On Lyric's Minor Commons by Daniel Benjamin a Dissertation Submitted
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On Lyric’s Minor Commons By Daniel Benjamin A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Lyn Hejinian, Chair Professor Judith Butler Professor Nadia Ellis Professor Anne-Lise François Summer 2019 Abstract On Lyric’s Minor Commons by Daniel Benjamin Doctor of Philosophy in English and Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory University of California, Berkeley Professor Lyn Hejinian, Chair On Lyric’s Minor Commons studies how minoritized writers use lyric poems to create alternative forms of collectivity. I argue that poets like Amiri Baraka, Frank O’Hara, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Jack Spicer use lyric poetry’s undetermined multiplicity of voicing and reading for various social and political aims. These poems become spaces for politics: they conjure and mobilize collectives of action and feeling. My argument complicates generic and historicist critiques that associate lyric voice with the reinforcement of humanism. While lyric is often considered to be the genre of individual subjective experience, I read lyric as the genre of the collective who can voice or read it. For the minoritized poets I discuss in this dissertation, lyric’s collective is not the unmarked hegemonic universal, but another commons. The politics of difference often emphasizes the individual relative to the collective; my readings show how the “black poem” or the “queer poem” offer a commons of their own. These poems are minor in their position vis-à-vis the unmarked hegemonic universal, and also minor in their alternative prefiguring of a different form of sociality without a coercive and majoritarian impulse. By calling these invocations commons rather than particularisms, I argue that these writers figure minoritized identities as forms of collectivity rather than fixed identifications. I begin with a reconsideration of the Romantic lyric, a primal scene for the association of lyric with the unmarked and abstract subject. Through reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals in apposition to some of William Wordsworth’s poems, I suggest a version of lyric reading that does not merely reproduce the subject, but instead exposes language to alternative reiteration through a contingent holding. Lyric’s attempt to capture experience in language, I argue, makes that experience into a commons. I then turn to more specific invocations by three mid-century U.S. poets, Amiri Baraka, Jack Spicer, and Frank O’Hara. Baraka and Spicer use lyric poems to call collective subjectivities— queerness and blackness, respectively—into being. Poems, for them, become utopian queer or black spaces par excellence: as Baraka writes, “Let the world be a black poem.” I complicate this utopian impulse by asking whether poems can offer security against despair. Across O’Hara’s bright sociality, and Spicer’s alienation, I find their poems offer various and contradictory sites of entry that account for how experiences of joy and negativity interfuse one another. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, whose commons is also internally differentiated, speculative, and without assurance. This poem, I argue, assembles a universality of aesthetic 1 judgment as an ecstatic community that is radically indeterminate, yet posited nevertheless. Throughout these investigations I emphasize how the collective is not a lamentable or optional feature for these poets: rather than using lyric to plumb the depths of personal experience, they use it to imagine and create various emergent commons. 2 Contents Acknowledgments ii Introduction: “A Universal Poem” iii Chapter 1: Lyric Theory in Apposition 1 Interlude: Writing the Community of the Future 31 Chapters 2 and 3: Queerness as Poetry / Blackness as Poetry: Introduction 38 Chapter 2: A Black Poem and a Black World 41 Interlude: The Negative as Resource 57 Chapter 3: This Is How We Dead Men Write to Each Other 63 Interlude: Two Ribbon-Wrapped Hearts 87 Chapter 4: On Ecstatic-Aesthetic Universality—In Zong! 97 Bibliography 122 i Acknowledgments I could not have written this dissertation without the generous support of so many people. Thank you to my dissertation committee, for your advice and guidance: Lyn Hejinian, Judith Butler, Nadia Ellis, and Anne-Lise François. Thank you to Kevin Killian, for modeling other forms of scholarship and guiding me to many mysteries. Thank you to Claire Marie Stancek for your careful reading, enlivening conversation, and myriad other forms of support and insight. Thank you to my family, for encouragement and love at farther distances. Thank you to my friends, colleagues, and community who made this work always feel collective: Adam Ahmed, Joe Albernaz, Bruce Boone, Brandon Brown, Brandon Callender, Dylan Byron, Judith Goldman, Erin Greer, Jane Gregory, Tim Heimlich, Angela Hume, Seulghee Lee, Hannah Manshel, JR Martin, Ismail Muhammad, Allison Neal, Samia Rahimtoola, Jocelyn Saidenberg, and Eric Sneathen. Thank you to Josephine Miles for the house in which I wrote most of this dissertation. A portion of chapter 4 was previously published, in slightly different form, in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, and it is republished by permission of the Publisher, Duke University Press. ii Introduction: “A Universal Poem” “If we must die,” begins Claude McKay’s famous 1919 sonnet—but who is we? In McKay’s description of the context around his writing of the poem, the “we” seems clearly rooted in the “Negro people” and even more particularly, “we Negro railroad men” to whom McKay first read the poem: Our Negro newspapers were morbid, full of details of clashes between colored and white, murderous shootings and hangings. Traveling from city to city and unable to gauge the attitude and temper of each one, we Negro railroad men were nervous. We were less light-hearted. We did not separate from one another gaily to spend ourselves in speakeasies and gambling joints. We stuck together, some of us armed, going from the railroad station to our quarters. We stayed in our quarters all through the dreary ominous nights, for we never knew what was going to happen. It was during those days that the sonnet, “If We Must Die,” exploded out of me. And for it the Negro people unanimously hailed me as a poet. Indeed, that one grand outburst is their sole standard of appraising my poetry. It was the only poem I ever read to the members of my crew. They were all agitated. Even the fourth waiter - who was the giddiest and most irresponsible of the lot, with all his motives and gestures colored by a strangely acute form of satyriasis - even he actually cried. One, who was a believer in the Marcus Garvey Back-to-Africa Movement, suggested that I should go to Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the organization, and read the poem. As I was not uplifted with his enthusiasm for the Garvey Movement, yet did not like to say so, I told him truthfully that I had no ambition to harangue a crowd. (A Long Way From Home 29-30) McKay describes a group whose inner cohesion increased due to the violence of outside forces. The “we” of Negro railroad men are forced into proximity by fear and nervous expectation. McKay’s poem replaces an externally produced agitation—clashes and violence—with the agitation of a poem that itself “exploded out of me.” This outburst comprises the substance of a future identification, McKay’s being “hailed” by the Negro people as a poet. It is as if the poem again becomes an external agitation, as its possible crowd-raising function immediately appears before him in the words of one of his hearers. The first line of the poem similarly balances the internally and externally created conditions of collective expression and identification, a balance that continues throughout the poem as a whole. If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursèd lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! iii O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! (Harlem Shadows 53) “If We Must Die” places the violence to which black people are subjected into the conditional. Black collective resistance counterbalances that violence in the next clause. McKay weighs the interpellating violence of anti-blackness against black resistance to that violence. While the “we” is first stated under the sign of that conditional risk of death, the completion of the conditional is a burst of fiat that places agency back in the hands of the collective. Thirteen collective pronouns are scattered throughout the poem’s fourteen lines, often both subject and object of fiat: “O let us nobly die,” “let us show us brave.” In McKay’s poem the we comes into existence not only through the violence that surrounds it but also through the force and energy of its own speech. While the poem powerfully accomplishes the existence of a collective in resistance, the contours of that “we” remain understated. Some characteristics may still be discerned. As Marcellus Blount has argued, the poem explicitly “builds its contrasts…between…man and beast,” with a less explicit suggestion that the “militant selves of the poem are in fact specifically male” (234). The poem’s lack of a specific delimitation of the “we” notwithstanding, it was widely read in the context of the race riots in the summer of 1919.