The Continuity of American Poetry (A Roundtable)

The Continuity of American Poetry (A Roundtable):  Virginia Jackson, UCI, panel chair; Radiclani Clytus, Columbia U; Ben Friedlander, U of Maine; Erin Kappeler, Missouri State U; Meredith McGill, Rutgers.Nineteenth-century... [ view full abstract ]

The Continuity of American Poetry (A Roundtable):  Virginia Jackson, UCI, panel chair; Radiclani Clytus, Columbia U; Ben Friedlander, U of Maine; Erin Kappeler, Missouri State U; Meredith McGill, Rutgers.

Nineteenth-century American poetry is still very much with us. While this poetry is still often described as "forgotten" and "conventional," commonly characterized as the embarrassing stuff twentieth-century American modernism left behind, nineteenth-century American poetics has never gone away.  This panel will take up moments in nineteenth-century American poetry and poetics as they are repeated in or sampled by twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry and poetics.  White it goes without saying that slavery, genocide, heteronormativity, settler colonialism, misogyny, banking, publishing, concepts of literary value and many other ideas and practices persist as relics of the nineteenth-century, not enough has been said about the ways in which poetry and poetics remain vehicles of and for that persistence.  Each speaker on this panel will select a nineteenth-, twentieth-, or twenty-first-century poem on which to focus her or his or their consideration of that history of transmission.

Radiclani Clytus:  The racialization of dialect in contemporary American poetry will often impact the production of a poem’s meaning in profound ways. For example, if a speaker’s voice and supporting contextual associations are perceived as “black,” there is no shortage of historical attributions awaiting our critical response—minstrelsy, plantation doggerel, or simply derogatory dialect are just a few classifications that come to mind.  But what happens if a poet’s cultural allusions fail to achieve their supposed de-racialized intentions?  Should we accept the resulting lop-sided arrangement wherein the speaker’s use of “inflammatory” language appears to support the superficial treatment and reading of black characters?  Must we always attribute such attempts at blackness to the long history of racial fantasy found in printed verse or trudged out onto the antebellum stage?  Or can we arrive at an alternative destination where the trope of racial surrogacy enables new meanings for our presumably new times?  In my discussion of Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, I will revisit W.S. Merwin’s mischaracterization of Manning’s Black Damon poems as “caricatured and parodied ‘End-man Minstrel’ language.”  By focusing on the seemingly ameliorative politics of paternalism and diction in “Dreadful Chapters Five,” “… Six” and “… Seven,” my aim will be to assess the possibilities of reading Manning’s racial provocations anew.

Ben Friedlander:  From "Negro Hero" in her very first book, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), through the sequence "Young Heroes" in Family Pictures (1970), on to her last book's tributes to Ellington and King (2000), Gwendolyn Brooks was concerned to praise models of action, ambition, and worth in the black community. A fascinating example of this is her 1986 poem "The Good Man," dedicated to Haki Madhubuti, a younger poet of the Black Power generation, and an inspiration to Brooks since the 1960s. The poem, however, did not arise naturally from within that relationship, but was instead a commission from 1965, published in a centennial commemoration of Lincoln's burial. The substitution of Madhubuti for Lincoln serves nicely as a figure for all that was forward-looking in Brooks's work, even as the minimal difference between the two poems suggests the degree to which she was carrying forward a nineteenth-century rhetoric of encomium. In my presentation, I will situate "The Good Man" and Brooks's earlier version in relation to other, older tributes to heroes, proposing that the acute differences of form and language obscure a more fundamental continuity of ideal.

Virginia Jackson will talk about some poems by Terrance Hayes:  "Antebellum House Party" (2014) and a series of recent sonnets each entitled "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin" (2017) (forthcoming in a book of the same name).  All of these poems explicitly--indeed, often parodically--put the history of poetics into conversation with the history of racialization.  Hayes consistently figures that conversation as a set of constraints.  In Hayes's work, poetic constraints are not progressive or "liberated" forms; instead, they are stanzaic and prosodic genres that figure repetition and misrecognition.  Thus the passage from, say, Wheatley to Hughes (both named in the sonnets) or from antebellum domesticity to contemporary racism loops temporal progression into historical regression, stanzas out of joint into the untimeliness of American history.

Erin Kappeler: Lana Del Rey has been recognized for her canny manipulation of the imagery of classic Hollywood, but so far her equally canny engagement with nineteenth-century poetry has gone unrecognized. From her extended reading of Leaves of Grass in her breakthrough album Born to Die to her engagement with W.E. Henley’s “Invictus” on the recent Lust for Life, Del Rey has consistently included nineteenth-century poetry in her investigations of an American media landscape, suggesting an ongoing fascination with this poetry’s capacity to animate and transmit cultural concepts. In this paper, I read the ways in which Del Rey uses nineteenth-century poetry to investigate American empire, suggesting that Del Rey’s sampling of "Invictus" in particular highlights the imbrication of the raced, classed, and gendered institutions of poetry with the racist, classist, and heterosexist institutions of empire. 

Meredith McGill:  One of our best readers of Transcendentalist poetry and poetics is poet and bookmaker Brian Teare, whose experimental sonnet sequence “Transcendental Grammar Crown” (2006, repr. 2013) claims a lineage that includes Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Charles Ives.  For this roundtable, I will focus on “Quakinggrass,” Teare’s erotic meditation on the common citational practices of poetry, photography, and natural history.  I will argue that despite the titular nod to Whitman, Teare’s chief interlocutor in this poem is Margaret Fuller, and that his attention to the problem of exemplarity and its intertwinement with questions of power and desire gives us back a Transcendentalist poetry shot through with passion, one largely free of the banal didacticism that literary critics continue to impose on it.