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Projective Citizenship— The Reimagining of the Citizen in Post-War American Poetry Lytton Jackson Smith Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 i © 2012 Lytton Jackson Smith All rights reserved ii ABSTRACT Projective Citizenship— The Reimagining of the Citizen in Post-War American Poetry Lytton Jackson Smith This dissertation examines the work of four poets writing in a projective or “open field” tradition in post-war America: Charles Olson, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, Susan Howe, and Myung Mi Kim. It considers the way these poets engage, via innovations in poetic form, with conceptions of the citizen and meanings of citizenship at different historical moments in the United States. Drawing on recent developments in citizenship theory which have focussed on what Engin Isin calls “acts of citizenship,” “Projective Citizenship—The Reimagining of the Citizen in Post-War American Poetry” suggests that poetry might offer a means for imagining alternative notions of the citizen, conceiving of citizens as active agents rather than passive subjects. iii i Contents Acknowledgments ii Preface iii Introduction: Creative Acts of Poetry: The Bollingen Prize, the Citizen-Poet, and Projective Citizenship 1 Exiling the Transformative Poet The Bollingen Prize: Ezra Pound’s Tenuous Citizenship Creative Acts: Poets and the Claim to Citizenship Reimagining the Citizen Projective Verse—Projective Citizenship “To Try To Get Down One Citizen as Against Another”: Citizenship through Epistolarity in Charles Olson’s Early Poetry 35 Writing Citizens: C.L.R. James, Charles Olson, and Moby-Dick Towards a Projective Citizenship Projective Citizenship: Polis is Letters, Writing “Ellington was a ‘citizen’”: Lyric Community beyond Citizenship in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Poetry of the Sixties and Seventies 76 “Contact LeRoi Jones”: Citizenship Beyond Epistolarity What sort of “Citizen” was Duke Ellington? “Poems Like Fists”: The Lyric Poem’s Political Acts Nation Time and Communal Identity “The subtle workings of the Body Politic on every citizen”: Citizenship through Text in Howe’s A Bibliography of the King’s Book 115 Can a Creative Act be an Act of Citizenship? Subjects, Citizens, and Author(ities) Beyond Mirrors: the Acts of Citizens “Word Model Plurality”: Citizenship through Translation in Myung Mi Kim’s Dura 151 How to Say Who Are Citizens Primers, Proofing, and the Citizens’ Language “They Must Be Taught The Language”: Resisting Proofing Can You Read and Write English? Notes 181 Works Cited 207 i Acknowledgments I owe a debt, and happily, to Brent Hayes Edwards, Michael Golston, and Matthew Hart, my advisory committee, who challenged and encouraged me in equal measure; this dissertation would not have been written without their support and insight. I am deeply grateful to my external examiners, Rowan Ricardo Phillips and Timothy Donnelly, for their perceptive analyses of my ideas, for their time in reading this dissertation, and for their belief in the project. The circuitous route my Ph.D. took, via Anglo-Saxon travel narratives and modern Greek poetry, is testament to the time, energy, and intellect of a set of amazing professors at Columbia University. To my colleagues at Plymouth University for supporting me during the last year of this dissertation: thank you. To the many, many friends who made this dissertation possible and helped develop its ideas: thank you for your continued inspiration and patience, particularly when I was terrible at replying to my e-mails. Especial thanks to Nijah Cunningham, Sherally Munshi, Joe North, Katja Lindskog, Jenny James, and Mary Kate Hurley, for asking and challenging and caring. To my parents and brothers, who helped me get to Columbia and didn’t complain when I insisted on staying there longer: all my love. Above all, my gratitude and love to Jess R. Fenn, fellow conspirator and conversationalist. This began on runs through Riverside Park and has continued to Paddington Recreation Ground. You kept me going when I’d found yet another dead end, and helped me along when the finish line seemed a bit too far away. You’ve taught me more than anyone, and I look forward to where what we learn will take us. ii Preface This dissertation emerges from a question posed by Charles Olson in the 1950s. In the early letter-poems of his Gloucester-based epic, Maximus, Olson/Maximus asks, “Who can say who are / citizens?” As the following pages demonstrate, that question was then (and continues to be now) part of wider debates over what citizenship meant and who had the power to define the citizen’s status. The premise of this dissertation is that poets have long attempted to engage with public discourse about citizenship, in part through making visible the workings of governmental versions of “the citizen.” I consider a particular historical place and time—the United States in the second half of the 20th century—in order to show how poets Charles Olson, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Susan Howe, and Myung Mi Kim have used the poem not just to address themes pertinent to citizenship but also to offer methodologies by which the citizen might differently constitute him- or herself. These poets, working within the innovative tradition of Open Field/Projective poetics, employ non-traditional forms and fragmented existing texts in order to show how citizenship often comes into being as a normative script to which citizens are subject and which they are complicit in sustaining. By disrupting such scripts within their poems, these poets participated in historical and contemporary discourses over citizenship in order to imagine new possibilities for the citizen through their creative acts. My arguments draw on recent work in citizenship studies that recognize a need to understand citizen status outside of traditional conceptions of rights, responsibilities, fixed borders, ethnic affiliation, place of birth, and so on. Various theorists, including Engin Isin, Melanie White, and Étienne Balibar, have begun to privilege the acts that constitute the citizen rather than the definitions that delimit inclusion and exclusion. While citizenship, in its narrowest sense, is a iii governmental, legislative category, designating an individual to whom a state has accorded a set of rights and responsibilities (voting, paying taxes, serving on juries, the expectation of a fair trial and due process), such theorists have shown that citizenship more fully relies on a set of narratives told to, about, and by citizens. Although citizenship is an essential category, the means by which an individual can rely on the protection of her government in a time of crisis, and through which she can expect to participate in the construction and maintenance of her society, it is experienced unequally. On one level, this inequality arises from the fact that some are born into citizenship while others apply for it; in a recent speech as part of the Zócalo Public Square/Cal Humanities’ “Searching for Democracy” series, former Clinton-speechwriter Eric Liu wondered, “What if every single one of us today had to earn our citizenship in some form or fashion?” (April 5, 2012). Additionally, beyond a rhetoric of whether citizenship is innate or earned, race, gender, and class govern the expectations of the state and of other citizens; historical factors and perceptions of appearance or behavior can determine how one is seen inside or outside citizen status, as Devon Carbado and others have shown. In her 2007 essay, “Borders of the Body: Black Women, Sexual Assault, and Citizenship,” Toni Irving records the then-definition of citizenship from the United States Citizenship and Immigration website: “a native-born, foreign-born, or naturalized person who owes allegiance to the United States and who is entitled to its protection.” That definition inscribes three categories within citizen status; they are not mutually exclusive (one can be foreign-born and naturalized) and the separation between these statuses allows for an assumption of difference within citizenship that has historically been used to discriminate the kinds of protection different classes of citizen are afforded. American citizens of Japanese affiliation during World War II, for example, were iv treated as hostile to the country of which they were citizens; they experienced citizenship not as a protection but as a technology of surveillance, suspicion, and control. Within the pages of this dissertation, I explore how Olson, Jones/Baraka, Howe, and Kim have reacted to similar failures of citizenship in order to insist on the citizen’s ability to articulate his/her relationship to citizen status. Since citizenship remains subject to revision by government, it becomes useful as a status not by virtue of its possession but by virtue of our ability to articulate and give meaning to it. The poets I examine within this dissertation react to normative scripts of citizenship by employing innovative poetics—that is, writing which tests, questions, and at times obviates inherited laws and forms, turning instead to its own content and concerns—in order to offer alternative conceptions of citizen status. In so doing, they contribute to a public discourse over citizenship by allowing us to re-imagine who citizens are, how they behave, and why they are necessary. A central premise of this dissertation is that citizenship involves making decisions about how to act with and towards others, often against hierarchies and pre-determined scripts. This premise involves moving away from a passive conception of “being” a citizen and towards an understanding of the participatory acts through which citizens relate to others and to the state. The citizen, conceived in this way, is a creative agent, and especially so where his or her citizenship is denied or weakened. This dissertation, therefore, is about the beliefs of a set of American poets working in experimental traditions who sought to make visible limitations placed upon citizenship—who used their written acts to interrupt existing scripts of citizenship and so to suggest plural manifestations of citizen status.