US Poetry in the Age of Empire, 1979-2012

P. Gwiazda

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781349500789
  9781137470850
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137466273
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Examining poetry by Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, and Amiri Baraka, among others, this book shows that leading US poets since 1979 have performed the role of public intellectual through their poetic rhetoric. Gwiazda's argument aims to revitalize the role of poetry and its social value within an era of global politics.

CHAPTER 1

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

In 1964, Robert Lowell wrote a poem about the American empire at its peak. Titled “July in Washington,” the poem describes the US capital as the center of the world, a “wheel” whose spokes “touch the sore spots of the earth.” The United States has replaced the old colonial European powers, even while it competes with the Soviet Union for influence among undeveloped or politically unstable countries. But this global hegemon is not free of inner corruption. The equestrian statues that adorn the centers of traffic circles in Washington “ride like South American / liberators,” politicians arrive in the capital “bright as dimes” but “die disheveled and soft.” Throughout the poem, Lowell seems skeptical if not scornful of America’s expansionist impulse: “we wish the river had another shore / some farther range of delectable mountains.”¹ Indeed, this moment in US history already marks the beginning of its decline. The poem’s imagery suggests, in the words of one commentator, that “the new era will be one in which American civilization will sink back into the wilderness from which it sprang.”² In “July in Washington,” Lowell seems simultaneously entranced and repelled by the American empire; it is difficult to tell how he feels about it because throughout the poem he remains characteristically ambivalent.

“Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry in the way Lowell, or before him Eliot, did,” said James Longenbach upon the publication of Robert Pinsky’s The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems in 1996. “But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky.”³ Almost two decades later, Longenbach’s assessment of Pinsky’s public stature seems only slightly exaggerated. By now, Pinsky’s oeuvre includes seven books of poetry—Sadness and Happiness (1975), An Explanation of America (1979), History of My Heart (1984), The Want Bone (1990), The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems (1996), Jersey Rain (2000), and Gulf Music (2007)—as well as several volumes of literary and cultural criticism such as The Situation of Poetry (1977), Poetry and the World (1988), Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002), and Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town (2009). Pinsky is also a tireless popularizer of poetry in the United States—indeed, a kind of “cultural pundit.”⁴ From 1997 to 2000 he served as the Poet Laureate of the United States. During that period, he codirected the multimedia Favorite Poem Project, a large-scale portrait of American poetry readership; three anthologies of verse were issued in conjunction with the project.⁵ In the years that followed, he wrote “The Poet’s Choice” column for The Washington Post, appeared regularly as “America’s Wordsmith” on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and several times on The Colbert Report. He also served as poetry editor at The New Republic and Slate. A longtime professor of creative writing at Boston University, he is listed as poetry “expert” at the online knowledge forum Big Think. From the outset of his career, Pinsky has fashioned himself as a citizen poet who speaks on behalf of his fellow citizens—even as the country itself undergoes profound transformations.

We can say that Pinsky perfectly exemplifies the idea of “culture poet” von Hallberg investigates in American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980. But unlike Lowell, who even in his most public-themed poems could not dissociate himself from his elite background, Pinsky writes poems that are suffused with images of middle-class life. These poems demonstrate his love of American music and movies. They express his appreciation of consumer products and technological gadgets. As he chronicles the experience of being American at the turn of the century, Pinsky remains in dialogue with popular culture, which for him is all but synonymous with national culture. In the title poem of his debut volume Sadness and Happiness, he complains about

foolish ghosts

urging me to become some redeeming

Jewish-American Shakespeare

(or God knows what they expect,

Longfellow)⁶

—a confession that, for all its self-protective irony, testifies to his aspirations as a public figure. And the foolish ghosts seem to have prevailed, at least in securing Pinsky the kind of name recognition few of his fellow practitioners can dream of. Although so far major honors like the Pulitzer and the National Book Award have eluded him, he has received numerous awards and distinctions, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Harold Morton Landon Prize in Translation (for The Inferno of Dante), the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lenore Marshall Prize, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN Center USA. He has held prestigious offices, including secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and chancellor at the Academy of American Poets. Pinsky received invitations to attend high-profile cultural events at the White House during the presidencies of Bill Clinton (which he accepted) and George W. Bush (which he declined).⁷ Today, after nearly five decades of high-profile literary activity, Pinsky is something of a national treasure. Fittingly enough, he is the only living poet featured in the series of bronze plaques along East 41st Street in Manhattan (next to the New York Public Library), among such luminaries as Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and of course Longfellow.

In this chapter, I will look closely at Pinsky’s book-length poem An Explanation of America (1979) to argue that it serves as a useful vantage point from which to begin our analysis of US poetry in the age of Empire. Lowell composed “July in Washington” at the height of the Cold War (the poem’s verdant imagery and references to South America are likely echoes of his 1962 tour of Trinidad, Brazil, and Argentina under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was secretly funded by the CIA). Pinsky, however, writes at a different juncture in the United States’ self-definition as a superpower, not only the aftermath of the Vietnam War but, as David Harvey calls it, “a revolutionary turning-point in the world’s social and economic history . . . the new economic configuration often subsumed under the term globalization.”⁸ Von Hallberg calls Pinsky’s poem “one of the markers by which the literary history of this period will be known.”⁹ But the poem’s focus on the meaning of the nation-state at the time of America’s changing position in the global matrix makes it more than just a representative poem of the Ford-Carter era. In an online Q&A session hosted by Smartish Pace in 2001, Pinsky talks about it as “strange and weird, a book-length poem experimental beyond anything I’ve dared try since—but I’m very proud of it, would have no problem reading from it to you.”¹⁰ A self-described “compulsive explainer,”¹¹ Pinsky places some of the most salient features of the United States’ national self-construction—exceptionalism, expansionism, and the dichotomy of individual and community—against the backdrop of the then emerging debates about multiculturalism.¹² At the time when the concept was facing one of its most robust challenges, he upholds patriotism as a primary mode of social attachment. He suggests that the divided, fragmented society signified by that much contested term—“America”—can be made whole by a shared act of the imagination.

In Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry (2010), Robert Archambeau argues: “This poem, coming at the end of a decade of identity politics and identity poetics, articulates an idea of American identity that is both compelling in itself and comforting to those who find identity poetics narrow and excessively divisive . . . An Explanation of America offers a vision of unified national identity.”¹³ Although I think Archambeau is right, in this chapter I want to focus on those passages in the poem that show Pinsky’s productive (in my view) hesitation about the concept of unified national identity. I want to point to those aspects of the text that problematize Pinsky’s supposedly single-minded vision; in particular, I concentrate on the stoical distance that characterizes many parts of the poem, best exemplified by Pinsky’s reference to the United States as “The plural-headed Empire, manifold / Beyond my outrage or my admiration” (EA, 15). As I argue, Pinsky’s equivocating poem offers not so much a conservative reaction to the rise of identity politics as a recognition of the weak bonds of nationhood in the multicultural, multilingual, indeed multinational America. Although Pinsky offers his young daughter (the formal addressee of his poem), his audience, and by implication his fellow citizens an opportunity for patriotic education, he speaks in a mood of acceptance of the difficulty of identification with “others,” unless it is through a deliberate exercise of the imagination. The conclusion he reaches in the poem—that even the feeling of national belonging requires a great deal of social imagining—sheds much light on the concept of American national identity in the mid-1970s as well as in the present moment.

Images and Metaphors

Not counting two shorter poems that begin and conclude the volume, An Explanation of America consists of three sections in which Pinsky discusses, respectively, “Its Many Fragments,” “Its Great Emptiness,” and “Its Everlasting Possibility.” These are indeed old myths, if not old clichés, which Pinsky sets up dialectically to elaborate on their implications in the mid-1970s United States. In terms of style, the poem also seems deliberately old-fashioned—an Augustan essay in verse minus the heroic couplet. The “Prologue” to Part One, titled simply “You,” gives us a sense of what to expect in the rest of the poem:

As though explaining the idea of dancing

Or the idea of some other thing

Which everyone has known a little about

Since they were children, which children learn themselves

With no explaining, but which children like

Sometimes to hear the explanations of,

I want to tell you something about our country,

Or my idea of it: explaining it

If not to you, to my idea of you. (EA, 5)

The epic simile reveals the basic method of Pinsky’s “explanation.” Influenced by his Stanford mentor Yvor Winters, a champion of clarity in poetry, Pinsky announces his preference for logical argument over passionate appeal. To “explain” means to “render plain or intelligible” (after the Latin verb explanare, to “smooth out” or “spread out on a flat surface”). Accordingly, Pinsky will speak as a discursive poet he himself describes in The Situation of Poetry, as “talking, predicating, moving directly through a subject as systematically and unaffectedly as he would walk from one place to another.”¹⁴ He will speak in a way that is deliberate, methodical, yet also somewhat meandering, if not dancelike: the loose iambic pentameter, caesuras and enjambments, verbal repetitions and sound effects, including the homoioteleuton in the opening two verses, suggest that Pinsky is not averse to rhetorical embellishment.

If not exactly “experimental,” then, An Explanation is an unconventional poem written in a manner that seems almost the exact opposite of the dominant mode of American poetry in the 1970s—the “the scenic style” (Charles Altieri’s term) typified by unobtrusive craft, authentic feeling, and lack of interest in public issues. In The Situation of Poetry, Pinsky describes this style as “interior, submerged, free-playing, elusive, more fresh than earnest, more eager to surprise than to tell”¹⁵—everything his own poem announces from the beginning it is not. Another unconventional aspect of Pinsky’s poem concerns its addressee. Pinsky structures his poem as a verse essay written to another person, not just any person but a family member, not just any family member but his daughter. The poem’s subtitle “A Poem to My Daughter” echoes Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter,” but there is a big difference between the nouns “poem” and “prayer” and especially between the prepositions “to” and “for.” By depicting himself as a father engaged in a kind of homeschooling, Pinsky channels one of the era’s debates concerning the gover...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   Civic Poetry, 1979–2012
• 1  “Beyond My Outrage or My Admiration”: Robert Pinsky’s An Explanation of America
• 2  “Nothing Else Left to Read”: Adrienne Rich’s “An Atlas of the Difficult World”
• 3  “Who the Biggest Terrorist”: Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America”
• 4  Ether: Juliana Spahr, Ben Lerner, Lisa Jarnot
• 5  Dreams of a Common Language: Mark Nowak, Anne Boyer, Rodrigo Toscano
• Coda   For Whom Does One Write?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index