Notes

Introduction Civic Poetry, 1979–2012

1. My use of the term “intellectual” derives in large part from Michel Foucault’s distinction, made in a 1976 interview, between “universal” and “specific” intel-lectual: “Intellectuals have become used to working not in the modality of the ‘universal,’ the ‘exemplary,’ the ‘just-and-true-for all,’ but within specific sec-tors, at the precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them (housing, the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university, family and sexual relations). This has undoubtedly given them a much more immedi-ate and concrete awareness of struggles. And they have met here with problems that are specific, ‘nonuniversal,’ and often different from those of the prole-tariat or the masses. And yet I believe intellectuals have actually been drawn closer to the proletariat and the masses, for two reasons. First, because it has been a question of real, material, everyday struggles; and second, because they have often been confronted, albeit in a different form, by the same adversary as the proletariat, namely, the multinational corporations, the judicial and political apparatuses, the property speculators, and so on. This is what I would call the ‘specific’ intellectual as opposed to the ‘universal’ intellectual.” Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 3: Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: New Press, 1997), 126–27.

2. 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.

3. 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

146 l Notes

Press, 2002), Harrington expands his argument to provide “the history of the construction of poetry as a category in the United States” (10).

4. 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.

5. Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 181n5.

6. Giles, Global Remapping, 12.7. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dial Press, 1963), 119. At the

close of his essay “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” Baldwin writes: “If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.” Thirty-five years later, Richard Rorty identi-fied this kind of civic passion (though without Baldwin’s entwining of race and sexuality) as central to the future of political activism: “Emotional involve-ment with one’s country—feelings of intense shame or glowing pride aroused by various parts of its history, and by various present-day national policies—is necessary if political deliberation is to be imaginative and productive.” Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 3.

8. Robert von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 28 and 228.

9. Other valuable surveys of post-World War II American poetry include the fol-lowing: Cary Nelson, Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry (1981); James E. B. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945–1965 (1984); Paul Breslin, The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry Since the Fifties (1987); Walter Kalaidjian, Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (1989); Kevin Stein, Private Poets, Worldly Acts: Public and Private History in Contemporary Poetry (1996); James Longenbach, Modern Poetry After Modernism (1997); and Edward J. Brunner, Cold War Poetry: The Social Text in the Fifties Poem (2004). See also The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945, ed. Jennifer Ashton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

10. Giles, “Globalization,” in A Companion to American Literary Studies, 381.11. See Amy Kaplan’s argument in her 2003 presidential address to the American

Studies Association: “While specifying the field as the study of the United States or recharting it as the comparative study of the Americas, we cannot lose sight of the power of ‘America’ in American studies. We have the obligation to study and critique the meanings of America in their multiple dimensions, to understand the enormous power wielded in its name, its ideological and affective force, as well as its sources for resistance to empire. We have thought much about ‘national identity’ in American studies, but we also need to study more about the differences among nation, state, and empire, when they seem to

Notes l 147

fuse and how they are at odds, to think of how state power is wielded at home and abroad in the name of America.” Amy Kaplan, “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 17, 2003,” American Quarterly 56.1 (March 2004): 10.

12. Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 122.

13. 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 com-parison 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.

14. 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.

15. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 182. Spanos charges: “The nation-state as a system is still, despite the pressures of late capitalism, very much intact. If this was not quite evident when this version of globalization theory began to emerge at the end of the twentieth century with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, it certainly became manifest in the wake of 9/11, when the United States, having recuperated its exceptionalist national identity—that is, cured itself of the ‘Vietnam syndrome’—drew on the mobilizing power of its ethos to launch its global ‘war on terror’ in the overt name of the American empire and the Pax Americana.” William V. Spanos, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 189.

16. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 43.17. “Let’s agree—so that we may then seek an explanation—that this century has

served as the occasion for vast crimes. But let’s immediately add that it’s not over, now that criminals with names have been replaced by criminals as anon-ymous as joint-stock companies.” Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Malden: Polity Press, 2007), 10. Badiou juxtaposes the “liberal” cen-tury with what he calls the “Soviet” century (1917–1991) and the “totalitarian” century (1917–1976) (ibid., 1–3).

148 l Notes

18. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 336.

19. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 303.20. Michael Hardt with Leonard Schwartz, The Production of Subjectivity:

Conversations with Michael Hardt, The Conversant (2012): 14.21. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization

(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996), 19.22. Ulf Hedetoft and Mette Hjort, “Introduction,” in The Postnational Self: Belonging

and Identity, ed. Ulf Hedetoft and Mette Hjort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xx. While their titles may suggest otherwise, influen-tial studies of cosmopolitanism like Timothy Brennan’s At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (1997) and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) acknowledge the continuing strength of local and national affiliations in the age of globalization.

23. 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.

24. As Gregory Jusdanis explains, “The success of nationalism is that it makes political attachments a personal process. The transfer of a person’s loyalties to the nation is an intensely psychological dynamic, which is why we speak of nationality as a form of identity. . . . Nationalism works through people’s hearts, nerves, and gut. It is an expression of culture through the body.” Gregory Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 30 and 31.

25. 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 con-cludes: “The transnational prevents the closure of the nation. But the transna-tional 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.

26. Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, 28.27. In recent decades, scholars like Bernard Williams, Eve Sedgwick, Philip Fisher,

Elspeth Probyn, Ruth Leys, Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai, and many others have investigated the role of affects in visual and literary arts. Most of these analy-ses distinguish between internally experienced feelings or moods and externally manifested emotions or passions. See Charles Altieri: “Feelings are elemental affective states characterized by an imaginative engagement in the immediate processes of sensation. Moods are modes of feeling where the sense of subjectiv-ity becomes diffuse and sensation merges into something close to atmosphere,

Notes l 149

something that seems to pervade an entire scene or situation. Emotions are affects that involve the construction of attitudes that typically establish a par-ticular cause and so situate the agent within a narrative. As a result, emotions typically generate some kind of action or identification. Finally, passions are emotions within which we project significant stakes for the identity that they make possible.” Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 48. See also Antonio Damasio’s somewhat simpler neurobiological model: “emotions are actions or movements, many of them public, visible to others as they occur in the face, in the voice, in specific behaviors. . . . Feelings, on the other hand, are always hidden, like all mental images necessarily are, unseen to anyone other than their rightful owner, the most private property of the organism in whose brain they occur.” Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando: Harcourt, 2003), 28.

28. William Butler Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 521–22.

29. Juliana Spahr, “Contemporary US Poetry and Its Nationalisms,” Contemporary Literature 52.4 (Winter 2011): 711.

30. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 57.

31. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 205.

32. Ibid., 5.33. 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.

34. Ibid., 67. For more on “choral” poetry, see W. R. Johnson: “Human beings have, after all, not only private emotions and selves but also public emotions and selves. For solo lyric and the private emotions that it shapes, the lyric situ-ation is Ich und Welt (“I and world”); for choral poetry, as we have seen with Pindar, that situation is Wir und Welt (“we and world”), and, unlike that of solo lyric, this situation does not define opposition or otherness. Its function is not to clarify the limits and the nature of the private self; rather in Wir und Welt the choral poet imagines those emotions which lead us to want to understand both the possibility of our communion with each other and the possibility of our communion with the world.” W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 17. Johnson devotes the last chapter of his study to Whitman.

35. Shira Wolosky, Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 176.

36. See Joseph Lease’s description of Whitman’s poetics: “Whitman’s representa-tive ‘I’ makes a social contract with a representative ‘you’—a subject position many readers, many citizens, may enter. Where information appears, this con-tract is often enacted through parataxis, one observation following another

150 l Notes

in parallel constructions that can seem direct and unmediated. And yet the paratactic logic of observation and enumeration does more than assemble facts; its juxtaposition of information about sexes, classes, occupations, and regions opens a virtual social space in the poem, making the poem a figure of soci-ety.” Joseph Lease, “Poetry as Information,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edition, ed. Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, and Paul Rouzer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 706. Lease also notes that “from a certain angle, public poetry has always been a poetry of information” (ibid.).

37. As Jarrell despairingly put it, “The poet lives in a world whose newspapers and magazines and books and motion pictures and radio stations and television stations have destroyed, in a great many people, even the capacity for under-standing real poetry, real art of any kind.” Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 18.

38. Helen Vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 35.

39. Hank Lazer, “The People’s Poetry,” Boston Review 29.2 (April/May 2004): 47.40. Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry Between

Community and Institution (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 37.41. Ibid., 38.42. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 127.43. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1996), 20 (emphasis in the original).44. In the concluding section of The Anatomy of Nonsense, Winters notes: “One

of the most curious facts about the poets of my own generation and of the generation following—that is, about the poets now, roughly, under fifty years of age—is this: that many of the best of them are teaching in the universities.” And later: “of this I feel sure: that this movement offers more hope for the invigoration of American literature than does anything else in sight; that it offers the only hope for American criticism; and that it offers an opportunity for the real improvement of the teaching of literature and the practice of liter-ary scholarship. A handful of brilliant poets, even if congenitally minor, scat-tered judiciously throughout our best universities, might easily begin to turn us a little in the direction of civilization.” Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1947), 570 and 574.

45. Ibid., 569.46. 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 coed-ited with Joan Retallack, Poetry & Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (2006). See my review of this volume, “Professing Poetry,” in Jacket 34 (October 2007).

47. As Alan Golding argued as early as 1995, the university is “where the read-ing of poetry mainly takes place—an institution dedicated to the making of meaning and to the maintenance and dissemination of reading conventions.”

Notes l 151

Alan Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 160.

48. Terrence Des Pres, Praises & Dispraises: Poetry and Politics in the 20th Century (New York: Viking, 1988), 119 (emphasis in the original).

49. Thomas R. Edwards, Imagination and Power: A Study of Poetry on Public Themes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 6.

50. Robert von Hallberg, “Poetry, Politics, and Intellectuals,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 8: Poetry and Criticism 1940–1995, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 28.

51. Ibid., 25.52. Lowry Nelson, Jr., Poetic Configurations: Essays in Literary History and Criticism

(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 148.53. Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (London:

Oxford University Press, 1945), 339. Hazard Adams notes some ambivalence in Plato’s ideas about poets: “Socrates knows well enough that the poets who are allowed to remain are not good poets but rather those who might well be sub-ject to the ridicule directed at poetasters or, in our time, the official work of the poets laureate. That before he is exiled, the mimetic poet is to be worshiped as holy and wondrous as well as delightful suggests Socrates’ considerable attach-ment to the old way even though he is being ironic, or half-ironic, if such a description may be permitted. That attachment could be called superstitious. It is as if Socrates’ statement is designed to placate the Muses of Poetry even as they are dismissed in a moment of humor tinged with regret. It appears that there will not be much fun in Socrates’ commonwealth, but there is quite a lot in its inventor.” Hazard Adams, The Offense of Poetry (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2007), 32. I will return to Adams’s study in Chapter 3.

54. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Freistat (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 535.

55. As Hart Crane, a great admirer of Plato, said in a 1932 letter to Gorham Munson, “No wonder Plato considered the banishment of poets; their reorga-nizations of chaos on basis perhaps divergent from his own threatened the logic of his system, itself founded on assumptions that demanded the very defense of poetic construction which he was fortunately able to provide.” Hart Crane, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1966), 226 (emphasis in the original).

56. 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.

57. 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).

58. Cary Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), 147–48.

152 l Notes

59. “If who one loves, fears, loathes, envies, or pities is not simply the product of accident but reflects a person’s values and perceptions, then emotions in some way enact a person’s attitudes toward the world. An emotion, in its appropri-ateness or inappropriateness, is a response that can reveal those fundamental commitments that provide an orientation for a practical life. When seen as an integral component within the practice of judgment, emotion can come to be something other than the tyrannical force that Gorgias celebrates and that Kant sought to outlaw. Instead, emotion can be a source of knowledge, enabling both discrimination and action, and any account of thought that hopes to be adequate to the complexity of the human mind needs to go beyond an understanding of reason as a transpersonal or formal mode of inference and incorporate emotion in an appropriate way.” James L. Kastely, “Rhetoric and Emotion,” in A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 223.

60. Rukeyser says this in a film documentary They Are Their Own Gifts (1978) directed by Lucille Rhodes and Margaret Murphy. Compare with Terry Eagleton’s definition of the political: “I mean by the political no more than the way we organize our social life together, and the power-relations which this involves.” Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 194.

61. Humphrey Carpenter, Auden (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 419. Carpenter also quotes a letter that Auden wrote to Stephen Spender in 1967 in which he says: “The ideal at which I aim is a style which shall combine the drab sober truthfulness of prose with a poetic uniqueness of expression” (ibid.).

62. Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (New York: Viking Press, 1981), xiv.63. 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.

64. 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 experi-ences 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.

65. Charles Altieri, The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), 147.

Notes l 153

66. Ibid., 156. Other scholars have recently been making a case for Auden’s impor-tance to post-World War II US poetry, most notably Aidan Wasley in The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene (2010), Christopher Nealon in The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), and Bonnie Costello in Pronoun Trouble: Auden and Others in the First Person Plural (forthcoming).

67. During his “American” period, Auden frequently contributed to general-interest publications like The New Republic, The Nation, Partisan Review, Esquire, and The New York Review of Books, and was often in demand as judge of literary prizes, commencement speaker, and lecturer. Auden is the highest-ranked poet in Richard A. Posner’s empirical study of “top 100 public intellectuals by media mentions” between 1995 and 2000 (other poets on the list include Bertold Brecht, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and William Butler Yeats). Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

68. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 1991), 606.69. Language poetry is of course a much more heterogeneous set of aesthetic, rhetor-

ical, and social practices than I briefly outline here. As Nealon notes, differences exist even among its chief practitioners and theoreticians, not only in their texts but also in the ways they construe the relationship between writer and reader: “[Lyn Hejinian’s] emphasis on participatory, even empowering, relation between writer and reader runs quietly against the language of disorientation and baffle-ment [advocated by Barrett Watten and Ron Silliman]. The two arguments are not opposite: one can easily imagine a pedagogy in which disorientation is used to reorient the reader, to make her more agile and alert. But it is an unstable mixture nonetheless.” Nealon, The Matter of Capital, 134.

70. 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.

71. Ibid., 67. In his 1913 essay “On the Addressee,” Mandelstam argues: “our sense of communication is inversely proportional to our real knowledge of the addressee and directly proportional to our felt need to interest him in ourselves.” Osip Mandelstam, The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed., Jane Gary Harris, trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), 72.

72. Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 113.

73. 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.

74. Spahr, “Contemporary US Poetry,” 712.75. Anne Boyer, “Poets and Lies,” Harriet: A Poetry Blog, August 2012, http://www

.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/08/are-we-often-seeing-what-is-untrue -as-true-anne-boyer-on-poets-and-lying/.

154 l Notes

76. In Dickinson’s Misery, Jackson explains: “The metaphor of the ‘soliloquy’ is a way for Mill to emphasize the effect of poetic address on its reader and at the same time insist that such an effect is unintentional. But is it? Mill’s extension of the metaphor makes his double bind clearer: ‘it may be said that poetry, which is printed on hot-pressed paper, and sold at a bookseller’s shop, is a solilo-quy in full dress, and upon the stage. But there is nothing absurd in the idea of such a mode of soliloquizing. . . . The actor knows that there is an audience present; but if he act as though he knew it, he acts ill.’ Of course, an actor does intend to produce an effect in his audience, so while the theatrical metaphor allows Mill to distinguish lyric from public or persuasive rhetoric, it also breaks down the distinction he wants to maintain: it makes lyric into a public perfor-mance that only pretends to be self-addressed.” Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 9 and 131. We can compare Jackson’s argument with T. S. Eliot’s observation, in his essay “The Three Voices of Poetry,” that “in every poem, from the private meditation to the epic or the drama, there is more than one voice to be heard. If the author never spoke to himself, the result would not be poetry, though it might be magnificent rhetoric; and part of our enjoyment of great poetry is the enjoyment of overhearing words which are not addressed to us. But if the poem were exclusively for the author, it would be a poem in a private and unknown language; and a poem which was a poem only for the author would not be a poem at all.” T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), 109 (emphasis in the original).

77. 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.

78. Some key passages: “The poet [tends] towards two extremes, or unilaterals: the extreme of utterance, which makes for the ideal of spontaneity and ‘pure’ emotion, and leads to barbarism in art; and the extreme of pure beauty, or means conceived exclusively as end, which leads to virtuosity, or decoration. And, in that fluctuating region between pure emotion and pure decoration, humanity and craftsmanship, utterance and performance, lies the field of art, the evocation of emotion by mechanism, a norm which, like all norms, is a conflict become fusion.” Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 55–56; “Part of the effect of a poem, as distinct from a natural utterance, derives from the reader’s awareness of the poet standing, as it were, behind the poem as its creator and artificer. This awareness is also commonly reflected in our interpretations, for among the meanings we seek for and infer from a poem are those that, in Aristotelian terms, might be called its final causes: that is, the motives or intentions, the governing design, of the poet as an artist, distinct from either a natural speaker or the fictive speaker of a poem.” Barbara Herrnstein Smith, On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 39 (emphasis in the original); “Poetry is language in which the signified or meaning is the whole process of signification

Notes l 155

itself. It is thus always at some level language which is about itself. There is something circular or self-referential about even the most publicly engaged of poems.” Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), 21 (emphasis in the original).

79. Mandelstam, The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, 72.80. 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.

81. 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.

82. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 260.83. Charles Altieri, “The Place of Rhetoric in Contemporary American Poetics:

Jennifer Moxley and Juliana Spahr,” Chicago Review 56.2/3 (Autumn 2011): 127, 128, and 137. Altieri concentrates on Moxley and Spahr, but also men-tions Ben Lerner, Joshua Clover, Karen Volkman, Graham Foust, and Geoffrey O’Brien among poets interested in rhetorical approaches.

1 “Beyond My Outrage or My Admiration”: Robert Pinsky’s An Explanation of America

1. Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 366.

2. Stephen Yenser, Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 230.

3. James Longenbach, “Figuring Multitudes,” review of The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966–1996, by Robert Pinsky, The Nation (April 29, 1996): 25.

4. Mary Maxwell, “Exhilaration and Derangement,” Literary Imagination 6.2 (Spring 2004): 307.

5. For a comprehensive analysis of the Favorite Poem Project, see Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 381–404.

6. Robert Pinsky, The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966–1996 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 231.

7. With Robert Hass and Rita Dove, Pinsky participated in a 1998 White House ceremony hosted by Bill and Hillary Clinton to celebrate the diversity of America’s poetic heritage. In January 2003, he declined Laura Bush’s invitation

156 l Notes

to the White House to celebrate “Poetry and the American Voice,” mainly in protest of the Bush administration’s plans for the war with Iraq.

8. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1–2.

9. Robert von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 237–38. A longtime champion of the poem and of Pinsky himself, von Hallberg offers additional insights on An Explanation in “Poetry, Politics, and Intellectuals,” where he characterizes it as “an effort to rehabilitate certain attitudes and way of treating American subjects that had fallen out of poetry in the extreme political and cultural climate of the 1960s.” Robert von Hallberg, “Poetry, Politics, and Intellectuals,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 8: Poetry and Criticism 1940–1995, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 48. And in Lyric Powers he includes Pinsky among those contemporary American poets (Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, and Robert Hass) who “deliber-ately situate their art at the point where college-educated, northern, metropoli-tan class of the intelligentsia asserts its authority to explain the world.” Robert von Hallberg, Lyric Powers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 90.

10. Robert Pinsky, “A Q&A Session with Robert Pinsky,” Smartish Pace, January 2001, www.smartishpace.com/home/poetsqa/pinsky_answers.htm.

11. Robert Pinsky, An Explanation of America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 6. All subsequent citations to this volume are indicated as EA in the text.

12. Werner Sollors notes the proliferation of studies about ethnicity, immigra-tion, and multiculturalism in the 1970s, including Michael Novak’s Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972), Andrew Greeley’s Ethnicity in the United States (1974), Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (1975), and Orlando Patterson’s Ethnic Chauvinism (1977). Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 21–39.

13. Robert Archambeau, Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 67 and 77.

14. Robert Pinsky, The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Traditions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 133–34. One of the poets Pinsky identifies as discursive is Lowell, specifically in his unrhymed sonnets and his “wish to discourse fully about a variety of subjects—and not mere length, not a wish to be ‘large’” (ibid., 134).

15. Ibid., 162.16. In an early excerpt from An Explanation published in American Poetry Review,

Pinsky actually refers to the poem, indeed any poem, as a “co-operation” and notes that “words themselves . . . imply a kind of contract.” Robert Pinsky, “An Explanation of America,” American Poetry Review 5.3 (1976): 18.

17. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 728–29.

18. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, trans. Henry Reeve, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 434.

Notes l 157

19. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1988), 54.20. James Joyce, Ulysses (1934; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1990), 331. As Richard

Ellmann reports, Joyce was skeptical of nationalism, especially Irish nation-alism. His own ideas about the state and nationality are echoed by some of Bloom’s half-drunk interlocutors in Ulysses: “[Joyce] continued to work on the Cyclops episode. His friend Weiss was one of those who unknowingly assisted him with it. They often discussed political theory, and Joyce liked to reduce Weiss’s arguments ad absurdum. One day, talking of the nature of the state, Weiss quoted some eminent authority to the effect that three elements are nec-essary to constitute a state: a people, a territory, and sovereignty. Joyce kept bringing up examples of smaller and smaller states, until he got Weiss to agree that a state could be only one person. He stepped on a chair, which he said was his territory, and declared, ‘Then I’m a state!’” Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 462.

21. Ernst Renan, “What Is a Nation?” trans. Martin Thom, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 18. As Renan famously remarks, “No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew or the massacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century” (ibid., 11).

22. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, 25.23. Marshall Toman, “Pinsky’s An Explanation of America,” The Explicator 42.3

(1984): 62–64.24. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the

Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 5.25. Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1994), 139.26. Pinsky, The Situation of Poetry, 134.27. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 174–207.28. In “A Mirror of the Middle West,” Bourne calls the American Midwest “the apo-

theosis of American civilization.” Randolph Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911–1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (New York: Urizen, 1977), 265. In Patterns for America, Susan Hegeman notes that by the 1930s the states like Nebraska, populated by immigrant groups with strong sense of loyalty to community rather than dedication to competitive individualism, began to be viewed as “a positive descriptor of ‘real’ America.” Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 13.

29. Robert Pinsky, Poetry and the World (New York: Ecco Press, 1988), 128.30. See Amanda Anderson’s useful distinction: “In exclusionary cosmopolitanism,

little to no weight is given to exploration of disparate cultures: all value lies in an abstract or ‘cosmic’ universalism. In inclusionary cosmopolitanism, by contrast, universalism finds expression through sympathetic imagination and intercul-tural exchange.” Amanda Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 267.

158 l Notes

31. At one point in Cather’s novel, Jim is shown reading Virgil’s Georgics (“Primus ego in patriam mecum . . . deducam Musas”) in which, as his Latin tutor explains, the word “patria” means “not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighborhood on the Mincio where the poet was born” (Cather, My Ántonia, 199).

32. In his essay on “civic poetry,” Nelson, Jr., refers to Horace’s poetry, especially his odes, as “strongly civic.” Lowry Nelson, Jr., Poetic Configurations: Essays in Literary History and Criticism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 150.

33. In the title poem of Sadness and Happiness, Pinsky refers to his “thorny / ego-tism, my hard-ons of self-concern.” Pinsky, The Figured Wheel, 231. Also, as Russell Jacoby argued at the time: “Neither narcissism nor the family can be considered apart from the tendencies of capitalism. Both express in different terms the subordination to the exchange principle. Both accept the same cur-rency. Children are deemed an increasingly unwise investment. For the profes-sional, children are judged a drain and obstacle to career and pleasures. Pets, autos, jogging, and tennis lessons offer more reliable compensation for the same expenditure.” Russell Jacoby, “The Politics of Narcissism,” The Problem of Authority in America, ed. J. P. Diggins and M. E. Kann (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 192.

34. One of my later examples Lisa Jarnot overturns this notion with her translation of Book XXII of Homer’s Iliad.

35. Here Pinsky’s poem comes closest to Benedict Anderson’s well-known defini-tion of the nation as “an imagined political community”: “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-mem-bers, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion.” Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; reprint, London and New York: Verso, 1991), 6 (emphasis in the original).

36. Robert Pinsky, “The Art of Poetry,” interview by Ben Downing and Daniel Kunitz, Paris Review 144 (Fall 1997): 55.

37. “However critical Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, and other transcendentalists may have been of specific United States imperial projects, like the Mexican-American War and slavery, transcendentalism relied on a rhetoric of transcendental expansion, internaliza-tion (and thus appropriation), and psychic progress and development well suited to the politics of Jacksonian America. The transcendentalists were particularly good in developing analogies between the physical frontier and the psychic and metaphysical boundaries to be overcome by the contemplative, educated man.” John Carlos Rowe, “Nineteenth-Century United States Literary Culture and Transnationality,” PMLA 118.1 (January 2003): 81.

38. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, 332.39. von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture, 233; Jay Parini, “Explaining

America: The Poetry of Robert Pinsky,” Chicago Review 33.1 (1981): 26; Alfred

Notes l 159

Corn, The Metamorphoses of Metaphor: Essays in Poetry and Fiction (New York: Viking Press, 1987), 12.

40. Robert Pinsky, “Eros against Esperanto,” in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Martha C. Nussbaum with Respondents, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 86. Pinsky’s essay was a response to Martha C. Nussbaum’s 1994 Boston Review article “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” in which she puts forward the idea of teaching American children to identify themselves primarily as members of world community. The article triggered responses from thinkers like Kwame Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Nathan Glazer, Hilary Putnam, Immanuel Wallerstein, and others, many of whom, like Pinsky, opposed what they consider her somewhat naive model of “cosmo-politan education.”

41. Ibid., 90. See Justin Quinn’s perceptive comment about Pinsky’s oeuvre: “Pinsky celebrates ethnic difference—after all, without it his social panorama would fade to beige—but insists that they are bracketed by a generous American nationalism.” Justin Quinn, American Errancy: Empire, Sublimity, and Modern Poetry (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), 140.

42. Nussbaum, in her own reply to the “cosmopolitan education” debate in For Love of Country, emphasizes the role of literature in promoting the value of universal attachment: “Shakespeare’s deviously fictive places (‘A seacoast in Bohemia’) indicate a desire to lure the imagination away from its most complacent moor-ings in the local, causing it to venture outward to some strange land, be it medi-eval Denmark or ancient Rome, where human beings, not without poetry and not without passion, attempt to love one another, often tragically. Even the most apparently local of literary landscapes—say, Joyce’s Dublin or Walt Whitman’s America—are landscapes of the imagination in which the human body and its zestful surprising irregularities have a more than local home. Consider, too, how much not-black-and-white poetry and prose concerns, in fact, the situ-ation of the exile and outsider—Philoctetes, Hamlet, Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom—people who, by virtue of their outsider status, can tell truths about the political community, its justice and injustice, its embracings and its failures to embrace. In engaging with such works—and indeed with any works that depict a world of human beings beyond the narrow one we know—in permit-ting these strangers to inhabit our minds and our hearts, we are enacting the love of humanity” (Nussbaum, “Reply,” in For Love of Country, 140).

43. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 242, 245.

44. Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 260.

45. Robert Pinsky, “Poetry and American Memory,” Atlantic Monthly (October 1999): 60–61.

46. Pinsky, Poetry and the World, 16–17. Contrast with Bonnie Costello’s more persuasive (in my view) interpretation: “The knife, the parasol, the goatskin trousers are symbols of culture in the midst of culture; they have no aura

160 l Notes

because they fill no absence. The invented objects of the island, though based on memory, had a vital importance for the present, established a thread of life. The museum is the symbol for the past; the objects in it have no present value. Everything is overrepresented in England, a landscape of dead symbols, per-haps a symbol of our contemporary world.” Bonnie Costello, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 207.

47. Pinsky, Poetry and the World, 89.48. Robert Pinsky, Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (Princeton and

Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 76–77.49. Robert Archambeau, The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World (Akron:

University of Akron Press, 2013), 95. On poets and their self-appointed pub-lic role, see Archambeau’s chapter “The Discursive Situation of Poetry” (ibid., 9–31).

2 “Nothing Else Left to Read”: Adrienne Rich’s “An Atlas of the Difficult World”

1. Bill Moyers, The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 345.

2. Adrienne Rich, “Adrienne Rich: I Happen to Think Poetry Makes a Big Difference,” interview by Matthew Rothchild, The Progressive 58.1 (January 1994): 33.

3. Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 22. All subsequent citations to this volume are indicated as ADW in the text.

4. Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 71.

5. Ibid., 4.6. Alice Templeton, The Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne Rich’s Feminist Poetics

(Lexington: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 164–65; Margaret Dickie, Stein, Bishop, and Rich: Lyrics of Love, War, and Place (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 165; Joshua S. Jacobs, “‘An Atlas of the Difficult World’: Adrienne Rich’s Countermonument,” Contemporary Literature 42.4 (2001): 729.

7. Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, “‘I Can’t Be Still’: or, Adrienne Rich and the Refusal to Gild the Fields of Guilt,” Women’s Studies 27.4 (1998): 313.

8. Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992; St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2002), 1.

9. Muriel Rukeyser, A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, ed. Jan Heller Levi (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 285.

10. See especially the New York Quarterly series on “the present state of poetry,” initiated by the magazine’s editor William Packard in 1985 and running well into the 1990s (articles by Packard, Andrew Glaze, Robert Peters, Richard

Notes l 161

Kostelanetz, and H. L. Hix are of particular relevance). For scholarly overviews of the “death of poetry” debate, see Vernon Shetley, After the Death of Poetry (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 165–92; Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry Between Community and Institution (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 25–30; and Robert Archambeau, The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World (Akron: University of Akron Press, 2013), 9–31. For a historically informed treatment of the subject, see Christopher Clausen, The Place of Poetry (1981).

11. Donald Hall, Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1982–88 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 2.

12. Joseph Epstein, “Who Killed Poetry?” Commentary 86.2 (August 1988): 14.13. Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?, 5.14. Ibid., 9.15. Hall, Poetry and Ambition, 8.16. Epstein, “Who Killed Poetry?,” 14.17. Ibid., 18.18. Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?, 10.19. Adrienne Rich, What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (New

York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 18.20. Ibid., 19.21. Rich, “Adrienne Rich: I Happen to Think Poetry Makes a Big Difference,” 35.22. Rich, What Is Found There, 232.23. See especially her essay “Toward a Woman-Centered University,” in On Lies,

Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 125–55.

24. Rich, Arts of the Possible, 57.25. Adrienne Rich, Time’s Power: Poems 1985–1988 (New York: W. W. Norton,

1989), 10.26. Rich, What Is Found There, 231.27. Moyers, The Language of Life, 345.28. Ibid.29. Templeton, The Dream and the Dialogue, 164.30. These lines may also allude to events that took place soon after Rich’s arrival

in California: “a series of murders, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, on women whose cars had broken down or who had been stopped for some reason, had been dragged from their cars and raped and mutilated. . . . And the drive through those mountains was going to be my commute to San Jose State University, where I would be teaching that year.” Adrienne Rich, Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 254.

31. One of Rich’s antecedents in the use of poem-as-a-map conceit, as well as in the fusion of autobiographical and patriotic motifs, is Boston poet John Holmes’s Map of My Country (1943). The US Navy distributed this book to its ship and station libraries during World War II.

162 l Notes

32. The following comments by Charles Altieri are relatively gentle in nature: “In my view some of her ideas are little more than slogans, and others seem to me unnecessarily confined to female subjects. On the one hand she can be too general, on the other not general enough.” Charles Altieri, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 167. Interestingly, two decades later Altieri became more appreciative of Rich’s use of rhetoric: “She manifestly refuses modernist ideals of impersonality so that she can take clear personal political stances and, more important, she can utilize every resource of spoken language in order to persuade her audi-ence to share her values. With those ends in mind, how can she not take such risks?” Charles Altieri, The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), 172.

33. As I noted in my introduction, Rich on occasion questioned the efficacy of self-consciously innovative poetries, even those produced by experimental feminist poets Susan Howe, Kathleen Fraser, and others: “I’m not sure that a new tex-tual form creates—it certainly doesn’t create a new consciousness.” See Rich, Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose, 270 (emphasis in the original).

34. Rich, What Is Found There, 53.35. Dickie, Stein, Bishop, and Rich, 128.36. As Donald E. Pease also points out, “in his effort to fill the space of transition

from the cold war to the New World Order, President George Herbert Walker Bush staged a war in the Persian Gulf that was designed to supply US citizens with televisual representations of a victory that the conclusion to the cold war lacked.” Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 40.

37. Helen Vendler, Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 221. If Vendler is right that the final “ethical” question “uses as its verb an archaic word both ethical and aesthetic,” then we could argue that the change from “What be- / hooves us?” to “What behooves us?” later in the poem (23) formally enacts a fusion of ethics and aesthetics that is so important to Rich’s project.

38. Many of these are now regularly included in anthologies of twentieth-century US poetry, including Cary Nelson’s Anthology of American Poetry (2000) and The New Anthology of American Poetry, edited by Stephen Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano (2003 and 2005).

39. Rich, What Is Found There, 83–84.40. Jed Rasula, The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940–1990

(Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996), 440.41. Rich, Arts of the Possible, 61.42. This opinion led Rich to include mostly the work of women, people of color,

working class, and gay and lesbian poets in her selections for David Lehman’s The Best of American Poetry anthology series in 1996. As she notes in her intro-duction, she was aiming to showcase poetry that “embodies the larger reaches of North American writing and experience” (ibid., 110).

43. Ibid., 111.

Notes l 163

44. Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society 3.1 (2001): 95–133.

45. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994), 251.

46. Rich, What Is Found There, 84.47. Moyers, The Language of Life, 344.48. As Peter Coviello argues, “For Whitman, nationality consists not in legal com-

pulsion or geographical happenstance but in the specifically affective attach-ments that somehow tie together people who have never seen one another, who live in different climates, come from different cultures, and harbor wildly dif-ferent needs and aspirations. To be properly American is thus, as Whitman con-ceives it, to feel oneself related in a quite intimate way to a world of people not proximate or even known.” Peter Coviello, “Intimate Nationality: Anonymity and Attachment in Walt Whitman,” American Literature 73.1 (2001): 87.

49. Rich, Arts of the Possible, 141–42.50. Ibid., 107.51. Rich, What Is Found There, 130.52. Robert von Hallberg, “Poetry, Politics, and Intellectuals,” in The Cambridge

History of American Literature, vol. 8: Poetry and Criticism 1940–1995, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 204. But see Paul Giles’s more generous interpretation of the poem’s self-conflicted vision: “Rich’s poetry thus rotates upon the rhetoric of contradiction and the richness and complexity of its internal fissures testifies to ways in which ‘American Literature’ and ‘global remapping’ can be seen as mutually consti-tutive rather than mutually exclusive, even in their reciprocal antagonisms.” Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 264.

53. Rukeyser, A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, 282–83.54. Moyers, The Language of Life, 344.

3 “Who the Biggest Terrorist”: Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America”

1. In one of several discussions of Baraka’s poem that appeared since I published an early version of this chapter in 2004, Mathilde Roza observes that “Somebody” expresses “no emotion about the actual attack. In further violation of the general expectations regarding 9/11 poetry, the poem paid no tribute or even attention to the tragic deaths of those who perished in the attacks, and provided no room for patriotism.” Mathilde Roza, “‘America under Attack’: Unity and Division after 9/11,” in American Multiculturalism after 9/11: Transatlantic Perspectives, ed. Derek Rubin and Jaap Verheul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 106.

2. Amiri Baraka, “Amiri Baraka Interview,” by Aaron Winslow, undated, The Argotist Online, http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Baraka%20interview.htm.

164 l Notes

3. M. L. Rosenthal, “American Poetry Today,” Salmagundi 22–23 (1973): 61.4. Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: A Quest for a “Populist Modernism”

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 8.5. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Emerging Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Henry Lee

Moon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 367.6. Amiri Baraka, The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris

(New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2000), 321–22.7. Amiri Baraka, Somebody Blew Up America and Other Poems (Philipsburg,

St. Martin: House of Nehesi Publishers, 2003), 46. All subsequent citations to this volume are indicated as SBUA in the text.

8. William Davidson and Shai Goldstein, “ADL Writes to the Governor of New Jersey about Amiri Baraka,” September 27, 2002, http://www.adl.org/antI _semitism/ltr_mcgreevy.asp.

9. Amiri Baraka, “The ADL Smear Campaign Against Me. I Will Not Resign, I Will Not Apologize,” CounterPunch, October 7, 2002, http://www.counterpunch .org/baraka1007.html.

10. “New Jersey’s Poet Dilemma,” editorial, The New York Times (October 4, 2002): A26.

11. Richard Cohen, “Anti-Semitism, Not Poetry,” editorial, The Washington Post (October 8, 2002): A25.

12. With characteristic bluntness Baraka then links Hitler’s use of the Reichstag fire to persecute his enemies to George W. Bush’s use of 9/11 to introduce civil liberties-limiting legislation like the infamous Patriot Bill: “The Reichstag fire, parallels the 911 Attack, in that after that ‘mysterious act of terrorism,’ which Hitler blamed on Jews and Communists, the Nazis passed a law The Reichstag Enablement Act, that gave the Nazis much the same carte blanche as the Bush administration used the 911 tragedy to pass the wholly undemocratic Patriot Bill and begin rounding up suspects, even without identifying them” (Baraka, “The ADL Smear Campaign”).

13. Davidson and Goldstein, “ADL Writes to the Governor of New Jersey.”14. Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative,” The New York Review of Books 50.16

(October 23, 2003): 10.15. Kwame Dawes calls Baraka “a public poet” who in some ways resembles the

West African griot as “a spokesperson for the community” but who is addition-ally “involved in the task of shaping an aesthetics” to influence that community. See Kwame Dawes, “Introduction,” in Somebody Blew Up America and Other Poems, by Amiri Baraka, xii–xiii. Michael Dowdy also notes that, despite being “overtly confrontational,” the poem can be viewed as an example of “authorita-tive agency”: “[Baraka’s] authority is partly borne of his experiences as a mem-ber of a minority group, but it is more a product of his refusal to compromise or to fear retribution. As such, his voice draws on and displays a trust in the poet’s role as a populist spokesperson, who is able to articulate people’s experiences, and the events that mark them, in unique ways.” Michael Dowdy, American Political Poetry in the 21st Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 63 and 67.

Notes l 165

16. Dowdy, American Political Poetry, 64.17. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American

Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 51–52.18. Paul Gilroy, “Race, Rice, and the Info-War,” in Cultural Politics in a Global

Age: Uncertainty, Solidarity, and Innovation, ed. David Held and Henrietta L. Moore (Oxford: OneWorld Publications, 2008), 201.

19. Roza draws on Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s examination of “hoo” in poems by Vachel Lindsay, Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot as “a scare word when used by a white person” to argue that “Baraka’s bombardment of multiple ‘whos’ may in fact serve to summon up the specter of the ‘Black Boogeyman’ spooking white America with its sinister yet titillating evil. Read in this way, the poem suggests that, in addition to the ideology of white supremacy, ‘America’ was destroyed by irrational fear and paranoia, and continues to allow itself to be spooked—even by a poem, one might add, judging by the public outrage at ‘Somebody Blew Up America.’ To the extent that Baraka actually personifies the ‘boogey-man’ when he delivers close to two hundred ‘hoo’-sounds in the performance of his poem, the poet may at the very least be accused of having played on white America’s fear of blackness quite deliberately to drive his point home” (Roza, “‘America under Attack,’” 110). Another scholar, Jeffrey Gray, also com-ments on Baraka’s “re-writing” of Lindsay in “Precious Testimony: Poetry and the Uncommemorable,” in Literature after 9/11, ed. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 275.

20. Although he stresses that both texts deserve a place in the American literary canon, in his analysis of Baraka’s poem vis-à-vis Lorenzo Thomas’s “Ailerons & Elevators” John R. O. Gery observes: “Baraka’s poem draws the battle lines not between al-Qaeda and us, but between the state and us, thereby guiding us toward those actions, violent or otherwise, he deems precipitous to revolutionary change (though, it is important to add, without dictating the specifics of that change); Thomas’s poem, on the other hand, works to undermine both enemy and self, together with the battle lines under dispute, not so much to advocate a course of action but in perhaps as equally radical a manner, to open space for the change in thinking necessary to salvage American ideology.” John R. O. Gery, “Duplicities of Power: Amiri Baraka and Lorenzo Thomas’s Responses to September 11,” African American Review 44.1–2 (Spring & Summer 2011): 169 (emphases in the original).

21. Baraka, The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, 169.22. Suzy Hansen, “Amiri Baraka Stands by His Words,” Salon, October 17, 2002,

http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2002/10/17/baraka/index_np.html.23. Baraka, “The ADL Smear Campaign.”24. Philip Metres, Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront

since 1941 (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2007), 221–22.25. David Lehman, “Foreword,” The Best American Poetry 2003, ed. Yusef

Komunyakaa (New York: Scribner, 2003), 2.26. Hazard Adams, The Offense of Poetry (Seattle and London: University of

Washington Press, 2007), 18 and 25.

166 l Notes

27. Andrew Epstein, Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 231.

28. Quoted in Hansen, “Amiri Baraka Stands by His Words.”29. William J. Harris and Aldon Lynn Nielsen, “Somebody Blew Off Baraka,”

African American Review 37.2–3 (2003): 183–87.30. Liam Rector, “Elitism, Populism, Laureates, and Free Speech,” American Poetry

Review 32.1 (2003): 10.31. Quoted in Hansen, “Amiri Baraka Stands by His Words.” According to his

poem “The Forgetting,” included in Gulf Music (2007), Pinsky was in the audi-ence when Baraka read his poem at the Dodge Festival in 2002.

32. Ibid.33. Quoted in Laura Mansnerus, “McGreevey Could Fire Poet Under Proposed

Legislation,” New York Times (October 8, 2002): B2.34. Baraka, “The ADL Smear Campaign.”35. Robert Pinsky, Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (Princeton and

Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 39.

4 Ether: Juliana Spahr, Ben Lerner, Lisa Jarnot

1. For more on Poets Against the War, see Dale M. Smith, Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 111–16.

2. Juliana Spahr, “Poetry in a Time of Crisis,” December 2001, http://people.mills.edu/jspahr/poetrycrisis.htm; Ben Lerner, “Coffee Chat #3: Ben Lerner,” interviewed by Victoria Chang, April 16, 2010, http://victoriamchang.blogspot .com/2010/04/coffee-chat-3-ben-lerner.html; Lisa Jarnot, “On Identity,” Symposium at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, 1998, http://www.poetspath .com/Scholarship_Project/jarnot.html.

3. Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 323.

4. In 2002 one of them, Juliana Spahr, coedited an anthology pointedly titled American Women Poets of the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language.

5. Joe Milutis, Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 157–58.

6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 346–47.

7. Michael Hardt with Leonard Schwartz, The Production of Subjectivity: Conversations with Michael Hardt, The Conversant (2012): 16. See also Hardt’s further reflections on the importance of communications—a key element of ether—to the present global order: “One thing we’re trying to do is argue beyond a notion that all the means of communication are manipulated in some instrumental way by some sovereign or localizable power that stands behind them. In other words: it’s not just that the media, or other forms of commu-nication, are instrumentally used to dupe people, or to maintain profits of

Notes l 167

corporations, or to make the population passive. . . . Those kinds of conspiracy notions about the media have a certain utility, but I think it’s more difficult than that. There isn’t a censor that tells the newspapers exactly what to think, and there isn’t even, usually, the head of a corporation who calls up a newspa-per and who tells them what to print and what not to print. It’s a much more amorphous aspect. It’s de-centered and has a network form. That’s the kind of thing we’re trying to grasp” (ibid., 7).

8. Spahr moved to Honolulu to teach at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa in 1997 and remained there until 2003. She describes that period in her memoir The Transformation (Berkeley: Atelos, 2007), which can be read as a companion volume to This Connection of Everyone with Lungs.

9. Muriel Rukeyser, A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, ed. Jan Heller Levi (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 212.

10. Juliana Spahr, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 71. All subsequent citations to this volume are indicated as TCEL in the text.

11. Juliana Spahr, “Contemporary Writers Series at Mills College,” 2005, PennSound, http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Mills-CWS.php.

12. Kimberly Lamm, “All Together/Now: Writing the Space of Collectivities in the Poetry of Juliana Spahr,” in American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, ed. Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 134.

13. Lynn Keller, “Post-Language Lyric,” Chicago Review 55.3–4 (Autumn 2010): 76.14. “A ‘whole-earth’ discourse stresses the globe’s unity and matters of life, dwell-

ing, and rootedness. It emphasizes the fragility and vulnerability of a corporeal earth and responsibility for its care. It can generate apocalyptic anxiety about the end of life on this planet or warm sentiments of association, community, and attachment. Such a discourse has to confront the globe’s islandness in the oxymoron of global localism. A ‘one-world’ discourse, by contrast, concentrates on the global surface, on circulation, connectivity, and communication. It is a universalist, progressive, and mobile discourse in which the image of the globe signifies the potential, if not actual, equality of all locations networked across frictionless space. Consistently associated with technological advance, it yields an implicitly imperial spatiality, connecting the ends of the earth to privileged hubs and centers of control.” Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 262–63.

15. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 279.

16. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 303.

17. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 58.

18. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 180.

168 l Notes

19. Ibid., 182–83.20. Michael Moon, “Solitude, Singularity, Seriality: Whitman vis-à-vis Fourier,”

ELH 73.2 (Summer 2006): 308.21. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New

York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 83.22. Philip Metres, “With Ambush and Strategem: American Poetry in the Age of

Pure War,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 361.

23. In The Transformation Spahr, using the third-person plural, describes her and her two lovers’ reaction to a polyamorous potluck in Hawaii: “Faced with a room full of fellow perverts, they were full of scorn. They told themselves it was just a swingers club, while they were the real perverts because they lived together, moving from bed to bed, sharing meals and chores. They stayed at the potluck only half an hour and then fled, giggling nervously and mocking themselves, telling themselves that they were not cut out to be polyamorous. They were instead just amorous” (Spahr, The Transformation, 176).

24. As Martha C. Nussbaum comments, being a citizen of the world is “often a lonely business . . . a kind of exile” (Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Martha C. Nussbaum with Respondents, ed. Joshua Cohen [Boston: Beacon Press, 1996], 15).

25. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 183.26. Ben Lerner, “Ben Lerner/Aaron Kunin,” in 12×12: Conversations in 21st Century

Poetry and Poetics, ed. Christina Mengert and Joshua Marie Wilkinson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 246.

27. Unsurprisingly, the chief proponent of the new sentence Ron Silliman faults Lerner for falling back on the conventional mode. After quoting an example from Angle of Yaw, he concludes: “Here, the joke overcomes the use of the joke and the poem collapses into a one-dimensional plane we may associate, say, with Russell Edson. But it’s done so well is the obvious rejoinder, and there’s no question that it is. All the more reason it should have been left out. What in Lerner’s best pieces functions as a disruption of the poetic here simply lies flat. Lerner’s best work comes at the other extreme, when the frame of refer-ence appears to change on an almost sentence-by-sentence basis.” Ron Silliman, “Nature of Influence Changes over Time,” Silliman’s Blog, December 5, 2006, http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2006/12/nature-of-inf luence-changes-over -time.html.

28. Ben Lerner, Angle of Yaw (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2006), 15. All subsequent citations to this volume are indicated as AY in the text.

29. Lerner, “Ben Lerner/Aaron Kunin,” 243.30. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1988), 28.31. “Increasingly, US leaders seem to believe that the vast superiority of its fire-

power, the sophistication of its technology, and the precision of its weapons allow the US military to attack its enemies from a safe distance in a precise and definitive way, surgically removing them like so many cancerous tumors from

Notes l 169

the global social body, with minimal side effects. War thus becomes virtual from the technological point of view and bodiless from the military point of view; the bodies of US soldiers are kept free of risk, the enemy combatants are killed efficiently and invisibly.” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 44. The increased use of drones (or unmanned aerial vehicles) as part of the US War on Terror during the Bush and especially the Obama presidency takes the RMA to another level.

32. Bernard Williams observes that “the most primitive experiences of shame are connected with sight and being seen,” while “guilt is rooted in hearing, the sound in oneself of the voice of judgment.” Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 89.

33. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund F. N. Jephcott and K. Shorter (New York: Verso, 1997), 50.

34. Lerner highlights the insufficiency of “mere” reading in Leaving the Atocha Station, his novel based on his experiences as a Fulbright Scholar in Spain. At the climax of the book, the protagonist Adam Gordon (Lerner’s alter ego), having just witnessed the bloody aftermath of the March 11, 2004 terrorist bombings in Madrid, vicariously reexperiences it by reading online newspapers: “I went back up to my apartment and refreshed the Times; the number of estimated dead was now around two hundred, at least a thousand injured. I considered walking back to Atocha, but instead I opened El País in another window and the Guardian in the third. I sat smoking and refreshing the home pages and watching the numbers change. I could feel the newspaper accounts modifying or replacing my memory of what I’d seen; was there a word for that feeling?” Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2011), 119.

35. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (New York: Verso, 2002), 15–16.

36. Ann Keniston, “‘Not Needed, Except as Meaning’: Belatedness in Post-9/11 American Poetry,” Contemporary Literature 52.4 (Winter 2011): 675.

37. Paul Krugman, “The Years of Shame,” The New York Times, September 11, 2012, http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/the-years-of-shame. In The Transformation, Spahr also notes her ambivalence upon seeing the make-shift “towers-of-light” memorial—two shafts of light pointing skyward aimed to memorialize the towers of the World Trade Center. Despite their beauty and poignancy, Spahr knows that they signify “wars and unjust wars, bombs and smart bombs, deterrence and self-defense” (Spahr, The Transformation, 162).

38. Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Documentation of Stockhausen’s Comments re: 9/11,” http://www.osborne-conant.org/documentation_stockhausen.htm.

39. Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe, Crimes of Art and Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 14–15.

40. In The Making of the Iliad: Disquisition and Analytical Commentary (2011), M. L. West describes the Iliad as the work of one poet who composed it some-time between 680 and 640 BCE. See also George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 185.

170 l Notes

41. Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” in War and the Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy (New York: New York Review Books, 2005), 30 and 33.

42. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 1990), 428, 336, 200.43. Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” 3 (emphasis in the original).44. As Jarnot reports, when in 1967 Duncan’s publisher Scribners expressed con-

cerns about including his “didactic and shrill” poems like “The Fire,” “The Multiversity,” “Up Rising,” “Earth’s Winter Song,” and “The Soldiers” in Bending the Bow, Duncan refused to omit the poems and instead published the book with New Directions. Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 264.

45. We can place Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl (2010), which features radical prac-tices like transposition, dialogism, and erasure to highlight “the current condi-tion of permanent, technology-driven global warfare,” in the same category of unconventional or creative translation. Christian Hawkey/Georg Trakl, Ventrakl (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), 9.

46. Lisa Jarnot, Iliad XXII (Buffalo: Atticus/Finch Chapbooks, 2006), n.p.47. Rachel Bespaloff, “On the Iliad,” in War and the Iliad, 45.48. Homer, The Iliad, 333.49. R. W. Sharples, “‘But Why Has My Spirit Spoken with Me Thus?’: Homeric

Decision-Making,” Greece & Rome 30.1 (April 1983): 1.50. Sharples comments: “With hindsight, a character finds it difficult to regard

certain actions as his own—either because he would not normally be capable of them, or because they now seem foolish; so he ascribes them to forces outside himself” (ibid., 3).

51. Bespaloff, “On the Iliad,” 48.52. Lisa Jarnot, “Lisa Jarnot,” in The Verse Book of Interviews: 27 Poets on Language,

Craft, and Culture, ed. Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki (Amherst: Verse Press, 2005), 203.

53. In 2003, Jarnot knitted over one hundred hats in memory of soldiers and civil-ians who had died in the US-led conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. See http://www.angelfire.com/poetry/lisajarnot/iraqhat.html.

5 Dreams of a Common Language: Mark Nowak, Anne Boyer, Rodrigo Toscano

1. Christopher Nealon, The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 33 and 141; Joseph Harrington, “Docupoetry and Archive Desire,” Jacket 2, October 27, 2011, https://jacket2.org/article/docupoetry-and-archive-desire; Brian Reed, “In Other Words: Postmillennial Poetry and Redirected Language,” Contemporary Literature 52.4 (Winter 2011): 759. For other useful surveys, see Stephen Burt, “The New Thing: The Object Lessons of Recent American Poetry,” Boston Review, May 1, 2009, http://bostonreview.net/poetry/new-thing; and Michael Davidson, “Introduction: American Poetry: 2000–2009,” Contemporary Literature 52.4 (Winter 2011): 597–630.

Notes l 171

2. Mark Nowak, “Notes toward an Anticapitalist Poetics,” The Virginia Quarterly Review 82.2 (Spring 2006): 238; Anne Boyer, “On Being a Feminist Poet,” Delirious Hem Blog, January 4, 2009, http://delirioushem.blogspot.com/2009/04/by-anne-boyer.html; Rodrigo Toscano, “Red, White, and Blue: Poets on Politics,” The Poetry Society of America, 2012, http://www.poetrysociety .org/psa/poetry/crossroads/red_white_blue_poets_on_politics/rodrigo _toscano/ (emphasis in the original).

3. In this context, Schwartz’s conversation with Hardt once again provides a help-ful insight: “language is creative. What one loses when either commodifying language (making language into private property, and one could even think when one says ‘commodified language’ of advertising language or of other ways that language becomes commodified), or when language is being regulated by some public authority (such as the state) . . . what one loses is precisely its inven-tive capacities. So that’s part of our argument for the ‘common’ throughout this. I think ‘language’ only poses one example, but as you say, this is maybe a paradigmatic one: what we lose when we lose the common or what we stand to gain when we make more of our lives open to this structure.” Michael Hardt with Leonard Schwartz, The Production of Subjectivity: Conversations with Michael Hardt, The Conversant (2012): 38–39.

4. Nowak, “Notes toward an Anticapitalist Poetics,” 239.5. David Ray Vance, “Mark Nowak: Radical Documentary Praxis [Redux],” in

American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, ed. Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 346.

6. Discussing Nowak’s Shut Up Shut Down, Michael Davidson identifies “fram-ing” as the very theme of the book: “how to see the photographs of closed factories in their largest social meaning and, at the same time, how to represent capital that is no longer reinvested in the environment in which it is produced. Nowak provides a number of ‘frames’ by which to understand those deserted factories—interviews, empirical data, news reports, bibliographies, photo-graphs, lyric poems, personal memoirs—to embody voices and sites of a weak-ened labor movement.” Michael Davidson, On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 42.

7. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 121. As Aihwa Ong notes, the US military engagements in Asia since the beginning of the twentieth century have led to economic and cultural “enmeshment” with the continent, especially China: “Europe may have given birth to the American nation, but the maturing nation has a dysfunctional con-jugal relationship with Asia.” Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations of Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 143.

8. Mark Nowak, Coal Mountain Elementary, with Photographs by Ian Teh and Mark Nowak (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2009), 48. All subsequent citations to this volume are indicated as CME in the text.

9. The even more deadly accident at the Upper Big Branch Mine on April 5, 2010, reveals the same failure of oversight.

172 l Notes

10. Nowak reports these accidents, and those in other parts of the world, on the blog he created upon the publication of his book, Coal Mountain: http://coalmountain .wordpress.com/.

11. Initial reports from the rescuers, immediately channeled by CNN and other news agencies around the world, indicated that while one miner had been killed instantaneously in the explosion, twelve had been found alive. A few hours later, the families celebrating the “West Virginia miracle” at the Sago Baptist Church received the news of there being only one survivor.

12. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 321.

13. Mark Nowak, “Imaginative Militancy and the Transnational Poetry Dialogue,” Radical History Review 112 (Winter 2012): 175.

14. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 235.

15. Paul Hoover, “Introduction: What Is Postmodern Poetry?” Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, 2nd edition, ed. Paul Hoover (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2013), liv.

16. Maria Damon, “Between Friendship Network and Literary Movement: Flarf as a Poetics of Sociability,” in Among Friends; Engendering the Social Site of Poetry, ed. Anne Dewy and Libbie Rifkin (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013), esp. 147–48; Brian Reed, Nobody’s Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013), 88–120.

17. Anne Boyer, “The Provisional Avant Garde,” HTML Giant, July 3, 2009, http://htmlgiant.com/author-spotlight/anne-boyer-on-a-provisional-avant-garde/.

18. Qtd. in Chris McCreary, “The Business of Poetry: Fundraising and Community Building in the Small Press World,” Boog City 83 (2013): 5.

19. Damon, “Between Friendship Network and Literary Movement,” 139.20. Lauren Levin, “Preoccupation: Notes on Anne Boyer and Stephanie Young,” Lana

Turner Blog, http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/blog/levinboyeryoungreview.21. Calvin Bedient, “Against Conceptualism: Defending the Poetry of Affect,”

Boston Review Online, July 24, 2013, http://www.bostonreview.net/poetry/against-conceptualism. Bedient’s notion of “cerebral avant-gardes” includes “Oulipo, Language poetry, conceptual writing, visual poetry, Flarf, critical poetics,” though he mainly discusses Oulipo and conceptual techniques as examples of what he calls “the stonewalling of affects.” Bedient’s provocation elicited plenty of online “comments,” as well as essays by Rachel Galvin and Drew Gardner published in Boston Review Online in February 2014.

22. Anne Boyer, My Common Heart (Denton: Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2011), n.p.23. Paul Mason, Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

(London and New York: Verso, 2013), 9.24. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 383.25. Carolyn M. Rodgers’s 1975 poem “and when the revolution came,” in which

she contrasts the militant rhetoric of Black Power with the submissive and accommodationist yet ultimately more constructive attitude of “church folks,” makes for an interesting comparison with “How a Revolution.”

Notes l 173

26. To understand the centrality of language, including basic terminology, to con-temporary political thinking, see Ernesto Laclau’s critique of Hardt and Negri: “First, they tend to oversimplify the tendencies towards unity operating within the multitude. They have a somewhat triumphalist and exaggeratedly optimis-tic vision of these tendencies, although one can never decide, on the basis of their account, whether they are virtual or actual. Secondly, and for the same reason, they tend to reduce the importance of the confrontations taking place within Empire. But thirdly, and most importantly, they are unable to give any coherent account of the nature of the break that would lead from Empire to the power of the multitude. I am not, of course, talking about a futurologi-cal description of the revolutionary break, but about something more basic: what does a revolutionary break consist of?” Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 243. Laclau offers the term “people” as a better category of analysis “because it helps to present other categories—such as class—for what they are: contingent and particular forms of articulating demands, not an ultimate core from which the nature of the demands them-selves could be explained” (ibid., 250).

27. “It permits a gratifying amount of muscular and mental self-assertion to the individual as regards his own particular contribution to the entire performance, while at the same time it flatly involves him in a group activity, a process of giv-ing and receiving” (Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 316 [emphasis in the original]).

28. Arrested in Iraq in May 2010, Manning was moved to the Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, where he was held in solitary confinement for nine months. Later he was moved to a medium-security facility in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (not far from where Boyer lives). In the summer of 2013, he was con-victed for violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to 35 years in prison with the possibility of parole after 8 years.

29. As Greenwald reports, Manning first sent anonymous, encrypted emails to computer hacker Adrian Lamo. Unable to decrypt them, Lamo then invited Manning to communicate with him using AOL IM chat. After several days, Lamo turned over the chat logs to the FBI. Glenn Greenwald, “The Strange and Consequential Case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo, and WikiLeaks,” Salon, June 18, 2010, http://www.salon.com/2010/06/18/.

30. Rodrigo Toscano, Deck of Deeds (Denver: Counterpath, 2012), 73 (emphasis in the original). All subsequent citations to this volume are indicated as DD in the text.

31. Roberto José Tejada, “Rodrigo Toscano,” BOMB Magazine, June 2013, http://bombsite.com/issues/999/articles/7255.

32. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 58.

33. Rodrigo Toscano, “Bumper-Car Effect: Rodrigo Toscano in Conversation with Leonard Schwartz,” Jacket 28, October 2005, http://jacketmagazine.com/28 /schw-tosc.html.

34. Rodrigo Toscano, Platform (Berkeley: Atelos, 2003), 21.

174 l Notes

35. Tejada, “Rodrigo Toscano.”36. Rodrigo Toscano, Collapsible Poetics Theater (Albany: Fence Books, 2007),

20.37. Bertold Brecht, Brecht on Art and Politics, ed. Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles,

trans. Laura Bradley, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn (London: Methuen, 2003), 141–42.

38. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” trans. John Heckman, New Left Review 62 (July–August 1970): 95.

39. Charles Altieri, “The Place of Rhetoric in Contemporary American Poetics: Jennifer Moxley and Juliana Spahr,” Chicago Review 56.2/3 (Autumn 2011): 127.

40. In making a distinction between rhetoric and poetry, Kant writes: “The ora-tor, therefore, gives something which he does not promise, viz. an entertaining play of the imagination. On the other hand, there is something in which he fails to come up to his promise, and a thing, too, which is his avowed business, namely, the engagement of the understanding to some end. The poet’s promise, on the contrary, is a modest one, and a mere play with ideas is all he holds out to us, but he accomplishes something worthy of being made a serious business, namely, the using of play to provide food for the understanding, and the giving of life to its concepts by means of the imagination. Hence the orator in reality performs less than he promises, the poet more.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 150.

Coda For Whom Does One Write?

1. Richard Blanco, “‘One Today’: Full Text of Richard Blanco’s Inaugural Poem,” ABC News, January 21, 2013, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/today-richard -blanco-poem-read-barack-obama-inauguration/story?id=18274653.

2. Craig Santos Perez, “Lip-Syncing the Poetry of Empire,” The Kenyon Review Blog, January 24, 2013, http://www.kenyonreview.org/2013/01/lip-syncing -the-poetry-of-empire/.

3. Mark Edmundson, “Poetry Slam: or, the Decline of American Verse,” Harper’s Magazine 327.1958 (July 2013): 62. Edmundson relies on the usual tropes of the now all-too-familiar “death of poetry” narrative, which depicts poets as willfully obscure, careerist (MFA programs), lacking in ambition, and unin-terested in speaking to society at large. Ironically, he counts Pinsky, Rich, and Baraka among poets who possess ambition but not enough verbal skill.

4. Hank Lazer, “American Poetry and Its Institutions,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945, ed. Jennifer Ashton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 169.

5. Consider Walter J. Ong’s remark that “to think of readers as a united group, we have to fall back on calling them an ‘audience,’ as though they were in fact listeners.” Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Routledge: London and New York, 1988), 74.

Notes l 175

6. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 66–67.

7. Astrid Franke, Pursue the Illusion: Problems of Public Poetry in America (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010), 261. Franke instead draws on John Dewey’s concept of a public from The Public and Its Problems as (in her words) “part of a political process that has its origin in the consequences of conjoined human interaction and is aimed at social action” (ibid., 9).

8. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 37.

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99, 103, 129, 152n63, 152n64, 153n66, 153n67

audience, 174n5and poetry, 17, 20–1, 23–4, 37–8,

55–60, 60–3, 67, 68–71, 81, 142, 152n63

Badiou, Alain, 7, 147n17Baldwin, James, 19, 47, 146n7

Baraka, Amiri, 1, 3, 5, 9, 10, 14, 17, 18, 24, 27, 30, 31, 73–92, 93, 116, 118, 119, 126, 141, 164n12, 164n15, 174n3

“The ADL Smear Campaign Against Me,” 77, 87, 92, 164n12

The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, 75, 86

“Somebody Blew Up America,” 1, 5, 14, 24, 25, 30, 31, 73–92, 93, 126, 141, 164n15, 165n19, 165n20

Baudrillard, Jean, 39, 103Beach, Christopher, 15, 161n10Beckman, Joshua, 116Bedient, Calvin, 125, 172n21Benjamin, Walter, 104, 124, 136Berlant, Lauren, 127, 148n27Bernstein, Charles, 74Bespaloff, Rachel, 110–11, 112Bishop, Elizabeth, 50, 86Blanco, Richard, 139–40, 141Bly, Robert, 30Borstelmann, Thomas, 5Bourne, Randolph, 43, 157n28Boyer, Anne, 1, 6, 9, 10, 14, 17, 24, 26,

31, 116, 117, 123–30, 137, 141“All of a Sudden the City on Fire,” 126“The Crowd,” 127“How a Revolution,” 126–7“I Keep in my Empire,” 127–8, 130My Common Heart, 1, 6, 26, 27, 31,

116, 125–30, 133, 136, 137

Index

190 l Index

Boyer, Anne—Continued“my vital demystified art,” 125“On Being a Feminist Poet,” 117“Poets and Lies,” 26“Preoccupation,” 128“The Provisional Avant Garde,”

124“The World Is Restored,” 126

Brecht, Bertold, 17, 130, 131, 133, 136, 153n67

Brennan, Timothy, 148n22Breslin, James E. B., 146n9Breslin, Paul, 146n9Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught, 55Brooks, Gwendolyn, 92Brunner, Edward J., 146n9Burke, Kenneth, 26, 121–2, 128, 131,

154n78Burt, Stephen, 170n1Butler, Judith, 159n40

Carpenter, Humphrey, 152n61Caryl, Christian, 4Cather, Willa, 41–4, 46, 158n31Chang, Victoria, 94Chin, Marilyn, 3Chomsky, Noam, 83choral poetry, 11–12, 94, 149n34civic poetry, 9, 17–22, 27, 30–1, 81,

93–4, 112, 116–17, 158n32as “culture poetry,” 4, 6, 31, 34See also didactic poetry; politics and

poetryClausen, Christopher, 161n10Clover, Joshua, 94, 155n83Cohen, Richard, 78Corn, Alfred, 48Cosgrove, Denis, 98, 101, 167n14cosmopolitanism, 8, 44, 48, 97, 148n22,

157n30, 159n40, 159n42, 168n24Costello, Bonnie, 153n66, 159n46Coviello, Peter, 163n48Crane, Hart, 29, 65, 151n55Creeley, Robert, 4Cudjoe, Selwyn R., 90

Damasio, Antonio, 149n27Damon, Maria, 124Davenport-Hines, Richard, 152n64Davidson, Michael, 170n1, 171n6Davidson, William, 77, 79–80Davies, Kenneth, 115Dawes, Kwame, 164n15“death of poetry,” 12–13, 15, 55–60,

67, 71–2, 160n10, 174n3Debord, Guy, 103Degentesch, Kate, 125Des Pres, Terrence, 17Dewey, John, 28, 175n7Dickey, James, 140Dickie, Margaret, 54, 63didactic poetry, 17, 23

poetry as information, 12, 149n36Dimock, Wai Chee, 2Donnelly, Timothy, 94Doolittle, Hilda (H. D.), 110Dorn, Edward, 4Dove, Rita, 155n7Dowdy, Michael, 81, 164n15Du Bois, W. E. B., 75, 92, 131Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 92Duncan, Robert, 30, 109, 110, 170n44DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 165n19

Eagleton, Terry, 26, 152n60, 155n78Edmundson, Mark, 141, 174n3Edwards, Thomas R., 18, 20Eliot, T. S., 22, 26, 53, 154n76,

165n19Ellmann, Richard, 151n20Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 98, 103empire, American, 3–4, 6–7, 9, 10,

18, 33Hardt and Negri’s definition of,

6–8, 95, 126–8, 132–3, 147n14, 168n31, 173n26

Epstein, Andrew, 89Epstein, Joseph, 56–7, 59ethos, 81, 89exceptionalism, 3, 7, 10, 17, 39–41, 50,

83, 132, 147n15

Index l 191

Fagles, Robert, 108, 109Ferguson, Niall, 7Fisher, Philip, 148n27Flarf, 115, 124–5, 126, 129, 130, 172n21Foucault, Michel, 15, 21, 145n1Foust, Graham, 155n83Franke, Astrid, 142, 175n7Fraser, Kathleen, 162n33Freud, Sigmund, 99, 100Friedman, Thomas L., 133Frost, Robert, 22, 140Fukuyama, Francis, 8

Galvin, Rachel, 172n21Gardner, Drew, 172n21Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, 83–4Gery, John, R. O., 24, 165n20Giles, Paul, 2, 3, 4, 6, 49, 162n52Gilroy, Paul, 85Ginsberg, Allen, 30, 74, 153n67Gioia, Dana, 55, 56–9Glaze, Andrew, 160n10Glazer, Nathan, 156n12, 159n40Glick, Jeremy M., 90globalization, 5–6, 7–9, 35, 98, 118–19,

103, 132–3, 167n14and the Occupy movement, 11–12,

116, 125–6, 127–8, 132–3, 136, 140Glück, Louise, 156n9Gogol, Nikolai, 39–40Golding, Alan, 150n47Goldsmith, Kenneth, 115Goldstein, Shai, 77, 79–80Gordon, Nada, 125Graham, Jorie, 156n9Gray, Jeffrey, 116, 165n19Greeley, Andrew, 156n12Green, Daniel, 28–9Greenblatt, Stephen, 51Greenwald, Glenn, 128, 173n29Gudding, Gabriel, 94, 115

Hall, Donald, 56–7, 59Hallberg, Robert von, 3–4, 6, 13, 18, 20,

29, 34, 35, 48, 70, 151n56, 156n9

Hamill, Sam, 93–4, 103Hansen, Suzy, 87Hardt, Michael, 6, 7, 8, 29, 73, 95, 98,

100–1, 113, 123, 126, 127, 147n14, 166n7, 169n31, 171n3, 173n26

Harrington, Joseph, 2, 26, 115, 116, 145n3Harris, William J., 90Harvey, David, 7, 35, 119Hass, Robert, 155n7, 156n9Hawkey, Christian, 170n45Hedetoft, Ulf, 8Hegel, G. W. F., 10Hegeman, Susan, 157n28Hejinian, Lyn, 24, 94, 153n69Hirsch Jr., E. D., 51Hix, H. L., 161n10Hjort, Mette, 8Hobsbawm, E. J., 148n23Hofstadter, Richard, 15Holmes, John, 161n61Homer, 107–8, 109–13Hoover, Paul, 124Horace, 17, 45, 47, 90, 158n32Howe, Fanny, 135, 162n33Howe, Irving, 15Hughes, Langston, 74, 83, 92Hume, David, 19

intellectuals, public, 1, 14–15, 18, 21, 51, 82, 83, 93, 136, 153n67

Foucault’s “specific” intellectuals, 15, 16, 21, 116, 145n1

Jackson, George, 54, 67–8, 71Jackson, Virginia, 26, 129, 154n76Jacobs, Joshua S., 54Jacoby, Russell, 15, 158n33Jameson, Fredric, 130Jarnot Lisa, 1, 6, 9, 10, 14, 17, 24, 25,

31, 93–5, 101, 108–13, 116, 117, 118, 141, 158n34, 170n44

Iliad XXII, 1, 6, 26, 27, 31, 93, 108–13, 158n34

“On Identity,” 94Robert Duncan, 170n44

192 l Index

Jarrell, Randall, 13, 21, 150n37Jay, Paul, 9Joffe, Joseph, 147n13Johnson, W. R., 149n33Jonson, Ben, 45Jordan, June, 65Joyce, James, 40, 151n20Judt, Tony, 80Jusdanis, Gregory, 28–9, 148n24

Kalaidjian, Walter, 146n9Kallen, Horace, 43Kant, Immanuel, 137, 174n40Kaplan, Amy, 146n11Kastely, James M., 152n59Kazin, Alfred, 15Keller, Lynn, 97Keniston, Ann, 106, 116Kocot, Noelle, 94Komunyakaa, Yusef, 30Kostelanetz, Richard, 161n10Krugman, Paul, 106Kundera, Milan, 111Kunin, Aaron, 102

Laclau, Ernesto, 127, 173n26Lakoff, George, 96Lamm, Kimberly, 97Language writing, 24–5, 26, 66, 94,

102, 105, 124, 135, 153n69, 153n70, 162n33

Lasch, Christopher, 45, 48Lazer, Hank, 13, 142Lease, Joseph, 149n36Lee, Li-Young, 3Lehman, David, 88, 92, 162n42Lentricchia, Frank, 107Lerner, Ben, 1, 6, 9, 10, 11–12, 14,

17, 24, 25, 27, 31, 93–5, 101–7, 109, 113, 116, 117, 128, 135, 141, 149n33, 168n27, 169n34

Angle of Yaw, 1, 6, 25, 31, 93, 101–7, 113, 135, 168n27

“Angle of Yaw,” 102–5, 113, 168n27“Didactic Elegy,” 105–7, 113

Leaving the Atocha Station, 169n34“A Note on the Human

Microphone,” 111–12, 128Levertov, Denise, 30Levin, Lauren, 125Lewis, R. W. B., 42Lewisohn, Ludwig, 43Leys, Ruth, 148n27Lindsay, Vachel, 165n19Loeffelholz, Mary, 2Logan, Nate, 124logos, 55, 81Logue, Christopher, 110Longenbach, James, 33–4, 146n9Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth,

29, 35Lorde, Audre, 65Lowell, Robert, 4, 33, 34, 35, 44, 49,

74, 156n14

Mandelstam, Osip, 24, 26, 153n71Martin, Dawn Lundy, 95Martínez, Dionisio D., 3Marx, Karl, 54Mason, Paul, 126Matthiessen, F. O, 10Maxwell, Mary, 34McAuliffe, Jody, 107McCarthy, Mary, 15McGrath, Thomas, 18McKay, Claude, 92McMichael, James, 4Mendelson, Edward, 22Merrill, James, 4, 86Merwin, W. S., 30Mesmer, Sharon, 125Metres, Philip, 87–8, 89, 101Mill, John Stuart, 26, 154n76Miłosz, Czesław, 9Milutis, Joe, 95Mitchell, W. J. T., 28–9Mohammad, Silem K., 125Moon, Michael, 101Moore, Marianne, 35Moxley, Jennifer, 94, 155n83

Index l 193

Moyers, Bill, 53, 59, 62Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 156n12

nation, and identity, 6, 8, 9, 10, 36, 38, 40–1, 46, 49, 65, 148n23, 148n24

Nealon, Christopher, 26, 115, 116, 153n66, 153n69

Negri Antonio, 6, 7, 8, 29, 73, 95, 98, 100–1, 113, 123, 126, 127, 147n14, 169n31, 173n26

Nelson, Cary, 2, 21, 27, 146n9, 162n38Nelson, Jr., Lowry, 19, 20, 158n32Newcomb, John Timberman, 12Ngai, Sianne, 148n27Nicholls, Peter, 26Nielsen, Aldon Lynn, 90Novak, Michael, 156n12Nowak, Mark, 1, 6, 9, 10, 14, 17, 24,

26, 27, 31, 116–17, 117–23, 133, 136, 137, 141, 171n6

Coal Mountain Elementary, 1, 6, 26, 31, 116, 117–23, 137

“Imaginative Militancy and the Transnational Poetry Dialogue,” 122

“Notes toward an Anticapitalist Poetics,” 116–17

Shut Up Shut Down, 118, 119, 171n6Nussbaum, Martha C., 159n40,

159n42, 168n24

O’Brien, Geoffrey, 155n83Ong, Aihwa, 122, 171n7Ong, Walter J., 174n5Osman, Jena, 115

Packard, William, 160n10Palmer, Michael, 30Parini, Jay, 48Pater, Walter, 17pathos, 55, 65, 72, 81, 125patriotism, 13, 18–19, 36, 44, 48, 49,

64, 146n7Patterson, Orlando, 156n12Peacock, Thomas Love, 19

Pearce, Roy Harvey, 10Pease, Donald E., 2, 148n25, 162n36Perelman, Bob, 130, 135, 153n70Perez, Craig Santos, 140Peters, Robert, 160n10Philip, M. NourbeSe, 59Pinsky, Robert, 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 14,

17, 18, 24, 27, 29, 30, 31, 35–51, 54–5, 60, 64, 69, 71, 73, 81, 90–1, 92, 93, 103, 104, 112, 116, 118, 127, 128, 141, 155n7, 156n9, 158n33, 159n40, 166n31, 174n3

An Explanation of America, 1, 5, 14, 24, 25, 29, 35–49, 51, 54–5, 81, 104, 112, 118, 127, 128, 141, 156n9, 156n16

Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry, 51, 92

“Eros against Esperanto,” 48, 159n40The Figured Wheel, 33–4, 158n33Poetry and the World, 44, 50The Situation of Poetry, 37, 156n14

Place, Vanessa, 115Plato, 19, 20, 151n53, 151n55politics

and poetry, 18, 20–1, 22, 24–5, 62–3, 74, 93–4, 116

Posner, Richard A., 153n67Pound, Ezra, 26, 64, 74, 153n67Probyn, Elspeth, 148n27Putnam, Hilary, 159n40

Quinn, Justin, 159n41

Raines, Ariana, 95Ramazani, Jahan, 3, 9, 151n57Rankine, Claudia, 115Rasula, Jed, 66Readings, Bill, 15Rector, Liam, 90, 92Reece, Florence, 62Reed, Brian, 115, 116, 124Reed, Ishmael, 90Renan, Ernst, 41, 49, 157n21Retallack, Joan, 150n46

194 l Index

rhetoricand poetry, 3, 25–7, 31, 74, 89, 136–7,

154n78, 155n80, 155n83Rich, Adrienne, 1, 3, 5, 9, 10, 14, 15, 17,

18, 24, 25, 27, 29, 30, 51, 53–72, 73, 81, 93, 97, 98, 99, 116, 117, 118, 119, 133, 141, 143, 161n30, 162n32, 162n33, 162n42, 174n3

Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose, 161n30, 162n33

Arts of the Possible, 25, 54, 58–9, 66–7, 69, 162n42

“An Atlas of the Difficult World,” 1, 5, 24, 25, 29, 31, 60–72, 97, 99, 141

What Is Found There, 57–8, 59, 62, 66, 68, 69–70

Riis, Jacob A., 39Rodgers, Carolyn M., 172n25Rorty, Richard, 19, 146n7Rosenthal, M. L., 75Rosenzweig, Franz, 100Rowe, John Carlos, 2, 47, 158n37Roy, Arundhati, 83Roza, Mathilde, 163n1, 165n19Rubin, Joan Shelley, 13, 155n5Rukeyser, Muriel, 13, 21, 29, 53, 55,

61, 65, 70, 74, 96, 100, 117, 118, 152n60

Sappho, 99Sartre, Jean-Paul, 141, 143Sassen, Saskia, 11Scalapino, Leslie, 135Schultz, Susan M., 115Schwartz, Leonard, 8, 133, 171n3Sedgwick, Eve, 148n27Shakespeare, William, 48Shapiro, Karl, 4, 65Sharples, R. W., 111, 170n50Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 19, 20, 127Shetley, Vernon, 161n10Silliman, Ron, 105, 135, 153n69, 168n27Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 26, 154n78Smith, Dale M., 26, 155n80, 166n1Snyder, Gary, 18

Sollors, Werner, 75, 156n12Spahr, Juliana, 1, 6, 9, 10, 14, 16, 17,

24, 25, 27, 31, 93–5, 96–101, 103, 106, 109, 113, 116, 117, 141, 150n46, 155n83, 166n4, 167n8, 168n23, 169n37

“Contemporary US Poetry and Its Nationalisms,” 9

“Poem Written after September 11, 2001,” 96–7, 113

“Poem Written from November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003,” 97–101, 113

“Poetry in a Time of Crisis,” 94This Connection of Everyone with

Lungs, 1, 6, 25, 31, 93, 96–101, 113

The Transformation, 167n8, 168n23, 169n37

Spanos, William V., 7, 147n15Spence, Rachel, 69Spender, Stephen, 152n61Spiegelman, Williard, 23Spinoza, Baruch, 100, 123Stein, Gertrude, 128Stein, Kevin, 146n9Steiner, George, 107Stern, Gerald, 91, 92Stevens, Wallace, 38, 165n19Stewart, Kathleen, 131

Tejada, Roberto José, 132, 134Templeton, Alice, 54, 61Thomas, Lorenzo, 24, 165n20Tocqueville, Alexis de, 39, 41, 42, 47Toman, Marshall, 41Toscano, Rodrigo, 1, 6, 9, 10, 14, 17,

24, 26, 31, 116, 117, 130–6, 137“El Barquito,” 132“Los Colaboradores,” 135Collapsible Poetics Theater, 130, 135Deck of Deeds, 1, 6, 26, 31, 116, 130–6, 137

“El Domesticado,” 134“El Edificio,” 132–3

Index l 195

“La Experimentalista,” 134“Los Exploradores,” 131“La Gallerista,” 134“El Lector,” 135, “El Librito,” 134Platform, 134“Red, White, and Blue,” 117, 133“El Refugiado,” 135“Los Resignados,” 134

Van Duyn, Mona, 4Vance, David Ray, 118Vendler, Helen, 13, 16, 65, 162n37Virgil, 158n31Volkman, Karen, 155n83

Wacquant, Loïc, 67Wallerstein, Immanuel, 159n40Warner, Michael, 142, 143Wasley, Aidan, 153n66Watten, Barrett, 24, 135, 153n69

Weil, Simone, 108West, M. L., 107, 169n40Whitman, Walt, 2, 10, 11, 12, 22, 23,

29, 38, 53, 55, 59, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 72, 100–1, 125, 139, 140, 163n48

Williams, Bernard, 148n27, 169n32Williams, Miller, 140Williams, William Carlos, 22, 35, 57Winters, Yvor, 16, 37, 150n44Wolosky, Shira, 12Wright, Lawrence, 87

Yeats, William Butler, 9, 23, 26, 27, 37, 153n67

Yenser, Stephen, 33

Zapruder, Matthew, 116Žižek, Slavoj, 101, 103, 105, 127Zolf, Rachel, 115