, she danced without a shirt, covering what she could. We lay together on Yom Kippur, chosen by a wrong God, the people of a book, broken by a book. (31) The frank sexuality of this “serious woman” proves overwhelming to the poet. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, holiest day of the Jewish calendar, when all good Jews should be fasting and praying, finds the lovers lying together, “chosen by a wrong God.” Is it the Jewish God, whom they apparently reject? Is it the god of love, who has instilled their desire within them? Atonement means reparation for sin, as well as the reconciliation of God and person. The lovers “atone” insofar as they are reconciled, brought together; these two “people of a book” (i.e., Jews) are “broken by a book,” for they follow the laws of a different Torah, which has led them away from their original faith. Yet the metaphor of—and the belief in—a “book” remains. For Kaminsky, our lives, however tempestuous they may be, are still inscriptions: as Jews believe, our fates are written and sealed in a book. Contemporary Jewish American poets hold tight to this vision of the book, and to the magical powers of the letters that comprise it. “The matter of the letters comprises the forms of all created beings, and you will not find a form that does not have an image of the letters”: these words of the thirteenth-century kabbalist Jacob ben Sheshet serve as one of the epigraphs to Aleph, the first book of poems by Tirzah Goldenberg (b. 1985). Goldenberg’s radically fragmented and elliptical style owes much to a tradition that may be traced to perhaps the greatest religious revisionist in American poetry, Emily Dickinson, and the most important of her recent descendants, the archivally obsessed Susan Howe. But Goldenberg (who was raised in an Orthodox community in suburban Philadelphia, but now lives in a small town in the state of Washington) gives Dickinson’s ellipses and Howe’s archival poetics a distinctly Jewish twist. One section of Aleph consists of

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brief, fragmentary poems which Goldenberg describes as “sifted from the language of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” the most ancient source of the Jewish biblical canon (72). These siftings from the original Book are concerned with prophecy and the prophetic vocation, the role of the nabi (prophet or proclaimer) which is never far from that of the Jewish poet: “prophets spoke / a stranger issued / from my mouth / its faithful witness” (27). Goldenberg understands the traditional reluctance of the prophet, as well as the uncanny experience of both poet and prophet when the voice of a stranger, an Other, issues forth from one’s mouth. She becomes the “faithful witness” of this experience. Archaeologist, archivist, scribe, psalmist, prophet: in a remarkably abbreviated set of lyrics, she plays all the roles: the season engraved the fruit of praise I will sound pipe measure I will enter my bounds I will say Author Fountain Source Summit before I move before I go out (34) In these lines, the poet agrees to “enter my bounds”; she binds herself to her “Author” (who is both herself and the Other) in a poetic covenant that is also the guarantor of her belief. A Jewish visionary moving through an American landscape toward the Source and Summit of her inspiration, Goldenberg, in her “elfin tefillin” (54), “like a bird driven far / for a broken vessel” (36), confirms what we have seen Allen Grossman declare—that “the only significant Jewish poetry will also be a significant American poetry.”

WORKS CITED Bloch, Chana. Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems 1980–2015. Autumn House Press, 2015. Cole, Peter. The Invention of Influence. New Directions, 2014. Finkelstein, Norman. Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination. Hebrew Union College Press, 2019.

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Goldenberg, Tirzah. Aleph. Verge Books, 2017. Grossman, Allen. “The Jew as an American Poet: The Instance of Ginsberg.” The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic of the Poetic Principle. University of Michigan Press, 1997, pp. 150–8. Heller, Michael. “Diasporic Poetics.” Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections, ed. Jonathan N. Barron and Eric Murphy Selinger, Brandeis University Press, 2000, 216–29. Kaminsky, Ilya. Dancing in Odessa. Tupelo Press, 2004. Osherow, Jacqueline. The Hoopoe’s Crown. BOA Editions, 2005. Reznikoff, Charles. The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918–1975, ed. Seamus Cooney, Black Sparrow / David R. Godine, 2005. Shapiro, Harvey. The Sights along the Harbor: New and Collected Poems. Wesleyan University Press, 2006. Terman, Philip. Rabbis of the Air. Autumn House Press, 2007. Weinfield, Henry. A Wandering Aramaean: Passover Poems and Translations. Dos Madres Press, 2012.

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What Is the Queer Confessional? JAN MARAMOT RODIL

When I write the term queer confessional, what does that neologism even mean? Who are the poets performing what is ostensibly confessional work, and what does that term imply regarding the complex valences of contemporary American poetry from the late twentieth century to the present moment? In attempting to define the term, I turn toward two particular poets who will prove useful in my foregrounding of what a queer confessional could potentially mean. Henri Cole and Frank Bidart are those poets, both of whom have been inspired by and are in dialogue with poets who are closely tied to the confessional movement such as Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Both have also been in dialogue with a long queer history of American poetics, taking inspiration from poets such as Hart Crane. There is admittedly an irony in foregrounding any definition of queer confessional by utilizing Henri Cole’s poetry; he has displayed a reticence to use the term “confessional” himself. In an interview for the Paris Review, he remarks that confessional poetry seems “more diary-like and confined to the here and now and without much aesthetic dignity.” Yet, his hesitance with the term precisely provides the opportunity to queer the confessional mode, and opens up an opportunity to not just simply chart a new form of poetics, but to trouble and queer the assumptions that arise when one hears the word “confessional.” In doing so, one finds that defining the queer confessional must also mean troubling the notion of an ostensibly stable truth, and it also expands the possibilities that confessional poetics offers into multitudes. Perhaps given that expansion of meanings, we can foreground the possibility of revising what seems to be an instinctual distrust regarding confessional poetics to find that its history is more deeply imbricated in queer modalities than has been assumed. Through an analysis of Henri Cole’s poems, and then Frank Bidart’s as well, this essay charts the existence of a new kind of confessional poetics that resists the notion of what Miranda Sherwin in “Confessional” Writing and the Twentieth-Century Literary Imagination identifies as an association “with private, self-revelatory impulses that are insufficiently and transparently transformed into art” (15). These “private, self-revelatory impulses” provide one example of how confessional poetry is often received in literary criticism, with the implication that these impulses are “lesser” in literary value. However, reducing confessional poetics to a self-centered modality does not fully account for the political and queer possibilities of confessional poetry. Thus, I argue for the existence of a queer confessional mode through a close analysis of Cole’s verse, which manifests an acceptance of contradictions and a preoccupation with in-betweenness. It is critical in reading confessional poetics to take stock of an autobiographical lens that considers the poet’s life experiences in sync with their written verse. However, a queer confessional model destabilizes an over-reliance on

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autobiographical “truth.” Queer confession espouses a “truth” that exists in constant conflict with itself and doubts its own existence via contradiction. The acceptance of an unstable truth from unstable life is in turn an acceptance of both “self-love” and “self-hate,” a queer configuration that is articulated by a confessional mode. To begin to identify how the queer confessional manifests in Cole’s poetry, we need to register its articulation of an Apollonian-Dionysian literary dynamic. The Apollonian-Dionysian literary framework is a model that allows for Cole to engage in a poetics of liberation that informs the queer confessional. From a literary viewpoint, the Apollonian-Dionysian framework operates as a juxtaposition of seemingly opposing forces similar to a binary. The Apollonian is presented as an orderly schema while the Dionysian pulses with discordant language. For Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, these impulses must retain a delicate balance. Yet Cole’s poetry deliberately blurs the line between both categories. He utilizes Apollo’s order and Dionysus’s disorder in tandem to create a framed disorder. This framed disorder is precisely the queer function that Cole engages by troubling two concepts that appear, at the surface, to be opposites and instead confuses both through deliberate contradiction. “Apollo,” the concluding long poem of The Visible Man, published in 1998, is exemplary of the framework of the framed disorder that I am proposing. Divided into fourteen sections, each with fourteen lines that do not resemble sonnets, the poem makes evident Cole’s poetic framework of a dual, scrambled “order” and “chaos.” For example, the second part begins thusly: Stay married, god said. One marriage.    Don’t abortion. Ugly mortal sin. Beautiful Gorgeous Mary loves you    so much. Heaven tremendous thrill of ecstasy forever. What you are,    they once was, God said, the beloved ones before you; what they are, you will be. (Cole, Visible 55) These quoted lines are “Apollonian” through the symmetrical construction of the poem they exist in, the terseness of their construction, and the invocation of panoptic reason. The sentences are almost fragmented, yet the Apollonian order is initially inscribed through the pattern of terseness. As one moves further forward in the quoted passage, elements of the Dionysian disorder begin to manifest through the lengthening of each sentence. The brevity of God’s entreating away from sin expands in length at the invocation of Mary. However, if the pattern of sentence length is disrupted, the language seems to remain Apollonian in tone and construction. Yet the seemingly ordered pattern belies a discordant Dionysian impulse. “Heaven tremendous thrill of ecstasy forever” is one such disruptive line that appears to be carefully constructed in an orderly, Apollonian fashion. Its Dionysian, disorderly pulses are embedded in its “tremendous thrill of ecstasy,” invoking the image of Dionysian or chthonic chaos that is formed through an Apollonian assemblage. The Apollonian-Dionysian framework is crucial to articulating the queer confessional framework and in identifying Cole’s configuration of queerness. Langdon Hammer makes a salient observation about the dual existence of the Apollonian and Dionysian dynamic by writing of Cole’s “desire to combine in his work the qualities of formal balance and open-ended, anarchic exploration that have longed defined opposing or even warring principles in American poetry” (64–5). Hammer’s

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lucid points elucidate the analysis of “Apollo” through the remarking of a “formal balance,” a formulation defined by faithfully hewing to traditional poetic form, that Cole utilizes to maintain the tightly knit Apollonian order of his poetry. However, this does not mean that the poem’s “open-ended anarchic exploration” is at war with its “formal balance.” Instead, Cole accepts the contradiction of a “framed disorder,” utilizing the Apollonian and Dionysian in tandem. In the tenth section of “Apollo,” Cole is cogent in describing the coexistent presence of order and disorder. He writes “Yet, subject is / only pretext for assembling the words / whose real story is process is flow.” Picking up on the notion of language assembly, the “subject” is Cole’s Apollonian moment of laying the framework for “assembling the words.” However, Hammer’s invocation of Dionysian “free-for-all sensuality” is what creates the “process” of the “real story.” For Cole’s poetry, order and disorder are intimately connected in ways that make reading them as oppositional unproductive. Thus, what is revealed is Cole’s relishing of complication and instability in his poetics, in which the Apollonian-Dionysian literary framework is taken as a fluid process. Apollonian order is the first appearance of the “pretext” that finds its conclusion in “flow.” However, Dionysian disorder is by no means the conclusion to the process of “flow.” I return to Hammer’s salient remarks on the Apollonian-Dionysian literary dynamic: “We can see Cole’s Apollonian Dionysian impulses, ‘mixed up’ like those two counterpointed voices.” The mixing of what seems to be two ends of a binary is instead the flowing of contradictions into one another. It is through the identification of these Apollonian-Dionysian contradictions that we begin to unpack the particular queerness of Cole’s verse.

UNSETTLING THE CONFESSIONAL After unpacking the Apollonian-Dionysian dynamic in Cole’s verse, I turn to analyzing the implications of confessional poetics’ legacy as a juncture in Henri Cole’s expression of queerness. Of course, Cole remarks somewhat negatively on the notion of his poetry being classified in the confessional vein: “When I am writing, there is no pleasure in revealing the facts of my life. Pleasure comes from the art-making impulse, from assembling language into art” (Weiss n.p.). It would be unproductive to impose the label of the (traditional) confessional onto Cole. He acknowledges the term’s existence but does not classify himself as such. However, what I propose is not necessarily imposing the confessional genre as we know it toward Cole’s verse. As this essay proposes a new model of looking toward confessional poetics via the queer confessional, the possibility of reimagining the confessional is rooted in a critical intersection between private, self-insulated spaces and their political ramifications. At stake in the intersection of public/private is also the crossing between poetic confession and a poet’s queerness. Cole’s verse is in conversation with such intersections. Accordingly, his poetry is deeply invested in an examination of private, family life (especially with a focus on the mother figure) that is also present in confessional poetics. A salient example would be “Mechanical Soft” from Cole’s Touch. After what may be a dreamlike evocation of a phalanx of horses marching down the avenue, the speaker abruptly explains: “Mother is dying, / you see, and proximity to this death makes me / nostalgic for the French language” (Cole, Touch 9). He recalls “spooning mechanically soft pears” into his mother’s mouth as she gradually weakens. The intensely personal nature of the second half of “Mechanical Soft” is indeed like a confessional poem in the traditional sense of the term. The speaker engages with the mother’s active death and suggests the complicated emotional turmoil

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released by the mother’s death. The chief focus on the mother figure is another marker in which Cole displays a deep familiarity with the conventional tropes of confessional poetry. It must also be noted that just as Cole utilizes its tropes, so he engages in its subversions as well. In contrast to Robert Lowell’s clear, photo-like language, or Sylvia Plath’s ferocious imagery, Cole’s confessional verse is Apollonian in language and sparse in detail. The language is often fantastical and surreal as well, the “mechanically soft pears” rendering a much more unstable image in which spooning these fantasy fruits, or perhaps they are commercially strained ones, is rooted in the pleasure of language assembly amid the mourning of the mother’s death. I then turn toward Peter Nickowitz’s Rhetoric and Sexuality in further tracing the legacy of confessional poetics in Cole’s work. Nickowitz’s research includes a deep analysis of Cole’s chief poetic inspirations, which includes Elizabeth Bishop as a crucial junction point, though a complicated one. Nickowitz writes that she actually “distrusted the confessional movement” (66). Despite such reservations, she also “betrays a certain tolerance for it,” namely through her relationship to Robert Lowell (a major figure in twentieth-century confessional poetry) and her reliance in her poems upon a criterion of “truth.” Her distrust finds an arguable continuation in Cole’s critique of confessionalism in his Paris Review interview. As the interviewer remarks, “You’ve said you see yourself not as a confessional poet, but as an autobiographical poet.” Nevertheless, it is important to note that the term “confessional” is in constant flux due to a long history of dissensus in the way literary criticism understands and values the genre. Thus, to negotiate such disagreements, this essay will turn toward analyzing the nature of “truth” and myth-making as constellatory points within which the confessional may question the pursuit of an absolute truth and adopt the more radical function of destabilizing the notion of what a “truth” is. Nickowitz suggests that for Bishop, a queer writer herself, a “reliance on ‘truthfulness’ functions as one way that the poet asserts a perspective.” I argue that Bishop’s “truth” is not absolute insofar as it is not required for the truth to be rooted to an absolute. Instead, I posit a “truth” in poetic verse that is unstable. There is an element that is confessed, and thus, to some degree attached to a notion of truth. Yet, truth itself is unstable, shifting with every telling. It is in this instability that the confessional can exist as a radical and queer space. Thus, this destabilization of an absolute truth is the retrieval of the confessional mode and the foundational marker of its intersections with a queer mode.

QUEER CONFESSIONAL IN PRACTICE A look through Cole’s expression of queerness is necessary to articulate the queer confessional in practice. Indeed, the locus point of Cole’s queerness occurs within the framed disorder of his verse, because his troubling of the Apollonian and Dionysian dialectic is at the root of his poetic queerness. However, the queering of the Apollonian-Dionysian literary framework only scratches the surface of how Cole troubles the notion of poetic genre and form. To further complicate this poetic queerness, the confessions that Cole expresses in his poems are tied to two critical aspects of queer theory in conversation with poetry: mother-eroticism and the poetics of difficulty. Mothereroticism, which both Roland Barthes and Nickowitz, identify, assumes that “desire for the mother functions as a basis for homoerotic desire” (Nickowitz 54); and the poetics of difficulty is an expression of the lived difficulty that Robert K. Martin identifies as being an integral aspect of Hart Crane’s queer experience. With these two ideas in mind, we see that Cole engages with the

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necessary queerness that troubles not only the notion of an absolute truth but also troubles the notion of pure, literary confession predicated on a clear, singular truth. The eroticized maternal figure becomes a salient image enabling us to engage queer confession in practice. An example is located in the poem “Touch:” Then I lay down beside you, dissolving loneliness, and the white maggots wriggled. As the preacher spoke, no one seemed to hear him, tamping their eyes, touching one another. (Cole, “Touch” 23) The troubling of truth is performed in these six lines, as Cole’s speaker lies down in a pine casket and physically desires to be with the mother figure represented as the “you.” The sustained Apollonian sparseness of Cole’s verse is a deliberate troubling of truth that destabilizes the confessional elements of the language juxtaposed with the surrealist action of Cole’s speaker lying near the dead mother’s body. Indeed, the images present in the verse are ones that simultaneously take pleasure in truth and refuse to elucidate it. The mother-son scene here recalls those in Lowell’s “Sailing Home from Rapallo” and “Man and Wife,” and at the same time it is entirely different from them. The notion of truth here is presented as a slippage through which the surrealism of Cole’s lying down with the mother is or is not meant to be taken as a literal. Instead, Cole invites the reader to question precisely what is being confessed through his sparse writing. The feeling of grief is the primary emotion that Cole’s speaker emphasizes as the confessional moment of maternal loss and, at the same time perhaps, the birth of writing. There are no “white maggots” that physically wriggle as Cole’s speaker imagines himself lying down next to his mother’s body, but the image of the maggot serves to facilitate Cole’s mood of grief and horror. Cole’s bodily actions and fantasies through intimate interaction with the mother and maternal loss intersect to trouble and queer the confessional form, making this very moment a queer confession. The questioning of truth is fundamental for a queer poet such as Cole, whose marginalized existence is reflected upon the loss of the maternal. In the framework of mother-eroticism, the loss of the mother marks a profound loss for a queer, male subject; and the expression of loss is rooted in a difficulty so great that even expression proves nigh impossible. Hart Crane, an earlier queer poet and one of Cole’s poetic inspirations, engages in a quite similar thematics of maternal grief and is a salient example of queer theory’s poetics of difficulty in a far more precarious and homophobic time. Robert K. Martin asserts that Crane’s “dilemma was double, since for him the plight of the homosexual in a heterosexual society and the plight of the artist in a materialistic one were conjoined” (117). Martin then motions toward a solution with two prongs, in which sexual and political anxiety must be resolved to begin to negotiate a queer existence. I believe, however, that the nature of Crane’s inspiration for Cole wasn’t to necessarily offer a solution but instead to provide an acknowledgment of poetic difficulty and to articulate the struggle of being a queer poet. Martin identifies the “plight of the homosexual in heterosexual society,” and that plight does indeed continue to exist today. Thus, perhaps finding a solution to queer struggle isn’t necessarily what’s at stake. Instead, the tools to articulate queer struggle and sexuality are at the core of the

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relationship between Cole and Crane. Examining the poetics of difficulty and struggle in Cole’s literary predecessors becomes integral into investigating how his own poetics operate in a queer American framework.

QUEER POSSIBILITIES If Henri Cole serves as a useful model for articulating a praxis for queer confession, if the term itself is to have general value, it stands to reason that the destabilization of truth can be adapted as a way of reading other queer poets, and that there must be other examples of the queer confessional poet existing alongside Cole. Though there are many such poets to choose from, an especially fitting example to display how the model can be adapted is Frank Bidart. Bidart is positioned even closer to the confessional movement than Cole himself, given that Bidart shares explicit and close links with Lowell (he was initially Lowell’s student at Harvard, later his friend, and eventually the editor of Lowell’s posthumous Collected Poems). Bidart has frequently been grouped with the confessional poets as a next-generation exemplar. Yet what makes him such a productive example is not simply that he fits both modalities of queer and confessional, but that his work provides such deeply scintillating examples of the queer confessional aesthetic. Of course Bidart is a different poet from Cole, engaging in a more explicit reveal of self than Cole’s playful Apollonian-Dionysian dynamic allows. Yet the destabilization of truth and the centrality of difficulty remain salient features of both poets. Bidart’s “Queer,” published in 2012, provides a striking example of how Bidart’s queer confessional manifests in its arguably rawest form: “Lie to yourself about this and you will / forever lie about everything” (Bidart 500). If Cole destabilizes the truth through his language that belies the discordant energy of queer confession, Bidart overtly destroys the stability of a “truth” from the outset of this poem. “Queer” begins with the notion of the “lie” and the performative aspects that one must engage in when carefully navigating a queer identity in a hostile environment. The text permits lying to others, to “them,” because that’s what they want. This is a poem that is explicitly about the complex situation of “coming out” as a gay man (500), and implicitly about coming out in the genre of the queer confessional. Yet Bidart does not ever once lean in or even reveal himself as such, only foregrounding his queer identity through the title and speaking about being a gay man through attaching his identity to a collective. Bidart pulls the rug out from under any notion of a stable truth by juxtaposing the forced performativity of the closet with the authenticity of the interior life: “But lie to yourself, what you will / lose is yourself ” (500). The lies and the truths come so close together that the queer subject experiences a kind of vertigo. Bidart’s queer confessional confesses the act of lying as a necessity, placing any act of public confession within the vexing quagmire of non-confession to the point where even the speaker himself recognizes that he risks losing his own identity, risks turning into “them.” He does speak about himself ostensibly, yet when he acknowledges that for a person of his generation “the crucial / scenario forever is coming out—or not,” he speaks for a collective as well as an individual, and he refuses to exclude either those who come out or those who do not, remembering that he himself waited for his parents to die before coming out (501). Queer confession recognizes those who understand the deeply held struggles of being queer, of dealing with unstable truths which are the other side of unstable lies, and of the often vexed choice between silence and speech. We see here the complexity of the possibilities that queer confession holds as a model for behavior, feeling and poetry itself.

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ARTICULATING A QUEER CONFESSIONAL In this essay, I have attempted to articulate a model of the queer confessional in terms of an ambiguated Apollonian-Dionysian framework, the terms of the queer confessional form, and the queer confessional as poetic practice in the work of Henri Cole and Frank Bidart. However, I stress the slippery and nascent nature of this model. The notion of queer confession is foregrounded upon conceptual paradigms (queerness and confession) that are themselves unstable and do not have a fixed definition. Thus, defining the term must be attentive to the presence of slippage. Queer confession must relish instability, especially when the notions of truth and life experience are called into question, becoming deliberately clouded and difficult. This foregrounding has only taken a brief foray into the issues and texts of the nascent queer confessional genre. Further study requires a more holistic look in Cole’s and Bidart’s oeuvres as well as a more expansive look into queer and confessional works more generally. In doing so, perhaps we can further the project of redefining what confessional poetics means in our present moment and its inseparability from queerness and the body politic. A queer perspective on literary tradition proves fruitful in retrieving the confessional tradition and recuperating it as a poetics of liberation. The inseparability from the body politic is necessary in order to illuminate the political work of queer confession, revealing how the turn toward personal and private space carries within it a statement of defiance, embodiment, and a challenge to heteronormative, neurotypical subjectivity. The queer confessional is a proposal of poetic possibility, of casting off tradition, and of deliberately engaging with difficulty in order to propose a new genre, a new modality, a new poetics in our present moment.

WORKS CITED Bidart, Frank. Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965–2016. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. Cole, Henri. Middle Earth. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Cole, Henri. Touch. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Cole, Henri. The Visible Man. Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Hammer, Langdon. “Apollo and Dionysus: Henri Cole Combines the Formal and the Sensual.” American Scholar vol. 77, no. 4 (2008), pp. 64–5. Martin, Robert K. The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry. University of Iowa Press, 1998. Nickowitz, Peter. Rhetoric and Sexuality: The Poetry of Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy, trans. William A. Haussmann. Neeland Media LLC, online ed., 2009. Sherwin, Miranda. “Confessional” Writing and the Twentieth-Century Literary Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Weiss, Sasha. “Henri Cole, the Art of Poetry No. 98.” Paris Review, no. 209, (Summer 2014). https://www.the​pari​ srev​iew.org/int​ervi​ews/6312/the-art-of-poe​try-no-98-henri-cole. Accessed June 19, 2022.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Poetry Translation and Poet-Translators BRIAN REED

To translate is to move or carry something between positions or locations, or to transition between states or conditions. As a literary practice, translation can be defined as the recreation of a text, written or performed in one language, in another. The word is frequently used, however, in a more extended sense to cover a range of other activities, such as transmediation, the transposition of a text from one medium to another; adaptation, the creative reinvention of a work, often in a new art form; cultural translation, communication across ethnic, racial, and other social boundaries; algorithmic translation, the transformation of texts according to computational or procedural rules, often with a computer’s assistance; and varieties of interlinguistic translation, such as modernization, standardization, and paraphrase. A plethora of histories of translation’s role and function in post–Second World War American poetry could be written, depending on the scope chosen. Even if a critic opts to limit herself to a narrow definition of translate—“to change into another language retaining the sense,” as Samuel Johnson defined it—there remain many practical and intellectual questions. Should she emphasize the translators, those who produce the translations? The activity itself, how it has been understood and pursued? The resulting texts, their publication, circulation, reception, and impact? Should one discuss only translation into English, or also translations from English into other languages? Does it matter when a poem was written as long as its translation dates after 1945? What if the translation is into English but the translator is not American? (That may sound like hairsplitting, but consider the runaway popularity of the English poet Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in the United States in the later nineteenth-century. Should it be included in a history of American poetry in the period?) Then there is a more fundamental problem: the prospect that the entire enterprise, the translation of poetry itself, is either impossible or even unethical. Robert Frost may never have said “Poetry is what is lost in translation,” but he is regularly attributed with the aphorism, and the frequency with which critics and bloggers repeat it testifies to a persistent belief that poetry, a literary mode whose roots are in song and which relies heavily on sound- and wordplay, is, at base, untranslatable. Change the rhythm, a skeptic would say, alter the phoneme-flow, tinker with the syntax, and the poem is no longer itself. Walter Benjamin, in “The Task of the Translator” (1923), famously agrees, arguing that a translation is only valid if the translator succeeds in creating a new and distinct work, worthy of appreciation in its own right, one that “gives voice to the intentio of the original not

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as reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement” (79). As Emily Apter has put it, any translation that falls short of such a lofty goal threatens to violate the “singularity” of verse, its near-“sacred” participation in the life of the language in which it was written (257). Translators do, nonetheless, continue translating poetry, whatever practical obstacles they may encounter and whatever ethical and aesthetic conundrums they may face. Readers continue to seek out their work, too, whether or not the results attain the sublimity of Benjamin’s translation touchstones, Friedrich Hölderlin’s Oedipus and Antigone (1804). Something valuable appears to survive a poem’s movement between languages. Indeed, based on the contents of most American bookstores today, poetry as an art form is frequently associated, by the marketplace and by general audiences, with a shortlist of non-Anglophone writers—among them Matsuo Bashō, Charles Baudelaire, Dante Alighieri, Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, and Sappho—and by anthologies of classical Chinese poetry and Japanese haiku. Literary critics, too, have, during the last half century, habitually drawn on figures familiar to them mostly through translation, above all Paul Celan and Aimé Césaire. The cultural life of the United States has been immeasurably enriched over the last half-century by the work of translators such as Brother Anthony (An Sonjae), Clare Cavanagh, Mary Ann Caws, Michael Hofmann, Richard Sieburth, and Eliot Weinberger; by the poetry translations published and promoted by small presses such as New Directions, Copper Canyon, Green Integer, Burning Deck, and Ugly Duckling; and by the editors at such translation-friendly journals as Hudson Review, Poetry, Gulf Coast, and Aufgabe. Organizations such as the American Literary Translators Association and the Book of the Month Club and prestigious prizes such as the PEN Translation Prize, National Translation Award, and Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize have honored and promoted high-quality work in the field. To omit translation from an account of post–Second World War American poetry is to underestimate the variety and reach of verse in the country. A few generalizations are possible about translation’s role and function in period. Politics, of different kinds and orders, has undeniably played a role in which poets have been translated into English and then achieve a wide distribution. Dissenting voices from the Soviet bloc, for instance, were prominent in the 1970s and 1980s, among them Joseph Brodsky, Czesław Miłosz, and Zbigniew Herbert; Bei Dao and the Ménglóng Shi Rén (Misty Poets) became well known following the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre; and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish became newly prominent in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The sustained popularity of Celan is inseparable from his reputation as a Holocaust survivor, and gay male writers such as W. H. Auden, Mark Doty, James Merrill, and Gore Vidal have been instrumental in translating and promoting the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy. Geopolitics has had other, less immediately obvious effects on the practice of poetic translation and the market for translated verse. Stephen Owen maintains that, although “lyric poetry” has long been “closely tied to the particularities of national languages,” in the post–Second World War era there emerges what can be called “world poetry,” a corpus of poems that travel, via translation, around the globe (532). The elite group of writers whose works have been selected for transnational dissemination and for prizes such as the Nobel are not necessarily the best, most famous, or most representative poets from their home countries. Instead, Owen says, there has been a bias favoring individuals whose poems engage or echo Anglophone or Francophone modernism and their postmodern successors and hence register to publishers, editors, and academics in metropolitan capitals, above all New York, London, and Paris, as possessing literary merit. This “exceedingly

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troubling game of reputation,” Owen asserts, has been pursued avidly within the American literary establishment, where an “imperial” attitude has held sway, and the “hierarchies” and “complex structures of national prizes, recognition and status” that exist in other countries have habitually been disregarded or ignored (542). Robert von Hallberg adds that the canon of “world poetry,” as it has circulated in the United States, has been distinguished by a surprising stylistic uniformity, a restrained, show-don’t-tell, nonmetrical “translatorese,” and he observes that, during the 1960s and 1970s, certain writers, such as W. S. Merwin and Robert Hass, began to employ this deracinated, “nude” style in their original verse, too. By the turn of the millennium, it had become a default mode for many poets, a “displaced idiom” capable of signaling aspirations to “generality,” that is, to global stature and universal relevance, and hence a way of writing recognizable as a marker of literary “authority” and seriousness (199–200). One can venture a few other generalizations about poetry translation in the United States in recent decades. It has not constituted a professionalized practice. The market for translated poems tends to be small; payment is rarely proportionate to the amount of time invested; there is little or no direct, targeted state support for translation of verse; and few if any degree programs certify novice translators of poems as trained and competent. Poetry translation most often takes place as an avocation or as a supplement to other sources of income, and even academics frequently regard the translation of verse as a distraction from their work on peer-reviewed articles and monographs. The decision to take on a particular translation project is typically based more on personal attachments or preferences than on a publisher’s needs or plans, and poetry translators often have more flexibility regarding deadlines than those working with other literary modes and genres (Flynn 277–9). Poetry translators also tend to receive more explicit recognition for their work. Books of translated poems generally place translators’ names on their front covers, and they sometimes even receive equal or higher billing than the original authors. Readers will know right away, for instance, whether a given copy of the Divine Comedy is Dorothy Sayers’s, John Ciardi’s, Allen Mandelbaum’s, or Clive James’s. Whereas one has to turn to the title pages of Mo Yan’s novels to learn that his translator is Howard Goldblatt, every book by another recent Nobel Prize winner, the Swedish poet Thomas Tranströmer, prominently features his translator’s name on its cover. In the case of the FSG edition of The Deleted World (2006), “Robin Robertson” is identical in size, font, orientation, and color to “Thomas Tranströmer.” The design deliberately conflates, even blurs, the distinction between author and translator. The belief among American readers and publishers that the translation of poetry is more an art than an occupation perhaps explains the long-standing popularity in the United States of poettranslators, individuals whose credentials as poets, not their formal education in non-Englishlanguage literary traditions, legitimize their work as translators. They are seen as possessing the craft, ingenuity, and verbal wit necessary to produce translations that are genuinely poetic, not simply vehicles for conveying a source text’s prose sense. They are imagined to be able to surmount, skirt, or solve the obstacles to translating in a satisfactory manner a body of literature grounded in sound- and wordplay. While they may not have the capacity to be fully faithful to the nuances of non-English texts, they can reinvent those poems and provide readers with inspired, new versions of them whose liberties and departures are justifiable because they are truer to the spirit of the originals than any literal or scholarly-pedantic rendering could ever be.

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As befits a group whose authority is, as Max Weber would put it, more charismatic than bureaucratic, American poet-translators can be individualistic, even idiosyncratic, in their choice of which authors and poems to translate. They are often drawn to figures with whom they identify or whom they find compelling for reasons of taste or personal politics. Marilyn Chin translated the Chinese modernist and labor camp internee Ai Qing (1910–1996). Lyn Hejinian translated two of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s books after meeting him in Leningrad. Peter Balaban, wounded during the Tet Offensive, later published Spring Essence (2000), a collection of verse by the Vietnamese poet Hồ Xuân Hương (1772–1822). Peter Balakian collaborated with Nevart Yaghlian on the first English-language version of Bloody News from My Friend (1911) by a correspondent of his grandfather’s, the Armenian poet and genocide victim Siamanto (Atom Yarjanian, 1878–1915). Canonical writers have, perhaps predictably, been a perennial favorite of American poet-translators. They have provided them with opportunities to emulate and challenge the accomplishments of admired precursors. In the 1950s Marianne Moore turned to the fables of Jean de La Fontaine. In 1981 Robert Bly published the Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. Clayton Eshleman spent fortyfive years working on, and reworking, what became The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (2007). In Recalculating (2013) Charles Bernstein takes on Osip Mandelstam, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Velimir Khlebnikov, among others, because such an exercise, he says, “makes possible other voices for myself, or, perhaps better to say, other selves for my voices” (47). The Latin and Greek classics have proved especially attractive over the years, from Guy Davenport’s mid-twentieth-century Archilochus to A. E. Stallings’s postmillennial Lucretius. Standouts in this vein would include Louis and Celia Zukofsky’s Catullus, David Ferry’s Virgil, and Anne Carson’s Sappho. American poet-translators have varied widely in their familiarity with the language from which they are translating and the literary tradition in which their source text participates. Some have been fluent and deeply read: John Ashbery and Cole Swensen, for instance, in French; Forrest Gander in Spanish; and Jennifer Scappettone in Italian. Immigrants to the United States, too, such as Don Mee Choi (South Korea), Johannes Göransson (Sweden), and Rosmarie Waldrop (Germany) have served as bridge-figures between their home and adopted language communities. Other times poets have persevered despite limited knowledge. They have, for instance, worked with academic experts in the relevant traditions, as Denise Levertov did with Edward Dimock for In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali (1967). They have worked from prose cribs, as Robert Pinsky did for The Inferno of Dante (1994). And they have worked directly with the poet him- or herself, as Hass did with Miłosz. Occasionally, they have passed off as translations of verse that could more accurately be described as loosely based on a precursor, as Coleman Barks has done with Rumi. In the late 1970s, Bly handed Barks, who neither speaks nor reads Persian, a copy of translations from Rumi’s Dīvān-e Šams by the Cambridge-educated scholar of Islamic studies A. J. Arberry and told his protégé that they had to be “released from their cages” (Rozina Ali n.p.). Coleman Barks’s books, which rework already dubious Victorian-era Rumi-renderings into contemporary-sounding, feel-good, new-age mysticism, have reached an audience of millions. Barks’s success speaks to an implicit hierarchy in which translations from European languages have often held to a much higher standard of rigor and fidelity than those from non-Western languages, especially Asian and Native American ones. This hierarchy is, of course, a reflection of the immigration history of the United States, the country’s racial politics, and the demographics of its literary elites, and one can observe a recurrent willingness among white American poets,

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from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Ezra Pound to Jerome Rothenberg, to embark on (and to anthologize) translations of non-Western texts despite their lack of any formal philological training or prior immersion in the relevant cultures. Perhaps typical is Kenneth Rexroth’s declaration in his essay “The Poet as Translator” (1961) that the “greatest translators of Chinese … knew less than nothing of Chinese when they did their best translations” and his scorn for the “barbarism” of those who are “too close to the language” and “too fascinated by its special very unEnglish … problems ever to see the texts as literature” (187–8). W. S. Merwin provides another good example of the differential treatment of the West and the Rest in post–Second World War American poetry. He undertook extensive travel in France, Spain, and Portugal as well as graduate-level study in Romance Languages as preparation for his later award-winning work on writers such as Nicanor Parra, Antonia Porchia, Jean Follain, and Lope de Rueda. When he turned to Asian literary traditions, however, instead of investing time and energy to educate himself to a comparable degree, he collaborated with native speakers and experts—Nguyen Ngoc Bich for Vietnamese and Soiku Shigematsu for Japanese—or he simply drew on preexisting English versions. At the beginning of his preface to East Window: The Asian Translations (1998) he unapologetically declares, “I know no Asian language” (3). Then, after recounting his childhood discovery of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat and his later interactions with Pound at St. Elizabeth’s, he returns to his near-complete ignorance of Chinese, Japanese, Persian, Sanskrit, and Vietnamese and states that while “I have had my doubts about working this way” he nonetheless has “succumbed repeatedly.” “I don’t know,” he rather evasively says, “that such a procedure can either be justified or condemned altogether” (11). To read such confessions as unadulterated Orientalism would be a mistake. There is more to the story, an ethos or attitude that is common among American poet-translators, no matter which language is at issue. Unlike their academic analogues—who frequently provide annotations, lengthy introductions, and other explanatory apparatus and who generally have to live up to the standards of university presses and peer reviewers—poet-translators have long had the freedom to print their work sans notes and with, at most, cursory prefaces explaining their method (or lack of one). Robert Lowell’s Imitations (1961), for instance, could be summarized as West Window: The European Translations. It contains a potpourri of lyrics by survey-course greats, from Sappho to Hugo to Montale, and Lowell echoes Merwin in such statements as, “I have come to feel that [Pasternak] is a very great poet. But I know no Russian. I have rashly tried to improve on other translations, and have been helped by exact prose versions given me by Russian readers” (xii). Lowell’s versions of Pasternak and other poets are sometimes “reckless with the literal meaning,” as he aptly describes them (xi). He in fact exhibits markedly less investment in fidelity to the spirit of his originals than Merwin. “I have been almost as free as the authors themselves,” Lowell somewhat coyly concludes his preface (xiii). And one critic has said, “instead of trying to carry over into English the work of someone who wrote in French or Russian, Lowell tried to establish for himself what relationship that non-English writer had to him: he tried, bluntly, to use the non-English writer as a kind of quarry for his own poetry” (Raffel 20). Lowell’s decision to label his volume Imitations is a conscious invocation of the Classical and early modern concept of imitatio. As John Dryden explains in his own translator’s preface—to Ovid’s Epistles—when writing an imitation an author “assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion” (509). This “later Poet” endeavors “to write like one, who has written before him, on the same Subject: that is, not to translate his

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Words, or to be Confin’d to his Sense, but only to set him as a Pattern, and to write, as he supposes that Author would have done, had he liv’d in our Age, and in our Country” (510). The tension here between sameness and difference, like and unlike, then versus now, is a recurrent feature of American poets’ translation practice from Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919) to Mary Jo Bang’s Inferno (2012), and readers have regularly been flummoxed. What does one do with Pound’s mention of a Frigidaire, or Bang’s allusions to Pink Floyd and Star Trek? How does one respond to such authors’ partial but sometimes haphazard updating of the literary conventions on display in their models? Do anachronism and brash formal liberties betray source poems? Renew them? Do the old and new works manage to fit together, as Benjamin says originals and translations ought, like “fragments” of a broken “vessel,” suggesting the ineffable but never realizable perfection of a poem’s full genius (78)? Poet-translators have regularly experimented since the Second World War with modes of translation that, while they may “set” a precursor poem “as a Pattern,” extend, warp, or supersede the tradition of imitation, as an early modern poet such as Dryden would have understood it (510). Sometimes these experiments have been procedural endeavors in which a poet devises or selects particular compositional strategies or rules that are then more or less strictly carried out. One popular variety has been homophonic translation, in which a writer seeks to find soundequivalents to a non-English poem using English words, and which frequently delights in, runs with, the absurdities and novelties that can result. David Melnick’s campy Men in Aida (1983), for instance, homophonically translates the first book of the Iliad in such a way as to rewrite Homer’s tale of heroism and war as a homoerotic bathhouse idyll. The epic’s opening lines—μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος / οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε (menin aeide thea Peleiadeo Achileos / oulomenin, e muri Achaiois alge etheke), “The wrath sing, goddess, of Peleus’ son Achilles, / the accursed wrath which brought countless woes upon the Achaeans” (Homer 12–13)—accordingly become “Men in Aïda, they appeal, eh? A day, O Achilles! / Allow men in, emery Achaians. All gay ethic, eh?” (Melnick 1). There have been, too, a range of more complex intertextual games, of the kind often labeled postmodern, that combine homage, pastiche and critique, from Jack Spicer’s After Lorca (1957) to Brandon Brown’s Flowering Mall (2012), a punk reboot of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857). Such poets may claim absolute imaginative freedom, and they may assert that their “forsak[ing]” of the “words and sense” of an original is in the service of deeper truths or higher pleasures (Dryden 509). Their audiences, however, must still assess the outcomes. In the absence of contextualizing information, it can be difficult to judge whether a given poet-translator is striving for fidelity and failing; seeking via unorthodox means to honor the spirit of the original; or using a source text as an occasion to generate a new text to be judged on its own merits. Louise Glück’s “Omens” (2006) is a good example. She subtitles it “After Pushkin,” but there is otherwise no indication of what she hopes to achieve by writing “after” him. She has clearly begun with his poem “Primety” (“Portents” or “Signs,” 1829), but she diverges from it in several respects. His lyric is tight and precise, two stanzas rhyming abab and a third abba, written in iambic tetrameter and relying heavily on repetition. Glück preserves the quatrains but opts for free verse and translates repeated words (e.g., “soprovozhdal”) differently (“followed,” “trailed”) (70). Her syntax is knottier, and her lines grow longer as her poem draws to a close. Glück’s poem “after Pushkin” sounds like much of the rest of her postmillennial verse—unfurling, unraveling, questing— and nothing like the Russian poet (musical, witty, controlled). Is “Omens” a bad translation? If so,

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by whose standards? Does one attribute Glück, who knows no Russian, with cultural imperialism, irresponsibility, or arrogance? Or does one savor her poem as echt Glück and treat “Portents” as merely an informing intertext, an optional adjunct to the primary experience on offer here? Translation studies can provide some guidance when trying to answer such questions. Lawrence Venuti has distinguished between domesticating translations, which strive for ready intelligibility in the target language, and foreignizing ones, which emphasize the historical, linguistic, and other differences that intervene between readers and authors. Domesticating translations, he believes, serve to reinforce existing power relations, because the “illusion of transparency” is only possible when a text is pared, via an act “ethnocentric violence,” of anything about it that might contradict or depart from publishers’ and audience’s assumptions about what literature is and does (16). In contrast, foreignizing translations, by drawing attention to translators, the act of translation, and the resistant particulars of texts, bring the problems of distance and mediation to the fore and thereby provide readers with an opportunity to reflect on, and potentially revise, their expectations and the ideologies that underpin them. By his lights, Glück is engaged in a domesticating exercise, and Russian speakers might complain that she has rewritten Pushkin in her own image and in the process lost all that makes him him. A foreignizing translation, though, is not always more effective. Vladimir Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin (1965) was undertaken partly out of frustration with what he considered to be the many infelicities and betrayals of Pushkin on display in Walter Arndt’s Bollingen Prize-winning version from 1962. The Russian emigré believed that a strict adherence to the Onegin stanza (fourteen lines, iambic tetrameter, intricate rhyme scheme) in English made hash of the novel in verse, and he opted instead for rough iambs that frequently break into outright prose. He also went spelunking in the OED for words that captured, in his opinion, the subtleties in Pushkin’s diction. Edmund Wilson, in a devastating review, complains that the results are “perversepedantic,” and he catalogues the ways in which Nabokov’s estranging decisions defeat, not advance, the cause of an improved appreciation for Pushkin’s characteristic virtues (n.p.). If a synoptic history of a subject as vast as translation and post–Second World War American poetry were possible, it would likely include a cornucopia of accidental encounters, misunderstandings, confusions of aesthetic and political ends, and quixotic, not always successful efforts at both domestication and foreignization. In lieu of that not-yet-written-perhaps-unwritable survey, here is one story that can suggest the sorts of incidents, decisions, and publications that might feature in it. In 1968, Aijaz Ahmad, a Pakistani critic living in New York, wrote several American poets and asked them to contribute to a project to mark the centennial anniversary of the death of the Persian and Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib (1797–1869). Ahmad supplied them with literal but clunky and rough translations of Ghalib’s poems, and they recast them into versions that they considered to be more artful. Ahmad initially envisioned producing a pamphlet or chapbook, but he received many more submissions than he had anticipated, and the end result was a 174-page book, Ghazals of Ghalib (1971), published by Columbia University Press. Contributors included such high-profile authors as W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, William Stafford, and Mark Strand. The ghazal is a venerable poetic form, originating in Arabia in the seventh century, that consists of five or more metrically identical couplets and conventionally obeys several strict formal rules, such as the repetition of the same end word in the second line of every couplet and the inclusion of the author’s pen name in the final one. Ghazals are typically preoccupied with love, loss, and separation, both romantic and spiritual, and each couplet is relatively stand-alone, exhibiting little

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or no narrative or other connection to those that come before and after. Although it has proved enduringly popular in the Islamic world, especially the Middle East and South Asia, the ghazal had, prior to Ghazals of Ghalib, limited currency in Anglophone countries. David Caplan attributes the enthusiastic reaction to Ahmad’s initial inquiries to two causes. First, the Vietnam War and anti-war activism were at their height, and, by participating in the Ghalib project, poets had an opportunity to connect with, and spread the word about, a non-Western writer who had witnessed and, in his letters and journals, documented the anti-colonial Indian Rebellion of 1857. Second, the non-Aristotelian logic informing the ghazal—its disregard for coherence and closure—appealed to American poets at a historical juncture in which they were already moving toward looser, fragmentary, free-associative style in response to the perceived breakdown in the late 1960s of the racial, class-based, sex-gender and other social norms that had prevailed in the early Cold War period (43–6). One can see these motives at work in Rich’s decision, in July of 1968, a year that had already seen the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy, to begin writing a series of original free verse poems, “Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib),” that disregards, as she puts it, “the structure and metrics used by Ghalib” and preserves only one aspect of the form, the rule that “each couplet” must be “autonomous and independent of the others” (59). Much like Victor Hugo in Les Orientales (1829) at an earlier moment of revolutionary ferment, Rich turned to the East in search of a form that might permit her to escape what she considered to be the deadening constraints of Western rationality. Ghalib himself, though, was no political radical. He was a member of the landed aristocracy and was closely associated with the Mughal court. He was appointed as the royal historian, and he served as a tutor both to Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II and his son Prince Fakhr-ud Din Mirza. He may have objected to the increasing power of the British Raj, but his poetry only occasionally and obliquely touches on anticolonial themes, and his day-to-day struggles after 1857 were largely personal, such as his efforts to have the British restore his pension. He would have been perplexed by any assertion that his ghazals challenged, in their very warp and woof, the underpinnings of patriarchal authority, or that their rhymes, repetitions, stock diction, and other conventional attributes were somehow inessential or dispensable. As American poets reworked Ahmad’s cribs, they did so in partial-to-complete ignorance of the Urdu language, Indo-Islamic literature, and the pre-twentieth-century history of South Asia. They Englished Ghalib in a domesticating manner, reinventing him to accord with their needs of the moment. The Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001), who moved to the United States from India in 1975, found American poets’ free verse pseudo-ghazals distressing, and he long attempted to educate them about “real ghazals.” He edited an anthology, Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (2000), which includes a long polemical introduction, and he published many examples of the form himself, collected in Call Me Ishmael Tonight (2001). An early salvo in his campaign was The Rebel’s Silhouette (1992), a selection of poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–1984) published with the original Urdu en face with English. As Ali’s use of the word rebel in the title suggests, Faiz represents the sort of non-Western poet that Ahmad’s correspondents might have sought out, had they known enough to do so. Faiz combined high literary achievement—he was twice a nominee for the Nobel Prize—with committed Marxist activism. He won the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962 and was a member of the anticolonial and leftist Anjuman Tarraqi Pasand Mussanafin-e-Hind (the Progressive Writers’ Movement).

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Ali’s introduction to The Rebel’s Silhouette revisits Ghazals of Ghalib, and he compares Ahmad’s “simplified” and “literal versions” of Ghalib’s verse, accompanied by “necessary scholarly explanations,” to the “approximations” produced by Merwin, Rich, and Stafford, which, he believes, sometimes manage to convey the “essence” of the original but other times fail rather spectacularly (xviii). Moreover, he points to specific instances, such as the poem “Don’t Ask Me for That Love Again,” in which Faiz “breaks radically” with Urdu literary precedent to highlight his “social commitment” and underscore his resolution to “take on political themes consciously” (xix–xx). Faiz, in other words, when read aright, can teach what it means for a non-Western poet, immersed in a millennium-old tradition, to push its expressive resources toward an embrace of “socialist revolution” (xx). And it did not involve an embrace of non sequitur as the grounds for political action. Curiously, given his gentle but devastating takedown of Ghazals of Ghalib in Rebel’s Silhouette and given his later acerbic scorn for the “arbitrary near-surrealistic exercises in free verse” that “pass for ghazals” in “so many monthlies” and “quarterlies” Ali himself opts for free verse in his Faiz translations (Ravishing 1). For example, he takes the opening couplet of one ghazal—“Donon jahaan teri mahabbat mein haar ke / Woh jaa raha hai koi shab-e-gham guzaar ke” (quoted in Kanda 309)—and attempts to find neither an equivalent of the repeated end word (“ke”) nor of the rhyme that precedes it (“mein haar,” “guzaar”). Instead, he gives readers five free verse lines, predominantly iambic and trochaic, seven to nine syllables in length: He bet both this life and the next and gambled all night for your love he first lost earth then eternity    Now he departs from his night of grief    Defeat visible in his eyes (Rebel’s 7) Expanding from two lines to five, Ali adds information and nuance not present in the Urdu, which K. C. Kanda (Delhi University) more literally translates as, “Having lost both the worlds in the game of love, / There goes a lonesome man, ending his night of grief ” (309). Ali apparently feels the need to drive home that Faiz’s “both … worlds” implies “this life and the next” and “earth then eternity,” as well as to emphasize that, in this context, “los[ing] … the game of love” entails having made a “bet,” “gambled,” and then experienced “defeat.” He also cannot resist supplying a wholly new image, “defeat visible in his eyes” (7). What explains these additions and amplifications? In his preface to Rebel’s Silhouette, Ali concedes that recreating Faiz’s ghazals in a new language forced him to be “unfaithful” to the poet’s exact words and to resort free verse, but he declares his intention to improve on Ghazals of Ghalib by displaying his “inwardness with” and “loyalty to” both Urdu and English. He hopes that Urdu speakers will be able to discern and respect his underlying “visceral attachment” and “fidelity” to the “spirit” of the original (xxiii). Of course, it is unclear why Urdu-fluent poetry lovers would be reading Rebel’s Silhouette in the first place, and Ali appeals to them in a prospective manner— reaching out to a future, purely potential source of validation—as opposed to, say, illustrating through testimonials, citations, or other credentials or reviews that his “inwardness” and “loyalty” have in fact enabled him to produce translations superior to Merwin’s or Rich’s Aijaz Ahmadassisted reinventions of Ghalib.

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As the Urdu scholar Frances W. Pritchett has shown, not only does Ali commit occasional errors and misread certain images and lines, he also tends to add “artificial clues” and “(pseudo-) information” in such a way as to reduce the originals’ artful ambiguity and give readers English versions that are altogether “simpler and more prosy” (62–3). He can appear intent, Pritchett says, on turning Faiz’s ghazals into “something more like a familiar kind of romantic lyric in English” (68). In other words, although Ali lays claims to special knowledge because of his linguistic background and national origin, his Faiz proves to have been American-domesticated. The Urdu poet sounds distinctly like one of Owen’s and von Hallberg’s “world poets,” that is, like a writer from outside the United States who generalizes about love and the human condition in relatively flat free verse. And Ali himself participates in the American tradition of the poet-translator whose authority rests more on personal charisma and vocational identity than on rigorous training and external checks and standards. To put it differently: however much one might wish to differentiate them on ethical and other grounds, Ali’s Rebel’s Silhouette and Coleman Barks’s The Essential Rumi (1995) belong to the same historical moment and emerge from the same literary culture. In the twenty-first century, American poet-translators continue to produce fascinating and vexing work. Some publications, such as James Wagner’s homophonic translation of Vallejo’s Trilce (1922) and David Habawnik’s Aeneid: Books I–VI (2015), reprise earlier efforts to reimagine canonical texts for contemporary audiences. Other writers have engaged in what postcolonial critics have called transcreation, a radical re-versioning of source texts that “has the devilish dimension of usurpation” and challenges assumptions about originality and derivation (Vieira 111). Sawako Nakayasu’s Mouth: Eats Color (2011), for instance, is a ludic exploration of possible approaches to translating the Japanese modernist Chika Sagawa, and in Ventrakl (2010) Christian Hawkey offers a series of comparably inventive translations and mistranslations of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl. Some books press beyond translation and transcreation into entirely new literary territory. To produce Yingelishi/吟歌麗詩: Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics (2011), Jonathan Stallings began with a textbook that teaches Mandarin speakers to pronounce English by providing nonsensical sequences of Chinese characters that “mimic the pronunciation of common English phrases.” He then excerpted that book and “recomposed” it, assembling strings of words that can be heard either as a Chinese or an English poem, depending on an audience’s capacities and proclivities (4). In “Translation as Creation and Criticism” (1963), the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos claims that “every translation of a creative text will always be a ‘recreation’,” and he goes on to assert that “the more intricate a text is, the more seducing it is to ‘re-create’ it” (315). The history of the translation of poetry in the United States illustrates that, although it may be impossible to translate verse, that very impossibility has proved an irresistible challenge. It can’t be done, it must be done, here are the results.

WORKS CITED Ali, Agha Shahid, ed. and trans. The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, revised ed. University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Ali, Agha Shahid. “Introduction.” Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English, ed. Agha Shahid Ali, Wesleyan University Press, 2000, pp. 1–14. Ali, Rozina. “The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi.” New Yorker, January 5, 2017, www.newyor​ker.com/ books/page-tur​ner/the-eras​ure-of-islam-from-the-poe​try-of-rumi.

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Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. Verso, 2013. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt, Schocken, 1968, pp. 69–82. Bernstein, Charles. Interview by Andrew David King. “ ‘Too Philosophical for a Poet’: A Conversation with Charles Bernstein.” boundary 2, vol. 44, no. 3 (2017), pp. 17–57. Burton, Raffel. “Robert Lowell’s Imitations.” Translation Review, vol. 5, no.1 (1980), pp. 20–7. Caplan, David. Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form. Oxford University Press, 2005. De Campos, Haroldo. “Translation as Creation and Criticism.” Novas: Selected Writings, ed. Antonio Sergio Bessa and Odile Cisneros, Northwestern University Press, 2007, pp. 312–26. Dryden, John. The Poems, ed. John Sargeaunt. Oxford University Press, 1910. Flynn, Peter. “Skopos Theory: An Ethnographic Enquiry.” Perspectives, vol. 12, no. 4 (2004), pp. 270–85. Glück, Louise. Averno. Farrar, 2006. Homer, Iliad, vol. 1, trans. A. T. Murray and revised by William F. Wyatt, Harvard University Press, 1924. Kanda, K. C. Masterpieces of Urdu Ghazal from the 17th to the 20th Century. Sterling, 1990. Lowell, Robert. Imitations. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. Melnick, David. Men in Aïda. Tuumba, 1983. Owen, Stephen. “Stepping Forward and Back: Issues and Possibilities for ‘World’ Poetry.” Modern Philology, vol. 100, no. 4 (2003), pp. 532–48. Pritchett, Frances W. “The Sky, the Road, the Glass of Wine: On Translating Faiz.” Annual of Urdu Studies, vol. 15 (2000), pp. 57–75. Pushkin, Alexander. “Primety” [“Portents” or “Signs”] [1829]. Selected Poetry, trans. Antony Wood, Penguin, 2020, p. 40. Rexroth, Kenneth. “The Poet as Translator.” World Outside the Window: The Selected Essays, ed. Bradford Morrow, New Directions, 1987, pp. 171–90. Rich, Adrienne. Leaflets: Poems 1965–1968. Norton, 1969. Stallings, Jonathan. Yingelishi/吟歌麗詩: Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics. Counterpath, 2011. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2008. Vieira, Else Ribeiro Pires. “Liberating Calibans: Readings of Antropofagia and Haroldo de Campos’ Poetics of Transcreation.” Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, Routledge, 1999, pp. 95–113. Von Hallberg, Robert. Lyric Powers. University of Chicago Press, 2008. Wilson, Edmund. “The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov.” Review of Eugene Onegin by Aleksandr Pushkin, trans. Vladimir Nabokov. New York Review of Books, July 15, 1965, www.nybo​oks.com/artic​les/1965/07/15/ the-stra​nge-case-of-push​kin-and-nabo​kov/. Accessed June 17, 2022.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Prosthetic Poetics: Contemporary Poetry of Disability JESSICA LEWIS LUCK

If, as Wallace Stevens wrote, modern poetry is “the act of the mind,” then postwar poetry is arguably the act of the body. Charles Olson’s influential “Projective Verse” (1950) exemplifies this shift to phenomenology, advocating for a poetics engendered by the breath and the ear. With poetic movements such as Olson’s Black Mountain School, the body-focused confessionals, the Beats and their sexual and pharmaceutical experimentations, the “leaping poetry” of the deep imagists, the Black Arts Movement’s chant poetics, and the body politics of feminist poetries, the body has been central to contemporary American poets. But what do they (and we) mean by “the body”? As critic Michael Davidson points out, many of these movements assume a normalized body as the source of their poetics, one unhampered by disability, prosthesis, or disease (118). The recent turn in literary and cultural theory toward phenomenology and affect studies often rests on similar ableist assumptions in its engagement with the embodied mind. A disability studies approach to contemporary poetry, however, enables theories of an embodied poetics and politics more complex than the ideology of some universalized “normal” body allows. It is precisely such a theory of complex embodiment that many contemporary poets with disabilities are enacting in their work, calling into question normative forms of embodiment, perception, and language use, and exploring new ones. The story of disability poetry after the Second World War is one of radical transformation. Mid-century poets with disabilities were nearly invisible, relegated to collections of maudlin “inspirational” verse, while more mainstream poets such as Josephine Miles, Vassar Miller, and Larry Eigner avoided the label. These early poets wrote in a culture where the medical model of disability held sway—disability as a biological defect, a lack that must be fixed, made “normal” through cure, prosthesis, or medical intervention. But alongside the revolutions of the disability rights movement of the 1970s, a new social model of disability emerged—disability as produced in bodies by the social and built environment. That is, a person with an impairment does not become disabled until she is excluded in some way by lack of access or discrimination, and thus it is society itself that must be fixed to better accommodate her. This new model of disability as a socially constructed identity category allowed people from different disability advocacy groups to begin to work together, as they realized they were fighting

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for the same rights: accessible transportation, barrier-free environments, and nondiscrimination.1 Influenced by other civil rights activism taking place around the country at the time, disability became a social and political force. In 1962, the same year James Meredith required a lawsuit to become the first Black person to attend the University of Mississippi, Ed Roberts broke the disability barrier in higher education, suing to gain admission to UC Berkeley. Near the Berkeley campus, Roberts founded The Center for Independent Living (The CIL) in 1972; The CIL is a (now international) organization governed by and for people with disabilities that aims to provide the vision and resources for living independently in the community. It is no coincidence that the Bay Area would then become the site for the first, and one of the most significant protests of the disability rights movement, the twenty-five-day sit-in at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). Demonstrations were held at the headquarters of HEW around the nation in 1977, but the group in San Francisco held out the longest, demanding the signing of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which gave civil rights to people with disabilities in programs receiving federal financial assistance. Grassroots organizations at the local and national levels continued to fight in the streets and in the courts, with many, such as ADAPT, focusing on the accessibility of public transportation. In 1988, students and faculty/staff allies at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, shut down the campus for a week, demanding and ultimately winning the appointment of the institution’s first deaf president, I. King Jordan, since its founding in 1864. These activist victories around the nation set the stage for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, the country’s first comprehensive civil rights law for people with disabilities. Though imperfect, the law aims to prohibit discrimination and guarantee that people with disabilities have the same rights to take part in mainstream American life, including employment opportunities and reasonable accommodations in the workplace and accessibility of goods and services in all public places.2 The efforts of the disability rights movement inspired the first pioneering collections and anthologies of disability literature and poetry. The Berkeley poet Josephine Miles published Coming to Terms in 1979, arguably one of the first books of postwar poetry to directly address the poet’s disability. Though Miles had a somewhat complex relationship to the disability rights movement (see Susan Schweik’s important scholarship), it’s hard to imagine that the activism surrounding her on campus did not influence this late-career turn to writing explicitly about her unique embodied experience in the world. Vassar Miller’s Despite This Flesh: The Disabled in Stories and Poems appeared in 1985, though she did not publish poems mentioning her disability until If I Had Wheels or Love in 1991. Baird and Workman’s Toward Solomon’s Mountain: The Experience of Disability in Poetry, the first anthology to focus exclusively on the genre of disability poetry, came out in 1986, though it, like Miller’s, also included nondisabled poets. Marsha Saxton and Florence Howe’s collection of women writers with disabilities, With Wings, published by the Feminist Press in 1987, contains thirteen poets, including Nancy Mairs, Vassar Miller, Muriel Rukeyser (after her stroke), and Adrienne Rich, who helped choose texts for the volume. The passage of the ADA in Early disability advocacy groups reflect the influence of the medical model, focusing on the cause of a particular disability, not its effects. The March of Dimes fought for the eradication of polio, for example, and Jerry Lewis’s notorious telethons raised money used to investigate genetic screening that would prevent people with muscular dystrophy from ever being born (Fleischer and Zames 13, 11). 2 As of this writing, the ADA is currently being threatened by new legislation (H.R. 620) attempting to weaken its provisions and impose much greater burdens on people with disabilities who encounter barriers to access. For a comprehensive history of the disability rights movement, see Fleischer and Zames. 1

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1990 seemed to launch a new era in disability poetry, with the publication of several significant single-author books by poets engaging directly with their disabilities,3 and Kenny Fries’s important edited collection of poetry, fiction, and drama, Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out (1997).4 The social model of disability arising out of the disability rights movement has done important work in defining disability as an identity category, like race and gender, with its own discriminations to overcome and its own voices to be heard, as these early anthologies illustrate. But some critics have complained that the pendulum has swung too far, eliding the significance of the biological body completely in the important effort to understand disability as a social construction. Tobin Siebers has challenged disability studies to craft an identity politics in a new register, one that takes into account the situated knowledge of particular bodies and their phenomenological experience (326). Not a model of identity as emerging exclusively from some bodily essence, but a theory of “complex embodiment [that] theorizes the body and its representations as mutually transformative” (328). Critic Lennard Davis finds that when bodies are understood alongside all of their differences and instabilities, disability becomes the one identity that links all the others. Indeed, he sees disability as the identity that best reflects the postmodern subject position—one that highlights that “difference is what all of us have in common. That identity is not fixed but malleable. That technology is not separate but part of the body” (311). According to Davis, then, we are not so much “postmodern” subjects as “dismodern.” And the fundamental instability of the dismodern embodied subject allows disability as an identity category to avoid some of the pitfalls of other identity politics and their more essentializing treatments of embodiment. Emerging as recently in the literary theoretical game as it has, disability poetry has similarly managed to transcend some of the controversial divides that have troubled earlier minority poetries—aesthetics versus politics, lyric versus experimental.5 The most important anthology of disability poetry in the United States to date, Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Bartlett et al. 2011),6 exemplifies this inclusiveness and shows what an identity-based collection can be when it has absorbed the lessons of deconstruction and intersectionality. The anthology includes both activists who understand their poetics as an explicit disability politics and poets who do not necessarily identify with the “crip” poet label, and everyone in between. It embraces poets

Michael Northen makes this point in his introduction to the Beauty Is a Verb anthology (20), listing Karen Fiser’s Words Like Fate and Pain (1992), Tom Andrews’s The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle (1994), Kenny Fries’s Anesthesia (1994), Floyd Skloot’s Music Appreciation (1994), Dara McLaughlin’s A Map of This World (1999), Steven Kuusisto’s Only Bread, Only Light (2000), and Jim Ferris’s The Hospital Poems (2004). 4 As of this writing, there is no book-length scholarly study focused exclusively on disability poetry. Significant work in the field has been done by literary disability studies scholars such as Michael Davidson, whose Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (2008) includes chapters on ASL poetry and Larry Eigner; Petra Kuppers, who has published work on disability poetics in addition to her work in disability performance studies; and Susan M. Schweik, who has written about poet Josephine Miles alongside her important history The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (2010). I find it interesting that poetry has often been at the forefront of literary disability studies, with the first major anthologies and the inaugural issue of the Journal of Literary Disability (now the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies) in 2007 focusing on the genre. In the popular press, poet voices have also dominated the New York Times op-ed series on Disability, which was launched in fall 2016 with an essay by Daniel Simpson. 5 Poets Harryette Mullen and David Mura, for example, have written about how more experimental work by writers of color often gets left out of the major anthologies for not being traditionally “black” or “Asian” enough in its content or style. 6 The first anthology of disability poetry from the UK came out in 2017: Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back. 3

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writing in the vein of the “mainstream” lyric and poets focused more on formal and linguistic experimentation. The poems are interested not only in disability as an isolated identity category but also in how it intersects with gender and sexuality.7 Because the anthology offers such a helpful broad spectrum of disability poetics in contemporary American poetry, I’d like to use it as a test case for exploring the theory of complex embodiment that poets with disabilities are often enacting.8 This theory of complex embodiment appears both as a body politics in the poem and as a body politics of the poem in contemporary disability poetry. As critic Craig Dworkin and others have explained, the politics in the poem indicates poetry with political content, such as Adrienne Rich’s feminist lyrics or Denise Levertov’s anti-war poems (Dworkin, Illegible 4). By contrast, the politics of the poem is “what is signified by its form, enacted by its structures, implicit in its philosophy of language, how it positions its reader, and a range of questions relating to the poem as a material object” (Illegible 4–5). Disability poetry engages with both these politics, and at times collapses them. Jim Ferris is one of the central figures engaged with the disability politics in the poem. Reclaiming the derogatory term “crip,” much as the gay rights movement appropriated “queer,” Ferris coined the term “crip poetry” to define work in an activist mode that challenges stereotypes and foregrounds disability experience (“Crip Poetry”). His oft-cited “Poet of Cripples” sonnet, for example, begins with the invocation, “Let me be a poet of cripples,” and calls for “room of our own, space to grow in ways / unimaginable to the straight / and the narrow” (BIV 94). In a similar vein, John Lee Clark, in his darkly ironic poem “Deaf Blind: Three Squared Cinquain,” critiques the patronizing and pitying tendency of a normate culture to view people with disabilities just going about their daily lives as “inspirational”—“BARBARA WALTERS IS IN AWE / of a deaf-blind man” who can actually cook for himself!9 Clark humorously blames Helen Keller for getting him into this predicament: “Can’t I pick my nose / without it being a miracle?” (BIV 160). Such consciousnessraising within a disability identity politics/poetics does powerful and important work. Poet Jennifer Bartlett speaks for many people with disabilities when she asserts that by far the most pain and difficulty surrounding disability experience comes from the prejudice of others rather than the disability itself (BIV 300). Though Jillian Weise avoids the “crip poet” label, concerned about the essentializing possibilities of its definition, she writes some of the most powerful examples of the body politics in the poem in the Beauty Is a Verb anthology.10 Weise’s “The Old Questions” narrates a tryst in which the speaker’s potential partner begins to ask questions about her prosthetic: When I asked you to turn off the lights, you said, Will you show me your leg first?   (BIV 146)

Only one contributor to the anthology, C. S. Giscombe, engages with race in his work. However, there are many American poets of color with disabilities currently engaging these questions, including Camisha L. Jones, Constance Merritt, Leroy Moore, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Khadijah Queen. 8 Subsequent texts quoted from the Beauty Is a Verb anthology will be cited parenthetically as BIV. Another invaluable resource for encountering this work is Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, an online open-access quarterly journal hosted by Syracuse University at www.wordga​ther​ing.com. 9 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson coins the term “normate” to describe the attitudes that govern how nondisabled people conceive of themselves in relation to non-normative forms of embodiment. 10 See also Weise’s The Amputee’s Guide to Sex (2007) and The Book of Goodbyes (2013). 7

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While the couple next door finds intimacy in touching and listening (to Rachmaninov, the last romantic composer), the speaker on this side of the wall finds herself increasingly separated from her partner via the gaze (dramatized in the line breaks as well): Do you sleep with it on? I forgot there would be this conversation.    (BIV 146) His questions transform her into a visual fetish object in a New Orleans peep show where no touching is allowed and there is no room for her own agency and desire, unlike her foil next door who has “found the backs” of her partner’s knees. Weise’s work demonstrates what a nonessentializing and intersectional body politics in the poem can achieve. Disability poetics often seems to collapse the distinction between the politics in and the politics of, however. Even the most overtly activist “crip” poets in the anthology find a body politics and poetics at work in the form of their poems too. Jim Ferris writes, “If my meters are sprung, if my feet are uneven, if my path is irregular, that’s just how I walk. And how I write” (“The Enjambed Body” 228). Daniel Simpson explains how, as a blind poet, his line breaks use “principles of cadence and musical scoring” as a guide rather than a painterly configuration (BIV 122). Laura Hershey finds a poetics in her daily process of getting comfortable with the help of an attendant: “You see, this is the way I want it. This is what I mean. Not quite that far. Left, not right. Pull a little further. Push again. A careful calculation of timing, tune and tempo” (BIV 132). A critical disability poetics is not a theory of poetics that relies on knowing the physical condition of the poet, however. Instead, it acknowledges and highlights the ways that the particularity of embodied experience plays an important role in any poetics. These poems critically engage with disability, both by examining the author’s bodily experience in the world and by exploring the embodied materiality of the poem itself. I’m interested, then, in reading disability poetics as a form of prosthesis, both for the poet and, most importantly, for the reader. The medical model of disability understands prosthesis as the replacement of defective or absent parts of the body. For these poets, however, the poem as prosthesis should not be read as merely a compensatory response to some lack. Alternative phenomenological theories of prosthesis read it more positively. Feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz explains in the chapter “Prosthetic Objects” that prosthetic incorporation is endemic to all human and animal bodies—we are always supplementing our bodies’ capacities with various objects and tools (146). But rather than reading prosthesis as a mere addition to a fixed body with a set of pre-given abilities, Grosz wonders if it is better understood as mutually transformative, an “aesthetic reorganization and proliferation” that generates new bodily capacities and behaviors (147). For contemporary poets with disabilities, the poem is incorporated—an extension of the embodied mind that generates a poetics of a lived perspective, a fusion of a particular body and world. As a result, I would argue, disability poetics becomes a potentially transformative prosthesis for the reader as well, enabling an aesthetic reorganization of thought and a proliferation of new qualities and capacities. A powerful body politics of the poem, indeed. This “prosthetic poetics” manifests itself in unique ways across the work of poets with disabilities. Alex Lemon suggests that his visual disability after a brain tumor operation has enabled the surrealist vision of his poetry (BIV 168). Creating broken lines with literal caesuras, Laurie Clements Lambeth attempts to convey the disconnect of her impaired sensations in poems such as “Hypoesthesia” and

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“Dysaesthesia” (BIV 176). For Denise Leto, with her speech disorder “the poetic line becomes a callisthenic beam of the spoken” (BIV 292);11 and Rusty Morrison writes, “I’ve begun to think of my chronic illness as a new language that my body is acquiring” (BIV 323). These poets are thus drawn to the radical formalism of avant-garde poetics to better speak in/of the radical forms of their embodiment. “The phenomenology of pain / harbors words which refuse / syntax and order, predictable, / eventual inevitability,” as Cynthia Hogue explains in “In a Mute Season” (BIV 311). Hogue’s poem “Green Surrounds the Mind of Summer” manifests this emerging experimental language in its collage of multiple texts, voices, and sounds.12 Despite the romantic title, there is no centering lyric “I” speaking in this poem. The first voice is a third-person narrator, describing how the patient is “Taking time, patience,” exploring “This new body a new land” (BIV 309). Then the doctor’s voice interrupts with a surreal meaning for the “green” that “surrounds the mind” of this explorer:                    “Let’s say that people with green haIr are more likely to cOntract this disease, so for our purposes it’s as if you have green haIr.” (BIV 309) The poem then shifts to second person, addressing a “you,” “an apostrophe designed to conjure ‘me’ back to the world,” Hogue writes in her introductory essay (BIV 307): He wOn’t kill but he cannot       cure you There is nO cure Now there’s nO there    your mind left     without your body     Where did ‘you’     gO? (BIV 309) Suspended between medicine’s promising cliché to kill or cure, the “you” of the poem seems neither dead nor alive, nowhere, “nO there.” Then a new voice/perspective on illness cuts in with a boxed quote from a medical anthropology text: The study of individual illness, with the notion of social illness, is a window for us to look at the characteristics of social experience in our society, as well as the development, maintenance and treatment of disease.

In this way, Leto’s work is similar to Jordan Scott’s book Blert, in which he doesn’t attempt to represent or mimic his stutter, but the stutter is registered in the language itself—it induces a stutter in readers. See also Craig Dworkin’s excellent essay on Scott’s work, “The Stutter of Form.” 12 The poem is part of a longer sequence, “The Incognito Body,” in Hogue’s book of the same name: The Incognito Body (2006). 11

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The poem attempts to reveal the ontology of illness through its pastiche of medical biology, the patient’s phenomenology, and cultural anthropology. But the speaker grows frustrated with all of this empty discourse: “If nothing means anything,” then even “the medical report / [is] a construction of meaning / to mean something” (BIV 310). Yet all the while humming beneath these discourses are the slippery sounds and signifiers of logos itself, revealed in Hogue’s play with capital letters. She unearths the word “AIL” in “dAILy” and the word “LIE” in “beLIEve” (BIV 309), much as these disruptions must emerge in the daily life and belief (in medicine, in healing?) of the ill person. If we track the other random capitals in the poem, the two Is (engulfed in the “green haIr” lines) are overwhelmed by the six capital Os in the opening stanzas, perhaps sounding the pain of the body itself. Elaine Scarry writes eloquently about how physical pain destroys language, but Hogue seems to have invented a poetic discourse that allows the body and its pain to seep and speak through. For if there is nothing outside the text and language constructs reality as deconstruction teaches us, “then disease-free / is a state of being / you can claim / to emBODY, saying if / you do, you do, and you dO / (it’s a lie)” (BIV 310).13 The speaker makes an effort in the act of repetition/incantation, but that final O (or /oo/) of bodily pain interrupts to give the lie to a reality constructed by pure disembodied discourse. Hogue’s experimental language gives voice to the bodily forces that rumble beneath the word. Such a language as used by Hogue, then, becomes a prosthetic device for the reader to experience language and the body in new and transformative ways. Amber DiPietra describes her poetics similarly: I need … to write a poetics that is porous, a membrane. A text that sucks the reader through its many holes and vaporous areas while offering also a sampling of real tissues, body-systems, that another body can assimilate. To bring my body in—and yours. … I am in search of a transparent, mobile language that moves, even when it occludes. This speaks directly to the processes of the body. (BIV 273) This prosthetic poetics takes Charles Olson’s organicism one step further. Like Olson, DiPietra imagines a kind of bodily “kinetics” of the poem in which something is transferred from poet to reader (Olson 240). For Olson this is a transfer of “energy” generated from the breath and the ear (240), the “speech-force of language” captured on the open field of the page (244). Despite all the body-related terms in Olson’s seminal essay, however, the word body itself never appears. His description of the actual “process of the thing” adopts tropes more from physics (energy, force, particles, tension) than biology (242). For DiPietra, the poem is not just a power cord, but a bodily prosthesis—a device that, once incorporated and assimilated, transforms the reader through its “aesthetic reorganization and proliferation,” generating new capacities (Grosz 147). The poetry of Larry Eigner offers a helpful test case for this more radical organicism of poem as prosthesis.14 Indeed, Eigner’s poetics is often associated with Olson’s Black Mountain school, particularly his notion of “composition by field.” Eigner’s brief lines drift from the left margin as

“O” is also the traditional opening to the poetic device of apostrophe, the act of addressing something absent or something that cannot speak (“O, Moon!”), a trope that works to “dramatize or constitute an image of self,” as Jonathan Culler explains (63), much as Hogue likewise attempts to do in this poem. 14 I develop this argument about Eigner’s poetics further in the essay “Larry Eigner and the Phenomenology of Projected Verse” (Luck). 13

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they unfold down the page, and can be read as a manifestation of Olson’s poetics of “kinetics” and “move[ment],” a “dance” or “speech-force” on the page (Olson 240, 243, 244). One way to read poem as prosthesis, then, is that it becomes for Eigner “a machine for walking” (Collected 195), so that he can write “o i walk i walk” in “Open” from On My Eyes and mean it as the words leap across the page (Collected 113; On My Eyes 24a).15 But it is also important to remember the actual kinetics of Eigner’s speech and writing process. Because of his palsied limbs, he painstakingly typed each poem using only his right index finger on a manual typewriter. Furthermore, as Ron Silliman suggests, Eigner provides the ultimate test to Olson’s emphasis on breath, speech, and voice (372), for his cerebral palsy made speech difficult for him and difficult for others to understand. Olson celebrated the ear (and presumably the typewriter) because “it has the mind’s speed” allowing the poet to “keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs … one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!” (242, 240). Eigner’s typing finger, however, could not keep up with “the mind’s speed.” Read in this context, Eigner’s poems generate a tension as the words punctuate the delay and skip across the timescape of his perception. Perhaps, though, his bodily constraint generated a distinct poetics, a different relationship of thought to typed word. Instead of Olson’s hyperactive catalogue of perceptions piled into long lines and lengthy poems, each word in an Eigner poem becomes a site for multiple perceptions and possibilities in sound and meaning. Take these three lines from Eigner dated June 19–September 9, collected in Beauty Is a Verb as an example: the window opening     no, already opened               nothing but the wind up (36) The word “opening” in the first line could be a gerund referring to the space of the window, or a verb referring to the action of the window, and the second line seems to confirm the latter interpretation, but only as it disintegrates our initial visual perception of the scene, “no, [the window was] already opened.” The meter also reflects the idea of opening as the lines expand from two to three to four feet per line. The precise parallelogram shape of the poem also invites reading in nonlinear patterns, revealing “no” and “nothing” lined up on the left and “opening,” “opened,” and “up” on the right. The word “up” also works to create a visual and aural symmetry with the beginning of the poem, “the window … the wind up,” but it shakes up that symmetry at the same time by suggesting the phrase “wind up,” introducing the first long /i/ sound in the poem and a whole new sense of physical action to this seemingly passive poem, of a body coiled and ready to strike. Like a stereoscope the poem has two openings, two windows (from early Scandinavian for wind, air and auga, eye) to look through that offer the reader multiple perceptions (OED), creating a 3D vision of words and their multiplicity. And herein lies Eigner’s sense of the transformative possibilities of poetry, which he explained in an interview: “no poetry can raise anyone’s hopes for a medical cure, say, or any sort of miracle. Just ‘refresh the eyes / against the abyss’ ” (areas 155).16

Michael Davidson does an excellent reading in this vein in his essay “Missing Larry,” an excerpt of which is included in Beauty Is a Verb, with the full essay found in his Concerto for the Left Hand. 16 Eigner is quoting his own poem here. That last line comes from a poem he wrote for Cid Corman, which reads: “how read it / line after line // given / one look // refresh the eyes / against the abyss” (areas 155). 15

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The visual and linguistic multiplicity produced by the prosthetic of an Eigner poem refreshes the eyes (and ears), keeping language’s vibrant instability at the forefront of the mind. David Wolach deploys his experimental poetics even more deliberately as a prosthetic device to investigate his own perceptions and to refresh those of his readers. His poems begin as “site-specific corporeal procedures” he calls “distraction zones,” in which he subjects his own body to a complex set of stressors and distractors while simultaneously attempting to articulate the experience.17 In one example, he writes “in [the] rain 34f, just after running for one hour on treadmill at midnight with neuromuscular disease” while exploring “Appendix M of CIA Interrogations Manual [on] stress holds” (BIV 337). As he explains, “these poems struggle to (un)map and (de)articulate the body’s position within a zone of pre-established discomfort, distraction, ‘noise,’ indicative of the surveillance-industrial complex” (BIV 336). The result is not so much a finished poem as “a degraded poem-attempt,” a “non-enclosed investigatory aesthetic ecosystem,” in which readers might be able to see or hear the lapsed logic of the discourses of power that shape their lives (BIV 337). Wolach hopes that merely staging and framing these bizarre constraints and self-imposed miniature acts of violence/control will “shake us up,” producing new feelings and behaviors, perhaps most importantly a somatic and cognitive awareness of the oppressive discourses that we live with every day without paying much affective attention (BIV 337). Wolach takes on the oppressive power of the medical gaze in the poem “(muted domestic pornography),” which was “written while watching 1) online homemade pornography (no audio), and 2) surgical imaging stills of the inside of my urinary tract. Oscillating between viewing (1) and (2), 30 second intervals” (BIV 340). The uncomfortable pairing of the medical scan and the pornographic film in this distraction zone becomes a prosthesis that shakes things up for us in interesting ways. Donna Haraway describes how the medical gaze always casts itself as a “modest witness,” a crucial foundation for its scientific claims to objectivity (24). The doctor’s hand clutching the genitalia or the technician’s eyes gazing into the urinary tract are disinterested and “self-invisible,” never themselves witnessed or the object of a critical gaze (Haraway 32). Wolach’s pairing suddenly associates the supposedly “modest” witness of the medical scan with the decidedly immodest gaze of the observer of online pornography and its related affects of voyeurism, titillation, and taboo. If “porno-graphy” literally means “writing about prostitutes” (OED), then Wolach’s poem itself becomes a prime example of the genre: “Never so held in held / Suspense: the long // Disease is pornographic,” the poem begins (340). He is the writer / “prostitute” whose body parts are “held” in “Suspense” for the camera, his “holes … a constant testing / Ground” as he “roam[s]‌corporate clinics” later in the poem (340). Wolach finds the body to be an “occultation,” something hidden or cut off from view by the imposition of the medical scan. He writes, “there is some I // Tensing with a perverting here / Here the sheen of a slowly open // Curve a depth I’ve seen this before” (340). The body image is strangely familiar, but the “perpetual breaks of strata // In continuity becomes continuity: I”; that is, the only continuity here, paradoxically, is the experience of fragmentation itself, as the couplet’s repetition of I demonstrates: “I / I here cannot see is a here with yet no // Name” (340). Wolach stutters the I across a line break and highlights its undecidability under the gaze of the medical scanner—it cannot see, it has no name. The medical images of his urinary tract only see the self as the body part they portray, which Wolach highlights by his own act of imaging the letter “I” as

These poems are from Occultations (2010).

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a penis. The interpretive “delivery system” of the scanner “holds I up / Up by its penis a story halos above // It: degraded lyric as convergence of aporias” (340). While the modest witness of the medical scan wants to hold up the body under a saintly halo of divine disinterested data, Wolach’s prosthetic poem-event de-sanctifies and dis-graces that gaze with its own “degraded lyric,” exposing for readers the “convergence of aporias” at the heart of any act of imaging a body or imagining a self.18 Perhaps one of the most unique examples of how disability poetics enables readers to experience the body and language in revolutionary ways is poetry performed in American Sign Language (ASL). Yet this poetry also presents some unique challenges to the field of disability poetics itself. First, many Deaf users of ASL consider themselves a linguistic minority rather than “disabled,” and so some ASL poets might avoid or reject having their work categorized as disability poetry.19 Another controversy is the notion of translation—should ASL performances have voice-over or captions in English for hearing audiences? The history of Deaf education in this country is rife with coercive pedagogies in which the Deaf person was forced to speak rather than use their native language in order to assimilate into a hearing culture. The battle against such oralist and audist ideologies has united and politicized the Deaf community, leading to protests such as the successful Gallaudet University Deaf President Now movement previously mentioned. At the same time, as Michael Davidson points out, “the scandal of speech in Deaf performance” can be used as a powerful poetic and political tool for Deaf artists (81). Poets Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner of The Flying Words Project, for example, use a combination of ASL, mime, and speech in their performances aimed at both hearing and deaf audiences. But rather than a direct “translation” of ASL, the spoken word and sound function only as another poetic element, “extending the gestural potential of ASL into an immanent critique of audist ideology,” as Davidson writes (83).20 Even when ASL performances include a “translation” for English-speaking audiences, I would argue, the juxtaposition of the two languages creates a powerful potential for defamiliarization and critique. Indeed, with a captioned ASL performance on video, audiences (note the audist biases of English word choice) have the very unusual experience of “reading” a poem in two different languages simultaneously—one in the abstract lexicon of English signifiers, one in the embodied sign system of American Sign Language. As with any translation of a text, the languages are not always going to line up perfectly, and poets can also play with the effects of saying something somewhat different in each language at the same time. As W. J. T. Mitchell notes in his preface to the essential edited collection Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature, such a disconnect between bodily gesture and spoken language is at the heart of the alienation effect that Bertolt Brecht famously described (Mitchell xxi), an effect that works to jolt both performer and viewer into a social-critical mindset.21 The politics of the poem in ASL poetry moves from the form of the words on the page to the form of thought staged on the human body itself.

This argument about Wolach’s poetics is also included in my article “Proprio-spection: The Poetics of Medical Imaging” in the special issue of the journal Amodern on Disability Poetics (2020). 19 Raymond Luczak, for example, has poems in the Beauty Is a Verb anthology, but does not advertise this publication on his website. 20 Other ASL poets include Ella Mae Lentz, Debbie Rennie, Bernard Bragg, Patrick Graybill, E. Lynn Jacobowitz, Manny Hernandez, and Clayton Valli. 21 Mitchell also cites a fascinating psychological study that links “gesture-speech mismatch” in children to “transitional knowledge states.” That is, when a child’s gesture is out of synch with her speech, it’s a good sign she is about to learn something new (Mitchell xxiii n.12). 18

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The poet Raymond Luczak discusses his experience of the profound differences between these two languages and their productive interaction in his poetics: ASL unleashes my emotion, and English tempers it. This tension between these two disparate languages informs all my rewrites because I borrow non-stop from each language without thinking about it. If I have trouble with a line, I sign it and rewrite. Sometimes I find I have to invent new ways of describing things in English because ASL is often superior to what’s possible in English. (BIV 220) To explore this dynamic interplay of ASL and English in performance, I want to examine Luczak’s English-language poem “Instructions to Hearing Persons Desiring a Deaf Man” in Beauty Is a Verb, which he also performs in ASL (with captions) on YouTube.22 The English poem is written in unrhymed couplets, with one line describing the deaf man and the other addressing the desiring “you” of the title (BIV 225).23 Divided across end-stopped lines, the “he” and the “you” of the poem seem destined never to connect because their unique languages make them foreign to one another. For much of the poem, the deaf man’s lines begin with a body part, often one associated with communication in ASL: eyebrows, hands, face, and eyes. Meanwhile, the hearing “you” is associated with the frustrations and abstractions of an oralist and written language: “You are a difficult language to speak,” “You are nothing but paper and ink” (BIV 225).The poem asserts that a deaf person is always a foreign country in which tourists rarely gain fluency. Thus, “his eyes will flicker with a bright fire when / you purge your passport of sound” (BIV 225). This ambiguous couplet can be understood in multiple ways. The fire in the speaker’s eyes could suggest anger as the hearing “you” addresses him in a foreign oralist tongue, the word “purge” implying that the speaker views this sound as some kind of repulsive toxic material. And yet this is also the first enjambed line of the poem where “he” and “you” begin to communicate, however awkwardly. The flickering fire in his eyes could also manifest desire, and “you purge your passport of sound” could signify that the potential hearing lover has cleared himself of suspicion or guilt by getting rid of sound as a form of communication. Indeed, in the next enjambed couplet, “he” is instructed in how to use a new bodily language: he must use his hands as his passport in order to receive the deaf man’s stamp of approval. Though the final couplet returns to end stopped lines and the notion of the deaf as a foreign country to the hearing, the poem has offered outsiders a potential way into this new country and its unfamiliar language. With the interaction of ASL and English in Luczak’s performance of “Instructions to Hearing Persons Desiring a Deaf Man” on video, this instruction and potential for connection materializes in real time for viewers. While with the poem on the page, readers can imagine that the “you” being addressed is someone else, a potential lover or friend, in the ASL performance, the viewer is immediately implicated and hailed as Luczak points his thumb signing YOU to begin while looking directly at the camera. I, the viewer, am the HEARING PERSON MESMERIZED by the deaf man and in need of instruction. (When writing about ASL, the standard form is to gloss a particular sign in all capital letters to convey the English meaning.) Luczak signs LIST with his right hand demarcating one line after another on the left hand, which also resembles the lineated version of the poem on the page. Deaf linguist and poet Clayton Valli was one of the first to explore the features of he English version of the poem also appears in Luczak’s book Mute (2010). T I use “deaf ” with a lower case here following Luczak’s practice within the poem.

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ASL as a literary genre with conventions similar to lineated poetry, including handshape repetition as a form of rhyme or alliteration. However, H-Dirksen L. Bauman has written insightfully about the role of the “line” in ASL poetry as more akin to the line in other art forms such as painting, architecture, dance, or cinema (98). In the subtitled ASL YouTube performance of “Instructions to Hearing Persons Desiring a Deaf Man,” Luczak nonetheless introduces a pause between each “line” of the poem, similar to the pauses heard in oral poetic readings of end-stopped lineated verse, perhaps to facilitate understanding for the phonocentric audience of this particular poem who are accustomed to more traditional list-like lines in their poems. While in the YouTube performance of Raymond Luczak’s poem’s title, the viewer is addressed directly, the first line offers a cinematic establishing shot of the DEAF MAN at a party or bar with hearing people. His EYEBROWS are furrowed as he looks around the AREA. He’s squinting, puzzled by all the visual input of people talking, but he’s leaning backward, which implies he’s not even trying to understand them. YOU, HEARING PERSON, are DIFFICULT to understand, he signs. The deaf man’s BEARD HIDES his HEART; he’s NOT TRUSTING. The next line puts the viewer into the position of the deaf man. With two fingers pointing in a V shape all around and tongue wagging, he represents the hearing people who stare at him and talk about him because of his sign language. To LEARN to SIGN is NOT EASY, as these people may think, and HEARING PEOPLE often DESTROY the DEAF PEOPLE they meet. Still, when the potential lover/viewer engages with the deaf man, his face SHOWS MAYBE. But it is frustrating to have to write back and forth with paper and ink, he signs. The next two lines “rhyme” with their end in negation: YOU SIGNING SKILLS NOT; YOU THINK SIGNING is going to be EASY NOT. Luczak’s EYES flicker while he signs FIRE in front of them as the poem reaches its climax. And, as in the English poem, the following “lines” are no longer end-stopped but a transformation line, when “one image or sign transforms into another without a break, threaded together through a single gestural line,” as Bauman writes (107). When you remove your voice, he signs, LEARNING (hands grasping and pulling toward the face) is going to be difficult—the sign for LEARNING combines quickly with the back of his hands hitting his pained face, the sign for FRUSTRATION. But that circular motion toward his face transforms slowly into his hands circling away from his face in the sign for SIGNING. Don’t give up, he implies, and you will start to be successful and smoother with repetition and practice. Cutting back to performing the deaf observer, he signs APPROVAL and STAMP, a sign that echoes the hammering movement of DIFFICULT in the opening of the poem, but this time with a very different affect on the deaf man’s face. Like the English poem, the ASL performance ends in some qualification: DEAFNESS to YOU is a different WORLD, BUT this LIFE has value. The LEARNING sign reappears again in the final line and opens outward into the Y hand-shape of FOREVER. But Luczak signs it with both hands instead of just one, implying a potential connection and partnership in learning across these different worlds. To aid my translation of the performance, I consulted with Fred Gravatt, Emeritus Professor of American Sign Language at California State University, San Bernardino, an interaction that in many ways mirrored the situation in the poem itself—a (rather inept and inapt) hearing person curious to learn something from a deaf person about Deaf language and culture. Our conversation revealed to me the ways that American Sign Language is itself a theory of complex embodiment, one that called into question my normative ideas about language use. While I kept wanting each gesture to correlate to a specific English word I could write down, Gravatt kept pointing me to the subtle landscape of expression and grammar in ASL that takes place in the eyes and face, in

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shifting body position and shoulder movements. As in the final lines of the poem, this interaction disabled some old biases and enabled an education in a new form of language, interpretation, and poetics. As Jennifer Bartlett writes in one of her poems, a movement spastic           and unwieldy is its own lyric and the able-bodied are tone-deaf to this singing[.] ‌(BIV 301) Through the politics in and the politics of their poems, poets with disabilities engage and enact theories of a complex embodiment that the at times “tone-deaf ” fields of contemporary poetry and theory have much to learn from. And these poets push the field of disability studies as well, expanding the field to include neurodiversity, illness, and invisible disabilities, and to consider how disability intersects with bodies also inscribed by gender, race, class, and sexuality. Whether in the context of such larger fields of study or within individual writers and readers, the prosthetic poetics of disability poetry enables new ideas and actions that may not have been possible before. Indeed, disability poetry might be understood as the consummation of Charles Olson’s project that launched the body-consciousness of postwar poetry. While for Olson the poem is abstract energy discharged and transferred from poet to reader, disability poetry becomes the material object that he yearns for in part two of “Projective Verse” (247), a prosthetic object that is mutually transformative for writer and reader.

WORKS CITED Alland, Sandra, Khairani Barokka, and Daniel Sluman, eds. Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back. Nine Arches Press, 2017. Baird, Joseph L., and Deborah S. Workman, eds. Toward Solomon’s Mountain: The Experience of Disability in Poetry. Temple University Press, 1986. Bartlett, Jennifer, Sheila Black, and Michael Northen, eds. Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Cinco Puntos Press, 2011. Bauman, H-Dirksen L., Heidi M. Rose, and Jennifer L. Nelson, eds. Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature. University of California Press, 2006. Culler, Jonathan. “Apostrophe.” Diacritics, vol. 7, no. 4 (1977), pp. 59–69. Davidson, Michael. Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body. University of Michigan Press, 2008. Davis, Lennard. “The End of Identity Politics: On Disability as an Unstable Category.” The Disability Studies Reader, 3rd ed., ed. Lennard J. Davis, Routledge, 2010, pp. 302–15. Dworkin, Craig. “The Stutter of Form.” The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, University of Chicago Press, 2009, pp. 166–83. Dworkin, Craig. Reading the Illegible. Northwestern University Press, 2003.

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Eigner, Larry. Areas / Lights / Heights: Writings 1954–1989, ed. Benjamin Friedlander. Roof Books, 1989. Eigner, Larry. The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner, 4 vols., ed. Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier. Stanford University Press, 2010. Eigner, Larry. On My Eyes. Jonathan Williams, 1960. Ferris, Jim. “Crip Poetry, or How I Learned to Love the Limp.” Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry, vol. 1, no. 2 (June 2007), http://www.wordga​ther​ing.com/past​_iss​ues/iss​ue2/essay/fer​ris.html. Accessed June 17, 2022. Ferris, Jim. “The Enjambed Body: A Step Toward a Crippled Poetics.” Georgia Review, vol. 58, no. 2 (2004), pp. 219–33, http://www.jstor.org/sta​ble/i40068​193. Accessed February 27, 2018. Fleischer, Doris Zames, and Frieda Zames. The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation. Temple University Press, 2011. Fries, Kenny. Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out. Plume, 1997. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia University Press, 1997. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Duke University Press, 2005. Haraway, Donna. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium: FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. Routledge, 1997. Hogue, Cynthia. The Incognito Body. Red Hen Press, 2006. Luck, Jessica Lewis. “Larry Eigner and the Phenomenology of Projected Verse.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 53, no. 3 (2012), pp. 461–92. Luck, Jessica Lewis. “Proprio-spection: The Poetics of Medical Imaging.” Amodern, vol. 10 (2020), https://amod​ ern.net/arti​cle/prop​rio-spect​ion/. Luczak, Raymond. “Instructions to Hearing Persons Desiring a Deaf Man.” YouTube, May 9, 2014, https://www. yout​ube.com/watch?v=kp8D​BkaS​8mw&t=10s. Luczak, Raymond. Mute. A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2010. Miles, Josephine. Coming to Terms. University of Illinois Press, 1979. Miller, Vassar. Despite this Flesh: The Disabled in Stories and Poems. University of Texas Press, [1985] 2011. Miller, Vassar. If I Had Wheels or Love. Southern Methodist University Press, 1991. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Preface: Utopian Gestures.” Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature, ed. H-Dirksen L. Bauman, Jennifer L. Nelson, and Heidi M. Rose, University of California Press, 2006, pp. xv–xxiii. Mullen, Harryette. “Poetry and Identity.” West Coast Line, vol.30, no.1 (1996), pp. 85–9. Mura, David. “The Margins at the Center, the Center at the Margins: Acknowledging the Diversity of Asian American Poetry.” Reviewing Asian America: Locating Diversity, ed. Wendy L. Ng, Soo-Young Chin, James S. May, and Gary Y. Okihiro, Washington State University Press, 1995, pp. 171–83. Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse.” Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander, University of California Press, 1997, pp. 239–49. “pornography, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, January 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/148​012. Accessed February 28, 2018. Saxton, Marsha, and Florence Howe, eds. With Wings: An Anthology of Literature by and about Women with Disabilities. Feminist Press, 1993. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford University Press, 1987. Schweik, Susan M. The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. New York University Press, 2010. Schweik, Susan M. “The Voice of ‘Reason.’ ” Public Culture, vol. 13, no. 3 (2001), pp. 485–505.

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Scott, Jordan. Blert. Coach House Books, 2004. Siebers, Tobin. “Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment—For Identity Politics in a New Register.” The Disability Studies Reader, 3rd ed., ed. Lennard J. Davis, Routledge, 2010, pp. 316–35. Silliman, Ron. “Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading.” Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 360–78. Stevens, Wallace. “Of Modern Poetry.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Knopf, 1995, pp. 239–40. Weiss, Jillian. The Amputee’s Guide to Sex. Soft Skull Press, [2007] 2017. Weiss, Jillian. The Book of Goodbyes. BOA Editions, 2013. “window, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, January 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/229​262. Accessed February 28, 2018. Wolach, David. Occultations. Black Radish Books, 2010. Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, www.wordga​ther​ing.com.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Data Dump: Poetry and Information in the Twenty-First Century JEFFREY GRAY

It is possible today, a hundred years after modernism’s onset, to suggest, first, that the most profound changes in the poetry of recent years are changes more of content than of form, and, second, that what is particularly striking in poetry today is what also characterizes society at large: the amount and variety of data, increasingly democratized in their relative value, and frequently uninterpretable due to their sheer mass. The many phases and varieties of disjunction that art and literature passed through in the twentieth century, added to, more recently, the rapidly rising sea of unfiltered and indiscriminate data, have resulted in a reading public much more accustomed to the discontinuous than it was fifty to a hundred years ago. Our demand for coherence, at least as regards this genre, has long been winding down, but with the advent of zettabytes and yottabytes of data, readers’ tolerance is arguably reaching new levels.1 Geoffrey Nurnberg might have been on to something when he observed, “There’s no road back from bits to meaning.” My effort will be to see a congruence in several contemporary trends: the turn in the academic world toward information and away from analysis and interpretation; the practice of “surface reading” and the rejection of readings that favor a political or emancipatory agenda; the “flat ontology” associated with the new materialisms, particularly object-oriented ontology; the advent of new psychological categories and symptoms that suggest a (further) decay of the idea of the “self ”; the explosion of big data, or the “information overload” as it is frequently called; the advent of new discoveries about madness and meaning, including the relation between dopamine levels and meaning-making or metaphorizing; and the most recent phase of the century-long repudiation and

There are now sixteen measures or categories of bytes, including megabyte (1,0002), gigabyte (1,0003), exabyte (1,0006), and zettabyte (1,0007). An Exabyte is one quintillion bytes. A zettabyte is 1,000 times larger. Yottabyte and Xenottobyte, very much larger, are still more recent coinages. “Exaflood” is a coinage meant to describe conditions under which “between 2006 and 2010 the global quantity of digital data will have increased more than six-fold, from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes” (Schwartz 55). “There were five exabytes of information created by the entire world between the dawn of civilization and 2003. Now the same amount of information is created every two days” (Eric Schmidt, quoted in Steinberger). 1

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turn away from the subjective in poetry.2 It will not be possible, obviously, to follow these strands or to trace them to their sources. (If they were found to share a common source—neoliberalism or “the new modesty,” for example—that would be an astonishing discovery.) But that they are all happening at once does suggest some sort of Geist in the world. I will try, at least, to see to what extent the state of information and the “democracy of objects” proposed by new materialists echo or replicate broad trends in contemporary poetry and vice versa. In this essay I will discuss poems that deal with, channel, appropriate, or otherwise treat data in ways exemplary of this condition. My final two examples will be long poems by Timothy Donnelly and Paul Muldoon. These are principally “mainstream” works—in terms of both the poets’ visibility and that of the publications where the poems have appeared. But before turning to them, let’s consider the poetics of data more generally.

THE POETICS OF DATA “Raw data” is a pleonasm insofar as data is implicitly raw. Data is that which is given. All the related terms—Latin datum, French données, Spanish datos—denote this givenness: signs, signals, bytes, images, footage, syllables, pulses as yet unglossed and, perhaps, unglossable. The data collection program of the National Security Agency (NSA), code-named “PRISM” (as if, like “Spectre,” it came out of a James Bond movie) is a surveillance technology created in 2007 by the George W. Bush administration, which collects communications from US internet companies. By design, PRISM collects data indiscriminately. Like the wide dishes pointing up at the night sky at Arecibo, PRISM serves as a figure for unlimited passivity and absorption. The data is stored in government databases, until such time as, by the introduction of a particular search term, they begin to make— or are coerced into making—sense.3 Until a signal emerges from the noisy background, that background is inert and indecipherable. Everything, because, again, of its unfathomable mass, is becoming background. Information, on the other hand, according to information theory, is inherently meaningful; it consists of codes that have been decoded. “Information Overload” is, in this regard, a misunderstanding. “Too much information” is the phrase you use to stop someone from telling you the details of their digestive disorder. The more serious condition of the twenty-first century is better named “data overload,” which represents epistemology in actual crisis, as a result of the unprecedented availability, in advanced capitalist societies to a greater extent, of everything all the time. The advent of massive data is concurrent in our time with several other developments, including the turn toward material culture in history and literary criticism: the movement from interpretation to information, thinking to facticity, idealism to realism—in short, the movement to empirical and forensic fundamentalisms. The assumption, often, is that matter cannot be argued with. Fatigued by, bored with, or intimidated by theory, literature scholars now write monographs about furniture,

Most of these I will expand upon later in this essay, especially the turn from the subjective, which not all readers will agree with. With regard to “surface reading,” a term coined by Stephen M. Best and Sharon Marcus, see Williams. 3 Under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the NSA can retain metadata—billions of phone calls, for example—until such time as any of them are thought to make sense. “The open abuse is how they use that data,” says Mike German, a former FBI agent. “It’s no longer about a particular subject” (Schwartz 63). 2

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upholstery, food, and the glue used in Renaissance book-binding, rather than metaphoricity, linguistics, hermeneutics, or psychological states. Instead of close reading, students turn to the periodicals where poems appeared, to examine their funding, their readership, their advertisers, the weight and texture of their paper, the ink used, the bars and cafes where the editors socialized, what they wore, and how their finances stood. Data overload also evokes the “flat ontology” that has become a feature of contemporary philosophy, countering the anthropocentric bases of modern philosophy since Kant. Writers such as Lévi Bryant, in The Democracy of Objects, and Graham Harmon, in Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, see a world of objects independent of their relation to human beings and human concepts or desires. In the world Bryant and Harmon describe, there exist no abstract propositions or archetypes—and thus no means of organizing data—and subjects are simply additional objects. Jane Bennett offers a similarly topographical metaphor when, in her manifesto Vibrant Matter, she argues the need to replace post-Kantian philosophy with an account of “human and nonhuman actants on a less vertical plane than is common” and to “horizontaliz[e]‌… the ontological plane” (ix). In a closely related philosophical field, the French writers Francois LaRuelle and Quentin Meillasoux, in titles such as Non-Philosophy and Non-Photography (both by LaRuelle) and After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (Meillasoux), while in agreement with Bryant in their emphasis on the democratization of being, differ from him in suggesting a position of absolute uninterpretability.4 Being is, for them, “radically immanent” and “foreclosed to thought” (LaRuelle xxii). In an important sense, the “democracy of objects” is not new in literature, especially in US poetry. Of the many lengthy catalogs in Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” consider the magnificent segment that begins “The pure contralto sings in the organ loft” (in section 15), which consists of sixty items (in this case, the items are mostly people, of varying occupation, some passed over quickly, others given more detail), presented paratactically. A random but representative sample, from about halfway through, begins as follows: The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open’d lips, The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck … The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great Secretaries This passage, juxtaposing a drug addict and a prostitute, notes disapprovingly their treatment at the hands of the public, and ends with a president and his cabinet. The list spells out no connections, whether of coordination or subordination, between the items, and yet the whole is coherent as we read it today. It is likely that it seemed far more disjunctive in its first version in 1855 and also in its last, in 1891, than it seems today, when we are programmed for parataxis and disconnection to a far greater degree, in part, as Bob Perelman has pointed out, because of media.5

I do not use the word “absolute” recklessly. LaRuelle writes, for example, “There is an absolute untranslatable—the Real— before every translation, condemned moreover by the Real to its foreclosure” (xxii). 5 Bob Perelman, in The Marginalization of Poetry, uses the example of ATT ads on television, where in a few seconds, a dozen people, “from all walks of life,” are shown performing their respective occupations, but having in common their using the telephone to connect, leaving—as Whitman himself intended—the impression not of just a catalogue but of community and “democracy.” 4

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In this way, Whitman illustrates a kind of flat ontology avant la lettre, introducing, seemingly on a level plane, dozens of people, dozens of images, of experiences, collapsing binary oppositions and hierarchies as he goes. Still, being in his poems is not exactly flat: unevenness is emphasized, and even while he democratizes, the lowly is usually privileged. In other words, morality—though Whitman often appears to repudiate it—precludes flatness. Whitman may stand in the rain of life and of data (as Buddha advised when he instructed his disciple Rahula to be like the earth, absorbing urine, pus, gore, and excrement indiscriminately), but he does not merely stand there; he frequently argues and he pontificates. There is in short this spiritual dimension to Whitman’s democratizing—his bringing as Blake did in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” and Ginsberg did in “Footnote to Howl,” the sacred and profane to the same level, challenging our attitudes toward both, and revealing the sacred in the profane and vice versa. A. R. Ammons, a famous cataloguer himself, said something similar in the early 1960s: “I said I will find what is lowly,” and after several attempts and examples, concludes that “though I have looked everywhere / I can find nothing lowly / in the universe,” everything being, rather, “magnificent with being!” (“Still,” Collected 141–2). Heather McHugh more recently concludes a poem titled “I Knew I’d Sing” with this sentence: “Nothing—but nothing—would be beneath me” (163). The parataxis of catalogs may suggest passivity, even indifference. Indeed, Theodore Adorno thought that parataxis, in absolving one from having to decide what is important and what is not, was “healing.”6 Nevertheless, as we see in Whitman’s catalogs, it can be meaningful. Dehegemonizing flatness, in other words, is not new, any more than parataxis is. The question, rather, is where has the flatness Whitman introduced in poetry led, and where has it gone in the twenty-first century. At the outset, we can say that there is a striking change in affect: the affective stance toward data is very different from Whitman to Pablo Neruda to John Ashbery to Tan Lin (below). While all catalogs are characterized by excess, twenty-first-century data now exceeds our capacity to differentiate, much less to interpret or absorb, because of the mounting “recalcitrance” of the object world (as Jane Bennett describes it). Finally, there is an increasingly sharp difference between flatness of being and flatness of data. One has to get into or very near to the twenty-first century before the flattening of being becomes widely visible. A. R. Ammons’s long poems offer an instructive example for the present. A title like Garbage (1993) might suggest a catalog of the myriad minutiae of the dump, a list of coffee grounds, orange rinds, cans, and bottles. But the poem is, as so often in Ammons, in fact mostly philosophical meditation. In other words, it is not a poetry of “stuff ” (to invoke David Wojahn’s essay on the poetry of stuff). When lists do enter the picture, they are short: “toxic waste, poison air, beach goo.” (Garbage 24) or “tongue, crotch, boob, navel, / armpit, rock, slit, roseate rear end” (25). In 121 pages, the lists seldom get longer. It would be a good idea to write a long poem about garbage, as, arguably, the two large poems I will consider shortly have done,7 but Ammons’s Garbage is not that poem. It is instead a discourse about social life, meals, the decaying body, the right and wrong way to speak, or to behave. In this poem, “garbage,” in other words, is largely figurative.8 In accounting for Holderlin’s paratactic practice, Adorno cites his “docility,” his “passivity” (134, 135), which “found its formal correlative in the technique of seriation” (135). He says, “Holderlin’s campaign to allow language itself to speak, his objectivism, is romantic” (137). 7 And that poems like Tommy Pico’s “Junk” and “Need” often seem to be doing. 8 A poem about the Pacific garbage patch, twice the size of Texas, may still be written. That patch (and the four other enormous patches worldwide) consists mostly of plastic and microplastics, fingernail-sized or smaller. A catalog in this case 6

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Yet Ammons’s framing concept is important in the context of looking at the capacious long poem of our time in the twenty-first century. He says he is looking for “a clear space and pure / freedom to dump whatever” (Garbage 49). And he said of Garbage that it was to be his “flattest poem” (DiCiccio 14), despite the poem’s (and the dump’s) tendency to pile up. That reference to flatness leads us to a principal reason for looking at long poems today: because of the volume of data, and the sense many people describe in our time of being overwhelmed, flooded, saturated— the sense of a sweeping terrain of objects where no object is foregrounded or backgrounded—and because of formal constraints already loosened over the past century that might accommodate this new sense, Ammons’s remark seems to point rather clearly to new poetry such as Donnelly’s and Muldoon’s. Coming to the twenty-first-century present, consider also Juliana Spahr’s long poems in this connection of everyone with lungs: A lawsuit exists where Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas are suing Hello! magazine for publishing poor-quality wedding photos. U2 spy planes exist flying over the Koreas. Supermodel Gisele Bundchen’s plan to eradicate hunger in Brazil exists. Heart disease in women exists. John Malvo’s trial exists. Aretha Franklin exists and a subpoena for her exists. Hackers of the Recording Industry Association of America website exist. Thalidomide exists. (Spahr 51) There is no assertion in Spahr’s poem beyond existence (frequently, though not always, the case in Whitman as well), and coexistence by and among breathing creatures. The implication in such lists is, as it is in Whitman, that disparate simultaneities are connected.9 This is true as well of Ross Gay’s “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude” (2015), which is in fact inspirational, and in which the Whitmanic message is that diverse things cohere and, indeed, are full of hope. (Gay’s endorphin and serotonin levels, like Whitman’s, are doing very well.) Gay’s is a catalogue of thank-you’s, very much like W. S. Merwin’s “Variation on a Theme” or like Blake for whom “gratitude is heaven itself.” This implication is absent, not sought, in Muldoon and Donnelly, whom I am using later as exemplary of a wider swath of contemporary artists.

may not be on the order of papaya, milk carton, condom, teabags, tampax but, in the entropic arc toward soup, just trillions of tiny plastic bits, origins unknown (but surely from plastic bags and plastic containers of one kind or another), now lining the intestines of almost all sea creatures. 9 In other poems in Spahr’s volume, connectedness may also reveal activist solidarity, as in “March 27 and 30, 2003.”

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When we look at catalogs in Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus, we also see the emphasis on often unseen or unacknowledged connectedness. Coste Lewis’s title poem is ekphrastic, but beyond the sense of a poem about one artwork, it more resembles a museum curator’s catalogue, consisting of lists of titles, catalog entries, and descriptions of objects—particularly those representing Black female forms—to be found in the museum, though the museum here is (or sounds like) the poet’s own youth and memory: Group Portrait in the Dark Tower: Picture perfect painted toenails colonnade— The Annotated Topsy Series, Untitled, The Cow Jumped Over the Moan. Let by gones be bygones, Hiawatha Woman with Jug Grievin’ Hearted Full Blown Magnolia, measuring and pacing Playland—Comrades! The Sun God and the Poet swinging in the park. (Coste Lewis 97) It is a kind of ekphrastic poem, insofar as it is about art, and it is in its disparate cataloging kind of disjunctive, but there is serious continuity; it is not centrifugal; it concerns growing up black amid all these race-referenced objects and titles (of books, movies, artifacts, and folklore). In “On Long Poems: Four Recent Books Make Length a Virtue,” Stephanie Burt chooses four of her favorite book-length poems from 2019: Fred Moten’s All That Beauty, Emmalea Russo’s Wave Archive, Rosalie Moffet’s Nervous System, and Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems. Her purpose is to reveal arcs and strategies of coherence, poems that “can preserve a sense of surprise in the middle, yet hold a book together, beginning to end” (Burt 167). My purpose here will be, by contrast, to illustrate the centrifugal societal and poetic forces that work against cohesion, and how big data, accessed through the internet, work strongly inside the long poem. In the remaining space of this essay, I will turn to another kind of long poem, one that does not—or certainly not explicitly—suggest hope, connectedness, or spirituality. This kind of long poem probably derives—if it derives from anywhere beyond our obvious conditions—from John Ashbery. It often reflects less a commitment or an ambition than a response to the era of hyper-information. Length, in these cases, is a result of an aesthetic of loose capaciousness, an implicit repudiation of the compression associated with the lyric at various stages of its history, and a delight in surprising textures and juxtapositions, especially those found in dissociative data. The crucial difference here, then, is between a poetry (like Whitman’s, A. R. Ammons’s, Juliana Spahr’s, or Robin Coste Lewis’s) that assumes a community of humans, if not of all life (“embedded deep in our cells is ourselves and everyone else” (Spahr 31)), and that of such poets as Paul Muldoon or Timothy Donnelly, neither of whom would ever announce that kind of community. Muldoon and Donnelly may not be identical to their respective speakers, but their speakers illustrate a nearly hopeless discontinuity and disconnection. The reader will decide whether the poets joyously participate in that, or whether they critique it by showing its operations. Certainly, they present discontinuity, and we see its effects and implications.

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I would emphasize that the poets I will give the most space to here, while they may be at the edge of an important curve, are not exactly avant-garde. For the latter category, consider the beginning of Brian Reed’s book Nobody’s Business: Twenty-first Century Avant-Garde Poetics, in which he recounts his sense of displacement by his students, who have found a hipper kind of “poetry” than what he had been sure was hip. They were not reading poets such as Susan Howe, Tom Raworth, or others Reed had regarded as groundbreaking around the year 2000 but rather “poems” like one by Tan Lin that is entirely composed of websites: http://www.bmj.com/ http://comm​ons.wikime​dia.org/wiki/Main_P​age And so on (quoted in full by Reed). Reed explains that twenty-first-century writers, unlike Pound or Eliot (and, he might have added, equally unlike Lowell or Bishop at mid-century, or Susan Howe or Tom Raworth in the late century and beyond), face a new dilemma: “the uninterrupted omnivorous 24/7 informational flood that today’s citizens must learn to navigate” (xvi). In this connection, I would like briefly to consider John Ashbery’s immense Flow Chart, from 1992, a book that seemed at the time to chart Ashbery’s own writing career and critical reception, but which also represented a turning point in hermeneutics. Critics throughout the twentieth century had assumed—in the cases of Houseman and Kipling, or in Pound and Eliot, or in the poetries of the mid- to late century—that a signal was there to be extricated from the noise, whether that signal was in the old-fashioned sense of an author’s intention or in some more elusive, more sophisticated sense than that. But after Flow Chart, critics, while not throwing in the towel in this regard, no longer, with some exceptions, worked at connecting the dots. Critics continued to “interpret” Ashbery but not to the degree they had, say, in the 1970s, when Charles Altieri, Richard Howard, Marjorie Perloff, Harold Bloom, David Kalstone, and many others published close readings of Ashbery poems in books and journals. By the mid-1990s, the number of critical or theoretical essays were far fewer.10 Ashbery’s importance did not diminish— quite the contrary: he was honored as few poets have ever been,11 but he was read differently. Bloom and Altieri, for example, had read Ashbery as a romantic, but from the late 1990s onward he would be read as a postmodern, ludic poet, irreverently collaging and reveling in the textures of contemporary capitalism and its many discourses. Without the example of Ashbery, the work of poets such as Michael Robbins, Mark Ford, Ben Lerner, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Mary Jo Bang, Tyler Mills, Bob Hicok, Dean Young, and hundreds of others, in Europe as well, would have been impossible.12 The following passage is taken randomly from Michael Robbins’s recent long poem “Walkman”:

The year 1995 might be the significant date, the year of John Shoptaw’s On The Outside Looking Out and Susan M. Schultz’s The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry. Few journal articles, and almost no books, were published on Ashbery’s work after that, though book chapters continued to appear. Ashbery published another fifteen books from that date until his death in 2017, but the heyday of Ashbery criticism, in spite of the poet’s fame, had been over for twenty years. 11 Ashbery received the National Arts and Humanities Award from President Obama, and he had a Library of America volume devoted to his work, the first instance of a living poet receiving this recognition. 12 The Polish critic Grzegorz Kosc says that most poets over fifty in Poland and the Czech Republic have been influenced by Ashbery (“Conversation”). The influence is stronger in eastern than in western Europe, he notes. 10

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I drank milk from jumbo Burger King glasses emblazoned with scenes from Return of the Jedi. You can’t buy tampons with food stamps even if your mother insists that you try. Salida sits along the Arkansas River (Robbins 100–1) In what classroom today will students be assigned to find connections between Salida (Colorado), tampons, and Burger King glasses? (I do not mean this is a situation to be mourned.) To make things cohere, to find connections in poetry, once an unabashed and indeed irrepressible humanist desire, is a “mad” desire today, insofar as we are no longer jarred by discontinuity, whether because of the many precedents I have mentioned above, because of film editing techniques we have practically downloaded into our cells, because of the familiarity over the past century or more with deranged or deeply unreliable narrators in all genres, and/or because of the unparalleled amount of data washing over and through us at every moment. Coherence exacts a price, as the painful lives of the mad demonstrate. Clinically, there is a good argument for the position that, as Frank Bidart says, “insanity is the insistence on meaning” (“The Arc” 86). Schizophrenics, with their high dopamine levels, do not suffer discontinuity and incoherence gladly. They are hungry for meaning, and they metaphorize continually. Connecting is everything. In the twenty-first century, that metaphorizing mechanism, which seemed such a necessity, has atrophied. I will stop short of concluding that we are becoming saner. In the pages that follow, I discuss two contemporary poems as representative of the flat mode that, while long in development, has been exacerbated by the recent data revolution and the disorientation that has come with it. I have chosen these poems because they are long (catalogs and capaciousness being my emphasis here); because, as I noted earlier, they are “mainstream” (insofar as the poets are well-known and the two poems appeared in prestigious periodicals); and because in their implicit concept of the poem, they seem essentially “contemporary”: that is, they share not only the disjunctive language familiar to most poetry readers but also the hermeneutical disenchantment I have discussed earlier.

TIMOTHY DONNELLY’S “HYMN TO LIFE” Donnelly’s poem “Hymn to Life” appeared in Poetry magazine in July/August 2014, taking up most of the issue. Its title comes from a sixteen-line poem by Lou Andreas Salomé, so loved by Nietzsche that he set it to music.13 In sixty six-line stanzas, Donnelly’s poem constitutes an ode to and a catalog of vanished species—a romantic poem, in that regard, and an ubi sunt—but in a flat, largely Salomé and Nietzsche are both mentioned in the poem, and the last two lines of Salomé’s poem are the penultimate ones of Donnelly’s poem. Hymn to Life ironically evokes Longfellow’s poems “A Psalm to Life” and “Hymn to the Night.” It also repeats the title of a book-length poem by James Schuyler. However, Donnelly says, in conversation, that he had not heard of Schuyler’s book prior to writing this poem. 13

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anti-romantic diction. The poem also enumerates histories of terms, of battles, of desserts, of early explorers, of villages, of mythologies, but, most of all, of flora and fauna, all this in turn interlarded with forays into Stanley Kubrick’s film style (including key scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey), personal diet regimens, Hawaiian etymologies, and popular songs of the late twentieth century. Much of the poem’s cataloguing is cast in negative terms, beginning, “There were no American lions. No pygmy mammoths left” (320), and continuing throughout with “no stout- / legged llamas … no single Yukon horse,” “no Eastern elk, no sea mink, and no heath hens,” and dozens of other examples (I count sixty-four species in all, along with at least as many other facts and comments about popular music, desserts, and so on). Apart from a few jarring moments, “Hymn to Life” is not generally disjunctive. The impression of discontinuity arises rather from the lack of hierarchy, as I have mentioned earlier, the lack of any implicit organizing agenda, and the presence of a possibly psychotic subjectivity—perhaps, even a nonsubjective subjectivity—an idea I will discuss further below. The poem’s apparent topic—species extinction—suggests an ecological engagement, an elegy for despoiled habitats, but it is not an elegy in the anthropological manner of LéviStrauss’s Tristes Tropiques nor of contemporary ecological writing.14 Other frames of reference, notably that of music, work themselves in without immediate relation to the subject of flora and fauna.15 As these other frames suggest, it is the movement of the poem that precludes its being seen as ecologically engaged. To characterize this movement, I suggest the geographical term anastomosis, to indicate irrepressible branching, dividing, subdividing, with one or another current frequently rejoining further down the stream. Euclides da Cunha used the term to describe the movements of the Amazon River and of the inhabitants of the area. Provisionally, at least, it may be a more useful term than the Deleuzian rhizome,16 in order to follow the drift, turns, and digressions of a poem such as “Hymn.” A passage from stanzas six and seven, concerning the Smith Island cottontails—“a long contested subspecies / of the Eastern cottontail” (321)—suggests the content I have described as well as the formal and logical drift of the poem:         These lost rabbits, somewhat shaggier than their mainland cousins, were named for the barrier island off the tip of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, where Thomas Dale, deputy governor of the Virginia Colony, set up a salt works back in 1614, and not for the Chesapeake’s other Smith Island

A better candidate for a poem explicitly about the despoiling of the environment is Donnelly’s earlier “Globus Hystericus,” which contains many lines such as “the reed- / fringed margins acid pink and gathering in the shell // and soft tissues of the snails unknowingly in danger” or “plumes // rising like aerosols, or like ghosts of indigenous peoples.” That poem, like this one, is very long. 15 The music references alone include Jon Bon Jovi, Atlantic Starr, Strauss’s “Blue Danube,” Neil Young, Cornell Haynes Jr., the Neptunes, Chuck Brown, the London Symphony Orchestra, and Katy Perry. Most of these enter the poem arbitrarily, or metaphorically. 16 A single figure may not be sufficient to account for the kind of divagation I speak of here. The metaphor of the rhizome introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus was meant to stand in opposition to an aborescent conception of knowledge. Arguably, the metaphor of its time, the rhizome was thought to be always between, always nomadic. 14

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up in Maryland, birthplace of the Smith Island cake, that state’s only official dessert—a venerable confection whose pencil— thin layers, numbering eight to twelve on average, lie divided by a fudge-like frosting cooked for greater lastingness, making it suitable for local oystermen to take with them on the long autumn harvest. (Donnelly, “Hymn” 321) The passage offers only the tip of a particular iceberg, among other icebergs; it is followed by accounts of still other Smith Islands: Smith Island in Washington state and then Smith island in Connecticut, leading to other contiguous topics, including that of the Thimble islands (of which the Connecticut Smith Island is a part), named after the thimbleberry, “cousin to the black raspberry.” Then we learn that the Thimbles were deforested so that the British troops would have nowhere to hide. That tributary having dwindled or become effectively a decayed link, the poem moves to other Smith islands left behind in that catalog, first in the state of Alabama, then in Minnesota. Eventually, we come back to what originally had seemed to be the gist of the poem, or at least its predominant rhetorical turn: “The blue pike cavorted through the waters / of the Great Lakes no longer. Ditto the somber blackfin cisco” (321). Whether the reader hears this commentary—on the Smith Islands, rabbits, layered desserts, and so on—as manic or tedious, or both, what is ultimately suggested by the anastomotic branching and rejoining is a consciousness so predisposed to details rather than structures that no hierarchy of information is possible. The topic of the original “lost rabbits”—which had a place within the wildlife-elegy theme of the poem—gives way to the topic of the region after which they are named, which gives way in turn to a seventeenth-century deputy governor’s factory, and then to another unrelated Smith island, and then to Maryland’s dessert (associated with the island not under discussion), which then receives more attention than the lost rabbits (now truly lost) or anything else in the stream of associations. But notice what happens with the not transition in line 5 of the above passage: “and not for the Chesapeake’s other Smith Island,” which marks a somewhat reckless drift to listing what is not, which then becomes as important as what is. By taking Whitman a step farther— celebrating not just what is but what is not, the catalog becomes infinite. Anti-matter ups the Whitmanic ante. The compositional strategy by which the information is set out results in what in the world of painting is called the all-over style, with roots in the technique of Cezanne, wherein no part— top, bottom, or sides—is treated differently than any other, so that nothing is subordinate to anything else; what in the world of postmodern theory is called aesthetic and/or hermeneutical flatness; and what in the world of psychology is sometimes called autism disorder spectrum.17 I mean by “autistic” simply that the autistic person frequently has difficulty constructing a system of relative value. The novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard has used the word to describe his own prose, by which I take him to mean two things: (1) his inability to see some events or scenes as more or

In the context of this discussion, the use of this term seems indispensable, though I use autism and Asberger’s Spectrum, here and below, metaphorically. The terms are more suspect than ever, not so much for their usefulness (they are useful), but because of the incomplete understanding of these “disorders.” Indeed, autism has been viewed not as a disorder at all but as an alternative mode, perhaps a uniquely contemporary mode, of engaging reality. 17

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less worthy of treatment than others, and thus his “boring” but compelling catalogs and accounts of the most trivial actions; and (2) his indifference to public or even family reaction: he loves his wife, but the prospect of her divorcing him (she does divorce him) for revelations in vol. 1 or 2 of My Struggle has not affected him; he is not so much blasé about this as puzzled at his own imperviousness.18 This second use of the concept of autism is helpful in understanding passages in which the poem turns to the poet writing it. These personal appearances in “Hymn to Life,” though infrequent, are telling, and I wish to consider them in the light of the large-scale anti-subjective poetics I have been examining:      To work on my character I pretend to be traveling Portsmouth to Arlington in modern garb at first [stanza 4]           Typically I keep a number of soaps on hand and seem to know by instinct which of them to reach for.     [stanza 27]           To enlarge my sympathy I attempt to picture the loud tarp tents around the digging site    [stanza 45] (Donnelly, “Hymn” 320, 325, 328) And toward the end of the poem, having mentioned Salomé’s poem “Hymn to Life,” and the music Nietzsche wrote for it, the narrator says, “I’ve listened to it and can’t say I like it but I’m listening to it / again as I try to finish” (Donnelly, “Hymn” 331). These remarks suggest not merely a recursive postmodern turn but a peculiar mental condition. “Pathology” is too strong a word for this mild, quietist, and increasingly familiar state of mind. Specifically, the passages suggest a distance between the speaker and the self, a strangely Buddhist alienation in which one observes the self as if it were not one’s self. Put differently, one displays an awareness that the “self ” is prosthetic; it is an object, as Heinz Kohet writes: the self, like any representation of an object, “is a content of the mental apparatus, not of its constituents, i.e. not one of its agencies [such as ego or superego] of the mind” (xv).19 Notably, the passages are almost completely without affect—the speaker has to “work” on his character, as if knowing it is undeveloped; he has to make an effort to “enlarge” his sympathy, aware that he is sympathydeficient; he observes with interest, nothing more, the fact that the self he monitors “seems to know” which soap to use. As an American project, this is familiar: self-improvement, whether to look better, behave better, or “boost my chi.” Even the music he doesn’t like, he tries to like. The catalog itself is performed with a perfunctory diligence, an effort to be thorough, a project straight from the superego, like Benjamin Franklin’s in the Autobiography.

he comments by Knausgaard were made in conversation at McNally-Jackson bookstore, New York City, on June 5, 2014. T I am thinking here also of Jacques Derrida’s argument in The Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origins, to the effect that ethnicity, origins, and identity are questions of making, that the self is a thing, an object of knowledge, and not an agency of the mind. It is remarkable how closely Kohet’s idea fits with the position of today’s new materialists—Bryant in The Democracy of Objects, for example—that the subject is simply another object, no more privileged than other objects. 18 19

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Thus, what might be seen as the problem of autism becomes a poetic strategy in poets such as Donnelly. In autism studies, it is known as “weak central coherence theory” (Firth), wherein the subject perceives details more clearly than do neurotypical people but at the expense of the “big picture.” Autistic people, in this regard, are the opposite of high-dopamine schizophrenics: they are not compulsive meaning makers. Arguably, weak central coherence is a disorder from which everyone in modern, internet-connected societies suffers. The condition is prefigured in literature by Jorge Luis Borges in the story “Funes, the Memorious,” in 1944. Ireneo Funes is a young Argentinian, who, after a fall from a horse, discovers that his mind has become capable of prodigious memory and focus. In this condition, he aspires to produce a dictionary that would be true to the world by representing everything—not just the leaf, nor even the maple leaf, nor even the one maple leaf you saw on a specific afternoon, but every moment of every leaf of every tree that has ever existed. (And similarly with every dog, every person, every chair, and so on.) Funes sees generality as an affront to reality. He is an idiot savant because, as Borges says, he is incapable of thought (“to think is to forget a difference,” he writes). Funes faces a world of zettabytes or yottabytes—an endless universe of data, with no abstractions, no order, and no categories, a world much like the one the new object-oriented ontologists imagine. From time to time, “Hymn to Life” offers, beyond the thematic continuity of vanishings and the rhetorical continuity of parallelisms and anaphora (“no / dire wolves, and no Texas reds”), a metacommentary on the compositional process, stepping outside the data of the poem in order to address its larger purposes. Perhaps the clearest instance of this occurs in stanza 18 (in a contemplative language strongly resembling that of Ashbery’s 1972 Three Poems):         All these gains and losses, so mysterious from a distance, held together it has felt by nothing stronger than momentum, like a series of bicycle accidents or a pattern in the pomegranate, come to hint at a logic in time, but whether it’s more fitting to say that they promise to reveal it or else threaten it is debatable. (Donnelly, “Hymn” 323) The passage functions as a blazon en abîme, providing a clue to the poem’s organization or lack of it (“held together … by nothing stronger / Than momentum”). Formal structures, in spite of repetitions, do not really “hold” the information together, since, while six-line stanzas block the information visually, the stanza form is arbitrary, and the sentences are prose. It is not self-evident that the “gains and losses” (what gains can there be in the face of these myriad annihilations?) are “so mysterious / from a distance.” The information is distanced, because of the alternately boilerplate and bookish language, and the lack not only of affect but of any commentary on the catalog of vanished species (or any of the other catalogs). Rather than any of that lending mystery, the opposite is the case: one feels a kind of torpor—a sense of numbing excess. By the time we have completed the long arc between the lost rabbits and the blue pike and the black fin, any elegiac strand that the poem may have seemed to promise has been eroded by the avalanche of information, not that elegy was ever a foregrounded purpose of the poem—not that the poem has not been, from the beginning, tongue in cheek, as indicated by the archaism of phrases such as “cavorted no longer,” followed un-archaically by “ditto.” Donnelly’s work is not symptomatic of dotage or of randomness any more than Ashbery’s was, but of diffidence, passivity, of the mind that asks, in a “democratic” spirit: Who am I to say what

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is valuable, what is to be left out, or put in?20 While this might remind one of Whitman’s claim of indifference not only to hierarchies but to right or wrong (“I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait”), it also resembles the “new modesty,” noted by Jeffrey J. Williams: the rejection of modes of reading that seek to unearth or expose repressed desire or political value. When we push Whitman’s leveling impulse into the twenty-first century, we see, again, a kind of autistic ethos—a dehegemonizing approach to data and, with it, a helplessness. The grammatical correlative to the democratizing and dehegemonizing impulse, as we have seen, is parataxis. If “Hymn to Life” and other poems discussed in this essay are any indication, we might say that the paratactic style that characterized twentieth-century literature, arguably from Whitman and Twain through Pound, Hemingway, and Stein, to the beats, deep image poets, and to the Language poets of the late twentieth century, is now spent, poetry having drifted back toward a qualified kind of hypotaxis: not the kind we associate with Milton but one that subordinates flatly.21 That is, Donnelly’s subordination is not that of subordinating conjunctions but of relative pronouns. In the era of the periodic sentence, readers simply waited—as they had been trained to do by reading Latin—until, after the numerous forestalling subordinate clauses or phrases, the main clause arrived. In Donnelly, however, which and that link and grammatically subordinate but without hierarchizing; the movement is always forward and never conclusive. Whitman’s catalogs were “democratic,” as were Gertrude Stein’s, in lines such as “cocoa and clear soup and oranges and oat-meal” (Stein 58), which listed things in no apparent rhetorical order, with no one thing or experience privileged above another. Donnelly’s poem, written in the time of the democracy of objects, orders its drift with a difference. It is a continuation of parataxis by other means, with a flatter ontology than we find in the earlier nineteenth- and twentiethcentury examples.

PAUL MULDOON’S “AMERICAN STANDARD” “American Standard” is a brand of toilet. It is also a poem in fifteen sections by Paul Muldoon. At twenty typeset pages, it is slightly longer than The Waste Land, with which—down to its wastedisposal title—it has important commonalities. The two poems are just short of a century apart, and indeed one would be forgiven for suspecting that Muldoon is attempting a twenty-first-century Waste Land, minus what Philip Larkin disparagingly called the “myth kitty”—that is, the freight of lore with which Eliot loaded his poem. Muldoon’s poem appears to be a sort of vast, ravenous toilet, down which the poem’s floods of miscellaneous data whirl. Literal toilets appear twice in the poem: alluding to US politics, with “The blue wave running down a urinal at JFK” (18); and, when the mother of Virgilio, the poet’s Soho waiter and his Dantesque guide, is cleaning bathrooms: “The toilet she’s wiping down is an

Andrew Dubois, in Ashbery’s Forms of Attention, and Nikki Skillman, in The Lyric in the Age of the Brain, have independently referred to Ashbery’s dissociations as functions of the poet’s mental condition—“dotage” and senility, for Dubois, and for Skillman “unawareness … forgetfulness … distractibility … failures of comprehension … ‘mindlessness.’ ” But Ashbery was, early and late, performing our time. Since the percentage of Americans over sixty-five has risen so sharply in recent years, perhaps Ashbery felt that that time of life, too, had to be performed. 21 See the opening lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost (“Of Man’s First Disobedience and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree,” etc.) for an example of extreme hypotaxis. 20

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American Standard” (17). The toilet also seems to evoke modernist provocations, most notably Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 readymade sculpture, “Fountain,” a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt.” Indeed, most of the poem’s many allusions are to Eliot, primarily to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land. The latter poem ends with “Shantih Shantih Shantih.” Muldoon’s frequent echoes of that line include “Shanty,” “Santee,” “Shandy,” “Shinto,” “Shantee,” “Chantey,” and “Cento,” each one repeated three times, and each spaced as in Eliot’s climactic line. The other most frequent Eliotic refrain is “Come in under the shadow of this red rock,” which is variously phrased: “Come in / Come in under / Come in under the shadow.” (The phrase is from The Waste Land, but the choppy, repetitive motif is from “Ash Wednesday”). It is repeated five times early in the poem and four times in section 10. Other Eliot lines, usually humorously mangled, include “I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and knickers” (19), “I am the third who walks / between you and Zorro, between you and the Swamp Fox” (20), and “like a patient oysterized upon a table” (19). (Balthazar, the fashionable Soho restaurant where the action of the poem begins, is famous as an oyster bar.) Other poets besides Eliot appear in cameos, sometimes having suffered a similar decay of the signal: For Frost, it is the “serial ordeal / of … forty cellular phones” (20); for Robert Hass and Ashbery, “Hello. My name is Virgil and I’ll be your waiter” (16); for William Blake, “the road of excess” (16); for Emerson, “I become a transparent eye-ball”; for Baudelaire, “O Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps!” (19). These and others appear and disappear under a torrent of what we might see as pop-ups and cookies, search-term lint, or the detritus that the Waste Land’s narrator imagines floating in the Thames (and which is not in fact there).22 Lastly, there is, as often in Muldoon’s extensive oeuvre, popular music. Trent Reznor and the band Nine-Inch Nails come up, repeatedly, as do David Bowie, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets,” Johnny Cash, Jimi Hendrix, Jelly Roll Morton, Alicia Keys, Hoagy Carmichael, Muddy Waters, Kurt Weill, Aretha Franklin, and Patty Smith, most of those toward the end of the poem. The poem is joyously free-associative; at the same time numerous themes, motifs, and phrases provide some coherence. One motif appears in the first line: “Not for nothing” (16).23 A cowboy theme runs throughout, as does the West Texas town of Laredo, famous from the Marty Robbins song. (“I take a frontiersman as my alter ego,” says the speaker later in the poem (17).) Even without the recurrence of the word “mudslinger,” the narrator frequently seems to channel the voice of Ed Dorn in that poet’s book-length poem Slinger, the first volume of which is titled Gunslinger, and which, along with The Waste Land, is a model or precedent here.24 A plot might be discerned in the course of the poem, with much else interlarded, as Virgilio guides him on his journey through, or down into, the “American Standard.” Virgilio has his own stories, which he sometimes tells in rhymed iambics, as Tiresias does in The Waste Land. Although Laredo places us in Texas, much of the imagery is Caribbean: the “rum heiress” (18);25 Puerto Rico; Hurricane Maria’s death toll (and Donald Trump’s obsession about that number); “Co

“ The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, / silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends.” (lines 166–7). The “not for nothing” motif is used also in Muldoon’s short daybook The Prince of the Quotidian. 24 Book I of Gunslinger came out in 1968. In all, the poem would comprise four “books,” each dedicated to a mind-altering drug: marijuana, LSD, cocaine, and cocaine again. 25 The rum heiress is probably Hilda Maria Bacardi, whose Coral Gables mansion was recently sold to the singer Marc Anthony. 22 23

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co rico Puerto co co rico” (16), which is the name of a song and a Puerto Rican soda, but also the cock crow—“co co rico co co rico”—in the final section of The Waste Land. The repetitions and rhetorical devices—chiefly, homophones and catalogs—do some work toward linking disparate elements, but the leaps in individual sections are of a piece with those I have pointed out in mid- to late twentieth-century and contemporary poets: Only last week, in the Mudslingers Drive-Thru, an old coot in an ’89 Cavalier embarked on an all-too-familiar threnody. A porpoise snored upon the phosphorescent swell. Vis-à-vis Trump, we have only ourselves to blame. (Muldoon, “American” 19) To track down just one of these lines, “A porpoise snored upon the phosphorescent swell” appears in an early draft of the “Death by Water” section of The Waste Land, though Pound cut it from the typescript (as indeed he cut all but eight lines of that short section). The line, certainly the sentiment, about Trump may have no single origin but has appeared in dozens of editorials. One can search for—and perhaps even find—some relation between those two lines, but, as with late Ashbery, what would be the point? If “American Standard” appears frivolous in its indiscriminate samplings, important issues and events are nevertheless introduced. These include Freedom Summer of 1964, SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and the murders of the civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney; climate change; Republican gerrymandering in Texas (at the hands of Justice Alito); Jurassic prehistory, the dinosaurs, and the La Brea tarpits; Ezra (Pound) and Tom (Eliot), as sexually abusive “frat boys”; immigration at the southern border; and the killing and dismembering of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the latter story told in Ogden Nashian rhymes and doggerel, à la Frederick Seidel (or like Ashbery in his “Ella Wheeler Wilcox” mode):26 Although his uncle may have dealt in arms That sure don’t mean a body’s safe from harm. The killers of Khashoggi musta had nerves of steel When they stopped him from showin’ a clean pair of heels. They shoulda known things ain’t gonna turn out right if you bring a saw to a fist fight. (Muldoon, “American” 18) This six-line stanza is repeated with variations (as “Did he take the fact his uncle dealt in arms / as some kinda good luck charm?” and “if you bring a bone-saw to a fist fight”). One could certainly accuse Muldoon of tone-deafness here with his irreverent play on the Western idiom, and perhaps remember the reaction to Kenneth Goldsmith’s 2015 reading of “The Body of Michael Brown.” No one, yet, seems to have raised any objections to Muldoon’s poem—but perhaps that silence measures the difference between the killing of a black American teenager and that of a Saudi journalist working in the United States. (It may also measure the distance between a live reading at Brown University and a poem in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement.)

Sample lines from Ashbery’s “Variations, Calypso, and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox” include “Gazing at the Alps was quite a sight / I felt the tears flow with all their might” (Selected 94). 26

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The “actual issues” I mention—the killings in Mississippi, the killing of Khashoggi, and others—become data in play, existing on the same ontological plane as Zorro, Captain Beefheart, and David Bowie. And here we might benefit from a backward look. From the days of the first New York School onward, the revolt against what was taken to be pompous wisdom (i.e., the ambitions of the high modernists) and the stuffiness of “tension and ambiguity” has been continuous. In his poem, “Seasons on Earth,” Kenneth Koch addressed directly what he took in the 1950s to be the oppressive New Critical situation of that time: “One hardly dared to wink / Or fool around in any way in poems” (7). It was a necessary critique, and it produced, both at the time and in its long and lasting influence, a great deal of refreshing poetry. But, after the New Criticism, with the coming of confessional poetry, trauma-based poetry, “deep image,” and other more expressivist poetics, that “revolt” (not of course that it was ever organized as such) continued to seem necessary, aimed now not at the allusive and erudite modernist poems but toward the fetishizing of “experience” and witness. It also entailed the postures of anti-art, again as a repudiation of poetry seen as ambitious or high-flown, or, to be fair, anything that took a risk. But when Koch or O’Hara filled poems with popular allusions, they (Koch more than O’Hara) eschewed genuine tragedy or heartbreak in contemporary events. Neither would have written “The Body of Michael Brown,” for example, even in their most appropriative modes.27 While O’Hara seemed to mock the white actress Lana Turner, he would never have treated the Black jazz singer Billie Holliday in the same way. Among the serious issues treated with humor in “American Standard,” I would note also the #MeToo movement. Section 4 consists of a rhymed anecdote narrated by a high school girl, depicting Pound and Eliot as predators: We’d landed up outside Luby’s on the way to the Junior Prom. There was myself, Ezra, and Tom. I was wearing my party dress. Ezra said that he was a great believer in less being more. His blue pencil was always at the ready. The pair of them were slightly unsteady. (Muldoon, “American” 17) Two lines in this section—beginning “Only if I let him put a finger in me”—are repeated several times: Just frat boy stuff. Just having a little fun. Only if I let him put a finger in me would he know if I was the One. (Muldoon, “American” 17) The roles in which “Tom” and “Ezra” are cast here reflect in part the familiar postmodern repudiation of high modernist masters (as fascist, as repressed, as elitist). What role, then, is the speaker or the poet playing? Is this first-person narrator meant to be the poet Muldoon as ephebe / prom deb, succumbing to sexual penetration by Pound’s blue pencil—Pound, who wants to violate and reduce the text (“less / being more”), as he did with The Waste Land—as the price of canonical

Tony Hoagland, in “Blame It on Rio,” argued persuasively that contemporary poets and students coming out of twenty-firstcentury workshops have misunderstood O’Hara, adopting only the zany tone, not the real connection to, and commentary on, culture. 27

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admission by the great gatekeepers? Or, beyond mere admission, perhaps investiture as “the One,” inheriting the mantle of Eliot? Or is this an allusion to the victims of Bill Cosby? Together with the Eliot-Pound motif, the Mexican border is the locale that “American Standard” most persistently returns to. In section 7, the narrator is rounding up a team “for the assault on the facility on South Laredo,” including an assortment of singers, poets, and statesmen (18). The list is not random but neither is it logical. In the titled “Finale” of the poem, a manic catalog orders items entirely by the morphology of the names; at one point the team members include “Amelia Earhart, Emily Dickinson, Emile Zola, Emiliano Zapata, Emilio Gucci,” and, at another, “Benny and the Jets, Bernardo Bertolucci, / Bernard of Clairvaus” (Muldoon, “American” 20).28 The poem’s last lines echo its first but with another list of names organized by their cognates:          Conan O’Brien co-hosting our brutal assault, with Conan the Barbarian even as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s assuring us our hope we might gain access to the Detention Center by way of Portal on PlayStation 4 isn’t entirely futile, assuring us it’s not entirely for nothing we toil. (Muldoon, “American” 20) The opening of this poem had the speaker stealing a horse in Soho to ride to a Texas detention center. The ending has his team assaulting that fortress, like Santa Ana and the Mexican army assaulting the Alamo (often mentioned in this poem), with the aid of PlayStation 4, just as his Mexican contact in New York City had escaped the center with that device, given to him by a sympathetic guard. The speaker’s uncle Jim had participated in Freedom Summer, and the memory of the “blood-plastered / heads of Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney. The smash and smear // of their pulverized / child-faces” (16) arises now amid the swim of other data. As I have asked in the case of Khashoggi and other examples, can a poem grounded in the poetics I have described, a poem this data-clogged, even data-determined (as with the catalogs of names), not to mention this parodic, engage with such historical moments, with these faces, this trauma? For this reason, it is easier to speak of the poem formally and rhetorically than it is thematically: to try to speak of the latter is to run into history, into events, and into the problem of wishing to be accountable in some manner to the humans (or in Donnelly’s case, the animals) involved. In this regard, an important precedent for “American Standard” is Muldoon’s “Dirty Data,” in his One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2014), which I will note here for its obvious relation to my title topic. The term “dirty data” refers, in the intelligence community, to data that is unclear or erroneous and that requires “cleansing.” (The poem refers specifically to the difficulty of knowing what was actually happening in North Ireland, especially on “Bloody Sunday,” in 1972.) This sequence at first appears to be steeped in Celtic and Roman history, but it wanders globally, visiting the chariot races in Ben-Hur, in which Messala, Ben-Hur’s childhood friend and later enemy, has his legs amputated (like Jamal Khashoggi); North American characters like Billy the In “Hymn to Life,” Donnelly uses the same associative means to generate forward motion. Speaking of the last ever passenger pigeon, Donnelly writes, “Her name was Martha. / Martha Washington went by Patsy as a child. Her pet raccoon / was Nosey. Cozumel Island’s pygmy raccoon is actually a distinct species.” 28

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Kid; Western species (seemingly out of Robinson Jeffers) such as ponderosa pine and goshawks; and Southwestern Indian ethnicities such as Mescalero. “Dirty Data”—like “American Standard” and “Hymn to Life”—needs to be read, and had to have been written, with the help of innumerable websites.29 Lorica Segmentata, for example, is a kind of Roman armor; Vari-X is a hunting rifle scope; a 3 Abreast Galloper is a type of carousel; Chiricahua are a band of Apache native Americans, and so on. (For this reader, all of these had to be searched on the web.) The lore is full of leaps, many of them global and across centuries, usually garbled with puns: “Ben Hourihane / falls fuel of the new Roman turbine” (208), “it swerves as a morning to those,” “not to speak of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, / for whom this is indeed a wickiup call” (225).30 To contrast these two poems—similar in their length and in their voluminous sampling of data from diverse sources—we might note immediately that Muldoon has long been more of a cut-up in his poetry, dropping jokes and puns somewhat as Charles Bernstein does, though often with a more conspicuously bookish frame of reference; and that Donnelly’s “Hymn to Life” has, comparatively, a kind of seriousness, with its ecological grounding, however much undercut by the poem’s inexorable drift and the narrator’s goofy inability to sustain focus and to discriminate among varying fields of data. One cannot look to “Hymn” as a useful commentary on vanished species any more than one can turn to “American Standard” for insights into the plight of immigrants along the US-Mexico border, atrocities like the killing of the American civil rights workers or of the journalist Khashoggi, or the incidence of sexual molestation. These two poems will not easily be understood in the context of the turn in recent years of poetry toward political issues—the Iraq War, the loss of habitats, Bush’s and then Trump’s presidency and many more—a direction different from that of the poems taken up in this essay. Yet, “American Standard”—while wildly allusive and linguistically playful—is probably the more “engaged” of the two principal poems I have presented here, even if those contemporary references are possibly downplayed and trivialized by the irreverence and fun-poking. In seeing Donnelly’s “Hymn to Life” and Muldoon’s “American Standard” as indicative of a direction—not the direction—of contemporary poetry, I wish to ask whether the flat ontology of these two poems is an extension of the postmodern aesthetic Frederic Jameson identified thirty years ago, or whether the flattening and dehegemonizing that characterizes this poetry is something more than an aesthetic sign of late capitalism; that is, whether the method reflects not so much pastiche or blank parody as the existential conditions and intellectual directions I suggested early in this essay. The lesson of postmodernism, it seemed, was that reality does not lie under or prior to language and process but inhabits the myriad surfaces of processes themselves, especially linguistic processes—the codes in which data comes to us. The difference, seen from the perspective of the twenty-first century, is that data in the 1980s and 1990s did not seem, as they do now, to be cresting over us like a tsunami. The flippant, ironic aspects of postmodernism were attractive, offering relief from both the ponderousness of modernism and the self-analysis of personal poetry. Art work that reacts to or rises out of twenty-first-century data, however, while it can certainly be frivolous in tone, comes with trouble in tow. In the case of Donnelly, the trouble takes the form of the death toll of habitats and species in the Anthropocene; in Muldoon it takes Donnelly is on record as having used dozens of websites for “Hymn to Life,” at least two of which—“The Owl Pages” and “The Minor Planet Center website”—are mentioned in the poem (“Conversation”). 30 “Wickiup” is also a Southwest Native American word, in most usages an equivalent to “wigwam.” 29

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the form of US historical trauma and the memory of it becoming drowned in floods of data. The anti-hermeneutical trend was, by most accounts, already present in postmodernism. That is, discontinuity was no longer an issue to be addressed (much less a problem to be solved); it was seen as inherent in the nature of data. But the oppressiveness and claustrophobia of data were not yet the dysfunctions of that time. Some of the anxiety of the postmodern carries over to today; postmodern writing often sets up a screen through irony and dissociation, finding ways to preclude the possibility of being serious or wrong or in bad taste—indeed avoiding sounding “good” in any sense beyond that of anti-art—so that events—Jamal Khashoggi in Muldoon, Osama Bin Laden in Donnelly (to use an earlier poem in his case)—may be distanced from us through linguistic play, wacky juxtapositions, irony, and other strategies of defamiliarization?31 Today it would seem another page is being turned, wherein writing is instead a correlative of the epistemology of our time. How is the reader meant to assimilate information when information is wall to wall? Can data’s overwhelming presence itself constitute engagement? (Some poetry of engagement—in the literal sense of invoking and addressing political issues of our time—is indeed written through and out of data.32) In remarks concerning disaster relief, the poet Joel Brouwer introduces the idea of a “crew one,” which cleans up the site, looks after the injured, distributes food and water, and contains the damage; and a “crew two,” which consists of “various scientific, charitable, meteorological, journalistic, and academic institutions and authorities” (“Statement” 212). The job of this second crew is to construct “coherent narratives” (212)—that is, to alter our sense of what has happened, leading us to “forfeit at least a portion of the confusion which is our natural state” (212). At a certain dopamine level, crew two is a necessity, and yet, with its explanations, it deprives us of the authenticity of our ignorance. This purported deprivation is a familiar idea from writings on trauma, such as Adorno’s remark that to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric; Claude Lanzmann’s comment (on the making of the film Shoah) that there is an “absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding”; Heideigger’s remark that to make things known is to do them violence; or the remarks of contemporary trauma theorists such as Linda Belau and Cathy Caruth. Similarly, writers who espouse “non-philosophy” or an objectoriented ontology, such as LaRuelle and Meillasoux, warn against violating objects by dragging them into accessibility.33 The tendencies I have emphasized here—the de-hegemonizing of data, our surrender to or embrace of data, and the repudiation of hermeneutics—while facilitated by the digital revolution, are more intrinsically connected to currents, if not crises, in human consciousness. I do not suggest I refer to Donnelly’s poem “Dream of Arabian Hillbillies,” which conjoins phrases from a 1996 speech by Bin Laden called “Declaration of War against Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” with lyrics from “The Beverly Hillbillies” theme song, “two texts about oil, economics, and destiny,” as Donnelly writes in his comments on the poem (215). 32 Examples include Joel Brouwer, “Lines from the Reports of the Investigative Committee”; Brenda Hillman, “In a Senate Armed Services Hearing”; Hugh Seidman, “Found Poem: Microloans.” 33 Adorno’s famous sentence occurs in “Cultural Criticism and Society” (18). During the eleven years it took to make the eight-hour documentary Shoah, Claude Lanzmann said that refusing to understand was his “iron law.” He wished to avoid “the absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding” (“Hier est kein Warum,” in Au Sujet de Claude Lanzmann, by Bernard Cuau et al., quoted in Caruth 123–4 n.13). There exists a split among the object-oriented philosophers between those who say that reality can never be accessed (LaRuelle and Meillasoux) and those who herald a new “great outdoors” of the world of objects (such as Bryant and Harmon). 31

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that theorists such as LaRuelle, Bryant, or Harmon—whom I have introduced here principally as context, rather than as a central topic—have helped found a new American poetics, any more than the waning of the Subject in, say, the poetry of the 1980s, was directed by Roland Barthes or Louis Althusser. Rather, US poetry today shares with numerous other cultural trends a hermeneutical disenchantment, such that, in reaction to the pretension of understanding phenomena, it seems more “honest,” more modest, or perhaps simply more interesting to list or cite information rather than to embed it or run it through with commentary. I suggest, in other words, that poets are tapping into this same ethos of the inscrutability of, and thus passivity before, data. That passivity may be impure, of course. Even in the most-cited contemporary examples of “pure” transcription, such as Kenneth Goldsmith’s experiments with copying out weather reports, the New York Times, and other found texts, the poet is in fact altering and making choices, as Marjorie Perloff notes in her chapter on Goldsmith in Unoriginal Genius (146–65), and as I suggest in “Hands Off: Official Language in Contemporary Poetry.” It is difficult to ignore the moral dimensions of this kind of poetics, even while one, supposedly, brackets the question of literary value. In real life, we value some things (our lives, say, or those of others we know, even those we do not know) over other things (caramel latte or hazelnut? Capt. Beefheart or Jay Z?). From a moral standpoint, reading poetry, should we deplore trivialization, or, beyond that, even desecration in Donnelly (species extinction) or in Muldoon (immigration, Civil Rights casualties, the murder of journalists)? These questions take “flatness” to another level. For Ammons, the poet must dig deep, even into the “heaven’s daunting asshole” (Garbage 22). Garbage is a leveler, but Ammons’s metaphor of digging introduces vertical possibilities, as it did for Whitman. In Whitman’s “This Compost” the poet is at first frightened of naked contact with the earth, given its freight of corpses, but then becomes convinced that all that rot is transformed into vegetable beauty and that there is nothing to fear. The hope in Ammons is for the adoption of a communal consciousness, through eros instead of through the ego of modernity and industrialism. If Ammons was digging, making an effort to understand history, trauma, or one’s own psychology, so were Whitman, Neruda, St. John Perse, Williams, Pound, dozens of mid-century poets, and, today, Spahr, Coste-Lewis, Claudia Rankine, Brenda Hillman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Nathaniel Mackey, and many, many others. But Ashbery was, again, a watershed.34 The kind of digging I refer to above was not of much interest to him. If he was “digging deep,” it was not so much to discover or reveal connection (though his poetry never precludes that) as it was for tuning in, like Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus picking up his poetry from the car radio, to the sound and feeling of his time. Ashbery’s alertness and sensitivity made him fascinated, if not hypnotized, by what whirled around him. The sea of refuse, of advertising, of inspirational writing (I am thinking of the great Three Poems), of falsehood and of sincerity, and of data—some of it treated indifferently (I mean Whitman’s indifference, not a cruel indifference), and at other times humorously, as do poets such as Muldoon or Donnelly today. One can see in these two long poems and in many others of our time a poetics of refusal, one that Ashbery acknowledged and embraced: not an urgency to separate signal from noise, but a refusal to do so, a recognition that such an effort must fail. To suggest that signals can be separated from The enormous topic of world poetry falls outside the ambition of this volume, but European poets, especially Eastern European, and Latin American poets as well (especially Chilean but also Mexican) have followed Ashbery’s path (and the path of the Language Poets) much more than any other during the past thirty to forty years. 34

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noise, to make that assumption, may be for them a kind of pretension, even dishonesty. Theirs is a refusal to sort, to prefer—like that of Borges’s character Ireneo Funes—a refusal to discriminate among data, to foreground one datum over any other. If one had to predict where first-world poetry on the page (as distinct from spoken word) will go, for better or worse, this, like the data stream in which we swim, may well be the mainstream.

WORKS CITED Adorno, Theodore. “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983, pp. 17–39. Adorno, Theodore. “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry.” Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Columbia University Press, 1992, pp. 109–49. Ammons, A. R. Collected Poems, 1951–1971. W. W. Norton, 1972. Ammons, A. R. Garbage: A Poem. W. W. Norton, 2002. Ashbery, John. Flow Chart. Knopf, 1992. Ashbery, John. Selected Poems. Penguin, 1986. Belau, Linda. “Trauma and the Material Signifier.” Postmodern Culture, vol. 11, no. 2 (2001). Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010. Bidart, Frank. Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965–2016. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. Borges, Jorge Luis. “Funes the Memorious.” Ficciones, trans. Antony Kerrigan, Grove Press, 1962, pp. 107–15. Brouwer, Joel. “Statement: The Clean-Up Crews: La Vérité, L’Âpres Vérité.” The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Century Anthology, ed. Ann Keniston and Jeffrey Gray. McFarland, 2012, pp. 212–13. Bryant, Levi R. The Democracy of Objects. Open Humanities Press, 20111. Burt, Stephanie. “On Long Poems: Four Recent Books Make Length a Virtue.” The Yale Review, vol. 108, no. 1 (Spring 2020), pp. 166–81. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Coste Lewis, Robin. Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems. Knopf, 2015. Da Cunha, Euclides. The Amazon: Land without History, trans. Richard Graham. Oxford University Press, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 2nd ed. University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Monolinguism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origins, trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford University Press, 1998. Diciccio, Lorraine. “Garbage: A. R. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Century.” Papers on Language and Literature, vol. 32, no. 2 (Spring 1996), pp. 166–88. Donnelly, Timothy. “Dream of Arabian Hillbillies.” The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Century Anthology, ed. Ann Keniston and Jeffrey Gray. McFarland, 2012, pp. 38–40. Donnelly, Timothy. “Globus Hystericus.” Paris Review, no. 190 (Fall 2009), https://www.the​pari​srev​iew.org/poe​ try/5947/glo​bus-hys​teri​cus-timo​thy-donne​lly. Donnelly, Timothy. “Hymn to Life.” Poetry, vol. 204, no. 4 (July/August 2014), pp. 320–31. Donnelly, Timothy. “Statement.” The New American Poetry of Engagement. McFarland, 2012, pp. 213–15. Donnelly, Timothy. Telephone conversation. October 20, 2016. Dubois, Andrew Lee, Jr. Ashbery’s Forms of Attention. University of Alabama Press, 2006. Dworkin, Craig. “The Fate of Echo.” Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, ed. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, Northwestern University Press, 2011.

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Firth, Uta. Autism: A Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2008. Gellman, Barton, Julie Tate, and Ashkan Sultani. “In NSA-intercepted Data, Those Not Targeted Far Outnumber the Foreigners Who Are.” Washington Post, July 5, 2014, http://www.was​hing​tonp​ost.com/world/natio​nalsecur​ity/in-nsa-inte​rcep​ted-data-those-not-targe​ted-far-outnum​ber-the-for​eign​ers-who-are/2014/07/05/8139a​ df8-045a-11e4-8572-4b1​b969​b632​2_st​ory.html. Accessed June 10, 2022. Gray, Jeffrey. “Hands Off: Official Language in Contemporary Poetry.” The News from Poems: Essays on the New American Poetry of Engagement, ed. Jeffrey Gray and Ann Keniston, University of Michigan Press, 2016, pp. 84–103. Harmon, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Pelican, 2018. Hoagland, Tony. “Blame It on Rio: The Strange Legacy of New York School Poetics: An Evolutionary Story of Delight and Dissipation.” Writer’s Chronicle, vol. 44, no.1 (September 2011), pp. 76–84. Kohet, Heinz. The Analysis of the Self. International Universities Press, 1983. Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle, Book 1. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle, Book 2: A Man in Love. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Knausgaard, Karl Ove. Conversation. New York City, June 5, 2014. Koch, Kenneth. Seasons on Earth. Penguin Books, 1987. Kosc, Grzegorz. Conversation. Olomouc, Czech Republic, October 14, 2014. LaRuelle, François. Principles of Non-Philosophy, trans. Nicola Rubsczk and Anthony Paul Smith. Bloomsbury, 2013. McHugh, Heather. Hinge and Sign: Poems 1968–1993. Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Meillasoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Bloomsbury, 2008. Muldoon, Paul. “American Standard.” Times Literary Supplement, February 1, 2019, issue 6044, pp. 16–20. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/artic​les/ameri​can-stand​ard-paul-muld​oon-poem/. Muldoon, Paul. “Dirty Data.” Selected Poems, 1968–2014, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2016, pp. 207–25. Nurnberg, Geoffrey. “James Gleick’s History of Information.” New York Times Book Review, March 18, 2011, p. BR1. Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry. Princeton University Press, 1996. Perelman, Bob. “Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice.” American Literature, vol. 65, no. 2 (June 1993), pp. 313–24. Perloff, Marjorie. “Introduction.” Gunslinger, ed. Dorn, Duke University Press, 1989, pp. iv–xviii. Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. University of Chicago Press, 2010. Perloff, Marjorie. 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Blackwell, 2002. Reed, Brian. Nobody’s Business: Twenty-first Century Avant-Garde Poetics. Cornell University Press, 2013. Robbins, Michael. “Walkman.” Best American Poetry 2018, ed. Dana Gioia, Scribner, 2018, pp. 98–105. Schultz, Susan M, ed. The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry. University of Alabama Press 1995. Schwartz, Mattathias. “The Whole Haystack.” New Yorker, January 26, 2015, pp. 54–65. Shoptaw, John. On The Outside Looking Out. Harvard University Press, 1995. Skillman, Nikki. The Lyric in the Age of the Brain. Harvard University Press, 2016. Snowden, Edward. “State of Surveillance,” on “Vice” TV, June 8, 2016. Spahr, Juliana. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems. University of California Press, 2005. Stein, Gertrude. “Orange In.” Tender Buttons. Dover, 1997. Steinberger, Michael. “The All-Seeing Eye.” NYT Magazine, October 25, 2020.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Steven Gould Axelrod is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and President of the Robert Lowell Society. He is the author of Robert Lowell: Life and Art (1978), Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (1990), and over seventy-five scholarly articles on such poets as Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Amy Gerstler, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. He has edited or coedited books on Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Lowell. He is coeditor of The New Anthology of American Poetry, Volumes 1–3 (2003, 2005, 2012). He is also coeditor (with Grzegorz Kosc) of Robert Lowell’s Memoirs (2022). He is Associate Editor of the scholarly journal, Bishop-Lowell Studies, and is currently finishing a book to be called Cold War Poetics. Stephanie Burt, Professor of English at Harvard University, is a distinguished scholar and critic of contemporary poetry as well as being a notable poet herself. Among her books of literary criticism and literary history are Randall Jarrell and His Age (2003), The Art of the Sonnet, with David Mikics (2005), The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence (2007), Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (2009), and Please Don’t Read Poetry (2019). Her edited books include Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden (2005) and The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (2016). Her volumes of poetry include Parallel Play (2006), Advice from the Lights (2017), and We Are Mermaids (2022). Ask her about the X-Men. Or about Randall Jarrell. Mike Cadden is a Professor Emeritus of English and a former president of the Children’s Literature Association. His most recent book is At Arm’s Length: A Rhetoric of Character in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (2021). Michel Delville is a scholar of prose poetry, a musician, and a Professor of literature at the University of Liège, Belgium, where he directs the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics. He is the author or editor of some twenty books, including The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre (1998); Eating the Avant-Garde; J.G. Ballard; Hamlet & Co (with Pierre Michel); Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism (with Andrew Norris); Undoing Art (with Mary Ann Caws); The Politics and Aesthetics of Hunger and Disgust (with Andrew Norris). He is the coeditor, with Mary Ann Caws, of The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem and of the international anthology Beginnings of the Prose Poem—All Over the Place. His awards and distinctions include the SAMLA Book Award, the Leon Guerin Prize, and the 2001 Alumni Award of the Belgian American Educational Foundation.

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Terence Diggory is Professor Emeritus of English at Skidmore College, holding a BA from Yale University and a PhD from Oxford University. His teaching and research interests examine the intersections of modern and contemporary poetry, painting, and drama, specifically studying the New York School Poets, the Beat Poets, Yeats, and Williams. His publications include The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets (coedited with Stephen Paul Miller), William Carlos Williams and the Ethics of Painting, and Yeats & American Poetry: The Tradition of the Self. Norman Finkelstein is a poet, critic, and Emeritus Professor of English at Xavier University. His most recent critical study is Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination (2019); his most recent volumes of poetry are In a Broken Star (2021) and Thirty-Six / Two Lives (2021), coauthored with Tirzah Goldenberg. He writes and edits the poetry review blog Restless Messengers (www.poe​tryi​nrev​iew.com). Hilene Flanzbaum is a Professor of English and the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Butler University, where she also holds the Allegra Stewart Chair in Modern Literature. Her edited books include The Americanization of the Holocaust and Jewish-American Literature: A Norton Anthology, and she has published many essays, such as “The World is Tref: Delmore Schwartz in the Fifties” (2015) and “In Our Image: The Staging of Jewish-American Identity” (2013). Her specialties include Modern and American Poetry, Jewish American Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, and creative writing. Richard Flynn taught poetry and children’s literature at Georgia Southern University for 30 years. He is the author of Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood (1990), as well as many essays. In 2020, he became Professor Emeritus of English. Jeffrey Gray, Professor Emeritus of English at Seton Hall University, is the author of Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry (2005) and editor of the five-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry (2005). He is coeditor (with Ann Keniston) of The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Century Anthology (2012) and The News from Poems: Essays on the 21st Century American Poetry of Engagement (2016); and, with Mary Balkun and Paul Jaussen, of the new Companion to American Poetry (2022). He is also translator of Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s novels The African Shore (2013) and Chaos, A Fable (2017). His many articles on American and Latin American culture have appeared in Contemporary Literature, Callaloo, Profession, American Poetry Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, and other journals. His poetry has been featured in the Atlantic Monthly, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, Mid-American Review, New Letters, The Literary Review, and Lana Turner. Michael Heyman is a professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he teaches courses on Children’s Literature, Poetry, Monsters, and Arthropodiatry. He is the head editor of The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense and This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse. Bethany Hicok is Lecturer in English at Williams College in Massachusetts. She teaches courses in modern poetry, modernism, critical theory, gender studies, and interdisciplinary courses on genetics and literature, utopias, and Ancient Greek literature and justice. She is the author of two critical

Contributors

491

books on American poetry: Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil (2016); and Degrees of Freedom: American Women Poets and the Women’s College, 1905–1955 (2008), which focuses on the poetry of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. She is also coeditor of a collection of essays, Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st Century (2012). She has published a number of essays on modern poetry and two book chapters on teaching. In 2017 Hicok led an NEH Summer Seminar on Elizabeth Bishop that led to an edited volume of new essays on Bishop and her archive (Lever Press 2020). Richard Hishmeh is Professor of English and Humanities at Palomar College and coeditor of Pacific Coast Philology, the journal of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association. His areas of research include American Literature, Poetry, and Film and Visual Culture. He is the author of numerous publications including “Marketing Genius: The Friendship of Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan,” published in The Journal of American Culture; and “Hemingway’s Byron: Romantic Posturing in the Age of Modernism,” published in the Hemingway Review. His latest efforts have been directed toward an original poetry collection entitled About Forty Miles Inland. Krystal Howard is Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at California State University, Northridge, where she teaches children’s and adolescent literature. Her research focuses on form and cultural studies in literature for young readers, and she serves as The Lion and the Unicorn Poetry Award Editor. For more information, visit www.krysta​lhow​ard.com. Michael Joseph retired in 2020 as a professor emeritus from Rutgers University where he had been the Rare Books Librarian. He resides in New York where he writes poems, edits The Robert Graves Review, and plays clarinet. Recent authorial exertions include three poems in Books 2.0 (Spring 2022), and “How British Lyric Poetry Came to Be Angry after Three Hundred Years of Stiff Upper Lips” in Emotions as Engines of History (2022). Ann Keniston is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, with a specialty in American Poetry. She is the author of two monographs: Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry (2015), the 2016 winner of the Warren-Brooks Award; and Overheard Voices: Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry (2006). She has coedited three volumes: The News from Poems: Essays on the 21st-Century American Poetry of Engagement (2016, with Jeffrey Gray), The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Century Anthology (2012, with Jeffrey Gray), and Literature after 9/11 (2008, with Jeanne Follansbee Quinn). She is also the author of a poetry chapbook, November Wasps: Elegies (2013) and two collections of poems, The Caution of Human Gestures (2005) and Somatic (2020), as well as many poems in journals. Keniston is the recipient of a 2017 Fellowship at the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University and several fellowships from the Nevada Arts Council. Andrew Lyndon Knighton is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics at California State University, Los Angeles. He teaches literary and cultural theory as well as American literary history. His scholarship has appeared in journals including ESQ, ATQ, The Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Literature Interpretation Theory, and Theory & Event; his book Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in Nineteenth-Century America was published by NYU Press in 2012. Currently, he is at work on a study of the poet Thomas McGrath.

492

492

Contributors

Grzegorz Kosc is Professor of English and the Director of the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw. He is the author of two critical books, Robert Lowell: Uncomfortable Epigone of the Grands Maîtres (2005) and Robert Frost’s Political Body (2014). Recently, he has contributed essays to Papers on Language and Literature, Partial Answers and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. In 2009 Kosc was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago. He has coedited, with Steven Gould Axelrod, a new edition of Robert Lowell’s autobiographical prose, Lowell’s Memoirs, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2022). Presently, he is coediting—with Thomas Austenfeld of the University of Fribourg, Switzerland—Robert Lowell in Context for Cambridge University Press. Lisette Ordorica Lasater is an Assistant Professor of English at Palomar College in San Marcos, California. The daughter of Mexican immigrants and a first-generation college student, she began her educational journey at a community college and received her PhD in English from the University of California, Riverside. Her research interests include contemporary Chicana/Latina literature and cultural studies, Chicana feminism, twentieth century American literature, and theater and performance studies. Maria Lauret is Visiting Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Sussex, UK. She has published several monographs, including Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature (2014) and a great number of journal articles on topics including multilingualism in American literature, African American culture, life-writing, Junot Diaz, and the “nation of immigrants” in US political discourse. Recent essays include “ ‘Your own goddamn idiom’: Junot Díaz’s Translingualism in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (Studies in the Novel 2016), “Americanization Now and Then: The ‘Nation of Immigrants’ in the Early Twentieth and Twentyfirst Centuries” (Journal of American Studies 2016), and “Teju Cole: Public Intellectual” (2021). She is currently writing a monograph on the literature of #Black Lives Matter. JonArno Lawson, recipient of multiple awards including The Lion And The Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry, has published many books for children and adults including children’s poetry such as Down in the Bottom of the Bottom of the Box (2012), scholarship including But It’s So Silly: A Cross-cultural Collage of Nonsense, Play, and Poetry (2017), and wordless picture books including Sidewalk Flowers (2015, with illustrations by Sydney Smith). Born in Hamilton, Ontario, and raised in nearby Dundas, Lawson now lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with his family. Jessica Lewis Luck, Associate Professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino, studies the connections between poetry and cognition, including issues of disability, embodiment, and poetics. Her publications include “Crossing the Corpus Callosum: The Musical Phenomenology of Lisa Jarnot,” in Reading the Difficulties (2014); “Lyric Underheard: The Printed Voice of Laura Redden Searing,” in a special issue on “Women Writing Disability” for Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers (2013); “Larry Eigner and the Phenomenology of Projected Verse” (Contemporary Literature 2012); “Sound Mind: Josephine Dickinson’s Deaf Poetics” (Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 2009); and “Entries on a Post-Language Poetics in Harryette Mullen’s Dictionary” (Contemporary Literature 2008).

Contributors

493

Susan McCabe was born on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, has taught in Oregon and Arizona, and is currently Professor of English at the University of Southern California, where she directed the PhD in Literature and Creative Writing Program (2006–9). She also served as President of the Modernist Studies Association. She is the author of five books, including two critical studies—Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (1994) and Cinematic Modernism: Modern Poetry and Film (2005)—and two poetry volumes, Swirl (2003), and Descartes’ Nightmare (winner of the Agha Shahid Ali prize and published by Utah University Press in 2008). She has also written the dual biography, H. D. & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism (2021). Her scholarship has primarily focused on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, with an emphasis on modernism, gender studies, and film; her creative writing builds upon many of the motifs found in her research. James McCorkle lives and writes on traditional Haudenosaunee land in Western New York and is a Visiting Associate Professor in Africana Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He is the author of The Still Performance: Writing Self and Interconnection in Five Postmodern American Poets (1989) and the editor of Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry (1989). A recipient of fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts in poetry, his collections of poetry include Evidences (2003), which was selected for the APRHonickman Award by Jorie Graham; The Subtle Bodies (2014); and In Time (2020). Bill Mohr is a professor in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach. Mohr’s literary history of Los Angeles poetry, Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 19481992, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. His critical essays have appeared in such magazines as the William Carlos Williams Review and the Journal of Beat Studies. From 1972 to 1988, he was active in Los Angeles as the editor and publisher of Momentum Press. His most recent anthology of poetry is Cross-Strokes: Poetry between Los Angeles and San Francisco, which he coedited with Neeli Cherkovski. Mohr’s poems, prose poems, and creative prose have appeared in dozens of magazines, as well as in a dozen anthologies, including all three editions of Charles Harper Webb’s Stand Up Poetry (1989, 1992, 2002); Suzanne Lummis’s Grand Passion and Wide Awake; and Coiled Serpent, from Tia Chuca Press. His volumes of poetry include Hidden Proofs (1982); Penetralia (1984); Bittersweet Kaleidscope (2006); and a bilingual volume published in Mexico, Pruebas Ocultas (2015). Cary Nelson has taught modern poetry and literary theory for many decades at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he is now Professor Emeritus of English. His many authored or edited books include The Incarnate Word: Literature as Verbal Space (1973), Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry (1981), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1987), Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (1989), Higher Education under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (1994), Will Work for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis (1997), Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education (1999), Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (2001), No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (2010), and Anthology of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (2014). Author of over two hundred essays, Nelson served as president of the American Association of University Professors from 2006 to 2012.

494

494

Contributors

Stanley Orr hails from Riverside, California. He is Professor of English and Chair of the Humanities Division at the University of Hawai‘i, West O‘ahu, where he teaches courses in writing, literature, and screen studies. Orr has published on topics ranging from Emily Dickinson’s “anti-nomianism” to Pasifika dramatist John Kneubuhl. His pieces appear in journals such as American Quarterly, Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Literature/Film Quarterly, and Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres. Orr’s book, Darkly Perfect World: Colonial Adventure, Postmodernism, and American Noir (2010), charts a trajectory of the noir ethos from fin de siècle adventure through postmodernist parody and revision, innovatively situating the noir ethos within the context of colonial discourse. Orr is also coeditor of The Pearson Custom Library: Introduction to Literature. His latest publication, “ ‘Welcome to the Fabled South’: John Kneubuhl’s Global Southern Gothic, 1959–1966,” appears in Small Screen Souths: Interrogating the Televisual Archive (forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in 2017). Josephine Nock-Hee Park is Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (2008) and Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature (2016). She is the coeditor of Asian American Literature in Transition, 1930-1965 (2021), with Victor Bascara, and Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity (2016), with Paul Stasi. She presently serves on the editorial boards of PMLA and Verge: Studies in Global Asias. Lissa Paul, a professor at Brock University in Ontario, Canada, is the Director of the PhD Programme in Interdisciplinary Humanities. Her most recent monograph is Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist (2019). She is a coeditor, with Philip Nel and Nina Christensen, of Keywords for Children’s Literature (2021). Marjorie Perloff is one of the most distinguished and prolific scholars of modern and contemporary American poetry in the world. She is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University and Florence Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. Among her books on contemporary American poetry are The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell (1973), Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters (1977), The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981), Poetic License (1990), Radical Artifice (1991), The Dance of the Intellect (1996), Poetry on and off the Page (1998), Differentials (2004), Unoriginal Genius (2010), Poetics in a New Key (2013), and Infrathin (2021). Howard Rambsy II is a Professor of Literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He operates the website Cultural Front, and he is the author of Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers (2020). Brian Reed is the Divisional Dean of the Humanities and the Milliman Endowed Chair in the Humanities at the University of Washington and a specialist in twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury poetry. He has written three books—Hart Crane: After His Lights (2006), Phenomenal Reading: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetics (2012), and Nobody’s Business: TwentyFirst Century Avant-Garde Poetics (2013)—and coedited two essay collections—Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow (2003) and Modern American Poetry: Points of Access (2013).

Contributors

495

He has also published more than fifty essays and articles on image-text relations in poetry, on sound in poetry, and on poetry in relation to other arts. Jan Maramot Rodil is an English PhD student at the University of California, Irvine. His main areas of interest are the intersections between the history of American poetry and queer theory. Particularly, he is interested in the conception of a queer poetics, how queer theory intersects with lyric theory by way of queer lyricism, and what it means to say that there is a tradition of queer poets. He has written on poets such as Walt Whitman, Hart Crane Elizabeth Bishop, Frank Bidart, and is currently slated to present papers on Langston Hughes, Jericho Brown, and Yone Noguchi. He is currently researching for a dissertation that focuses on queer poetics and its disjunctive history in the story of American poetics. Craig Svonkin is Professor of English at Metropolitan State University of Denver and Executive Director of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association. He has published essays including “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg’s Spiritual Self-Othering,” “From Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart: Becoming the Other; Suiciding the White Male ‘Self ’,” and “A Southern California Boyhood in the Simu-Southland Shadows of Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room.” Svonkin coauthored three essays on children’s poetry: “A New Parliament of Fouls: The 2015 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry,” “Old Guard→AvantGarde→ Kindergarde: The 2014 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry,” and “Outside the Inside the Box: The 2013 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry.” He also coedited the special “Metafamily” issue of Pacific Coast Philology and the symposium “Why Comics Are and Are Not Picture Books” for Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. is a poet and scholar of American poetry and children’s literature. He directs the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at San Diego State University, where he is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature. In addition to coediting Prizing Children’s Literature: The Cultural Politics of Children’s Book Awards (2016) and All of a Kind: Remembering June Cummins (Cats in the Basement, 2020), Thomas has published numerous essays, poems, and two books—Poetry’s Playground (2007) and Strong Measures (2007). He can be found on Twitter @josephsdsu. Laura Westengard is an Associate Professor of English at New York City College of Technology, City University of New York. She serves as Board Co-Chair of CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies and sits on the Editorial Board for the journal WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly. She coedited The 25 Sitcoms That Changed Television: Turning Points in American Culture and has published in journals such as JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory and Steinbeck Review. Her book, Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma, was released in 2019 by University of Nebraska Press. Erika T. Wurth’s publications include three novels, Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend, You Who Enter Here, and White Horse, two collections of poetry and a collection of short stories, Buckskin Cocaine. A writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, she teaches creative writing at Western Illinois University and has been a guest writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work has appeared

496

Contributors

or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Boulevard, The Writer’s Chronicle, Waxwing, and The Kenyon Review. She is a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Scholar, attended the Tin House Summer Workshop, and has been chosen as a narrative artist for the Meow Wolf Denver installation. She is represented by Julia Eagleton at the Gernert Agency. She is Apache/Chickasaw/ Cherokee and was raised outside of Denver. Traise Yamamoto, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, specializes in Asian American literary and cultural studies, poetry, and race and gender theory. Yamamoto is the author of Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (1999). Her scholarly work has also appeared in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique; The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism; Race, Gender and Class; and Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction. Most recently, “An Apology to Althea Connor: Private Memory and the Ethics of Public Memoir” appeared in Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America. She has written on visual artists Kim Yasuda and Eddy Kurushima for the Japanese American National Museum series “Finding Family Stories.” Her poetry and fiction have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including The New Republic, Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies.

497

INDEX

Abate, Michelle Ann The Lion and the Unicorn 346 The ABC of Reading 7 Abdurraqib, Hanif 397 “Abject Lesson” (Yamada) 219 “The Abortion” (Sexton) 21 Abrams, Stacey 283 3 Abreast Galloper 482 Abreu, Manuel Arturo 293 The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Alexie) 292 abstract expressionism 85 Acevedo, Elizabeth 341, 347 The Poet X 347 ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) 126 Adams, Ansel 316 ADAPT 450 adaptation 437 Adoff, Arnold 358 Adorno, Theodore 468, 483 Advice from the Lights (Burt) 299, 301–2 Ae‘a, Alohi 189 Aeneid: Books I-VI (Habawnik) 446 Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age (Elliott) 2 The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry: A Study of Children’s Verse in English (Joy and WakelyMulroney) 351 Affonso, Ashlee Lena “Hawaiian Tourism Authority” 190 “MCBH” 190 African American 139–52, 163–77, 221–3, 279–85, 391–403 African American Environmental Thought: Foundations (Smith) 316 “African Sleeping Sickness” (Coleman) 171 After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (Meillasoux) 467 After Lorca (Spicer) 442 “After Pushkin” (Glück) 442 Agard, John 341, 351 Age of the Crisis of Man (Greif) 77 Ahmad, Aijaz 443–4

Ai 3 92–3 Aion 54 “A Julia de Burgos” [“To Julia de Burgos” ] (Song 2–5) (de Burgos) 166 Akbar, Kaveh 301 Akutagawa, Ryunosuke A Fool’s Life 291 Alarcón, Norma 49, 198–9, 201 Writing Self, Writing Nation 49 Alcalá, Rosa 300 Aleph (Goldenberg) 426–7 Alexander, Elizabeth 252, 395, 396–8 Alexander, Joy “The Verse-novel: A New Genre” 346 Alexander, Kenneth 168 Alexander, Kwame 341, 348 The Crossover 347 Alexander, Will 148, 395 Alexie, Sherman 407, 408 The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian 292 “Dead Letter Office” 408 Algarín, Miguel 238, 369 Ali, Agha Shahid 444–6 Call Me Ishmael Tonight 444 Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals 444 Alicia Keys. See Cook, Alicia Augello Alighieri, Dante 438 Allen, Donald 85, 154, 156 The New American Poetry (NAP) 17, 85–7, 154–5 Allen, James. L. “Surfer” 180 Allen, Paul Gunn 207 All I Asking for Is My Body (Murayama) 182, 183–4 All My Children 401 All That Beauty (Moten) 470 Althusser, Louis 398, 484 Altieri, Charles 45, 306, 471 Amati-Mehler, Jacqueline 372 “America” (Ginsberg) 133 American Ace (Nelson) 21, 346 American Civil War 37

498

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (McKibben) 315 American feminist poetry. See feminist poetry The Americanization of the Holocaust (Flanzbaum) 146 American Notebooks (Hawthorne) 61 American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination (Lyons) 177 American poetry about the Second World War 37 and war 33–46 The American Poetry Anthology (Halpern) 159 American Poetry Review 8 American Poetry Since 1970: Up Late (Codrescu) 155–6 American prose poem 61, 66. See also postwar prose poetry American Sign Language (ASL) 458–60 “American Standard” (Muldoon) 477–85 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 450 American Tree, Poetry Loves Poetry: An Anthology of Los Angeles Poets 156 American war poetry 34 Amida 424 Ammons, A. R. 113, 303, 468–9, 484 Garbage 468–9, 484 Tape for the Turn of the Year 113 “A Mother’s Touch” (Yamada) 218–19 “Analogy” (White) 411–12 The Anarchivist (Huth) 255 anastomosis 473 “Anatomy. Myology. Plate XV” (Huth) 263, 267 An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense (Tigges) 347 The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–1978 (Foye) 148–9 Anderson, Jack 61, 64 Anderson, Tracy 309 Andrade, Carlos Drummond de 237 “And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures with You” (Carrillo) 26 Angel Island 53 Angelou, Maya 207, 393, 394 “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (Loy) 373 Annie Allen (Brooks) 107, 166–7 Another Attempt at Rescue (Smoker) 405, 413 Another Life (Walcott) 113 anthologies 153–60 Anthology of L.A. Poets (Bukowski) 157 Anthony, Adelina 205 anti-emotion 11 anti-lyric 11 Anti–Vietnam War Movement 35, 40 anti-war poems 35 anti-war poetry 34, 35, 40, 43, 45, 306, 444, 452 Anzaldúa, Gloria 208, 362, 373

Index

Borderlands/La Frontera 270, 361, 365 This Bridge Called My Back 26 Apache, Chiricahua 287 Apache, Crisosto 287–92 “(X) ARTIFACTS [on broken treaties]” 290 “Collapse” 288–90 “37 Common Characteristi(x) s of a Displaced Indian with a Learning Disability” 291–2 gender, sexuality, and native LGBTQI 290–1 GENESIS 287, 290–1 Ghostword 291 on influenced by poets 291 Isness 291 “K’us tádini tsąąbi +2: [38 necks + 2]” 291 “Ndé isdzán” [“two of me” ] 290–1 “Of Thunderous Blood Storm” 291 “Treaty x” 290 “Treaty xx” 290 Apache, Mescalero 287–8 Apollinaire, Guillaume 440 “Apollo” (Cole) 430–1 Apollonian-Dionysian literary framework 430–1, 434–5 “The Applicant” (Plath) 20–1 April on Olympia (Cervantes) 233 Apter, Emily 438 Arab American poetry 379–89 Araujo, Virginia de 237 Arberry, A. J. 440 Arcades Project (Benjamin) 16 Archilochus 440 Argueta, Jorge 341 Ariel (Plath) 20, 164 Aristotle 9, 57, 398 Armantrout, Rae 173, 225–30, 281, 327, 332–4 “Asymmetries” 226–7 Collected Prose 225 Conjure 228–30 “Context” 225 Finalists 225 on folly 230–1 “I and I” 226 intersubjective failure or communication denial 227–8 Itself 229 Money Shot 331 “Money Talks” 331 Necromance 225 “The New Zombie” 229 Partly: New and Selected Poems 2001–2015 225 “Pretty Little” 228 on process of writing 226 “Revisions” 306–7

499

Index

on silence in poetry 225–6 “Soft Money” 331 on subjects of poetry 228–9 on use of personal in poetry 226–7 Veil: New and Selected Poems 225 Versed 225–6 Wobble 225–6, 306 Armitage, Kimo 189 Arnold, Matthew 2 “(X) ARTIFACTS [on broken treaties]” (Apache) 290 The Art of Confession (Grobe) 164 The Art of the Sonnet (Mikics and Burt) 299 asemic poetry 259 Ashbery, John 15–17, 55, 62, 63, 85, 88–91, 128, 132, 326, 440, 468, 470–1, 477–9, 484 The Double Dream of Spring 88–9 Flow Chart 88, 471 Herald Tribune 88–9 “The Instruction Manual” 326 Rivers and Mountains 88 “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” 88, 90–1, 113 The Tennis Court Oath 88 Three Poems 62, 63, 88, 476 Asian American avant-garde 55 Asian American literary canon 54 Asian American literature 49 Asian American movement 50 Asian American poetry 49–58, 177–93, 215–20, 245–53 Asian American poets 303 “The Asians Dying” (Merwin) 40–2 Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods For Jazz (Hughes) 275 “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” (Williams) 356 assemblage or quoting poems 86, 173, 312, 421, 430 “Ass Why Hard” (Lum and Chock) 184 “Asymmetries” (Armantrout) 226–7 At Arm’s Length: A Rhetoric of Character in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Cadden) 339 At the End of the Open Road (Reznikoff) 110 Atwood, Margaret 64, 66 Atwood, Rufus 221 Auden, W. H. 51, 104, 438 Some Trees 88 Aufgabe 438 “Aunty’s Rocks” (Holt) 187 authenticity 143 “The Autobiographical Pact” (Lejeune) 114 autobiographical prose of poets 113–22 dianoia 120–2 exteriority 117–20 naturalnes 114–17

Autobiography (Franklin) 475 “auto-sacrifice” (Kapil) 56 avant-garde aesthetics acts 54 avant-garde experimental techniques 50 Axelrod, Steven Gould 73, 135, 139, 178, 205, 206, 208 A Cold Spring 135 Babel, Isaac Benya Krik 422 Babel to Byzantium: Poets & Poetry Now (Dickey) 155 Baca, Jimmy Santiago Martin & Meditations on the South Valley 270 Baciu, Ştefan 190 “Birthday in Hawaii” 179 “Bagel Shop Jazz” (Kaufman) 128 Baird, Joseph L. Toward Solomon’s Mountain: The Experience of Disability in Poetry 450 Baker, David 302 Scavanger Loop 306 Bakhtin, Mikhail 63 Balaban, Peter 440 Balakian, Peter 440 Balaz, Joe 188 Balaz, Joseph Ho’omanoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature 186–7, 191 Ramrod 186 “Spear Fisher” 187 The Bald Soprano (Ionesco) 344 Ball, Charles 316 Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man 314–15 “Bamboo, the Dance” (Chin) 249–50 Bamboo Ridge Quarterly 182, 185 Ban en Banlieue (Kapil) 49, 57 Bang, Mary Jo 471 Inferno 442 The Baobab Room (Nelson) 223 Baraka, Amiri 238, 326, 399 Barba, Sharon Rising Tides 22 Barkawi, Lana “Introduction to Arab American Poetry” 388 Barker, Ilse 117 Barks, Coleman 440 The Essential Rumi 446 Barrett, Lindon 165, 169 Barrio Logos (Villa) 198

500

Bart, Lionel “Consider Yourself ” 370 Oliver! 370 Barth, John 65 Barthelme, Donald 66 Barthes, Roland 10, 202, 432, 484 A Lover’s Discourse 68 Bartlett, Jennifer 452, 461 Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability 451–2 Basho, Matsuo “Pepperpod/add wings/dragonfly” 248 Bashō, Matsuo 438 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 256 Bass, Ellen 25 No More Masks! 19, 22, 25 Bate, Jonathan Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition 308 The Bat-Poet (Jarrell) 351 Baudelaire, Charles 9, 63, 68, 438, 478 Les Fleurs du mal 442 Bauman, H-Dirksen L. 460 Baxtered, Bothered, and Bedeviled (Huth) 261 Bay Poetics (Young) 160 Beachy-Quick, Dan North True, South Bright 291 Beardsley, Monroe C. 114 Beat poets/poetry 128, 139–51, 158–9, 291, 293 Beautiful Ballerina (Nelson) 221 Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Bartlett & Northen) 451–2, 456, 459 Beauvoir, Simone de The Second Sex 20 Becker, Paula 29 Beckett, Samuel 272 Becoming a Poet (Kalstone) 80 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell Other Traditions 17 Bedient, Cal 8 ‘Beer Can Hat’ (Lum) 184 Before Columbus Foundation 269 Beginnlosigkeit (Strauß) 68 Bell, Marvin 358 Bell, Vereen 74, 81 Notebook 78 Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero 74 Bellah, Robert Habits of the Heart 270 The Bell Jar (Plath) 117 “Beneath the Shadow” (Cervantes) 209 Beneath the Underdog (Mingus) 270 Benedict, Barbara 185

Index

Benedikt, Michael 61–2, 64 Mole Notes 65 The Prose Poem: An International Anthology 61–2 Ben-Hur 481–2 Benjamin, Walter Arcades Project 16 “The Task of the Translator” 437–8 Bennett, Jane Vibrant Matter 467 Bennett, Joshua 393 “Benny and the Jets” (John) 478 Benya Krik (Babel) 422 Berg, Stephen Naked Poetry 155 Bergvall, Carolyn 374 Berke, Nancy 19 Bernikow, Louise The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America 22, 25 Bernstein, Charles 16, 68, 93, 96, 113, 115, 173, 281, 482 “Dysraphism” 116 Recalculating 440 Bernstein, Herman Joseph 116 Berry, James When I Dance 341 Berry, Wendell 238 Berryman, John 108, 113, 114, 144 77 Dream Songs 164 Dream Songs 264 Love and Fame 114 Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei 55–6 Bervin, Jen “CALLEDBIRDAND / WORMSCRIPT” 319 I Ching 320 “INMYOLDSKIN // INSIDEIT / MYNEWSKIN” 320 “Project Note” 319 “SILK / LANGUAGE” 319 Silk Poems 319 100 Best African-American Poems (Giovanni) 394 A Bestiary (Hoang) 57–8 The Best of Bamboo Ridge (Kwon) 183–4, 191 Betts, Reginald Dwayne 394, 397 Bich, Nguyen Ngoc 441 Bidart, Frank 173, 281, 293, 429, 434–5 Golden State 164 “Lie to yourself about this and you will / forever lie about everything” 434 “Queer” 434 Bierstadt, Albert 316 “Bilingual Blues” (Firmat) 370, 373 Bin Laden, Osama 483

Index

BIPOC poets 293 Bird, Hera Lindsay 301 “Birthday in Hawaii” (Baciu) 179 Bishop, Elizabeth 1, 73, 113, 117, 128, 166–7, 207, 299, 302, 303, 352, 429, 432 “Crusoe in England” 16 “Homosexuality” 128 “Insomnia” 128 “In the Waiting Room” 19, 207, 233 “Love Lies Sleeping” 128 Love Poems (Tentative Title) 128 “The Man-Moth” 113 “One Art” 135 “Poem” 327–8 Questions of Travel 117, 164, 166 “Rainy Season, Sub-Tropics” 302 Bitsui, Sherwin 409, 415 “The Northern Sun” 409 Shapeshift 405, 408 “The Sun Rises and I Think of your Bruised Larynx” 409 Blackaby, Susan 358 “Black and Blue” (Waller) 165, 168 Black Arts Movement 54, 361, 368–9, 399, 449 Black Arts poetry 54, 163–73, 361, 399, 449 Black Boy (Wright) 270 “Black Dog [pinoy style]” (Pizo) 185 “The Black Heralds” (Vallejo) 284 Black poets 391–402 Black Power 21, 22 Black Renaissance Noiré 287 The Black Riders and Other Lines (Crane) 262 “The Black Swan” (Jarrell) 302 Blake, William 291, 356, 383–4, 478 Blakely, Henry 167 Blanchot, Maurice 65 The Madness of the Day 65 Bloch, Chana “The New World” 421–2 Bloody News from My Friend (Siamanto) 440 Bloom, Harold 88, 90–1, 141, 471 Deconstruction and Criticism 90 Bly, Robert 61, 109, 440 “Counting Small-Boned Bodies” 45 Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke 440 “The Body of Michael Brown” (Goldsmith) 331, 479, 480 Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy 271 Bogen, Laurel Ann 160 Bök, Christian 8, 264 Bolden, B. J. 164

501

Bone Light (White) 405, 411, 412 Book 2.0 (Warner) 348 “The Book of Yolek” (Hecht) 39 Books 2.0 (Joseph) 339 Booth, Dexter 394 Borderlands/La Frontera (Anzaldúa) 270, 361, 365 Borges, Jorge Luis 65, 66, 485 “Funes, the Memorious” 476 Borja-Quichocho-Calvo, Kisha “Returning to My Mother(is) land, Returning Home” 189 Borjas, Sara 293 Born Palestinian, Born Black (Hammad) 380 Bottoms, David The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets 156 Bourdain, Anthony 1 Bourdieu, Pierre 324 Bowie, David 398, 478, 480 “The Boy Died in My Alley” (Brooks) 168 Bradstreet, Anne 270 Brady, Mary Pat 202 Brainard, Joe I Remember 262 Braithwaite, Kamau 252 Brandon, Som 300 Brathwaite, Kamau 394, 395 The Bread Givers (Yezierska) 102 Break the Glass (Valentine) 291 Brecht, Bertolt 458 “Brent Crude” (Spahr) 310 Breslin, James 86–7 From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry 87 Breton, André 66 Briante, Susan 327 Bridges, Constance Q. 394 “Brief History of Bilingualism in Poetry” (Villanueva) 367 Brim, Matt 131–2 Imagining Queer Methods 131 Brinkley, Robert 1–2 “The British Prison Ship” (Freneau) 34 Broder, Melissa 293 Brodsky, Joseph 438 Brolaski, Julien Talamantez 362, 372–4 Brooks, Cleanth 76, 114 The Well-Wrought Urn 76 Brooks, Gwendolyn 40, 107, 113, 120, 164, 165, 169, 172, 207, 252, 352, 353, 391, 392, 394–5, 396 Annie Allen 107, 166–7 “The Boy Died in My Alley” 168 “The Children of the Poor” 167

502

“Gay Chaps at the Bar” 38 “Notes from the Childhood and Girlhood” 167 Report from Part One 120 “The Womanhood” 167 Brother Anthony 438 Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (Hemphill) 129 Brown, Brandon Flowering Mall 442 Brown, Calef 341, 354 Brown, Ed Gumdrop Follies 341 Brown, F. Douglas 394 Brown, Jericho 392, 396, 397, 398 The Tradition 398 Brown, Lee Ann 67 Brown, Sterling 393 Brown, Wendy 324–5 Brown Girl Dreaming (Woodson) 341, 346, 347 “Brown Girl Manifesto” (Chin) 252 Broyles, Marianne Aweagon 409–10 “Mohawk Horse Breaker” 410 The Red Window 405, 410 Bruce, Lenny 103 Bryan, Beverly 351 Bryant, Jen 346 Bryant, Lévi 484 The Democracy of Objects 467 Buckley, Christopher How Much Earth 158 Buell, Frederick 305 Buell, Lawrence 312 Bukowski, Charles 160, 170 Anthology of L.A. Poets 157 Bullet (Turner) 46 Bunyan, Paul 348 “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” (Eliot) 103 Burgess, Puanani “Choosing My Name” 187 Burroughs, William 128 A Burst of Light (Lorde) 121 Burt, Stephanie 3, 299–303 about 299 Advice from the Lights 299, 301–2 The Art of the Sonnet 299 Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry 299 on defense of Randall Jarrell 299 The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence 299, 301 “Hermit Crab” 301

Index

“On Long Poems: Four Recent Books Make Length a Virtue” 470 Parallel Play 299 Please Don’t Read Poetry 299–300 The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them 299–301 on racial, ethnic, gender, class, or geographic identity in poetry 302–3 Randall Jarrell and His Age 299 Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden 299 “To the Naked Mole Rats at the National Zoo” 301 “Burying Blues for Janis” (Piercy) 23 “Bury Me in a Free Land” (Harper) 165 Bush, George H. W. 379, 466 The Business of Fancydancing (Alexie) 408 “But Is It Poetry?” (Livingston) 347 But It’s So Silly: A Cross-Cultural Collage of Nonsense, Play and Poetry (Lawson) 339, 341, 349, 351 Byways (Laughlin) 114 Cables (Cervantes) 210 Cadden, Mike 339 At Arm’s Length: A Rhetoric of Character in Children’s and Young Adult Literature 339 on children’s/young adult verse novel 345–6 Cage, John 9 Cahan, Abraham 102 The California Poem (Sikelianos) 312–13 “Caligula 2” (Lowell) 76 “CALLEDBIRDAND/WORMSCRIPT” (Bervin) 319 Call Me Ishmael Tonight (Ali) 444 Calvino, Italo 65 Campbell, Alistair Te Ariki 188 Camp Notes and Other Poems (Yamada) 215 Camp Notes and Other Writings (Yamada) 215 Cancer Journals (Lorde) 121 Cane (Toomer) 251 “The Cane Cutters” (Kono) 183 The Cantos (Pound) 15, 67 Caplan, David 444 Captain Beefheart. See Van Vliet, Don Carlisle, Fred 34 Carmichael, Hoagy 478 Carrillo, Jo “And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures with You” 26 Carroll, Lewis 225, 347 Carroll, Paul Young American Poets 155 Carson, Anne Sappho 440 Carver: A Life in Poems (Nelson) 21

Index

“Case in Point” (Jordan) 22 The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Rose) 352 Cash, Johnny 478 Cassells, Cyrus 393, 397 Castillo, Ana 207 “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude” (Gay) 469 Catullus (Zukofsky & Zukofsky) 440 Causley, Charles 341 Cavafy, C. P. 438 Cavanagh, Clare 438 Caws, Mary Ann 63, 438 Celan, Paul 438 “Death Fugue” 249–50 “The Censor and the Poet” (Santayana) 271 The Center for Independent Living (The CIL) 450 A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (Joseph) 385 Cervantes, Lorna Dee 170, 195, 196, 198, 204–11, 233–43 about 233 April on Olympia 233 “Beneath the Shadow” 209 Cables 210 From the Cables of Genocide: Poems On Love and Hunger 207, 233, 243 on celebrated poets 233–4 on Chicanx poetics 235–6 Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems 233, 239, 241–2 Drive: The First Quartet 208, 233, 234 Emplumada 206, 233, 241 influenced by poets 236–8 on interactive binary theme at work 234 mortality in poems 240–1 “My Father’s Shoes” 235 “On Speaking to the Dead” 210 “Pleiades from the Cables of Genocide” 204 “Poema para los Californios Muertos” 236 “Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent Well-Read Person, Could Believe in the War between the Races” 237 “Striking Ash” 208 Sueño 233 on voice and voices in poem 243 Césaire, Aimé 148, 438 Cezanne, Paul 474 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung 49–50 Dictée 56–8, 362, 365–7 “Make swarm” 57 Chagall, Marc 150 Chambers, Nancy Poetry for Children: The Signal Award 1979–2001 352

503

Chaney, James 306, 479 Changing Is Not Vanishing (Parker) 406 Chappelle, Dave 247 Charara, Hayan Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry 379, 381 Charles, Jos 133 Feeld 133 Charleston, Cortney Lamar 300, 397 Charlot, Jean 181 Cherkovski, Neeli 151 Whitman’s Wild Children 143 Chernoff, Maxine 64, 69 “Phantom Pain” 64 Chester, Laura Rising Tides 22 Chicago Seven 101 The Child as Poet: Myth or Realty? (Koch) 347 “The Children of the Poor” (Brooks) 167 children’s fiction 342 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (Tarr and Flynn) 351 children’s poetry 339–59 future of 350–59 genres and topics 345–8 nonsense poetry 343–5 Chin, Frank 54 Chin, Justin 170 Chin, Marilyn 113, 170, 245–53, 440 about 245 “Bamboo, the Dance” 249–50 Black culture and poetry 251–2 “Brown Girl Manifesto” 252 “Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44)” 247–9 “For Mitsuye Yamada on her 90th Birthday” 217, 250–1 on global consciousness in poems 245–6 Hard Love Province 245 “How I Got That Name” 113, 246–7, 252 The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty 245 “Poetry Camp” 247 A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems 245 “Postscript: Brown Girl Manifesto, One of Many” 252–3 Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen 245, 247 Rhapsody in Plain Yellow 245 “We Are Americans Now, We Live in the Tundra” 247 “Why Men Are Dogs” 247 Chinese Exclusion Act 51

504

“Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44) “ (Chin) 247–9 Chiricahua 482 Chirico, Giorgio de 89 Cho, Margaret 247 Chock, Eric 183, 191 “Ass Why Hard” 184 Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii’s Local Writers 183, 185 “Waolani Stream, 1955/1975” 182 Choi, Don Mee 440 “Choosing My Name” (Burgess) 187 Christensen, Nina Keywords for Children’s Literature 340 Christian Johann Heinrich, Heine 9 “Christina’s World” (Wyeth) 255 Chukovsky, Kornei From Two to Five 344 Church, Frederic Edwin 316 Ciardi, John 439 Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems (Cervantes) 233, 239, 241–2 Cisneros, Sandra 200, 205, 207 Citizen: An American Lyric (Rankine) 172, 279, 281–2, 397–8, 414 “City of the Big Shoulders” (Sandburg) 348 Civil Rights 21–2, 449–51 Cixous, Helène 151 Clark, John Lee 17, 275–6 “Deaf Blind: Three Squared Cinquain” 452 “Pastoral Poesy” 308 class 26–7, 36, 38, 167, 168, 205–6, 234, 236, 280, 316 identity 95 race and 110 social 95 Claudel, Paul 78 Clifton, Lucille 113, 118, 164, 170, 319, 394, 395 Collected Poems 169 “confession” 169 “dad” 169 “daddy” 169 “daddy 12/02–5/69” 169 “Dear Mama” 169, 170 “enter my mother” 169 “forgiving my father” 169 “Generations” 118, 169 Good Woman 166 “if mama” 169 “mother, I am mad” 169 “my daddy’s fingers move among the couplers” 169 “my father hasn’t come back” 169

Index

“my lost father” 169 “my mama moved among the days” 169 “My mother teached me” 169 “the lost baby poem” 21–2 “To Mama too late” 169 “your mother sends you this” 169 Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Burt) 299 Clover, Joshua 326 “Long-Term Capital Management” (“LTCM” ) 327–9, 332 Clune, Michael 326 Coats, Karen Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature 342 Cocteau, Jean Orpheus 484 Codrescu, Andrei 159, 160 American Poetry Since 1970: Up Late 155–6 Up Late 160 “Coffee-faced Ivy Leaguers” (Kaufman) 128 The Colbert Report 331 Colby, Kate 302 A Cold Spring (Axelrod) 135 Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Klein) 178 Cole, Henri 293, 429–35 “Apollo” 430–1 “Mechanical Soft” 431 Touch 431 The Visible Man 430 Cole, Nat King “Mona Lisa” 369 Cole, Peter “Song of the Shattering Vessels” 424–6 Cole, Thomas 316 Coleman, Wanda 164, 169, 170 “African Sleeping Sickness” 171 “Disconnections” 171 Heavy Daughter Blues 166 Coleridge, Samuel The Lyrical Ballads 115 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 291 “Collapse” (Apache) 288–90 Collected Poems (Clifton) 169 Collected Poems (O’Hara) 88 Collected Poems (Rich and Conrad) 22 Collected Prose (Armantrout) 225 Collins, Billy 114 Colomé, Pura López Watchword 291 “The Colonel” (Forché) 45

505

Index

The Color Purple (Walker) 251 Coming Attractions: An Anthology of American Poets in Their Twenties (Cooper) 157 Coming to Terms (Miles) 450 “comma poems” 51–2 “Commitments” (Hemphill) 129–30 “37 Common Characteristi(x) s of a Displaced Indian with a Learning Disability” (Apache) 291–2 Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life 287, 291 The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (Eshleman) 440 “Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women” (Rich) 29 “confession” (Clifton) 169 confessional poetry 86, 107, 163–77, 205, 246–7, 250, 269–71, 273, 412, 429–35, 480 “Confessional” Writing and the Twentieth-Century Literary Imagination (Sherwin) 429 Confessions (Augustine) 271–2 Conjure (Armantrout) 228–30 Conrad, Pablo Collected Poems 22 Conrad, Rachel Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency 341, 353–4 “Consider Yourself “ (Bart) 370 The Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius) 271 Console, Cyrus 69 The Contemporary American Poets: American Poetry Since 1940 155 contemporary poetry 50, 69, 156, 281, 323–35, 366, 392, 400, 402, 409, 449–61 contemporary war poetry 46 “Context” (Armantrout) 225 A Controversy of Poets (Kelly and Leary) 155 Cook, Alicia Augello 478 Cook, Peter 458 Cooper, Amy 284 Cooper, Christian 284 Cooper, Dennis Coming Attractions: An Anthology of American Poets in Their Twenties 157 Copp, Jim Gumdrop Follies 341 Corn, Alfred 88 Corpi, Lucha 200 Corpse Whale (okpik) 291 Cortázar, Julio 65 Cortés, Hernán 200 Cosby, Bill 481 Coste-Lewis, Robin 484 “Counting Small-Boned Bodies” (Bly) 45

The Court Jester (Kaye) 343 Crane, Hart 429, 432–4 Crane, Stephen The Black Riders and Other Lines 262 Crapsey, Adelaide 51, 300 “Crash Report” (McGrath) 38 Creeley, Robert 17, 113 “poetics of conjecture” 63 Presences: A Text for Marisol 62, 113 crip poetry 451–2 “Crise de vers” (Mallarmé) 62 The Crossover (Alexander) 347 cross-racial identification 54 cross-racial solidarity 54 “The Crouching Lion” (Yamasaki) 180 “The crowd at the ball game” (Williams) 277 Crowl, Jamie 223 Cruising Utopia (Muñoz) 134 “Crusoe in England” (Bishop) 16 Cullen, Countee “Incident” 165 Curie, Marie 29 Curriculum Vitae (Joseph) 385 Cuvier, Georges 317 “dad” (Clifton) 169 “daddy” (Clifton) 169 “Daddy” (Plath) 21, 172, 205 “daddy 12/02–5/69 “ (Clifton) 169 Dahlen, Beverly 93 Daily Worker 36 Dali, Salvador 150 Damon, Maria 128, 140, 142–3, 147 The Dance of the Intellect (Perloff) 7 Dancing in Odessa (Kaminsky) 426 Dangerous Crossroads (Lipsitz) 383 Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves 255 Danladi, Chekwube 394 Dao, Bei 438 Dargan, Kyle 394 Dark Thirty (Frazier) 405, 410 Darwish, Mahmoud 438 data overload 466–7 “Daughters, 1900” (Nelson) 21 Davenport, Guy 440 Davidson, Michael 449, 458 Davis, Frank Marshall 186 Davis, Glover 158 Davis, Lennard 499 Davis, Lydia 65 Dawes, Kwame 397

506

Day by Day (Lowell) 73, 75, 79–80, 82–3, 173 Daye, Tyree 397 “The Day Lady Died” (O’Hara) 113 “Day-Long Day” (Villanueva) 368 “Dead Letter Office” (Alexie) 408 “Deaf Blind: Three Squared Cinquain” (Clark) 452 “Dear Brother at Home” (Hughes) 36–7 “Dear Folks at Home” (Hughes) 36 “Dear Mama” (Shakur) 169–71 “Death by Water” 479 “Death Cry for the Language” (Glancy) 364 “Death Fugue” (Celan) 249–50 Debord, Guy Michael Jackson 330–2 de Burgos, Julia 164, 165 “Farewell from Welfare Island” 166 “Intima” [“Intimate” ] (Song 6–7) 166 “A Julia de Burgos” [“To Julia de Burgos” ] (Song 2–5) 166 de Campos, Haroldo “Translation as Creation and Criticism” 446 Deconstruction and Criticism (Bloom) 90 “Deep South” (McGrath) 38 deFoiard Brown, Jacques 223 deixis 120 The Deleted World (Tranströmer) 439 Deleuze, Gilles 1–2 The Logic of Sense 344 Delgado, Juan 269–77 on confessional poetry 269–70 “Diapers” 273 “Earache” 269 El Campo: Poems and Paintings 269, 274 “Flavio’s New Home” 272 “Flora’s Plea to Mary” 272 “Grandma Taught Me to Respect You” 273 Green Web 269–70 “He Took Her Away” 269 “The House in El Monte” 269–70 on influence of poets or prose writers 275–7 “Mrs. Lucy Rivera” 272 “My Mother’s Stories” 273 Native Voices: Poetry Festival 274 “Ofelia’s Dream” 272 on personal element in poems 271–2 A Rush of Hands 269, 273 “Sisters” 272 “Visiting Father” 269, 271 Vital Signs 269 on working with visual artists or other creative artists 274–5 DeLima, Frank 185

Index

The Democracy of Objects (Bryant) 467 democratic 95, 190, 316, 325, 476–7 Dends, Ed 344 Denver Quarterly 287, 291 Derricotte, Toi 393, 397 Derrida, Jacques 65, 275 de Rueda, Lope 441 de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine The Little Prince 223 A Description of New England (Smith) 313–14 Desert Run (Yamada) 215 “Desire” (Hughes) 165 Despite This Flesh: The Disabled in Stories and Poems (Miller) 450 Deuteronomy 422–3 de Vos, Philip 341 dianoia 120–2 “Diapers” (Delgado) 273 “Diasporic Poetics” (Heller) 420 Diaz, Natalie 414–15 “Hand-Me-Down Halloween” 415–16 When My Brother Was an Aztec 405, 415–16 Dickens, Charles A Tale of Two Cities 23–4 Dickey, James Babel to Byzantium: Poets & Poetry Now 155 Dickinson, Emily 30, 237, 284, 300, 323, 426–7, 481 Dictée (Cha) 49–50, 56–8, 362, 365–7 Dien Cai Dau (Komunyakaa) 45 Differentials (Perloff) 7 Diggs, LaTasha N. N. 397 digitization 325 Dimock, Edward In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali 440 Dimock, Wei Chee 2 Diné (Navajo) 287–8 DiPietra, Amber 455 “Dirty Data” (Muldoon) 481–2 disability poetry 449–61 disability rights movement 449–51 The Disappointments of Language (Huth) 261 “Disconnections” (Coleman) 171 Disidentifications (Muñoz) 383 Divine Comedy (Dante) 439 Diving into the Wreck (Rich) 113, 129, 235 Dodd, Jayy 293 “Does change require losing all?” (Moraga) 197 The Dolphin (Lowell) 167, 173 Donne, John 9, 10, 104, 291 Donnelly, Timothy 18, 327, 466, 469–70 “Hymn to Life” 472–7, 482–5 “Don’t Ask Me for That Love Again” (Faiz) 445

Index

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Rankine) 279, 281, 332–3, 334 Doolittle, Hilda 93, 311 Dorn, Ed Gunslinger 478 Slinger 478 Doty, Mark 438 The Double Dream of Spring (Ashbery) 88–9 Douglas, Michael 469 Dove, Rita 391–90, 394, 395, 398, 399, 401 Thomas and Beulah 252, 391 Dowling, Sarah 366 Down at the Santa Fe Depot: 20 Fresno Poets 157–8 Down In The Bottom of the Bottom of the Box (Lawson) 339 Dragomoshchenko, Arkadii 440 “Dramatic Monologues and the Novel-in-Verse” (Ruwe) 346 The Dream of a Common Language (Rich) 27, 29 Dream Songs (Berryman) 164, 264 Dreyfus, Hubert 142 Drifting Flowers of the Sea and Other Poems (Hartmann) 51 Drive: The First Quartet (Cervantes) 208, 233, 234 Drops of this Story (Hammad) 380 “Drowning in my Own Language” (Yamada) 218 Dr. Seuss 348 Fox in Socks 343 “The Lonely Goatherd” 343 Oh, Say Can You Say 343 The Sound of Music 343 Dryden, John 441–2 Ovid’s Epistles 441 Duarte, Chelsea Mana‘olana 189 Dubliners (Joyce) 275 Du Bois, W. E. B. 316, 318 The Souls of Black Folk 314–15, 317 Duffy, Carol Ann 341 Du Fu 250 Duhamel, Denise 327 Duncan, Robert 8, 17 “Up Rising” 43 Dungy, Camille T. 397 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau 93–4, 471 HOW(ever) 93 Durand, Asher 316 Dutton, Nicole Terez 394 Dworkin, Craig 17, 452 Dylan, Bob 46 “Dysaesthesia” (Lambeth) 453–4 “Dysraphism” (Bernstein) 116

507

“Each Other” (Yau) 65 Eady, Cornelius 393 “Earache” (Delgado) 269 Earhart, Amelia 481 “Easter, 1916” (Yeats) 9 East Window: The Asian Translations (Merwin) 441 “Eating Out Alone” (Lowell) 78 Echo of Our Song: Chants and Poems of the Hawaiians (Pukui) 179 economies of scale 323–35 ecopoetics 305–20 Edge of Irony (Perloff) 8 Edifi cio Sayonara (Yau) 65 Edson, Russell 61, 65 The Very Thing That Happens 64, 65 The Wounded Breakfast 65 Eggleston, Rushad 348 Eigner, Larry 449, 455–6 On My Eyes 456 Ein Landarzt (Kafka) 66 “El Beso” (Grimké) 165 “El Buen Sentido” (Vallejo) 285 El Campo: Poems and Paintings (Delgado) 269, 274 “Elegy for the Airplane” 52 Elhillo, Safia 397 Eliot, George 20, 302, 471, 477–81 Eliot, T. S. 85, 103–5, 150, 205, 233, 361, 367, 408 Four Quartets 208, 211 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 478 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 252 The Waste Land 477–81 “Elizabeth Bishop and Containment Policy” (Axelrod) 135 Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist (Paul) 340 Elliott, Emory Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age 2 Ellis, Thomas Sayers 396, 397 Ellison, Ralph Invisible Man 168 Elmusa, Sharif S. 381–2 Flawed Landscape: Poems 1987–2008 382 Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry 379 “With New Englanders” 381–2 El Said, Maha 379 “The Face of the Enemy: Arab-American Writing Post 9/11” 379 The Emergence of Prose (Godzic and Kittay) 120 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 61–2, 478 Emotions as Engines of History (Joseph) 339 Emplumada (Cervantes) 206, 233, 241

508

Empringham, Toni Fiesta in Aztlan 158 The End of the Alphabet (Rankine) 279 Engels, Friedrich 327 Engle, Margarita 340, 341, 347 The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist 347 Enjoy It While It Hurts (Lawson) 349 “enter my mother” (Clifton) 169 Erdrich, Louise 405, 407 “Family Reunion” 407 Erkkila, Betsy “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” 34 Eshleman, Clayton 170, 311 The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo 440 Juniper Fuse 310 Espinoza, Joshua Jennifer 293–6 about 293 “Birthday Suits” 294 on emotion and humor in poems 294 I’m Alive. It Hurts. I Love It 293, 295 influenced by poets 293 “Like a Good Woman” 294 “The Moon Is Trans” 294 “My First Love” 293 Outside of the Body There Is Something Like Hope 293 regarding tweet on Twitter 295–6 “Sometimes in a Moment of Déjà Vu” 294–5 There Should Be Flowers 293–4 on trans poetry 293–6 “Essay on Man” (Pope) 246 The Essential Rumi (Barks) 446 Estes, Angie 300 Estopin, Julianna 282 “Ethnic Identity and Imperative Patriotism: Arab Americans Before and After 9/11” (Salaita) 380 ethnicity 105, 127, 206, 303, 363 ethnic nationalism 52 Eugene Onegin (Nabokov) 276, 443 Evans, Steve 96 Everwine, Peter 158 Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poem (Nye) 386 experimentation 358–9 Explorations in the Field of Nonsense (Tigges) 347 expressionist 85 exteriority 117–20 fabulists 63–6 Fairbanks, Douglas 50–1 The Thief of Baghdad 51

Index

Faiz, Faiz Ahmed “Don’t Ask Me for That Love Again” 445 The Rebel’s Silhouette 444–6 “Family Reunion” (Erdrich) 407 Fanon, Frantz 282 “Farewell from Welfare Island” (de Burgos) 166 “The Farewell Stairway” (Guest) 93, 94 Faster Than Light: New and Selected Poems, 1996– 2011 (Nelson) 221 “Father” (Yamada) 219 Fawcett, Farrah 331 Feeld (Charles) 133 Felver, Christopher Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits 287 feminism, second-wave 19 feminist anthologies 22–6 “Feminist Manifesto!” (Loy) 252 feminist poetry 19–31, 54, 67, 93–6, 109, 125, 129, 181, 195–212, 215, 218, 237, 245, 248, 251–2, 361, 365, 421, 424, 449–53 feminist politics 19, 20 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence “Populist Manifesto” 156 Ferris, Jim 452–3 “Poet of Cripples” 452 Ferry, David Virgil 440 Festival: Poems from Hawaii (Thompson) 178–80, 190 Ficciones (Borges) 66 Fiedler, Leslie 103 Fiegel, Sia 188 Field, Edward A Geography of Poets 156–7 The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (Nelson) 221, 223–4 Fiesta in Aztlan (Empringham) 158 “Fifty Days at Iliam” (Twombly) 256 Finalists (Armantrout) 225 Financialization 325, 331 Finkelstein, Norman 106 Finkielkraut, Alain 106 Finlay, Ian Hamilton “Little Sparta” 274 Finnegans Wake (Joyce) 275 Finney, Nikky 395 Head Off & Split 398 Firmat, Gustavo Pérez 362, 370–2 “Bilingual Blues” 370, 373 Tongue Ties 370 first-wave feminism 22 First World War 44, 367 “First Writing Since” (Hammad) 380–1

Index

Fisher, B. K. 134 Fitzgerald, Adam 18 FitzGerald, Edward The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam 437, 441 Fixel, Lawrence 64, 65 Flanagan, Bob 157 Flanzbaum, Hilene 144, 146, 150 The Americanization of the Holocaust 146 flat ontology 465, 467, 468, 477, 482 “Flavio’s New Home” (Delgado) 272 Flawed Landscape: Poems 1987–2008 (Elmusa) 382 “Flora’s Plea to Mary” (Delgado) 272 Flow Chart (Ashbery) 88, 471 Flowering Mall (Brown) 442 Floyd, George 281, 284 Flynn, Richard 340–1, 352–4, 358 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 351 Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood 339 Foerster, Jennifer Elise Leaving Tulsa 405, 414 “Pottery Lessons I” 414 Follain, Jean 441 A Fool’s Life (Akutagawa) 291 “Footnote to Howl” (Ginsberg) 468 “For a Coming Extinction” (Merwin) 306 Forché, Carolyn “The Colonel” 45 “For Ethel Rosenberg” (Rich) 108 “forgiving my father” (Clifton) 169 Forler, Nan 358 For Lizzie and Harriet (Lowell) 74, 75, 78, 81 “Form Follows Function: The Relationship between Structure and Content in Three of Karen Hesse’s Novels” (Glenn) 346 “For Mitsuye Yamada on her 90th Birthday” (Chin) 217, 250–1 The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence (Burt) 299, 301 “For My People” (Walker) 251 For the Union Dead (Lowell) 77, 173 Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem (Nelson) 21 Foucault, Michel 142–3, 239, 325 “The Subject and Power” 142 Four Quartets (Eliot) 208, 211 “The Fourth Wave” (Wurth) 405–16 Fox in Socks (Dr. Seuss) 343 “The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night” 341 Foye, Raymond 148 The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–1978 148 “Fragment” (Grimké) 165 Francis, Vievee 394

509

Franklin, Aretha 478 Franklin, Benjamin Autobiography 475 Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters (Perloff) 7, 87 Fraser, Kathleen 93 Frazier, Santee 409–10 Dark Thirty 405, 410 “Mama’s Work” 410 Fredman, Stephen 62–3, 113 Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse 62 Freedberg, Sydney 89 Freedom Summer (1964) 479 The Freeing of the Dust (Levertov) 44 Freneau, Philip “The British Prison Ship” 34 “Friday” (Picard) 189 Fries, Kenny Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out 499 Frog and Toad (Lobel) 223 “From a Tin Box” (Smoker) 413 “From Ka ‘a’awa to Rarotonga” (Trask) 187 From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry (Breslin) 87 from Sand Creek (Ortiz) 291 From the Cables of Genocide: Poems On Love and Hunger (Cervantes) 207, 233, 243 From the Garden to the Street: Three Hundred Years of Poetry for Children (Styles) 351 From Tongue to Text: A New Reading of Children’s Poetry (Pullinger) 353 From Two to Five (Chukovsky) 344 Frost, Helen 341, 358 Frost, Robert 300, 395, 437, 478 Full Circle (Yamada) 215 Funes, Ireneo 476, 485 “Funes, the Memorious” (Borges) 476 Fuseli, Henri 295 Gander, Forrest 440 Gansworth, Eric 407 “Iroquois Backboard Rebound Song (III) : The Art of Guarding” 408 “My Hair Was Shorter Then” 408 Nickel Eclipse: Iroquois Moon 408 “Song for a Snapping Turtle Rattle” 408 Garbage (Ammons) 468–9, 484 Garcia, Jerry 408 The Garland (Meleager) 177 Garvey’s Choice (Grimes) 347 Gay, Ross 300, 393, 397 “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude” 469

510

“Gay Chaps at the Bar” (Brooks) 38 Gay Liberation Front 126 “Gee, Officer Krupke” (Sondheim) 341 gender 127 affiliation 159 binaries 20, 129 diversity 217 identity 19, 26, 126, 142 nonconforming poets 131, 295 oppression 22 politics 92 and sexuality 132, 452 stereotypes 21 “Generations” (Clifton) 118, 169 generative sentence 63 GENESIS (Apache) 287, 290–1 Geography III 327 A Geography of Poets (Field) 156–7 Gershwin, George “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off ” 370 Gershwin, Ira “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off ” 370 Ghalib, Mirza 443–4 “Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib) “ (Rich) 444 Ghazals of Ghalib (Merwin, Rich, Stafford & Strand) 443–5 Ghaziani, Amin 131–2 Imagining Queer Methods 131 Ghostword (Apache) 291 Ghraib, Abu 46 Gibran, Khalil 383–6, 388 The Prophet 384 Gibson, Eliza Rodriguez y 205, 206 Gibson, Rodriguez y 208–9 Ginsberg, Allen 85, 87, 105, 107–10, 127–8, 133, 139, 141–7, 155 Ginsberg, Irwin Allen 293 Gioia, Dana 324–5 Giovanni, Nikki 164, 169, 170, 393–4, 399 100 Best African-American Poems 394 Girmay, Aracelis 397 Giscombe, C. S. 318 Giscome Road 312, 318–19 Giscome, John Robert 319 “Sound Carries” 318 Giscome Road (Giscombe) 312, 318–19 Gizzi, Michel 69 Glancy, Diane 362, 363–5 “Death Cry for the Language” 364 Lone Dog’s Winter Count 364

Index

Glenn, Wendy “Form Follows Function: The Relationship between Structure and Content in Three of Karen Hesse’s Novels” 346 Glover, Clifford 27 Glück, Elisabeth 275 Glück, Louise 173, 281 “After Pushkin” 442 “Omens” 442–3 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 9 Goldberg, Natalie Writing Down the Bones 240 Goldblatt, Howard 439 Golden, James 394 Goldenberg, Tirzah 426–7 Aleph 426–7 “Golden Lovers” (McGrath) 38 Golden State (Bidart) 164 Goldsmith, Kenneth 16, 324, 327, 333, 484 “The Body of Michael Brown” 331, 479, 480 Seven American Deaths and Disasters 330–1 Seven Disasters 10 Gonzalez, Rigoberto 293 Gonzalez, Sonia 208 Goodman, Andrew 479 Good Woman (Clifton) 166 Göransson, Johannes 440 Gorey, Edward 348 Gotham Book Mart photograph of literati 51 Goux, Jean-Joseph 325 Goya, Francisco “Los Caprichos” 274 Graham, Jorie “I Won’t Live Long” 308 Runaway 308 Graham, Natalie J. 394 Grahn, Judy “A Woman Is Talking to Death” 24–5 “Grandfather Was Queer, Too” (Kaufman) 151 Grandma (film) 95 “Grandma Taught Me to Respect You” (Delgado) 273 Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry (Elmusa & Orfalea) 379 Grapes, Jack 160 Gravatt, Fred 460–1 Graves, Robert “Leaving the Rest Unsaid” 356 Gray, Jeffrey 141 “Grecian” (Keats) 76 Greenberg, Clement 102–3 “Green Surrounds the Mind of Summer” (Hogue) 454 Green Web (Delgado) 269, 270

Index

Greif, Mark Age of the Crisis of Man 77 Grimes, Nikki 341, 348, 358 Garvey’s Choice 347 Grimké, Angelina Weld 25 “El Beso” 165 “Fragment” 165 Grobe, Christopher The Art of Confession 164 Grossman, Allen 107, 323, 419–20, 427 Grosz, Elizabeth 453 Growing Up Local: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose From Hawai‘i (Kwon) 183–4 Gruesen, John J. 277 “Guadalajara!” 326 Guattari, Félix 1–2 Gucci, Emilio 481 Guest, Barbara 85, 93–4 “The Farewell Stairway” 94 Herself Defined 93 Moscow Mansions 93 “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” 93 Seeking Air 93 Gulf Coast 438 Gulf War (1990–1) 46 Gumdrop Follies (Copp and Brown) 341 Gunn, Thom 251 Habawnik, David Aeneid: Books I-VI 446 Habits of the Heart (Bellah) 270 Hacker, Marilyn 20 “Regent’s Park” 20 Hadas, Rachel 355 Hager, Kelly 352 Halevi, Jehuda 420–1 Hall, Dana Naone 186 “Sunday Service” 190 Hall, Donald New Poets of England and America (NPEA) 155 Halpern, Daniel The American Poetry Anthology 159 Hamera, Judith 330 Hamilton, Ian 115 Hammad, Suheir 380–1, 383 Born Palestinian, Born Black 380 Drops of this Story 380 “First Writing Since” 380–1 “Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam on Broadway” 380 Hammer, Langdon 430–1 Hammond, James Henry 316

511

“Hand-Me-Down Halloween” (Diaz) 415–16 “Hanukkah” (Reznikoff) 419 Haraway, Donna 309, 457 Harburg, Yip “If I Only Had a Brain” 341 Hard Love Province (Chin) 245 Hardwick, Elizabeth 77 Harjo, Joy 20, 207, 237, 363, 405, 407 “I Give You Back” 407 When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry 287 Harmon, Graham 484 Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything 467 Harnick, Sheldon “The Shape of Things” 341 Harper, Frances “Bury Me in a Free Land” 165 Harper, Michael S. 394, 395 Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry (Niatum) 407 Harrington, Janice N. 393, 397 Harris, Marie 64, 69 Harris, Reginald 394 Hartigan, Grace 86, 89, 92, 95 Hartman, Geoffrey 365 Hartmann, Sadakichi 50–5, 58 Drifting Flowers of the Sea and Other Poems 51 Tanka and Haikai: Japanese Rhythms 51 Harvey, David 325 Harvey, Yona 393 “Has anyone looked in the eyes of the dead?” (Ginsberg) 42 Hass, Robert 233–4, 236, 439, 440, 478 Have Come, Am Here (Villa) 51 “Hawaiian Cowboy” (McPherson) 187 “Hawaiians Eat Fish” (Westlake) 187 “Hawaiian Tourism Authority” (Affonso) 190 Hawaii Review 182, 287 Hawkey, Christian Ventrakl 446 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 61 Hayden, Robert 164, 165, 168, 396 “Night Blooming Cereus” 251 Hayes, Terrance 163, 170, 302, 393, 394, 397, 401 Hay Otra Voz: Poems (1968–1971) (Villanueva) 368 H. D. See Doolittle, Hilda Head Off & Split (Finney) 398 “The Health of Us” (Rankine) 279–80 Heaney, Seamus 224, 305 Heart’s Needle (Snodgrass) 164

512

Heath Anthology of American Literature 177 Heavy Daughter Blues (Coleman) 166 Hecht, Anthony 159 “The Book of Yolek” 39 Hedberg, Mitch 295 Hegel, G. W. F. 117 Heidegger, Martin 63 Hejinian, Lyn 67, 68, 113, 173, 264, 281, 302, 440 My Life 67, 113, 129, 352 Heller, Michael “Diasporic Poetics” 420 Hemingway, Ernest 477 Hemphill, Essex 129–30 Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men 129 “Commitments” 129–30 Hendrix, Jimi 478 Herald Tribune (Ashbery) 88–9 Herbert, Zbigniew 438 Here (Turner) 46 “Hermit Crab” (Burt) 301 “The Heroics of Style: A Study in Three Parts” (Levin) 409 Heron, Gil Scott Nothing New 276 Herrera, Juan Felipe 157 Herrick, Robert 356, 357 Herself Defined (Guest) 93 Hershey, Laura 453 “He Took Her Away” (Delgado) 269 Heyen, William “Riddle” 40 Heyman, Michael 343–4, 347–7, 351, 352, 358 on children’s/young adult verse novel 348 on nonsense poetry 345 The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense 339 This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse 339 Hicok, Bob 471 “Highway Robbery” (Midge) 407–8 Hillman, Brenda 251, 484 Hilo Rains 184 Hirschman, Jack 157 History (Lowell) 78, 81, 173 Hitler, Adolf 35, 37 Hoahwah, Sy 413 “Madischie Mafia” 413 Velroy and the Madischie Mafia 405 Hoang, Lily 50, 58 A Bestiary 57 “On the Geography of Friendship” 57

Index

Hoffman, Abbie 101–2 Hoffman, Julius 101 Hofmann, Michael 438 Hogan, Linda 319, 363 “Hog Butcher of the World” (Sandburg) 348 Hogue, Cynthia 454–5 “Green Surrounds the Mind of Summer” 454 “In a Mute Season” 454 Hölderlin, Friedrich Oedipus and Antigone 438 Holiday, Harmony 397 Holliday, Billie 15, 480 Holt, John Dominis 183, 186 “Aunty’s Rocks” 187 “On Being Hawaiian” 187 Waimea Summer 187 Holton, Robert 139 Holy Ones 288 Holzer, Jenny 256 Homage to Sextus Propertius (Pound) 442 Home(is) lands: New Art and Writing from Guahan and Hawaiʻi (McDougall and Perez) 189–90 The Homeplace (Nelson) 221–2 Homer, John Edgar 442 Homeric Hymns 76 Homeric Hymns (Homer) 76 “Home Wrecker” (Vuong) 130 “Homosexuality” (Bishop) 128 Hongo, Garrett 191 Honolulu Advertiser (Westlake) 179 ho‘omanawanui, ku‘ualoha 187–8 Ho’omanoa; An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature (Balaz) 186–7, 191 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 300 Horney, Karen 248 “The Horse” (Levine) 39 The House at Pooh Corner (Milne) 223 “The House in El Monte” (Delgado) 269–70 House of Leaves (Danielewski) 255 “The House on Moscow Street” (Nelson) 221 Housman, A. E. 471 Howard, Krystal 339, 340, 348, 352 on children’s/young adult verse novel 346–8 The Verse Novel Review 346 Howard, Richard 471 “How British Lyric Poetry Came to Be Angry after Three Hundred Years of Stiff Upper Lips” (Joseph) 339 Howe, Florence No More Masks! 19, 22, 25 With Wings 450 Howe, Susan 264, 426–7, 471

513

Index

HOW(ever) (DuPlessis) 93–4 How I Discovered Poetry (Nelson) 21, 221–3, 341 “How I Got That Name” (Chin) 113, 246–7, 252 “Howl” (Ginsberg) 85, 128 “Howl” (Ginsberg) 155 How Much Earth (Buckley, Oliveira and Williams) 158 Hoʿomānoa (Balaz) 186–7 “Huckleberries” (Thoreau) 315 Hudson Review 438 Hugging the Jukebox (Nye) 386 Hughes, Langston 170, 408–9, 413 Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods For Jazz 275 “Dear Brother at Home” 36–7 “Dear Folks at Home” 36 “Desire” 165 I Wonder as I Wander 35–6 “Letter from Spain” 35 “Love Letter From Spain” 36 “The Negro and the Racial Mountain” 408 “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” 317–18 “Poem” 165 Hughes, Luther 397 Hughes, Ted “An Otter” 341 Poetry in the Making 351 Hugo, Richard 157, 416 Hugo, Victor 441, 444 Les Orientales 444 Hume, T.E. 248 “Hunger” (Rich) 29 Hương, Hồ Xuân Spring Essence 440 Husserl, Edmund 277 Hutchinson, Ishion 397 Huth, Geof 255–68 about 255 The Anarchivist 255 “Anatomy. Myology. Plate XV” 263, 267 Baxtered, Bothered, and Bedeviled 261 In Chancery 255 The Disappointments of Language 261 It’s a Wonderful Life 261 “jHegaf:” 257, 267 on language into poetry 255–8 Lines of Thought: Fidgetglyphs 255, 267 Longfellow Memoranda 255, 265 on lyricism 263–5 on performance of poetry 259–62 on poems as exclusively linguistic artifacts 258–9 on poetic practice 265–7 “Stoen 87: u u” 261 texistence 255

on visual poems 267–8 on visual poetry 262–3 “The Weight of Thinking” 267, 268 Hyesoon, Kim 57 “Hymn to Life” (Donnelly) 472–7, 482–5 “Hypoesthesia” (Lambeth) 453–4 hypothesis formation 355–7 “I and I” (Armantrout) 226 I Ching (Bervin) 320 identity politics 97 If I Had Wheels or Love (Miller) 450 “If I Only Had a Brain” (Harburg) 341 “if mama” (Clifton) 169 “I Give You Back” (Harjo) 407 Ignatow, David 64 “I Have Folded My Sorrows” (Kaufman) 139 Ihimaera, Witi 188 “I Knew I’d Sing” (McHugh) 468 The Imaginary Jew (Finkielkraut) 106 Imagining Queer Methods (Ghaziani and Brim) 131 I’m Alive. It Hurts. I Love It (Espinoza) 293, 295 Imitations (Lowell) 441 Inada, Lawson Fusao 53, 55, 158 band of brothers 54 “In a Dark Time” (Roethke) 171 “In a Mute Season” (Hogue) 454 In Chancery (Huth) 255 “Incident” (Cullen) 165 Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry (Charara) 379, 381 Indiana, Robert 256 Indian Trains (Wurth) 405 “Infelix” (Menken) 165 Inferno (Bang) 442 The Inferno of Dante (Dante & Pinsky) 440 information 466 Infrathin (Perloff) 7 Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience (Vecchione and Raymond) 340 “In Memory of My Feelings” (O’Hara) 85–7, 90, 92, 96 In Memory of My Theories (Smith) 96 “INMYOLDSKIN // INSIDEIT / MYNEWSKIN” (Bervin) 320 innovation 52, 63, 69, 96, 128, 130, 135, 365, 391 In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali (Levertov & Dimock) 440 Inscriptions: 1944–1956 (Reznikoff) 419 “Insomnia” (Bishop) 128 “The Instruction Manual” (Ashbery) 326

514

“Instructions to Hearing Persons Desiring a Deaf Man” (Luczak) 459–60 intellectual humility 354–5 intellectual impostures 68 In the American Tree (Silliman) 156, 158–60 “In the Waiting Room” (Bishop) 19, 207, 233 “Intima” [“Intimate” ] (Song 6–7) (de Burgos) 166 “Introduction to Arab American Poetry” (Barkawi & Soliman) 388 Invisible Man (Ellison) 168 Ionesco, Eugene The Bald Soprano 344 Iraq War 46 I Remember (Brainard) 262 IRL (Pico) 405 “Iroquois Backboard Rebound Song (III) : The Art of Guarding” (Gansworth) 408 “I rub my skull, / that turtle shell” (Lowell) 76 A Is for Oboe (Nelson) 221 Isness (Apache) 291 It’s a Wonderful Life (Huth) 261 Itself (Armantrout) 229 Iverson, Lucille We Become New 22–3 I Wonder as I Wander (Hughes) 35–6 “I Won’t Live Long” (Graham) 308 Jacket2 177 Jackson, Gary 394 Jackson, Major 393, 394, 397 Jackson, Paul 330–1 “Ode” 33 Jacob, Max 61, 65, 66 Jaffer, Frances 93 “Jail Poems” (Kaufman) 148 Jaji, Tsitsi 394 James, Clive 439 James, Henry 1, 389 Notebooks 1 James, Joyce Ulysses 18 Jameson, Frederic 114, 482 Janeczko, Paul B. 358 japonisme 51 Jara, Victor 276 Jarrell, Randall 37, 75, 153, 272–3, 300, 352 The Bat-Poet 351 “The Black Swan” 302 “Losses” 38 The Lost World 164 “Well Water” 75 “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” 301–2

Index

Javar, Darlene M. “Shame and the First Day of College” 184–5 Jeffers, Robinson 316 Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun 52–3 Racial Things, Racial Forms 52–3 Jess, Tyehimba 392, 397, 398 Olio 398 Jewish American poetry 101–10, 101–10, 139–46, 366–7, 419–27 Jews on Approval (Samuel) 102 “jHegaf:” (Huth) 257, 267 jingoistic poems 34 Joans, Ted 139, 142, 148 John, Elton “Benny and the Jets” 478 Johnson, Barbara 114 “Poetry and Its Double” 114 Johnson, Cyrée Jarelle 397 Johnson, Lyndon 43 Johnson, Peter 64, 69 Johnson, Samuel 437 Jolas, Eugène 361 Jones, Catherine Zeta 469 Jones, Gayl 398 Jones, Patricia Spears 395 Jonson, Ben “On My First Son” 271 Joplin, Janis 23 Jordan, I. King 450 Jordan, June 23, 25, 129, 207, 251, 353, 399 “Case in Point” 22 “A Poem about My Rights” 20, 129, 252 Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood 352 Who Look at Me? 352 Jorge Luis Borges: por el mismo sus poemas y su voz 276 Joseph, Lawrence 385–6 A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems 385 Curriculum Vitae 385 Shouting at No One 385 “That’s All” 385 Joseph, Michael 341, 352, 354 Books 2.0 339 Emotions as Engines of History 339 “How British Lyric Poetry Came to Be Angry after Three Hundred Years of Stiff Upper Lips” 339 The Robert Graves Review 339 The Journal of Black Poetry 399 Joy, Louise The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry: A Study of Children’s Verse in English 351

Index

Joyce, James 172 Dubliners 275 Finnegans Wake 275 Juana, Sor 207 Juhasz, Suzanne 201 “A Julia de Burgos” (de Burgos) 166 “June 1940” (Kees) 37 Juniper Fuse (Eshleman) 310 Just Us: An American Conversation (Rankine) 279, 282–4 Juvenal 23 Kabbalah, Lurianic 424 Kaddish (Ginsberg) 164 “Kaddish” (Ginsberg) 105–8 Kafka, Franz 1, 66 Ein Landarzt 66 Kahlo, Frida 207 Kaiwi, Monica 188 Kalahele, Imaikalani 186, 188, 189 Kalakaua, King 188 Kalstone, David 80, 118, 471 Becoming a Poet 80 Kamauu, Māhealani 188 Kaminsky, Ilya 426 Dancing in Odessa 426 Kanda, K. C. 445 Kapil, Bhanu 50, 52, 56 art of 50 “auto-sacrifice” 56 Ban en Banlieue 49, 57 Kasischke, Laura 300 Katy Perry. See Hudson, Katheryn Elizabeth Kaufman, Bob 128, 139–51, 170 “Bagel Shop Jazz” 128 “Coffee-faced Ivy Leaguers” 128 “Grandfather Was Queer, Too” 151 “I Have Folded My Sorrows” 139 “Jail Poems” 148 “Mulberry-eyed girls in black stockings” 128 “Turtle-neck angel guys” 128 “kawaiha‘o” (Luteru) 190 Kaye, Danny The Court Jester 343 Keali‘i, David 189 “Where Are You From? (Son for the Return Home)” 189–90 Kealoha 189 Keats, John 104 “Grecian” 76 Keene, John 397

515

Kees, Weldon “June 1940” 37 Keller, Helen 452 Keller, Lynn 305, 308 Kelly, Anne Keala 188 Kelly, Donika 293, 394 Kennedy, Robert 444 Kennedy, X. J. 341 Kent, George 167 Kerouac, Jack 128, 139–41 On the Road 139–40 Ketjak (Silliman) 305 Keywords for Children’s Literature (Nel, Christensen and Paul) 340 Khashoggi, Jamal 479–83 Khlebnikov, Velimir 440 Kierkegaard, Søren 277 Kilmer, Joyce “Trees” 355–7 Kim, Elaine H. 49 Writing Self, Writing Nation 49 Kim, Myung Mi 327, 334 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 145, 444 Kingston, Maxine Hong 183 The Woman Warrior 270 Kinnell, Galway 155 Kipling, Rudyard 471 Kippur, Yom 426 Kirsch, Adam 81 Kizer, Carolyn 23–4 KKK 280 Klee, Paul On Modern Art 274 Klein, Christina 180 Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 178 Klepfisz, Irena 362, 365, 366 “Though I’m not a Zionist” 367 Knausgaard, Karl Ove My Struggle 474–5 Knauth, K. Alfons 361, 362 Kneubuhl, John 190 Kneubuhl, Victoria Nālani 189 Knight, Ethridge 251 Knightly, Andrew 173 Knighton, Andrew Lyndon 173 Koch, Kenneth 66, 85–6 The Child as Poet: Myth or Realty? 347 Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children 347 “Seasons on Earth” 480

516

Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry 347 Koertge, Ron 160 Kohet, Heinz 475 Kolbert, Elizabeth 305 Komunyakaa, Yusef 169, 170, 391, 392, 395 Kono, Juliet S. “The Cane Cutters” 183 Kora in Hell (Williams) 61–2 Korczak, Janusz 39 Korn, Alfons L. “Lahilahi’s Song” 179 Kostelanetz, Richard 66 Kowit, Steve The Maverick Poets 160 Kramer, Larry 275 “Kristenography” (Mullen) 171–2 Kristeva, Julia 199 Kubrick, Stanley 473 Kunitz, Stanley 236 Kwon, Brenda 184 The Best of Bamboo Ridge 183–4, 191 Growing Up Local: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose From Hawai‘i 183–4 Labrador, Roderick N. 185 “La Dulce Culpa” (Moraga) 201 “Lady Lazarus” (Plath) 113 La Fontaine, Jean de 440 “Lahilahi’s Song” (Korn) 179 Lai, Paul 374 Lali 177 Lambeth, Laurie Clements “Dysaesthesia” 453–4 “Hypoesthesia” 453–4 Landgraf, Kapulani 188 Land of Unlikeness (Lowell) 173 Language-oriented variety 67 Language poetry 42, 66, 68, 88, 116, 129, 158–60, 225, 233, 326, 411–2 Language revolution 50 Language writers 88, 92 Language writing 66–8 Lanzmann, Claude 483 Larkin, Philip 477 LaRuelle, Francois 483–4 Non-Philosophy 467 Non-Photography 467 Lasky, Dorothea 18, 293 “The Last One” (Merwin) 320 Latino/a poetry 195–212, 233–43, 269–77, 293–6, 303, 348, 411

Index

Latinx poets 293, 303 Lau, Alan Chong 53 Laughlin, James Byways 114 Laurentiis, Rickey 393, 394, 397, 401 Lawn of Excluded Middle (Waldrop) 67, 68 Lawrence, D. H. 18 Lawson, JonArno 300, 340, 341, 343–4, 350, 351, 358 But It’s So Silly: A Cross-Cultural Collage of Nonsense, Play and Poetry 339, 349, 351 on children’s poetry 351 Down In The Bottom of the Bottom of the Box 339 Enjoy It While It Hurts 349 on nonsense poetry 343 Old MacDonald Had Her Farm 349 Over the Rooftops 349–50 Over the Shop 341 on poems or poetry books 348–9 Sidewalk Flowers 339 Lazer, Hank 225 leaping poetry 449 Lear, Edward 347 “Sea Spider” 344 “Seeze Pyder” 344 Leary, Paris A Controversy of Poets 155 Leary, Robert A Controversy of Poets 155 Leaves of Grass (Whitman) 384 Leaving Our Shadows Behind Us 185 “Leaving the Rest Unsaid” (Graves) 356 Leaving Tulsa (Foerster) 405, 414 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 171–2 “Leda and the Swan” (Yeats) 13 Lee, Dennis 342 Legge, William 164 Lehman, David 92 Lejeune, Philippe 114 “The Autobiographical Pact” 114 Lemon, Alex 453 Lenhart, Gary 95, 96 Lerner, Ben 471 Lerner, Kenny 458 Les Fleurs du mal (Baudelaire) 442 Les Orientales (Hugo) 444 Leto, Denise 454 “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off ” (Gershwin and Gershwin) 370 “A Letter” (Riggs) 406 “Letter from Spain” (Hughes) 35 The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941 277

Index

Levertoff, Olga Tatjana 119 “Olga Poems” 119 Levertov, Denise 8, 87, 113, 225, 326, 452 The Freeing of the Dust 44 “Life at War” 43–4 “Modes of Being” 44 “The Pilots” 44 In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali 440 “Staying Alive” 44 Tesserae: Memories and Suppositions 119 “What Were They Like” 44 Levin, Dana 410 “The Heroics of Style: A Study in Three Parts” 409 Levine, Philip 40, 109–10, 157, 158, 326 “The Horse” 39 What Work Is 110 “Zayde” 110 Levis, Larry 158 Lévi-Strauss, Claude Tristes Tropiques 473 Lewis, Robin Coste 397, 470 Voyage of the Sable Venus 470 “Lexington Avenue, An Eclogue” (O’Hara) 96 LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) 126–7 Li Bai 250 Library of America 22 The Lice (Merwin) 306 “Lie to yourself about this and you will / forever lie about everything” (Bidart) 434 “Life at War” (Levertov) 43–4 Life on Mars (Smith) 398 Life Studies (Lowell) 73, 75, 81, 86, 107–8, 110, 115, 117, 146, 164, 166, 168, 173 “Life Writing” (Lowell) 218 The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist (Engle) 347 “Like a Good Woman” (Espinoza) 294 Liliʻuokalani (Queen) 178 Lilly, Ruth 396 Lin, Tan 468, 471 Lincoln, Kenneth “Native American Renaissance” 405–6 Lines of Thought: Fidgetglyphs (Huth) 255 “Lines Written but Never Mailed from Hawaii” (Meredith) 179, 181 The Lion And The Unicorn Award 339, 346, 354, 358 Lipsitz, George 383–4 Dangerous Crossroads 383 “ ‘The Shortest Way Through’: Strategic Antiessentialism in Popular Music” 383 Listen Up! An Anthology of Spoken Word Poetry 380 “A Litany for Survival” (Lorde) 129

517

The Little Prince (de Saint-Exupéry) 223 “Little Sparta” (Finlay) 274 Livingston, Myra Cohn “But Is It Poetry?” 347 Lobel, Arnold Frog and Toad 223 Locklin, Gerald 160 Lockwood, Patricia 301 The Logic of Sense (Deleuze) 344 Loma. See Soto, Christopher Lombardo, Gian 69 Lone Dog’s Winter Count (Glancy) 364 “The Lonely Goatherd” (Dr. Seuss) 343 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 265, 440–1 Longfellow Memoranda (Huth) 255, 265 Long Soldier, Layli 414–16 Whereas 405, 414 “Long Summers” (Lowell) 82 “Long-Term Capital Management” (“LTCM” ) (Clover) 327–9, 332 Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature (Coats) 342 “Look Within” (McKay) 39 Lorca, Federico Garcia 150 Lorde, Audre 113, 125, 129, 197 A Burst of Light 121 Cancer Journals 121 “A Litany for Survival” 129 “Love Poem” 27 “A Thinking Woman Sleeps With Monsters” 26–30 “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” 25 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name 121 Lord Weary’s Castle (Lowell) 73, 74, 76, 107, 115 Lorica Segmentata 482 Los Angeles Review of Books 19 “Los Caprichos” (Goya) 274 Losch, Naomi 188 “Losses” (Jarrell) 38 The Lost World (Jarrell) 164 Louima, Abner 333 Louise, Joy 351 Love and Fame (Berryman) 114 “Love Letter From Spain” (Hughes) 36 “Love Lies Sleeping” (Bishop) 128 “Love Poem” (Lorde) 27 Love Poems (Tentative Title) (Bishop) 128 A Lover’s Discourse (Barthes) 68 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Eliot) 478 Loving in the War Years (Moraga) 196–7, 199, 203 Low, Jackson Mac 68 Lowell, Amy 25, 51, 293

518

Lowell, Given 107 Lowell, Robert 9, 13–14, 73–83, 85, 87, 90, 107, 109, 113, 155, 164, 165, 169, 172–3, 269, 272–3, 277, 281, 352, 429, 432 “Caligula 2” 76 Day by Day 73, 75, 79–80, 82–3, 173 The Dolphin 167, 173 “Eating Out Alone” 78 History 78, 81, 173 Imitations 441 “I rub my skull, / that turtle shell” 76 Land of Unlikeness 173 Life Studies 73, 75, 81, 86, 107–8, 110, 115, 117, 146, 164, 166, 168, 173 “Life Writing” 218 For Lizzie and Harriet 74, 75, 78, 81 “Long Summers” 82 Lord Weary’s Castle 73, 74, 76, 107, 115 “Man and Wife” 173, 433 “The March I” 40 “The March II” 40 “Memories of West Street and Lepke” 40 The Mills of the Kavanaghs 73 Near the Ocean 173 “The Neo-Classical Urn” 75 “Night Sweat” 77 Notebook 1967–68 113 “Sailing Home from Rapallo” 433 “Skunk Hour” 13, 73, 166 “a turtle shell/stuck on a pole” 76 For the Union Dead 173 Loy, Mina “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” 373 “Feminist Manifesto!” 252 Lucci, Susan 401 Lucretius 440 Luczak, Raymond 459–60 “Instructions to Hearing Persons Desiring a Deaf Man” 459–60 Ludwig, Richard M. 179 Lum, Darrell H. Y. 183 “Ass Why Hard” 184 ‘Beer Can Hat’ 184 Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii’s Local Writers 183, 185 Lummis, Suzanne 160 “Lunch in Nablus City Park” (Nye) 386 Lunch Poems (O’Hara) 10, 326, 329 Lundquist, Sara 94 Luria, Kabbalist Isaac 424 Luteru, Lufi A. Matā’afa “kawaiha‘o” 190

Index

Lyons, Paul American Pacifi cism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination 177 Lyrical Ballads 308 The Lyrical Ballads (Coleridge) 115 lyricism 263–5 lyric poetry 9, 263, 438 Macdonald, Cynthia “Objet d’Art” 23 Mackey, Nathaniel 395, 397, 484 MacLeish, Archibald “The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak” 37 Madame Butterfly 55 Mader, Thomas 197 “Madischie Mafia” (Hoahwah) 413 The Madness of the Day (Blanchot) 65 Magritte, René 148, 150 Mahjar 379 Mairs, Nancy 450 “Make swarm” (Cha) 57 Mallarmé, Stéphane 62 “Crise de vers” 62 Mama’s Promises (Nelson) 221 “Mama’s Work” (Frazier) 410 “Man and Wife” (Lowell) 173, 433 Mandelbaum, Allen 439 Mandelstam, Osip 440 “The Man-Moth” (Bishop) 113 Manning, Harriet 330 “The March I” (Lowell) 40 “The March II” (Lowell) 40 Marcus, Morton 64, 69 marketplace 323–35 Marler, Regina Queer Beats 128 “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (Whitman) 468 Marsh, John 326 Marshall, Nate 397 Martin, Dawn Lundy 393, 394 Martin, Robert K. 432, 433 Martin & Meditations on the South Valley (Baca) 270 Marx, Chico 144 Marx, Groucho 144 Marx, Karl 327 Marxian 330, 332 “Masks of a Woman” (Yamada) 218 Mason, Theodore O. 177 The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature 177 Matejka, Adrian 397

Index

Mattachine Society 126 Matthews, Airea D. 392 Maule, Tina “The Spider Shell” 179 Mauri Ola 189 The Maverick Poets (Kowit) 160 May, Jamaal 397 “MCBH” (Affonso) 190 McClure, Michael 238 McCrae, Shane 302, 397 McDermott, Karen 282 McDougall, Brandy Nālani 188, 191 Home(is) lands: New Art and Writing from Guahan and Hawaiʻi 189–90 “Lei Niho Palaoa” 189 McGovern, Thomas 269, 274 McGrath, Thomas “Crash Report” 38 “Deep South” 38 “Golden Lovers” 38 McHugh, Heather “I Knew I’d Sing” 468 McKay, Claude 40 “Look Within” 39 McKibben, Bill American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau 315 McMullin, Dan 188 McPherson, Michael “Hawaiian Cowboy” 187 ‘Junior Got the Snakes’ 184 “Summit” 181 McRae, Calista 73, 77 “Mechanical Soft” (Cole) 431 Meditations on First Philosophy 277 Meillasoux, Quentin After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency 467 Meleager The Garland 177 Melnick, David Men in Aida 442 Melt, H. Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation 293–4 “Memories of West Street and Lepke” (Lowell) 40 Men in Aida (Melnick) 442 Menken, Adah “Infelix” 165 “Myself ” 165 Meredith, James 450 Meredith, William 179, 191

519

“Lines Written but Never Mailed from Hawaii” 179–80 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 277 Merrill, James 438 Merwin, W. S. 155, 181, 191, 386, 439, 441 “The Asians Dying” 40–2 East Window: The Asian Translations 441 “For a Coming Extinction” 306 Ghazals of Ghalib 443–5 “The Last One” 320 The Lice 306 “Mountain Day” 181 “Variation on a Theme” 469 “When the War Is Over” 33 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 273 metaphorical density 64 #MeToo movement 480 Mezey, Robert 158 Naked Poetry 155 Michael Jackson (Debord) 330–2 Michaux, Henri 65 Michener, James A. 178 micropoetics 2 Midge, Tiffany 407 “Highway Robbery” 407–8 Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed 407–8 “Weeds” 408 migrant languages 370–2 Mikics, David The Art of the Sonnet 299 Miles, Josephine 449 Coming to Terms 450 Millay, Edna Vincent 15 Miller, David L. 142 Miller, Vassar 449, 450 Despite This Flesh: The Disabled in Stories and Poems 450 If I Had Wheels or Love 450 Mills, Tyler 471 The Mills of the Kavanaghs (Lowell) 73 Milne, A. A. The House at Pooh Corner 223 Miłosz, Czesław 251, 438, 440 Milton, John 291, 477 Mingus, Charles Beneath the Underdog 270 minor literature 1–2 Mirikitani, Janice 53–5 “Mirror Mirror” (Yamada) 217–18 Mirza, Fakhr-ud Din 444 Mish, Jeanette Calhoun 206

520

Mistral, Gabriela 207 “Mistress” (Yamada) 219–20 Mitchell, Ellie 223 Mitchell, W. J. T. Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature 458 Mitsuye and Nellie: Asian American Poets 215 Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America 388 “mock-manifesto” (O’Hara) 86 Modersohn, Otto 29 “Modes of Being” (Levertov) 44 Moffet, Rosalie Nervous System 470 “Mohawk Horse Breaker” (Broyles) 410 Mole Notes (Benedikt) 65 Momaday, N. Scott House Made of Dawn 407 “Mona Lisa” (Cole) 369 Money Shot (Armantrout) 331 “Money Talks” (Armantrout) 331 Mongrélisme (Retallack) 373 Monroe, Jonathan 63 Montaigne, Michel de 57 Montale, Eugenio 441 Monte, Steven 69–70 Moody, Jonathan 394 Moody, William Vaughn “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines” 35 “The Moon Is Trans” (Espinoza) 294 Moor, Indigo 394 Moore, Lisa 19, 22 “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines” 46 Moore, Marianne 25, 73, 79–80, 82, 93, 246, 440 Moraga, Cherríe 170, 195, 196–204, 205, 207, 210 “Does change require losing all?” 197 “La Dulce Culpa” 201 Loving in the War Years 196–7, 199, 203 Shadow of a Man 197 This Bridge Called My Back 26 A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness 196–7, 202, 205 Mordecai, Pam 341 “Morenita” (Morris) 369–70 Morganfield, McKinley 478 “The Morning Half-Life Blues” (Piercy) 23 Morris, Alurista 367–70 “Foolish Rituals” 369 “Morenita” 369–70 Morris, Tracie 367–70 Morrison, Rusty 454 Morrissey, Patrick 302

Index

The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets (Smith and Bottoms) 156, 159 Mortenson, Erik 141 Morton, Jelly Roll 478 Moscow Mansions (Guest) 93 Moss, Thylias 393 Moten, Fred All That Beauty 470 “mother, I am mad” (Clifton) 169 The Mother/Child Papers (Ostriker) 109 “A Mother’s Prayer” (Yamada) 218–19 “Mountain Day” (Merwin) 181 Mouth: Eats Color (Nakayasu) 446 Mo Yan 439 “Mrs. Higashi Is Dead” (Yamada) 218–19 “Mrs. Lucy Rivera” (Delgado) 272 Mrs. Nelson’s Class (Nelson) 221 Ms. Magazine 27 Muddy Waters. See Morganfield, McKinley Muhs, Gabriela Gutierrez y 207 “Mulberry-eyed girls in black stockings” (Kaufman) 128 Muldoon, Paul 466, 469–70 “American Standard” 477–85 “Dirty Data” 481–2 One Thousand Things Worth Knowing 481 Mullen, Harryette 2, 17, 67, 68, 164, 327, 362, 372–4, 395, 396, 397 “Kristenography” 171–2 Muse & Drudge 373 “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” 172 “Natural Anguish” 171 Recyclopedia 373 multilingual American poetry 361–74 Muñoz, José Esteban 134–5, 383–5 Cruising Utopia 134 Disidentifications 383 Murasaki, Shikibu Tale of Genji 216 Murayama, Milton All I Asking for Is My Body 182, 183–4 Murphy, Margueritte S. 63 Muse & Drudge (Mullen) 373 Muslim poets 303 Mussolini, Benito 35–6 “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” (Mullen) 172 “my daddy’s fingers move among the couplers” (Clifton) 169 “my father hasn’t come back” (Clifton) 169 “My Father’s Shoes” (Cervantes) 235 “My Father Was a Wandering Aramaean” (Weinfield) 422

Index

“My First Love” (Espinoza) 293 “My Hair Was Shorter Then” (Gansworth) 408 Myles, Eileen 94–5, 293 My Life (Hejinian) 67, 113, 129, 352 “my lost father” (Clifton) 169 “my mama moved among the days” (Clifton) 169 “My Mother’s Stories” (Delgado) 273 “My mother teached me” (Clifton) 169 “Myself “ (Menken) 165 My Seneca Village (Nelson) 221 My Struggle (Knausgaard) 474–5 My Way (Bernstein) 117 Nabokov, Vladimir Eugene Onegin 276, 443 Nafis, Angel 397 Nakayasu, Sawako Mouth: Eats Color 446 Nakba 382 Naked Poetry (Mezey and Berg) 155 “narrative of grammar” (Wesling) 63, 65 Nash, Ogden 479 Nation 408 National Book Award 88 National Book Critics Circle Award 88 National Organization for Women (NOW) 21 National Security Agency (NSA) 466 Native American poets/petry 303, 362, 405–16 “Native American Renaissance” (Lincoln) 405–6 Native Guard (Trethewey) 398 Native Voices: Poetry Festival (Delgado) 274 “Natural Anguish” (Mullen) 171 Natural History of the West Indies (Valdés) 313 naturalness 114–17 Nature Poem (Pico) 308 “Ndé isdzán” [“two of me” ] (Apache) 290–1 Neal, Larry 399 Nealon, Bernes 326 Nealon, Christopher 326 Near the Ocean (Lowell) 74, 173 Necromance (Armantrout) 225 “The Negro and the Racial Mountain” (Hughes) 408 Negro Digest 399 “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (Hughes) 317–18 Nel, Phil 348 Nel, Philip Keywords for Children’s Literature 340 Nelson, Marilyn 221–4, 341, 348, 351, 354, 358, 394, 395, 396 American Ace 21, 346 The Baobab Room 223 Beautiful Ballerina 221

521

Carver: A Life in Poems 21 on creative practice 222 “Daughters, 1900” 21 Faster Than Light: New and Selected Poems, 1996–2011 221 The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems 221, 223–4 Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem 21 The Homeplace 221–2 “The House on Moscow Street” 221 How I Discovered Poetry 21, 221–3 A Is for Oboe 221 Mama’s Promises 221 moral, ethical, or spiritual issues in poetry 223 Mrs. Nelson’s Class 221 My Seneca Village 221 on poetry works for children and adolescents 224 poets for children or adults 224 “Queen of the Sixth Grade” 222–3 scholars of poetry 224 “Women’s Locker Room” 224 A Wreath for Emmett Till 221, 341 “The Neo-Classical Urn” (Lowell) 75 neoliberalism 324–3 Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (Komunyakaa) 391 Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color (Soto) 131 Neruda, Pablo 207, 233, 235–6, 438, 468, 484 The Book of Questions 341 Nervous System (Moffet) 470 The New American Poetry (NAP) (Allen) 17, 85–7, 154–6 New Anthology of American Poetry 178 New Jim Crow 315 New Poets of England and America (NPEA) (Hall, Pack, and Simpson) 155–6 The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses (Miller) 142 “New Prose Poem” 66 new sentence 66–8 “New Sentence” (Silliman) 63 “(Newsreel) “ (Rich) 30, 42 The New Woman’s Survival Sourcebook 29 New World 307 “New York Notes” (Shapiro) 420 New York School poetry 128, 129, 132, 159, 263, 326, 342, 480 subjectivity and identity in 85–97 New York Times 394, 401, 484 “The New Zombie” (Armantrout) 229

522

Niatum, Duane Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry 407 Nichols, Grace 341, 351 Nickel Eclipse: Iroquois Moon (Gansworth) 408 Nickowitz, Peter Rhetoric and Sexuality 432 Niedecker, Lorrine 311–12 Nielsen, Aldon Lynn 150 Nietzsche, Friedrich 63, 277, 472, 475 The Birth of Traged 430 “Night Blooming Cereus” (Hayden) 251 “Night Sweat” (Lowell) 77 Nine-Inch Nails 478 Nixon, Rob 307, 320 “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” (Stevens) 307 Nobody’s Business: Twenty-first Century Avant-Garde Poetics (Reed) 471 Noel Young’s Capra Press 158 Noguchi, Isamu 217 Nolan, Sarah 309 No More Masks! (Howe and Bass) 19, 22, 25 Non-Philosophy (LaRuelle) 467 Non-Photography (LaRuelle) 467 Nonsense (Watts) 344–5 Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Stewart) 347 nonsense poetry 343–5 “Nooksack Valley” (Snyder) 311 North American poets 340–2 “The Northern Sun” (Bitsui) 409 North True, South Bright (Beachy-Quick) 291 The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature (Mason) 177 Notebook (Bell) 78 Notebook 1967–68 (Lowell) 113 Notebooks (James) 1 “Notes from the Childhood and Girlhood” (Brooks) 167 “Notes on the Spring Holidays” (Reznikoff) 419 Nothing New (Heron) 276 novel approaches 118, 128, 141, 168, 171, 255, 302, 341, 345–7, 439, 442 Nowak, Mark 327 Nuanua 177 Nueva Canción 276 Nurnberg, Geoffrey 465 Nye, Naomi Shihab 340, 353, 386–8, 484 Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems 386 Hugging the Jukebox 386

Index

“Lunch in Nablus City Park” 386 Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners 340 O‘ahu, Windward 187 Obama, Barack 414 objectifying tendencies 53 Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Harmon) 467 “Objet d’Art” (Macdonald) 23 O’Connor, Flannery Wise Blood 255 “Ode” (Jackson) 33 “Ode on Causality” (O’Hara) 97 “Ode to Fort Street” 188 Oedipus and Antigone (Hölderlin) 438 “Ofelia’s Dream” (Delgado) 272 Oh, Say Can You Say (Dr. Seuss) 343 O’Hara, Frank 11, 16, 85–90, 92, 94, 104, 128, 132, 480 Collected Poems 88 “The Day Lady Died” 113 “In Memory of My Feelings” 85–7, 90, 96 “Lexington Avenue, An Eclogue” 96 Lunch Poems 10, 326, 329 “mock-manifesto” 86 “Ode on Causality” 97 “Personism” 85–6, 93 “A Step Away from Them” 12 Oka, Francis Naohiko 53 O’Keefe, Georgia 316 okpik, d. g. Corpse Whale 291 Old MacDonald Had Her Farm (Lawson) 349 “The Old Questions” (Weise) 452–3 Olds, Sharon 173, 281 “Olga Poems” (Levertoff) 119 Olio (Jess) 398 Oliveira, David How Much Earth 158 Oliver! (Bart) 370 Olmstead, Frederick Law 315 Olney, James 114 Olson, Charles 17, 85, 289, 374, 455–6, 461 “Projective Verse” 85, 449, 461 “Omens” (Glück) 442–1 “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines” (Moore) 35, 46 “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (Wheatley) 164, 314 “On Being Hawaiian” (Holt) 187 Once Were Pacific (Somerville) 191 “One Art” (Bishop) 135 On Elizabeth Bishop (Tóibin) 117

Index

One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (Muldoon) 481 “On Long Poems: Four Recent Books Make Length a Virtue” (Burt) 470 On Modern Art (Klee) 274 On My Eyes (Eigner) 456 “On My First Son” (Jonson) 271 “On Speaking to the Dead” (Cervantes) 210 “On the Geography of Friendship” (Hoang) 57 On the Road (Kerouac) 139–40 Ordinary Light (Smith) 119 Oresick, Peter 326 Orfalea, Gregory Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry 379, 382 “organic prose style” (Fredman) 63 Orlovsky, Peter 128 O’Rourke, Meghan 115 Orpheus (Cocteau) 484 Ortiz, Simon J. 363, 405, 407 from Sand Creek 291 “Spreading Wings on Wind” 407 Osherow, Jacqueline “At the Wailing Wall” 423–4 Osman, Jena 327 Ostriker, Alicia 106, 109 The Mother/Child Papers 109 Other Traditions (Beddoes) 17 “An Otter” (Hughes) 341 “Our Afterlife 1” (Lowell) 73 Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed (Midge) 407–8 “Out Loud: The Experience of Literature in the Digital Space” (Warner) 348 Outside of the Body There Is Something Like Hope (Espinoza) 293 Over the Rooftops (Lawson) 349–50 Over the Shop (Lawson) 341 Ovid Metamorphoses 273 Ovid’s Epistles (Dryden) 441 Owen, Stephen 438–9, 446 lyric poetry 438 Oyama, Kiyoshi 183 Pacific Coast Philology 347 Pacific Islander poets 303 “Pacific Poetries” 177 Pack, Robert New Poets of England and America (NPEA) 155 Packer, George 46 Padgett, Ron 262 Pahdopony, Juanita 363–5

523

“Taa Numu Tekwa Huruunu” (“The Loss of Our Language” ) 363 Paley, Grace 109 “The Women in Vietnam” 21 “Papa’s Naga Uta” (Yamada) 219–20 parabolists 63–6 “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” (Guest) 93 Parallel Play (Burt) 299 Pardlo, Gregory 392, 397, 398 Paris Review 429, 432 Parker, Morgan 293, 301 Parker, Pat “Womanslaughter” 20 Parker, Robert Dale Changing Is Not Vanishing 406 Parra, Nicanor 441 Parra, Violeta 207 Partly: New and Selected Poems 2001–2015 (Armantrout) 225 Pascua, Jay “Sinangan” Baza “Save Pågat” 190 Passover Haggadah 423 Pasternak, Boris 441 “Pastoral Poesy” (Clare) 308 Patchen, Kenneth 61 Paterson (Williams) 207 patriotic poems 34 Patterson, Orlando 198 Paul, Lissa 348, 352, 358 on children’s poetry 350–1 Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist 340 Keywords for Children’s Literature 340 “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff ” (Rich) 29 PEN America 293 Pendlebury, Kate 352 “Pepperpod/add wings/dragonfly” (Basho) 248 Perelman, Bob 68, 305, 467 Perez, Craig Santos 372–4 Home(is) lands: New Art and Writing from Guahan and Hawaiʻ i 189–90 “ ‘Towards a New Oceania’: On Contemporary Pacific Islander Poetry Networks” 190 Perez, Emma 198 Perez-Wendt, Māhealani 189, 191 perfume concert 50 Perillo, Lucia 303 Perkins, Leialoha Apo “Plantation Non-Song” 186 Perkoff, Stuart Z. 157 Perloff, Marjorie 2, 7–18, 69, 86–7, 362, 471 about 7

524

on anti-lyric or anti-emotion 11 on capitalism 8 on conceptual poetry and emotion 8 The Dance of the Intellect 7 Differentials 7 on documentaries 16 Edge of Irony 8 on emotion 9, 10, 12 Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters 7, 87 Infrathin 7 on long poems and short poems 15 lyric poetry 9 The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell 7, 87 Poetic License 7 Poetics in a New Key 7 The Poetics of Indeterminacy 7 Poetry On and Off the Page 7 Radical Artifice 7 “Take Five” 7 Unoriginal Genius 7, 16 Perse, St. John 484 “Personism” (O’Hara) 85–6 Peterson, Allan 300 Peterson, Tim Trace 131 “Petroglyphs, Puako, Hawaii” (Sinclair) 179 “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev” (Rich) 29 Phantom Noise (Turner) 46 “Phantom Pain” (Chernoff) 64 Philip, Marlene Nourbese 327 Phillips, Carl 393, 396, 401 Phillips, Rowan Ricardo 396, 397 The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty (Chin) 245 Picard, Tiare “Friday” 189 Pico, Tommy 293, 414, 415 IRL 405 Nature Poem 308–9 Picture Bride (Song) 182 Pieces O’Six (Low) 68 Piecework: 19 Fresno Poets (Veinberg and Trejo) 158 Piercy, Marge 234 “Burying Blues for Janis” 23 “The Morning Half-Life Blues” 23 “The Pilots” (Levertov) 44 Pink Floyd 442 Pinsky, Robert 120 The Inferno of Dante 440 The Situation of Poetry 120 Pizo, Elmer Omar Bascos “Black Dog [pinoy style]” 185 Place, Vanessa 7 “Plantation Non-Song” (Perkins) 186

Index

Plath, Sylvia 113, 164, 165, 170, 206, 207, 233, 234, 269, 293, 299–300, 432 “The Applicant” 20–1 Ariel 20, 164 The Bell Jar 117 “Daddy” 21, 172, 205 “Lady Lazarus” 113 “Poppies in October” 171 Plato The Republic 235 Please Don’t Read Poetry (Burt) 299–300 “Pleiades from the Cables of Genocide” (Cervantes) 204 “Poem” (Bishop) 327–8 “Poem” (Hughes) 165 “Poem about My Rights” (Jordan) 20, 129, 252 “Poema para los Californios Muertos” (Cervantes) 236 “Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent Well-Read Person, Could Believe in the War between the Races” (Cervantes) 237 The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (Burt) 299–301 The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell (Perloff) 7, 87 poetic avant-gardes 52–6 Poetic License (Perloff) 7 poetics 361–74 schools and movements 2, 105, 132, 178, 356, 449 Poetics in a New Key (Perloff) 7 Poetics Journal 93 The Poetics of Indeterminacy (Perloff) 7 “Poet of Cripples” (Ferris) 452 Poetry 7, 340, 438 Poetry and Childhood (Whitley) 351 “Poetry and Its Double” (Johnson) 114 “Poetry and Women’s Culture” (Rich) 29 poetry anthologies of Hawai‘i 177–91 poetry as confession 163–73 poetry awards 391–402 “Poetry Camp” (Chin) 247 Poetry for Children: The Signal Award 1979–2001 (Chambers) 351, 352 Poetry Hawaii (Stewart and Unterecker) 180–1, 190–1 Poetry in the Making (Hughes) 351 Poetry L.A. 157 Poetry Loves Poetry 156, 160 Poetry Magazine 293 Poetry On and Off the Page (Perloff) 7 Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry (Thomas) 340, 347, 351, 353, 357 Poets Against the War 45 Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse (Fredman) 62

525

Index

Poets West (Spingarn) 157 Poets & Writers 395 The Poet X (Acevedo) 347 Pollock, Iain Haley 394 Pope, Alexander “Essay on Man” 246 “Pope of Greenwich Village” 51 “Poppies in October” (Plath) 171 “Populist Manifesto” (Ferlinghetti) 156 Porchia, Antonia 441 “Porque No Estas Conmigo” (Shange) 369 Porter, Cole 3 Porter, Eliot 316 Portnoy’s Complaint 103 A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems (Chin) 245 post-Language crisis 85 postmodern 39, 65–7, 81, 85–95, 154, 167, 291, 326, 407–8, 412–13, 442, 451, 474–5, 480–3 Postnegritude Visual and Literary Culture (Reid) 142 “Postscript: Brown Girl Manifesto, One of Many” (Chin) 252–3 Potato Face (Sandburg) 348 “Pottery Lessons I” (Foerster) 414 Pound, Ezra 16, 50–1, 68, 158, 233, 235, 248, 311, 361, 374, 441, 471, 477, 479–81, 484 Cantos 15, 67 Homage to Sextus Propertius 442 Pratt, Mary Louise 178 “Prayer for Change” (Yamada) 218–19 prediction 357–8 Pregnancy Discrimination Act 22 Prelude (Wordsworth) 115 Prepositions (Yamasaki) 180 Presences: A Text for Marisol (Creeley) 62, 113 “Pretty Little” (Armantrout) 228 Prima, Diane di 139 Primack, Richard 306 “Primety” (Pushkin) 442–3 PRISM. See National Security Agency (NSA) Pritchett, Frances W. 446 “Projective Verse” (Olson) 85, 449 “Project Note” (Bervin) 319 The Prophet (Gibran) 384 prose and poetry 45, 61–70, 113–24, 146, 149, 160, 182, 247, 261, 398, 409 The Prose Poem: An International Anthology (Benedikt) 61 prose poetry 61–70 prosthetic poetics 449–61 Pryor, Richard 247

Pukui, Mary Kawena Echo of Our Song: Chants and Poems of the Hawaiians 179 Pullinger, Debbie From Tongue to Text: A New Reading of Children’s Poetry 353 Pushkin, Alexander “Primety” 442–3 Qing, Ai 440 Qin Leng 341 Quart, Alyssa 327 “Queen of the Sixth Grade” (Nelson) 222–3 “Queer” (Bidart) 434 Queer Beats (Marler) 128 queer confessional 293, 429–35 queer poetry 125–36 after 1945 127–31 histories 125–7 reading 131–6 queer poets 293, 303 “Que Hay Otra Voz” (Villanueva) 368 questioning 355–7 Questions of Travel (Bishop) 117, 164, 166 Quillette 354 Rabinow, Paul 142 race 20, 38 discourses 121 identity 26 inequities 163 as metaphor 133 and poverty 168 Race and the Avant-Garde (Yu) 52 The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (Rankine) 279 Racial Things, Racial Forms (Jeon) 52–3 Rackham, Arthur 357 Radical Artifice (Perloff) 7 “Rainy Season, Sub-Tropics” (Bishop) 302 Rampersad, Arnold 35 Ramrod (Balaz) 186 Ranapiri, Essa 301 Randall, Julian 394 Randall Jarrell and His Age (Burt) 299 Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood (Flynn) 339 Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden (Burt) 299 Range, Melissa 300 Rankine, Claudia 164, 170, 172, 173, 279–85, 327, 334, 393, 394, 395–8, 401, 484 about 279

526

Citizen: An American Lyric 172, 279, 281–2, 397–8, 414 Don’t Let Me Be Lonely 279, 281, 332–3 The End of the Alphabet 279 “The Health of Us” 279–81 Just Us: An American Conversation 279, 282–4 The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind 279 studies in whiteness 280 The White Card 279 “Rape” (Rich) 22 rape law reform 22 Rasula, Jed 154 Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals (Ali) 444 raw data 466 Raworth, Tom 471 Ray, Sukumar 343 Raymond, Alyssa Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience 340 “Reading Myself ” (Roth) 78 Reagan, Ronald 324 The Rebel’s Silhouette (Faiz) 444–6 Recalculating (Bernstein) 440 recovery 118 Recyclopedia (Mullen) 373 Red Ink Magazine 287 The Red Window (Broyles) 405, 410 Reed, Brian Nobody’s Business: Twenty-first Century Avant-Garde Poetics 471 Reed, Justin Phillip 397, 401 Reeves, Roger 397 “Regent’s Park” (Hacker) 20 Rehabilitation Act 450 Reid, Ian 43 Reid, Mark A. 142 “Remnants” (Song) 182 Rén, Ménglóng Shi 438 Report from Part One (Brooks) 120 The Republic (Plato) 235 “A Response to Jehuda Halevi” (Terman) 420–1 Retallack, Joan Mongrélisme 373 “Returning to My Mother(is) land, Returning Home” (Borja-Quichocho-Calvo) 189 Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen (Chin) 245, 247 Reverdy, Pierre 61, 66 “Revisions” (Armantrout) 306–7 Rexroth, Kenneth 157 “The Poet as Translator” 441

Index

Reznikoff, Charles 110, 419–20 At the End of the Open Road 110 “Hanukkah” 419 Inscriptions: 1944–1956 419 “Notes on the Spring Holidays” 419 Reznor, Trent 478 Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (Chin) 245 Rhetoric and Sexuality (Nickowitz) 432 rhizome 473 Ribaut, Jean The Whole and True Discovery of Terra Florida 313 Ricciardi, Gabriela 121 Rich, Adrienne 20, 108–10, 129, 246, 251, 326, 443– 6, 450, 452 Collected Poems 22 “Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women” 29 Diving into the Wreck 113, 129, 235 The Dream of a Common Language 27, 29 “For Ethel Rosenberg” 108 “Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib)” 444 Ghazals of Ghalib 443–5 “Hunger” 29 “(Newsreel)” 30, 42 “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff ” 29 “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev” 29 “Poetry and Women’s Culture” 29 “Rape” 22 “Shooting Script” 42 “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” 20 “Tear Gas,” “(I am afraid.) / It’s not the worst way to live” 30 “A Thinking Woman Sleeps With Monsters” 26–30 “Twenty-One Love Poems” 27 “Wait” 46 Richard Burton Reads the Poetry of John Donne 276 Richards, I. A. 15 “Riddle” (Heyen) 40 Riggs, Lynn 406 “A Letter” 406 Riggs, Marlon “Tongues Untied” 130 Rilke, Rainer Maria 11, 29, 242, 438 Rimbaud, Arthur 8, 18, 61, 87, 149, 150 Riprap, & Cold Mountain Poems (Snyder) 311 Rising Tides (Chester and Barba) 22 Riverfront Times 401 Rivers and Mountains (Ashbery) 88 Robbins, Marty 478 Robbins, Michael 471 “Walkman” 471 Roberson, Ed 395, 396

Index

The Robert Graves Review (Joseph) 339 Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero (Bell) 74 Roberts, Ed 450 Robertson, Lisa 96 Robertson, Robin 439 Robeson, Paul 241 Roe v. Wade 21 Rolfe, Edwin 35, 37 Rollins, Alison C. 397 Roman, Camille 178 Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (Bate) 308 “Romantic Pain” (Myles) 94 Romero, Fabian 293 A Room of One’s Own (Woolf) 29 Root, Maria 195 Rootabaga Pigeons (Sandburg) 348 Rootabaga Stories (Sandburg) 348 Rose, Jacqueline The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction 352 Rose, Wendy 207, 239 Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children (Koch) 347 Rosenthal, M. L. 163 Rossetti, Christina 216, 291 Roth, Laurence 367 Roth, Philip 103, 108 “Reading Myself ” 78 Rothenberg, Jerome 441 Rowell, Charles 399 The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (FitzGerald) 437, 441 Rubin, Jerry 101 Ruby, Kathryn We Become New 22–3 Rueckert, William 41 Ruefl, Mary 327 Rukeyser, Muriel 326, 450 Rumens, Carol 170 Rūmī, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad 438, 440 Dīvān-e Šams 440 Runaway (Graham) 308 “Running to Become Susan Lucci of Poetry World” 401 A Rush of Hands (Delgado) 269, 273 “Rusk says Toughness/Essential for Peace” (Ginsberg) 42 “Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam on Broadway” (Hammad) 380 Russo, Emmalea Wave Archive 470 Russo, Linda 312–13 Ruwe, Donelle 352 “Dramatic Monologues and the Novel-in-Verse” 346

527

Sagawa, Chika 446 Said, Edward 381 “Sailing Home from Rapallo” (Lowell) 433 Saint Augustine Confessions 271–2 Sakamoto, Yoshiro 179 Sal 140 Salaita, Steven “Ethnic Identity and Imperative Patriotism: Arab Americans Before and After 9/11” 380 Saleh, Dennis 158 Salinas, Luis Omar 158 Salomé, Lou Andreas 472, 475 The Salt Ecstasies (White) 291 Samuel, Maurice 102 Jews on Approval 102 Sanchez, Sonia 23, 207, 251, 394, 395, 399 Sandburg, Carl “City of the Big Shoulders” 348 “Hog Butcher of the World” 348 Potato Face 348 Rootabaga Pigeons 348 Rootabaga Stories 348 Santa Barbara Song Sparrow 312 Santayana, George 277 “The Censor and the Poet” 271 Santos-Perez, Craig 362 Sappho (Carson) 438, 440 Saroyan, Aram 266 Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (Yamanaka) 184–5 “Save Pågat” (Pascua) 190 Saxton, Marsha With Wings 450 Sayers, Dorothy 439 Scalapino, Leslie 173, 264, 281 Scappettone, Jennifer 440 Scarry, Elaine 455 Scavanger Loop (Baker) 306 Schiff, Robin 302, 327 Schneider, Steven 392 Schoenberg, Arnold 15 Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 (Sorby) 351 Schultz, Susan M. 177 Schuyler, James 85, 128, 132 Schwartz, Delmore 104 Schwerner, Michael 479 Scott, Clive 65 Scott, Herbert 158 Scott-Heron, Gil “Work for Peace” 46 Scranton, Roy 307

528

Seale, Bobby 101 “Seasons on Earth” (Koch) 480 “Sea Spider” (Lear) 344 The Second Sex (Beauvoir) 20 second-wave feminism 19 violence against women 22 Second World War 37–9, 40, 153, 178 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 126–7 Tendencies 126 Touching Feeling (Sedgwick) 133 SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) 26 Seeking Air (Guest) 93 “Seeze Pyder” (Lear) 344 Seidel, Frederick 479 Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (Bly) 440 Selenite, Venus 293 “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (Ashbery) 88, 90–1, 113 The Sense of Beauty 277 Seven American Deaths and Disasters (Goldsmith) 330–1 Seven Disasters (Goldsmith) 10 Sexton, Anne 165, 166, 168–9, 170, 241, 293, 299 “The Abortion” 21 To Bedlam and Part Way Back 164 Shadow of a Man (Moraga) 197 Shadowtime 16 Shakespeare, William 291 Shakespeare’s sonnets read by John Gielgud 276 Shakur, Afeni “Dear Mama” 171 Shakur, Sekyiwa 171 Shakur, Tupac 164, 171 “Dear Mama” 169–71 “When Ure Hero Falls” 171 “Shame and the First Day of College” (Javar) 184 Shan, Han Riprap 311 Shange, Ntozake “Porque No Estas Conmigo” 369 “The Shape of Things” (Harnick) 341 Shapeshift (Bitsui) 405, 408 Shapiro, Harvey “New York Notes” 420 Shapiro, Karl 61, 104 Share, Don 7 Sharrad, Paul 186, 187 Shaughnessy, Mina 26 Shaw, Lytle 92 Shell, Marc 362 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 19

Index

Shepherd, Reginald 397 Sherwin, Miranda “Confessional” Writing and the Twentieth-Century Literary Imagination 429 Shigematsu, Soiku 441 Shklovsky, Victor 2 Shockley, Ann Allen 121 Shockley, Evie 308, 397 “Shooting Script” (Rich) 42 “ ‘The Shortest Way Through’: Strategic Anti-essentialism in Popular Music” (Lipsitz) 383 “short short story” 64 Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Smith) 398 Shouting at No One (Joseph) 385 Shreiber, Maeera 106 Siamanto Bloody News from My Friend 440 Sidewalk Flowers (Smith and Lawson) 339 Siebers, Tobin 499 Sieburth, Richard 438 Signal: Approaches to Children’s Books 352 Sikelianos, Eleni The California Poem 312–13 Silberman, Charles 102 “SILK / LANGUAGE” (Bervin) 319 Silko, Leslie Marmon 170, 207 Silk Poems (Bervin) 319 Silliman, Ron 63, 66, 68, 69, 113, 120–1, 225, 264, 323, 456 In the American Tree 156, 158–60 Ketjak 305 Silva, Simón 269, 274 Simic, Charles 66, 69 The World Doesn’t End 66 Simpson, Daniel 453 Simpson, Darius 397 Simpson, Louis 110 New Poets of England and America (NPEA) 155 Sinaviana-Gabbard, Caroline 188 Sinclair, Marjorie “Petroglyphs, Puako, Hawaii” 179 Sinclair, Safiya 397 Sinister Wisdom 19, 27 “Sisters” (Delgado) 272 The Situation of Poetry (Pinsky) 120 Siva, Ernest 274 Skelley, Jack 157 skepticism 355 “Skunk Hour” (Lowell) 13, 73, 166 Slate (O’Rourke) 115

Index

Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man (Ball) 314–15 Smith, Bessie 251 Smith, Danez 293, 301, 302, 393, 397 Smith, David The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets 156 Smith, John A Description of New England 313–14 Smith, Kimberly K. African American Environmental Thought: Foundations 316 Smith, Patricia 393, 394, 397 Smith, Patty 478 Smith, Rod 96 In Memory of My Theories 96 Smith, Sydney Sidewalk Flowers 339 Smith, Tracy K. 113, 119–20, 392, 393, 394, 396–401 Life on Mars 398 Ordinary Light 119 Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah 398 Smoker, M. L. 405, 409 Another Attempt at Rescue 405, 413 “From a Tin Box” 413 “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” (Rich) 20 SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) 479 Snodgrass, W. D. Heart’s Needle 164 Snyder, Gary 157, 312, 316, 319 “Nooksack Valley” 311 Riprap, & Cold Mountain Poems 311 “Soft Money” (Armantrout) 331 Soja, Edward Thirdspace 160 Sokal, Alan 68 Soldier, Layli Long 414 Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood (Jordan) 352 Soliman, Moheb “Introduction to Arab American Poetry” 388 Solis, Dulce Maria 205 Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (Kaufman) 139 Somerville, Alice Te Punga 185, 189, 191 “Sometimes in a Moment of Déjà Vu” (Espinoza) 294–5 Some Trees (Auden) 88 Sondheim, Stephen “Gee, Officer Krupke” 341 Song, Cathy 177, 178, 186 Picture Bride 182 “Remnants” 182

529

“Song for a Snapping Turtle Rattle” (Gansworth) 408 “Song of Myself ” (Whitman) 128, 356, 384 “Song of the Redwood Tree” (Whitman) 316–17 “Song of the Shattering Vessels” (Cole) 424 Sorby, Angela 352 Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 351 Sosa, Mercedes 276 Soto, Brian 282 Soto, Christopher 293 Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color 131 Soto, Gary 158, 275 The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois) 314–15, 317 “Sound Carries” (Giscome) 318 The Sound of Music (Dr. Seuss) 343 Spahr, Juliana 363, 398, 399, 401, 469, 484 “Brent Crude” 310 “The Program Era and the Mainly White Room” 398 That Winter a Wolf Came 310, 312 Spangler, Jason 140 Spanish American War 34 Spanish Civil War 35, 37 Spear, Roberta 158 “Spear Fisher” (Balaz) 187 Specimen ’73 (Vangelisti) 157 Spicer, Jack After Lorca 442 “The Spider Shell” (Maule) 179 Spingarn, Lawrence Poets West 157 Spivak, Gayatri 383 “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity” (Rich) 108 “Spreading Wings on Wind” (Ortiz) 407 Spring and All (Williams) 311 Spring Essence (Hương) 440 Stafford, William 157 Ghazals of Ghalib 443–5 Stallings, A. E. 440 Stallings, Jonathan Yingelishi: Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics 446 Stand Up Poetry (Webb) 160 Stanley, Orr 74 Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out (Fries) 499 Star Trek 442 “Staying Alive” (Levertov) 44 steady state theory 68 Steig, Jeanne 341 Stein, Gertrude 25, 61, 66, 67, 129, 150, 172, 357, 368, 372, 477 Tender Buttons 67

530

“A Step Away from Them” (O’Hara) 12 Stevens, Wallace 323, 449 “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” 307 Stewart, Frank Poetry Hawaii 180–2, 190–1 Stewart, Susan Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature 347 St. John, David 158 St. John of the Cross 384 “Stoen 87: u u” (Huth) 261 Strand, Mark Ghazals of Ghalib 443–5 strategic anti-essentialism 140, 383–7 strategic essentialism 383 Strauß, Botho 68 The Streets Inside: Ten Los Angeles Poets 157 “Striking Ash” (Cervantes) 208 Strong Measures (Thomas) 340 Stryker, Susan 126 Stuckey, Sterling 169 Styles, Morag From the Garden to the Street: Three Hundred Years of Poetry for Children 351 Teaching Caribbean Poetry 351 “The Subject and Power” (Foucault) 142 Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation (Melt) 293–4 Sueño (Cervantes) 233 Sullivan, Hannah 470 Sullivan, Robert Whetu Moana 188–9 “Summit” (McPherson) 181 “Sunday Service” (Hall) 181, 190 “The Sun Rises and I Think of your Bruised Larynx” (Bitsui) 409 surface reading 465 “Surfer” (Allen) 180 surreal-autobiographical poem 87 Svonkin, Craig 208, 280, 352, 358 Swearingen-Steadwell, Laura 394 The Sweet Flypaper of Life 274 Swensen, Cole 440 Swenson, Tree 243 Szalai, Jennifer 394 Sze, Arthur 409, 411 “Taa Numu Tekwa Huruunu” (“The Loss of Our Language” ) (Pahdopony) 363 Tafolla, Carmen 200 Takara, Kathryn Waddell 186 “Take Five” (Perloff) 7

Index

Tale of Genji (Murasaki) 216 A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens) 23–4 Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii’s Local Writers (Chock and Lum) 183, 185 “Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed” (Lowell) 13–14 Tanka and Haikai: Japanese Rhythms (Hartmann) 51 Tape for the Turn of the Year (Ammons) 113 Tardos, Anne 362, 367, 370–2 “Toowomba 8” 371 Uxudo 371 Tariq, Malcolm 394 Tarr, Anita Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 351 Tate, Allen 107 Taylor, Peter 73 Teaching Caribbean Poetry (Styles) 351 “Tear Gas,” “(I am afraid.) / It’s not the worst way to live” (Rich) 30 Tendencies (Sedgwick) 126 Tender Buttons (Stein) 61, 67 Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits (Felver) 287 Tenepal, Mallinali 200 The Tennis Court Oath (Ashbery) 88 The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense (Heyman) 339 Terman, Philip “A Response to Jehuda Halevi” 420–1 Tesserae: Memories and Suppositions (Levertov) 119 texistence (Huth) 255 Thaman, Konai Helu 186 Thatcher, Margaret 324 “That’s All” (Joseph) 385 That Winter the Wolf Came (Spahr) 310, 312 The Book of Questions (Neruda) 341 “The Book of Yolek” (Hecht) 39 “The Face of the Enemy: Arab-American Writing Post 9/11” (El Said) 379 The Lion and the Unicorn Award 342 “the lost baby poem” (Clifton) 21–2 “The New World” (Bloch) 421 “The Program Era and the Mainly White Room” (Spahr & Young) 398 There Should Be Flowers (Espinoza) 293–4 “The Task of the Translator” (Benjamin) 437–8 “The Women in Vietnam” (Paley) 21 The Thief of Baghdad (Fairbanks) 51 “A Thinking Woman Sleeps With Monsters” (Rich and Lorde) 26–30 Thirdspace (Soja) 160 “Third Wave” 407, 413, 415

Index

This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse (Heyman) 339, 344 This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga and Anzaldúa) 26 “This Compost” (Whitman) 484 “this Vortex named Kansas” (Ginsberg) 43 Thomas, Amber Flora 394 Thomas, Dylan 234 Thomas, John 157 Thomas, Joseph T., Jr. 358 on children’s fiction 342 on contemporary children’s poetry 347, 351 on nonsense poetry 343 Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry 340, 347, 351, 353, 357 Strong Measures 340 Thomas, Truth 394 Thomas and Beulah (Dove) 252, 391 Thompson, Phyllis Rose 178 Festival 179–80 “Lines Written but Never Mailed from Hawaii” 179 Thompson, Robert 330 Thoreau, Henry David 61, 314 “Huckleberries” 315 “Though I’m not a Zionist” (Klepfisz) 367 Three Poems (Ashbery) 62, 63, 88, 476 Tibor de Nagy Gallery 88, 93 Tigges, Wim 344 An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense 347 Explorations in the Field of Nonsense 347 Tillich, Paul 277 Tillinghast, Robert 73 Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency (Conrad) 341, 353 Title IX 21 To Bedlam and Part Way Back (Sexton) 164 Tó hajiilee 288 Tóibin, Colm On Elizabeth Bishop 117 “To Julia de Burgos” (de Burgos) 166 Tolbert, T.C. 131, 293 Tolson, Melvin B. 172 “To Mama too late” (Clifton) 169 Tompkins, Jane 2 Tongia, Makiuti 186 “Tongues Untied” (Riggs) 130 Tongue Ties (Firmat) 370 Toomer, Jean Cane 251 “Toowomba 8” (Tardos) 371 “To See Letters” (White) 412

531

“To the Naked Mole Rats at the National Zoo” (Burt) 301 “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth” (Wheatley) 164 Touch (Cole) 431, 433 Touching Feeling (Sedgwick) 133 “ ‘Towards a New Oceania’: On Contemporary Pacific Islander Poetry Networks” (Perez) 190 Toward Solomon’s Mountain: The Experience of Disability in Poetry (Baird and Workman) 450 The Tradition (Brown) 398 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (Eliot) 252 Trakl, Georg 446 transcreation 446 “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (Lorde) 25 translation 437 algorithmic 437 cultural 437 domesticating 443 foreignizing 443 homophonic 442 interlinguistic 437 poetry 437–46 “Translation as Creation and Criticism” (de Campos) 446 transmediation 437 Transparent (TV series) 95 trans poetry 131, 293–6, 301, 303, 373 trans poets 293, 303 Tranströmer, Thomas The Deleted World 439 Trask, Haunani-Kay 185, 186, 188 “From Ka ‘a’awa to Rarotonga” 187 Travisano, Thomas 178 “Treaty x” (Apache) 290 “Treaty xx” (Apache) 290 “Trees” (Kilmer) 355–7 Trejo, Ernesto Piecework: 19 Fresno Poets 158 Tretheway, Natasha 252 Trethewey, Natasha 392, 393, 394, 396, 398, 400 Native Guard 398 Trilce (Vallejo & Wagner) 446 Trilling, Diana 107 Trilling, Lionel 105 Trinidad, David 157 Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss) 473 Troubling the Line (Tolbert and Peterson) 131 Troupe, Margaret 252 Troupe, Quincy 252 Trump, Donald 388, 479

532

Trump era 294 “Tu Do Street” (Komunyakaa) 45 Turner, Brian Bullet 46 Here 46 Phantom Noise 46 Turner, Lana 12, 480 Turner, Tina 251 “Turtle-neck angel guys” (Kaufman) 128 “a turtle shell/stuck on a pole” (Lowell) 76 Tuwhare, Hone 188 Twain, Mark 477 “Twenty-One Love Poems” (Rich) 27 Twombly, Cy “Fifty Days at Iliam” 256 Ulysses (James) 18 The United States Treaty with the Apaches 290 University of Massachusetts (UMass) 96 Unoriginal Genius (Perloff) 7, 16, 484 Unterecker, John Poetry Hawaii 180–2, 190–1 Up Late (Codrescu) 160 “Up Rising” (Duncan) 43 Uxudo (Tardos) 371 Valdés, Gonzalo Fernández di Oviedo y Natural History of the West Indies 313 Valentine, Jean Break the Glass 291 Valéry, Paul 61 Vallejo, César “The Black Heralds” 284 “El Buen Sentido” 285 Trilce 446 Van Clief-Stefanon, Lyrae 394 Van Dooren, Thom 306, 320 Vangelisti, Paul Specimen ’73 157 Van Jordan, A. 397 Van Vliet, Don 478 Vari-X 482 Vassilakis, Nico 257 Vecchione, Patrice Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience 340 Veil: New and Selected Poems (Armantrout) 225 Veinberg, Jon Piecework: 19 Fresno Poets 158 Velroy and the Madischie Mafia (Hoahwah) 405 The Velveteen Rabbit (Williams) 223 Vender, Helen 74, 300

Index

Ventrakl (Hawkey) 446 Venuti, Lawrence 443 verbal economy 323 Versed (Armantrout) 225–6 “The Verse-novel: A New Genre” (Alexander) 346 The Verse Novel Review (Howard) 346 The Very Thing That Happens (Edson) 64–5 Vibrant Matter (Bennett) 467 Vidal, Gore 51, 438 Vietnam War 21, 40, 42, 45 Vigil, Evangelina 207 “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” (Erkkila) 34 Villa, Jose Garcia 50–1, 54–5, 58 Have Come, Am Here 51 Volume Two 51 Villa, Raul Homero Barrio Logos 198 Villanueva, Tino 362, 367–70 “Brief History of Bilingualism in Poetry” 367 “Day-Long Day” 368 Hay Otra Voz: Poems (1968–1971) 368 “Que Hay Otra Voz” 368 Villon, Francois 18 violence against women 22 Viramontes, Helen Maria 207 Virgil (Ferry) 440 The Visible Man (Cole) 430 visionary thrust 61 “Visiting Father” (Delgado) 269, 271 visual poetry 256 Vital Signs (Delgado) 269 V-Letter and Other Poems (Shapiro) 104 Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (Nye) 340 Volume Two (Villa) 51 Volunteer for Liberty 35 von Hallberg, Robert 439, 446 world poetry 439 Voyage of the Sable Venus (Lewis) 470 Voyce, Stephen 22 Vuong, Ocean 130–1 “Home Wrecker” 130 Wagner, James Trilce 446 Waimea Summer (Holt) 187 “Wait” (Rich) 46 Wakefield, Dan 107 Wakely-Mulroney, Katherine The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry: A Study of Children’s Verse in English 351 “Waking in the Blue” (Lowell) 74

Index

Walcott, Derek 113, 251 Another Life 113 Walden (Thoreau) 61 Waldrop, Rosmarie 67–8, 69, 440 Lawn of Excluded Middle 67, 68 Walker, Alice 207, 393–4 The Color Purple 251 Walker, Frank X. 394, 397 Walker, Margaret 392 “For My People” 251 Wallace, Mark 96 Waller, Fats “Black and Blue” 165, 168 Wallingford, Katharine 76, 82 Wallschlaeger, Nikki 293 Wang, Dorothy 374 Wang Lun 250 “Waolani Stream, 1955/1975” (Chock) 182 Warner, Marina Book 2.0 348 “Out Loud: The Experience of Literature in the Digital Space” 348 “Warning” (Yamada) 219–20 war poetry 34 Washington Post 325 The Waste Land (Eliot) 477–81 Watchword (Colomé) 291 Watten, Barrett 92 Watts, Alan Nonsense 344–5 Wave Archive (Russo) 470 Waxwing 405 “We Are Americans Now, We Live in the Tundra” (Chin) 247 Weaver, Afaa Michael 393, 397 Webb, Charles Harper Stand Up Poetry 160 We Become New (Ruby and Iverson) 22–3 Weber, Max 440 Webster, Paul Francis 341 “Weeds” (Midge) 408 “The Weight of Thinking” (Huth) 267, 268 Weill, Kurt 478 Weinberger, Eliot 438 Weiner, Lawrence 256 Weiner, Lee 101 Weinfield, Henry “My Father Was a Wandering Aramaean” 422 Weinfield, Mortimer 423 Weir, Dara 269 Weise, Jillian 452–3 “The Old Questions” 452–3

533

Weitz, Paul 95 “Well Water” (Jarrell) 75 The Well-Wrought Urn (Brooks) 76 Wendt, Albert 186, 187, 188, 189, 190 Wesling, Donald 63, 65 West, Cornel 279 West Coast, anthologies 153–60 Westlake, Wayne 186 “Hawaiians Eat Fish” 187 Westlake, Wayne Kaumualii 186, 189 Honolulu Advertiser 179 Whaitiri, Reina 188–9 “What Were They Like” (Levertov) 44 What Work Is (Levine) 110 Wheatley, Phillis 169, 368 “On Being Brought from Africa to America” 164, 314 “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth” 164 Wheeler, Susan 327 When I Dance (Berry) 341 “When I was Growing Up” (Wong) 26 When My Brother Was an Aztec (Diaz) 405, 415–16 When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (Harjo) 287 “When the War Is Over” (Merwin) 33 “When Ure Hero Falls” (Shakur) 171 “Where Are You From? (Son for the Return Home) “ (Keali‘i) 189–90 Whereas (Long Soldier) 405, 414 Whetu Moana (Sullivan) 188–9 White, James L. The Salt Ecstasies 291 White, Orlando “Analogy” 411–12 Bone Light 405, 411, 412 “To See Letters” 412 White, Simone 397 The White Card (Rankine) 279 Whitehead, Kim 19 Whitley, David Poetry and Childhood 351 Whitman, Walt 18, 34, 42, 128, 241, 280, 383–4, 388–9, 477, 484 Leaves of Grass 384 “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” 468 Song of Myself 128 “Song of Myself ” 356 “Song of Myself ” 384, 467–9 “Song of the Redwood Tree” 316–17 “This Compost” 484

534

Whitman’s Wild Children (Cherkovski) 143 The Whole and True Discovery of Terra Florida (Ribaut) 313 Who Look at Me? (Jordan) 352 “Why Men Are Dogs” (Chin) 247 “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (Ginsberg) 42–3 Wicker, Marcus 393, 397 Wieners, John 293 Wife, Stepford 21 Wilbur, Richard 341 “Wild Swans at Coole” (Yeats) 11–12 Wilkinson, Claude 397 Williams, Jeffrey J. 477 Williams, Margery The Velveteen Rabbit 223 Williams, M. L. How Much Earth 158 Williams, Phillip B. 397, 401 Williams, Serena 172 Williams, William Carlos 44, 51, 61, 62–3, 233, 312, 412 “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” 356 Paterson 207 Spring and All 311 “The crowd at the ball game” 277 Wilson, Edmund 443 Wilson, Rob 185, 305 Wilson, Ronaldo V. 394 Wimsatt, William K. 114 Wise Blood (O’Connor) 255 Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (Koch) 347 “With New Englanders” (Elmusa) 381–2 With Wings (Saxton & Howe) 450 Witness Stones 222 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 63, 68 Wobble (Armantrout) 225–6, 306 Wolach, David 457–6 “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” (Jarrell) 301–2 “The Womanhood” (Brooks) 167 “A Woman Is Talking to Death” (Grahn) 24–5 “Womanslaughter” (Parker) 20 The Woman Warrior (Kingston) 270 women poets 19 Women’s Liberation Movement 19, 21 “Women’s Locker Room” (Nelson) 224 Wong, Nellie “When I was Growing Up” 26 Woods, Jamila 397 Woodson, Jacqueline 340, 341, 347, 348, 351 Brown Girl Dreaming 341, 346, 347

Index

Woolf, Virginia 18 A Room of One’s Own 29 Word, Hilary 392 Wordsworth, William 13, 308 “Work for Peace” (Scott-Heron) 46 Workman, Deborah S. Toward Solomon’s Mountain: The Experience of Disability in Poetry 450 The World Doesn’t End (Simic) 66, 69 world poetry 438–9 The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (Rosen and Bernikow) 22 The Wounded Breakfast (Edson) 65 Woznicki, John 154 A Wreath for Emmett Till (Nelson) 221, 341 Wright, James 87, 155, 326 Wright, Jay 392, 396, 397 Wright, Richard 276 Black Boy 270 Writing Down the Bones (Goldberg) 240 Writing Self, Writing Nation (Alarcón and Kim) 49 Wurth, Erika “The Fourth Wave” 405 Indian Trains 405 Wyeth, Andrew “Christina’s World” 255 A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness (Moraga) 196–7, 205 The X-Men 287 Yaghlian, Nevart 440 Yale Younger Poets series 88 Yamada, Mitsuye 170 Yamada, Mitsuye Yasutake 215–20 “Abject Lesson” 219 about family and immediate community 215 about Minidoka 219 about poets and other writers influenced by 216 about roles of memory in poems 215–16 Camp Notes and Other Poems 215, 217 Camp Notes and Other Writings 215 Desert Run 215 “Drowning in my Own Language” 218 “Father” 219 Full Circle 215 “Masks of a Woman” 218 “Mirror Mirror” 217–18 “Mistress” (Yamada) 219–20 “A Mother’s Prayer” 218–19 “A Mother’s Touch” 218–19

535

Index

“Mrs. Higashi is Dead” 218–19 “Papa’s Naga Uta 219–20 “Prayer for Change” 218–19 on relationship with Nisei writers, artists, and activists 216–17 “Warning” 219–20 Yamamoto, Hisaye 216 Yamanaka, Lois-Ann 191 Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre 184–5 Yamasaki, Jean “The Crouching Lion” 180 Prepositions 180 Yamauchi, Wakako 216 Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne 202 Yau, John 55–6, 65 “Each Other” 65 Edifi cio Sayonara 65 Yeats, William Butler “Easter, 1916” 9 “Leda and the Swan” 13 “Wild Swans at Coole” 11–12 Yellow Medicine Review 287 Yellow Power 54 Yezierska, Anzia 102 The Bread Givers 102 Yildiz, Yasemin 363, 370 Yingelishi: Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics (Stallings) 446

Youn, Monica 300, 302 Young, Dean 471 Young, Gary 160 Young, Kevin 252, 393, 396, 399, 401 Young, Stephanie 398, 399 Bay Poetics 160 “The Program Era and the Mainly White Room” 398 Young American Poets (Carroll) 155 “The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak” (MacLeish) 37 “your mother sends you this” (Clifton) 169 Yu, Timothy 52–4 Race and the Avant-Garde 52 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Lorde) 121 Zapata, Emiliano 481 Zapf, Hubert 313 Zappa, Frank 478 “Zayde” (Levine) 110 Zitkala-Ša 406 Zola, Emile 481 Zorro 480 Zukofsky, Celia Catullus 440 Zukofsky, Louis 67, 368, 374 Catullus 440

536

536