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REVELATORY LINES, REVOLUTIONARY LOVE: BEATS, BLACK ARTS, AND THE POETICS OF PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT By BERIT BRINK A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2016 © 2016 Berit Brink To Dee-dee ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Marsha Bryant, Debra Walker King, and Louise Newman for being so supportive, helpful and accommodating throughout the writing process. I would especially like to thank Tace for setting up a dissertation group and for offering such extensive, detailed feedback at every stage of this project - it has helped me push this project well beyond what I thought it could be. I thank my parents and brother Lennart for always helping me put things in perspective. Finally, and most importantly, I thank Dee-dee, for being there, always. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................................7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................9 Directing Our Glance: Poetry and Social Change ....................................................................9 Notes .......................................................................................................................................18 2 A CITY IN FLUX: RE-IMAGINING SAN FRANCISCO IN TIMES OF CRISIS, 1848-1955 ...............................................................................................................................20 Ghost City: Nineteenth-Century Science Fiction and Spiritualism ........................................24 Red City: Leftism and Communism in 1930s San Francisco .................................................29 City of Dreams: Bohemians in San Francisco 1930-1955 ......................................................34 City Spaces and the Public Sphere .........................................................................................40 Harnessing the Current of Strangeness ...................................................................................50 Notes .......................................................................................................................................55 3 NIKKI GIOVANNI AND MICHAEL MCCLURE: VISIONS OF LOVE AS REVOLUTIONARY ACTION ..............................................................................................57 Legal Violence and Black Arts Resistance .............................................................................69 Love in Times of Violence: Giovanni’s Dreams ....................................................................72 McClure’s Mammalian Vision ...............................................................................................85 Walking the Line between Action and Abstraction ................................................................98 Notes .....................................................................................................................................101 4 SONIA SANCHEZ AND GARY SNYDER: “DOING” POETRY AND THE CREATION OF A COUNTERPUBLIC ..............................................................................102 Modeling Mindfulness: Snyder’s Environmental Poetry .....................................................110 Exploding Myths: Sanchez’s Witnessing and Verbal Hand Grenades .................................123 “Poetry is not a Luxury”: Modeling Alternatives and the Creation of Counterpublics .......135 A Window into Utopia: Creating Spaces for Change ...........................................................148 Notes .....................................................................................................................................152 5 CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................................154 The Afterlife of Long 1960s Poetry: Towards a Common Humanity ..................................154 Notes .....................................................................................................................................167 5 WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................168 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................178 6 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy REVELATORY LINES, REVOLUTIONARY LOVE: BEATS, BLACK ARTS, AND THE POETICS OF PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT By Berit Brink December 2016 Chair: Tace Hedrick Major: English This dissertation examines the way in which poets from both the Beat Generation and the Black Arts movement used poetry as a form of activism during the long 1960s (1955-1975) in San Francisco, and considers to what extent similarities in their performative and stylistic strategies warrant a reconceptualization of “the counterculture.” Specifically, by juxtaposing the early work of Beat poets Gary Snyder and Michael McClure with that of Black Arts poets Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez, I show that each used poetry to project what I call an alternative social imaginary: a vision of an ideal society that serves as the driving force behind social change regardless of whether it will eventually be realized. As such, poetry performances functioned in a way similar to Jill Dolan’s “utopian performatives” for they offered spectators hope of a better world. Building on Dolan, I show that they did not merely offer a glimpse into this alternative world, however, but also used poetry as a space for modeling the kinds of behaviors and practices necessary to potentially realize these visions. To explain how they did this, I first take a close look at San Francisco and argue that the city’s tendency to “reimagine” itself throughout history might be a reason why the social imaginaries offered by long-1960s poets found fruitful ground here. Second, I analyze the work of Nikki Giovanni and Michael McClure published between 1968-1974 and argue that for both 7 poets authentic feelings of love and solidarity formed the foundation for an alternative social imaginary because these could undermine the repressive realities of capitalism and white supremacy. Finally, in my last chapter, I juxtapose Gary Snyder’s work with that of Sonia Sanchez and use both Michael Warner’s theory of publics and counterpublics and Jill Dolan’s idea of “utopian performatives” to illustrate how both poets modeled “wholeness” for their publics, and what role these publics played in effectuating social change. I conclude by considering how the excavation of such significant similarities between seemingly disparate movements might offer hope for finding common ground in the polarized atmosphere of the contemporary United States. 8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Directing Our Glance: Poetry and Social Change Let’s / change / to a wave / of liberated joys / and set the models of reality / afloat like toys. – Michael McClure Jaguar Skies Over the course of 2016, the 1960s have seemed closer than ever. The police shootings of several African American men, the retaliatory killing of policemen in Dallas, Texas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a strong protest movement in the form of Black Lives Matter, and the rise of Republic Presidential nominee Donald Trump, whom some have compared to President Richard Nixon,1 all indicate that alienation, discontent, and racial discord have returned with nearly the same force as in the 1960s. Then, too, police brutality sparked severe distrust among black communities and state violence was frequently sanctioned to break up protests, most notoriously at the National Democratic Convention of 1968 and at Kent State University in 1970. While cultural differences such as the comparative lack of student activism and less overt nature of racist incidents means we cannot collapse the two decades, news outlets are nonetheless teeming with articles2 drawing parallels between 2016 and 1968. Academically, however, relatively few have returned to the 1960s. The research that has broached the topic tends to fall into two categories: it either takes a long look at the 1960s or approaches the decade from a different, specialized angle. These approaches are clearly not without merit: I am indebted, for example, to the in-depth overview of black literary nationalism by James Edward Smethurst (2005) and Madhu Dubey’s argument that some novels written by black women during the height of the Black Arts movement reconfigure black nationalist ideology (1994). More recently, however, publications concerning the 1960s have been less interdisciplinary and more decidedly historical 9 in scope. There have been several broad overviews of 1960s America on the one hand, such as Tom Hayden’s 2009 book The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama and Christopher Strain’s The Long Sixties: America, 1955-1973 (2016), as well as a handful of specialized historical research on the other hand, such as Clarence Lang’s Black America in the Shadow of the Sixties (2015) and Port Huron Statement (2015) by Richard Flacks and Nelson Lichtenstein. The interchange of arts and politics,