Abstract
The relationship between U.S. poetry and its democratic culture has been cast in the most literal of roles by some of its commentators. Bill Moyers’s high-profile and well-funded “Search for American Democracy,” for example, was earnest in its celebration of the importance of the nation’s poets. “Democracy needs her poets,” Moyers reminds us in the introduction to the book accompanying his successful The Language of Life series, “because our hope for survival is in recognizing the reality of one another’s lives.”1 The assumptions supporting ventures such as Moyers’s have been treated with derision by critics on both the Left and the Right, disdainful of its adherence to the possibility of transparent self-expression and acquiescence to a blandly depoliticized multiculturalism.2 The suggestion that democracy relies on the politics of an institutionally produced notion of “recognition” seems to provide a rather weak solution to the tension between the cultural homogeneity demanded by the Right and the risk of cultural incommensurability associated with the social movements on the Left. Claims such as Moyers’s appear to suggest the effect on poetry of the “uneasy merger of individualism with institutional collectivism” that has come to debilitate the popular potential of U.S. democratic culture.3
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Notes
Bill Moyers, The Languages of Life (New York: Main Street Books, 1996), xii–xiv.
Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture: Between Community and Institution (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999).
Richard M. Merelman, Partial Visions: Culture and Politics in Britain, Canada and the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 59.
Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 172.
Debra Morris, “Privacy, Privation, Perversity: Towards New Representations of the Personal,” Signs 25, no. 2 (2000), 325.
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 26.
Drucilla Cornell, At the Heart of Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 39.
Charles Altieri, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Oskar Negt, and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, translated by Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 15.
The obvious and important exception to this is the work of Adrienne Rich. See Altieri, Self and Sensibility; Walter Kalaidjian, Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
Holden assumes a dichotomy between men and women’s poetry, suggesting that “male” poetry “although realistic in setting and characterization” tends to be a poetry of “sensibility” whereas “female” poetry “though often anguished and passionate, attempts to deal realistically with questions of history, ideology, social and personal responsibility—to deal with ideas rather than “feelings.” Jonathan Holden, The Fate of American Poetry (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1991), 29.
Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
Diane Elam, e.g., suggests that the simultaneity of deconstruction and feminism in the academy produces the “political institution in which non-political thought can occur and the non-political institution in which political thought can occur”; Diane Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme (London: Routledge, 1994), 94.
Henry Giroux, “Modernism, Postmodernism and Feminism,” Postmodernism, Feminism and Cultural Politics, edited by Henry Giroux (Albany: State University of New York, 1991).
Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985).
Michael Bérubé, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centres: Tolson, Pynchon and the Politics of the Canon (New York: Cornell University Press, 1992), 36.
Stephen Wilbers, The Iowa Writers Workshop: Origins, Emergence and Growth (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1980).
John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1938), 328.
Alan Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 86.
Dave Smith, Local Assays (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 222.
D.G. Myers, The Elephants Teaching: Creative Writing since 1880 (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996), 168.
Wendell Berry, “The Specialization of Poetry,” Hudson Review 28 (1975), 12.
Berry, “The Specialization of Poetry,” 25. This anxiety was repeated in other critical writing of the 1970s, such as Charles Molesworth, The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979) and was still present in much later texts such as
Ross Talarico, Spreading the Word: Poetry and the Survival of Community in America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
Joseph Epstein, “Who Killed Poetry?” Commentary 86, no. 2 (1988), 20.
George Garret, “The Future of Creative Writing Programs,” Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy, edited by Joseph Moxley (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers in English, 1989).
Yet an account more vexed and more complex than this lapserian narrative of academic rationalization has also been proposed. Lorenzo Thomas, e.g., has noted that the “anti-communist and anti-industrial stance” of the Southern Agrarians so active in Iowa in the 1920s and 1930s was profoundly implicated in a white supremacism that could uniquely afford to be so nostalgic about the “southern way of life.” Lorenzo Thomas, Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Birmingham: Alabama University Press, 2000), 86. Walter Kalaidjian has similarly noted that the cultural politics of this particular form of New Criticism was based not simply on a reaction against a newly powerful consumer culture but also on a fascistically “proactive, anti-Communist agenda.”
Walter Kaladjian, “Marketing Modern Poetry and the Southern Public Sphere,” Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization Rereading, edited by Kevin J.H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 302.
Walter Kalaidjian, Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 23.
Paul Engle, “The Writer on Writing,” On Creative Writing, edited by Paul Engle (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1964).
Robert Dana, “Preface,” A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, edited by Robert Dana (Iowa: Iowa University Press, 1999), x. This was an assumption shared by Stegner. See
Wallace Stegner, On the Teaching of Creative Writing (Hanover, NH: Montogomery Endowment, Dartmouth College, 1988).
Paul Engle, “The Creative Person in a World of Conflict,” Education during World Transition, edited by Charles M. Allen (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1951), 38.
Rita Dove, “Introduction to the Best of American Poetry 2000,” Best American Poetry 2000, edited by Rita Dove (New York: Scribner, 2000), 17.
Rita Dove, The Poet’s World (Washington DC: The Library of Congress, 1995), 67.
Alison Booth, “Abduction and Other Severe Pleasures,” Callaloo 19, no. 1 (1996), 125.
Carol Muske, Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography and the Shape of the Self (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 92.
Arnold Rampersad, “The Poems of Rita Dove,” Callaloo, 9 no. 1 (1986), 53.
Zofia Burr, Of Women, Poetry and Power (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 185.
Rita Dove, On the Bus with Rosa Parks (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 69.
Pat Parker, Movement in Black: An Expanded Edition (Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1999), 122.
Marable Manning, Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1990 (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1991). What proportion of the Afro-American community experienced these positive changes remains contested. William Chafe suggested that as many as 35–45% of black families succeeded in achieving a middle-class lifestyle while Marable Manning suggests it may be as low as 7–10%.
William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America since World War II (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by J.N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 288.
Rita Dove, The Darker Face of the Earth (Brownsville: Storyline Press, 1994), 115.
See Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: American in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 118.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by P. Williams and L. Chrishman (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).
Kevin Stein, Private Poets, Worldy Acts: Public and Private History in Contemporary American Poetry (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1996), 146.
Carolyn Forché, Gathering the Tribes (Yale: Yale University Press, 1976), 4.
Carolyn Forché, “Foreword to Inside Apartheid: One Woman’s Struggle in South Africa,” Inside Apartheid: One Woman’s Struggle in South Africa, edited by Janet Levine (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1988). Forché also wrote the text for El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers, edited by Susan Meisela, Harry Matthison, and Fae Rubenstein (New York: Writers and Readers Publishing Co-Operative, 1984).
Michael Greer, “Politicising the Modern: Carolyn Forché in El Salvador and America,” The Centennial Review xxx, no. 2 (1986), 168.
Carolyn Forché, The Country between Us (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 16.
Jonathan Holden, Style and Authenticity in Postmodern American Poetry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 76.
Robert Pinsky, The Poet and the World (New York: Ecco Press, 1988).
Carolyn Forché, “Sensibility and Responsibility,” The Writer and Human Rights, edited by Toronto Arts Group for Human Rights (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 23–24.
Carolyn Forché, “Roundtable Comments,” The Centennial Review xxx, no. 2 (1986), 130.
Carolyn Forché, “The Writer in Politics,” The Writer in Politics, edited by William Gass and Lorin Cuoco (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1996), 141.
Carolyn Forché, “Introduction,” Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forché (New York: Norton, 1993), 31.
Carolyn Forché, “On Subjectivity,” Onward: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, edited by Peter Baker (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 350.
Carolyn Forché, The Angel of History (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), Preface.
Bill Roorbach, Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2. This genre is, as such a broad definition implies, also much broader and less politically coherent than Forché’s interpretation of it perhaps suggests. In its institutionalized forms, the genre can include diaries, journals, memoirs, personal essays, cultural criticism, and travelogues.
Carolyn Forché, “The New Literature,” Writing Creative NonFiction: Instructions and Insights from the Teachers of the AW P, edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard (New York: Writer’s Digest Books, 2001).
Shoshona Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanlaysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), xvii.
Helen Vendler, “Ascent into Limbo,” The New Republic, July 11, 1994, 27, 28. Cited in Thomas Gardner, “Introduction,” Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry, edited by Thomas Gardner (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 4.
Jorie Graham, “Introduction,” Best American Poetry 1990 (New York: Collier Books, 1990). Reprinted on the “Jorie Graham” page at the website for The Academy of American Poets (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15774. Last accessed September 2006).
Jorie Graham, “A Presidential Lecture by Writer’s Workshop and English Department Associate Professor Jorie Graham,” University of Iowa, February 3, 1991.
Cynthia Hogue, “The Speaking Subject In/Me: Gender and Ethical Subjectivity in the Poetry of Jorie Graham,” Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry, edited by Thomas Gardner (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 242.
Helen Vendler, The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 82.
Jorie Graham, The Errancy (London: Carcanet Press, 1998), 1.
Isobel Armstrong, “Writing from the Broken Middle,” Women: A Cultural Review 9, no. 1 (1998), 72.
Jorie Graham, Overlord (London: Carcanet Press, 2005), 2.
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© 2007 Nicky Marsh
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Marsh, N. (2007). The Poetics of Privacy: Writing the Lyric Self. In: Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607156_3
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