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Introduction Civic Poetry, 1979–2012

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Introduction Civic Poetry, 1979–2012 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.
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