Download 1 Note on the text: the following pages are the script of a lecture given

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Note on the text: the following pages are the script of a lecture given (or to be
given) on various occasions (at UCLA, at UC Berkeley, at University of
Washington, and at Notre Dame) this year and last year. On some of those
occasions, another lecture has followed or will follow this one. This essay is
thus not yet in publishable form, and does not include notes. It is being revised
for publication as a separate essay and will appear as part of a chapter in my
current book project. Please do not cite or circulate this version.
Virginia Jackson
AMERICAN POETRY IN PUBLIC
In the middle of Ben Lerner’s 2014 10:04: A Novel --(and I should say that all of
the texts I am going to talk about today have produced various degrees of public
reaction in the US in the last two years—so what I will say is very much about a
very contemporary version of American Poetry in Public, though my way of
understanding the contemporary is historical, or at least depends on a nineteenthto-twenty-first-century arc)—in any case, in the middle of Ben Lerner’s 2014
10:04: A Novel, the narrator, who identifies as a poet (just as by this point Lerner
is a poet who identifies as a novelist, a self-consciousness indexed by the subtitle
“A Novel”), this “I,” in any case, looks from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and sees
what he calls “an urban experience of the sublime”:
Bundled debt, trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal drinking
water, the vast arterial network of traffic, changing weather patterns of
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increasing severity—whenever I looked at lower Manhattan from
Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who
momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of its possibility, a
proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body. What I felt when
I tried to take in the skyline—and instead was taken in by it—was a
fullness indistinguishable from being emptied, my personality dissolving
into a personhood so abstract that every atom belonging to me as good
belonged to Noor, the fiction of the world arranging itself around her.
(108-109)
Readers of nineteenth-century American poetry—or readers of Whitman anyway,
since a lot of people read Whitman who don’t read much nineteenth-century
American poetry—will recognize Lerner’s urban sublime as a version of the end
of Whitman’s 1856 poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the last stanza of which
appeared taped to doors and telephone poles in lower Manhattan in the days
following September 11th, 2001. Lerner’s way of condensing that very
nineteenth-century poem within the dystopic landscape of the twenty-first century
certainly owes something to that stanza’s ad hoc inauguration of the new
millennium, though nothing Lerner can find in his poetic landscape is a match for
that stanza’s sheer beauty:
You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,
Not any more you should be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,
We use you, we do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us,
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We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also,
You furnish your parts toward eternity,
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.
One of the things that Whitman’s lines can do that Lerner’s prose cannot do, of
course, is to be lines rather than just sentences, verse rather than narration. That
seems like a funny thing to say of Whitman, of all poets, since in 1856 there were
so many complaints about Whitman’s long disobedient lines as not poetry. Many
nineteenth-century readers agreed with one of my favorite of Whitman’s
anonymous early reviewers that “Walt Whitman is as unacquainted with art, as a
hog is with mathematics.” Yet from the vantage point of those people who posted
these lines in response to 9/11 and from the vantage of Lerner’s surrogate in the
novel he published less than two years ago, the odd, tipsy exhilaration of a
hyperbolically apostrophic, lineated direct address to the deaf and dumb buildings
of lower Manhattan looks like the kind of public poetry the twenty-first century
can only imagine in retrospect. Side by side, you can see without reading which
of these blocks of text is formatted as “poetry” and which is formatted as “prose.”
The nineteenth-century lines appear to us now not artless but artfully,
aesthetically framed next to the collapsing sentences about millennial collapse.
The flickering utopian horizon of the promise that poetry, of all things, could
restore to us the collective humanity the buildings within those lines lack may be
receding into the century before modernism (or the historical events that produced
modernism) deprived us of our faith in apostrophic collectivity, but Lerner’s
character imagines Whitman’s nineteenth-century vision of a public organized by
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poetry as salvageable for the future, as the lyric possibility we lost in the twentieth
century and might now—at the brink of repeated economic and accelerating
environmental decline--find a way to recover.
In Lerner’s version of this complex historical imaginary, post-modern
novelization ironically frames pre-modern lyricization, so that the portrait of the
artist as a young man holds that artist’s aspirational embrace of a public made
possible not only for but by poetry at the distance of a selfie stick. Lerner embeds
the collapse of that distance and the abstraction of the first person into the
collective work of selving in his narrative, so that at the end of the passage I’ve
cited here, the famous opening of Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass almost
comically becomes the relation between Lerner’s autobiographical character and
his friend Noor rather than the relation between me and you (I celebrate myself/
And what I assume you shall assume/ For every atom belonging to me, as good
belongs to you). This is to say that by framing Whitman’s antebellum lyrical
heights within a novel set in Brooklyn Heights in the twenty-first century, Lerner
also conforms to Bakhtin’s twentieth-century elevation of the genres of the many
over the expression of the one, of the polyglot novel over the monologic lyric.
Only at that multiplied distance is Lerner able to indulge in what the end of his
paragraph calls “a mild lacrimal event” brought on by the “proprioceptive flicker
in advance of the communal body.” This decidedly hipster affect at the edge of
Brooklyn is the imaginary self-integration of the poem Lerner is not writing in the
novel. The utopian vision of the communal body is already gone before it is
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invoked, not only because it is stuck in the nineteenth century but because it is
stuck in poetry.
The idealization of the nineteenth century as a moment before poetry and
its public drifted apart, before the poet turned into the hipster novelist, the
moment when the lines on the right rather than the prose on the left attracted
collective attention (before a poet had to become a novelist to sell books--though
again that’s an illusion when it comes to Whitman, who did not gain much of a
public until the twentieth century, and even then, only in fits and starts), all this is
part of the zeitgeist Lerner’s prose has channeled to such cult acclaim. But we did
not need to wait until last year for an expression of that spirit of the age, since
public and private foundations (The National Endowment of the Arts, The
National Endowment for the Humanities, The Poetry Foundation, and the Library
of Congress, to name just a few) have been launching highly capitalized projects
“to raise poetry to a more visible and influential position in American culture” (to
cite the Poetry Foundation website for decades now. Here is the central paragraph
of the Foundation’s mission statement
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/history-and-mission:
The Poetry Foundation works to raise poetry to a more visible and
influential position in American culture. Rather than celebrating the status
quo, the Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for
poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery,
and encouraging new kinds of poetry. In the long term, the Foundation
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aspires to alter the perception that poetry is a marginal art, and to make it
directly relevant to the American public.
The simple use of “more” –“more visible and influential”-—betrays the pathos
that is the basis of Lerner’s and, in fact, of a national contemporary ideal: what
once was may again be. Nostalgia is always potentially redemptive. Our
contemporary national discourse on poetry in public consistently frames
nineteenth-century American poetry as the lost promised land, fondly recalling
not only Whitman’s rebel ways but the mainstream Whittier and Longfellow as
poets who had “a broad cultural influence that today seems more typical of
movies or popular music than anything we can imagine possible for poetry” (as
Dana Gioia, former Chairman of the NEA, rather wistfully wrote in 1993). The
Poetry Foundation’s mission statement goes on to state that “the Foundation seeks
to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new
audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of
poetry. In the long term, the Foundation aspires to alter the perception that poetry
is a marginal art, and to make it directly relevant to the American public.”
So how would that happen? The word “poetry” appears four times in the
two sentences, but what does the word mean? Even an organization as
conservative in its approach as the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation does not just
beg the question of the shifting definition of the term that gives it its name and has
made possible its recent two hundred million dollar endowment from the estate of
Ruth Lily. According to this statement, whatever it is, poetry is not as visible and
influential as it might be, and the perception that it is “a marginal art” needs to be
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changed in order for poetry to become “directly relevant to the American public.”
The clear implication of this language is also the clear implication of Lerner’s
Whitmanian aspiration: poetry is good for the American public, or it would be
good for the American public if that public knew what was good for it. This
website and our national arts and humanities agencies tend to agree that new
audiences, new avenues for delivery, new kinds of poetry might make a new, a
better American public—a new and better America. If now I’m the one who is
beginning to sound like Whitman, that is no accident. As the title of this talk and
the title of my new book suggest, I too idealize the American nineteenth century
as a time when the public knew that poetry was good for it—though my echo of
Whitman might alert us to something suspicious about this always already
idealized version of both American poetry and the American public (especially
when that public depends on the benevolence of an heiress). I will turn to the
ideal of a unified public—and a unified America-- in a moment, but first it is
worth noticing that the history of the idealization of poetry is of course not a
recent phenomenon and has included many fascinating chapters. That said,
statements like the ones included in the Poetry Foundation’s mission statement
tend to suggest that we may be in the middle of one of the strangest chapters so
far. While Plato so idealized the power of poetry that he exiled the poets, he did
so at a time and place in which there was no question of who reads (or hears or
sees) poetry. Everybody did. When Sir Philip Sidney defended the poet’s power
of invention, he did not do so because no one cared about the poet’s inventions.
Everyone did. When John Stuart Mill pushed the definition of lyric poetry beyond
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the horizon of anyone’s practice (except maybe, in a pinch, Shelley’s), he did not
do so because no one was reading all the poetry that fell short of his mark. As
Stuart Curran has put it, in the first half of the nineteenth century in England
anyway, “the most eccentric feature of [the] entire culture [was] that it was simply
mad for poetry” (5). When Theodor Adorno suggested that the modern lyric “is
always the subjective expression of a social antagonism,” he did not do so
because he worried that his Berlin audience did not care about poetry; on the
contrary, he worried that his title “Lyric and Society” would make his audience
think that “a sphere of expression whose very essence lies in defying the power of
social organization . . . must be arrogantly made by the sociologist into the
opposite of that which it knows itself to be” (63, 56). Adorno was afraid that the
listeners to his 1957 radio address would care about the lyric so much that they
would be angry at a critic who tampered with their ideal. Not until recently has
the idealization of poetry—and the idealization specifically of the lyric—attached
so much potential public power to a genre that we also fear is now considered (in
the words of the Poetry Foundation) “a marginal art” or that can only be imagined
to have power in the context of a narrative of its demise.
It could be argued that this notion of power on the brink of collapse is left
over from the history that idealized the poetic genres everyone did read, but I
think that something else is going on in the many recent instances of the
invocation of such power. In The Americans’ Favorite Poems project, for
example (the public poetry revival project of former American Poet Laureate
Robert Pinsky, supported by the Library of Congress) or in Dana Gioia’s late-
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twentieth-century NEA project I alluded to earlier (which resulted in his book
Can Poetry Matter?), or even in less public-minded literary critical views like
Terry Eagleton’s nostalgia for a practical criticism of poetry, or Jim Longenbach’s
claim that “poets since the time of Callamachus have resisted their own usefulness”
[xi], or Susan Stewart’s assertion that poetry is “a force against effacement—not
merely for individuals but for communities through time as well” [2], or Simon
Jarvis’s contention that “a different kind of thinking happens in verse” [4]) there
lurks the fear that poetry and poetry reading are nearing extinction and the
implication that if we are able to save poetry we will be able to save our minds or
our communities or our integrity or even the economy and the planet. Yet it is
also possible that our collective idealization of poetry as an idea in danger and in
need of rescue—by literary critics, by private and public foundations, and
especially by an imaginary version of the national reading public—is itself a
symptom of rather than a solution to our current dilemma. As Barbara Packer
wrote over a decade ago, predicting the discourse that was about to take hold with
rather uncanny accuracy, “for literary historians. . .poems are essentially
specimens from an ecosystem now vanished; the historian’s aim is to reconstruct
that ecosystem as a comparative anatomist might reconstruct from a few
mastodon teeth not only the skeleton of the extinct beast yet the grasses on which
it fed,” while “at the other end of the spectrum are critical idealists. . .for whom
poems are abstracted from time, from history, from change.” The challenge,
Packer argued, was to combine the work of the historian with the vision of the
idealist. One way to do what Packer imagined we should be doing would be to
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begin to turn the increasingly idealized category of poetry itself back toward the
history of its idealization, not in order to reconstruct an archaic poetic prairie on
which we can no longer graze or to embrace an ideal abstraction in which we can
always float free but in order to tell the difference between poetry as an idea and
poetry as a genre.
So let me follow Packer’s delicate articulation of our current critical
predicament with a perhaps indelicate polemical declaration: Poetry is not a
genre. Poetry is an idea. As I like to tell my students, it is as odd to think of
poetry as a genre as it would be to think of prose as a genre. There are many
distinct verse genres, just as there are many genres of prose, but lineation itself is
not a genre, if by a genre we mean a mode of recognition instantiated in discourse
(and this will be my simple working definition of genre here, so I’ll repeat it: a
genre is a mode of recognition instantiated in discourse). Since just a moment
ago we were all ready to agree that the difference between prose and poetry was
simply visible in the format of lines in print, we have already begun to
acknowledge that if there are large frames for collective, spontaneous, and
dynamic moments of recognition and that it must then follow that there are many
frames within those frames, many collectivities within the collective, many
publics within the public (some of you will have thought of Lerner’s prose simply
as first-person narrative, for example, others as post-postmodern metafiction;
others will have thought of it in relation to Knausgaard and the new autofiction;
some will have thought of Whitman’s genre simply as “poetry” or perhaps as
“Whitman’s Poetry,” some as “free verse” (a phrase not coined until 1915,
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actually), some as apostrophic verse or a version of the Ode, and some as
Romantic Lyric). All genres are mise-en-abyme or “Russian doll” structures—
genres always contain genres that contain other genres-- since genres are not
made up of a list of formal attributes (“sonnets consist of fourteen lines,” for
instance, or “comedies end in marriage and tragedies end in death”) but are
instead already inside you, part of the way you have already learned (or have
already been schooled) to communicate with the people around you. Genres are
modes of sociality—which is to say that sociality would be impossible without
genres (this is Bakhtin’s point in his 1953 essay on “Speech Genres” and it is the
basis for the entire discipline of linguistic anthropology, the discipline which is
the basis for my working definition of genre). Because that sociality depends on
each person’s degree of internalization or indoctrination or just experience, genres
not only shift historically but also shift from person to person, a variation we just
experienced in thinking about the genres we assign (or don’t assign) to Lerner and
Whitman. I agree with Lauren Berlant that genres are always vehicles not only of
collective and normative recognition but also function as “intimate public spheres”
in which those shared recognitions can be queered or bent or calibrated or
adjusted or just personalized. What Berlant’s version of this social historical
understanding of genre holds in the phrase “intimate public sphere” is the way in
which genres address us, hail us, and then (and this is the important turn) the way
in which we enter that scene of address, the ways in which we live there, so that
the given little by little becomes what is made (in Lerner’s language, so that we
can turn bad forms of collectivity into figures of its possibility).
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The idea that poetry is or ever was one genre rather than a variety of
variously experienced and incorporated genres is the primary symptom of the
long historical process I have called the lyricization of poetry. There have been
lots of misunderstandings of my theory of lyricization, and this is not the place to
clear those up, but let me just say here that by “lyricization” I do not mean that all
poetry has become the personal, subjective expression of the individual, or that
this personal genre of expression is the reason that we have come to think that
poetry has lost its public. That seems to me the current understanding of the
predicament of American poetry in public—that is, that the personal lyric has lost
its public, either because we are not interested in or sophisticated enough to
appreciate aesthetically framed personal expression or because we watch too
many episodes through Amazon Prime or HBO (which comes to the same thing).
I think that this understanding is just wrong; the ways in which it is wrong
account for our current desperate attempts to solve the riddle of the
“marginalization” of American poetry in public. If we persist in such
misunderstandings, it won’t matter how many hundreds of millions of dollars we
devote to “expanding and enhancing the presence of poetry in America”—it just
won’t work. So let’s imagine a very different way: what I mean when I say that
we have come to idealize one blurry, lyricized idea of Poetry that no longer
functions as a genre is that the songs, riddles, epigrams, sonnets, epitaphs, blasons,
lieder, elegies, marches, dialogues, conceits, ballads, epistles, hymns, odes,
eclogues, and monodramas considered lyric in the Western tradition before the
early nineteenth century were not lyric in the same sense as the poetry that we
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now think of as lyric. The fact that we now think of almost all poetry as lyric is
the secondary symptom of the historical process of lyricization. As the stipulative
functions of particular genres collapsed into one big idea of poems as lyric (a
process that began in the second half of the eighteenth century and in my view is
ongoing), the only function poems were left to perform in our culture was to
become individual or communal ideals. Such ideals might bind particular groups
or subcultures (in slams, for example, or avant-garde blogs, or poetry cafés, or
salons, or university, foundation, library, and museum reading series), but the
more ideally lyric poems and poetry culture have become, the fewer actual poetic
genres address readers in specific ways. That ratio is responsible for our twentyfirst-century sense that poetry is all-important and at the same time already in its
afterlife. The historical transformation of many varied poetic genres into the
single abstraction of the post-Romantic, nineteenth-century lyric is responsible for
our current, spectral ideal of a bygone genre powerful enough to overcome its
own incipient extinction. We mistakenly think that the lyric flourished in the
nineteenth century and is now “marginalized” when in fact what has happened is
that the genres of poetry that addressed particular publics in the nineteenth
century have now collapsed into an abstraction of Poetry we have confused with
an ideal of the romantic lyric. As the lyricization of poetry has progressed, this
large idea of poetry has subsumed the other social, reciprocal functions that
ballads or odes or elegies or epistles or drinking songs once performed. Poetry
has thus come to circulate as an idea rather than as a genre, as a large abstract
frame rather than as a number of specific forms of sociality and address.
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How does this lyricized ideal of poetry work—or for the most part, not
work-- for contemporary reading publics? What I’ve been describing as the long
historical process of lyricization would mean that by now poetry tends to circulate
as an idea of personal expression rather than as a genre of collective address. For
example, when Dan Chiasson wrote recently in The New Yorker that Claudia
Rankine’s 2014 poem Citizen: An American Lyric challenges “our sense of the
lyric’s natural territory as exclusively personal, outside the scope of politics,” the
use of the word “lyric” as a noun that is so established it can claim “natural
territory” supposes that such poems are so individual they cannot be collective,
which would mean that the lyric would not be a genre in the sense in which I have
defined the term. As I’ve written elsewhere (most recently in the definition of the
lyric in the new Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics and in The Lyric
Theory Reader, which I just co-edited with Yopie Prins), I don’t think that the
lyric is a person, place or thing, exactly, and I have my doubts about our common
uses of the adjective. I’d say that contemporary discourse about the lyric may
stabilize both the noun and the adjective much more than either use of “lyric” was
stabilized at any point since the late eighteenth century. By the time that lyric
became part of Goethe’s tripartite system of genres (along with drama and epic)
in the eighteenth century, the adjective began to become a noun—but a noun that
stood for a wide range of possible referents and that often shape-shifted back into
an adjective. Lyrical Ballads weren’t yet nominative lyrics, but they weren’t
exactly ballads, either. By the end of the nineteenth century, “lyrics” became a
common term for many varied genres of poetry (especially in fancy print
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editions), and by the middle of the twentieth century, “poetry” just became
another work for “lyric” (so the term “lyric” was rarely needed, which makes
Rankine’s resurrection of the term remarkable in itself). Yet part of what
Chiasson’s review of Citizen is reacting to is a much later moment in the history
of lyricization, a moment contiguous with the present. By the mid 1980s, certain
groups of poets began to press back against what they complained of as the
“norm” of the “personal, expressive lyric” and that resistance served to fix the
lyric (often referred to in this late twentieth-century historical phase as “the
romantic lyric,” again as if it had been forged once and for all in the nineteenth
century) into an enemy camp. From the longue durée perspective of the history
of lyricization I’m trying to sketch here in its broadest outlines, this is a false
divide. Once the process of abstraction that turned particular verse genres into
one big lyricized idea of Poetry reached a certain peak in the twentieth century it
didn’t just stop, it kept going, and that movement toward abstraction eventuated in
various avant-garde versions of poetics that defined themselves as anti-lyrical. In
fact, this latter development is not a reversal but a continuation of the ongoing
process of lyricization, and the retro-projection of the lyric as a pre-existent,
nineteenth-century norm is a fantasy. Rankine marks an important new chapter in
this false divide when she subtitles her remarkable recent book “An American
Lyric.” By reclaiming the noun in its decadent historical form, for her own
purposes, Rankine turns the idealized lyric back toward certain practical public
purposes.
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So if my first claim—that poetry has become an idea rather than a genre—
supposes a history of loss, abstraction, blurring, waning, or, indeed,
“marginalization,” I want to make a second claim for contemporary American
poetics. Because history is always unfinished business, the process of lyricization
may be entering a new phase. Again, by “contemporary” I mean poems that have
appeared in the last few years, so what I want to describe is indeed a very new
phenomenon. Rankine seems to me to be at the forefront of an emerging wave of
American poets who are beginning to turn the abstraction of address characteristic
of our current lyricized idea of Poetry away from its wistful gaze at the landscape
of a lost ideal and instead toward specific moments of collective and spontaneous
recognition. Rankine makes our current abstract, lyricized idea of Poetry work
again as a genre—which is to say that she is turning an abstraction back into a
particular mode of address that she calls “lyric.” This newly lyricized mode
brings race, the crucible of any idea of an American public, into painfully sharp
focus. Thus my claim for the practical purpose of this emerging poetics is that it
makes racially marked modes of address obvious by making those modes into a
new genre, a new intimate public sphere, or perhaps it would be better to say into
a genre calibrated to the history of the present. Rankine appropriates a very
Whitmanian (which is to say, nineteenth-century) version of “An American Lyric”
in order to expose the ways in which the generic, lyricized abstraction of poetic
address cannot account for race, either as collective, spontaneous recognition or
as personal expression:
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A woman you do not know wants to join you for lunch. You are visiting
her campus. In the café you both order the Caesar salad. This overlap is
not the beginning of anything because she immediately points out that she,
her father, her grandfather, and you, all attended the same college. She
wanted her son to go there as well, but because of affirmative action or
minority something—she is not sure what they are calling it these days
and weren’t they supposed to get rid of it?—her son wasn’t accepted. You
are not sure if you are meant to apologize for this failure of your alma
mater’s legacy program; instead you ask where he ended up.
The
prestigious school she mentions doesn’t seem to assuage her irritation.
This exchange, in effect, ends your lunch. The salads arrive.
Like Lerner, Rankine embeds a very Whitmanian form of intimate public
address—Whitman’s signature “you”—within a narrative of everyday life.
Unlike Lerner, the Whitmanian strain in these lines does not idealize a lost
moment of poetic collectivity but instead leaves your relation to even this
privileged version of the American dream awkwardly ajar. Rankine’s lines here
are not Whitman’s long lines (those lines that in the nineteenth century were
thought to verge on prose but that now look to us so poetic) but are in fact prose;
format alone does cannot determine genre here. The framing of this prose within a
book called “An American Lyric” and the orientation of that prose toward the you
we cannot but read as Whitman’s national project of address as well as the
isolation of this block of text on an otherwise white page invite us to recognize
this prose as poetry—not as an idea of poetry but as a nested structure of
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conflicting sites of recognition and disavowal. Genres do not blur together into
one large abstraction here; instead, generic outlines become more fixed and
brittle, glaringly obvious in the moments of non-recognition that widen between
them. If “you” are functioning here as “I”—that is, if what Rankine assumes is
what you are said to assume, which seems to be the grammatical situation, in a
perverse literalization of Whitman—then you not only went to Williams College
(which I’m assuming that most of you did not) but you are black (which most of
you probably are not) and so, despite the grammatical interpellation, you probably
do not assume what I assume, and I certainly don’t assume what you assume, if
you assume that I join you in holding a single thing you hold dear. Yet because
we are the you in these lines, we also know that the woman in this scene does not
know anything about what we are thinking. Further, again in a very Whitmanian
move, because we are reading this in print, you know that whatever it is you are
thinking, you can close the book (whatever it is, American Lyric or contemporary
neo-realist novel, complete with Caesar salads) whenever you like. In this casual
snapshot discussion of elite private education, Rankine manages to create a
poetics in which the reader is intimately implicated in a scene of public education.
But public education is of course not always so casual. In the section of
Citizen entitled “In Memory of Trayvon Martin,” which is also subtitled in yet
another genre, as a “Script for Situation Video created in collaboration with John
Lucas” (Rankine’s husband), you read:
On the tip of a tongue one note following another path, another dawn
where the pink sky is the bloodshot of struck, of sleepless, of sorry, or
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senseless, shush. Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years
of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty,
inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a
felony, accumulate into the hours inside our lives where we are all caught
hanging, the rope inside us, the tree inside us, its roots our limbs, a throat
sliced through and when we open our mouth to speak, blossoms, o
blossoms, no place coming out, brother, dear brother, that kind of blue.
The sky is the silence of brothers all the days leading up to my call.
In this stunningly beautiful elegy for a public figure, Rankine makes virtuoso
turns on Dante’s ninth circle of Hell, on Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road,” on
a sermon by Henry Ward Beecher, on Miles Davis, on Isaiah 65, on the
nineteenth-century song form of “John Brown’s Body,” to which we will return,
and I’m sure there are other riffs I’m not catching here, in order to marshal a large
abstract idea of Poetry (rather like Shelley’s idea of a transcendent poetic history
in “Adonais,” his elegy for Keats) as a medium of racial history. The resonance
of pastoral elegy here—not only in the intimation of “Adonais” but also of “When
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (Whitman’s great pastoral elegy for a
public figure and the most beautiful poem in the English language) might seem to
promise a generic redemption or resurrection of that history of public racial
injustice by poetic means, but that’s not what happens in this gorgeous elegy. On
the page facing this passage, Rankine pastes this picture, free of caption or
comment:
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The conversation between this photograph and the passage might at first seem to
be a dialectical relation between private and public perspectives, the history of
racial violence and the lynching tree itself radically personalized in the prose
poem stand aginst the white public radically exposed in the photo. That dialectic
appears even more fixed when we notice the alteration of the photograph,
originally taken August 30th, 1930:
21
Those of you who have read Citizen will know that it is punctuated by
images that address you at intervals timed to reinforce or amplify the text (again,
these images are products of Rankine’s collaboration with her husband John
Lucas). These images invoke media publics embedded in the public that
contemporary poetry supposedly does not have. In the image that stands across
from the elegy for Trayvon Martin, Lucas has taken out the mutilated and hung
black men and sharpened the focus on a particular version of a very American
public. These white people look and point at a blackness that frames the tree that
is inside the us in the text but is very much outside us in the picture. We are
implicated in both scenes of address, and yet we cannot be or have both kinds of
bodies. By taking our gaze off of the bodies cut and lynched and placing that
gaze on the bodies watching, Rankine and Lucas reverse the logic Jacqueline
Goldsby attributes to lynching photography when she describes such photographs
as reinforcing “the scope of lynching’s power to oppress by ordering the nation’s
knowledge in ways that, paradoxically, allowed Americans—both whites and
blacks, in the South as well as throughout the country—to ‘remember to forget’
the violence done to African Americans.” I am suggesting that Rankine is using
what she calls “an American Lyric,” of all things, to reorder such orders of
national knowledge, to reverse such logics of forgetting, to reorganize public
recognition of the ongoing history of the present in which Trayvon Martin and
Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Walter L. Scott and so many unnamed and
unseen have merged into that blacked out background that throws the whiteness
of this public into such vivid relief.
22
I want to make it clear that I am not arguing here that Rankine is part of a
new wave of American poetry in public because her poetry takes up such
spectacularly public figures and causes. On the contrary, I am arguing that
Rankine is making a difference in the history of poetics, or what I have called the
history of lyricization, and that the subject of race makes it possible for her to do
that because race bends the lines of address in specific directions toward
particular moments of recognition that cannot be blurred into one abstract idea of
a public or one abstract idea of poetry. When the poet Kenneth Goldsmith caused
a scandal last year by reading a poem he called “The Body of Michael Brown” at
Brown University, he also appropriated a scene of spectacular racial violence for
poetic purposes, but his way of turning such a public issue into poetry worked to
very different effect. I wasn’t at Brown for the reading, and Goldsmith has not
published (and now think will probably not publish) the poem, which was a
reading of a redacted version of Brown’s autopsy report. Goldsmith clearly
thought of this reading as an extension of his “uncreative writing” project, which
he has described as a response to a contemporary moment when “long-cherished
notions of creativity are under attack, eroded by file-sharing, media culture,
widespread sampling, and digital replication” “The world is full of texts, more or
less interstingl” Goldsmith likes to say, “I do not wish to add any more” (a
statement which is itself simply a repetition of the conceptual artist Douglas
Huebler’s statement “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting. I do
not wish to add any more.”) Instead, he appropriates, pirates, plunders, and
plagiarizes public documents in what he describes as an anti-lyrical poetic project.
23
By anti-lyrical, Goldsmith means to oppose his form of conceptual writing to the
personal expression of the emotional truth of the self. Such an uncreative, antiexpressive practice promises to make American poetry public in the sense that
the texts of which that poetry is made are literally public: news reports, telephone
books, radio broadcasts, internet posts, tweets, weather reports, etc. Yet when
Goldsmith read his uncreative piece on Michael Brown at Brown last year, his
appropriation of the autopsy report provoked widespread outrage. The ripple
effects have been national and have included death threats, but even that weekend
at Brown the graduate student and poet Aaron Apps staged a furious sound piece
broadcast through the voice of a computer:
The image, the death, is ubiquitous. Lyricizing a racialization of Brown’s
corpse is horrific. . .How dare you make poetry porn out of a medicalized,
dehumanized body, how dare you?
Goldsmith’s defense of his performance in response to Apps and to the flood of
other protests has gone something like this: “I indeed stated at the beginning of
my reading that this was a poem called ‘The Body of Michael Brown’; I never
stated, ‘I am going to read the autopsy report of Michael Brown.’ That said, I
didn’t add or alter a single word or sentiment that did not preexist in the original
text, for to do so would be to go against my nearly three decades’ practice of
conceptual writing, one that states that a writer need not write any new texts but
rather reframe those that already exist in the world to greater effect than any
subjective interpretation could lend. Perhaps people feel uncomfortable with my
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uncreative writing, but for me, this is the writing that is able to tell the truth in the
strongest and clearest way possible.”
This is not the place for me to take a side in this debate, but I do think that
“The Body of Michael Brown” exposed something about Goldsmith’s conceptual
project that had been hard to see before. When Apps accuses Goldsmith of
lyricizing a racialization of Brown’s corpse he may or may not mean what I mean
when I say that all poetry has been lyricized over the last two centuries; I think
that what he means is that to make a black murdered body into poetry for a white
audience is the kind of obscenity that Rankine makes so graphically visible, and I
agree. But Goldsmith also lyricized the autopsy report by abstracting its mode of
address, turning its public into the poetry-hearing-and-reading public at Brown.
In this sense, he unwittingly participated in a long history of the lyricization of a
public figure who becomes a racial martyr, since of course his title is also an echo
of “John Brown’s Body,” the song that was the subject of countless broadsides
before and during the Civil War, that was the basis of “The Battle Hymn of the
Republic,” that was the subject of one of Melville’s most beautiful post-bellum
lyricizations, and that was then awkwardly (though not apparently finally)
modernized by Stephen Vincent Benet in his popular long narrative poem of 1928.
“John Brown’s Body” circulated as marching song, ballad, parody, ode, hymn,
chorus, epic, lyric, anthem, and elegy; it addressed abolitonists, anti-abolitionists,
Christians, revolutionaries and pacifists. It managed to make a white man the
figure for nineteenth-century sacrifice and suffering in slavery’s overthrow and
aftermath. In this sense as in others, Goldsmith’s ostensibly anti-lyrical project is
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actually a direct inheritor and continuation of the long American history of
lyricization and it participates as well in our contemporary idealization of a
nineteenth-century version of American poetry in public.
I can and probably should end on that disconcerting note, but if I could
impose on your patience for just a few more minutes, I want to end this first
lecture on American Poetry in Public by returning to an alternative to the sort of
abstraction and idealization (of poetry, of the nineteenth century, and of the
public) that Goldsmith’s poem performed despite (ore really, because of) itself.
Terrance Hayes’s “Antebellum House Party,” published around the same time as
Citizen and the Ben Lerner novel with which we began— it came out almost in
The New Yorker issue of April 28, 2014 and is now reprinted in Hayes’s 2015
How to be Drawn, a book dedicated to “the ones like us”-- does not idealize the
dissolution and abstraction of personhood, as Lerner’s prose does, and it also does
not frame a publicly massacred black body as a poem, as Goldsmith’s
performance did, and there are good reasons why it does not do either of these
things. Those reasons seem too obvious to state, yet the problem of stating the
obvious turns out to be one of the things Hayes’s poem is about. In Whitman’s
antebellum New York, the “dumb, beautiful ministers” of the downtown skyline
might “furnish. . .parts toward eternity,” and such furniture might be imagined by
Lerner as a way to make bad forms of twenty-first century collectivity figures of
its nineteenth-century possibility, but at Hayes’s antebellum house party, the
collective literally and metaphorically depends on a person addressed as furniture,
a person abstracted into the furniture of the collective. I will devote the next
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lecture to the importance of this inversion, but it’s worth noting that the difference
between Lerner and Goldsmith and Hayes is a difference in the genre as well as in
the racism of bad forms of collectivity: while Lerner idealizes antebellum New
York and poetry in prose, and Goldsmith despite his protests idealizes poetry’s
public potential, Hayes insists on the aesthetics of verse form in a poem (and a
New Yorker poem at that) not only in strict tercets but in metrically complex
lineation (the meter feels regular, but these are not fourteeners and they are also
not strictly dactylic; I could get really fancy and call them basically
decapentasyllabic, which would mean that they are based on a quantitative Greek
form of political verse, but I would be making that up. Most scansion consists in
just such speculative flights of fancy, of course, and as my classical fantasy
implies, most scansion entails determining what metrical schemes “the ones like
us” will recognize. When I wrote to Hayes to ask about the meter, he responded
that “tis the rhythm of the breath, methinks,” a response that probably means that
he was making fun of me. A friend of mine thinks that the beat of the lines is
fundamentally hip-hop, but that seems to me racial profiling). More obviously,
the poem radically de-idealizes antebellum American culture and its twenty-firstcentury legacy. For black people, the nineteenth century doesn’t look in
retrospect like a happy time for American poetry in public. But does Hayes’s
poem also de-idealize poetry? I think that it does, and the ways in which it does
bear some relation to Rankine’s strategies in Citizen. Like Rankine, Hayes turns
an abstract idea of poetry—here allied to technical skill rather than to allusion-back into a genre of public address with a vengeance. That vengeance is a form
27
of rage in Hayes, and that scary black rage is carefully, painstakingly constrained.
If Lerner’s hipster affect depends on a certain flatness and Goldsmith’s
conceptual performance depends on the formal constraint of words given and
never made, then Hayes’s affect is held in check by the formal determination of
the lines themselves, as if poetic form could become an anti-Kantian Afropessimist strategy. An earlier Hayes, poem, simply called “Sonnet,” repeats the
line We sliced the watermelon into smiles fourteen times in three quatrains and a
couplet; the perfect pentameter performs the difference between the recognition of
a sonnet as a genre and the recognition of cultural misrecognition comically—or
meta-comically, while the tercets of “Antebellum House Party” perform generic
constraint tragically, or meta-tragically. In the new book, HOW TO BE DRAWN,
each poem depends on a different constraint, some as simple as blank verse,
another a elaborate as “the style of a crime report”. In “Antebellum House Party,”
Hayes uses his tercets to lyricize a racialized body, but his form of lyricization,
like Rankine’s, turns that body itself out of rather than into spectacle, turns the
already objectified person into a public project of objectification in which we are
forced to participate. This bad form of collectivity cannot become a figure of its
possibility. We imagine with the poet the way in which nineteenth-century
history comes the history of the present, uninterrupted; the nineteenth century is
not this poem’s dream but this poem’s nightmare, and none of us can escape it;
the tercets are not our lyric release but our lyricized implication in the scene of
ongoing American violence and subjection that keeps never stopping. It seems to
me that if Rankine and Hayes are the new representatives of American poetry in
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public, then it is time to change our stories about poetry, about the public, and
especially about America. I am amazed to be able to say that I think that just in
the last few years such a change has become possible, and I am sorry to be
running out of time to say more about how and why I think we may be on the
brink of a new moment in American public poetry, a moment when the forms of
recognition instantiated in the discourse of lyricization are undergoing a radical
adjustment, a new mode of public exposure, a new version of a distinctly
racialized intimate public sphere. I will end today simply by reading the poem
rather than by giving a reading of it. The fact that this rage-filled address to the
American public managed to pass as a New Yorker poem is one of the most
astonishing things about it, and I hesitate to diminish that astonishment with
commentary making explicit much of what is left furiously implicit in the lines
themselves. I will close simply by reprinting it, and you can see for yourselves
whether you think that it approaches the apostrophic public ambition of the
Whitman poem with which we began. If it does (and I think that it does) then the
twist it gives that apostrophe should hurt. I will address that intended poetic
injury to the (always already white) American public in my next lecture.
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Antebellum House Party
To make the servant in the corner unobjectionable
Furniture, we must first make her a bundle of tree parts
Axed and worked to confidence. Oak-jawed, birch-backed,
Cedar-skinned, a pillowy bosom for the boss infants,
A fine patterned cushion the boss can fall upon.
Furniture does not pine for a future wherein the boss
Plantation house will be ransacked by cavalries or Calvary.
A kitchen table can, in the throes of a yellow-fever outbreak,
Become a cooling board holding the boss wife’s body.
It can on ordinary days also be an ironing board holding
Boss garments in need of ironing. Tonight it is simply a place
For a white cup of coffee, a tin of white cream. Boss calls
For sugar and the furniture bears it sweetly. Let us fill the mouth
Of the boss with something stored in the pantry of a house
War, decency, nor bedevilled storms can wipe from the past.
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Furniture’s presence should be little more than a warm feeling
In the den. The dog staring into the fireplace imagines each log
Is a bone that would taste like a spiritual wafer on his tongue.
Let us imagine the servant ordered down on all fours
In the manner of an ottoman whereupon the boss volume
Of John James Audubon’s “Birds of America” can be placed.
Antebellum residents who possessed the most encyclopedic
Bookcases, luxurious armoires, and beds with ornate cotton
Canopies often threw the most photogenic dinner parties.
Long after they have burned to ash, the hound dog sits there
Mourning the succulent bones he believes the logs used to be.
Imagination is often the boss of memory. Let us imagine
Music is radiating through the fields as if music were reward
For suffering. A few of the birds Audubon drew are now extinct.
The Carolina parakeet, passenger pigeon, and Labrador duck
No longer nuisance the boss property. With so much
Furniture about, there are far fewer woods. Is furniture’s fate
As tragic as the fate of an axe, the part of a tree that helps
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Bring down more upstanding trees? The best furniture
Can stand so quietly in a room that the room appears empty.
If it remains unbroken, it lives long enough to become antique.