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City Poems and Urban Crisis, 1945 - Present City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2016 City Poems And Urban Crisis, 1945 - Present Jeffrey Nathan Mickelson City University of New York, Graduate Center How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1215 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] CITY POEMS AND URBAN CRISIS, 1945 – PRESENT by JEFFREY NATHAN MICKELSON A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 ii © 2016 JEFFREY NATHAN MICKELSON All Rights Reserved iii This manuscript has been read and accepted by the Graduate Faculty in English to satisfy the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. JEFFREY NATHAN MICKELSON November 13, 2015 AMMIEL ALCALAY Chair of Examining Committee November 13, 2015 MARIO DIGANGI Executive Officer AMMIEL ALCALAY, PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE THOMAS ANGOTTI, PROFESSOR OF URBAN AFFAIRS AND PLANNING DAVID RICHTER, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv Abstract CITY POEMS AND URBAN CRISIS, 1945 – PRESENT by Jeffrey Nathan Mickelson Adviser: Professor Ammiel Alcalay City Poems proposes that twentieth-century American city poets hold important concerns, commitments, and strategies in common with urban theorists and city planners. The study situates canonical and lesser-read city poetry, including work by William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, George Oppen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Wanda Coleman, among others, in relation to discourses of urban crisis. Following Raymond Williams, Henri Lefebvre, and James Scully, it approaches city poetry as a form of social action that holds particular value for practitioners of progressive city planning. Because poetic representations of cities influence public perceptions, City Poems suggests, they have the potential to shape private and government actions. The relationship between poetry and public life has become an increasingly urgent topic for American poets, in particular since the emergence of neoliberalism as the dominant political order in the 1980s. Applying insights from critical urban theory and reader-response criticism, City Poems suggests that poets and planners have shifted their responses to urban crisis in the wake of neoliberalism’s emergence from articulating comprehensive theories of the city to observing and responding to everyday practices in communities. Following through on this insight, the study analyzes the efforts of city poets and progressive planners to expand the range of knowledge that counts in defining the social and physical dimensions of cities and argues that experiential knowledge and affective engagement have proven to be crucial components in their visions of a more just and equitable urban future. The study’s main contributions are the commonalities it identifies in the practices of city poets, urban theorists, and city planners and the methodology it demonstrates of reading city poetry as a mode of insurgent urban practice. v Acknowledgements I am indebted to my adviser, Ammiel Alcalay, for the support, guidance, and encouragement he has provided at all stages of this project. Tom Angotti helped me identify urban planning resources early. I am grateful for the time and energy he has offered in helping me refine my understanding of the planning literature. David Richter supervised my orals list on hermeneutics. Our conversations then and since then have enhanced the way I read. In addition to the members of my committee, I also owe debts to the English faculty at The Graduate Center, including Mario DiGangi, who gave me confidence to pursue an interdisciplinary project, Alan Vardy, who provided helpful feedback on my prospectus, and David Greetham, who encouraged my investigation of Brooklyn Bridge Park. I would not have started this project without the advice and friendship of my fellow students in the English program, especially Megan Paslawski, Erin Nicholson Gale, Charlotte Thurston, and their partners. I am grateful, as well, to my current and former colleagues and students at Stella and Charles Guttman Community College. In particular, I appreciate the chance Toni Gifford, Stuart Cochran, and Scott Evenbeck took in involving me in the college’s creation and development and the unfailing personal and professional support I have received from Nicola Blake and Tracy Daraviras. Outside Guttman, Caity Mold-Zern kept me on my feet at crucial moments and James Hatch insisted I could finish. Finally, and most importantly, I thank my family, Diane, Mark, Joshua, Bill, Xander, and Pixie, for giving me the courage start on this path, and my partner, Sameer, whose patience, kindness, and questions have sustained me in my research and writing by reminding me of the joy to be found in the struggle. City Poems is dedicated to the memory of my student, Shawn Depusoir. vi Contents Introduction: City Poems and Urban Crisis 1 Chapter 1: Writing Around Williams: Paterson and Experimental Urban Poetics 15 Chapter 2: Community and Crisis in Los Angeles Poetry 78 Chapter 3: The “Curious” Languages of New York: George Oppen’s City 134 Chapter 4: The Poetics of Neighborhood: Reading “Bronzeville” and the “Loisaida” 193 Chapter 5: Poetry and Progressive Planning 240 Works Cited 282 City Poems and Urban Crisis 1 Introduction: City Poems and Urban Crisis Show me the words that will reorder the world, or else keep silent. — Tony Kushner, Angels in America The Housing Act of 1949 authorized unprecedented federal intervention in the built environments of American cities. Conceived in response to fears about slowing economic growth and perceived threats to public safety, the Act enabled the physical transformation of urban neighborhoods through aggressive redevelopment. While the Act required that cities direct a majority of federal funds toward the construction of new low-income housing, from its passage to the present, greater and greater percentages of urban renewal and redevelopment investments have been allocated to “higher and better uses.” Far from strengthening the urban fabric, in fact, many of the interventions pursued under the Act have resulted in the physical and social destruction of low-income and minority neighborhoods and the displacement of vibrant urban communities.1 From passage of the Act, through the urban uprisings of the 1960s and the demolitions of larger housing projects that peaked in the 1990s, to the uncertain present of cities such as Detroit, researchers, city planners, and residents have contested national priorities for addressing the “urban crisis.”2 During the same period, American poets have increasingly turned to the urban as a setting and subject matter for experimental poetics. This study 1 The Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Kelo v. City of New London favoring the use of the powers of eminent domain to seize land for private development is a recent example of this tendency. Ashley Foard and Hilbert Fefferman describe the legislative history of the urban renewal policy in “Federal Urban Renewal Legislation” in the edited collection Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy. 2 An early use of “urban crisis” to describe the state of American cities appears in the report of the Kennedy Conference on Urban Affairs held on October 10, 1960 in the midst of Senator John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. The term was used widely in popular and academic media throughout the 1960s. Victor Gruen’s The Heart of Our Cities: The Urban Crisis: Diagnosis and Cure (1964) and Irwin Isenberg’s The City in Crisis (1968) are representative titles. Critiquing this line of reasoning, Naomi Klein argues in The Shock Doctrine (2007), that government and business leaders sometimes define existing conditions as “in crisis” in order to achieve political ends. Approaching “crisis” as a revolutionary opportunity, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in Commonwealth (2009), and David Harvey, in Rebel Cities (2011), suggest that activist groups can take advantage of the rhetoric of crisis by consolidating their agendas and efforts in opposition to capitalism. City Poems and Urban Crisis 2 documents debates about the present and future of American cities that have played out in parallel in the fields of urban theory, city planning, and contemporary poetics from 1945 to the present. Identifying common concerns, commitments, and strategies emerging across and within these fields, it points to opportunities for collaborative work toward developing a more just and equitable urban future. An important starting point for this discussion is the urban crisis of the 1950s and 1960s, a period of social and political anticipated by the 1949 Housing Act. Triggered by the departure from cities of wealthy, white residents and the concomitant erosion of public funding for infrastructure and social services, the crisis signaled a rupture in the collective urban consciousness that contributed to the rise of movements for racial and social justice. In response to the crisis, civil rights groups turned to cities as venues for organizing and as terrains of conflict. Focusing attention on everyday urban problems such as access to housing, services, and jobs,
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