Abstract
In this book, I consider poems published in the United States since 1979 that directly engage with national and global politics. I show that over the past 35 years some of America’s leading poets became discerning witnesses of their country’s transformation from self-appointed defender of freedom and democracy to powerful if uncertain keeper of the “new world order.” In ways that are artistically remarkable and intellectually probing, these poets registered signs of violent resistance to America’s domination, including the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and the subsequent US wars with Afghanistan and Iraq. They also took part in public debates concerning the meaning of nation, state, and empire following the unprecedented expansion of free markets and communication technologies. My examples include three poems that illustrate the experience of being American at this juncture in global history: Robert Pinsky’s An Explanation of America (1979), Adrienne Rich’s “An Atlas of the Difficult World” (1991), and Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America” (2001). In the second half of my book, I discuss Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005), Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw (2006), Lisa Jarnot’s Iliad XXII (2006), Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary (2009), Anne Boyer’s My Common Heart (2011), and Rodrigo Toscano’s Deck of Deeds (2012). As I demonstrate, these younger poets also find compelling ways to reinvigorate the tradition of public-oriented poetry in English.
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Notes
John Carlos Rowe, The New American Studies ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002 ), 4
Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006 ), 3–4
Donald E. Pease, “Rethinking ‘American Studies’ after US Exceptionalism,” American Literary History 21. 1 (2009): 23
Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011 ), 266.
Joseph Harrington, “Why American Poetry Is Not American Literature,” American Literary History 8.3 (1996): 496. In his later study Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern US Poetics (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), Harrington expands his argument to provide “the history of the construction of poetry as a category in the United States” (10).
Mary Loeffelholz, “Disliking It: American Poetry and American Literary Studies,” in A Companion to American Literary Studies, ed. Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine ( Malden: John Wiley & Sons, 2011 ), 159–61.
Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 181n5.
Robert von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 28 and 228.
Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012 ), 122.
Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire ( New York: Penguin, 2004 ), 24
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), viii. See also Josef Joffe’s notion of the United States as a “default power”: “What distinguishes the United States from the rest is its choice of role and mission in the world. This self-definition is best illuminated by a comparison with Russia, which wants back what it lost, and China, which wants more than it has. Both countries want more, but for themselves, not for all. Driven by selfish purposes, powers such as Russia and China cannot be what the United States was at its best in the twentieth century: a state that pursued its own interests by also serving those of others and thus created global demand for the benefits it provided. It is neither altruism nor egotism but enlightened self-interest that breeds influence.” Josef Joffe, “The Default Power: The False Prophecy of America’s Decline,” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2009), http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65225/josef-joffe/the-default-power.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 347. We should note that in their later works Hardt and Negri are less eager to grant the United States a dominant status. Thus, in Commonwealth they identify Beijing, Mumbai, and Frankfurt as possible alternative sites of military, cultural, and financial power. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011 ), 278.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004 ), 336.
Michael Hardt with Leonard Schwartz, The Production of Subjectivity: Conversations with Michael Hardt, The Conversant (2012): 14.
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization ( Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996 ), 19.
Czesław Miłosz, Beginning with My Streets: Essays & Recollections, trans. Madeline Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992 ), 82
Writing in the same year as Miłosz, E. J. Hobsbawm pronounced nationalism to be “at its peak.” E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 ), 192.
Paul Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 118 (emphasis in the original). Discussing the transnational lens of New American scholarship, Donald E. Pease also concludes: “The transnational prevents the closure of the nation. But the transnational is not the Other of the nation. The transnational names an undecidable economic, political, or social formation that is neither in nor out of the nation-state.” Donald E. Pease, “Introduction: Re-Mapping the Transnational Turn,” in Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, ed. Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe ( Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2011 ), 5.
William Butler Yeats, Essays and Introductions ( New York: Macmillan, 1961 ), 521–22.
Juliana Spahr, “Contemporary US Poetry and Its Nationalisms,” Contemporary Literature 52.4 (Winter 2011): 711.
Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961 ), 57.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002 ), 205.
Ben Lerner, “A Note on the Human Microphone,” Critical Quarterly 54.2 (July 2012): 66–67. Lerner later incorporated his reflections on the “people’s mic” into “Contest of Words: High School Debate and the Demise of Public Speech,” an essay he published in Harper’s Magazine in October 2012.
Shira Wolosky, Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 ), 176.
Helen Vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989 ), 35.
Hank Lazer, “The People’s Poetry,” Boston Review 29.2 (April/May 2004): 47.
Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry Between Community and Institution ( Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999 ), 37.
Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 20 (emphasis in the original).
Juliana Spahr, “Juliana Spahr Interview,” by Emily Carr, The Argotist Online, undated, http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Spahr%20interview.htm. Spahr’s commitment to creative writing pedagogy is evident in the volume she coedited with Joan Retallack, Poetry & Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (2006). See my review of this volume, “Professing Poetry,” in Jacket 34 (October 2007).
Terrence Des Pres, Praises & Dispraises: Poetry and Politics in the 20th Century (New York: Viking, 1988), 119 (emphasis in the original).
Thomas R. Edwards, Imagination and Power: A Study of Poetry on Public Themes ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1971 ), 6.
Lowry Nelson, Jr., Poetic Configurations: Essays in Literary History and Criticism ( University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992 ), 148.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Freistat ( New York: W. W. Norton, 2002 ), 535.
von Hallberg, “Poetry, Politics, and Intellectuals,” 26. See also von Hallberg’s chapter on “Civility” in his book Lyric Powers ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 ), 70–104.
Jahan Ramazani discusses English-language poetry about the news in Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Cary Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical ( New York and London: New York University Press, 1997 ), 147–48.
Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (New York: Viking Press, 1981), xiv.
W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1956), 84. Of special interest is a letter Auden wrote in 1937 to an unknown person who had sent him some poems for evaluation. In his response, Auden identifies the poems’ stylistic shortcomings and notes their author’s failure at “visualising one’s audience.” He then recommends: “Try to think of each poem as a letter written to an intimate friend, not always the same friend. But this letter is going to be opened by the postal authorities, and if they do not understand anything, or find it difficult to wade through, then the poem fails.” W. H. Auden to unknown recipient, November 8, 1937, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Willard Spiegelman, The Didactic Muse: Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 21. Although he never held a permanent teaching position in the United States, Auden had a genuine commitment to the idea of education, which dated back to his experiences as a schoolmaster in the 1930s. As he said in 1936: “The four necessary human relationships: to love; to be loved; to be a teacher; to be a pupil.” Qtd. in Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden ( London: William Heinemann, 1995 ), 117.
Charles Altieri, The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry ( Malden: Blackwell, 2006 ), 147.
W. H. Auden, Collected Poems ( New York: Random House, 1991 ), 606.
Bruce Andrews, Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 50 (emphases in the original). Bob Perelman’s The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History(1996)also focuses on the academic context of Language writing.
Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations ( New York: W. W. Norton, 2001 ), 113.
Charles Altieri, “Without Consequences Is No Politics: A Response to Jerome McGann,” in Politics & Poetic Value, ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987 ), 307.
W. H. Auden, The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, vol. 1: Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, 1926–1938, ed. Edward Mendelson ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002 ), 469.
Peter Nicholls, “Poetry and Rhetoric,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 186. See also Smith’s definition of “rhetorical poetry”: “an art motivated to address public concerns and to increase possibilities of social action through persistent performative inquiry.” Dale M. Smith, Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent ( Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012 ), 2.
W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Commitment to Form; or, Still Crazy After All These Years,” PMLA 118 (2003): 324
Daniel Green, “Literature Itself: The New Criticism and Aesthetic Experience,” Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003): 78
Gregory Jusdanis, “Two Cheers for Aesthetic Autonomy,” Cultural Critique 61 (Fall 2005): 28.
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© 2014 Piotr K. Gwiazda
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Gwiazda, P.K. (2014). Introduction. In: US Poetry in the Age of Empire, 1979–2012. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137466273_1
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