UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE
Finding Themselves by Two: Serial Poetics in Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka
DISSERTATION
submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English
by
Nicholas Aaron Joseph
Dissertation Committee: Virginia Jackson, Chair Martin Harries Oren Izenberg
2020
© 2020 Nicholas Aaron Joseph
DEDICATION
For Corinna
“whose words are entangled
inextricably among my own”
We must travel in the direction of our fear - JB
ii TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements iv
Vita v
Abstract of the Dissertation vi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 - Seriality and the Misrecognition of American Poetry: Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
Serial Poetics and the Discontinuity of American Poetry 13
“The Proof of a Poet”: Text, Paratext, and Formal Discontinuity in the 1855 Leaves 25
The 1856 Leaves: Revising, Clustering, and Cataloging 42
“Let It Stand”: Sexuality, Self-Censorship and Recognition in the Calamus Poems 50
Chapter 2 - “He Finds Himself by Two”: George Oppen and the Serial Deferral of Genre
Oppen’s Serial Disclosures: The Deferral of Genre, the Genre of Deferral 64
Sonnets, Haikus, and Blasons: Deferring Genre in Discrete Series 74
Filling in the Blanks: Silence and The Materials 95
Conversation and Collaboration: Oppen and Language Poetry 107
Chapter 3 - “Endless Series of Selves”: Amiri Baraka’s Serial Poetics Against Passing
When I Say It Is Roi Who Is Dead: Baraka or Jones? 116
“I pass”: Situating Passing in Literary and Critical Race Theory 124
White Black Negroes: Passing Against Beat Poetics 139
Bibliography 168
iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some of the teachers, friends, and family members I want to thank will never read a word of this dissertation. I couldn't have finished it without any of them.
At the University of California, Irvine, thanks are due to the brilliant members of my committee:
Virgnia Jackson has been a fierce thinker and ally throughout this process, and much of what I understand about the history of poetics has been informed by her work; Martin Harries has been a generous and ingenious reader whose vast expertise never fails to energize my work and crystallize my thoughts; Oren Izenberg’s clear and cutting intellect has offered a level of clarity and complexity that I continue to aspire to.
Before graduate school, I was lucky to have had teachers who showed me how to work, write, and think – at times, almost without my realizing I was learning to do so. I’m grateful to Drew
Daniels, Christopher Rice, and the late Kate Ritchie for introducing me to what a love of literature and writing could look like.
I was incredibly privileged throughout this process to have had not only the support of my family, but the insight of family members who had completed doctorates themselves. Even when they were on the other side of the country or the world, my parents have always been there for me, as have my aunts and uncles, whose encouragement and accomplishments helped me believe
I could finish what I started.
Last and most, I’d like to thank Corinna and Maryum Rosendahl. Thank you both, for everything you’ve given and for everything it’s meant.
iv VITA Nicholas Aaron Joseph
2013 B.A. in English, Wesleyan University 2013-14 Regents Fellowship, University of California 2014-18 Teaching Assistant, University of California, Irvine 2016 M.A. in English, University of California, Irvine 2020 Ph.D. in English, University of California, Irvine
FIELD OF STUDY Poetry and Poetics, Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century American Literature
v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
Finding Themselves by Two: Serial Poetics in Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka
by Nicholas Aaron Joseph Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Irvine, 2020 Professor Virginia Jackson, Chair
This dissertation focuses on the work of three American poets – Walt Whitman, George Oppen, and Amiri Baraka – whose writing exemplifies the persistence of “seriality” in Modern poetry and poetics. Though “serial poetics” has long been invoked to make sense of a wide range of poetry and poets, there is little consensus on what, exactly, a “serial poem” is. I examine this oversight as a problem within the history of poetic formalism, and I connect the lack of recognition that serial poems are given within literary discourse to larger questions about the construction of identity within poetics and critical theory. In different yet always historically- situated ways, Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka all challenge critical commonplaces about the poet and the poem by adopting not so much a recognizable poetics as a contingent serial “stance.”
This approach provides these poets with a powerful yet flexible resource for developing distinctive practices of artistic and social self-making – to find themselves, as Oppen puts it, by two. Each of my chapters examines one of these poets’ strategies of serial self-making, or
“autopoetics,” as it manifests in his approach to poetic form. For instance, Whitman aspired to be both the quintessential American bard and a radical queer bohemian in a nineteenth-century
America that was largely incapable of recognizing his performance of these identities. Oppen,
vi who was Jewish, a Communist, and a G.I. during World War II and McCarthyism, fought throughout his life to distance himself from the White Anglo-Saxon identity of his Modernist
“fathers” and the upper-class identity of his actual father. Baraka was born into the Black middle class but underwent regular ideological conversions, courting constant controversy in his commitment to social transgression and artistic transformation. The serial strategies that I identify in these three poets’ lives and work ultimately help to expose, clarify, and enrich problems of classification, continuity, and closure that have come to be inseparable from the history of Modern American poetry and poetics.
vii INTRODUCTION
This dissertation is about a poet who wrote the same book for over thirty years, a poet who stopped writing poems entirely for twenty-five years, and a poet who periodically reinvented himself over a fifty-year-long career. One wrote the same book over and over again, filling each version with poems that stretched for pages on end, claiming to contain as many multitudes and contradictions as America itself. Another was so awed by language’s vast power in a divisive postwar world that he wrote poems that arrived on the page broken and disjointed, whose working drafts were so pasted over they looked like paper mache. A third, who changed his name a half-dozen times over the course of his life, wrote “[a]ssassin poems, poems that kill,” poems that continually advocated a revolution whose terms he was forever redefining and refining (Baraka 2014, 149).
What unites the work of Walt Whitman, George Oppen, and Amiri Baraka – other than their formidable poetic abilities, their fierce political commitments, and the fact that they are
American men – is that each deploys “seriality” in his work to such a degree that it becomes difficult to talk about his distinct “works” (much less a unified “body” of work). What unites the three chapters of my dissertation is that, though “serial poetics” is often invoked in making sense of poets as different from each other as Whitman and Dickinson, Stevens and Stein, or Olson and
Oppen, there is little consensus on what, exactly, a “serial poem” is. Certainly, poets have long composed and presented individual poems in a set order or “series,” as in paired poems and sonnet sequences. On the other hand, certain genres of poetry follow a sequential or “serial” logic: for instance, the turn, counter, and resolution of the classical ode, or various figures of
1 repetition such as rhyme and meter.1 However, I want to suggest that the strategies of repetition, revision, and reflexivity that these three poets so adamantly take up represent a distinct variety of seriality, a repertoire of formal resources that allows them to work through problems of classification, continuity, and closure that have come to be inseparable from the history of
Modern American poetry and poetics. Each participates, that is, in what Adorno called a
“paratactic revolt against synthesis”: a radical questioning of linearity that, through disjunctive and dissonant strategies, “provides a corrective to the primacy of the subject” as a singular or stable authority (Adorno 2019, 135, 137). In different yet always historically-situated ways,
Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka all challenge the idea of the poet and the poem by adopting not so much a recognizable poetics as a contingent serial “stance” that allows them to produce flexible formal relationships between part and whole, same and other, poet and public – to find themselves, as Oppen puts it, by two.
Outside the field of poetry and poetics, seriality rarely causes definitional difficulties. In recent decades, for instance, serial forms in a variety of media – such as serialized novels, television series, graphic novels, and podcasts – have been widely discussed and celebrated for the ways they adapt the serializing tendencies of mass culture directly into their formal strategies. Almost without exception, however, these discussions fail to consider serial poems and poets. To take a few examples from the period in which I wrote this dissertation: the Popular
Seriality Research Unit, an interdisciplinary group of scholars active from 2010 to 2016, focused almost solely on narrative forms in attempting to address “questions concerning the wide
1 One common way of understanding serial poems is to frame them as a more overtly disjunctive, paratactic, and open-ended cousin to the poetic sequence. For a study of sequential forms in Modern British and American poetry see Gall, Sally M. and Rosenthal, Macha Louis. The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1983. Roland Greene offers a transhistorical and comparative approach to the poetic sequence in Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence. United States: Princeton University Press, 2014.
2 distribution and broad appeal of series since the 19th century.”2 Similarly, a high-profile 2016 symposium on “The New Seriality Studies” examined serial “periodicals, novels, television, comics, film, and music” but failed to account for poetry’s distinct relationship with “seriality's formal, spatial, temporal, material, and social effects.”3 Finally, though the Interdisciplinary
Nineteenth Century Studies group chose “Serials, Cycles, Suspensions” as the theme of its 2018 conference (where I presented a chapter of this dissertation), the number of presentations that focused on poetry and poetics could be counted on one hand.4 Whether one is interested in nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first century serialities, attempts to understand the serial poem have been severely lacking.
I want to suggest that this relative lack of recognition that serial poems are afforded within literary discourse is related to larger questions about “recognition” and the construction of identity within poetics and critical theory. My contention is not simply that seriality’s distinctive formal “affordances” offer a valuable resource for navigating the complexities of identity within various historical moments.5 Rather, I am arguing that seriality’s pervasive yet paradoxical position within poetic formalism may be understood as a kind of analog for the questions of social and literary recognition that Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka pose. Each of these poets is ultimately interested in poetry as a process of self-making – in every sense, an autopoetics6 – that
2 “About,” “Publications,” The Popular Seriality Research Unit, accessed 29 November 2020, http://www.popularseriality.de/en/ueber_uns/index.html, http://www.popularseriality.de/en/publikationen/index.html. 3 “The New Seriality Studies,” Heyman Center for the Humanities, accessed 29 November 2020, http://heymancenter.org/events/the-new-seriality-studies/. 4 “INCS 2018 – Serials, Cycles, Suspensions,” San Francisco State University, accessed 29 November 2020, https://lca.sfsu.edu/conference/incs2018. 5 I borrow the notion of formal affordances from Caroline Levine, who approaches seriality through her reading of networks in David Simon’s HBO television series The Wire. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Italy: Princeton University Press, 2017. 6 My sense of “autopoetics” as a practice of self-reflexivity is primarily derived from Livingston, Ira and N. Katherine Hayles. Between Science and Literature: An Introduction to Autopoetics. University of Illinois Press, 2006. Accessed December 3, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1xcn8f.
3 uses serial strategies as a way to articulate the shape of themselves and their poems. In each of their work, seriality names the formal attitude by which the need to be recognized becomes inextricably linked to a need to elude, defer, and delude recognition – typically, but by no means uniformly, as a means of resisting and revising dominant discursive frames. In The Politics of
Recognition, Charles Taylor writes: “What has come about with the modern age is not the need for recognition but the conditions in which the attempt to be recognized can fail” (Taylor 1992,
35). This threat of failure contained in the “[n]onrecognition or misrecognition” of one’s racial, sexual, socioeconomic, or other identifications, “can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being” (25). Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka all show how, on the contrary, the formal resources of serial poetics can transform misrecognition into a powerful practice of social and aesthetic invention. To borrow the language of bell hooks, they work “to identify marginality as much more than a site of deprivation [but] also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance” (hooks 1990, 341). Each of my chapters examines one of these poets’ strategies of serial self-making as it manifests in his approach to poetic form and address to various publics. For instance, Whitman aspired to be both a quintessential American bard and a radical queer bohemian in a nineteenth-century America that was largely incapable of recognizing his performance of these identities. Oppen, who was
Communist, Jewish, and a G.I. during World War II and McCarthyism, fought throughout his life to distance himself from the White Anglo-Saxon identity of his Modernist “fathers’” and the upper-class identity of his actual father. Baraka was born into the Black middle class but underwent regular ideological conversions, courting constant controversy in his commitment to social transgression and artistic transformation. For each poet, seriality’s persistent formal resistance to stability, stasis, and singularity comes to powerfully reflect the ways in which their
4 own processes of self-making are, as Allen Dunn puts it in his essay on “the promise of misrecognition,” necessarily “the product of struggle, revision, and adjustment” (Dunn 2005,
224).
Rather than understanding this version of serial poetics as a genre or a mode7 – or indeed, arguing for singular categories such as the serial poem or poet – I will argue that this distinct practice of struggle, revision, and adjustment is best understood as a poetic stance. In my argument, the word “stance” refers to the always-shifting yet ever-embodied auto-poetic constructions of self that Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka all make so crucial to their work. On a theoretical level, my use of this term – as opposed to alternatives like “attitude” or “impulse,” which I will also use occasionally – is intended to echo Erving Goffman’s notion of “footing.”
Rarely applied to literary works outside of drama, Goffman’s notion of discourse as an ongoing, improvisatory series of “changes in footing” provides a useful model for my sense of these poets’ serial stances.8 According to Goffman, footing refers to the way that even everyday
“presentations of self” are addressed within multiple discursive frameworks that are always
“embedded” within a given context (Goffman 1981, 151).9 A change in footing refers to the practice of shifting or “code-switching” across these various forms of address – whether these shifts entail different tones, audiences, languages, genres, or myriad other expressive resources
(126). Exemplifying Goffman’s sense of the messy and multidirectional forms of recognition
7 Joseph Conte’s 1991 study, which views the serial poem as a specifically postmodern poetic genre, is still the main critical touchstone for discussions of serial poetics: Conte, Joseph M. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. United States: Cornell University Press, 2016. By contrast, Rachel Blau DuPlessis theorizes seriality as the privileged mode of poetry in general when she suggests that “segmentivity – the ability to articulate and make meaning by selecting, deploying, and combining segments – is the underlying characteristic of poetry as a genre” (51). See Duplessis, Rachel Blau. "Manifests." Diacritics 26, no. 3/4 (1996): 31-53. 8 One argument that applies Goffman’s notion of “footing” to poetry and poetics can be found in Warner, Michael. “The Preacher’s Footing” in This Is Enlightenment. Edited by Siskin, Clifford and William Warner. United Kingdom: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 9 Goffman introduces his ideas of social performance in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. United Kingdom: Doubleday, 1959.
5 embedded within language, Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka all refuse to imagine their work as voiced by stable speakers, addressed to consistent audiences, or bound by clear beginnings and endings.10
On a more overtly poetic level, my use of “stance” is also intended as a figure for the way that Jack Spicer influentially described his own process of writing serial poems. For Spicer, the serial poem hinges on maintaining receptivity to the muses of accident and chance: the serial poet must be concerned with “keeping himself ignorant of the way that the form is going”
(Spicer 2010, 55). Though he uses a variety of metaphors to describe this process – including, most famously, the sense that his serial poems are dictated to him by “Martians” – his account of seriality’s intermittent cuts or “black outs” shares with Goffman a theatrical and improvisatory framing of social performance. “[I]t’s as if you go into a room, a dark room,” Spicer writes. “A light is turned on for a minute. Then it’s turned off again and you go into a different room where a light is turned on and turned off” (55). In this familiarly postmodern sense of poetic form,
Spicer goes on to show – in playful, powerful, and postmodern fashion – how the cuts, gaps, and interstices of his serial poems are what ultimately produce their meaning. My dissertation, however, further builds on Spicer’s idea of seriality by showing how such “expressive hiatus[es],” as Adorno would call them (Adorno 2019, 136), take place not merely at the level of poetic content or structure – in Spicer’s analogy the successive “rooms” of the poem. Rather, for
Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka, seriality asserts itself most persistently at the level of the “poet” who is always entering and reentering the room – and, in a sense, always discovering and
10 In this sense, the idea of poetic “stance” or “footing ” could also be considered in conversation with twenty-first century theories of the lyric and “lyrciziation” that like Goffman, are interested in uncovering what normative critical abstractions like the “speaker” obscure about the contingencies of poetic address. See, for example, Jackson, Virginia, Prins, Yopie. The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology. United States: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Javadizadeh, Kamran. “The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 134, no. 3 (2019): 475–90.
6 rediscovering themselves and shifting their “stance” within it accordingly. Or, as Baraka puts it, in similarly provocative fashion: “Endless series of selves resolve, and at each pt of progress, we are whoever we must be to develop + reunderstand reality” (Baraka 2000, 449).
Baraka himself understood well the nuances involved in changing one’s stance to reflect new aesthetic and sociohistorical realities. Throughout his theoretical writing on the Black musical tradition, Baraka specifically uses the term “stance” as a way of describing the history of jazz as a coherent yet highly contingent formal impulse, paradoxically built on improvisation and spontaneity. Baraka’s work consistently frames jazz as the highest possible artistic achievement, arguing that its form allows for the articulation of a “continuous though constantly evolving social philosophy” that is inseparable from African-American identity (185): “Music, as paradoxical as it might seem, is the result of thought. It is the result of thought perfected at its most empirical, i.e. as attitude, or stance” (Baraka 1991, 40; emphasis in original). In this reading, “stance” operates as a kind of musically-embodied intellect, distinct enough to create unique aesthetic models yet dynamic enough to respond to developments in medium, audience, or circumstance. Over time the music of Baraka’s “perfect” jazz musician – and I want to suggest, the sense of autopoetics that Baraka himself practices – “changed as he changed, reflecting shifting attitudes [or] consistent attitudes within changed contexts (41; emphasis in original). Collapsing the artist and the medium into the figure of a formally- and historically- embodied “stance,” Baraka describes the “changing and diverse motion” of his own serial reinventions. When Baraka consents not to be a single being by “passing” across conflicting cultural and artistic identities, when Oppen “finds himself by two” through increasingly complex practices of deferral (Oppen 1975, 35), when Whitman attempts to “contain multitudes” at the expense of constant self-revision and self-censorship – each participates in the paratactic revolt
7 against singularity that I want to claim for serial poetry and poetics. In each of my three chapters,
I uncover the complexly-situated forms of social recognition – such as class, race, gender, and sexual orientation – that these poets both make legible and challenge through their serial engagements with poetic resources such as genre, tradition, community, and medium.
The American poet most inextricably associated with constructing, qualifying, and revising his poetic self, Walt Whitman is an obvious figure with which to begin a dissertation about seriality and Modern American poetry. For Oppen, Baraka, and so many other poets,
Whitman’s work offers a set of serial poetic resources that can themselves be continuously taken up, challenged, and changed. In this sense, Whitman could be said to exemplify Foucault’s claim that “the author” names not so much a stable historical entity as “a series of subjective positions”
(Foucault 1980, 309). My chapter attempts to think about Foucault’s conception of the author as a necessarily serial construct in relation to Roy Harvey Pearce’s observation, written two years earlier, that “All American poetry [after Leaves of Grass] is, in essence if not in substance, a series of arguments with Whitman” (Pearce 1957, 57; emphasis added). Though Pearce’s New
Critical argument couldn’t be more distant from Foucalt’s poststructuralist one, his sense of
Whitman’s influence might be linked to what Foucault does for the category of “the author”: reworking Yeats’ description of poetry as “an argument with oneself,” Pearce uses the language of seriality and the series as a kind of structural analog for what Whitman does to question the status of “the poet” or “the poem.” Indeed, the ambition and scale of Whitman’s genre-defying and boundary-breaking serial project in Leaves of Grass would enable later serial poets such as
Jack Spicer to argue for poetry itself as a normatively numerous practice: as Spicer boldly claimed, a century after the initial 1855 publication of Leaves, “There is no single poem” (qtd. in
Killian and Ellingham 1998, 106). My chapter takes all of these claims seriously by focusing not
8 on any one edition of Whitman’s continuously-evolving text, but rather on the shifting practices of revision, re-iteration, and reproduction that gradually become recognizable across its shifting forms of address. In my reading, Leaves of Grass comes to name a “series of arguments” with a self that understands itself “a series of subjective positions.” For instance, I show how Whitman views poems like the one which would become “Song of Myself” less as a discrete text than as part of a paratactic and paratextual practice of “proofing” the self through struggle, revision, and adjustment. I go on to trace Whitman’s shifts in poetic stance as he continues to develop his distinctive yet oft-parodied practice of cataloging, ultimately demonstrating his attempt to erase boundaries of recognition between text and paratext, poetry and prose in the 1856 and 1860 editions. Finally, I offer a new way of understanding the relationship between the six editions of
Leaves of Grass through a reading of Whitman’s queer serial poetics in his selected letters and
“Calamus'' poems.
While Whitman’s work spans one major arc in the longue durée of what is now known as
Modernism, George Oppen’s traverses another, equally rich period. Whitman published his first book in 1855 and his last in 1892; Oppen published his first book in 1934, his second over twenty-five years later in 1962, and his final one in 1978. My choice in focusing my second chapter on Oppen, rather than on more canonical practitioners of Modernist seriality such as
Gertrude Stein or Ezra Pound, partially reflects my own interest in American poetry of the middle and second half of the twentieth century. Allowing High Modernism to exist as a conspicuous gap in my dissertation moreover echoes not only the twenty-five year silence at the center of his oeuvre, but the formal particularities of Oppenian seriality that I will draw out in his work. Acutely conscious of the way that Whitman’s “normatively experimental” mode was actively being swallowed up by Modernist ideals of disjunction, indeterminacy, and collage,
9 Oppen cultivates a serial poetics of suspicion, doubling, and deferral that recasts several important aspects of Whitman’s. Whereas Whitmanic expression is highly public and effusive,
Oppen emphasizes the quiet, the miniature, and the equivocal – a poetic stance that I term, in a riff on Oppen’s first collection, his “serial discretion.” While Oppen’s famous break from poetry comprises the most extreme version of his attempt to generate meaning through expressive hiatus and deferral, I work to uncover how this strategy informs his work at micro-, as well as macro- levels. My chapter does this by first making legible Oppen’s surprising engagement with the history of verse genres in Discrete Series. From there, I go on to examine Oppen’s complex
“argument with Whitman” in later works like This in Which (1965), demonstrating how Oppen turns many of Whitman’s most distinctive strategies of address into strategies for interrogating the self. Finally, I expand both the idea of Oppenian seriality and the historical scope of my chapter by examining how Language Poets in the late-twentieth century collaboratively create a
“series of arguments” with Oppen by deploying a poetic version of what Goffman calls an “open state of talk” (Goffman 1981, 135).
Though his work has only occasionally been discussed in relation to Whitman’s and
Oppen’s, perhaps no poet has taken the serial impulse toward transformation and reinvention further than Amiri Baraka. A writer whose work spans poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism, and whose political and aesthetic alignments shifted to reflect developments in his life and context, the poet still most commonly referred to by the split signifier Jones/Baraka represents a kind of limit case in my study of seriality. This is a poet who would go from claiming, in the context of the Greenwich Village “Beat” scene, “The only ‘recognizable tradition’ a poet need follow is himself” (Jones 1960, 425), to advocating for poetry as a vital weapon in global class struggle a few decades later. Baraka’s constant erasing and rewriting of the self – which William J. Harris
10 influentially labeled the “Beat,” “Transitional,” “Black Nationalist,” and “Third World Marxist”
Barakas – has inspired significant celebration and criticism over the years. Earlier and less incisive explanations of Baraka’s ideological and aesthetic reinventions tend to frame them as a kind of pathological restlessness: leveled primarily by White critics (and Baraka himself), these accusations largely hinge on loose psychological diagnoses such as personality crisis, solipsism, or schizophrenia.11 More recent and helpful accounts, advanced primarily by critics steeped in critical race theory (and, again, Baraka himself), favor intersecting cultural and literary frameworks of reinvention and revolution, such as religious conversion, musical improvisation, the African “griot” tradition, and Marxist forms of political collectivity.12 Building on these many discussions, my chapter attempts to frame Barakan seriality within the social and aesthetic practice of “passing,” a historical phenomenon which I argue offers Baraka both a persistent resource and ongoing object of critique. By situating this poetics of (and against) passing within
African-American literary tradition and critical race theory, I ultimately attempt to unsettle longstanding commonplaces about Baraka’s artistic “periods” while also gesturing to a new way of thinking about the racial performativity of avant-garde poetics.
“[E]ach time there was a difference just a difference enough so that it could go on and be a present something” (Stein 1935, 294-5). This is Gertrude Stein, in her 1935 lecture “Portraits and Repetition,” describing the way that both the film medium and her linguistic “portraits” use serial techniques to formally reflect nothing less than lived experience of modernity itself.
“[A]ny one is of one’s period,” Stein claims, “and this our period was undoubtedly the period of
11 Baraka discusses the “schizophrenic tenor” of his life in his Autobiography (Jones 1984, 41). See also Menchise, Don N. "LeRoi Jones and a Case of Shifting Identities." CLA Journal 20, no. 2 (1976): 232-34. 12 See Walker, Madeline Ruth. The Trouble with Sauling Around: Conversion in Ethnic American Autobiography, 1965-2002. United States: University of Iowa Press, 2011. 97-109. Schultz, Kathy Lou. "Amiri Baraka's Wise Why's Y's: Lineages of the Afro-Modernist Epic." Journal of Modern Literature 35, no. 3 (2012): 25-50. See also Muyumba, Walton. "Improvising over the Changes: Improvisation as Intellectual and Aesthetic Practice in the Transitional Poems of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka." College Literature 34, no. 1 (2007): 23-51. Liner, James. "The Different Persons of Amiri Baraka: Collectivity, Singularity, and Becoming-Minor." symploke 23 (2015): 247-267.
11 the cinema and series production. And each of us in our own way are bound to express what the world in which we are living is doing” (294). Though Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka are each of their period, occupying distinct positions within literary and social history, each exemplifies a stance of struggle, revision, and adjustment through which Modern American poets have attempted to gain social and artistic recognition – for themselves and for their poetry. Only by serially revolting against the poem and the self as sites of synthesis can they imagine modes of being and writing capable of reflecting the shape of identity as it finds itself, over time and across contexts, “by two. Or more” (Oppen 1975, 35).
12 Chapter 1 - Seriality and the Misrecognition of American Poetry: Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
Serial Poetics and the Discontinuity of American Poetry
By the time Walt Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855,
“seriality” had emerged as a distinctly recognizable social, material, and aesthetic practice in
American culture. A newly literate, socio-economically diverse audience prompted an explosion of regularly-produced print publications – from distinguished literary monthlies like the Atlantic and Graham’s Magazine, to notably bohemian papers like the Saturday Evening Press, to countless cheap “dailies” of the penny press. What followed was a so-called “serialmania” for socially sweeping and thematically suspenseful narratives, widely read on both sides of the
Atlantic. As early examples of “popular seriality,” these so-called “serial fictions” or “magazine novels” (Okker 2003, 5, 1) – beginning in France with Eugene Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, migrating to Britain with Charles Dickens and George Eliot, and finally taken up by American novelists such as William Dean Howells, Fanny Fern, and Harriet Beecher Stowe – produced and sustained America’s first truly distinct literary culture, what one contemporary paper dubbed
“the golden age of periodicals” (Price and Smith 1995, 5). In regular installments, week after week, a nation of readers separated by geographical and ideological boundaries was united in the collective public narrative of an “imagined community.”13
Since serial fiction’s nineteenth-century heyday, “seriality” has continued to be invoked in literary and narrative theory. Poetry, however, presents a problem for this area of study.
13 For the concept of the “imagined community” and discussions of how literary periodicals contributed to the spread of nationalism, see Anderson, Benedict. Imagined communities. United Kingdom: Verso, 2006. For a discussion of the public-facing nature of nineteenth and early twentieth century poetics, see Harrington, Joseph. Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics. Middletowns: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
13 Understood today as typically neither “popular” nor “narrative,” poetry is often neglected in theoretical and historical considerations of seriality, which tend to focus on more self- consciously mediated genres, from comic strips to films franchises to television series. At a mere formal level, this makes some sense: while narrative conventions like character and plot demand that novel readers invest their time in the promise of an eventually satisfying resolution, poetry’s comparative subtlety and abstraction means that, especially written at a relatively large scale, it struggles to compete with the incessant unfolding of life lived at the pace of modernity. We might recall here Edgar Allan Poe’s sardonic but nevertheless compelling claim that “If any literary work is too long to be read in one sitting […] the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed” (Poe 2004, 67). Despite poetry’s seemingly anomalous position within the mass media production of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, returning to the serial culture of the nineteenth century returns us to a time when poetry was both widely re-produced and widely read: “magazine verse” by the likes of William Cullen
Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, Lydia Sigourney, and James Russell Lowell, not to mention long poems such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s bestselling Hiawatha and Evangeline, all testify to a Transatlantic culture that was “simply mad for poetry” (Curran 1990, 15). This chapter considers the implications and problems that an expanded sense of nineteenth-century seriality offers to the history of American poetry by focusing on the serial strategies of Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass. By examining a number of the most persistent critical commonplaces and contradictions surrounding Whitman’s work, I demonstrate how seriality emerges as an historical and formal problem that continues to inform American poetry in general and our understanding of Whitman in particular.
14 The effects of such serial trends and transformations in the public sphere have not gone unremarked in Whitman’s life and work: both as a former newspaper editor and a regular if controversial presence in the “poet’s corner” section of these regularly-printed and widely- distributed publications, Whitman was enough of a figure in nineteenth-century print culture that, during his lifetime, “more readers encountered his work in periodicals than in any of his books”
(Walt Whitman Archive, “Periodicals”). At the same time, however, Whitman the print journalist is only one of many guises that the poet affected and readers have retrospectively recognized.
The question of how to read or “recognize” Whitman, however, is not – or at least not merely – a question of genre, the tool of literary criticism that is typically used to identify, differentiate, and categorize texts. Rather, as the versions of seriality that mediate the relation of Whitman’s work to literary history, genre theory, and queer poetics all demonstrate, seriality names a persistent critical problem that exploits, exceeds, and ultimately explodes the formal, historical, and generic frames of recognition that readers have foisted upon it. This serial openness to contradiction and contingency, I’ll argue, is thus not a “mode” or “genre” at all, but an aesthetic and social
“stance” through which Whitman addresses similarly radical transformations within nineteenth- century literary and political culture: in particular, the formalization of a collectively- recognizable “national literature,” the open-ended and medium-specific terms of address proper to “print culture,” and the self-censorship inherent in professing non-normative sexual identities.
After considering how variously “serial” structures manifest in the critical language that considers Whitman’s work and closely reading the early editions of Leaves of Grass with an eye toward its catalogs, false starts, and open endings, I’ll turn to more obscure horizons of
Whitman’s writing to demonstrate how seriality might better help us understand how such techniques structure Whitman’s practice, and Whitman studies, all the way down.
15 In many ways, it is tempting to view Whitman’s grand entrance into poetic culture, in the form of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, as unique and original, a moment in which the poet simply celebrates himself and his country into a sudden existence. “America,” Ralph Waldo
Emerson had written a decade prior in “The Poet,” “is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for meters” (Emerson 1957, 238). Whitman, so the story goes, heard this call and imagined himself as its answer. However, even Emerson’s famous – and at the time, almost isolated – approval of Whitman’s work already indicates the extent to which this inaugural moment is part of a larger historical series: in Emerson’s short letter to the younger writer, which nowhere mentions the words “poet” or “poetry,” he writes, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start” (Emerson 1957, 362). As Whitman himself put it of his years before publishing Leaves, he’d been "simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought [him] to a boil” (qtd. in Trowbridge 1902, 166).
Seriality thus presents a historical as well as a practical question for Whitman scholarship
– where should we begin in considering his work? And where, and how, should we end? Literary historians have done much to contextualize this long and simmering “foreground” before Leaves of Grass, frequently proposing new origin stories in the political, artistic, and literary culture of
Whitman’s day. For instance, one standard critical narrative holds that the progression of Leaves of Grass, from its propitious birth to its deathbed edition, is a continual decay into poetic normativity, a text bloated beyond recognition by indulgence and redundancy. Chastened by nineteenth century critical disdain and shocked by his text’s inability to change the American culture of 1855 as he knew it, Whitman gradually transformed from Bowery “b’hoy” to “Good
16 Gray Poet.”14 Concurrently and by contrast, more contemporary readers have worked to re-make versions of Whitman that suit a wide and often competing range of contexts and ideologies, constantly re-casting Whitman as a flexibly subversive figure. Ed Folsom, for instance, suggests in the context of book history that all of Whitman’s readers work, effectively,
[to create] new Walt Whitmans—a Whitman who speaks particularly to the gay community, an ecological Whitman whose work resonates with the green movement, a socialist Whitman dedicated to a poetry of the working-class, a patriotic Whitman who celebrates America, a Whitman who speaks in an open and unaffected way to children, a Whitman who speaks across language and culture to Spanish and German and Arabic and Chinese readers. There are as many Whitmans as there are readers […] (Folsom, “Whitman Making Books”)
Whether we choose to focus on the “Good Gray Poet” or the “Good Gay Poet,” this series of consecutive and potentially contradictory recognitions points to the way that seriality describes not only a distinct material practice in the public sphere, but also a larger critical impulse toward classifying and unifying a wide range of aesthetics and forms of address. Rather than tracing distinctions or continuities between Whitman’s work and the serial culture of his day, I want to suggest the competing and unstable frames of recognition through which readers have
“encountered” Whitman since the nineteenth-century – shifting from newspaper man to radical poet to, eventually, a staple of the literary canon – have everything to do with the serial practices that Whitman is constantly experimenting with in Leaves of Grass. Once we begin paying attention not only to the full range of serial practices in Whitman’s work, but also to the critical language that tends to re-produce them, it quickly becomes clear that “seriality” inhabits a role in the history of American poetry and poetics that is as central as it is capacious and contradictory.
14 For one example of this critical narrative, see Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. United States: Princeton University Press, 1961. For more favorable views of Whitman’s political development, see Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1996. For general cultural and historical background, see Reynolds, David S.. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. United Kingdom: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011.
17 Even as readers have invoked forms of seriality as a means of making order and continuity from the formal and historical complications of Whitman’s work, they tend to encourage further disorder and discontinuity in its critical language. In The Continuity of
American Poetry, Roy Harvey Pearce argues for Whitman’s foundational role in a specifically
“modern” national poetry, built on a distinctly “antinomian” impulse toward re-creation and re- invention: “All American poetry [after Leaves of Grass],” Pearce claims, “is, in essence if not in substance, a series of arguments with Whitman” (Pearce 1961, 57). Pearce’s 1961 study, still the only work to attempt something like a comprehensive history of American poetry, is hardly alone in its characterization of Whitman as a compulsively modern or “normatively experimental” figure after whom many subsequent poets and audiences have adopted indispensable and perhaps otherwise unthinkable writing and reading practices (Warner 2005, xii). As Michel Foucault would observe several years after Pearce’s study, the “author-function” in literary criticism operates as a “principle of unity” that serves “to neutralize the contradictions that are found in a series of texts” (Foucault 1980, 308.) In this sense, “Whitman” does not simply refer to the singular and biographical figure of “Walt Whitman,” but rather a mode of recognition unto itself. More recently, Jacques Ranciere has argued that Leaves of Grass inaugurates a crucial moment in the history of modern “aisthesis,” a “mode of intelligibility” or
“regime of perception, sensation, and interpretation” by which modern subjects come to recognize artworks as such (Ranciere 2013, x). Despite their vast differences in methodology, however – one New Critical, canonical, and continuous, the other historical materialist, avant- garde, and dialectical – these two approaches to aesthetic modernism both defer to “serial” models in order to describe the formal and historical stakes of Whitman’s work, to largely different effects. Whereas Pearce strives to plot the history of American poetry as a “continuing
18 series” of canonical texts (3), Ranciere sets this moment of poetic history against a fragmented, episodic, and deliberately non-canonical backdrop. Pearce claims that, formally, Whitman’s work was by necessity “in no way externally or generically structured” (73); similarly, Ranciere praises the 1855 Leaves as a “single continuous flow of sixty pages” that, with its catalogs, ellipses, and lack of titles, offers “an unprecedented verbal form” (72). Alternately continuous and discontinuous, progressive and reactive, Whitman’s serial poetics are able to sustain a wide variety of aesthetic judgments and historical models – all of them, however rely on a conception of history and form that oscillate between different ways of recognizing seriality as a principle of non-recognition. Whitman’s readers, in other words, tend to reproduce seriality’s strained recognizability in the very act of interpreting it.
We can see the types of complications such a serial structures of recognition creates for critical language with greater clarity if we focus on a more specific example of Whitman’s poetry – in particular, the many ideas of order that readers have attempted to assign to
Whitman’s most famous work, the poem that would become “Song of Myself.” For instance,
John Burroughs, one of Whitman’s nineteenth-century champions, writes in 1896 of the poem as
“a series of utterances, ejaculations, apostrophes, enumerations, associations, pictures, parables, incidents, suggestions, with little or no structural or logical connection, but all emanating from a personality whose presence dominates the page, and whose eye is ever upon us” (Burroughs
1896, 121). Here, Burroughs articulates a common pattern in and difficulty of Whitman’s work: attempting to describe the work’s formal properties in their full variety and complexity, the poem’s “series” of successive parts manifest, in Burroughs’ response, as a distinct series of their own. Burroughs’ critical “enumeration,” which moves from bare vocalizations such as
“utterances” and “ejaculations,” to more generically determined forms of address like
19 “apostrophes” and “parables,'' while simultaneously being interspersed with looser means of linking like “associations” and “suggestions,” ultimately has no more “structural or logical connection” than it claims for Whitman’s poetry. What holds them together, in fact, is only the critic’s elevating of the “series” as a privileged idea of order for an otherwise disparate list of ordering strategies. Less descriptive than imitative, such moments demonstrate the way in which seriality, as a writing practice that readers have struggled to put their fingers on since the nineteenth-century, tends to be reproduced in the very critical accounts that would attempt to make sense of it.
The simultaneous confusion toward and reliance on seriality that structures these critical instances – Folsom’s list of bookmakers’ reproductive habits, Pearce’s account of American poetry as a series of “iterated and reiterated songs of myself” (Peare 1957, 430), and Burrough’s attempt to encompass the range of Whitman’s paratactic practices – points to a persistent irony of Whitman’s writing: the fact that the most recognizably “Whitmanian” aspect of his writing is also seen as the least recognizably “poetic.” Such moments often revolve around one of most persistent and persistently remarked-upon formal features of Whitmanian seriality – the catalog.
Whether one calls them catalogs, lists, enumerations, litanies, or any number of other names, however, the non-hierarchical, accumulative, and juxtapositional way in which things follow and are linked to one in another offers Whitman a formal resource that immediately places his verse in conversation with a great variety of publicly-mediated discourses. At the same time, this quintessentially Whitmanic poetic feature would simultaneously prove most embarrassingly uncouth to troubled contemporary readers and most distinctively subversive to later audiences.
Over the years, the catalogs have been compared to biblical and Homeric lists, an auctioneer’s inventory or Sears Roebuck catalog, “a merchant's inventory or lawyer's brief,” municipal
20 records, “market reports gone wrong,” or a “price-current list of poetic materials,” a gallery of paintings, journalistic headlines or travelogues, impressionist painting, a telephone directory, and the montage and cross-cutting techniques of film.15 They have been saddled within ideologies that range from the populist and democratic, the flaneurship of a specifically American urbanity,
Transcendentalist subjectivity, “Associationist” psychology, and mystical meditation.16 As my own example of critical cataloging moreover demonstrates, it is difficult not to give in to the serial impulse when attempting to classify Whitman’s work: the tendency not only of his poems to catalog different various images, objects, and affects, but also of his readers to engage in cataloging practices of their own, indicates the way in which seriality infects Whitman’s discourse the whole way down. While there has been enough scholarship on Whitman’s uses of parataxis to make features like the catalogue seem like the entirety of his poetic idiosyncrasy, serial writing and reading practices are crucial to understanding Whitman at the level not only of line or catalog, but also poem, cluster, edition, ideology and career.
Serial strategies simultaneously make such identifications possible and jam the works of straightforward classification precisely because seriality is primarily a generic problem – that is,
15 Most of my examples are taken from Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself": A Mosaic of Interpretations. United Kingdom: University of Iowa Press, 1989, 141. See also: Wilson, Rob. American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, 134-166. Bohan, Ruth. "Walt Whitman and the Sister Arts." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 16 (Winter 1999), 153-160. Hoffman, Tyler. "A Prefatory Note on Whitman, Stevens, and the Poetics of Americana." Wallace Stevens Journal, 40.1 (2016), 6. Abieva, Natalia A. “Impressionistic peculiarities of Whitman's poetics: Research on the syntax and stylistics of romano-germanic languages". Studia Linguistica 3 (1996), 66-71. 16 For an overview of Whitman’s cataloguing practices, see Mason, John B. “Catalogues.” The Walt Whitman Archive Accessed 25 October 2020, https://whitmanarchive.org/ For a reading of the democratic principles underlying WHitman’s cataloging, see Hartnet, Stephen John. Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002, 132-172. For a view of Whitman’s cataloguing practices against a broad interdisciplinary survey of “the list” as a genre, see Belknap, Robert E. The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, 73-119. Andrews, Malcolm. "Walt Whitman and the American City." The American City: Literary and Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Graham Clarke. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. 179–197. For a historical reading of Whitman’s “catalogue rhetoric” see Buell, Lawrence. Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (1973), 166-187. Hier, Fred. “Walt Whitman’s Mystic Catalogues.” Conserving Walt Whitman’s Fame: Selections from Horace Traubel’s Conservator, 1890–1919. Ed. Gary Schmidgall. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2006. 391–96.
21 a discursive difficulty that operates at the intersection of historical and formal legibility. The dilemma that seriality poses for Whitman in particular then, is what would a poet who produced texts so exuberantly idiosyncratic, protean and digressive that few contemporary readers recognized them as “poems” at all, want from something as stable and particular as “genre”?
Such a question, I want to suggest, demands a re-thinking of what is meant by “serial poetics” along the discontinuous terms of non-recognition that I have begun to sketch out here. Ideas of genre have often been invoked and challenged in the reception and reproduction of Whitman’s work. The critical response to the poem that would become “Song of Myself,” for instance, is structured by serial recognitions and re-makings at both micro- and macro- levels – even the indexical awkwardness of affixing “poem that would become” to the titles of various poems in
Whitman’s oeuvre points to these discursive changes in footing. For example, in his critical compendium Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’: A Mosaic of Interpretations (1989), E.H. Miller provides a wide-ranging view of the ways readers have attempted to make sense of Whitman’s longest and most enduring poem. As Miller’s use of the word “mosaic” in his title suggests, such a work demands a highly synthetic approach – “Song of Myself” can only be understood as a gestalt of many, often conflicting accounts. The sheer number of names given to the different pieces of the poem – songs, chants, phases, sequences, movement, acts, scenes, stages, episodes, and sections, to name a few (Miller 1989, xix-xxvii) – offers a model of the many ways critics have attempted to assign order, however arbitrary or provisional, to Whitman’s work. This borrowing from the media of visual arts, drama, and music moreover testifies to the difficulty, if not futility, of generic classification that such a poem presents. Miller addresses this critical dilemma toward the end of his introduction:
A summary of the views of ‘Song of Myself’ presented here is as complex and inconclusive as the guesses of the ‘I’ of the poem in answer to the child’s
22 question, ‘What is the grass?’ For ‘Song of Myself’ is epic (proto-epic, autobiographical epic, or epical in scope), heroic poem, lyric, prophetic or mystical (inverted or no) vision, a conversion narrative, a love poem, a comic drama, a drama of identity, an American pastoral, an opera, a self-making (simultaneously of person and poem, a reverie and meditation. And perhaps there is no end. Surely it is, among other things, a ‘grass-poem’ […] (xviii)
Echoing the many other critical catalogs that have worked to present the shapeless and shape- shifting nature of Whitman’s work, Miller’s digressive and meandering sentences both identify and perform Whitmanian seriality. The categorical scattershot encompasses both major forms, or archigenres,17 like the epic and lyric and more narrow subgenres, such as hybrid and historically- determined categories like “the American pastoral.” The account trades on accounts of genre that hinge on differing situations of address (from the apostrophe to a lover to the monologue toward a dramatic audience), varying focuses in thematic content (the visionary and transformative, heroic and romantic), and conflicting media (the work is simultaneously operatic and meditative).
Like my analysis, these different categorizations are not clear-cut or mutually exclusive, and my point isn’t simply that any attempt to summarize the scope of Whitman’s work will necessarily “contain multitudes.” The summary, however, serves as yet another example of the pervasive language of seriality in the exceedingly “complex and inconclusive” history of
American poetry and poetics. More recently, the creation of the Whitman Archive has opened up new avenues for understanding the historicity and genericity of Whitman’s writing, as well as the various secondary texts, historical contexts, and critical discourses that surround and mediate it.
In the forty-two results for the word “genre” in the Archive’s searchable bibliography, we can see the ways in which critics of Whitman’s work have consistently depended on and exploited various ideas of genre – even as their efforts demonstrate they might do well to jettison the term
17 Genette, Gérard. The Architext: An Introduction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
23 entirely. Reading at this distance, Whitman’s genres are alternately said to be “disenchanted,”
“interlaced,” “messy-boundaried,” “fused,” “hybrid,” or even “transgenre”; his poems are always
“testing,” “transgressing,” “reconfiguring,” or otherwise working “regardless” of such categories, whether they be conventional poetic sub-genres such as odes, georgics, elegies, and dream visions, privately-mediated texts such as letters and war diaries, or visual media like painting, printmaking and sculpture (Walt Whitman Archive, “Bibliography”). In both the
“mosaic” and “archive” of Whitman’s work, this simultaneous resistance to and dependence on textual categories suggests that, for Whitman, genre can be neither left behind nor re-claimed.
Moreover it suggests that generic recognition is not precisely the kind of collective reading practice that Whitman’s texts are capable of supporting: as much as readers are able to find different conventions with which to reconcile Whitman’s idiosyncrasies, his genericity is ultimately neither premised on “genre” in any traditionalist view, nor on “recognition” in terms of ready identification and categorization.
At what is likely the most-quoted moment of Leaves of Grass, the speaker muses “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then…. I contradict myself; / I am large…. I contain multitudes.”18 Serial poems like Whitman’s are self-consciously “large,” “contradictory,” and inevitably multiple texts, recognizable chiefly through the ways they strain against singularity and sustained recognition. By placing seriality – one of the most unstable, contradictory, and difficult-to-recognize shapes available to modern poetics – at the center of Whitman’s work, we can understand much about readers’ struggles to account for the forms, histories, and subjectivities that circulate throughout Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s work – and the
18 Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn: n.p., 1855, 55 (reprinted in the Walt Whitman Archive, https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/). I will also cite from the 1856 edition (Brooklyn, 1856), the 1860 edition (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860-1861), and the 1892 or “deathbed” edition (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891- 1892). For further references, I will use the parenthetical citations (Whitman LG 1855), (Whitman LG 1856), (Whitman LG 1860), and (Whitman LG 1892). All references are to the Whitman Archive unless otherwise noted.
24 “Whitmanian” more generally – is, to twist Pearce’s formulation, ultimately a series of arguments with itself. Rather than attempting to fit a wide variety of generic impulses, textual revisions, and subject positions into any one continuing narrative, telling the history of Whitman alongside the history of seriality points to an account of nineteenth-century American poetry that is continuous only in its essential dis-continuity. The remainder of this chapter turns to the serial practices that Whitman’s writing puts enlists in the service of this formal, historical, and generic discontinuity, and restores seriality’s full material and aesthetic implications to its proper place in
American poetry. By examining the range of serial practices that Whitman applies to his poems and thinking about poems – that is, the various lines, segments, catalogs, clusters, beginnings, backtrackings, indirections, closures, quotations, silences, disjunctions, revisions, re-iterations, and reproductions that define the text’s serial forms of poetic and public address – I’ll show how the Whitmanian “serial poem” is that which eludes, defers, and ultimately deludes the horizons of genre, even as seriality must be understood for the ways it is constantly addressing, deploying, recasting, and performing the way that genres work in the world and within texts.
“The Proof of a Poet”: Text, Paratext, and Formal Discontinuity in the 1855 Leaves
Because seriality’s wide range of revising, recycling, and reiterating practices enters every level of Whitman’s poetic project, simply knowing where to begin reading a text such as
Leaves of Grass presents considerable difficulties in itself. As a generic problem and a
Whitmanian one, this question of beginnings is not only theoretic and historical, but formal and practical. As is well known, Whitman insisted on maintaining control over the formatting, printing, and dissemination of his text, effectively acting as both poet and printer in a nineteenth-
25 century context that rarely afforded such authorial luxury. As Ed Folsom suggests, “Whitman probably never composed a line of poetry without, in his mind's eye, putting it on a composing stick” (Folsom “Whitman Making Books”). Whitman’s long foreground in print culture influenced not only his writing but also his reading practices: he was a ravenous yet sporadic reader, a collagist and annotator who took to texts “with scissors in one hand, pen in the other… much as a printer would handle proof.” When it came time to print the 1855 Leaves, he selected the Rome brothers’ print shop, despite their primary focus on legal documents, largely due to their willingness to allow him to work and revise from proof sheets, in real time (Greenspan
1990, 74, 85). Throughout every edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman would continue to align himself with publishers who allowed him as active a role as possible in the design and printing of his book.
However, as crucial as the affordances of American print culture no doubt were to
Whitman’s practice, the poet’s familiarity with techniques of the literary presses only get us so far in understanding the unique seriality of Leaves of Grass. Lisa Gitelman has recently argued that we might better understand the conditions of early modern authorship and readership if we move away from studying capacious definitions like “print culture” and toward the particular genres that are emergent, dominant, and residual at a given point in history (Gitelman 2014, 2).
Following this logic, and the particular logic of Whitman’s strategies of beginning and re- beginning, I want to suggest that Whitmanian seriality specifically foregrounds his writing as draft, version, or “proof” – practical and provisional texts that are necessarily mediated by an endlessly deferred address and openness to revision.
Whitman brings together this practical attention to his medium with his formal ambivalence toward finality, for instance, when he famously concludes the prose Preface of the
26 1855 Leaves (itself a last minute addition on the printing floor) by claiming: “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it” (Whitman LG 1855, 12).
Here, Whitman not only gestures to the deferral of authority that his poems, as we’ll see, attempt to formally replicate, but also draws on a compositor’s terminology of “proof”: “a trial impression of a page […] used for making corrections before final printing.” This simultaneously formal and historically-specific notion of the “proof” is essential for understanding the 1855 edition and the many horizons Whitman is already imagining for his text. In one sense, the claim shows a canny awareness of its modern audience by projecting a reading public as a crucial compositor in recognizing Leaves’ power and determining its influence. At the same time, the use of this printing term also plays upon the notion of a kind of mathematical “proof,” formal evidence that recognizes a text’s claim to truth. According to this dual logic, poetry can act as both “trial” and confirmation, and the 1855 Leaves functions as both theory and test, seller and product of this new and uniquely American poetry. Though not readily recognizable as
“poems,” the texts that follow this claim serve as evidence for the initial claims of the prose, effectively offered as an aesthetic “solution” to the goals laid out in the Preface.
Throughout the ’55 edition, the repeated reframing of Whitman’s utterances work to unsettle poetic commonplaces like the lyric “speaker” itself into something more historically- and media-specific – something like a “proofreader,” with all the messiness of the drafts, revisions, and ink stains this term implies. Whitman’s claim about “the proof of a poet,” for instance, would be revised in subsequent editions, with substantial shifts in meaning to accommodate different personal and historical contingencies. In the 1856 Leaves, the long prose
Preface would be repurposed and lineated as a poem titled “Poem of Many in One,” where the above line reads: “The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferred till / his country absorbs him as
27 affectionately as / he has absorbed it” (Whitman LG 1856, 195; emphasis added). By the time of the deathbed edition, by which time the poem had taken on its final title, “On Blue Ontario’s
Shore,” the statement was again slightly altered and confined to a parenthetical: “(The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferr'd till his country / absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorb'd it.)” (Whitman LG 1892, 272). As the final formal congruity between the “deferr’d” and the
“absorb’d” demonstrates perhaps most clearly, these persistent revisions highlight the way that even Whitman’s grandest claims to authority are proven provisional at the level of both writing
(proofing) and reception (absorbing). Indeed, the original claim seems to be a revision of a note he characteristically scrawled at the top of a newspaper clipping: “The great poet absorbs the identity of others and the experience of others and they are definite in him or form him; but he presents them all through the powerful press of himself” (Greenspan 1990, 77). By tracing the serial development of this phrase across the various textual horizons of Leaves of Grass – from the idealistic foreground (“powerful press of himself”) to the optimistic debut (“proof of a poet”) to the realistic revisions (“sternly deferr’d”) – we see how such a poetic project always imagines recognition as a kind of re-cognition or re-thinking. A compulsive reviser, Whitman nevertheless drafts in ink, his utterances always carrying with them the trace of future and past iterations.
While I’ll take up several implications of this serial impulse later in this chapter, here I simply want to point out how overlooking these repetitions and deferrals within the 1855 edition obscures the important ways that Whitman makes central to his practice an impulse of beginning and re-beginning, almost as if by fits and starts. Even before the Preface, Whitman is already drawing attention to the formal difficulties of openings and the unstable borders between where one poem ends and another begins, finding opportunities for invention in seemingly the most stable print conventions. In particular, serial texts such as Whitman’s make idiosyncratic use of
28 what Gerard Genette calls “paratext”: those elements that “surround [the text] and prolong it, precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb, but also in its strongest meaning: to make it present” (Genette 1991, 261). In every edition of Leaves of Grass, textual elements such as the cover, title page, frontispiece, copyright page, and the titles themselves all constitute important instances of paratext, and effectively unsettle the border between “the text” proper and its surroundings. Not only did Whitman have a “long foreground” as journalist and occasional poet prior to 1855, but in effect, the first edition of Leaves itself has a kind of “long foreground” as well, mediated at every level by Whitman’s careful attention to and experiments with the material properties of his volume. Although one could, as many critics have, take a substantial detour into the history of the book by examining the cover, bindings, paper stock, and other unique physical properties of different editions,19 I will do my best to confine myself here to what takes place in ink between the covers of the 1855 edition.
The infamous daguerreotype of Whitman that the 1855 edition offers in lieu of an author name provides the most notorious example of how Whitman’s poetics serially “present the text” in ways that both follow and defy nineteenth century poetic convention. Taken by Whitman’s friend, the daguerreotypist Gabriel Harrison, this portrait of a brash Brooklynite was remarked upon by virtually every contemporary reviewer. Whitman would later recall the day in 1854 that the picture was taken:
I was sauntering along the street: the day was hot: I was dressed just as you see me there. A friend of mine—”Gabriel Harrison (you know him? ah! yes!—”he has always been a good friend!)—”stood at the door of his place looking at the passers-by. He cried out to me at once: 'Old man!—”old man!—”come here: come right up stairs with me this minute'—”and when he noticed that I hesitated cried still more emphatically: 'Do come: come: I'm dying for something to do.' This picture was the result. (Walt Whitman Archive, “Walt Whitman by Samuel Hollyer”)
19 See in particular Folsom; Schmidgall, Gary. ""Damn 'em, God bless 'em!": Whitman and Traubel on the Makers of Books." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 24 (Fall 2006), 141-157.
29
As is typical for Whitman’s practice, what begins or appears to begin as accident and contingency – signaled here by the characteristic Whitmanian word “sauntering” – quickly becomes folded into the serial logic of Leaves of Grass. While the more “generic” copyright that follows the author’s image does identify a “Walter Whitman'' as the book’s copyright holder, any explicit identification of the author with Whitman’s name does not appear until twenty-nine pages in, buried in the poem that would become “Song of Myself,” in lines that confirm the reviewers’ “rough” impressions:
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, Disorderly fleshy and sensual . . . . eating drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist . . . . no stander above men and women or apart from them . . . . no more modest than immodest. (Whitman LG 1855, 29)
Whitman’s “speaker” is presented simultaneously as both living and larger than life, embodied yet more than a body. The equation of the poet’s self with a heavenly body or “kosmos” underscores the crucial difference between an institutional “Walter” and an intuitional “Walt.” In the Preface, Whitman’s definition of the “disorderly fleshy and sensual” poet is further framed in opposition to the competition and hierarchies of print culture and, indeed, capitalism more generally: “The American bards,” Whitman writes, “shall be marked for generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors . . They shall be kosmos . . without monopoly or secresy . . glad to pass any thing to any one . . hungry for equals night and day” (Whitman LG 1855, vii). Within this context, the image of Whitman standing somehow both in and out of dominant cultural and economic logics, posits a kind of intuitive recognition that desires more direct contact than generic print labels, or capitalist relationships, can attain. “This is no book,” Whitman would famously declare toward the end of the 1860 edition: “Who touches this, touches a man… I spring from the pages into your arms” (Whitman LG 1860, 455). As much as any of his poems,
30 the daguerreotype and its auspicious placement at the beginning of Leaves work to confirm this claim, and attest to a kind of polymorphous expressiveness in the 1855 text. Seriality’s always provisional forms of address “present” the text only insofar as they endlessly expand and defer the horizons of the text, which is not a discrete utterance, but a space in which many disparate voices and versions circulate.
Across the various editions of Leaves of Grass, every element of Whitman’s paratextual
“foreground” would gain in complexity, always in implicit – and at times, explicit – conversation with the series of texts and paratexts that preceded it. For instance, like Whitman’s prefatory claims, the frontispiece, too would go through a great many revisions. Perhaps most intriguing is the scandalous fact that, even during the 1855’s printing, Whitman appears to have worked with printers to enhance the crotch area of the image.20 He would swap out the original picture for a new and slightly more distinguished one in the 1860 edition (taken by one S.A. Schoff), a bohemian worker-poet image that was itself in process – each printing featured an increasingly finished version of the image. By later editions, of course, he would adopt the “Good Gray” look of “Papa Walt.” As with all of Whitman’s experiments with deferral and opening in the paratexts, such innovations are not merely significant events in the history of the book, but are part and parcel of the serial practices that serve to expand the terms of the text’s discursive legibility.
Whitman’s unconventional takes on the author photo only begin to gesture to the kinds of oversights that reading modes not attuned to the many manifestations of Whitman’s serial “false starts” can perpetuate. For instance, the reader who imagines that Whitman’s titling practices
20 See Ted Genoways, “‘One goodshaped and wellhung man’: Accentuated Sexuality and the Uncertain Authorship of the Frontispiece to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass.” Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays. Edited by Susan Belasco, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
31 offer a straightforward point of departure quickly runs yet again into the complicated seriality of
Leaves’ paratext. In The Title to the Poem, a study of “the expectation of wording in the space above a poem,” Anne Ferry writes extensively of Whitman’s efforts to expand the poetic legibility of titles, but fails to acknowledge the number of different titles a typical Whitman poem takes on over the course of its history (Ferry 1996, 1). In fact, Ferry goes so far as to claim, incorrectly, that the poems in the 1855 Leaves were simply title-less; in fact they each shared the same, serial inscription: “LEAVES OF GRASS.” This title, the same one down to the period that graces the title page and cover, constitutes a metonymic displacement that is crucial to the reiterative nature of the text. Over the course of Leaves of Grass, Whitman warps this
“expectation” of a title into the expectation of a particular title, one that doesn’t clearly demarcate poems so much as it does draw them into a over-determined and ultimately
“disorderly” idea of order – how is one to understand where one is in the text of Leaves if each moment is made indexically indistinguishable from the last? Whitman’s idealist and populist impulses, in other words, extend to the level of page or “leaf” itself – just as the true poet does not stand “above men and women or apart from them,” no one poem is granted priority over others. For instance, Michael Moon goes so far as to point out that the 1855’s lack of structuring devices like title, stanza, and rhyme scheme literalize Thomas Paine’s claim that, in a proper democracy, “There shall be no titles” (quoted in Moon 1991, 37). As we’ll see, the matter of titles, no less than similarly paratextual elements like the author photo, takes on further complications in later editions, as Whitman labels and re-labels different versions of his poems, and, in effect, changes the “stance” or “footing” from which they speak.
A highly choreographed performance to which Whitman gives as much attention as the poems themselves, the series of “openings” that frame the 1855 Leaves – its own “long
32 foreground” – nevertheless offers only a taste of Whitman’s long project of serial beginnings.
From the grandiose yet only implicitly addressed claims of the Preface, to the ambiguity of authorship in the frontmatter, Leaves of Grass strives to be as democratic, free, and inclusive as it is singular, contradictory and elusive. Thus far, Leaves’ attitude toward beginnings – hesitant, provisional, multiple – has gestured toward the serial properties that make its formal and historical horizons difficult to stabilize. By the time the poet finally gets around to what most readers would consider the “poetry” proper of Leaves, any sense of clear demarcation between text and paratext, substance and preface, is largely dissolved.
“Song of Myself,” that is, enacts such serial strategies on a much larger scale, through formal techniques of address that take up the call of the Preface and defer its fulfillment to the discretion of the reader. Because he was highly aware that the poems that follow the preface would encounter resistance in being recognized as “poems” at all within the context of nineteenth-century literary culture, Whitman’s first “LEAVES OF GRASS.” – what most critics would now refer to as “the poem that would become ‘Song of Myself’” – opens by modeling the reading and writing practices such a project demands:
I CELEBRATE myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. (Whitman LG 1855, 13)
In moving from Preface to poetry, Whitman conspicuously shifts perspectives – third-person claims that were made of “the poet” or “American bards” in general are now applied to the first- person “me myself.” With characteristic egotism, the poet sets out to answer the Preface’s
Emersonian call for a poet of the new world. However, even as the lines that directly preceded these suggested that it was “his country” that would offer “the proof of a poet,” the Whitmanian
33 logic of this poem collapses the reader’s task into the writer’s prerogative: the speaker celebrates himself; the reader need merely follow suit.
Compare, for instance, Whitman’s strategies of opening to that of the generic “epic.”
Given the nationalistic scope that Leaves of Grass announces on nearly every page, not to mention its large scale, it’s no wonder that the many attempts to wrestle the poem into a recognizable generic structure tend to defer to the epic as a model. However, in contrast to the invocation of a muse typically found in an epic proem, Whitman’s poem seems to invoke only itself as inspiration and source. Virgil, for example, begins the Aeneid by foregrounding the subject of and inspiration of the song over the subject who sings it: “Arms and the man I sing, who, forced by fate / And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate, / Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan
Shore […] “O Muse! The causes and the crimes relate” (Taylor 1936, 1). Whitman, on the other hand, opens Leaves of Grass with an opening declaration of highly individuated self-expression
– “I celebrate myself” – that makes first-person subjectivity itself the prime subject matter and source of the poem. The point is not so much to plot a continuation of the epic genre into an
American “proto-'' or “personal” epic, but rather that this self-conscious invocation of poetic convention operates as only one of many modes of beginning that Leaves of Grass adopts in setting out.
Indeed, despite the robust sense of selfhood this poem that the eventual title might encourage us to take as its epic subject, this serial self is, at best, an in-process composition. At the same time that a “speaker” seems to spring forth, fully formed down to the last atom, this arrival is no more singular or sudden than Whitman’s own arrival on the literary scene. Just as the 1855 Leaves of Grass was anticipated by Whitman’s long foreground as a newspaper man and the copious preparations – travelling, reviewing, collaging, note-taking, etc. – that his career
34 entailed, the poem that would become “Song of Myself” is a continuation of the formal and thematic motifs that are already simmering in the long paratext that precedes it. As Edward Said suggests of texts such as Tristram Shandy or “The Prelude,” Leaves of Grass is a text preoccupied with the formal and conceptual difficulties of setting out: “each at the outset is only a beginning, each is preparatory to something else,” Said writes, “and yet each amasses a good deal of substance before it gets past the beginning” (Said 1985, 14). Constantly qualified by a formal play of authority and address, the poem that would become “Song of Myself” adds another iteration to the paratext’s already ongoing series of self-reflexive gestures towards deferred and reciprocal construction.
While Whitman’s “notorious catalogues,” as Wallace Stevens called them (qtd. in
Hoffman 2016, 6), are probably the best example of this impulse toward multiplicity and inclusivity, such a stance is also clear at this particular moment of beginning. The slew of chiastic structures that opens the poem (“what I assume you shall assume”; “belong to me… belongs to you…”) insist on an equivalence between addresser and addressee that underscores a formal and practical commensurability between poet and reader, unsettling too-easy claims of singularity or hierarchy. Just as the deployment of epic convention works only as a one moment of recognition within a larger series of self-identifications, so the insistence on the reader’s participatory role renders the self of “Song of Myself” just one of many. The terms of such a multiple, contradictory self is precisely what is at issue in a poem whose democratic speaker must be “not above or apart” from his readers. Toward the end of the poem, Whitman will reiterate that “I do not say these things for a dollar, or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat; It is you talking just as much as myself.... I act as the tongue of you, It was tied in your mouth.... in mine it begins to be loosened” (Whitman LG 1855, 53). Earlier on, a similar unsettling of a
35 hierarchical economy is evident in the claim that all belonging to the speaker belongs “as good” to the reader – a formulation that can be creatively paraphrased to mean both “as well” and “as a good.” If Leaves of Grass acknowledges its status as a publically-traded commodity, it also idealistically declares itself to be no more subject to the laws of property and ownership than it is to authorial conventions of print culture. The poem demonstrates its unease with and overcoming of such conventional and formulaic relations a few lines later:
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes . . . . the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. […] I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me. (13)
In these lines, the poem’s opening doubles down on an intuitive rather than institutional sense of authority. The poem’s ambitions to be “undisguised and naked” echo Leaves of Grass’s refusal to assign titles to its poems and a name to its author: in this simultaneous employment and upending of convention, the speaker-hero of Whitman’s epic refuses the intoxications of neat labels and announces a more provisional and difficult-to-pin-down mode of being in the world.
Throughout Leaves, even the poems’ most singular and confidently-rendered utterances turn out to be modified, qualified, and re-iterated across different catalogs, poems, and revisions.
Textually embodied by the poetic “I,” author photograph, copyright page, and preface, generically bolstered by an invocation of epic tradition, and publically situated by an economy of address to a nation of potential readers, Whitman’s speaker or “proofreader” announces its serial logic in every instance of beginning and re-beginning.
Just as the serial relation between preface and poetry becomes important precisely for the way the latter works to confirm or “prove” the claims of the former, the next transition between pieces in the ’55 works on a similar logic. The poem that would come to be known as “Carol
36 (and earlier, “Song”) of Occupations” does not simply re-state the prior poem’s forms of address, but rather frames the opening as a poetic “proof,” a first draft of a mode of address soon to be re- made. If the poem that would become “Song of Myself” begins by invoking conventional readerly assumptions such as the “speaker” only to take them away just abruptly, this second poem “resets the type,” so to speak, in its preoccupation with Whitman’s composition practices as an endlessly open-ended “occupation.” Whitman’s tendency to locate moments of recognition within the intricacies of the print medium continues throughout Leaves of Grass, and calls upon readers to identify his real concern not with “leaves” of living, “organic” grass, but with the transformation as reams of dead, but no less vibrant paper. Or, to remain within the terms provided by the ’55, “LEAVES OF GRASS.” (II) reframes the opening play of expression and assumption in “LEAVES OF GRASS.” (I) around a thematic cluster of different forms of labor and material processes:
COME closer to me, Push close my lovers and take the best I possess, Yield closer and closer and give me the best you possess.
This is unfinished business with me . . . . how is it with you? I was chilled with the cold types and cylinder and wet paper between us.
I pass so poorly with paper and types . . . . I must pass with the contact of bodies and souls. (57)
The interpellation to come not close but “closer” immediately gestures to the in medias res nature of the address, one which reframes the opening declaration of “Song of Myself” around a new economy of images and motifs. Though Whitman goes on to catalog and celebrate numerous different occupations, he begins, significantly, with the “unfinished business” of printing – “unfinished’ because of the text’s always in-process character. The reader no longer
“assume[s]” with but rather “yield[s]” to the open conditions of utterance, a “give” and “take”
37 that underscores both intimacy and frustration: this is no easy transaction but “unfinished business,” a phrase that simultaneously puns on sexual non-fulfillment, alludes to the poem’s organizing focus on vocations, and, most significantly, points to the text’s provisional status.
Explicitly dramatizing the conditions of writing and being read, any notion of the poem’s
“speaker” is better understood as the idea of the poem itself, all too aware of the terms of its mediation – that is, its crude manifestation as reading material. This struggle is part of what
Whitman means in the Preface when he declares Leaves as “[a]n attempt to put a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the 19th century, in America) freely, fully, and truly on record” (Whitman LG 1892, 438). In the poem that would become “Carol of Occupations,” however, even the attempt to speak “freely, fully, and truly” runs into practical problems of the print medium. The desire of unmediated contact with the reader cannot pass beyond the “cold” conventions of different generic “types,” but can only mobilize their reading practices in ever different iterations.
Each subsequent opening within Leaves of Grass continues to emphasize this impulse, as each iteration of “LEAVES OF GRASS.” recasts and reframes the impulses toward authority and deferral with which the poem that would become “Song of Myself” opens. The transition between the poems that would become “Song of Myself” and “Carol of Occupations” thus begins to make a kind of recognizable genre of these texts titled “LEAVES OF GRASS.”, even as these various serial changes in footing – resistance to beginnings, shifts in address, openness to revisions, and the meta-discursive tensions such moves make legible – seem to actively work against the possibility of such types being “recognized” with any consistency. Such competing attitudes toward recognition are particularly visible throughout the final, untitled poems that make up the latter pages of the 1855 Leaves, which ends not with a bang but with a kind of
38 sputtering of different poetic genres. Though each of the six iterations of “LEAVES OF
GRASS.” in the 1855 is given its own page and title with which to begin, towards the end of the volume consistent formatting gives way without warning to a succession of poems unframed by any textual apparatus except the occasional horizontal bar between pieces (Whitman LG 1855,
13, 57, 70, 87). While the poems that would become “Song of Myself” and “Carol of
Occupations” argue for a paradoxical fantasy of recognition and reception both articulated through and hampered by the mediation of print, the non-conclusive conclusion of the volume as a whole demonstrates a tension between Whitman’s allegedly unprecedented mode of address and the various formal constraints it nevertheless seems to depend upon for its ultimate presentation. Ed Folsom has demonstrated that the cramped formatting in the later pages was not pre-planned and likely a product of Whitman realizing over the course of composition he had less space than he’d thought. Whitman’s poetics of inclusivity thus reflects the simultaneous limitations and opportunities that such poems identify as the affordances of the print medium.
For instance, similar contingencies caused Whitman to choose the large legal paper that his publishers used for their other publications. Not only did this added space allow Whitman to maximize the volume of work he could present to his reader, the large formatting also enabled him to develop his characteristic long lines (Folsom “Whitman Making Books”).
The beginning of “Carol of Occupations” is thus just one of the most conspicuous moments in which Whitman’s poetry dramatizes a generative struggle with its material mediation. For instance, the physically cramped pages of text toward the end of Leaves – what we might call the long “post-ground” of the 1855 edition – also witness Whitman’s “calculating on the fly” as he runs up against limited resources. The ending of the poem that would become
“Song of Myself” further emphasizes the ways that even Whitman’s most declarative utterances
39 prove to be only singular and highly provisional moments of stability among many. This is partly what Whitman means when the “speaker” dissolves into so much natural material at the end of
“LEAVES OF GRASS.” (I):
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me… he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed… I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed wilds. I depart as air . . . . I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop some where waiting for you. (Whitman LG 1855, 56)
Positioned as the first poem in a larger text, the conclusion of “LEAVES OF GRASS. (I)” inevitably suggests both resolution and re-beginning. On one level, this last stretch of the poem – which would be labeled as the fifty-second in subsequent editions, evoking the fifty-two weeks of the calendar year in order to hint at a sense of organic roundedness at its close – plays on an extended metaphor of the water cycle, foregrounding themes of both mutability and circularity:
Whitman’s speaker wanders as a cloud or “scud,” simultaneously “barbaric” and almost unnoticeable, as he “depart[s]” and “effuse[s]” in so many forms of life and life-giving substance
(“vapor,” “grass,” “dirt,” “blood,” etc.). Appropriately, however, these self-consciously natural images ultimately end up on a highly artificial one: the reader’s “bootsoles,” which generate the
40 very traces (or we might even say “prints”) that must be followed. To the extent that the poem trains the reader in a certain practice of recognition, in other words, it does so by framing such moments not as singular “finish” or “stop,” but rather as endlessly prolonged “search,” preoccupied with the different materials in which such encounters can be located.
Earlier in the 1855 preface, Whitman is more direct, if no less grandiose, in making it clear that the experience of his text entails not merely the sustained close reading of a static object, but a transformative encounter with an intimately mediated form of address: in quasi- liturgical fashion (“This is what you shall do”), the reader is commanded not only to “read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,” but also to “re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book” (Whitman LG 1855, xi). At the same time, however, this practice of reading is made equivalent with revision and re-examination: understanding, internalizing, or otherwise acting on such claims means unsettling the text’s claims to singular authority. Consequently, the interpellation that closes the poem that would become “Song of Myself” in the ’55 is notably open-ended: though the “I” still leads the way, the “you” is given the authority to trail after in a way that is sensitive to the contingencies of readerly desire (“If you want me again”). The conclusion of this poem, much like the opening, thus trades upon a number of genres and reading practices: while the oratorical and liturgical style emphasizes the hierarchical, almost pedantic relationship between an all-inclusive “I” and a reflexively responsive “you,” the poetry’s constant acknowledgment of itself as an uneasy construction of paper material, poetic convention, and public opinion simultaneously emphasizes the reader’s role in providing stability to a distinctly open-ended and contingent text.
Just as the opening of Leaves is locatable at any number of textual and paratextual points, so too does Whitman’s attitude toward closure and “finish[ing]” work on a logic of
41 deferral. From the carefully curated author portraiture that inhabits the frontmatter to the wide- ranging generic catalogue that constitutes the backmatter, the scenes of recognition through which Whitman “presents” his text to his audience highlights an always-ongoing process of poetic production, reception, and revision. As his Preface phrases it, “A great poem is no finish to a man or woman but rather a beginning” (Whitman LG 1855, xi). In the 1855 edition,
Whitman begins to answer his own call for a new American poetry that is constantly making itself anew. In the 1856 edition, he will continue to test the limits of himself precisely by continuing to test the bounds of what can be recognized as “a great poem” – or a “poem” at all.
The 1856 Leaves: Revising, Clustering, and Cataloging
Paying attention to Whitman’s serial deferrals not only at the level of individual text or poem but across different editions further demonstrates the way that Whitman brings serial practices to every level of Leaves of Grass. As Folsom puts it, “Whitman did not just write his book, he made his book, and he made it over and over again, each time producing a different material object that spoke to its readers in different ways” (Folsom “Whitman Making Books”).
This claim speaks to two concerns that continue to shape the seriality of Whitman’s work: on the one hand, the emphasis on “making” that highlights Whitman’s printerly hand in dealing with the material properties of his texts; on the other, the iterative and re-iterative nature of Leaves’ poetic and historical address. Even if the poet quickly discovered, through bewildered reviews and disappointing book sales, that the influence of the first edition did not spread as far as he had so confidently proclaimed it would, new Leaves – as well as readers to sustain them – would sprout up from the scattered ideological seeds and poetic utterances the 1855 had sown. The
42 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1881 and Deathbed editions are their own unique specimens, each featuring additions, revisions, and re-orderings that speak to emerging concerns and emergent publics. This section of my chapter will focus on a few of the most prominent formal and historical re-framings that constitute the second, 1856 edition. If the 1855 Leaves demonstrated the long historical foreground of its production with a long textual foreground of its own, perpetuated by various formal false starts and recognized the constant need for and impossibility of closure, the 1856 reveals its preoccupation with its own reception through similar yet re- focused strategies. In a twist on the opening lines of the poem that would become “Song of
Myself” – which, in the 1856, was given the title “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” – what the reader assumes, the second edition of Leaves assumes. Simultaneously a new beginning and part of an ongoing series, Whitman’s second volume recasts the intimacy of the reader-author relationship in a more public light, and produces a volume that responds to his public’s strained capacities for recognition by doubling down on the serial feature that nineteenth-century readers found most difficult to reconcile with an idea of poetry – the catalog.
These tensions of serial production and reception are highly visible in one of the most remarkable and remarked-upon features of the 1856 edition. In a notorious episode, Whitman expanded the 1855’s already daring use of paratext by excerpting part of the laudatory letter that
Emerson had sent him upon reading the first edition ("I greet you at the beginning of a great career – R.W. Emerson”), and printing it on the 1856’s spine. Though Whitman was roundly criticized for the highly public placement of this originally private recommendation – as he had been previously for publishing the letter in The New York Tribune without Emerson’s consent – the miniaturized review on the spine perfectly fit the serial project of “proofing” that Whitman had begun in the 1855 edition. On its most basic level, the review fulfills the generic function of
43 the book blurb, a piece of paratext that Whitman would subsequently be credited with inventing.21 Whereas, in the 1855, parataxis was the text’s primary tool for implicitly supplying evidence for claims, in the 1856, it is Emerson’s overt praise that provides irrefutable “proof” of
Whitman’s most ambitious poetic aims. The poetry had reached this one high-status reader, the quotation implies; logically, they might reach “you” as well. Whitman’s writing thus continues to shuttle back between the uneasy threshold of preface and poem, text and paratext.
In this regard, it is also worth noting that Whitman lineated (and capitalized) Emerson’s words, rendering them into a kind of poem of their own: – “I Greet You at the / Beginning of A /
Great Career.” While he may simply have been responding to the necessity of space, the poet’s working within cramped material resources echoes the end of the first Leaves of Grass. Reading closely, we can moreover see the way that this “you” continues the open-ended and reciprocal terms of address that Whitman had endorsed so conspicuously in the 1855 Preface and
“LEAVES OF GRASS” (I). Though Whitman’s name is placed directly above this poetic
“blurb,” one could argue that the “you” is not necessarily limited to referring to the author, but could equally refer to the reader taking Leaves down from the shelf – the “you whoever you are” to whom so much of the poetry is addressed. If “[t]he proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it,” Whitman’s characteristic use of this ambiguous pronoun continues to allow for the possibility that the reader of Leaves, no less than the writer, is called to a poetic project of considerable stakes and scale.
21 Though this may seem a somewhat dubious distinction given Whitman’s alleged desire to stand outside commodity relations in his poems, many critics have pointed out that Whitman’s formal practices are not far removed from many of the advertising techniques of the day.See, for instance, Blake, David Haven. Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. 98-137. Emerson himself added that it was only when he “saw the book advertised in a newspaper that [he] could trust [Whitman’s] name as real and available for a post-office” (Walt Whitman Archive “Letter to Walt Whitman”).
44 On yet another, more explicitly “serial” level, the highly deliberate selection from
Emerson’s letter gestures to the long series of openings and renewals that the 1856 continues to participate in: despite its being a revised, second edition, Whitman foregrounds his text as marking “the beginning of a great career.” Of course, Emerson himself notes in his letter that this beginning “yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start,” and Whitman acknowledges elsewhere in the text that full appreciation of his work’s import will be “sternly deferred” by public contingency. Nevertheless, Whitman’s ambitions to revise and perfect
Leaves of Grass mean that he is in a sense forever making his debut. Over the course of his career, Whitman himself would constantly repudiate his previous editions, ever gesturing to the latest or upcoming text as a new horizon of his work, encompassing and exceeding all previous versions. At the same time that the 55’s early reviewers checked Whitman’s optimism, this polarized reaction demonstrated it was impossible to be ambivalent to his work – in contrast to
Emerson’s initially effusive, if qualified praise, for instance, John Greenleaf Whittier notoriously tossed his copy into the fireplace (Miller 1962, 27). The fact that Whitman produced another, vastly different edition and rushed it to publication within the year testifies not merely to the fact that his poetics were constantly evolving, but that they were flexible enough to respond to the poet’s reading public.
The reader who felt interpellated by Emerson’s openly addressed “greet[ing]” would open the book to find a poet both continuous and discontinuous with that of the 1855. Paratexts like the title page, copyright, and author frontispiece largely follow the original edition in maintaining a somewhat ambiguous authorship: other than the spine and the re-titled first poem, only the copyright page identifies a “Walt Whitman.” A number of other paratextual innovations added to the second edition, however, demonstrate the development of Whitman’s serial
45 practices in ways that further point to the poet’s negotiating both of his readership and of his own ideas about literature and culture. For instance, doubling down on the poetics of self-promotion that Emerson’s recommendation enabled, Whitman added the “Leaves-Droppings” section, which includes both a simulated response to Emerson’s letter in the “Correspondence” portion and a number of reviews, both authentic and self-penned, in the “Opinions” portion. Punning on the act of “eavesdropping,” “Leaves-Droppings” does similar work in that it renders the border between public and private all the more porous. Moreover, the self-conscious inclusion of a multitude of voices continues to suggest that the poetic process entails not a single “speaker” but multiple “proofreaders,” qualifying, supporting, and challenging one another in a fictive representation of the public sphere.
The 1856 edition, in other words, responds to its readership and accordingly qualifies the ambitions that had been brought “to a boil” in the 1855. Meredith McGill has demonstrated one way in which Whitman’s poetics of remaking needn’t be seen merely as a concession to his public, but rather as a strategic reworking of its most characteristic and contemporary practices.
McGill argues that Whitman’s openness to the contingency of authorship and reception is mediated by what she calls the “culture of reprinting,” a pre-copyright system of circulation whose claims to cultural legitimacy needed neither legal authority nor presuppositions of originality. In the 1856 edition in particular, McGill argues, Whitman’s experiments with forms of poetic address and inclusions of paratextual materials call upon strategic deferrals of the authoritative poetic “I” to a discourse imagined as already in process. In this way, Whitman
“[launches his] voice into a print culture that had for the most part failed to recognize it” (McGill
2013, 47).
46 If the culture of reprinting mediates the 1856’s impulse toward “passivity, secondarity, and responsiveness” (43), various serial practices underwrite McGill’s critical account. In particular, the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass marks the high point of the Whitmanian catalog.
While one could open to virtually any page of the 1855 Leaves of Grass and find seemingly interminable lists of images, personas, propositions, and questions, from single words to larger phrases to entire clauses, the 1856 edition works to re-frame the catalog as its principle of unity at every level. One need not look further than the 1856’s Table of Contents to see how the poet’s attempt to absorb a nation of readers leads him to take up his most characteristic formal strategies in the seemingly most unexpected places. For instance, what immediately stands out about Whitman’s table of contents and titles – both new in this edition – is the fact that each entry features the word “Poem” somewhere within it (Whitman LG 1856, iii, iv). This self- conscious act of labeling works on a number of levels. While Jay Grossman has pointed out that
Whitman’s overemphasis on the poetic nature of his book’s contents is both a self-defensive and self-reflexive response to his culture’s rigid reading practices, epitomized in the refusal of positive and negative reviewers alike to recognize Leaves as “poems” (Grossman 2003, 94-115), such generic over-determination stretches convention to parodic levels. If readers had failed to recognize the “poetical nature” of the 1855 edition due to its eschewal of poetic conventions, the
1856 employs one of the most basic generic expectations – titles – in order to make the possibility of misrecognizing his poems as such virtually impossible. Playing upon Emerson’s careful neglect to identify his “extraordinary” writing as poetry, Whitman finds a way through to the “extra-ordinary” by this exceedingly categorical – or seemingly all too “ordinary” – strategy of labeling.
47 At the same time, however, Whitman’s overtly “generic” terms of recognition hinge upon the recognition of a substantially less conventional, more Whitmanian process. Whitman’s strategies of re-arrangement and re-labeling draw upon and expand the cataloging practices simultaneously so familiar to and so detested by contemporary audiences. Simply put, the table of contents looks altogether like one of Whitman’s catalogs. Just as a poem like “Song of
Myself” features so many moments that test the limits of anaphora with seemingly interminable lists of social, natural, and vocational “types” (note the punning on specific resources of the print medium, not unlike the use of “proof”), so too does Whitman’s catalog of his contents render the division between poetry and paratext all the more difficult to demarcate. Though the poems no longer stand in the clearly re-iterative relation that the 1855’s “LEAVES OF GRASS.” labels suggest, their status as discrete yet endlessly contingent objects continues to frame the contents as distinctly serial. Even titles that seem to violate the anaphoric structure (such as “Sun-Down
Poem,” later to become “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”) can be seen as consistent with the fits and starts that characterize these long lists in the original Leaves. If readers of the 1855 found such paratactic demonstrations difficult to reconcile with an idea of poetry, the 1856 covertly suggests a further twist of poetic decorum: it is almost as if the entire 1856 Leaves of Grass works like a catalog of its own development. “Missing me one place search another,” Whitman had instructed at the end of his most famous poem. In effect, Whitman dares his contemporary readers to say of the 1856 edition that the Table of Contents is essentially its greatest poem.
Whitman’s idiosyncratic choices within the context of more overtly signified conventions entail both a drastic extension of his contemporary poetic culture’s conventions of closure and the recognition of Whitman’s distinctive formal strategies as a kind of genre unto themselves.
Looking at this edition, it is all the more obvious why a critic like Burroughs would be called
48 upon to employ parataxis in order to describe the “utterances, ejaculations, apostrophes, enumerations associations, pictures, parables, incidents, [and] suggestions” that such poems list in so many concatenated forms. For instance, “Broad-Axe Poem,” the fifth poem in the volume, turns almost completely on a strategy of catalogs and their arrangement. Sometimes these series are marked by anaphora; other times they are merely a consistently repeated part of speech. The grammatical units range in size from single words (section 9) to entire clauses that stretch across multiple lines of print. Longer catalogs such as these may take the form of rhetorical questions
(section 6), relative clauses that defer predication (section 5), or serve as the predication itself
(section 7). Some of the catalogs list performative acts, which enact particular intentions in the act of utterance, such as in the opening salvos (“Welcome are…”). In the final sections, this type of performative catalog takes the shape of a refrain (“The shapes arise!”), which in turn enumerate more particular “shapes” or emblems of American life (Whitman LG 1856, 140-160).
Elsewhere in the 1856 edition are entire poems that might be properly known as “catalog poems.” “Poem of Women,” for example, withholds predication until its final lines, and is otherwise composed solely of long lists (101-102, “Broad-Axe Poem” is thus one of many poems concerned not with order but with a serial process of “ordering” (Pearce 1957, 61).
All of these examples demonstrate how, in reaction to the 1855 edition, Whitman aims to prove seriality as a viable means of recognizing poetry in and of itself – and the primary means of recognition available to his poetry in particular. In this sense, the second edition does not so much give in to critiques of the first as it does double down on the most salient serial traits of the
“proof”: to truly understand Whitman’s serial intentions in the 1856, we must allow for a conception of poetic form that is both self-consciously re-iterative and uniquely open to the contingency of publicly-circulated reading practices.
49
“Let It Stand”: Sexuality, Self-Censorship and Recognition in the Calamus Poems
As both a discrete, highly mediated print object and a larger serial project, Leaves of
Grass does not so much end as it does endlessly open, qualify, and re-invent itself. To return to the close of his most famous poem: Whitman would only amend the odd spelling of “some where” in the 1860 edition, by which time he had also changed a number of the more radical typographical choices, such as replacing the widely dispersed ellipses and exclamation marks into less conspicuous punctuation. What is significant about this choice in the context of the
1860 edition, however is the multiplicity of beginning and endpoints opened up by Whitman’s new attention to the sequential and metonymic relations between poems and pieces of them, as the 1860 sees Whitman experimenting with even more intricate arrangements of poems. These
“clusters” organize the massive edition into a number of thematically discrete yet inevitably overlapping sections, which would continue to structure subsequent editions. No amount of careful structuring however, can temper the overtly homoerotic charge of the “Calamus” section, for which the 1860 is often characterized as the “coming out edition.” Additions such as the spermatic imagery on the title page demonstrate Whitman’s continued investment in the paratextual means by which his text finds highly personal utterance, particularly in images of bodily dissemination. However, even with the full formal and generic resources of the poetic text, “coming out” in the nineteenth century – that is, before homosexuality exists as such in the social imaginary – can only proceed by way of self-censorship and indirection.22 For instance, though Whitman still declines to give his name on the cover or copyright page, the cocky author
22 See Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
50 portrait offered by the 1855 has been replaced by image of an image of a much tamer Whitman, captured far more delicately this time from the buttoned and cravat-ed chest up.
Such modes of self-censorship and revision as means of (non-)expression in Whitman’s writing of this period have been explored most recently and relevantly by Michael Moon, whose reading places the poet at the center of New York’s proto-bohemian scene and argues for the
“series” as a complexly social and historically-situated concept within it:
...much of the poetry is engaged in a kind of world-making in which the “new amorous world” Whitman envisions will be safe but in which it still best flourishes in a highly resonant and charged silence. This silence, I want to insist, is not simply that of the closet, but also of a public sphere—an overlapping series of public spheres—“streets, ferry boats, public assemblies”—in which hitherto proscribed desires and activities have begun to find eloquent, albeit often quiet or silent, modes of manifestation. (Moon 2006, 319)
For Moon, such silent eloquences figure Whitman’s relationships with other men as a series of non-teleological attachments, in line with Charles Fourier’s theories of association. Such a conception of Whitman’s not-quite-ambiguous cruising habits pervades the 1860 edition in particular, as Whitman cannot help but constrain his otherwise openly wandering erotic yearnings. While there is more to say about the epistemology of the closet in Whitman’s historical moment,23 what I want to point out is that, what Moon himself articulates here without fully articulating is an idea of the seriality as a kind of generic non-genre – that is, a mode of recognition that exhibits itself both consistently and disparately, without surrendering to the constraints of monogamous, limiting attachments. Thus, while I agree with Moon that
Whitmanian seriality forces readers to accept silence and passivity as manifesting a particular form of poetic production, I would also point out that the manifestation of such relationships often makes for contradictory modes of recognition that come into uneasy relation with such generic practices. This silent resistance to singularity allows Whitman, that is, to declare of his
23 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
51 otherwise quite open attachment to “manly love,” “I dare not tell it in words—not even in these songs” and “Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, / And yet they expose me more than all my other poems” (Whitman LG 1860, 374). These lines, taken from the unpublished series “Live Oak, with Moss” and the 1860’s “Calamus” cluster, respectively, are characteristic of the telling-without-telling strategies with which his poems tend to handle the difficulties that plague “coming out” in different situations of address. Although I’ll return to the way that the 1860’s “clusters” function no more consistently or directly than Whitman’s oblique and obscure professions of his sexuality, I first want to point out the way that a similar kind of non-constraining constraint inhabits another of the most significant moments of the poem that would come to be known as “Song of Myself.”
Not only does Whitman programmatically advance a resistance toward beginning and ending throughout his work, as early as in the 1855 edition he seems unsure about whether poetry entails concrete expression at all. In the preface, Whitman suggests that the resources of the American language are plentiful and flexible enough to operate as “[t]he medium that shall well nigh express the inexpressible.” The “inexpressible” that Whitman hopes to express is not merely content unarticulated by prior poetic utterances, but also the non-generic yet nonetheless charged forms of recognition that motivate his apparent refusal towards sexual and poetic commitment. Often indicated through the cluster of predicates that includes stopping, loafing, drifting and leaning, this ambivalence is most clearly visible in the speaker’s infamous, extended description of an intimate encounter with his own soul:
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice. (Whitman LG 1855, 15)
52 The importance of serial poetics to Whitman’s writing becomes clearer the more we dig into the contradictory play of absence and substitution in this instance of spiritual self-love. The speaker commands the addressee to “loose the stop” that seems to impede utterance, only to reiterate the preference for that pause or “lull” in speech: such productive pauses and ambient hums attempt, in a sense, to make silence speak. However, despite the classical inflection of “valvèd” (the accent was removed in subsequent editions), this scene hardly represents a moment of mere
Romantic passivity toward a larger, animating force such as nature. Indeed, Whitman’s text seems actively to resist any such universalization. Note the increasing abstraction of nouns along the central line of the quotation, a series of refusals that gesture toward and beyond cultural and poetic conventions: though any nineteenth-century practitioner of poetics would hardly need this declaration to realize that Whitman’s text rejects the “best” of “music,” “rhyme,” and “custom,” the word “lecture” is particularly revealing. Understood both as a discretely read object and a particularly didactic form of address, the word and Whitman’s explicit refusal of it point toward the complex of generic expectations against which the text is constantly posing itself. Any utterance that can be labeled through the use of such conventional categories is, for Whitman, unworthy of utterance, to the extent that silence itself becomes the least normative and thus most expressive means of poetic articulation.
In its complex valorization of loafing and lulls, Whitman’s text once again seems hardly compatible with an idea of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of feeling” or “feeling confessing itself to itself” (Wordsworth 2000, 598; Mill 1860, 95). For a poet as unapologetically verbose as Whitman, even the slightest of lulls would seem to render his voice nearly unrecognizable. And yet, in lieu of openly recognizable poetic conventions – “music, rhyme,” etc. – Whitman shows how “constraint” itself becomes part of the practices that make his deepest
53 desires recognizable, if by no means conventional. In contrast to these notably British and
“Romantic” models of poetry, which would render poetic expression the unproblematic utterances of a universal subjectivity, Whitman’s poems can only offer a poetics of loosed
“stops” – a coming out by fits and starts that places the imperative to speak in the reader while simultaneously anticipating and confounding their generic resources for response. In such moments of emotional overflow, Whitman suggests how it might be possible to make silence speak.
To read Whitman in this way is not simply to point out once again his deviation from contemporarily recognizable forms of poetic making (that which can be “lectured”), but rather to show how forms of expressive non-expression tend to surface despite great effort to revise and rein them in. Returning to the “Calamus” cluster helps clarify how seriality motivates these oddly recognizable sites of non-recognition, especially when we consider it in its important yet uneasy relation to the unpublished “Live Oak, with Moss” sequence. Discovered in 1955 as a collection of handwritten pages, often written over and pasted together, “Live Oak, with Moss” is important for demonstrating the depth of revision and restraint that went into Whitman’s not- quite profession of homosexuality in the 1860 edition. However, rather than demonstrating, as
Alan Helms has, the way these drafts help tell the “story” of Whitman’s coming out over a number of disparate poems, I want to point to how seriality functions as a mode of recognition that needn’t depend on the restored integrity of any one “narrative” for its telling (Helms 1992,
51). Particularly revealing here is Whitman’s own characterization, on the back of one of these pages, of “Live Oak” as “A Cluster of Poems, Sonnets expressing the thoughts, / pictures, aspirations &c / Fit to be perused during the days of the approach of / Death.” If these poems are indeed “Sonnets” they are, as Helms notes, certainly “improbable” examples (51). While it is
54 possible, through considerable readerly gymnastics, to assign fourteen discrete lines to at least a few of the twelve poems that make up this series, such conventions are hardly what Whitman seems to want from his invocation of this most traditional of genres. Indeed, accepting the stated aspirations – both generic and otherwise – of Whitman’s texts can only perpetuate oversimplified and over-docile narratives of the “Good Gray Poet” and his decline into decorum. For Helms,
Whitman’s straining under the history of this genre means that his poems can only flail against their own contextual limitations – “a kind of whistling in the homophobic dark” (54). While it is true that the text seems at times to strain under the sonnet’s well-documented history as a means of expressing unrequited love, such genre straining is also very much in line with how Whitman frames the inexpressible, because un-nameable, idea of homosexuality as identity and practice.
In the eighth poem of the series, the insomnia brought about from his abandonment by a lover prompts the speaker to pace nocturnally along “country roads” and “city streets” – actions not unfamiliar to the reader of his previously drifting and sauntering subjects. “Stifling painful cries,” the speaker’s silent wandering soon gives in to more expressive wondering:
Sullen and suffering hours–(I am ashamed— but it is useless —I am what I am;) Hours of my torment—I wonder if other men ever have the like out of the like feelings? Is there even one other like me—distracted — his friend, his lover, lost to him? Is he too as I am now? Does he still rise in the morning, dejected, thinking who is lost to him? And at night, awaking, think who is lost? Does he too harbor his friendship silent and endless? Harbor his anguish and passion? Does some stray reminder, or the casual mention of a name, bring the fit back upon him, taciturn and deprest? Does he see himself reflected in me? In these
55 hours does he see the face of his hours reflected? (Whitman LG 1860, 355)
In these lines, as throughout Whitman’s “coming out” poems in the 1860, Whitman registers a tortured restraint in regards to being recognized for the very identity he simultaneously wants so explicitly to claim (“I am what I am”). Whitman’s anxiety about acceptance, moreover, is an anxiety about the proper audience for his poems – how is he to know whether those who are “in rapport,” to use his frequent phrase for homosexual inclination, with the reading practices demanded by his “Sonnets” will also be “in rapport” with the same-sex longings they frame? A tentative answer arrives in Whitman’s formulation of these longings as “like, out of the like feelings.” On the one hand, this not-quite chiastic structure emphasizes what we might call the communal alienation that attends nineteenth-century homosexuality – to be alike in being unlike means that overt statements of attraction are only possible through fleeting glances and covert textual intimations. On the other hand, such “faint clews” can and indeed would prove capable of manifesting Whitman’s otherness to the many queer disciples with whom he would maintain both romantic and platonic correspondences until his death. In this sense, Whitman no more imagines that readers encountering his texts after the fact will recognize these poems as sonnets than he does that his sexuality will remain undiscovered. Rather than re-telling the story of
Whitman’s sexual discretion ad nauseum, we should think about how Whitman’s invocation of such cultural and generic constraints works toward valorizing the reading practices that make legible his turn his “like, out of the like” poetic and personal desires.
As Whitman moved on from the 1860 edition, the basic structure of Leaves of Grass as an ornately ordered personal anthology would remain largely unchanged, despite his frequent re- arrangements and revisions in and across a variety of clusters. Rather than attempting to make
56 sense of the serial iterations that would let in 1867’s “Drum-Taps,” the 1872’s “Passage to
India,” or any number of the clusters that would continue to be re-arranged in the 1881 edition and which were seemingly cemented by the elaborately-prepared deathbed edition of 1892, I want to conclude by turning to a much discussed but still misunderstood moment in a conspicuously less public instance of Whitman’s writing – his correspondence with the English poet, intellectual, and early advocate of homosexuality John Addington Symonds. By applying the serial practices I’ve discussed throughout this chapter – in particular, the meta-discursive, self-censoring, yet ultimately reproductive tendencies of the text – to Whitman’s larger conception of the status of writing, we will see the ways in which a deepened understanding of serial poetics allows in turn for a deepened understanding of how the poet understood the relation between himself and his works.
Recent critics working to understand the relation of Whitman’s later poetry to his poetics as a whole often focus on the way in which public and private contingencies such as the horrors of the Civil War, the fluidity of sexual identity, and the ever-expanding horizons of Leaves’ reception do not merely re-shape the text, but also call into question the status of writing itself. In particular, Whitman’s fear that “The real war will not get into the books,” articulated in his Civil
War diary Specimen Days, is often repeated as a testament to the poet’s anxiety about the inadequacies of print to history (Whitman 2007, 85). To this end, to claim that his poems “pass so poorly with paper and types” is also to acknowledge that the body of the poetic text is ultimately a privileged body to inhabit. Having attended the sick, wounded, and dying soldiers of the War, Whitman seems to recognize that his text’s claim that “Who touches this, touches a man” is only possible as part of a larger poetic performance that no longer seems to hold (though the line and its overtly sexual address would remain in all subsequent additions).
57 The Whitmanian word that goes furthest in helping us understand this complex interplay between life and text over time is “convulsion,” a term that has received virtually no attention in
Whitman criticism. Defined as a “sudden, violent, irregular movement of the body,” this involuntary motion is highly resonant with the kinds of episodes that Whitman’s serial practices in his later writing increasingly frame. It is, moreover, a term that throws the generic and contextual difficulties of Whitman’s texts into considerable relief. “This then is life, / Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions” Whitman proclaims in
“Starting from Paumanok,” framing what several of his other poems call “the life that has exhibited itself” as only a surface manifestation of much deeper impulses. Self-reflexively expounding on the specificity of the “diary” genre in Specimen Days, Whitman suggests that the diary’s inevitably erratic form – a “batch of convulsively written reminiscences” – represents the only genre capable of mediating the violent history of war (Whitman 2007, 82). As the word
“batch” reminds us, moreover, few poets were so preoccupied with the material minutiae of the print medium. In espousing this highly personal and always in-process mode of putting ink to paper, Whitman is also entering directly into conversation with key literary debates of the day.
For instance, in his 1849 novel Kavanagh, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – the bestselling poet of the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic – appeals to an explicitly “convulsive” poetics during a key scene in which two characters debate the merits and motifs of a specifically
“American” literature. While one Mr. Hathaway claims: “If it is not national, it is nothing.” Mr.
Churchill – a would-be sentimental novelist with a procrastination habit – insists that,
“Nationality is a good thing to a certain extent, but universality is better.” For Hathaway, the
American people “do not want art and refinement; we want genius,—untutored, wild, original, free”; Churchill, on the other hand, fears that bucking English tradition altogether would also
58 mean throwing out poetry’s broader claims to express universal truths in subjective language.
Ultimately, though both insist on “originality” as fundamental to artistic genius being recognized as such among different national literatures, Churchill firmly states that he only wants such a genius if it arrives “without spasms and convulsions” (Longfellow 1857, 75). Though it is not evident from Longfellow’s novel what a writing that spasms and convulses would look like, the episode frames such a formal problem as at the core of both aesthetics and nationalism. Pitting convulsion and convention in direct opposition to each other, the most celebrated and most non- convulsive of poets suggests that, in antebellum America, the project of the literary cannot be recognized in the sudden, violent, and irregular movements to which the body, if not the artistic temperament, is shamefully subject. For Whitman, however, poetry is not abstract and universal but corporal and contingent: the private, episodic, and always heavily revisable text of the diary as genre, as well as the “temper of society” by which it is mediated, ultimately leads him to argue that such a form “can indeed be best described by that very word convulsiveness” (Whitman
2007, 82; emphasis in original). Whitmanian seriality does not merely make a virtue of the
“untutored, wild, original, and free” movements that Longfellow can only see as vice, but also draws attention to the resonances such irregular impulses share with the problem of writing as
Whitman would come to understand it.
It is just such a moment of convulsive non-recognition that characterizes Whitman and
Symonds’s far more heated and infamous exchange. In August of 1890, Symonds, having praised and inquired into the “Calamus” poems conception of “Comradeship” over a correspondence of several years, finally asked Whitman bluntly to give his opinion on “those semi-sexual emotions and actions which no doubt occur between men.” The elder poet’s
59 response, buried at the end of his letter, has long been read as one of Whitman’s most distinctive moments of self-censorship:
Ab't the questions on Calamus pieces &c: they quite daze me. … that the calamus part has even allow'd the possibility of such construction as mention'd is terrible—I am fain to hope the pages themselves are not to be even mention'd for such gratuitous and quite at the same time entirely undream'd & unreck'd possibility of morbid inferences—wh’ are disavow'd by me & seem damnable. (Whitman 2007, 72–73)
As many critics have pointed out, this response is clearly a self-defensive gesture that Whitman found necessary in guarding his reputation against a writer who openly intended to use his correspondence to write a biography. What is more interesting, however, is the way the text continues to return obsessively, serially, to the very question it disavows: “I end the matter by saying I wholly stand by L of G as it is, long as all parts & pages are construed as I said by their own ensemble, spirit & atmosphere.” Even as Whitman claims to “end the matter,” his writing practices prove inimical to concluding in any straightforward way. In this sense, it is important to entertain the very real possibility that Whitman is not merely flustered here, but is rather writing wholly in accord with the “ensemble, spirit & atmosphere” of the serial methods by which
Leaves of Grass was composed. While M. Jimmie Killingsworth has argued that the poet’s attempts to explain himself to Symonds are the same “defensive moves [that] guided Whitman’s revisions and prose explanations” (Killingsworth 2016, 171), this point doesn’t quite grasp the full implications of Whitman’s modes of self-revision. Indeed, the letter itself is a kind of
“ensemble” construction: not uncommon for Whitman’s correspondence, the paper is made up of several different sheets pasted together and over each other. It would seem that Whitman could only address the question in fits and starts, and with considerable second-guessing.
Given that such serial practices are part and parcel of how Whitman approaches poetic utterance, then, we must take seriously the seemingly impulsive affect that this carefully-crafted
60 text is intended to perform. Whitman’s letter ultimately ends, as Caroll C. Hollis has noted, on a note so “wildly incongruous” that no homosexual reader could possibly misrecognize it as anything but “a plea to keep up the pretense” of normative sexuality (Hollis 1986, 35):
Tho’ always unmarried I have had six children—two are dead—One living southern grandchild, fine boy, who writes to me occasionally. Circumstances connected with their benefit and fortune have separated me from intimate relations. I see I have written with haste & too great effusion—but let it stand. (Whitman 2007, 73)
Given Whitman’s willingness to revise his letter by way of cut and paste, there is little doubt his alleged “haste” is part of the elaborate performance Hollis and others have identified. After several wild goose chases for the phantasmal illegitimate children, critics have settled on alternately characterizing Whitman’s claim as reflexive self-defense, misguided boast, winking code, or some combination of the three. However, given what has been called Whitman’s
“homosexual coding” (Killingsworth 2016 102), it seems important to consider what other interpretative horizons Whitman might have had in mind for his text. In other words, like
Whitman in the poem that would become “Song of Myself,” it is time to explain myself: I want to suggest that we might get farther in understanding the nature of Whitman’s poetics if we take him in a certain sense at his word. That is, I contend that Whitman’s “six children,” both so intimately and improbably divulged, are in fact the six “illegitimate” editions of Leaves of Grass that had been published by 1890. Openly endorsing a statement for which he knew he could give no “proof,” Whitman takes up once more the strategies of meta-discursive deferral that render his own texts “no finish,” but only more “proofs.” In a paternal formulation that would have pleased him greatly,24 Whitman is not merely the “author” but the “father” of his books – just as each individual edition of Leaves, in a sense, “fathers” the next. Springing from the same source,
24 For a more in-depth discussion of Whitman’s queer poetics of fatherhood, see Coviello, Peter. "Whitman's Children." PMLA 128, no. 1 (2013): 73-86.
61 genetically correspondent yet ultimately taking on lives, reading practices, and forms of address uniquely their own, the texts of Leaves of Grass that constitute Whitman’s serial issue are ultimately only understandable if we place seriality – practices of revision, redirection, and reproduction – at the center of his poetics. Just as Jack Spicer would write nearly a century later that “There is no single poem” (qtd. in Killian and Ellingham 1998, 106), there is no single
Leaves of Grass – no one Whitman, poem, edition, genre, reading or reader is adequate to the serial practices that define the poet’s lifework.
In an essay in Scholarly Editing, Kenneth Price and Nicole Gray’s discussion of the
“messy boundaries” of Whitman’s texts offer the latest perspective on the way that Whitman’s approach to genre often renders the supposed singularity of such categories unrecognizable
(Gray and Price 2016, unpaginated). In the context of the Whitman Archive, indexing texts as intricately constructed as the correspondence with Symonds requires that the text be understood as the dynamic, multiple, and self-reproducing object it is – genres must be cross-referenced, photographic evidence must be provided, and different editions and revisions must be taken into account. Discussing Whitman’s letters in general and the Symonds draft in particular, Price and
Grey write: “[A] robust system of relation, created and implemented through both the annotations and the encoding, is needed to fully represent the complexity of this object, which singlehandedly muddies the distinctions between incoming and outgoing letter, as well as draft and final copy” (Gray and Price). I propose that, even more so than archival techniques, digital tools, or generic flexibility, seriality itself is just such a “robust system of relation” – one, moreover, which the highly discontinuous story of American poetry and poetics cannot be told without. Serial reading and writing practices are “what gets into the books” in Whitman’s writing
62 precisely because they work the hardest to make legible the generative – if not necessarily generic – tensions between the legitimate and illegitimate, the recognizable and unrecognizable.
63 Chapter 2 – “He Finds Himself by Two”: George Oppen and the Serial Deferral of Genre
Oppen’s Serial Disclosures: The Deferral of Genre, the Genre of Deferral
In this chapter I build off my discussion of seriality and Walt Whitman to examine how this practice continues to evolve in the production and reception of George Oppen’s poetry. Just as the impulse to read “genre” into Whitman’s work required a notion of the generic based on revising, recycling, and reiterating, any attempt to read Oppen generically might initially seem to read him very much against the grain. However, this decidedly traditional concept is constantly circulating in Oppen’s work, albeit in momentary, contingent, and ever-deferred ways. Though most readers would find it quite odd – if not totally antithetical – to call Oppen a writer of sonnets, haikus, blasons, or “conversation poems,” a reworked definition of seriality allows me to do precisely that in this chapter. Moreover, demonstrating the pertinence of serial poetics – a generative but under-explored concept for the many poetic movements and modernisms that have claimed Oppen for their own – can help clarify some persistent problems of poetry’s relation to literary history, problems which Oppen’s writing poses in numerous forms.
In the previous chapter, I asked how far a definition of genres as collective and historically-situated reading practices could accommodate a notoriously contradictory, accumulative, and digressive text like Leaves of Grass. For Whitman, “genres” no longer seemed the “relatively stable” types of utterance particular to a “sphere of communication” that M.M.
Bakhtin defines (Bakhtin 1986, 60), but just the opposite, taking on an unstable, dialogic, and ultimately serial character, premised on revision, reversal, and non-recognition. In particular, some of Whitman’s most prominent public and private preoccupations – with the formalization of a collectively-recognizable “national literature,” with the open-ended and medium-specific
64 terms of address proper to “print culture,” and with the self-censorship inherent in professing a non-normative sexual identity – means that his readers can constantly encounter both highly
“generic” and highly “non-generic” poetics in the most surprising moments of his work. In
Whitman’s hands, even the critical commonplace of poetry’s having a distinct speaker seems always open to flux – a self-consciously multiple, democratic, and provisional impulse that led me in my previous chapter to dub his poems “proofs” and their speakers “proofreaders.”
Like Whitman, Oppen and his writing seem to jam the works of poetic history and criticism. However, while Whitman writes at a nineteenth-century moment that was “modern” insofar as it was defined by mass commodity production, the proliferation of regularly-produced print publications, and a nascent national consciousness at a critical stage, Oppen’s “modernism” is that of High Modernist difficulty. Aesthetically, Modernist artists found themselves at the uneasy border between “making it new” and acknowledging poetic history, between “tradition” and one’s “individual talent.”25 Whereas Whitman took aim at the nineteenth-century literary establishment’s standards of distinction with verse that was alternately too paratactic and prosaic, too bodily and bawdy, to fit within the narrow terms of recognition inherited from British
Romanticism, Oppen – an insider of the Modernist avant-garde from early in his career – faced no such proscriptions against experimentation. Socially and historically as well, Oppen’s twentieth century was defined by crisis on a personal and global scale in ways significantly different from Whitman’s nineteenth: Oppen rejected his upper-class background and lived through the Depression, was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge and assisted in the liberation of a concentration camp at Landsberg am Lech, and spent eight years a political exile in Mexico organizing for the Communist party. Though each took an active, and indeed, anxious interest in
25 Pound, Ezra. Make It New. London: Faber and Faber, 1934. Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Edited by. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, 1975. 37-440.
65 the politics of his day, their disparate identities – Oppen being upper-class, Socialist, and Jewish,
Whitman being working-class, bohemian, and queer – further distinguished their practices.
Due to these aesthetic and historical differences, Oppen’s version of seriality looks quite distinct from Whitman’s. It also, however, looks quite different from much canonical High
Modernism, such as Pound’s Cantos or Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and “Four Quartets.” This difference between Oppen’s work and these long sequences of epically-inflected collage and erudite allusion is not simply a difference in scale: though Oppen is often reduced to a poet preoccupied with, as his fellow “Objectivist” poet Zukofsky puts it, “the detail, not the mirage”
(Zukofsky 1931, 273), or as he himself puts it, “[t]he little words” (Oppen 1969, 162) or “small nouns” (Oppen 1975, 78), Oppen would also aspire to long poems as ambitious as any
“Quartets” or Cantos at various points in his career.26 Nor is this difference simply a matter of content: though his poems tend to steer relatively away from the stuff of religion or myth, his interest in the crises and catastrophes of his own time is nevertheless as historically inflected as
Pound’s or Eliot’s – consider, for instance, the frequent occurrence of dates and quotations in his work, moments which reverberate with historical significance despite their lack of proper nouns or clear referents.
The real distinction to Oppen’s poetics, I want to suggest, has less to do with his highly particular versions of Objectivism, Communism, or Modernism. In fact, what lies at the root of such commitments in Oppen’s work is his highly particular commitment to a common structure – seriality. Understood as an impulse toward parataxis and revision that invokes genre while sitting uneasily within its expectations, serial poetics proved throughout Oppen’s career to be the only writing and reading practice capable of sustaining the poet’s ever-evolving set of aesthetic and
26 Unless otherwise noted all references to Oppen’s poetry are cited in Oppen, George. Collected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1975.
66 social identities. This practice is contained in embryo within lines from a poem entitled “Myself I
Sing,” which Oppen included in The Materials, his first collection after his famous twenty-five year break from writing poetry: “Two. / He finds himself by two. / Or more” (35). As I’ll explore in much more detail below, to find oneself “by two” is perhaps one of the most basic ways in which seriality – the quasi-generic stance that defers the stability of genre while allowing for error, duality, and revision – functions in Oppen’s work. In this chapter, I argue that close attention to the multiplicity of contexts, conversations, and other forms of mediation in which such poetry circulates over time simultaneously brings the seriality of Oppen’s work to the fore and makes his place in literary history so hard to parse. Moreover, as I demonstrated to be the case with Whitman, this impulse shapes both the formal stakes of the poetry itself but also the sizable critical discourse that surrounds it. In Oppen’s hands, as well as in those of his critics, comrades, and collaborators, the shape of poems and the shape of history find themselves by two
– a practice that calls for vastly expanded definitions of what it means to read and write poetry.
From some perspectives, Oppen’s alleged resistance to genre might not appear so surprising: as a poet whose suspicion toward language is so prevalent he stopped writing for twenty-five years, whose poems shy away from recognizable speakers or forms of closure, and who indeed seems to believe that it is only “Possible / To use / Words provided one treat them /
Like enemies” (97), the idea of “genre” might seem to be the most limiting, stultifying, and ultimately suffocating resource available to any poet interested in making a poetry out of the materials of one’s time.27 Indeed, to echo Oppen in his only prose publication of any considerable length, how can the allegedly “modern” and “American” poet begin to “speak for
27 John Wilkinson dubs this the poet’s “linguaphobia” – the proper term for this would be the other term is “misology.” See Wilkinson, John. “The Glass Enclosure: Transparency and Glitter in the Poetry of George Oppen.” Critical Inquiry 36.2 (Winter 2010). 218-238.
67 himself,” if she is already setting out within the terms of constraint and categorization that
“genre” can all too easily imply (Oppen 2003, 180)?
Despite such claims, however, something that looks very much like genre is intimately bound up with Oppen’s work, which unequivocally announces its serial character not only in his first collection Discrete Series (1934), but also through the twenty-five year silence that followed it: in both his books and his biography, the path taken from one point to another is always subject to revisions and reversals. At the same time that readers have occasionally pointed out the prevalence of such “serial poetics” in Oppen’s writing, Oppen’s impulse toward this broken and open-ended mode has come to be such a commonplace in his writing that it is often taken for granted. In his influential 1934 review of Discrete Series, for instance, William Carlos Williams notes the “discrete” character of the work – the book is to be read as “a series separate from other series” – but doesn’t probe the second word of the descriptive title (Williams 1985, 56).
Confirming this persistent inattention in recent criticism, Michael Davidson, one of Oppen’s most prominent contemporary readers, claims, “It is as though we have focused only on the first word in the title to his first book Discrete Series, to the exclusion of the second,” and have thus downplayed the piecemeal and paratactic nature of Oppen’s text (Davidson 1997, 28). While it may be that the idea of the “series” seems all too self-evident in Oppen’s oeuvre – which begins with his aptly-titled debut and continues to employ versions of seriality in book-length pieces like Of Being Numerous (1968) and many other shorter poems – it is precisely the self-evidence of this difficult-to-pin-down genre that makes it overdue as an area of study.
Despite Davidson’s claim, seriality nevertheless seems to haunt critical writing about
Oppen’s work, either explicitly or by conspicuous absence. For instance, two recent and important accounts consider the idiosyncrasies of Oppen’s writing practices in ways that often
68 gesture to serial poetics’ characteristic play of recognition through parataxis and revision, though without specifically invoking seriality as such. Peter Nicholls argues that each of Oppen’s seven volumes of poetry must be understood within the context of twentieth century modernism, albeit a modernism with diminishing returns. While contingencies in Oppen’s personal and political life, as well as his constantly developing philosophical leanings, mean that he is constantly re- working this poetic inheritance – for instance, Nicholls’s study begins with an anecdote in which a young George and Mary Oppen meet Ezra Pound and take his politics and persona with a considerable grain of salt – Nicholls argues that, nevertheless, “it is a modernism broadly conceived that provides him with a constant instigation to begin again” (Nicholls, 2007, 3). This commitment to “beginning again” – not simply in each of his books but within individual poems
– is, I’ll argue shortly, precisely where an expanded definition of seriality might offer some clarification to the “fate” of modernist poetics as it is presented and problematized in Oppen’s work.
In another recent account of Oppen’s poetics, Oren Izenberg challenges the commonplace of a twentieth-century American poetry divided between the traditional and the “new,” lyrical and language-oriented, Poundian and Stevensian, by re-drawing these battles lines as a distinction between the aesthetic and the “anti-aesthetic,” indeed, the “altogether anti- phenomenal” (Izenberg 2006, 808). For Izenberg, Oppen’s writing exemplifies a strain of
American poetry “that sacrifices its formal coherence, its beauty, and even its very perceptibility” to the unique demands of its politics (794): according to this logic, his readers must reconcile a range of materials that are not “poems” in any generic sense – such as Oppen’s private “daybooks,” and even his twenty-five year silence – as falling under the heading of “the
69 poetic.” Building off this suggestion, I’ll demonstrate that the expanded terms of recognition that
Oppen’s poetry presents are most visible not so much in its silences, but in its seriality.
While neither Nicholls nor Izenberg focuses on seriality as such, critics who do place serial poetics at the center of Oppen’s work nevertheless betray the same unexamined instability that has come to accompany critical accounts of seriality. Alan Golding for instance, slips between “long poem,” “sequence,” and “serial poem” in his essay titled “Oppen’s Serial Poems.”
He argues that, contrary to a view of the poet as a kind of “miniaturist,” “Oppen did distinguished work in “the genre of – call it what you will – the long poem, the serial poem, the poetic sequence” and that “to ignore why Oppen works in this genre” is to ignore much of his achievement (Golding 1988, 222). Despite his acknowledgment of this form’s particular susceptibility to being re-labeled, it doesn’t occur to Golding to question “the serial poem” as a genre. In all of these critical readings, both Oppen’s commitment to seriality and his commitment to genre go unspoken, presumed, or undefined – his poetics are both overdetermined and undetermined. Indeed, it’s my contention that, for a writer like Oppen, they could never be anything but. Like Whitman, Oppen doesn’t so much engage with genre as he does take a
“stance” toward genre: for Oppen, it is possible to deploy the generic provided one treats it alternately like an enemy and a comrade. His reasons, moreover, are both aesthetic and socio- historical. On the one hand, Oppen desperately wants the stability that genre can offer: continuity with poetic history, the possibilities of comradeship and community, the clarity of collectively- established “truths.” On the other hand, he is anxious about the ever-present possibility of being misunderstood and mis-categorized, as well as the possibility of his commitments to radical causes being questioned.
70 These persistent problems of recognition that attend the seriality of Oppen’s work come to light in a moment of Mary Oppen’s autobiography Meaning a Life. Given, perhaps, the often- opaque nature of his poems, Oppen’s eventful biography has long held interest for readers attempting to get to the bottom of his complicated poetics. In her account, Mary describes numerous forms of travel, such as sailing from Lake Michigan to the Hudson Bay, disembarking at random New York subway stops, boarding a freighter to traverse the Atlantic, and taking a horse and buggy across Europe. Most particular and most revealing, however, are Mary’s recollections of hitchhiking across the country with George shortly after they were kicked out of
Oregon State University for spending an illicit off-campus night together – their first date.
Despite being hampered by sexual prohibition in the form of the Mann Act and alcoholic
Prohibition in the form of the Volstead Act, as well as being pursued by a private investigator hired by George’s upper-class and disapproving father, the practice of “hitching” and the attendant kindness of strangers they encountered revealed a world and a people previously unavailable to them – a mode of sociality through which it seemed first possible to the young artists that “poetry was being written in [their] own times.” In an often quoted passage, Mary writes:
We were in search of an esthetic within which to live, and we were looking for it in our own American roots, in our own country. We had learned at college that poetry was being written in our own times, and that in order for us to write it was not necessary for us to ground ourselves in the academic; the ground we needed was the roads we were travelling. As we were new, so we had new roots and we knew little of our own country. Hitchhiking became more than a flight from a powerful family – our discoveries themselves became an esthetic and a disclosure. The people we met, as various and as accidentally met as thumbing a ride could make them, became the clue to our finding roots; we gained confidence that this country was ours in a sense which we hadn’t known under our parents’ roofs. (Oppen 1978, 68)
71 What emerges in such scenes of surrender to contingency, conversation, and community is a mode of life adequate to the modes of knowledge that George’s poetry would consistently work to grasp. While still technically within the bounds of the law, hitchhiking circa 1926 in many ways models a particularly Oppenian – and particularly serial – idea of genre. Hitchhiking, like genre, is necessarily not a legally-recognized or institutionally-codified practice, but a discursively constructed resource, hinging on the constant possibility of intimate encounters and willful digression. While the two young artists would constantly be told to “move on” by various figures of authority they encountered in their travels, hitchhiking is a contract relationship that circulates around those “various and accidentally met” individuals capable of recognizing both the request of a thumb pointing down the road and the potential for alternative forms of sociality to which they might gesture (82). In this sense, one might say that travel is no less a “test of truth” than George imagined poetry could be (148).
Although many readers have pointed out the importance of this particularly subversive mode of transport to Oppen’s subsequent poetics and worldview, what’s particularly interesting for thinking about a practice like seriality is Mary’s use of the important Oppenian word
“disclosure,” which gestures both to a kind of intimately produced knowledge (similar to the slippage between the “discrete,” another key term for Oppen, and “discreet”), and the opposite or rejection of closure (dis-closure). George addresses these ideas most directly in a 1984 interview when he describes his poetry’s “sequence of disclosure,” which “[separates] the connections of the progression of thought” through line breaks and other resources of poetic syntax, as producing a species of highly contingent knowledge production (Swigg 2014, 204). Indeed, the semantics of “hitching” are all the more resonant with the complexities of Oppen’s work if we recall the dual meaning of “hitch” as “to be pulled or assisted” and “to disrupt.” That is to say,
72 Oppen strives for his poems – in their false starts, jarring isolations, floating modifiers, wayward predicates, resonant silences, and open endings – to model the pleasures and problems of thought itself.28
There are two important points to note here – first, that this disjunctive mode of poetic making, simultaneously open to and resistant to progress, is better described by “series” than it is
“sequence”: serial disclosure, understood as that messy clarity of thought that defers finality, actively resists the associations with generic consistency and formal wholeness that “sequence” often conjures. The other irony is that this “thinking” poetics is equally, despite what many readers would claim to recognize, a speaking one: a tentative, halting, and self-conscious kind of talk, but talk nevertheless. For instance, at the close of Meaning a Life, Mary recalls a visit to an elderly William Carlos Williams that indicates a way in which something like serial “speech” is recuperable from Oppen’s work. After a long conversation in which George read a number of pieces, Williams ultimately advised the younger poet, who was preparing to give his first public reading at the Guggenheim, to read his poem “Population” “slowly and twice” (Oppen 1978,
202). While the anecdote serves on the one hand to show the gulf between the two poets’ work both on and off the page, Williams’ injunction is in fact not far from the kind of reading practices that Oppen’s writing practices often demand – a poem like “Population” must be reiterated in order to be understood. In espousing this poetics of reading “slowly and twice,” moreover,
Williams the elder Modernist offers his counterpart a version of serial poetics that “finds itself by two.” For his part, however, Oppen hardly needed to be told that the poetic process is always subject to considerable false starts and repetitions. I want to turn now to the first of Oppen’s
28 Simon Jarvis has called in Wordsworth’s poetry a kind of “thinking in verse” and the editors of a recent collection of Oppen criticism a “thinking poetics.” Jarvis, Smon. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Shoemaker, Steve, ed. Thinking Poetics: Essays on George Oppen. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2009.
73 attempts at beginning: his debut collection Discrete Series. After reading this book as an exemplary instance of seriality’s complex generic resources, and The Materials as a conversation with personal and poetic history, I’ll turn to a variety of critical and creative texts that have gone almost completely unrecognized in Oppen studies.
Sonnets, Haikus, and Blasons: Deferring Genre in Discrete Series
Discrete Series (1934), Oppen’s first collection of poetry, is a book that, as Walter
Benjamin put it, of Baudelaire’s poetry, “presents difficulties” (Benjamin 1968, 155). However, while Benjamin meant primarily that Baudelaire offered lyric poems to an audience for whom such texts could only seem outdated, Oppen’s work is resistant to its readership in ways that can seem all too contemporaneous with that of his peers. The relative ease with which Oppen’s poems fit into a general “High Modernist” framework of disjunction, collage, and difficulty is ironically underscored by Ezra Pound’s insistence in the Preface that Oppen’s is a poetry “not got out of any other man’s books” (qtd. in Nicholls 2007, 1). In fact, the problems of reading
Oppen’s alleged idiosyncrasies in Discrete Series are quite legible if we understand that their particular difficulties are bound up with questions of the “discrete” status of serial poems – the terms of their seemingly arbitrary openings and closures. Throughout the collection, numerical organizations are abruptly introduced only to be just as abruptly removed; some sections appear to have titles, others are individuated merely by longer stretches of empty space. Ultimately, where to delineate a poem’s beginning and end largely seems a matter of readerly discretion.
Oppen himself would often cite the mathematical notion of the “discrete series” – “a series in which each term is empirically justified rather than derived from the preceding term” – as a way of pointing out the self-sufficiency of each singular unit: “The poems are a series, yet
74 each is separate, and it’s true that they are discrete in that sense; but I had in mind specifically the meaning to the mathematician – a series of empirically true terms” (Oppen 2014, 10).
Despite the fact that Oppen’s piecemeal approach to “the poem” as such seems to emphasize a particularly provisional approach to “truth,” critics have generally been content to leave the issue at that. For instance, Joseph Conte dubs Discrete Series as a subset of the serial poem known as the “finite series,” in which individual poems are meant to stand on their own within the larger serial work (Conte 1991, 121-141). I, however, don’t think we should be so quick to accept
Oppen’s word on this occasion – especially given that he himself would be much more concerned to let the object of the poem itself speak, rather than the always opaque, ever revisable claims assigned to it. In particular, what a taxonomic account like Conte’s misses is the larger fact of seriality’s characteristic capacity to distort, perform, and defer ever-present questions of generic recognition. In this section of my essay, I read these not-quite generic aspects of Oppen’s
Discrete Series with special attention to the serial nature of its production, reception, and criticism. The collection both depends on the performance of various referential frames and constantly gestures to the insufficiency of any attempt at something as stable as singular genres – or poems, for that matter.
The first, much-discussed “poem” in Discrete Series, an untitled piece that takes the shape of a sonnet but also seems to wrestle with its constraints, puts the reader’s practices of recognition to just such a generic “test of truth,” as Oppen would call it:
The knowledge, not of sorrow, you were saying, but of boredom Is—aside from reading speaking smoking—— Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was, wished to know when, having risen, “approached the window as if to see
75 what was really going on”; And saw rain falling, in the distance more slowly, The road clear from her past the window- glass—— Of the world, weather-swept, with which one shares the century. (3)
Beginning self-consciously in medias res, the poem’s opening lines are both conversational and prompting (“you were / saying”). These odd “asides,” which take the predication on a detour while also signaling a direct second-person address, both digress and develop the logic of the poem. Indeed, this simultaneity of digression and development might be said to be Oppen’s primary mode in this poem, which seems to work on a strategy of deferral made possible by a gradual fine-tuning of rhythm and predication. The “”Not…but” logic here suggests a constant refusal and substitution, as precisely what ones desires “knowledge of” is serially re-framed over the course of the fourteen lines: sorrow, boredom, reading, speaking, smoking, and finally, the world. Oppen’s point is not to provide that knowledge, but rather to showcase the difficulties of achieving such a “knowing” in context of the often-tedious historical realities in which one’s
“reading” and “speaking” is situated – a situation which includes the literary detritus of a number of allusions and genres.
Despite the intimately conversational address to a “you,” the poem does not seem to carry any kind of amorous connotation that might typically be associated with the sonnet’s larger history. Indeed, this “sonnet” doesn’t have Shakespeare, Petrarch, or Wordsworth in mind, but
Henry James, a story of whose Oppen quotes in the middle lines. Rather than choose a more immediately recognizable James reference – say, Isobel Archer or Daisy Miller – Oppen opts for a more formal allusion that cuts across genres. In the lines “Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was, / wished to know when, having risen,” what seem like syntactical stutters and starts are
76 uneasily reconciled with the slip into quotation. The insistent “it was” confirms James’s character as subject of both the sentence and of this stage in the poem’s search for knowledge; tonally, the phrase suggests a speaker seeking out stability within the chaos of his syntax and thought. Meanwhile, the participle “having risen” attempts to assign a brief temporal logic to a poem that is otherwise quite disinterested in narrative coherence, a fact underscored by the hasty list of gerunds (“reading speaking smoking”), habitual actions that the speaker invokes only to discard as unsuitable objects of knowledge. In these speech-like attempts of clarification, which take on the speech of the James text as its own, the intricately yet messily sequenced lines approach a kind of novelistic realism; we could almost say that Oppen is smuggling something like free indirect discourse into his poetics here, as the poem’s attempt to formulate a statement on knowledge seems to “merge” with that of the characters whose conversation underscores its difficulties.29
If the poem’s slippery foregrounding of novelistic allusions and tones is one way that
Oppen mines and undermines particular generic resources, the fact of the poem’s fourteen lines is no less suggestive Though the poem’s lineation, with its relatively regular indentations, might seem utterly unlike anything else Oppen would write, it characteristically complicates the propositions its lines tentatively put forth. For instance, while the single-word lines “smoking –” and “glass –” put the poem temporarily in the territory of the “emaciated sonnet” (typically composed of fourteen lines of single words), the m-dashes load each with considerable syntactic tension, and refuse to allow the reader to fall back on recognizable models of structural organization. It is as if his poem is temporarily wearing the guise of a sonnet, only to mask a far more complex play of cross-generic and inter-textual relations.
29 I borrow this phrasing from Gérard Genette, who describes free indirect style as a “merged” voice in which “the narrator takes on the speech of the character.” See Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. United Kingdom: Basil Blackwell, 1986, 174.
77 Equally deceptive is the moment where the trained reader of a Shakespearean sonnet might expect a “turn,” at line eight, which incorporates the most conclusive punctuation of the poem in the form of a semi-colon, only to finally proceed with the predication: at long last, we know what Maude is doing, as well as what she has done and seeks to know. If these lines seem to promise forward momentum to a poem whose substitutive logic has worked throughout to reject it, they equally seem to run up against another kind of limitation in the “window / glass,” as the bourgeois subject’s dream of thinking outside her stuffy confines is nevertheless framed by the particular limitations of her view out the window: Maude can’t see through to “the knowledge… of boredom” for the weather, which falls with a staggered speed that echoes the start-and-stop progress of the lines themselves. The projection of domestic space upon the supposedly knowledge-laden, natural environment just beyond the window continues in the final
“couplet,” which introduces the last iteration of the poem’s deferring “Not…but” logic. If there is a final “resolution” to this moment, it’s achieved through both a formal swell of sound and the massing of materials the poem has introduced in its syntactical wake. Having defined the object of the poem’s knowledge to be neither affects such as sorrow or boredom, nor habitual actions such as reading, speaking, or smoking, Oppen concludes with a couplet that brings together both interiority and exteriority and holds them in uneasy relation: on the one hand, the lines underscore the difficulties of knowing both a “world” and “a century” that are “swept” by the everyday contingencies of something like the weather; on the other, the equally everyday task of sweeping suggests this supposedly natural sphere “shares” certain qualities with the domestic one. Within the context of a poem that has consistently refused to let lines unfold without the stutters of appositives and asides, these lines are moreover strikingly musical, as the stream of
“w” and “s” sounds imitates the steady back and forth of a broom’s sweep, further highlighting
78 the verse’s habitual attempt to smooth out the seemingly uneven rhythm of its logic. Though form and content may seem to merge here in a tentatively satisfying way, it is difficult to imagine that the poem will be any less bored by this moment of closure than Maude might be with her newfound “knowledge.”
Discrete Series will continue to adopt this logic of rejection and substitution throughout its sections. While it may be possible to read the poem without considering “the sonnet” as such, the poem’s field of references, much like its stuttering syntax, put forth a question of tentative yet troubled recognition that will continue to color the collection’s organization and reception.
Lyn Hejinian, for one, adds to these difficulties when she calls this poem (which would become known out of necessity as “The knowledge, not of sorrow, you were”) the “real” preface of
Discrete Series (Hejinian 2009, 48). This act of generic classification opens up several questions
– is it the real preface because it is relatively unrecognizable when placed against the poetry it precedes? because its poetics better describes the contents that follows than Pound’s characterization does? If Oppen’s poems are truly a “discrete series” in the mathematical sense he intends, should one be able to excise individual poems as metonymic representations of the rest of the collection? In this case, which of these poems would not be considered a “preface” of some kind to the poems that follow or surround it? Gayatri Spivak famously suggested that
“[t]he preface harbors a lie” insofar as it cannot truly hope to be written from a standpoint ‘pre-“ or before the text itself, but is only ever retrospective (Spivak 2013, x). A preface is thus like serial poetry in that it performs a deferring work, mediating the apparent im-mediacy of the poetic contents. For Oppen’s “preface” however, this paratextual element does not carry the traditionally public or promotional connotations of standing “alongside” the text, but rather
79 bleeds into what might conventionally be recognized as the text proper. Texts, in Oppen’s logic, cannot stand alone anymore than they can be said to conform to singular genres.
Looking at the subsequent presentations of this “poem” in later Oppen texts, we might approach another way in which it may be said to serially “preface” its subsequent framing. As is so often the case with serial poetics, the terms of such work’s mediation – such as its editing and criticism – tend to become concomitant with the poetics, exemplifying a kind of seriality in and of themselves. These practices all ask the question of what qualifies a “discrete” poem at several different levels of mediation. That is to say, the question of where a poem is said to begin or end tends to dissolve the poem into a text in process, sustained by re-iterated acts of framing and re- framing, both intra-and extra-textual. Indeed, we could almost say of Oppen’s re-production on the page what one editor of Oppen, Michael Davidson, says of editing Oppen’s writing practices more generally: “It is often difficult to discern where the poem ends and the ‘rubble’ begins”
(Davidson 1997, xiv).” For instance, in editing Oppen’s Selected Poems, Robert Creeley selects just this piece and one other from Discrete Series for inclusion, and thus effectively makes their implicit discreteness all-too explicit. These selections, moreover, pressured as they are by anthological and critical practices, seem to defer to what is most generically “recognizable” in constructing Creeley’s sense of Oppen’s early work. In the process, Creeley not only confirms
Oppen’s claims about the self-sufficiency of such pieces, but also frames this ostensibly
“mathematical” formulation of discretion as a legibly poetic one.
While the fourteen-lines of “The knowledge not of sorrow…” strain against a just- recognizable version of the sonnet, Creeley’s second selection, a four line section from later in
Discrete Series, contains the seventeen syllables that generally make up the haiku form, while at the same time conspicuously working against some of its chief strategies:
80 The edge of the ocean, The shore: here Somebody’s lawn, By the water. (9)
The piece, especially as Creeley frames it by excising it from the larger series, demonstrates the kind of inconclusiveness that is typical of many Oppen poems, which tend to eschew epiphany and end in bare observation. The logical hinge is less the colon than the word “here,” a deictic that both insists on the presence of something self-situated and signals a shift in the poem’s descriptive strategies. While the definite articles of the first two lines suggest objects that ostensibly speak for themselves, the final two lines present images that seem to require reference to something other than themselves – some “somebody” whose claims on the land make “the water” no longer a natural fact but something more proprietary. Just as the word “shore” seems to reframe the ocean’s edge as a more particularly “scenic” scene, the pun on “here”/“hear” similarly gestures to the presence of a listener – a kind of tourist to the poem who can transform the sparseness of the setting into a more particular mode of inhabiting the world. Indeed, unlike
“ocean” or “shore,” the word “lawn” necessarily suggests the fact of ownership, and thus sacrifices the fundamental “here”-ness of the initial image in favor of something or someone out
“there.”
The poem’s subtle play of substitutive diction also echoes haiku convention, a generic proximity that Pound would much more famously adapt in “In a Station of the Metro,” written twenty years prior. However, while both pieces might be said to employ haiku-like strategies of juxtaposition and lineation as their primary devices of defamiliarization, the similarities stop there: where Pound’s poem is situated in a discrete locality, Oppen’s is all too vague; where
Pound’s images are descriptive and enigmatic, Oppen’s are stripped down and intentionally un- evocative. In gradually assigning ever more suggestive diction and referential frames, however,
81 Oppen’s poem in fact more faithfully performs one of haiku’s most important haiku conventions: by proceeding from the “apparition” of a ghostly yet provocative image of urban life, to a more discrete, small-scale image of nature, Pound’s moves from universal to particular, and thus, according to at least one critic, undoes the conventional logic of the haiku. Discussing this alleged shortcoming of Pound’s poem in a 1965 essay, Richard Eugene Smith writes: “If the haiku poet wishes to compare and contrast two visual mages, he must set the image of a small or transient or relatively insignificant phenomenon of nature against the background of one which is vastly larger or more enduring or more significant” (Smith 1965, 522). The haiku, as a genre, thus depends on sequence, the succession in which one things follows another; simply to reverse the order in which images appear is thus to undo the force of the genre entirely. For Smith, to move from the more general social image to the particular natural one can only be a decline in intensity: “By employing the greater image in a way which makes it seem to suggest the lesser image, Pound inadequately expresses the intense feeling which he wishes to convey” (524).
However, difficult as it is to imagine experiencing this famous example of “high Modernism” with fresh eyes, one can imagine that the opposite, conventional sequence, would represent an even more severe decline in intensity (something like: “These petals on a dark wet bough; an apparition of faces in the crowd”). As Pound knew, the ghostly and surreal encounter between anonymous faces in the metropole was, by 1914, the more readily available image to the urbane, sophisticated audience that might read his poetry. For such an audience, the lyricism of such a naturalistic image would fall conspicuously flat. His 1934 The ABC of Reading, a didactic attempt to mold the precise type of readership he desired, outlined the principles of condensation that motivates his serial reinvention of genre: for Pound, to write is to condense (“dicte = condensare”) (Pound 1960, 92). If “In a Station of the Metro” is a failed haiku, it is certainly not
82 a failed poem; indeed, I would suggest that Pound, like Oppen, approaches something like seriality here in both his substitutive, paratactic logic and his notoriously incessant revision of this poem.30 No printing of Pound’s now-canonical poem is complete without a note that details the possibility of putting the poem on the page in other ways, through alternate punctuations and spacing. Pound not only achieves his re-imaginative program of “making it new” in the generic territory of the haiku, he does so by following a serial program of revision, one that demands the gesture to many iterations of a poem that refuses to be singular.
Returning to Oppen’s own not-quite haiku, we can see the ways in which its own serial logic performs while ultimately holding off these generic constraints. While a poem like “In a
Station of the Metro” undertakes a distinct metaphoric shift between “faces” and “petals” in its two lines, Oppen’s poem doubles down on a far more incremental logic and refuses to situate the bare observations within any geographic locality and connotative associations. Indeed, while the haiku is known for the way that verbs are not necessary in its logic of juxtaposition, Oppen’s poem is even more conspicuously absent of predication: one things follows another in a manner that, seemingly contrary to the logic of parataxis, hardly seem to clash at all. In this sense, “The edge of the ocean” (as Creeley would title it) takes up a de-familiarizing “Not, but...” logic within the context of yet another generically recognizable form. Thus, the poem’s distorted performance of haiku convention – its deliberate lack of predication and its difficult equivalence between like and terms – allow for an argument about presence and absence to emerge that is wholly dependent on the shades of specificity made available by its alternately widening and narrowing diction.
30 Pound provides an account of his revisions in his 1914 essay on “Vorticism” that, while almost certainly idealized, indicates the many serial iterations this poem took on before settling in its unsteadily “final” form. See Pound, Ezra. “Vorticism.” Fortnightly Review 96 (September 1914), 461–471.
83 And yet, in isolating such a poem from its original surroundings, Creeley’s selection can also be said to move in a direction utterly opposite from that of the poem, which, in the Selected
Poems, performs a kind of self-sufficiency that it simply does not have in the original text.
Indeed, even to call this selection a “poem” would be troubling from the fact that, considered as part of the larger series, the piece looks almost as much like a stanza as it does a discrete work.
The lack of title – a choice that Oppen certainly could have made otherwise, given the intermittent titles in Discrete Series – similarly challenges the natural attempt to assign a larger direction to the decidedly constrained and circular descriptions. Oppen would write that his intention in Discrete Series was to "construct a method of thought from the imagist . . . intensity of vision" (Oppen 1969, 161) – that is, not merely to produce imagistic poems, as such, but rather to disclose a larger sequence of disjunctive development. The point here is not that an edited edition of Oppen’s poems needs to cover a wider swath of Discrete Series than an anthology form allows, but rather that Creeley’s selection deliberately defers to what is most recognizable to the reader of a certain kind of “modern poetry” – the “imagist” strategy of “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” – without allowing for the dialectical and dialogic reversals that are crucial to how Oppen’s longer serial poem functions. Oppen may, in this moment of his first collection, briefly pose at a kind of “Modernist” and generic legibility, but his particular brand of seriality does not rest so easily either within the single instant of time or the singular space of a page.
A final way that Discrete Series seems simultaneously to exploit and defer terms of generic recognition is in its consistent gestures toward the “blason.” This distinctively poetic device, as well as its long history of misrecognitions and their concretizations, models the kind of recombinative part-whole relations that seriality hinges on. Historically, there were once two
84 types of blason: the blason satirique, of which an “epigram” might be a close synonym, and the blason médaillon, which is intended “to describe briefly a single object.” This insistence on singularity and brevity, as well as the etymological resemblance to “blazon” (for most critics, the spelling is interchangeable), eventually meant that the device came to be understood, in the
Renaissance, as an attempt at poetic emblem, akin to a kind of epitaph or armorial insignia.
While this association is allegedly an historical distortion, it is true that the blason emerged from the “effictio” tradition of constructing a perfectly efficient language object (Greene 2012, 150).
The most well-known consequence of such a move toward compression is the feminist critique of the tradition of the courtly blason. This line of argument highlights violence done to the female figure ,in the suggestion that she is simply the sum of so many discrete parts, which can be named, contained and thus confined.31 Barthes, one of only a few critics to take up this device in the context of “modern” literature, notes in S/Z that “As a genre, the blazon expresses the belief that a complete inventory can reproduce a total body, as if the extremity of enumeration could devise a new category, that of totality” (Barthes 1974 114; emphasis in original). As a gesture toward totalizing, then, what is consistent about this convention is the tension between the self-sufficiency of the art object and the problems of foreclosure such reductions introduce.
Such “top-to-toe” descriptions produce a sexist fantasy of bodily possession that reached its most pervasive and parody-able peak in the Renaissance. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to imagine why a twentieth-century poet with “Objectivist” intentions regarding problems of perception might be interested in poetic devices that foreground the necessary object status of a poem. Oppen’s approach to this richly historical feature of poetry has the effect of constantly
31 For a further discussion of the blason tradition, see Vickers, Nancy J. “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme.” Critical Inquiry (Winter 1981) 8, 2.
85 gesturing to yet consistently deferring the possibility of disclosing various figures in their fullness – an attitude that reflects his stance toward the labor of poetry in general and serial poems’ unfinished character in particular. Extended attention to such generic features not only demonstrates the complicated way in which the most basic poetic devices function in Discrete
Series; reading this intermittent generic gesture in Oppen’s work also helps to demonstrate the relative dearth of poetic ornament in the work otherwise. The blason finds its object “by twos,” even as it acknowledges the impossibility of fully grasping that which it claims to hold as singular.
The first instance of metaphor in Discrete Series presents such difficulties that attend not only the use of the “blason,” but the very idea of poetic artifice more generally: “Her ankles are watches / (Her arm-pits are causeways for water)” (5). The first line can be read in a number of ways, all of which put the workings of metaphor and blason on full display. On the one hand, the deceptively declarative predication (“X is Y”) draws out the necessary foreclosures that attend any attempt to stall the moment of description, as the pun on the word “watches'' as “observes'' similarly gestures to the problematically time-bound nature of such perceptions. If we add in the troubling associations of the blason with the male poet’s gaze, we might see the congruence between “ankles'' and “watches'' as things seen when a dress or sleeve is just a tad too revealing – in this sense, Oppen’s observer seems to be counting down the moments until he will next glimpse this mildly intimate view. On the other hand, the second, perhaps more readily readable metaphor is restricted to a parenthetical – is Oppen trying to be “discrete” about the fact that the woman of his attention sweats? While the metaphor of the first line enlarges the sense of the figure by equating her with a sense of temporal situatedness, the second doubles down on the intensity of the vision by assigning her almost architectural proportions. In both cases, the
86 construction of “beauty” as central preoccupation is not explicitly stated, but submerged within the historicity of the descriptive device. Barthes suggests that such a reduction as telos rearranges conventional subject-predicate relations: “The blazon consists of predicating a single subject, beauty, upon a certain number of anatomical attribute: she was beautiful for her arms, neck, eyebrows, nose, eyelashes, etc.: the adjective becomes subject and the substantive becomes predicate” (113; emphasis in original). As his metaphors do little more than foregrounding their substantive status as metaphor, Oppen’s gaze performs generic specificity uneasily and uncomfortably: the lines echo each other almost as drafts or palimpsests, each mutually supporting the alternately fleeting and static views of the feminine figure while also refusing any final clarity. Rather than employ poetic devices in straightforward ways, Oppen’s poems prefer to move primarily by deferrals, reversals, and re-framings.
A similar moment brings together both simile and echoes of the blason in an oblique description of a sexual encounter:
Near your eyes – Love at the pelvis Reaches the generic, gratuitous (Your eyes like snail-tracks)
Parallel emotions, We slide in separate hard grooves Bowstrings to bent loins Self moving Moon, mid-air. (11)
The scene, which links visual perception and physical movement through its anatomical attentiveness, is highly aware of the simultaneously explicit and over-represented ground it treads. Rather than employ “generic, gratuitous” depictions of sex, Oppen’s roundabout description of “Love at the pelvis” is both direct and indirect, threatening yet not finally succumbing to a dissolve into cliché. Accordingly, the parenthetical simile (“Your eyes like
87 snail-tracks”) both supports and confounds legibility: the eyes may be oozing with tears (of pleasure or of pain?), or evoking the mutual or “parallel” emotions of the two participants. It’s possible that Oppen’s poem views this overt use of a poetic device more as a mediated performance, rather than a deliberate practice, of conventional meaning-making. In this sense, either reading threatens to dissolve into a pose at representational clarity. In tother indented line,
“Self moving” can be read both as a description of the bowstrings that precede it – they could be making music as if by their own accord, or perhaps just going through motions so highly practiced as to become automatic – or of the moon that follows it, which the alliteration of
“moving” “Moon” and “mid-air” partially supports. If this sex isn’t completely vanilla, it also isn’t so earth-shattering that it’s capable of moving the planets, although natural orbits and the passing time – an image of gradual motion that echoes the prior “snail tracks” – may make it appear that way.
Once again, the point here is not that the “generic,” understood here to include formal strategies such as the blason and similes, as well as their employment toward the representation of an unfulfilling sexual encounter, is utterly necessary to enjoying the poem. For instance, the highly auditory clash of sensory diction in lines such as “We slide in separate hard grooves /
Bowstrings to bent loins” and the push and pull imagery of the “Self moving / moon” provide more than ample incentive for the reader to engage with the poem “slowly and twice,” as
Williams might direct. However, Oppen’s alternate foregrounding and foreclosing of poetic ornament demands a surprising kind of collaboration with the particular difficulties it presents.
The generic, even for poems as seemingly resistant as Oppen’s, is only gratuitous if it surrenders to cliché, going through constrained motions as if traveling in grooves.
88 While the blason is most recognizable when deployed toward the depiction of feminine figures, Discrete Series also finds Oppen breaking down by twos workers and modes of conveyance, all of which have the effect of dramatizing the labor of perception as a serial practice. The first numbered poem in the collection details indirectly a mode of transportation just barely recognizable as an elevator in a Manhattan building:
1
White. From the Under arm of T
The red globe.
Up Down. Round Shiny fixed Alternatives
From the quiet
Stone floor… (3)
This architectural catalog dissolves space into a collection of so many parts and procedures, simultaneously representing and undoing the space of an ambiguous form of capitalist production. The section begins describing an architectural feature by reducing it to basic shapes that echo each other (“under arm” and “T”), while the starkness of the word “White” suggests this is a space almost clinical in its inhabitants’ race and social status. The red globe is presumably the light that signals the elevator’s arrival, a movement that echoes the “top-to-toe” strategies of the blason’s means of taking inventory. The word “Round” works as a pivot from the directional and descriptive to a more formal practice, readable across the line break as alternately “Up, down, and around” and as a modifier for the “shiny fixed alternatives” – presumably, the different floors of the elevator, but also, perhaps, the simultaneously “fixed” yet
89 open-ended sections of the poem. In breaking down this mode of transport into its discrete parts
– the shapes and connotations that make for the push and pull of words on the page – Oppen’s poem objectifies a mode of reading as a kind of transportation. To read alternately back, forth, and around that which might seem most enclosing or fixed (be it an elevator or a discrete poem) is precisely the kind of “elevating” reading practices that the seemingly unassuming poem demands.
Two more snapshots from Discrete Series particularly attest to how Oppen exploits something like the blason in foregrounding the piecemeal character of labor and motion in his serial poem. In a description of a steam-shovel operator, serial strategies of jarring enjambment and punctuation actively work both to advance and interrupt the depiction of manual labor, in the process drawing attention to writing as a kind of “construction” in itself:
Who comes is occupied Toward the chest (in the crowd moving Opposite Grasp of me) In firm overalls The middle-aged man sliding Levers in the steam-shovel cab, – Lift (running cable) and swung, back Remotely respond to the gesture before last Of his arms fingers continually – Turned with the cab. (7)
Though there is more than a slight echo of Whitman’s own urban flâneur mode in the erotic undertones of “firm” overalls, nothing like Whitman’s speaker-centered diction motors this verse. More important are the ways in which Oppen discloses force and motion, as the lines threaten to burst out of their fixed positions, shifting tenses and referents at near-dizzying pace.
So complete is the disjunction in a line like “Lift (running cable) and swung, back,” for instance, that the word “back” evokes deictic directions like “toward” and “opposite” and the bodily
90 vocabulary of “arms fingers” and “chest,” without finally falling comfortably within either reading. Oppen himself would claim, in a 1968 interview, that the lines are “messed,” admitting to some “pretty bad syntax” that goes too far in attempting to convey “the confusion of the city”
(Oppen 2014, 24-25). Despite the self-evident difficulty of such lines, however, it would be short-sighted to think that they do not fit readily within the kind of writerly labor with which
Discrete Series is concerned. In the same interview, Oppen admits that part of the problem is that his commitment to parataxis is in fact all too “modern,” and is quick to historicize his choices:
“In a way it’s more conventional than some of the other poems, I think, which is what I was objecting to a little bit. It’s a sort of ‘montage,’ because there’s just the city and I’m jumping around like the fashionable camera of that time” (25). If Oppen’s sensibility is indeed, as Pound declared, not gotten out of any other man’s books, that does not mean it isn’t subject to constraints of the “conventional” that cut across genre and medium. Indeed, Oppen’s desire to distance himself from this early iteration of his poetics demonstrates the ways in which seriality does not merely entail a disjunctive impulse to confound via parataxis, but in fact allows for the poet himself to take a kind of serial approach to his own oeuvre. Elsewhere in Discrete Series,
Oppen writes “One moves between reading and re-reading. / The shape is a moment” (11). These lines, like Oppen’s near-attempt to re-write his lines in the context of an interview, suggest that reading is not only time- and space- sensitive, but in fact constitutes a kind of space-time of its own – to read Oppen is not simply to move “slowly and twice” within his thought, but rather to develop alternate, even competing constructions of a particular moment of language. As his joint approach to the generic fixity of the blason or the “jumping around” of montage demonstrates,
Oppen needn’t stick to any one poetic mode, but, like the various figures he depicts, can re-work
91 and renew his poems to take different shapes over time – whether those iterations are as small as a line break or as large as a silence of several decades.
The tentative poetics of re-reading and re-writing developed here are a preoccupation throughout Discrete Series. In the final sections, Oppen is more explicit than ever regarding the way that this serial practice takes on representational strategies that refuse to proceed sequentially, though they may pose at doing so:
“Drawing”
Not by growth But the Paper, turned, contains This entire volume (14)
As one of the few pieces in Discrete Series that receives a title, “Drawing” and its self- consciously discrete status encourage a metonymic and medium-specific account of poetic production. Though the poem seems to describe the kinds of reading practices appropriate to
Oppen’s larger “volume,” what it would mean for Discrete Series to proceed by “growth” is not as immediately clear as it may seem: would this mean a linear, almost narrative progression? A thematic coherence? An accumulation of depth? Rather than offer a positive version of this conspicuously “organic” sensibility, however, the piece recasts the “Not…but” structure of the opening poem in a condensed but no less provocative manner. If the opening poem takes the gerunds “reading speaking smoking” to be habitual inevitabilities that must be moved past to attain knowledge of a greater outside, this closing poem suggests both “drawing” and “drawing out” as its primary means of proceeding. Even as this strategy of deferral serves as a negative example to the sense of linear progression, the surprising formal coherence of ending where one has begun might be said to attest to a kind of “growth” all the same: in the poem’s having
“turned” full circle, the reader naturally looks for what has changed. If “The knowledge not of
92 sorrow,” hinges on a deferral of certain kind of generic and historical knowledge, even as it exploits this potential familiarity with conventions and allusions, “Drawing” calls attention to the textual medium in ways that assume a kind of physicality to Oppen’s serial practices. For instance, the poem doesn’t equate reading with the familiar phrase of turning the page, but rather the “paper”; similarly, the idea of Discrete Series not as a book, but as a “volume,” adds a punning sense to the notion of the text as a “container” of meaning. The final section of Discrete
Series, on the same page, draws out this sense of “drawing” as both temporally and spatially extended, ending on its most direct reflections on the serial status of utterance:
Written structure, Shape of art, More formal Than a field would be (existing in it) – Her pleasure’s Looser; ‘O—’
‘Tomorrow?’—
Successive Happenings (the telephone) (14)
The idea of poetry quite explicitly advanced here both expands on and reverses the previous section’s sense of a “turned” shape, viewable from multiple angles. If the singular shape of a
“Drawing” might make it possible to “contain” an “entire volume” of poetry – through a single narrative, thematic, or structural sense – these lines finally suggest that a “written structure” hinges on a more “successive” logic. A discrete series does not imply the lack of temporality of a
“field,” in which every moment exists in the same readily available space, but rather depends on things happening successively and in relation to each other. Moreover, as Oppen’s constant refurbishment of the “Not…but…” logic of his poem indicates, to approach the “more formal” is
93 also to become “looser”; that is, the reading and writing practices described here, in becoming more generic, over time strain at recognizability. For instance, the poem’s attempt to represent the one-sided experience of a phone conversation is just barely legible through the two words in quotation. Given the immediate, sexually charged context of allegedly “loose” pleasures, the conversation is most likely a would-be romantic exchange: in this reading, the oddly archaic and deflated “O” expresses a crushed masculine response to the initial feminine rebuke, and echoes the poem’s previous use of this construction (“O City Ladies!”); “Tomorrow?” is the slightly panicked follow-up attempt to secure the appointment, or perhaps a preoccupied stalling of the continued courting. Like the other exchanges highlighted by Oppen’s jump-cutting urban camera, the medium-specificity of a telephone conversation models the way in which different discursive frameworks can be indicated with the sparsest of generic signifiers. In these final sections, the theme of frustrated pursuit formally unfolds as a distinctly serial construction, the utterance stymied at one turn yet renewed at other. “Not tomorrow,” the drama of the poem suggests through it successive silences, “but maybe the day after.” Only intermittently recognizable within generic terms specific to poetic history, Discrete Series constantly points towards conditions of utterance that challenge the very notion of literary recognition.
Indeed, this readerly activity of “filling in the blanks'' that Oppen’s poem presents in its final moments is a common way in which seriality’s strategies of deferral often put the task of construction in the hands of those who encounter it. Burton Hatlen suggests a roughly congruent notion in an interview with the Oppens: “One of [Hatlen’s students] said it looks to me like someone has erased half of the words and it’s my job to find out what goes in the missing spaces.” Oppen’s response “Yes, that’s good, sure” is more than a little bemused (Oppen 1981,
39); however, it directly points to the logic of scarcity and substitution that proves to underlie so
94 much of Discrete Series. Such dialogs and deferrals will continue to define Oppen’s poetics throughout his later work – a point at which the need to “fill in the blanks'' becomes even more pressing and even more distinctive.
Filling in the Blanks: Silence and The Materials
No account of Oppen’s poetics is complete without considering his twenty-five year hiatus from writing poetry. The Oppens’ exile in Mexico, during which they organized for the
Communist party alongside many other expats and artists, is the single best evidence of not only the poet’s suspicion of words in a postwar period that seemed to call for more direct practices, but also his commitment to challenging the financial privilege pressed upon him since birth.
What is almost as remarkable as the fact that Oppen would return to poetry with such force, however, is the fact that his readers have often come to polar-opposite conclusions about the poetics that define his work before and after this conspicuous break.
For some critics, there is ultimately continuity to be found in the poet’s pre- and post- silence work. For instance, Hugh Kenner famously quipped of the notoriously slow and deliberate writer that, “In brief, it took twenty-five years to write the next poem” (qtd. in Oppen
2014, 218). Charles Bernstein similarly suggests that the period can be read as a kind of paratactic break or “hinged interval” between the discrete yet characteristic utterances found throughout his work: “Could the twenty-five-year-gap between Discrete Series and The
Materials be Oppen’s grandest hinged interval?” (Bernstein 1999, 199). To extend their logic in terms of what we’ve already seen in Discrete Series, we might think of the silence between volumes in terms of a sustained gap between the “Not…” that finally produces the dialectical
95 turn of the “but.” Both in youth and maturity, this view states, Oppen’s poetry operates on more or less consistent principles of avant-garde difficulty and modernist experimentation.
For other readers, the poetics pre- and post-silence may as well constitute two distinct poets. For instance, Ron Silliman – yet another Language poet who has been important in the reception of Oppen’s work – critiques the later Oppen as emblematic of what he dubs “Third
Phase Objectivism.” According to Silliman, after the initial Objectivist “moment” in the 1930s and a long second period of “neglect” (Silliman 1999 163), Objectivist poetics re-emerged in the postwar period as a “middle road” between poets associated with the New York, Beat, and Black
Mountain “schools” of the “New American Poetry” and a more staunchly academic poetry that had finally accepted the lessons of poets like Pound and Williams toward open-form and speech- based poetics. As a literary-historical moment, “Third Phase Objectivism” thus entails a
“resurgence of interest in existing texts with the production of new writings” (Blau DuPlessis and Quartermain 1999, 6). The difference, however, is that in these later, third-generation texts, the energy that characterized “first-phase Objectivism” is all but lost to a more subdued, formal mode, which trades in the moment’s original technical preoccupations with “what the poem is” for a renewed attention to the “importance in what the poem says” (Williams, quoted in Silliman
165, emphasis mine). Though he is careful to point out that this shift is, “a difference in position
[and not] a decay in skills,” Silliman clearly views Oppen’s later poems as a far cry from those of Discrete Series, and lists a number of techniques that restrict such work’s ability to stand on its own as “a technical matter” (165, 166).
Like Bernstein and Kenner, I want to suggest that Oppen’s silences are an indispensable part of his larger poetics; and, like Silliman, I would also contend there are differences between
Oppen’s later and earlier poems. Rather than debating the continuities, contradictions, and
96 relative merits of Oppen’s “early” and “later” poetics, however, a serial approach to such poetry demonstrates how the work is capable of handling a great variety of generic impulses and rhetorical modes without committing to any one narrative of development or decline. Indeed, while a reader like Silliman might critique the overt nostalgia and relative straightforwardness of later poems like “Sara in her Father’s Arms” (30) or “Daedelus: The Dirge” (58) – both of which seem almost similar to “conversation poems” in a neo-Romantic sense – it is the very fact of such poems’ relative unfamiliarity within the poet’s oeuvre that exemplifies the way serial practices extend horizons of generic recognition precisely by incorporating that which is initially unrecognizable. Such attempts to “read the illegible,” as Craig Dworkin would put it – whether that illegibility is a politicized aesthetics of silence or the surprising emergence of certain genres
– ultimately highlights the sheer range of serial guises through which Oppen’s work has been produced and reproduced.32
My reading of The Materials, Oppen’s second collection of poetry, is motivated by two comparisons that Oppen has made of his work to that of other poets: one, to W.H. Auden, is quite surprising; the other, to Walt Whitman, is not. The first poem that Oppen wrote upon his return to poetry was “Blood from the Stone” (initially titled “To Date”). Based, as Peter Nicholls has shown, on a dream that Oppen had, the poem takes up the poet’s concern that he not “rust” in his middle age (Nicholls 2007, 28). Indeed, The Materials is full of poems that take up the theme of “jammed” or corroded systems and the perpetual motion they inhibit (“Image of the Engine”
(18-21), “Leviathan” (68)). “Blood from the Stone,” a short serial poem in four parts, is preoccupied primarily with the lived experience that has been suppressed by his silence – most notably domestic bliss with Mary, post-war malaise and the “specter,” as he describes it, of the
Depression. Indeed, in the surprisingly romantic – and, given the constant play of the organic and
32 See Dworkin, Craig Douglas. Reading the Illegible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003.
97 inorganic, surprisingly Romantic – there seems to be a considerable distance from a poet who could write in Discrete Series, of sex as so many mechanical motions:
In the door, Long legged, tall, A weight of bone and flesh to her – Her eyes catch – Carrying bundles. O! Everything I am is Us. Come Home. (31)
Despite these notably more nostalgic details, however, “Blood from the Stone” is quite recognizably an Oppen poem: the tendency toward bare observation and absence of predication, a notable use of small words, and the five discrete sections all sound much like the poet both pre- and post-silence. Perhaps what most overtly signals this recognizability, however, is the fact that
Oppen would later suggest that the poem as a whole, like those “messed” sections of Discrete
Series, were in need of re-writing: “How did I get to fiddling around like that? To my shame this will sound like an Auden explanation…. Of course, I need to make that a totally forthright statement. Shades of Auden – me, the unaudenized and diselioted! I’ll rewrite it” (qtd. in
Nicholls 2007, 37). Just as Williams instructed the younger poet to read “slowly and twice” when presenting his work for the public, here Oppen also seems to feel his work in need of being deliberately written over again. Oppen’s desire to disown and re-work his earlier work is suggestive: even in professing rejection of his High Modern forebears, Oppen seems to recognize shades of both Auden and Eliot haunting his work. Or, to put it another way, the poet protests too much. Even if Oppen would take pains to distance himself from the “discursive” and
“conversational” forms his writing could sometimes take, the fact remains that this stylistic pose is one that his work is nevertheless capable of sustaining. What Oppen and Nicholls disdain as mistaken associations of his work as speech-based practices might be better understood as
98 productive moments of serial misrecognition. A more contemporary episode is particularly revealing here: in her review of Oppen’s New Collected Poems, Marjorie Perloff concludes her own litany of the violence done to Oppen’s legacy by pointing out that “…as recently as 1999, at the first national meeting of the Modernist Studies Association, when Peter Nicholls, who happens to have a heavy London accent, gave a keynote address on Oppen, a good part of the audience evidently thought he was speaking about W. H. Auden!” (Perloff 2002, 562). The anecdote is not merely an amusing indicator of the canon-centric inclinations of Oppen’s would- be audience, but, more importantly, a demonstration of how Oppen’s work, especially as it serially unfolds across subsequent volumes, can be reconciled with apparently diametrically opposite poetics without too much confusion. Rather than railing against the characterization, we might be better readers of Oppen if we embrace the way serial poetics seem capable of sustaining a wide variety of genres and discourses.
The obvious counterclaim to such an argument, however, would be that any poetics so open to misrecognition also runs the danger of being distorted and adapted to despicable political commitments – no small concern for a poet who spent much of his “off” years fighting Fascism in Europe and organizing Communist resistance in Mexico. In this light, Oppen’s anxieties about his words’ mischaracterization take on a special urgency: if Oppen could conceivably be indistinguishable from a poet like Auden, how might his much closer stylistic proximity to someone like Ezra Pound – a poet from whose politics he, Mary, and other poets were increasingly eager to distance themselves – be interpreted? The complications and ironies are especially visible if we think about the distance The Materials takes from Discrete Series, even as the later book maintains similar strategies in newly recognizable forms. While Pound could praise Oppen in 1936 for a style that did not come from any other man’s books, The Materials
99 sees Oppen very deliberately reading into other men’s books. His dialoguing with the history of poetry includes poems that seem to gesture to particular works (“O Western Wynd” (53),
“Ozymandias” (38), “Leviathin”) and that include overt references to discrete genres (“Eclogue,”
“Daedelus: The Dirge” (58), “Travelogue” (25)), and even translations from the Buddhadeva
Bose with similarly genre-conscious titles (“To Memory” (65-66) and “Still Life” (67)). At every level, The Materials seeks not to escape from history, or the possibility of being misrecognized within it, but rather to embrace such possibilities as horizons of poetic production and reproduction.
Before turning to Oppen’s conversation with a much different “modern” poet, I want to spend a brief moment with “Eclogue,” the opening poem of The Materials. Given that its title refers to the genre of a dialog between two shepherds, it is particularly revealing of the way
Oppen continues to exploit the generic and conversational in ever new guises. The piece foregrounds this rural exchange while evoking a sense of discretion, perhaps not unlike that which the Oppens and their fellow Communists had to adopt over the course of the preceding twenty-five years:
The men talking Near the room's centre. They have said More than they had intended. Pinpointing in the uproar Of the living room An assault On the quiet continent. Beyond the window Flesh and rock and hunger
Loose in the night sky Hardened into soil
Tilting of itself to the sun once more, small Vegetative leaves And stems taking place
100
Outside – O small ones, To be born! (17)
Formally, the poem is characteristic of Oppen’s attempt to avoid predication in favor of wrestling with the difficulties of descriptive perception. The verbs in the second half of the poem arrive quietly and without clear connection to their subjects – “tilting of itself,” “taking place,” and “to be born” are prominently placed either at the beginnings or endings of lines, but either mismatch in number (is it “flesh and rock and hunger” or “the night sky” that “til[s] of itself”) or seem otherwise oddly suspended in space and time. Whether it is stems and leaves or an earlier referent that is “taking place,” such predication assigns a notion of process to an otherwise static entity. That which seems to hold still and silent is nevertheless shifting, tilting to its source of light and growth.
In all these senses, the poem is unusually preoccupied with the unforeseen challenges of
“birthing” words: in ways that recall Oppen’s attention to the re-adjustments and framings that constitute image-production in Discrete Series, “Eclogue” seems particularly conscious of its status as a made object. It is here that the dual generic and dialogic connotations of the “eclogue” are useful – the paranoid men speaking beyond themselves at the beginning of the poem not only converse across the increasingly naturalistic landscape of the poem, they also seem to converse with the larger issue of when and how speech should take place. Given the rural conventions an
“eclogue” traditionally traverses, it is worth asking what kinds of flocks these “shepherds” lead.
Especially seeing as “Eclogue” is the first poem in the first collection post-silence, I would suggest that they are addressing the fact of these poems themselves. The “small ones,” whose birth is hailed by the slightly archaic and recognizably “poetic” gesture of the exclamatory “O,” could be simply the plants that the poem observes taking place “beyond the window.” But they
101 could also be the self-consciously “small” productions-in-process that populate The Materials, a reading that Oppen’s characteristically inconclusive ending (the connotations of ceasing on a grammatical “infinitive” are helpful here) seems to support by pushing the reader toward the subsequent poems that reframe both this poem and the larger histories with which the poetry converses. In other words, the people talking at the center of the room are readable as Oppen conversing with himself across the gap of his twenty-five silence – two very different poets nevertheless reconcilable in their shared compulsion to speak despite words’ inherent tendency to say more than intended.
A poem like “Eclogue” thus demonstrates that, despite his best efforts to avoid associations with a more conventional poetic history, Oppen veers toward the conversational and generic in ways that are ambivalent, perhaps even self-contradictory. A similar kind of dialog with iterations of one’s self is visible in “Myself I Sing,” a poem that wears its influences on its sleeve. If Oppen was hesitant to be compared to Auden, the Whitman comparison is one that
Oppen seems very much willing to engage, as the poem foregrounds the simultaneous proximity and distance Oppen’s poetics take from Whitman’s and from that of Discrete Series. Here is the first half:
Me! He says, hand on his chest. Actually, his shirt. And there, perhaps, The question.
Pioneers! But trailer people? Wood box full of tools – The most American. A sort of Shrinking In themselves. A Less than adult: old.
102 A pocket knife, A tool – And I Here talking to the man? The sky
That dawned along the road And all I’ve been Is not myself? I think myself Is what I’ve seen and not myself. (35)
From the beginning, the poem gestures to the instability of any address that takes its speech situation for granted; despite mimicking the confident diction of Whitman’s most self-assured poems, Oppen’s own statements are constantly running up against the terms of their mediation.
Here, even the possibility of speaking sincerely and from the heart is challenged by the material fact of the would-be speaker’s clothing, a distorting surface that immediately pushes the language into a kind of equivocation, underscored by the word “perhaps.” Oppen’s poem finds nothing that is not open to doubt and uncertainty, from the limits of what demarcates a self to the associational logic that would place its language in conversation with “pioneer” and “trailer people” alike. Whereas Whitman nominally welcomes all classes and creeds into his utopian vision, Oppen scrutinizes every thread of his poem’s texture, unable to weave a coherent vision that doesn’t include backtracking and second guessing. For Oppen, to accept such ready-made terms as “American” inevitably implies a “shrinking” of possible modes of association, just as the declaration of “Me!” forecloses the potential of more expansive means of communication.
Oppen doesn’t “sing” himself – he “think[s] [him]self,” and in doing so destabilizes the singular object of a “self” in favor of an ongoing, in-process nature of his vision.
The second half of the poem continues to challenge the notion of singularity and self- evidence, and in the process provides one of the most enduring and flexible images of what
“seriality” means for Oppen – the key notion of finding oneself “by two’s”:
103 A man marooned No longer looks for ships, imagines Anything on the horizon. On the beach The ocean ends in water. Finds a dune And on the beach sits near it. Two. He finds himself by two. Or more. ‘Incapable of contact Save in incidents’ And yet at night Their weight is part of mine For we are all housed now, all in our apartments, The world untended to, unwatched. And there is nothing left out there As night falls, but the rocks (35-36)
To the extent that the poem has unity in any one direction, the final lines work largely to reinforce the opening – as the individual at the beginning of the poem searches for their own heart only to have the very concept of a centered “self” challenged beyond reconstruction, so the final non-image of “night” and “nothing” is absent of any entity “but the rocks,” the most inert and lifeless of objects. At the same time, the rocks, in the context of the poem, almost demand to be assigned meaning simply by virtue of their multiplicity and overtly objectified status. For
Oppen’s “man marooned,” that is, any object – not merely those contextually loaded with connotation such as ships or hearts – can be adequate to a kind of imaginative rescue from the burden of discrete articulation, provided that that object is understood ultimately as serial, in process, simultaneously divided (as are those in their “apartments”) yet always with the potential for recombination, revision, and reversal.
Oppen’s sense of seriality “by two’s” requires special attention in this regard. Aided by the deceptively declarative enjambment, Oppen in these lines first offers the number “two” as an object for contemplation, then allows for the possibility of a dual understanding of self, and finally opens up even this action to further scrutiny. The complicated back and forth is
104 underscored by the fact that what directly follows this declaration is another characteristic Oppen move: not merely quotation, but self-quotation. ‘[I]ncapable of contact / Save in incidents” appears in a section of Discrete Series, a section which Oppen would in fact refer to later as an early working out of the problems he’d approach in Of Being Numerous. Similar to the self- aware accounts of poetic labor in poems like “Drawing” or “Eclogue,” Oppen cannot help revising himself within the context of a serial conversation.
As the lines are framed in “Myself I Sing,” Oppen’s impulse toward reiteration gestures to the continuity of his poetry’s thematic obsession with the difficulties of unmediated “contact”
– even as the lines in both form and content insist on the discrete autonomy of each individual
“incident” of quotation. In the earlier version, however, as in the poem that Creeley would isolate as “The edge of the ocean…” the sea becomes a figure for the arbitrariness of singularity and of spatial demarcations:
Wave in the round of the port-hole Springs, passing, – arm waved, Shrieks, unbalanced by the motion – Like the sea incapable of contact Save in incidents (the sea is not water) Homogenously automatic – a green capped white is momentarily a half mile out – The shallow surface of the sea, this, Numerously – the first drinks – The sea is a constant weight In its bed. They pass, however, the sea Freely tumultuous. (8)
The poem is replete with images of stasis and mutability, from the syntactic level of the individual word to the conceptual level of the larger image. Similar to the poem “The edge of the ocean…” Oppen draws a distinction between “sea” and “water” that gestures to the taxonomical
105 tensions between the discrete and general: though the sea may consist of water, it is more than the sum of its materials due to its existence within multiple iterations and connotations. Thus, the ocean is “a constant weight / In its bed” only because it is subject to cyclical movements such as the tides, storms, and the seasons. Even the word that opens the poem seems to flicker in meaning, pointing simultaneously to a kind of opening salvo (to “wave” in greeting) and the shifting make-up of its setting (the “green capped white” of the sea surface’s peaks and valleys).
The clearest figure of deferral in the poem, however, is the image of the horizon, “homogenously automatic” because it maintains its basic form despite unceasing motion both “momentarily” and forever “half a mile out.” Through these images which circulate and accumulate in both Discrete
Series, The Materials, and Of Being Numerous, Oppen foregrounds the incessant horizons of revision and re-iteration, and persistently re-frames the significance of singular utterances for their status as instances in a series. Both constant and momentary, each iteration or “incident” of the phrase takes on meaning only in relation to a larger process of becoming.
Oppen’s practice of finding himself “by two” (or more) tells us a number of things about the history of his poem’s production, and, by extension, how to tell the history of so-called
“modern” poetry. For one, it emphasizes the surprising ways in which individual poets may be re-framed and identified with precursors they resist (Auden), quite as persistently as those they embrace (Whitman). It demonstrates this, moreover, by foregrounding a particular ambivalence toward closure that is not merely an “open form,” but a larger attitude toward poetic- and self- revision. Just as a poet like Whitman must ultimately be accounted for by the messiness of his larger oeuvre as much as for the visionary ambitions of the original Leaves of Grass, Oppen is defined by a kind of disaggregation, pieces that are available to be reworked and recombined. In this sense, it would be a mistake to think that the texts of what Silliman calls “First-Wave
106 Objectivism” are in any sense complete or simply “existing” – they are always already wrapped up in their status as productions in-process. In his attempts to give a narrative of literary history, that is, Silliman ultimately turns work like Oppen’s precisely into what it isn’t – a linear, singular narrative. Or, to put it in slightly different terms, such utterances are only legible in relation to the next, a moment of listening within a larger, ongoing conversation. As the deferring strategies of Discrete Series demonstrated early and within the context of a single volume, each iteration of
Oppen’s poetics is only ever a tentative whisper, a thrown voice opening up a conversation that, as we’ll see even more fully in the final section of this chapter, takes many readers and many repeated iterations to sustain.
Conversation and Collaboration: Oppen and Language Poetry
Throughout this chapter, we have seen the ways in which Oppen takes up a serial approach to poetry that defers generic recognition and converses with past and future iterations of his poetics, “finding himself by two” both within individual poems and across multiple volumes. Moreover, we’ve begun to see how the reception of his work – in particular, its evaluation, historicization, and anthologization – often takes up similarly serial practices, constructing Oppen as an increasingly important, if increasingly contradictory, figure within twentieth century poetics. Given that Oppen’s serial poems are always situated within a larger
“conversation,”33 awaiting to be untangled in different encounters and the pauses between, we might look more closely at subsequent texts by poet-critics who have foregone the difficulties of describing his work for engaging it directly in their own writing, and who have thus further entangled it in a chronic conversation. This uniquely participatory critical conversation suggests
33 For instance, Davidson argues that the writing practices exemplified in Oppen’s “daybooks” – in which poems are often written and pasted over one another – mark his poetry as “part of a much larger ‘conversation’ for which the published poem is a scant record” (Davidson 1997 27).
107 a further sense in which Oppenian seriality works “by two”: not only do Oppen’s poems reiterate and revise previous poems, that is, but his readers have also taken a special interest in reiterating and revising individual poems and, in turn, the larger construction of Oppen as man and poet.
However, despite their attempts to render Oppen’s poetics ever more legible, I’ll demonstrate how Oppen’s readers – for whom I suggest we need a term closer to “conversers” or
“collaborators” — tend inevitably to enter into poetic conversations that depend on the very ideas of “genre” and “conversation” to which their stated poetics would place them in opposition.
As the invocation of Mary’s writing at the beginning of my chapter suggests, Oppen’s poetry has never had a source in a singular voice. Writing about their struggles to find their way in the poetry and politics of the 1930’s, for instance, Mary notes: “It must be remembered that we were always two; we learned from reading and from what we saw, but conversation never ceases between us, and our critical views of our elders kept us from depending on them for our daily intellectual sustenance” (Oppen 1978, 135). Her comments here not only show the conscious gulf they aimed to keep between their work and “elder” poets, but also the collaborative strategies they imagined could serve as an antidote to such artists’ potentially problematic politics. George similarly avowed this distinctly dual, collaborative nature of his work. The dedication of his Collected Poems, for instance, reads: “For Mary / whose words in this book are entangled / inextricably among my own” (Oppen 1975, unpaginated). While the intertwined logic of coupledom is certainly important to his poems, Oppen’s (or the Oppens’) work has also proven capable of sustaining other types of textual conversation. Much like the
“series of arguments” in which Whitman’s attempts to reimagine the terms of poetic recognition took shope, the serial affordances of Oppen’s work render his oeuvre uniquely open to
108 reiteration, recycling, and reframing. Such inextricable entanglements across space, time, and speakers are also close but not quite identical to what Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter
Quartermain dub the Objectivist “nexus” – a larger social and literary field “whose temporality spans moments of production, reception, criticism, and reproduction” (Blau DuPlessis and
Quartermain 1999, 21). In Oppen’s hands, seriality’s distinctly diachronic and developmental logic ultimately blurs the lines of poetic production and reception into a more open participation framework – in particular, an open-ended form of language that Erving Goffman has usefully termed an “open state of talk.” Discussing the insufficiency of straightforward speaker/listener relationships, Goffman discusses this formal state as “a peculiar condition between” the two practices of “ratified participation” and “bystanding”:
A further issue. In recommending earlier that a conversation could be subordinated to an instrumental task at hand, that is, fitted in when and where the task allowed, it was assumed that the participants could desist from their talk at any moment when the requirements of work gave reason, and presumably return to it when the current attention requirements of the task made this palpably feasible. In these circumstances it is imaginable that the usual ritualization of encounters would be muted, and stretches of silence would occur of variable length which aren’t nicely definable as either interludes between different encounters or pauses within an encounter. Under these conditions (and many others) an “open state of talk” can develop, participants having the right but not the obligation to initiate a little flurry of talk, then relapse back into silence, all this with no apparent ritual marking, as though adding but another interchange to a chronic conversation in progress. (Goffman 1981, 134-5)
Goffman’s account of conversation that is “fitted in when and where the task allowed” draws heavily on the digressive and dialogic practice we might associate with Whitman’s experiments in what my previous chapter called the long foreground and post-ground of Leaves. It also recalls the young Oppens’ accounts of consciously open-ended practices such as hitchhiking, and their own collaborative processes: in the kind of “chronic conversation” that Goffman describes, “talk never ceases” between the two convesants, even though the production of discrete poems within
109 this process may temporarily make it seem as if a conclusion has been reached. This constant back and forth between “desist[ing]” and “return[ing],” moreover, does much to describe the shape of Oppen’s writing career, as it has been characterized by “stretches of silences […] which aren’t nicely definable as either interludes between different encounters or pauses within an encounter” (135). Finally, this open state of talk, a kind of stance of readiness and receptivity, also supplies a way of recognizing texts whose terms of closure are always open to deferral and whose production is open to multiple participants – serial strategies, which work hand in hand in poems like Oppen’s, and, as we’ll see in my next chapter, Baraka’s.
We have already seen evidence of such a “conversation” in complexly allusive poems such as “Myself I Sing,” paratexts such as Pound’s preface to Discrete Series, and critical re- framings such as the Creeley-edited Selected Poems. However, writers associated with the late- twentieth century movement Language Poetry have proven to be Oppen’s most innovative conversants. In particular, essay-poems like Charles Bernstein’s acrostic experiments (“Hinge
Picture”), Bruce Andrews’ paratactic quote collages (“Surface Explanation”) and Rachel Blau
DuPlessis’s extended engagement with his work (Drafts) all build upon Oppen’s questions about the generic status of poetry by reframing the linguistiic materiality of Oppen’s texts through the application of serial practices.34 To conclude this chapter, I’ll look briefly at one of these poetical-critical texts, which toes the line between production and reception and, indeed, seems to argue for an idea of poetic production as reproduction.
By taking up a kind of loose acrostic form, Bernstein’s “Hinge Picture” makes a number of important structural sacrifices and assumptions. Relatively rare to Modern poetry yet common
34 Andrews, Bruce. Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996. 162-169. Blau DuPlessis’ ongoing serial project Drafts introduces a much-needed feminist critique within Oppen’s work. See also Burton Hatlen, Burton. “‘Feminine Technologies’: George Oppen Talks at Denise Levertov,” American Poetry Review (May–June 1993) 9–14 and Riffkin, Libbie. “‘That We Can Somehow Add Each to Each Other?": George Oppen between Denise Levertov and Rachel Blau DuPlessis.” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 4 (2010), 703–735.
110 to the elementary school classroom, this genre is exceptionally laden with conventions, constraints, and connotations.35 However, acrostics are not completely unfamiliar to poets linked to the Language movement or other avant-gardes. In particular, Jackson MacLow invented and often made use of a particular procedural form called the “diastic” (from the Greek “dia”
(through) and “stichos” (“a line of writing”), which Bernstein adopts here.36 One of MacLow’s many self-described “objective chance operational method[s]” (O’Driscoll 2013, 111), the diastic involves selecting a chosen phrase or “seed text” and locating words that begin with each of its letters within a larger “source text,” which the poet is expected to proceed through chronologically. Though both “seed” and “source” may be any genre, the inevitable disjunctions between different selected units, as well as the instruction to lineate, tend to produce texts that look like a particularly paratactic kind of poetry. In “Hinge Picture,” which uses Oppen’s name as seed text and his Collected Poems as source text, Bernstein takes up the aleatory nature of the diastic genre as a gambit of recognition, producing five poems that are “of” Oppen in the dual sense of “by” and “about.” The result is a kind of writing as reading, completely composed of the source text’s words, which are now only recognizable by reading through the imposition of different syntactic and thematic orders.
Here is the second of the five “diastics,” whose lines draw completely from The
Materials:
Generations to a Sunday that holds Exterior, 'Peninsula Of the subway and painfully Re-arrange itself, assert
35 Brogan, T.V.F. Colon, D.A.. “Acrostic.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition. Ed. Greene, et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. 6. 36 See Hartman, Charles O.. Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996, 95-96.
111 Grand Central's hollow masonry, veined Eyes. The patent
Of each other's backs and shoulders Planned, the city trees Proud to have learned survival Effortless, the soft lips Nuzzle and the alien soft teeth (195)
While it is not impossible to perform a kind of reading on the “poems” Bernstein produces, I would suggest that Bernstein’s poems are so typically Oppenian precisely because they foreground process over product, in what becomes an almost imitation of generic reading. Or, to put it another way, perhaps the most characteristic quality is the fact that they are like Oppen’s,
“messed” – in need of some work in order to achieve anything like “clarity.” The first line, taken from the third section of the poem “Tourist Eye,” is particularly difficult to parse in this new context. In the original, Oppen points to the church ritual of piano music “tying / Generations to a Sunday that holds / As the building holds” (44). Here, the line floats, absent of clarifying predication; even if a Sunday is capable of “holding” different activities or connotations, it is hard to fill in the blank necessary to make sense of “generations to” anything. The first stanza continues to alternate between this sense of abstraction (as in the line break “assert / Grand
Central’s hollow masonry”) and a sense of concreteness, as a number of more fortuitous enjambments occur: for instance, “veined / Eyes'' and “ painfully / Re-arrange itself” offer a quite straightforward image and action, respectively. The adjective “veined,” which in
Bernstein’s version visually echoes an image of the New York City subway system as a kind of veined, arterial network, also introduces a series of alternating personifying and objectifying maneuvers that continue throughout the rest of the poem. For instance, the random lineation of
Bernstein’s “hinges” produce the sense that these “backs and shoulders” are both “planned” and
“patent[ed]”; in context, one can view this bodily procession as the city’s commuters, who come
112 to constitute the very system they so routinely ride. Another kind of transformation happens across the next line, as the city trees find themselves somehow surviving within a hostile urban environment; their “soft lips” and “alien nuzzle” are legible as a lovely evocation of rootedness, recalling Frank O’Hara’s similarly intuitive image of a “tree breathing through its spectacles”
(O’Hara 1995, 360). It is worth noting that the final two lines are in fact two consecutive lines from Oppen’s “Psalm,” the only time such an incident occurs in Bernstein’s piece.
What we might call the “painful re-arrangements” of the diastic genre are thus not completely resistant to the kinds of close reading that Oppen’s poems regularly demand.
Nevertheless, Bernstein’s generic reworking is not free of important, ultimately distorting critical choices. For instance, simply by taking up the diastic procedure, which runs out of the text of
Discrete Series after just a handful of maneuvers, Bernstein ensures that his tribute to Oppen emphasizes the “later” work of Oppen – that is, the “third phase Objectivism” that the poet allegedly so exemplifies. Though one might expect to see slight differences between the poems according to when the individual lines were composed, at this structural remove any differences between the pre- and post-silence Oppen are effectively annulled. The result is a curious hybrid.
At the level of the individual line and even, occasionally, at the level of entire stanzas, Oppen’s poems can often take on the rhetorical modes and thematic coherence that are characteristic of the later work. At the same time, the diastic’s mechanical “hinging” of disparate lines to each other ensures that the emotional intensity of “what the poem says” – according to Silliman, a prime characteristic of third-phase Objectivism – is notably hindered, building via either technique or sustained attention to contents only through chance and considerable readerly labor.
Moreover, the inevitably paratactic relationship between lines tends to push the difficulties of
Oppen’s language onto his strategies of enjambment: the reader is effectively prompted to “fill in
113 the blanks” in ways that recall the disjunctive difficulties of his early work. Thus, Bernstein not only finds a way to recuperate the formal tendencies of the Discrete Series-era Oppen within the content of the Materials-era Oppen; by taking up the simultaneously enabling and constraining procedural genre, Bernstein does so in a way that reflects Oppen’s stance toward language as both enemy and ally. Like a sonnet, blason, haiku, or acrostic, the deferral of genre can still be a genre. In “Hinge Picture,” the writing that Pound had so early praised as “not gotten from any other man’s books” is now pressed into a formal procedure completely of another poet’s making.
Indeed, in appealing to this particularly procedural version of genre, Bernstein in fact might be said to make a genre of Oppen: he adds another serial iteration to the deferred generic terms by which we recognize Oppen’s poems as such. Indeed, given that the poet’s name is literally embedded in a poem entirely of his own words, throughout “Hinge Picture” we are always aware that what we are reading is of, about, addressed to, GEORGE OPPEN. Bernstein suggests that this result is particularly appropriate to the typical structure of Oppen’s poetry:
“That these poems are so characteristically Oppenesque is, I think, less the effect of familiar lines or typical references than the way single Oppen lines can be hinged to ‘each other’ to create the marvelous syntactic music found throughout his work.” And indeed, this is part of
Bernstein’s point – such “objective chance operational methods” resist close reading, push toward the surface in precisely the way that Oppen’s poetry often prefers, as Bernstein puts it,
“the manipulation of words to create rather than describe” (Bernstein 1999, 193). As I have shown in “Hinge Picture, “however, part of what makes such poems work is their ability to work both on the level of “first” and “third phase” Objectivism: on the one hand, the poetry’s method reframing within genre of the diastic (“what the poem is”) serves as the primary way by which we recognize and classify this new poem as a poem; on the other hand, the poem’s capacity to
114 sustain the same reading practices by which we recognize Oppen’s poetry as Oppen’s is built on the possibility of making meaning in more conventional ways (“what the poem says”).
Contributing an utterance in the larger “conversation” of Oppen’s writing, Bernstein effectively
“turns” the entire “volume” of Oppen’s oeuvre into something new, yet nevertheless distinctly
“of” Oppen – an “open state of talk” that is also an Oppenian state of talk. In this way, Bernstein attempts to reproduce Oppenian seriality as a stance that can be taken up in ever new forms.
Throughout this chapter, we’ve seen how Oppen offers such a distinctive case of serial poetics precisely because his work is so often defined by consistent discontinuities, silences, and revisions. In his generic deferrals, stylistic re-workings, and reader re-constructions, Oppen exemplifies the “capacity for multiple characterizations” that defines seriality within a much broader range of media (Kelleter 2017, 22). Far from using these characteristics to distinguish his work from generic practices, we should use the notion of seriality to re-define our ideas of these commonplaces of poetic history and literary criticism. In my next chapter, I will continue to explore the serial horizons of Modern poetic subjectivity by whosing how Amiri Baraka also negotiates seemingly conflicting positions within poetic tradition and sociopolitical history.
Unlike in my previous chapters, however, which situated Whitman’s and Oppen’s serial arguments with the self against a broad range of social and literary practices, my third chapter will take a more narrow, yet deeper interest in the phenomenon of racial “passing” in order to reimagine the critical conversations that have failed to recognize the extent of Baraka’s serial poetics.
115 Chapter 3: “Endless Series of Selves”: Amiri Baraka’s Serial Poetics Against Passing
The only recognizable tradition a poet need follow is himself. (Jones 1999, 425).
[We] declare the need for: an art that is recognizably Afro-American [...] (Baraka 1991, xii)
Yes, poetry should be a weapon of revolutionary struggle. (Baraka 1975, unpaginated)
When they say it is Roi / who is dead I wonder / who will they mean? (Baraka 2014, 115)37
When I Say It Is Roi Who Is Dead: Baraka or Jones?
When I say it is Amiri Baraka who is the subject of this chapter I wonder, who do I mean? This syntactically-recursive question reworks the closing lines of Baraka’s “The Liar,” which serve as one of my epigraphs. The final poem in The Dead Lecturer (1964), Baraka’s second poetry collection, “The Liar” was written back when the poet was still known as LeRoi
Jones – that is, before he left the Greenwich Village poetry community (not to mention his wife and mixed-race family), before he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in his new home of
Harlem, before he converted to Islam and chose the name “Imamu Amiri Baraka,” before he was beaten by police and jailed for his particpation in the ‘67 Newark race riots, and before he renounced the entirety of his early poems – including “The Liar” – as “a cloud of abstraction and disjointedness, that was just whiteness” (Jones 1969, unpaginated).38 This series of rapid artistic and political reinventions, and The Dead Lecturer in particular, marks what is commonly known as the “Transitional Period” of Baraka’s life and work – one stage of a narrative that broadly sketches how the poet went from playing a prominent role in a primarily White avant-garde
37 Unless otherwise noted, all references to Baraka’s poetry are cited in Baraka, Amiri. S.O.S: Poems 1961–2013. Ed. Paul Vanglesti. United States: Grove Atlantic, 2015. 38 Biographical details cited in Baraka 1991, xxxi-xxxiii.
116 poetry scene (his “Beat” or “Bohemian” period) to becoming the "prime mover and chief designer” of the Black Arts Movement (his “Black Nationalist” period) (Neal 1968, 33). In 1974 he once again renounced his earlier writing, this time for its failure to recognize the centrality of the class struggle to political and artistic life: declaring himself a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, he thereafter began his “Third World Marxist” period, an outlook that largely defined Baraka’s life and writing until his death in 2014. With a few exceptions, This four-period logic (Beat,
Transitional, Black Nationalist, Marxist) remains in place as a common critical shorthand for making sense of Baraka’s body – or perhaps better, bodies – of work.39
When “The Liar'' asks how to name Roi in his death, then, the poem poses a critical and categorical question that Baraka’s readers – not to mention Baraka himself – have frequently posed about his writerly “corpus.” Perhaps more than any other American poet of the twentieth century, Baraka challenges the conception of the poet and the poem as singular, stable categories. Moreover, no poet invests these impulses with such immense and varied stakes, nor takes them to such extreme lengths. On the one hand, the widespread scholarly tendency to refer to the poet as “Jones/Baraka” might be said to literalize Édouard Glissant’s description of
Blackness as the “consent not to be a single being.” This phrase, which has been taken up by the poet-critics Fred Moten and Claudia Rankine, unsettles the stability of supposedly singular subject positions and “refuse[s]… stereotypes of blackness” in moving toward more nuanced understandings of historically-situated difference (Rankine 2020, 31).40 At the same time,
39 To take one prominent recent example, Paul Vangelisti employs it as the organizing principle of Baraka’s complete poems. ibid. 40 See Moten’s critical trilogy consent not to be a single being, which consists of Black and Blur (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), The Universal Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), and Stolen Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). The phrase originally appears in Glissant, Édouard, Manthia Diawara, and Christopher Winks. "Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia Diawara." Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 28 (2011): 4-19. See also Adusei-Poku, Nana. “The Multiplicity of Multiplicities—Post-Black Art and its Intricacies,” Darkmatter 9, no. 2 (November 2012), accessed November 29, 2020,
117 however, the Jones/Baraka label, which suggests a Foucauldian concept of authorship as “a series of subjective positions” (Foucault 1980, 309), sidesteps more complex questions that such a critical naming convention raises about the construction and continuity of identity – including, most troublingly, Baraka’s’s well-documented history of misogynist, homophic, and anti-Semitic remarks. If we are to re-imagine and reconcile the current critical understanding of multiple, serial “Barakas” – not just the “recognizably Afro-American” “Amiri Baraka,” nor the “just whiteness” of “LeRoi Jones,” but the “changing and diverse motion” between and beyond such categories – what sort of framework will do justice to the vitality and variety of his work
(Baraka 1991, xi)?
In previous chapters of my dissertation, I’ve argued that seriality serves as a dynamic formal resource for poets who reject the imperative toward singularity and closure that writing within discrete genres entails, enabling them to take up instead overtly non-generic strategies as a basic “stance” of their work. Through practices of repetition, revision, and reframing, serial poets “find themselves by two,” developing bodies of work in which they strain against and subvert dominant terms of social and literary recognition. In Walt Whitman’s and George
Oppen’s poetics, for instance, the very idea of the poem or the poet – becomes something closer to a flexible impulse toward “being numerous” or “contain[ing] multitudes.”
However, if “recognizably serial” poems are often not necessarily recognizable within literary criticism’s tendency to privilege genre as its primary lens, the idea of a “recognizably black” poem presents a version of this problem at considerably higher stakes.41 To be
http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2012/11/29/the-multiplicity-of-multiplicities-%E2%80%93-post-black-art-and- its-intricacies/. 41 See Nielson, Aldon. “This Ain’t No Disco” in The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry in Our Time. Ed. Edward Foster and Joseph Donahue (Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, 2002), 536–46 and Shockley, Evie. Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. United States: University of Iowa Press, 2011.
118 “recognized” as a Black poet within the cultural logic of whiteness is both to be accorded certain political rights and cultural distinctions, but also to be subject to (the object of) violence and erasure: to matter is also to face the all-too-real risk of being made into mere matter.42 Claudia
Rankine captures what we might call the duplicity of social recognition in her 2015 essay “The
Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning”:
The unarmed, slain black bodies in public spaces turn grief into our everyday feeling that something is wrong everywhere and all the time, even if locally things appear normal. Having coffee, walking the dog, reading the paper, taking the elevator to the office, dropping the kids off at school: All of this good life is surrounded by the ambient feeling that at any given moment, a black person is being killed in the street or in his home by the armed hatred of a fellow American.43
In this transformation of public “grief” into the “good life” of private routine into the “ambient feelings” of a kind of constant, collective mourning, Rankine shows how “the everyday of Black immanent and imminent death” emerges in the gaps and contingencies of a supposedly “post- racial” America (Sharpe 2016, 13.44 For Rankine, this legacy of historical violence produces in
Black subjects the disorienting effect of occupying multiple socio-historical realities at once – a contemporary form of duBoisian “double consciousness” that is most remarkable for the fact that it can be felt as so unremarkable.
Rankine’s account of the way that African-American subjecthood is “surrounded” and split by the ever-present threat of state-sanctioned violence suggests a consent not to be a single being that is very different from Whitman’s or Oppen’s versions of seriality. More specifically, we might compare Rankine’s use of serial subjectivity as a kind of affective survival tool to the
42 Glissant discusses this idea in terms of a “right to opacity.” See Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 189-194. 43 Rankine, Claudia. “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning.” The New York Times, June 22, 2015, accessed November 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of- mourning.html 44 See also Mbebe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, 1 (2003) 11–40.
119 “recursiveness” that Brent Hayes Edwards has identified, via Nathaniel Mackey, as a key component of Black serial poetics. For these theorists, the serial poem’s imperative to repeat and reframe itself offers a means of negotiating the ongoing historical trauma of racism and the precarious, provisional, and plural forms of embodiment that such an inheritance produces. This view repeats, with crucial differences, traditional views of “the serial poem” broadly conceived: for instance, Joseph Conte defines this “uniquely postmodern genre” primarily by “the discontinuous and aleatory manner in which one thing follows the next” (Conte 1991, 3).
Paratactic and disjointed, yet also unified and unidirectional, this distinctly “avant-garde” – and therefore, implicitly White45 – poetic form stands in direct contrast to the recursive and explicitly raced aesthetic impulse of Black serial poetics. Mackey writes (and Edwards quotes):
Provisional, ongoing, the serial poem moves forward and backward both, repeatedly “back / at some beginning,” repeatedly circling or cycling back, doing so with such adamance as to call forward and back into question and suggest an eccentric step to the side—as though, driven to distraction by shortcircuiting options, it can only be itself beside itself” (Mackey 2006, xi–xii)
For Mackey, as for Rankine, the condition of Black life produces a sense of serial self. The serial poet, no less than the poem, can only be herself beside herself. Black serial poems turn this plural selfhood into a powerful formal resource.
“The Liar” – which, as the final poem in The Dead Lecturer, can be seen as poised on a critical threshold between the “Transitional” “LeRoi Jones” and the “Black Nationalist” “Amiri
Baraka ” – offers both an example of this side-stepping, circuitous movement, and a starting point for re-framing the linear, four-period logic of Baraka’s development. Indeed, we might see the poem’s direct engagement with specific autobiographical detail, including its self-reflexive use of the poet’s own name, as a kind of autopoetics or autotheory, a form that employs
45 See The Boston Review’s series on “Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” accessed November 29, 2020, http://bostonreview.net/blog/boston-review-race-and-poetic-avant-garde.
120 “embodied experiences as a primary text or raw material” (Fournier 2018, 646).46 The middle of the poem winds its way through an intricate sequence of lines in which the poet seems to serially proclaim, process, and question his capacity to claim a stable identity at the level of the body itself:
Wherever I go to claim my flesh, there are entrances of spirit. And even its comforts are hideous uses I strain to understand. Though I am a man who is loud on the birth of his ways. Publicly redefining each change in my soul, as if I had predicted them, and profited, biblically, even tho their chanting weight, erased familiarity from my face. (115)
Reading auto-poetically, we might say that the restlessness and uncertainty that attend this attempt to “claim [one’s] flesh” is LeRoi Jones’s own struggle to define, inhabit, and express his ideas about identity at a crucial juncture in his personal and poetic development. Voiced by an
“I” that finds itself in an ongoing process of redefinition, erasure, and rebirth, the snaking, oblique sentences both propose and problematize race – reductively referred to here as the
“flesh” – as a lens for social recognition. For instance, the first of the sentences I’ve quoted frames subjectivity itself as a kind of property, an identity “claim” which can be somehow possessed even as it possesses its subject: in this sense, the “entrances of spirit” that haunt this subject at a skin level suggest an understanding of race as a kind of commodity, animated by the
“hideous uses” of capitalist systems of valuation. To situate one’s body within racial discourse,
46 This is one reason why my readings will dispense with the idea of the poetic “speaker” – I will use instead whichever name the poet was using to refer to himself at the time of a text’s composition, and will default to “Baraka” where necessary.
121 the poem suggests, is also to be systemically subjected to the intersectional violence of what bell hooks would call “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks 2004, 17). Running alongside the poem’s anti-capitalist logic, the lines also contain a nuanced concept of identity as performativity. Given that, as Judith Butler has shown, “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender” the speaker’s claim, “I am a man,” is more troubled than its straightforward phrasing suggests (Butler 2011, 25). On the one hand, this identification is self- fulfilling: if gender doesn’t exist beyond its performance, to proclaim a gender role is to reinforce the way one participates within, and comes to be embodied through, the privileges and paradoxes of patriarchy. On the other hand, this identification is self-destructive, a speech act whose repetition “erases” any internal differences of the performer in order to foreground his highly self-conscious and “public” performance. As indicated by the profusion of qualifiers throughout these lines (“Though,” “as if,” “even tho”), Jones defines himself less by any static property like a singular “soul,” “flesh,” or “face” than by the iterative motion of change itself.
Lacking a grammatical subject, the last sentence twists and turns on itself, a complex but incomplete dependent clause that formally suggests this lack of stable subjecthood. Anticipating
Roi’s own anticipation of his death in the closing lines, the poem links self-definition with the burden or “weight” of self-annihilation: the need to be recognized as a subject creates the self even as it negates alternative horizons of selfhood.
While I have moved quite quickly through these lines – whose complexity, at the very least, belies Baraka’s attempt to dismiss early poems like this one – I have tried to note the way in which they foreground identity as a property or performance that simultaneously defines and destroys. The figure of “The Liar” – who is the figure of a liminal LeRoi Jones and an imminent
Amiri Baraka – embodies a process of change that constantly redefines the body, exposing the
122 deceptive yet generative gap between who the speaker claims to be and who he may yet turn (or be turned) into. What if we were to see this idea of identity, and how it develops over the course of his career, not merely as White or Black, Beat or Marxist, but rather as a mode of racialized performance that simultaneously acknowledges and unsettles White supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchy as a determining cultural frame? That is, what if we saw Baraka’s
“Transitional” period not as a unidirectional movement in which he simply passes from “Jones” to “Baraka,” but rather as a critical version of the social and artistic practice of “passing”?
Though the phenomenon of passing has long been an important part of American literature, as in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century genres like the “passing tale,” as well as more recent “neo-passing” narratives in fiction and film, passing has gone largely undetected in the history and criticism of American poetry.47 Given that passing is, by definition, a rhetorical strategy for going undetected – Sarah Ahmed, for instance, describes it as a “technology” that grants marginalized subjects conditional access to contested cultural spaces (Ahmed 2004, 122)
– this critical oversight is both highly logical and desperately in need of further attention. I want to suggest that not just Baraka but a great deal of so-called “Modern” American poets have been deeply invested in passing as both a formal resource and an object of critique. By reading in the break of Baraka’s Beat and Transitional poetics – that is, by reading explicitly within, across, and through not only Baraka’s prolonged breaking from Whiteness, but also the formal breaks of his serial poetics – I show how this moment or “movement” of his work tells a powerful autotheroetical story of the poet’s “passing” within, and ultimately trespass against, spaces from which he would otherwise be barred based on his race, class, and national identity. “The Liar” may indeed be “LeRoi” – a seemingly un-politicized, faux-bohemian poet whom Amiri Baraka
47 Some canonical and more contemporary examples include: James Weldon Johnson’s, Autobiography of an Ex- Colored Man (1912); Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Nella Larsen’s, Passing (1929); Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), Spike Lee’s Blackkklansman (2018).
123 must kill off in order to come into his most authentic self – but “The Liar” is also the poet’s
“lyre” – a concept of poetry as deceptive yet beautiful artifice that stretches back to the very origins of poetic craft, as when Plato excluded poets from his Republic on the grounds that they merely produced “lies unlike the truth.”48 As a rigid, reductive taxonomy for indexing and controlling racially-marked bodies, the social formation of race is not unlike the literary formation of critical abstractions like “speaker,” “self,” or “genre” (discourses for which Plato’s
Republic is a problematic bedrock): each functions as tool of categorization and classification that objectifies and oppresses what remains on its margins. Ultimately, I situate “Jones/Baraka” not in any particular genre, period, or person, but in the ceaseless, indeterminate motion across the enigmatic “ / ” at the center of his critical identity. This motion can be understood as a critical practice of passing, a constant crossing and internalization of culturally-constructed boundaries, an embodied form of performance that Baraka will alternately weaponize and be wounded by in his writing.
“I pass”: Situating Passing in Literary and Critical Race Theory
Before tuning in to some examples of Baraka’s poetics of passing in his Beat and
Transitional poetry, I want to situate my ideas within African-American history and literary theory in order to frame my conception of passing as a distinct social and artistic practice. As I’ll show, passing refers to a mode of performance that articulates intersectional identity by simultaneously reproducing and resisting dominant sociocultural norms and economic logics.
Passing, in other words, is simultaneously a “position” one takes and an “imposition” one
48 Theories of “mimesis” are a critical artery in the history of poetics. See, for example, Auerbach, Erich., Said, Edward W.., Trask, Willard R.. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature - New and Expanded Edition. United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 2013.
124 receives: both the intentionally subversive action of a politically-conscious subject and a self- annihilative participation in the reinforcement of norms. For Baraka, poems serve as particularly productive sites for such performances to occur, as he is able to strategically work within literary conventions as a way of thinking through and articulating his critical practice. Lacking the political and poetic resources elevated by an artistic culture dominated by Whiteness, Baraka’s early poetry creates opportunities for discovering formal resourcefulness within the normatively white space of Modernist, avant-garde poetics. If passing refers to a performance of culturally- accepted identity that marginalized subjects undertake to cross into spaces that might otherwise be inaccessible, inhospitable, or dangerous to them, then Baraka’s poetics of passing can be similarly understood as the reproduction (and reinvention) of critically-accepted literary genres to make them available to subjects who might not otherwise recognize themselves within these forms. In this sense, my description of passing might recall hooks’s sense of marginality more generally, which she understands as providing “both sites of repression and sites of resistance”
(hooks 1990 342). This section of my chapter situates this impulse within critical race theory and
African-American literary technique before turning to a series of examples from Baraka’s prose and ultimately returning to the end of “The Liar.”
By thinking about passing as a “a social and artistic practice,” I want on one level to narrow my focus from the broad concept of “race” – which is, as Omi and Winant capture in their work on “the race concept,” a culturally-constructed fiction of White supremacy (Omi and
Winant 1986, 6) – to a more specific mode of performance, a way of being in relation to the policing and reinforcing of racial norms. Baraka’s more than half-century-long writing career, which historically coincides and is in frequent conversation with important transformations in the practice of passing, offers a particularly rich subsection of the phenomenon’s development. To
125 uncover the breadth and depth of this engagement, I follow critical race theorists from a number of different discourses who have considered passing as “a psychologically prevaricating act of performance that encompasses both aggression and repression” (Thompson 2004, 3). For instance, the legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris defines passing as “a feature of race subordination in all societies structured on white supremacy,” an attempt to seize the privileged “property” of whiteness that both challenges and reinforces a racist “economic logic” (Harris 1993, 75). The poet Harryette Mullen similarly describes passing a kind of double-sided “theft,” a positive appropriation of white privilege that, in its “active denial of black identity,” nevertheless serves to strengthen the illusions of racial purity on which whiteness depends for its power (Mullen
1994, 72). Irene Redfield, the protagonist of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella Passing, puts it more plainly yet no less incisively when she calls passing, simply, a “hazardous business” (Larsen
2010, 186). Indeed, the psychological and physiological “hazards” involved in passing have led some critics to associate “passing for” a particular identity with “passing away” or “passing on” from life itself (Thompson 2004, 21). Baraka’s first two collections (Preface to a Twenty-
Volume Suicide Note... and The Dead Lecturer), for instance, signal this association even at the level of their titles.
While all of these accounts frame passing as a simultaneously aggressive, repressive, and evasive survival mechanism, more recent “second wave” work on the concept of “neo-passing” has further complicated contemporary understandings of passing’s politics of performance. As a critical concept, neo-passing attempts to distinguish between the historical particularities of passing in Jim Crow America, when racial recognition and oppression were enforced de jure through legislation tied primarily to segregation and miscegenation, and passing in post-Civil
Rights (allegedly “post-racial”) America, in which race nevertheless continues to be policed de
126 facto through ongoing policies of mass incarceration, voter suppression, economic policy, unequal access to health care and housing, andmore. This focus on passing’s disturbing persistence and adaptability offers an expanded definition of the phenomenon as a practice of transformation that has itself transformed, not longer merely “improvisational” but importantly intersectional and multidirectional (Thompson 2004, 17). Indeed, it may seem difficult to grasp how Baraka – who was a central figure in the Black Power movement, who was loudly, publicly committed to African diasporic politics, and whose skin was too dark to pass for White in person
– can be linked to the partially assimilationist poetics of passing. However, as Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Young clarify in Neo-Passing: Performing Identity After Jim Crow:
...although the term passing inevitably retains its conceptual link to segregation- era acts of black-to-white passing, it is now used as often to describe a white person who dupes people into believing he or she is black, a gay person who presents him- or herself as sraight, a poor person who presents him- or herself as rich, a white author who uses an Asian name to get published, and so on. (Godrey and Young 2018, 1)
As this series of disparate examples demonstrates, contemporary passing refers on the one hand to a culturally-mandated contortion by which subjects whose identities are systematically rendered invisible and vulnerable within dominant culture risk further erasure and annihilation in order to survive. On the other, it can also refer to a phenomenon Godfrey and Young term
“reverse passing,” a romanticization or even fetishization of marginalization, a performance through which subjects attempt to deny, disavow, or, more perversely, make reparations for their privilege. Moreover, this flexible conception of “passing” shows how the identities mobilized and traversed by such maneuvers include not merely race, but gender, sexuality, class, and even the category of “the author” as such. “Neo-passing,” in other words, exposes the way in which every identity is constructed, leveraged, and policed, based on one’s capacity to reproduce
127 different identity positions at specific socio-historical moments and locations. As we’ll see in the examples that close this section, LeRoi Jones is all too aware of the simultaneous liberations and limitations that such performances afford.
On another, more obviously poetic level, my focus on passing as a social and artistic practice is intended to echo Nathaniel Mackey’s conception of the African-American literary technique of “othering.” In his essay “Other: From Noun to Verb'' – which takes its title from
Baraka’s essay “Swing: From Verb to Noun,” about the historical appropriation of Black music by White musicians – Mackey describes two forms of othering: on the one hand, a transgressive artistic impulse; on the other, an oppressive social practice. Mackey writes, “Artistic othering has to do with innovation, invention, and change. Social othering has to do with power, exclusion, and privilege, the centralizing of a norm against which otherness is measured, meted out, marginalized” (Mackey 1992, 51). In short, “social othering” refers to the historical and institutional enforcement of racism writ large. The importance of “artistic othering,” on the other hand, lies in its ability to invert and transform these “othering” forces of White supremacy into a generative formal technique, rooted in “black linguistic and musical practices that accent variance, variability”: a verbal (in the sense of oral and not-noun) emphasis on multiplicity, mobility, and fugitivity. For instance, Mackey cites “verbal nouns,” which Zora Neal Hurston describes as a formal characteristic of African-American vernacular, as one of his main examples: this urge to add action to language, Hurston writes, gives us words like “‘chop-axe,’
‘sitting-chair,’ ‘cook-pot’ and the like because the speaker has in his mind the picture of the object in use. Action” (quoted in Mackey 1992, 53). A further example of this verbal, variable
“accent” can be found in Baraka’s 1964 essay “Hunting is Not Those Heads on the Wall”
(written squarely in his so-called “Transitional” phase), in which he advocates for the dynamic
128 process of “art-ing,” as opposed to the static artifactuality of “art.” For Mackey, such explicitly raced interventions privilege the verb over the noun in order to “linguistically accentuat[e] action among a people whose ability to act is curtailed by racist constraints” (53).
“Passing” and “othering” are not merely similar in that each refers to a technique for artistically manipulating and being socially manipulated by dominant cultural logics: each is also importantly linked to the project of black serial poetics. Mackey’s comments on the relation between action and constraint echo what he has written elsewhere about seriality as liberatory praxis: “seriality, which literally wants to expand the poetic space to practice in, resonates with that larger black quest for social space, political space” (qtd. in Edwards 2010, 628). For instance, the sprawling character of Mackey’s serial poems “Mu” and The Song of the
Adomboulou – which stretch over three decades and many volumes – can be understood as part of this quasi-epic “quest” to expand the terms of social recognition for Black subjects by metaphorically expanding the poetic territory of the Black serial poem. I want to suggest that
Baraka’s poetics of passing is engaged in a similar but distinct serial practice. Where Mackey sees the serial poetics of othering as a practice of difference, variability, and action that expands the borders of racially-defined spaces, the poetics of passing employs a different repertoire of serial techniques and attitudes. Rather than creating a distinctive (and distinctively Black) poetics, “passing” poems negotiate the compulsion to maintain literary and cultural boundaries by necessarily reproducing dominant literary forms. The very process of proving oneself within these formal constraints creates agentic opportunities for subtly challenging the normative and racist logics on which they rely. In Baraka’s poetics of passing, moreover, these interventions are staged specifically at the level of the self. We might adopt Mackey’s conception of the serial poem as that which “shortcircuits,” circles back on, and “steps to the side of itself” in order to
129 describe the forms of identification that such a poetics imposes upon the subjects who practice it
(Mackey 2006, xi–xii). In The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones for instance, Baraka coins the verb
“meing” – an extension of the art-as-process concept of “art-ing” – to refer to these necessarily self-splitting and self-doubling subjective techniques (Baraka 1984, 56). As the notion of a provisional, in-process “me” suggests, passing forces marginalized subjects to perform in such a way that they distance themselves from previous subjective identifications while attempting to align themselves with ever-new conceptions of self. This “me-ing” of the self – what Mackey would call a “verbing” or “versioning”– is evident even from a glance at the covers of Baraka’s many books, which, given the constantly-changing names that Baraka/Jones used over the course of his life, are often labeled by multiple, seemingly hybrid figures. Remarkably, for instance, texts like Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965 (1971) and The Autobiography of LeRoi
Jones (1984) each list a different name – or more precisely, a different combination of names – as their author. LeRoi Jones, one-half of the author of Raise, Race, Rays, Raze, a collection of essays written during Jones/Baraka’s “Black Nationalist” period, becomes the subject matter of
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, an account of his life up to 1984, written during his “Third
World Marxist” period. It is as if, in the fifteen-year span that separates these texts, Amiri Baraka doesn’t so much shed the parenthetical name “LeRoi Jones” as he does reposition him as one of many identities which he “passes” between and beyond. In this way, Baraka experiments with the practice of passing as an active, serial form of subjectivity: multiplying the “me” positions from which he can speak, he provides himself with the agency to choose between and mix these identities, rather than have these identity categories externally imposed upon him.
A moment in Baraka’s essay “Poetry and Karma” – collected in Raise – provides a revealing example of the way in which Amiri Baraka and LeRoi Jones seem to shortcircuit, step
130 to the side of, and pass between themselves. Baraka’s polemical essay, which, like the collection as a whole, is emblematic of his “Black Nationalist” period, primarily critiques White poetic culture’s tendency to marginalize the work of Black artists and to call for a radical Black politics capable of destroying and transforming this cultural field – a kind of “karmic” redistribution of literary resources. In a sudden, self-reflexive moment of this largely theoretical and historical essay, the author turns back and considers his own past: specifically, LeRoi Jones’s singular position within the midcentury American poetic avant-garde. Baraka (Jones) exclaims: “Only
LeRoi Jones in New American Poetry, 1945-60. The Negro! Whose poetry then, only a reflection of what the rest of that E-X-C-L-U-S-I-V-E club was doing. You mean there was no other poetry, you mean there were no other spooks, &c. I pass” (Baraka 1971, 25). On its simplest level, this moment uses personal experience as evidence to support its larger project, alluded to in the collection's title: that is to say, “razing” Whiteness and “raising” Blackness. In this sense,
“I pass” criticizes an ongoing problem in poetic and political history: Baraka (Jones) rejects or
“passes” on the idea of re-aligning himself with an implicitly White poetic lineage, epitomized here by Donald Allen’s anthology New American Poetry: 1945-1960 (1960). Both the “I” and the “pass” of this stark declaration, however, take on multiple possible meanings depending on how we understand their terms of address and who’s voicing them: for instance, one can also read this moment as the author’s critiquing the “E-X-C-L-U-S-I-V-E club” of Whiteness for perpetuating the conditions in which Black subjects need to “pass” to be seen as socially valid.
Successfully passing through a space in which one would be otherwise marginalized, Sara
Ahmed has suggested, “requires passing as a particular kind of subject, one whose difference is unmarked and unremarkable” (Ahmed 2004, 122). By referring to LeRoi Jones as “The Negro!”
Baraka remarks on and thus marks his former self as a Black subject, placing himself
131 simultaneously in the position of this othered subject passing for an avant-garde poet, and as the regulator of racial normativity who “outs” or reveals him. In this sense, the “I” who passes refers both to the person LeRoi Jones and to the author Baraka (Jones), who points to/remarks on the way that his former self was accepted within this group thanks to his ability to “reflect” (that is, produce “passing” versions of) its poetic attitudes and norms. Stepping to the side of himself through alternating first-person (“I pass”) and third-person address (“Only LeRoi Jones”),
Baraka/Jones uses the suggestively polysemous character of the word “pass” – that is, its capacity to signify multiple things at once – in order both to signal his former “passing within” exclusive poetic spaces and to effect his ongoing “passing between” multiple identities. This example of me-ing, in other words, recalls the movement of Mackeyan serial poetics applied to the level of the subject: Baraka – or indeed, Baraka (Jones) or Jones/Baraka – calls Roi forward in order to call him back into question, as if he can only imagine a holistic sense of himself by
“stepping to the side” of himself. In this way, “Poetry and Karma” practices a kind of serial poetics of passing, a practice that transforms White supremacy’s demand that individuals occupy multiple subject positions at once into a formal resource, a form of social and artistic power.
While I don’t mean to suggest that Baraka’s use of the verb “pass” always refers to the practice of passing, I do want to argue that it is no accident that Baraka (Jones) concludes this particularly rich moment or “passage” with this phrase. What is remarkable here is not simply the fact that Baraka’s “I” can refer to multiple selves, but, moreover, that these selves can create a kind of dialogue between each other, a dialogue that reproduces passing’s structures of recognition in order to critique them. To state “I pass” is not merely to acknowledge the social necessities of passing within exclusively White spaces, but to experiment with and expand the resources that such a practice affords. For Baraka, passing is not simply an attempt to gain the
132 powers and privileges of Whiteness, but a kind of power in and of itself: an active act of strength that allows marked subjects to mark themselves with their own, more multiple and active conceptions of identity – as Baraka would put it, to “me” themselves – in ways they are typically denied. Rather than the “upward mobility” that is often cited as passing’s primary goal, Baraka’s serial poetics of passing emphasizes a freedom of mobility that, like the expansive poetic territories of Mackey’s own serial projects, attempts to infiltrate the normatively White spaces of
American poetic history and subvert the modes of marking that demarcate these spaces’ boundaries. Though passing usually suggests obeying dominant cultural frames that insist that subjects be unmarked and unremarkable, Baraka’s writing persistently passes between and beyond recognizable identity categories, a (re)marking that challenges the fantasies of pure and singular subjecthood on which such normatively White discourses depend.
We are now able to rephrase and answer more directly the question that begins this chapter: When Baraka says “Roi is dead,” who – and what – does he mean? Recall that, as the final poem in The Dead Lecturer, the last collection of poetry published with just “LeRoi Jones” as its author, “The Liar” is perched on a threshold in the poet’s development, a kind of liminal or
“Transitional” point between White bohemianism and Black Nationalism. By Baraka’s account,
“The Liar” would simply be part of the “just white,” “‘uselessly ‘literary’” work that he left behind (along with his given name, mixed-race first family, and Beat compatriots) when he moved to Harlem. By this logic, “Roi’s” death at the end of “The Liar” – as well as the larger
“preoccupation with death [and] suicide” that define early works like Preface to a Twenty-
Volume Suicide Note and The Dead Lecturer – is a necessary but negliglbe step that clears the way for Amiri Baraka’s emergence in works like Black Magic and Raise (Baraka 1969, unpaginated). “The Liar” would in this sense exemplify Foucault’s conception of the potentially
133 self-destructive nature of the author function: “Where a work had the duty of creating immortality,” Foucault writes, “it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author” (Foucault 1980, 301). I want to argue that Baraka’s attempt to metaphorically “kill off”
“Roi” in “The Liar” is best understood as an example of his serial poetics of passing. Though
Jones doesn’t use the word “pass” in this poem, the fact that the poem ends with Roi’s “passing away” places this moment in conversation with the ideas of passing as transgressive rejection
(passing on/over) and self-annihilative assimilation (passing for/within) that I’ve explored throughout this section. However, whereas in “Poetry and Karma,” Baraka uses the polysemy of the word “pass” in order to signal his “passing” between identities, in “The Liar” Jones puns on the name “Roi” itself in order to achieve this movement. The closing lines use the author’s name to echo and pun on the familiar historical phrase designed to signal and enact a transition in sovereign power: “The king [in French, le roi] is dead; long live the king.” Exemplifying what medieval historians call “the double body” of state authority – that is, the “body natural” of the monarch and the “body politic” of the monarchy – the overtly paradoxical phrase is a rhetorical tool that ensures the perpetuity of the king’s power as it is “passed on” from monarch to monarch, body to body.49 In its historical usage, the statement therefore functions as a
“performative utterance” that, in J.L. Austin’s terms, literally does what it says: authority is, in a quite literal sense, discursively constructed (Austin 1962, 3). By imitating this performative enactment of sovereign power, Jones’s poem in fact attempts to articulate and embody a kind of authority of its own – that is, a Foucauldian power over the very category of authorial self. In a way that is similar to the third-person address to “LeRoi” in “Poetry and Karama,” Baraka
49 See Kantorowicz, Ernst Hartwig. The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. United States: Princeton University Press, 1997. See also Bullins, Ed. "The King Is Dead." The Drama Review: TDR 12, no. 4 (1968): 23-25.
134 “names himself” in order to assert the discursive power that naming as a performative utterance entails – which is, in a sense, the authority to name authority itself.
Complicating this seizing of power, however, is the fact that “The Liar” does not just echo a broadly Modern, Euro-centric, implicitly White imperialist history; it also echoes this history precisely in a way that aligns it with a broadly Modernist, Euro-centric, implicitly White poetic formalism. That is, even as this moment of “The Liar” ostensibly marks a rejection or
“passing” on the Modernism of the New American Poets, the poem achieves this rejection through a literary technique that is deeply embedded in that same poetic tradition: allusion.
Punning across English and French to reanimate a worn-out historical phrase, Baraka’s recycling of this centuries-old proclamation demonstrates what T.S. Eliot would call the poet’s “historical sense,” which links past and present, “individual talent” and “tradition,” through the intertextual and metadiscursive literary technique. “The Liar’s” emphasis on disjunctive polyvocality and erudite historical reference aligns the poem perhaps most closely with Ezra Pound, whose
Modernist dictum “Make it New” is clearly operative in this moment of the poem – indeed, a young Jones listed Eliot and Pound, alongside Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and many more, as his most important influences. Both Jones’s linguistic playfulness and his use of his own name make “the Liar” especially reminiscent of Frank O’Hara’s work, as in poems like “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” and “Katy,” among many others
(O’Hara 1995, 306-307, 242). Thus, even as this moment depicts Roi’s passing away in order to suggest his passing on and beyond such poetic influences, the use of a typically Modernist poetic device places the poem in conversation with this lineage by offering an imitation or “passing version” of one of its privileged techniques. To borrow Signithia Fordham’s description of passing as “acting white,” Jones’s poem passes insofar as it “look[s] white on paper” – that is,
135 “The Liar” “display[s] the skills, abilities, and credentials” that are “traditionally associated” with normatively White American poetics (Fordham 2008, 244). This is why Jones ultimately places this allusion in the mouths of a hypothetical “them” (“when they say”): in my reading of the poem, “they” refers, in fact, to poets like Olson, O’Hara, and Ginsberg – that is, the White poetic influences around whom Baraka felt he could only be himself as a different, “passing” version of himself. Though this moment is a performative utterance, it is not what Austin would call a “happy” one – that is, its speaker does not have the proper performative power to enact what they would claim to (Austin 1962, 5). By depicting Roi’s death as a speech act voiced by these “othering” forces of White literary tradition, Jones contrasts the normatively White position of power from which such a “happy” performative utterance could be addressed with the limitated authority possessed by nonconforming subjects to recognize and empower themselves via the language of Whiteness.
Because Jones is suspicious of Modernist allusion as a form that merely perpetuates traditional forms of power, “The Liar” attempts to bring about an even more radical act of transformation. While the speech act “The king is dead; long live the king” uses the figure of epanalepsis – that is, a repetition of a phrase in the beginning of a clause at the end of that clause
– to assert the continuity of state power across discontinuous bodies, Jones’s version refuses to supply the second term in this equation. Crucially, that is, Jones does not say “LeRoi Jones is dead; long live Amiri Baraka” – even though such a metaphorical reincarnation is precisely what the four-period logic of much Baraka scholarship would still have us imagine. By extension with the logic of the allusion, however, a poem that ended in such a straightforward declaration of rebirth would be simply reinforcing the status quo, extending the reign of an earlier regime’s power dynamics, exemplified here by a central formal conceit of Modernist poetics. Jones’s
136 poem therefore disrupts the transition in power by specifically questioning the conceptual frameworks of meaning-making from which this performative utterance is voiced: “who do they mean?” Rather than simply re-naming himself within “their” framework, “Roi” engages in what
Kimberly Benston would call “an act of radical unnaming” – a “shattering of nomination” that, for Benston, as for Baraka, must be understood as a specifically African-American literary tradition, one which “sees all labels formulated by the master society (‘they’) as enslaving fictions” (Benston 1984, 165, 151). Indeed, the fact that “Amiri Baraka” means “blessed prince” in Swahili further indicates the way that Jones is thinking about the continuities and contingencies of political and literary authority. By refusing to end his poem with a straightforward re-naming – a “passage” from one symbolic authority to another – Jones creates a kind of prolonged rupture, a power vacuum with revolutionary potential, a gap that he refuses to smooth over by simply imitating the closed formal loop of this historical phrase. The “blessed prince,” in other words, remains a prince, and therefore remains within the position of potentiality and becoming that opens up, rather than forecloses, alternative forms of power and meaning-making. In this way, the closing lines of “The Liar” articulate not so much a transition of power as transition as power: a freedom of choice, a retaining of mobility, perhaps even the subversive capacity to produce generative “lies,” that I’ve been arguing is crucial to Baraka’s poetics of passing. Jones’s unseating of the author-sovereign figure of “Roi” ultimately aligns this poetics not with a practice of assimilation that imitates and perpetuates White forms, but rather with the most pressing goals of contemporary Black Studies: what Fred Moten describes as an “abolitionist project” concerned with the radical displacement of sovereignty and White supremacy.50 Jones passes in and out of the aesthetic regime of Modernist formalism in order to pass beyond it toward the possibilities of a Black serial poetics.
50 Moten, Fred and El-Hadi, Nehal. “Ensemble: An Interview with Dr. Fred Moten.” Mice Magazine, accessed 29
137 Through these examples, I’ve demonstrated how Baraka articulates an idea of poetic influence, an attitude toward formal closure, and a strategically mobile sense of self that narratives about the Beat, the Black Nationalist, or the Marxist poet fail to fully appreciate. As
Baraka puts it: “Endless series of selves resolve, and at each pt of progress, we are whoever we must be to develop + reunderstand reality” (Baraka 2000, 449). To develop a poetics that does not simply repeat itself but recreates itself, Baraka makes a series of himself, always emphasizing the ways in which this “being” or “meing” is situated within a historical, embodied reality that is itself ever-changing. The dialogues he creates between different versions of himself are always specific and contingent dialogues with his Beat impulses, his Black identity, his
Marxist politics. Serially stepping to the side of himself, the poet speaks to his selves and for his selves, standing in and as an ensemble of one. In this sense, what Baraka has written about Black music is equally true of his poetry: “Music, as paradoxical as it might seem, is the result of thought. It is the result of thought perfected at its most empirical, i.e. as attitude, or stance”
(Baraka 1991, 40; emphasis in original). This music therefore “ change[s] as he change[s], reflecting shifting attitudes [or] consistent attitudes within changed contexts” (41; emphasis in original). Hence the misguidedness of referring to a singular “Transitional” period in the poet's career. Constantly shifting his poetic stance to play to and pass among new audiences and circumstances, Baraka is most powerfully himself when he is resisting and reinventing the self: always developing, always passing in and out, always “find[ing] himself by two. Or more”
(Oppen 1975, 35). No wonder then, that Baraka claims, in an aside toward the end of his
Autobiography, that “(even when this is a book, I’ll be gone gone again)” (Baraka 1984, 319). In the next section of my chapter, I want to turn from this early transitional moment in Baraka’s development to an even earlier one – his so-called “Beat” period – in order to draw out the ways
November 2020, http://micemagazine.ca/issue-four/ensemble-interview-dr-fred-moten
138 in which here, too, Baraka articulates a poetic stance that strategically passes between contradictory forms of literary and cultural authority.
White Black Negroes: Passing Against Beat Poetics
This is not a mythic notion of marginality. It comes from lived experience. (hooks 1990, 341)
“How you sound??” LeRoi Jones asks in the title of his first recorded statement of poetics, which Donald Allen solicited for the appendix of The New American Poetry (Jones
1999, 424). In this section of my chapter, I want to ask this question right back at him.
Specifically, I want to ask how “LeRoi Jones” sounds – that is, to examine how the pre-Black
Power, pre-Marxist, pre-Baraka Jones articulates a poetic “stance” or voice that is both of and not of the avant-garde he found himself among in Allens’ anthology. On one level, Jones can demonstrate impeccable Beat credentials: he befriended Allen Ginsberg after writing him a letter on toilet paper, married his first wife in a Buddhist temple, co-founded a number of influential
“little magazines,” was a regular presence at the Five Spot and other local jazz cafes, and is generally credited with writing the first history of jazz and blues. However, though critics have largely been content to place Baraka’s earliest work within the neat category of his “Beat” period, a closer look reveals how the poet’s singular status as “The Negro” within this poetic community inflects his voice with the kind of serial rupture or side-step that I have argued is characterstic of the poetics of passing. As we’ll see, Jones’s negotiation of multiple, conflicting identities in allegedly “Beat” texts like Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1961) served both to legitimize the self-stylized “margins” that Beat poets situated themselves within and to expose the racial contradictions that Beat aesthetics attempted to obscure. Of course, with at least
139 one notable exception,51 Black artists typically did not literally pass for White in the Greenwich
Village bohemian scene of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. But, as I’ll suggest by situating Baraka’s ideas about Blackness, music, and authenticity against those espoused by Beat poetics, Jones nevertheless had to navigate much of the same contradictions, contortions, and categorizations that “passing” historically entails.
Indeed, as an exemplary “Black Beat,” Jones apparently inhabited the “Beat” half of this identity convincingly enough that Kimberly Benston, one of Baraka’s earliest and most prominent academic champions, claims that the poet’s first collection as a whole contains only
“scattered remarks and allusions that indicate the poet might be black or have a particular interest in black people” (Benston 1976, 109). W.D.E. Andrews writes, even more misleadingly, that
“No black writer before Jones had achieved the American Dream of racial assimilation so effortlessly” (Andrews 1982, 197). While it’s true that the poems in Prefacee are quite different from the “identifiably, culturally Black” poetry he would go on to write, Baraka’s first book demonstrates not merely a “passing” interest in Blackness (as Benston suggests), nor an untroubled attainment of an implicitly White social position (as Andrews does). In fact, by reversing the contemporary racial logic of Beat poetics, Jones is able to work within these normatively White aesthetics and articulate an explicit theory of passing as anti-assimilationist
Black aesthetic. His readers’ persistent inability to detect and remark upon this stance in Jones’s earliest work may be understood as a result of the way that passing is itself a practice for going undetected and unremarked within White poetic space.
To draw out Jones’s poetics of passing, I will read a selection of Baraka’s Beat period writings against “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer’s celebratory portrait of the “hipster” or
51 Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. “White Like Me.” The New Yorker, 17 Junes 1996, accessed November 29, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/17/white-like-me.
140 “beatnik” as sociopath, existentialist, and radical.52 According to Mailer, the hipster’s existentialism is a symptom of the post-war generation’s “suppressed knowledge” of its own mortality (Mailer 1957, 276). Forced to choose between “conformity and depression” in a world shadowed by the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, the hipster concludes that “the only life- giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self” (277). While I will offer multiple points of comparison between the hipster’s stance and Jones’s practice of passing, the most obvious – and obviously problematic – is the way that Mailer locates the vital, life-giving force of Beat poetics within a thinly existentialist and essentialist idea of Blackness.“ [I]t is no accident,” Mailer argues, “that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries” (278). Reducing the lived experience of Blackness to the condition of marginalization, Mailer’s titular “White Negro” finds the linguistic and artistic forms of Black culture empowering precisely and perversely due to Black people’s historical lack of power.53 By highlighting the embodied precarity which always mediates the experience of simply “living while Black,” Mailer fetishizes the cultural and socioeconomic conditions in which black-to- white passing becomes necessary in order to gain social mobility and mitigate threats of violence.
52 While I will move somewhat freely between the three terms “beat,” “beatnik,” and “hipster,” as Mailer does, it should be noted that each term emerged at different points and took on somewhat different meanings within the development of the “Beat Generation” (also referred to as “The Subteranneans” and the ‘Bop Generation.” Ann Charters’ introduction to The Portable Beat Reader supplies one solid overview. See also John Clellon Holmes’s 1952 Times article “This is the Beat Generation” and Kerouac’s 1958 Playboy article “The PhIlosophy of the Beat Generation.” 53 The contours of the critical field(s) related to lived experience of Black life are too vast to do justice to here. In addition to Rankine, Sharpe, and Moten, see for instance: Fanon, Frantz. “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” in Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Books, 2008. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death. United Kingdom: Harvard University Press, 1985.
141 However, contrary to the image that Mailer’s “White Negro” suggests of a Black person light-skinned enough to pass for White, his description of this figure in fact exemplifies the opposite phenomenon of white-to-black (neo)passing – what has also been called “reverse passing,” and for some, is closer to racial masquerade and minstrelsy.54 “So there was a new breed of adventurers,” Mailer writes, “urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro” (279).
Mailer’s “new breed” of rebel can be placed within a longer history of cultural appropriation, in which familiarity and comfort within conventionally Black spaces came to be understood as a badge of authenticity – even as Blackness itself was also popularly constructed as a kind of contagion that one could simply “catch.” As Baz Dresisinger puts it in her study of “white passing narratives”: “Because ‘blackness,’ so to speak, is imagined as transmittable, proximity to blackness is invested with the power to turn whites black” (Dreisinger 2008, 4). Mailer’s essay, whose composition was contempreanous with the nascent Civil Rights movement, gestures toward a liberal post-racial horizon that effectively sees Blackness itself as a set of signifiers that are simply up for grabs. The vision of “angelheaded hipsters” “dragging themselves through the
Negro streets at Dawn” that opens Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” is perhaps the most famous example of this troubling “beatification” of Black subjectivity and “mytholog[ization]” of Black space
(Dreisinger 2008, 4). Beats like Ginsberg, Kerouac, and many others whom Baraka counted as influences ultimately “approximate” Blackness – with “approximate” understood as an
54 Some discussion of this phenomenon can be found in: Wald, Gayle. Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture. United Kingdom: Duke University Press, 2000. Hobbs, Allyson. A Chosen Exile. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. For a reading of the history of Blackface minstrelsy in America, see Lott, Eric. Love and Theft : Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1995.
142 appropriation by proximity – in order to provide the energy and model for how their poems should sound.
While many critics have begun to explore “reverse” or “white passing narratives” and place them within well-known histories of racial appropriation and minstrelsy in America, my focus on Baraka’s Beat poetics expands these accounts in two ways. First, I continue to move beyond the study of narratives – fiction, journalism, films, etc. – in order to think about “passing poems.” While, as I’ll show, the poems in Preface do tell a kind of story of Jones’s predicament as a Black Beat, this narrative unfolds in ways that are distinct to poetry and poetics. Second, I focus not merely on “white-to-black” or “reverse passing,” but on an even more nuanced version of this practice: that Beat poetics is partially based on the mechanics of white-to-black passing means “Black Beats” like LeRoi Jones are placed in the distinct position of “black-to-white-to- black” or “reverse reverse” passing. Far from resolving or negating the problematic aspects of
Mailer’s “beatniks” and “hipsters,” such alleged “Black White Negroes” articulate a distinct poetics, demanding nuanced critical attention in its own right.55 “I took up with the Beats,”
Baraka writes in his Autobiography, “because that’s what I saw taking off and flying somewhere resembling myself” (Baraka 1984, 162). The irony here is that this same bohemian identity locates its artistic power in proximity to an appropriated and fetishized version of Blackness – one which Jones is called upon to identify with and, to some degree, legitimize. In this sense, the logic of reverse reverse passing demands not only that marginalized subjects pass for privileged subjects, but also that they perform as a romanticized version of a Black self. Thus, as The
55 The term “beatnik” was in fact coined by San Francisco columnist Herb Caen to describe Kaufman. See Lee, A. Robert. “Black Beats: The Signifying Poetry of LeRoi Jones/Imamu Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman.” Beat Down To Your Soul: What was the Beat Generation? Edited by Ann Charters. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. 303-327.
143 Autobiography puts it, Jones can’t simply be himself, he can only “resemble” a passing approximation of Blackness.
The beginning of Jones’s 1960 essay “Cuba Libre” offers one helpful example of how
Jones’s Black Beathood necessarily places him within competing frames of reference. Jones’s first serious prose publication, the essay is an extended meditation on the complexities of managing multiple, intersecting identities, as well as an incisive, if conflicted, takedown of the lack of political engagement Jones was beginning to sense among himself and his fellow Beats.
The opening section, titled “What I Brought to the Revolution,” describes the moment that serves as this passing narrative’s call-to-action:
A man called me on a Saturday afternoon some months ago and asked if I wanted to go to Cuba with some other Negroes, some of whom were also writers. I had a house full of people that afternoon, and since we had all been drinking, it seemed pretty silly for me to suddenly drop the receiver and say, ‘I’m going to Cuba,’ so I hesitated for a minute, asking the man just why would we (what seemed to me to be just “a bunch of Negroes”) be going. For what purpose? He said, “Oh, I thought that since you were a poet you might like to know what’s really going on down there.” I had never really thought of anything in that particular light. Being an American poet, I suppose, I thought my function was simply to talk about everything as if I knew… it had never entered my mind that I might really like to find out for once what was actually happening someplace else in the world. (Jones, 1991, 125-126)
Surrounded by “various beats, bohemians, and intellectuals” in his Greenwich Village apartment
(131), singled out for a political impulse he does not yet have, Jones in this passage experiences what Erving Goffman would call a change in footing – a change in his discursive position that alters how he is situated in relation both to others and to himself. For Goffman, one’s “footing” refers to the capacity to “code-switch” among various audiences and forms of address (Goffman
1981, 126). Such discursive shifts both expose and are enabled by the multiple, overlapping discourses that are always “embedded” within a given context (151). In this particular speech situation, carefully dramatized by Jones’s conversational prose, these layered discourses all
144 revolve around the different forms of national, artistic, and ethnic identification embedded in this snapshot of Village life. Though Jones does not specifically name the race of the “house full of people” surrounding him, their bohemian affectations and lack of racial particulars are implicitly coded in the essay as White. After all, none of them receives the phone call that Jones does, a fact that drives home the distance that already exists between these “gringo Yanquis” and himself (128). The telephone call thus signals a change in footing – that is, a shift in conversational medium that alters the subject position from which Jones can presume to speak.
Instantly, Jones is not only othered from those surrounding him, but also othered to himself: he is of yet not of the Beat poets he counts as his friends, of yet not of the politically-engaged African-
American writers going on the trip, and of yet not of the revolutionary Cuban population that the rest of the essay will show him attempting to “pass” among. Note, for instance, how even the question that Jones reflexively asks, about “the purpose” of the trip, is a question that would seem antithetical to the Buddhist and existentialist underpinnings of Beat philosophy (Watts
1992, 613). This change in footing, what Mackey might frame as a call to embark on an explicitly “black quest,” unravels his capacity to situate himself within the purposefully purposeless ideology of “the hip.”
As the narrative of “Cuba Libre '' goes on, Jones marches with Fidel Castro, talks jazz in
Cuban clubs, and feebly attempts to defend his lack of political engagement to numerous impassioned revolutionaries: “I’m a poet… what can I do? I write, that’s all, I’m not even interested in politics'' (147). All this spiritual, political, and artistic questioning prompts Jones to discover not only “what’s really going on” in the “someplace else” of Cuba, but also “what’s really going on” in himself. In the essay’s final section, titled “What I Brought Back Here,”
Jones returns to New York armed with the knowledge that his participation within the Beat
145 “revolution” represents a privileged distortion of real struggle. On the one hand, Jones is highly critical of the Beats’ thinly escapist performances of subversion, noting how they lack the real political engagement and risk inherent to the scenes he has witnessed in Cuba: “The rebels among us have become merely people like myself who grow beards and will not participate in politics. Drugs, juvenile delinquency, complete isolation from the vapid mores of the country, a few of the current ways out” (160). Rather than elevating these vices and disguises into a kind of faux-spiritual strategy, as Mailer’s beatnik does, Jones instead names a feeling of being constricted by these overlapping frames of reference, a discursive position that threatens to erase the possibility of a clearly directed critique: “The young intellectual living in the United States inhabits an ugly void. He cannot use what is around him, neither can he revolt against it. Revolt against whom?” (145). Jones’s “Beat” period poems can be understood as negotiating, via constant changes of footing, precisely such questions of power, positioning, and address. Jones may be, as he puts it in Preface, “[i]ncapable of a simple straightforward / anger” (14), yet by explicitly critiquing the fantasies of marginalization inherent to Black Beat subjectivity, his poetry ultimately opens a space of resistance within the conventions of Beat poetics itself.
I want to turn now to how these overlapping layers of identification are formally reflected in his poems, which are often explicitly voiced from the subject position of a speaker “passing” within multiple embedded frames. By reading “Hymn to Lanie Poo,” one of the most complicated poems in Preface, I’ll demonstrate how Jones’s poetics of passing works to formally embody the very elements of the “hip” that Mailer’s “White Negro” takes from an imagined idea of Blackness, only to strategically displace and reclaim their sources of discursive power through serial poetic strategies. Whereas Mailer imagines Blackness as a possession that can be appropriated by way of proximity, Jones’s poems depict the embodied experiences of Black
146 Beathood as a more complex process of identification. In particular, I will show how Jones positions himself against passing for the ways this practice perpetuates racist reductionism, even as he perpetuates the policing of sexual norms that go hand in hand with passing’s intersectional imperatives. By code-switching between differently-situated performances of Black identity, the poem offers an important intervention that challenges the racial assumptions of Mailer’s “White
Negro” and offers an alternatively raced vision of Beat poetics.
Looking at the poem for a distance, Jones’s “Hymn to Lanie Poo” is characteristic not just of “Beat poetics,” but of the New American Poetics more broadly. Across seven, very differently-structured sections, Jones layers speakers and settings on top of each other in a densely-coded tonal pastiche. For instance, the use of a Rimbaud quotation as the poem’s epigraph initially seems to place “Hymn” in familiar Modernist territory. Jones, however, specifically chooses a moment from Rimbaud’s oeuvre that interacts with the long history of
Modernism and Whiteface Blackness.56 Taken from the poem “Mauvais Sang” in A Season in
Hell, the epigraph (“Vous êtes des faux Nègres”) roughly translates to “You are fake Negroes”
(Rimbaud 2003, 11). In the context of Rimbaud’s poem, this phrase is one example of the ways by which Rimbaud’s speaker presses Blackness into service as a central motif for describing his hellish spiritual landscape. Throughout the poem, he specifically roots this constitutional weakness in a inherited complex of religious, cultural, and biological traits – or, as the poem’s title translates, his “bad blood.” In the context of Jones’s poem, this epigraph can be read in at least two important ways, depending on the question of how we understand the logic and direction of the poem’s embedded passing narrative. On one hand, Rimbaud’s eagerness to
56 Marjorie Perloff influentially situates American Modernist poetry within the “poetics of indeterminacy” exemplified by poets like Rimbaud. See Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. United Kingdom: Northwestern University Press, 1999. For a reading of the construction of Whiteness within High Modernist poetry and poetics, see DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. ""HOO, HOO, HOO": Some Episodes in the Construction of Modern Whiteness." American Literature 67, no. 4 (1995): 667-700.
147 compare his struggles to a reductive idea of Negritude can be compared to Mailer’s own problematic equation of the embodied precarity that Black people historically experience with the fetishized precarity that the Beat perform.57 I want to suggest that Jones’ poem level precisely this argument against “the hip,” a critique of White-to-Black passing that I will draw out by specfically comparing Mailer’s “White Negro” to Baraka’s own figure of the jazz musician in the twentieth century. On the other hand, Jones also seems to criticize Black people – specifically and troublingly, Black women – who pass for White by adopting the habits or reinforcing the institutions that perpetuate White dominance. As we’ll see, though Jones demonstrates an awareness of the conditions that make such performances necessary, his own reinforcement of heteronormativity in this poem also demonstrates the limitations of a poetics of passing that isn’t yet capable of acknowledging intersectional difference.
I’ll begin with the first possible reading of the epigraph, that these “fake Negroes” refer to the Beats themselves. The poem’s first two numbered sections parody Mailer’s portrait of the beatnik by adopting the diaristic tone of a nature documentary Encoding the Village scene as exotic locale and the hipster as a kind of noble savage, these sections embed real and imagined spaces upon each other in order to create striking juxtapositions that expose the primitivizing impulses of Mailer’s faux-anthropological mode:
All afternoon we sit around near the edge of the city hacking open crocodile skulls sharpening our teeth. (5)
57 Jill Stauffer examines this phenomenon in depth through her concept of “ethical loneliness.” See Stauffer, Jill. Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard. United States: Columbia University Press, 2015.
148 In this absurdist setting, literally on the margins of the city, elephants “stomp out of the subway” and sculptors “spen[d] the day hunting” “then [take] in a flick” (6-7). Part New York School and part National Geographic, such fantastic, if occasionally infantile scenes may be understood as irony-laden depictions of, on one hand, the mainstream view of the Greenwich Village Beat and, on the other, an imperialist, White-supremacist fantasy of African life on the other. “Any Negro who wishes to live,” Mailer writes, “must live with danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him” (279). Jones ridicules this conception by imagining Black subjects who live in parodically close proximity to danger, ostensible Africans who sharpen their teeth in order assert their dominance over their ferocious prey. Crucially, both of these imagined subject positions are rooted in a fetishized, exoticized idea of Blackness – a fact that Jones will continue to explore as the poem’s central paradox.
As “Hymn to Lanie Poo” goes on, it continues to provide snapshots of the “bohemian” lifestyle, such as scenes of wild parties, where guests from “Queens, Richmond, Togoland, The
Cameroons” are serenaded by John Coltrane and which eventually spill out to the Manhattan streets, where these guests terrorize the “squares[s]” and “cornballs” they encounter with their overtly sexual music, dancing, and outfits (6, 8-9). Within these depictions of disruptive Beat performances, Jones also begins to insert increasingly problematic approximations of stereotypically African-American voices, crafting a self-reflexive parody of the racial contradictions involved in identifying as both “Beat” and “Black.” The poem’s penultimate section, titled “die schwartze Bohemian” (i.e. the Black Bohemian), incorporates both Beat slang and stock characters of Blackface minstrelsy in order to suggest the racist history that both these figures inhabit. Jones’s worrying over his possible perpetuation of this dehumanizing history is
149 formally reflected by the way he embeds these multiple discourses within disruptive syntax that is deliberately difficult to follow:
They laught,
and religion was something
he fount in coffee ships, by God.
It’s not that I got enything against cotton, nosiree, by God
It’s just that… Man lookatthatblonde Whewee!
I think they are not treating us like
Mr. Lincun said they should Or Mr. Gandhi
For that matter. By God.
ZEN
is a bitch! “Like “Bird” was, Cafe Olay
for me, Miss.
But white cats can’t swing… (9-10)
The rapid shifts in tone, setting, dialect, and spelling in these lines’ serial “code-switches” weave together a dizzying discursive field that links White bohemia to what Saidiya Hartman has called
“the afterlife of slavery.”58 Continuing the strategy of embedding and overlapping different discourses that was introduced in the poem’s earlier sections, the stereotypes that saturate these lines are difficult to hear and deeply uncomfortable to read aloud, as they require giving voice
58 Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. United States: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
150 not only to pretentious cliches, but overt racial stereotypes. While the lines that contain fleeting or “passing” parodies of Beat voices (“Zen is a bitch!”; “Cafe Olay for me, Miss”) might be relatively innocuous on their own, they are juxtaposed with more overtly racist and misogynist caricatures, suggesting the ways in which self-consciously hip utterances are rooted within more complexly oppressive histories. For example, the minstrel-like voice that is audible in the middle lines specifically draws attention to the way that liberal ideals (like those of “Lincun” and
“Gandhi”), might obscure the endurance of ongoing social struggle. The tone being impersonated here is intended to echo that of early African-American characters of vaudeville and Hollywood, such as Stepin Fetchit or Sleep n’Eat: figures who were designed to provide comic relief in the form of racist caricatures. On the one hand, “Hymn” draws attention to the way that such characters reinforce a broad range of African-American stereotypes, from the (feigned) ignorance and obsequience (“By God,” “nosiree”) to the damaging association of Blackness with a kind of predatory sexuality (“Man lookatthatblonde / Whewee!”). Jones would later provide a catalog of these stereotypes in “A Poem for Willie Best,” a poem about the actor who played the character Sleep n’Eat: “Lazy / Frightened / Thieving/ Very potent sexually / Scars / Generally inferior / (but natural rhythms)” (65). Jones’s preoccupation with passing means that such characteristics are often foregrounded in order to be ridiculed and subverted – indeed, this is why
Jones refers to Best as “A renegade / behind the mask. And even / the mask, a renegade disguise”
(64). In “Hymn,” Jones is engaged in a similar project of questioning who qualifies as “a renegade” and who is merely wearing the “disguise” of one. Throughout, the sheer difficulty of extracting the different voices from each other imitates Jones’s own difficulty in attempting to occupy simultaneously privileged and precarious subject positions. The sudden proximity of seemingly disparate discourses is designed to reflect the violently disruptive experience that
151 actually inhabiting an historically marginalized body entails, without the built-in privilege that
Whiteness offers. The Beats, whose voices Jones inserts amongst the voices of more obvious minstrel figures, are ultimately legible in this reading as “bad bloods”: “bad” in the sense of
“bogus” or fake, and “blood” in the sense of a slang term for a Black person.59
In such passages, Jones attempts to approximate the formal language of the Beats while also linking their poetic strategies to racist histories that would stereotype and essentialize his own expressive capacities. For example, the seemingly slapdash structure of these lines might be said to recall the ”spontaneous bop prosody” Jack Kerouac famously advocated as a crucial mode of Beat poetics, or the energy and imagery of Mailer’s “language of hip.” Kerouac dictates in his ars poetica “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” that the Beat writer should take “[n]o pause to think of proper word” but should instead allow for the “infantile pileup of scatalogical buildup words,” always keeping open the possibility of wayward directions and revealing disruptions.
Kerouac equates this quasi-mystical stream-of -consciousness practice with the seemingly selfless spontaneity of the great bebop improvisers, situating Beat writing practices and Black music more generally within an abstract ideal of rhythm that he calls the “Great Law of Timing”
(qtd. in Charters 1992, 57). Keroauc’s elevation or “beatification” of the “infantile” and
“scatalogical” properties of language recalls Bakhtin’s formulation of the carnivalesque: the
“mixing of the high and low” that situates itself in opposition to the “one-sided and gloomy official seriousness of a dogmatic, entrenched social order” (Bakhtin 1984, 108, 160). Kerouac’s endorsement of the carnivalesque, which is typical of Beat ideology’s valorization of the margins, suggests that the supposed outsider figures like the jazz musician are in fact privy to the
59 This phrase has historical roots in racially determinist discourses such as the “one-drop rule.” It was reclaimed, after the Black Power movement, as an identifier commonly used within parts of the Black community. See Herbst, Philip. The Color of Words: An Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Ethnic Bias in the United States. United Kingdom: Intercultural Press, 1997. 34.
152 most fundamental vibrations of the universe. Mailer also uses loose comparisons to jazz in order to suggest the mysterious ways that hip language seems to create its own temporal logic. For
Mailer, the Beat’s language is categorically incapable of stasis, emphasizing movement and rhythm to the extent that such subjects ultimately see themselves “more as a vector in a network of forces than as a static character in a crystallized field” (Mailer 1957, 28). Both Kerouac and
Mailer suggest the ways in which Beats poetics attempts to upend social mores by exposing and reinventing the inner-workings of language. At the same time, each does so by arguing for a view of that beatnik as occupying a seemingly omnipotent, all-seeing position that presumes a privileged, even transcendent relationship to the realities of time and space. From here, it is not difficult to see how such idealized figures could come to stand above and beyond the specifics of discrete historical and socioeconomic conditions. As Jones has quipped elsewhere, “Minstrels never convinced anybody they were Black” (Baraka 1991, 205). The insufficiency of such performances can be linked to the discomfort that the “pileup” or “buildup” that lines like those in Jones’s “die schwartze bohemian” scene ultimately produce: the poem’s disjunctive articulation of a kind of Beat minstrelization of Blackness comes to stand in for the poet’s attempt to position himself within an idealized image of self that refuses to situate his language with histories of actual struggle.
Understanding the “fake Negroes” of the poem as the Beat poets themselves ultimately enables “Hymn” to reproduce the Beat performativity of race in order to critique it. Even as the serial disruptions of Jones’s lines seemingly embody the spontaneity and energy of Beat poetics, that is, they also expose the ways that this poetics might call upon its poets to appropriate culturally-specific forms, such as jazz and zen. Indeed, the poem’s implicit critique of Mailer’s
“White Negro” can be usefully compared to Baraka’s similar critique of White jazz musicians,
153 which he develops in important theoretical works like Blues People: Negro Music in White
America (1963) and Black Music (1967). In his essay “Swing: From Verb to Noun” – which, recall, is where Mackey bases his idea of “othering” as a verbal, versioning of self – Baraka describes the phenomenon of White jazz musicians as “a new class of white American” (Baraka
1991, 38), who, similar to Mailer’s “new breed” of hipsters, represent a “violent contradiction of terms” (37). According to Baraka, the formal conventions of jazz meant that it could be formally appropriated as a musical genre without being adequately recognized as a “continuous though constantly evolving social philosophy” of Blackness (185). One historical consequence of this appropriation and oversight, he argues, was that a White, diluted version of jazz was in some cases the first “jazz” ever heard by White and Black audiences alike. Black jazz musicians, then, were put in the contradictory position of attempting to access a “blues impulse” that had already been claimed and distorted by Whiteness.60 Baraka’s conception of Black jazz musicians attempting to artistically express and financially support themselves in this watered-down or
“powdered variety” of jazz resembles that of the Black poet who passes for “Beat” (37). To be accepted as poets of the hip, such “Black White Negroes” are pressured to perform a “fake” idea of Blackness in pursuit of a passing Beat attitude, just as Black jazz musicians might feel pressured to play a Whiter, less obviously “anti-assimilationist” version of jazz in order to be accepted by mainstream audiences (182).
In this light, Jones’s many references to the Black musical tradition throughout Preface must be understood for the ways they foreground the complex racial mediations that are inextricable to the history of Black Music and Beat poetics alike. For instance, while many of the poems in Preface contain fleeting references to jazz and blues giants like Charlie Parker
60 For a theory of “the blues impulse” in African-American literature, see Baker, Houston A. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
154 (“Bird”), John Coltrane, and Bessie Smith, Jones also titles an entire poem after “Symphony
Sid,” the moniker of Sid Torin, a White radio DJ who popularized bebop for White audiences
(33). Indeed, submerged allusions to jazz are also audible both in the title of “How You
Sound??” (which is a lyric from the Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday tune “My Sweet Hunk
O’ Trash”) and the moment from “Cuba Libre'' cited above, when Jones claims the world beyond
Greenwich Village had “never entered [his] mind.” “It Never Entered My Mind” is a jazz standard that, within the years immediately prior to Jones’s writing the essay, had been recorded both by Black jazz musicians like Miles Davis and White ones like Stan Getz and Chet Baker.
Similar to the way the “die schwartze bohemian” section embeds references to jazz against racist caricatures, Jones demonstrates how, in the context of Beat poetics, even the history of Black music may offer only highly mediated access to a version of Black subjectivity. While Jones may be explicilty interested in reproducing the “faux Negro” poetics of the Beats, he does so with a critical awareness of how doing so runs the risk of reproducing historically harmful performances of Black subjectivity. Similar to the way that Black jazz musicians effectively had to “pass” for themselves in order to compete with their White appropriators, Jones cannot employ the “spontaneous bop prosody” of Beat poetics without simultaneously working through the racial contradictions such techniques attempt to stand above.
Before turning to the second possible reading of the poem’s epigraph, I want to pause to note some of the difficulties of reading Jones’s earliest writing. Though Preface contains poems that look and sound many different ways, I have chosen to focus on these moments in “Hymn to
Lanie Poo” not because I believe they represent the poet’s best work, but because they exemplify the racial performances that makes Baraka’s work both so challenging yet important to read and talk about. I turn now to a second way of reading Jones’s critique of fake Negritude in order to
155 draw out these difficulties more fully. This interpretation hinges on the idea that “Lanie Poo,” herself, is the object of the poem’s critique. This is, of course, partially contradictory, as the poem is in fact positioned as a “hymn” to Lanie, a generic marking that frames the text as explicitly both musical and spiritual, praise raised to the level of song. Lanie, as Jones has revealed, and the poem perhaps implies in its final section, is a stand-in for the poet’s sister,
Sandra Elaine, whose family nickname was “Lanie Poo” and who later changed her name, after her brother’s example, to Kimako Baraka. Though the extent to which “Lanie” should be understood as Kimako herself is a complex question I’ll address in more detail in my conclusion to this chapter, the poem does make clear that its central figure is, crucially, a Black woman. In this sense, the poem’s title might be seen as practicing a kind of raced carnivalesque, in that it elevates a socially-marginalized subject to a position of quasi-divinity. Though this divinity of the everyday is typical of “the Beat,” the raced and gendered elements of this elevation are especially important given that, as Ann Charters notes, “The Beat generation did less well for its women” than it did even for its African-American poets (Charters 1992, xxxiii). Moreover, while substantial work has been done to resituate the important role of writers like Hettie Jones, Dinae
DiPrima, and Anne Waldman within the Beat movement,61 the role of Black women in the movement, as artists or even simply as the subjects of positive representations, has lagged considerably behind. Jones himself was seemingly indifferent at best to female subjects in much of his early work, and was in fact overtly misogynist, not to mention homophobic, in his “Black
Nationalist” writing especially. Nevertheless, I want to suggest that “Lanie” ultimately functions in this poem as a kind of alternative to the forms of passing that Beat poetics impose upon “black bohemians.” As we’ll see, Jones’s portrayal of his sister – and, by extension, of Black women’s
61 See Friedman, Amy L. ""Being Here as Hard as I Could:" The Beat Generation Women Writers." Discourse 20, no. 1/2 (1998): 229-44, and Girls who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation. United States: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
156 particular position within White supremacy and patriarchy more generally – helps him touch upon the specifically intersectional poetics of passing, as examined by the work of Judith Butler especially.
“Hymn to Lanie Poo” both begins and ends by turning its gaze on a Black woman who, especially in the context of the poem’s other depictions of race, comes to represent crucial questions about authenticity and appropriation. The opening section resembles a kind of epic proem in that it introduces us to a muse figure, presumably Lanie.
O, these wild trees till make charming wicker baskets, the young woman the young black woman the young black beautiful woman said. These wild-assed trees will make charming wicker baskets.
(now, I’m putting words in her mouth...tch) (4)
The gradual coming-into-focus of the poem’s central figure (“the young woman / the young black woman / the young black beautiful woman”) reflects the “coming into things by degrees” by which Jones describes, in another poem in Preface, the poetic process (26). By slowly adding descriptive layers to this image, Jones foregrounds an act of social recognition and identification, one which classifies and categorizes youth, beauty, and race – in that order. Jones’s “I” enters this poem in a moment that might be called a change in footing, a self-reflexive shift that shines a light on this self’s self-conscious management and manipulation of language. Note how the poem opens by describing an act of making that is also an act of taming, as Lanie imagines – or the speaker imagines her imagining – crafting “charming wicker baskets” from “wild trees.” This contrast of materials inherent to this act paves the way for those later, more extreme examples
157 that will juxtapose a wild and savage idea of African life with the performed version of it in
Greenwich Village. Similarly, by catching himself in the act of “putting words in her mouth,”
Jones’s “I” draws attention to the way in which he, like Lanie, may be trying to make something
“charming” and domestic out of something supposedly less constrained by such values Though it’s not immediately clear how, exactly, the speaker is putting words in the mouth of the “young black beautiful woman” – it seems related to his self-conscious addition of the intensifier “assed” to the opening phrase – the poem is already laying out an idea of language as something that can be imposed upon others, not only by the slow buildup of words, but also, perhaps, by force.
Understanding the histories and subjectivities that Jones’s gaze is and isn’t capable of seeing is crucial in order to understand the objects of the poem’s critique. Jones may be drawing attention to the way that a Black woman can be accepted within the confines of polite society, provided she is able to present a suitably “young” and “beautiful” surface. It is also important that this figure – like the “Lanie” of the poem’s title – is given importance to the extent that she is made beautiful or beatific by an implicitly male gaze or by a male poet’s art. Indeed, though the poem is addressed to a Black woman, this is not to say that Black women are treated in the poem with the respect befitting the genre of the “hymn.” For instance, similar to the minstrel figure of the “die schwartze bohemian” section, the poem’s first proper section parodies myths of
Black male sexual potency in ways that objectify as much as they deify: “The god I pray to / got black boobies / got steatopygia” (5). In yet another gesture to the long aftermath of colonialism, steatopygia is the name given to the genetic voluptuousness for which, to take a single example,
Saartje Bartman was objectified, abused, and forced into performance.62 This juxtaposition of scientific terms with cruder ones in this clause offers another example of the way that the poem’s
62 For further discussion of Bartman’s involuntary role in the history of scientifically-sanctioned racism, see Osha, Sanya, "African Sexualities II", African Postcolonial Modernity, US: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 181–199.
158 strategies of disjunction serve to critique the historical vicissitudes of forced Black performance.
The reference to “steatopygia” also provides a clue to the speakers’ earlier use of “assed” as an intensifier for the adjective “wild.” Such diction not only suggests a possible parody of the
“infantile pileup of scatalogical buildup words” that Kerouac advocated as spontaneous bop prosody, it also continues to inscribe this parody within specifically raced and sexualized terms.
By putting the word “assed” in the mouth of the scene’s figure for Black womanhood, is Jones critiquing a form of passing as a kind of sexualized capitulation or “ass-kissing,” which marginalized subjects may be called upon to perform in order to thrive? Or is he drawing attention to a larger history of racist and sexist violence, within which “passing” might be seen as only one possible survival mechanism? The simultaneous tendency both to parody and to reproduce racial stereotypes ultimately speaks to the scope of the problem and difficulty of the question.
This figure doesn’t appear again until the poem’s final section. Here, she is not only identified as the speaker’s sister, she is also is quite aggressively accused of exemplifying a
“generation / of fictitious ofays” – Lanie, that is, is not a “fake Negro” but rather a fictitious
White person. According to the poem, Lanie epitomizes the worst of the Black Bourgeoisie in that she has won acceptance into the cultural center by successfully passing for a version of
Whiteness – one that involves her participating in capitalism by buying expensive cars, taking up traditionally White art forms like ballet, and having her hair done in ways that presumably make it less “Black” and more “White”:63
About my sister. [...] my sister drives a green jaguar my sister has her hair done twice a month my sister is a school teacher
63 See Frazier, E. Franklin. Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class in the United States. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1957.
159 my sister took ballet lessons my sister has a fine figure, never diets my sister doesn’t like to teach in Newark because there are too many colored in her classes my sister hates loud shades my sister’s boy friend is a faggot music teacher who digs Tschaikovsky my sister digs Tschaikovsky also it is because of this similarity of interests that they will probably get married. (11)
Given the context of the Rimbaud epigraph, the poem may be leveling the accusation that this
“sister “is a “bad blood” or racial traitor for the distance she creates between Black people – such as her “colored” students or “loud shades” – and herself. In this reading, the tenor of the poem’s critique would be something along the lines of the – again, slightly infantile – accusation, “If you like Whiteness so much why don’t you marry it?” Indeed, Lanie’s seemingly most damning transgression is not any of these more superficial “Whitening” practices, but rather her taking up with an implicitly White partner. The late ‘50s and early ‘60s, as Deborah Thompson has pointed out, “were a time when interracial relationships shifted in the U.S. cultural imagination from being radical and progressive to being reactionary and regressive.” Where liberal ideology once viewed black-white pairings as potentially subversive forms of relation, such marriages came to be seen among the Black radical community as symptoms of “assimilation or appropriation.”
However, in perpetuating ideas of racial purity, this movement ultimately created conditions in which de facto “re-segregation became inevitable” (Thompson 2002, 84). Baraka himself would go on to participate in this re-segregation when he left his own mixed-race family. What is most reactionary and regressive about the depiction of interracial marriage in “Hymn,” however, is not so much its complicated privileging of Black racial solidarity, but rather the fact that its accusation is coupled with a homophobic slur. Indeed, Baraka’s “Black Nationalist” period is
160 notorious for its tendencies to link Whiteness to homosexuality as part of a strategy for emasculating – and thus, for Baraka, disempowering – Anglo-American culture.64 Here, the use of the word “faggot” places Jones’s poem within an uncomfortable position of policing sexual norms that cut across both Anglo- and African-American culture. Read in combination with the fact that Kimako Baraka (“Lanie”) herself was an out lesbian, the overt homophobia and misogyny of Jones’s poem demands careful attention.65
Within the scope of my argument about passing, the poem’s framing of Lanie’s passing within a heteronormative framework might be said to echo Judith Butler’s arguments about the phenomenon’s fundamentally intersectional character. In her essay, “Passing, Queering,” Butler demonstrates that the joint taboos of homosexuality and miscegenation tend “to converge at and as the constitutive outside of a normative heterosexuality that is at once the regulation of a racially pure reproduction” (Butler 1993, 169). By placing Lanie’s identity within the logic not only of passing for White but also of passing for heterosexual, the poem ultimately gestures toward White supremacist and patriarchal anxieties that have historically centered on narratives around racial purity, miscegenation, and heteronormativity. In this logic, Lanie’s interracial marraige might be read as assimilationist not only because it creates lighter-skinned offspring more capable of passing for White, but also due to its concession to the heterosexual institutions that reinforce this pattern of domination. The question, then, becomes whether the poem is
64 See especially Baraka, Amiri. “American Sexual Reference : Black Male.”Home: Social Essays. United Kingdom: Akashi Classics, 2009. 65 For example,I am especially interested in the way that the discomfort produced by this problematic poetic strategy might be compared to the “the willfully harsh, anti-assimilationist sound of bebop” that Baraka describes in his critical writing on jazz (Baraka 1973, 181-182). For a reading of Baraka’s queer poetics, see Muñoz, José Esteban. “Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity.” Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York UP, 2009. 83-96. For arguments that Baraka’s homophobia may be an attempt to conceal his own homosexuality, see Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York UP, 2001. For discussions of homophobia in African- American culture more generally, see Clarke, Cheryl. “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community.” 1983. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. Ed. Barbara Smith. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000. 190-201.
161 critiquing such passing subjects for failing to adhere to Jones’s nascent Black Nationalist views, which would problematically perpetuate an idea of power as masculine and misogynist, or if, as in Baraka’s later Marxist work, the poem is critiquing the larger systems that force subjects to adopt such contradictory and confining positions.
While the inclusion of homophobic hate speech would seem to frame Jones’s position as starkly opposed to this queer, interracial relationship, the intricate domestic tableau that concludes the poem ultimately suggests a more sympathetic reading, one which frames the couple’s actions against a tonal backdrop of White supremacist oppression:
Smiling & glad/in the huge & loveless white-anglo sun/of benevolent step mother America. (11)
Whereas White-to-Black passing narratives traditionally see Blackness as a form of “catchable” contagion, here it is Whiteness – which Jones figures throughout the poem in the all- encompassing image of the sun – that is imagined as an inescapable, transmittable force. In this sense, the lines powerfully reverse a major trope of “reverse passing” narratives of cheap racial thrills in order to draw attention to the conditions that make traditional, Black-to-White passing no casual or passing inclination, but a stark social necessity. The forced compliance of these
“smiling & glad” participants in this interacial relationship retain the privileges of the good life to the extent that they can avoid being seen as Black under the glare of the “sun” that is White
America. At the same time, however, the fact that this is a “loveless” marriage, not of sexual attraction but of necessity, means that the main way Lanie and her “boy friend” have of shoring up Whiteness – having lighter-skinned children – is denied them as queer subjects. Thus, even as
Jones betrays his anxiety about this queer interracial relationship in his use of hate speech, the
162 poem also productively frames his fragility within the larger mechanisms that Butler shows to be operative in passing. Seriality, I want to suggest, is what ultimately enables Jones to reflect the sense of confinement and contortion that such intersectional forms of passing can entail. Note there isn’t a single line in the above stanza that does not contain some kind of formal “break,” from the enjambments between compound words to the “slash marks” and ampersands that visually break up the lines. For example, isolating the genitive preposition “of” at the end of the stanza’s central line serves to highlight the way in which racially-marked subjects are made to feel both “of” and “not of” the America in which they live. By strategically disrupting the lineation of this stanza, Jones formally suggests the way that attempting to reproduce a passably
White genealogical “lineage” can be literally disruptive – and destructive – to one’s practices of self-making. In concluding his poem on images of a “step / mother,” a “sun,” and a “sister” – which could be taken to refer to the speaker’s fictional sister, Jones’s actual sister, or perhaps a larger idea of intersectional camaraderie – Jones demonstrates the ways that he is already posing questions about race, kinship, and community that would continue to preoccupy him throughout his career – questions that would, moreover, shortly lead him to serially “break” and remake his relationships with the influences, friends, and family with whom he’d lived, written, and loved.
“Hymn to Lanie Poo” is, indeed, a hymn. However, the object of its highly equivocal praise is not the “Beat” idealization of the margins, but, rather, figures like Lanie. For Jones,
Lanie’s ability to navigate the embodied, intersectional violence of White America frames her as an explicit corrective to Mailer’s idealized “White Negro,” whose privilege prevents him from inhabiting any such reality. The poem’s ultimate critique is not merely against “passing” – which in fact offers Jones, like Lanie, a necessary formal resource for adapting and reversing the social and aesthetic practices of Whiteness – but rather against the conditions in which passing
163 becomes a necessity. Similarly to how “The Liar” demonstrates the ways in which Baraka’s oeuvre is defined not by any discrete “Transitional period” but rather a “constant and diverse motion” of normative, serial transition, “Hymn to Lanie Poo'' demonstrates the ways his ‘Beat period” names an ever-shifting engagement with intersectional subject positions or “footings.”
While “The Liar’s” depiction of a transition in and as power aligns with the abolitionist project of contemporary Black studies, Jones’s complexly-situated critiques of “passing” in the poems of
Preface frame even his earliest work within the spirit of examining Black life and precarity with which I began this chapter. Strategically exposing Beat poetics’ racist reproductions of
“practically” Black approximiations, Baraka’s work provides a much-needed reality check regarding who, in America, truly “live[s] with death as immediate danger” (277). As bell hooks reminds us, marginality is, for Black subjects, not “mythic” but “based on lived experience”
(hooks 1990, 341).
I want to conlude my chapter, and my dissertation, with personal experience – first
Baraka’s, then my own. Roughly twenty-five years after Jones wrote this poem, Sandra Elaine
Jones/Kimako Baraka/Lanie Poo was murdered in an intersectionally-motivated act of violence, an attempted rape that occurred in her Manhattan apartment complex.66 Living with this fact, much less reading the poem through its lens, is painful. What would it mean to read the poem now as “hymn” and elegy, as part of the condition of mourning that Rankine points to as the condition of Black life? How does LeRoi Jones’s hymn to his sister sound to an Amiri Baraka who has lost his? How does he hear the poem’s use of hate speech against Black women and homosexuals – not to mention the invectives hurled against Jews and a litany of other groups
66 “Baraka’s Sister Slain in Manhattan Plaza; Suspect Arrested,” Feb 2, 1984. Accessed December 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/02/nyregion/baraka-s-sister-slain-in-manhattan-plaza-suspect-arrested.html. Baraka wrote a beautiful eulogy: “Lanie Poo: Remember Kimako Baraka,” The Unity Project. Accessed Dec 3, 2020, https://unityarchiveproject.org/article/lanie-poo-remember-kimako-baraka/.
164 over the course of his writing67 – in light of this loss? How are we to read the acts of physical, psychological, and systemic violence faced by Kimako in her life against the acts of linguistic violence that Baraka attempts to mobilize in his poems?
In her works Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), Citizen (2014), and Just Us (2020),
Rankine depicts both the macro-level violence that writing like Baraka’s, at its best, exposes, but also the micro-level and quotidian violences that such writing, at its worst, performs. For myself, as a non-Black critic – more specifically, as a mixed-race person who has had the privilege of being able to pass for White – my point in mourning Lanie is not to make a spectacle of her death, turning her body into part of a body of evidence for a history of “misogynoir”-istic violence.68 My point, rather, is to point to my own privilege and complicity on precisely these all-too everyday levels – and, by pointing, to remember (and remember to remember) a history that threatens to remain quotidian. Reading the work of Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka from an elevated critical position, as if operating somehow above the conditions they describe, has persistently led me back to my own participation in the types of normative practices that criticism, and their work, is capable of. Writing this dissertation over a period of time that almost perfectly coincided with the Trump era – the era of #metoo, of Black Lives Matter, of too many
“constant and diverse” movements to mention – also made my privilege within White supremacist imperialist capitalst patriarchy clear in important and importantly uncomfortable ways – an awareness I’d been doubly privileged not to have fully faced. Confronting what and
67 Jones addressed this aspect of his writing, with intermittently satisfying results, in his 1980 essay “Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite.” He did not choose the title. See Baraka, Amiri. “Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite.” Village Voice, December, 17, 1980. 68 The term “misogynoir” refers to the specific experiences of Black- and women-identifying persons. It has its roots in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality. See Crenshaw, Kimberlé. "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color." Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241- 299. Accessed December 4, 2020. doi:10.2307/1229039. A reader on the subject is available from Cassandra Press: Bailey, Moya, et al. Reader on Misogynoir. Ed. Kandis Williams. United States: Cassandra, 2017.
165 whom I see or don’t see, hear or don’t hear, feel or don’t have to feel, is an ongoing personal and critical challenge that work like Rankine’s and Baraka’s might help to spark but which such authors shouldn’t have to instigate on their own. Moments where I’ve reinforced patterns of domination, moments where I’ve failed to side with the margins, moments where I’ve been participatory in or silent in the face of oppression – such privileged moments are the promise of and the problem with passing. What would it take to pass beyond passing? What would it mean to make this work into a preface to further work?
Prefaces, as Baraka would write later in his life, serve “as both ‘anchor’ (as in relay races) to one motion, and as ‘1st leg’ to another, further motion” (Baraka 1991, xi). As a genre, prefaces serve as a kind of threshold or pivot, a space in which writers can develop, qualify, and revise their claims, and thereby avoid the ever-present threat of ideological stagnation. As I continue to write and think about Baraka, recognizing his faults and recognizing within them aspects of my own, I want his work to stand as a model for my own constant and diverse motion toward more just forms of being, seeing, feeling, and sounding – to step to the side, to shortcircuit, and even to “split [oneself] open” in order to see what assumptions and oversights continue to shape my critical stance (Baraka 1984, 243). I want to practice, that is, a critical version of what hooks describes as “a particular way of seeing reality [that looks] both from the outside in and from the inside out” (hooks, 1990 431). It is just such a generatively serial stance that Baraka describes at the end of his poem “Betancourt,” which he wrote about his determination to reinvent himself upon his return to Greenwich Village from Cuba. I offer it by way of an ending that is, in the traditions of Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka, always already a way of beginning:
(I mean I think I know now
166 what a poem is) A turning away… from what it was had moved us… A madness Looking at the sea. And some white fast boat. (38)
167 Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W.. Notes to Literature. Trans. Sherry Weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.
Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 79, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer 2004): 117-139.
Andrews, W. D. E. ""All Is Permitted": The Poetry of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka." Southwest Review 67, no. 2 (1982): 197-221. Accessed December 2, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43469451.
Austin, John Langshaw. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Ed. James Opie Urmson. United Kingdom: Clarendon Press, 1962.
Bakhtin, Mihail. “The Problem of Speech Genres.” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.
–. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. Michael Holmquist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. New York: Freundlich Books, 1984.
–. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. United States: Morrow, 1973, 181-182.
–. The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. Ed. Henry C. Lacey. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2000.
–. Hard Facts: Poems 1973-1975. Newark: Congress of Afrikan People, 1975.
–. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. U.S.: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991.
Baraka, Amiri., Jones, LeRoi. Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays Since 1965. United States: Random House, 1971.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. U.S.: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. United States: Schocken, 1968.
168 Benston, Kimberly. Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
–. “I yam what I am: The topos of (un)naming in Afro-American literature” in Black Literature & Literary Theory. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. New York: Routledge, 1984.
Bernstein, Charles. My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Burroughs, John. Whitman: A Study. United States: W. H. Wise, 1896.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge, 1993.
–. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. United States: Taylor & Francis, 2011.
Charters, Ann. “Introduction.” The Portable Beat Reader. U.S.: Viking Penguin, 1992.
Conte, Joseph M. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Curran, Stuart. Poetic Form and British Romanticism. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Davidson, Michael. Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Dreisinger, Baz. Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008.
Dunn, Allen. "Pleasures of the Text: the Promise of Misrecognition." Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 88, no. 3/4 (2005): 217-38. Accessed November 29, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41179125.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Quartermain, Peter. “Introduction.” The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999.
Edwards, Brent Hayes. "Black Serial Poetics: An Introduction to Ed Roberson." Callaloo 33, no. 3 (2010): 621-637. Accessed Dec 3, 2020. https://doi:10.1353/cal.2010.0036.
169 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Stephen E. Whicher. Boston: Riverside Editions, 1957.
Ferry, Anne. The Title to the Poem. United States: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Folsom, Ed. “Whitman Making Books/Books Making Whitman: A Catalog and Commentary.” Walt Whitman Archive, accessed November 29 2020, https://whitmanarchive.org/
Fordham, Signithia. "Beyond Capital High: On Dual Citizenship and the Strange Career of "Acting White"." Anthropology & Education Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2008): 227-46. Accessed December 3, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25166666.
Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Sherry Simon. United States: Cornell University Press, 1980.
Fournier, Lauren. “Sick Women, Sad Girls, and Selfie Theory: Autotheory as Contemporary Feminist Practice.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 33 no. 1 (2018): 643-662.
Genette, Gérard, and Marie Maclean. "Introduction to the Paratext." New Literary History 22, no. 2 (1991): 261-72. Accessed November 27, 2020. doi:10.2307/469037.
Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Godfrey, Molly, Young, Vershawn. “Introduction.” Neo-Passing: Performing Identity After Jim Crow. United States: University of Illinois Press, 2018.
Goffman, Erving. Forms of Talk. United States: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.
Golding, Alan. “George Oppen's Serial Poems.” Contemporary Literature 29.2 (1988): 221-40. Accessed December 3, 2020. doi:10.2307/1208438.
Gray, Nicole, Price, Kenneth, M. “The Letters in the Litter: Messy Boundaries and Other Conundrums in Editing Walt Whitman’s Correspondence.” Scholarly Editing 37 (2016). Online.
Greenspan, Ezra. Walt Whitman and the American Reader. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
170 Grossman, Jay. Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Harris, Cheryl I. "Whiteness as Property." Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707-791. Accessed December 2, 2020. doi:10.2307/1341787.
Hejinian, Lyn. “Preliminary to a Close Reading of Discrete Series” in Thinking Poetics: Essays on George Oppen. Ed. Steve Shoemaker. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2009.
Helms, Alan. "Whitman Reading Whitman: "Live Oak with Moss"." The American Poetry Review 21, no. 2 (1992): 51-56. Accessed December 3, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27780701.
Hoffman, Tyler. "A Prefatory Note on Whitman, Stevens, and the Poetics of Americana." Wallace Stevens Journal 40 (Spring 2016), 6-9. Accessed December 3, 2020. https://doi:10.1353/wsj.2016.0002.
Hollis, C. C. "Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire [review]." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 3 (Spring 1986), 31-38. Accessed December 3, 2020. https://doi.org/10.13008/2153-3695.1120.
Izenberg, Oren. "Oppen's Silence, Crusoe's Silence and the Silence of Other Minds." Modernism/modernity 13.1 (2006): 787-811.
Jones, LeRoi. “How You Sound??” in Allen, Donald. The New American Poetry, 1945-1960. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Kelleter, Hugh. “Introduction.” Media of Serial Narrative. Ed. Hugh Kelleter. United States: Ohio State University Press, 2017.
Killian, Kevin., Ellingham, Lewis. Poet Be Like God : Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1998.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
Larsen, Nella. The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories. United Kingdom: Knopf Doubleday, 2010.
171 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Kavanagh: A Tale. United Kingdom: Knight & Son, 1857.
Mackey, Nathaniel. "Other: From Noun to Verb." Representations, no. 39 (1992): 51-70. Accessed December 2, 2020. https://doi:10.2307/2928594.
–. Splay Anthem. United Kingdom: New Directions Books, 2006.
Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro: Spiritual Reflections on the Hipster.” Dissent (Fall 1957): 276-287. Online.
McGill, Meredith L.. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
Mill, John Stuart. "Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties." The Crayon 7, no. 4 (1860): 93-97. Online.
Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself": A Mosaic of Interpretations.: Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989.
Miller, James E.. Walt Whitman. United States: Twayne, 1962.
Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Moon, Michael. "Solitude, Singularity, Seriality: Whitman vis-a-vis Fourier." ELH 73, no. 2 (2006): 303-323. Accessed December 3, 2020. doi:10.1353/elh.2006.0019.
Mullen, Harryette. "Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness." Diacritics 24, no. 2/3 (1994): 71-89. Accessed December 2, 2020. doi:10.2307/465165.
Neal, Larry. "The Black Arts Movement." The Drama Review: TDR 12, no. 4 (1968): 28-39. Accessed December 3, 2020. https://doi:10.2307/1144377.
Nicholls, Peter. George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2007.
O’Driscoll, Michael. “By the Numbers: Jackson MacLow’s Light Poems and Algorithmic Digpahism” in Time in Time: Short Poems, Long Poems, and the Rhetoric of North American Avant-Gardism, 1963-2008. Ed. J. Mark Smith. Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013.
172
O’Hara, Frank. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Ed. Donald Allen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Okker, Patricia. Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-Century America. United States: University of Virginia Press, 2003.
Omi, Michael. Winant, Howard. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. United Kingdom: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
Oppen, George. Collected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1975.
–. "Poetry and Politics: A Conversation with George and Mary Oppen" in George Oppen: Man and Poe. Ed. Burton Hatlen. Orono: University of Maine, 1981, 23-50.
–. The Selected Letters of George Oppen. Ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990.
–. Selected Poems. Ed. Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions Books, 2003.
–. Speaking with George Oppen: Interviews with the Poet and Mary Oppen, 1968-1987. Ed. Richard Swigg. U.S.: McFarland, Incorporated, Publishers, 2014.
Oppen, George. Dembo, L.S.. “George Oppen.” Contemporary Literature 10.2 (Spring 1969): 159-77.
Oppen, Mary. Meaning A Life. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1978.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. United Kingdom: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.
Pound, Ezra. The ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1960.
Perloff, Marjorie. “‘The Rescue of the Singular,’ George Oppen’s New Collected Poems.” CL 43, no. 2 (September 2002): 560-69.
Price, Kenneth. Smith, Susan Belasco. Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America. United States: University of Virginia Press, 1995.
173 Rancière, Jacques. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. United Kingdom: Verso, 2013.
Rimbaud, Arthur. A Season in Hell and Other Works. Trans. Stanley Appelbaum. United States: Dover Publications, 2003.
Said, Edward W.. Beginnings: Intention and Method. United States: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake. On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Silliman, Ron. “Third Phase Objectivism” in The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999.
Silver, I.. Brogan, T.V.F.. Alduy, C. “Blason.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition. Ed. Greene, et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. 150-151.
Smith, Richard Eugene. “Ezra Pound and the Haiku.” College English 26, no. 7 (1965): 522– 527. Accessed December 3, 2020. doi:10.2307/373518.
Spicer, Jack. The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. Ed. Gizzi, Peter. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2010.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. United States: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
Stein, Gertrude. "Portraits and Repetition" in Lectures in America. Boston: Beacon Press. 1935
Taylor, Edward Fairfax. The Aeneid of Virgil: Translated Into English Verse. United Kingdom: J. M. Dent & Company, 1936.
Thompson, Carlyle Van. The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination. New York: Peter Lang, 2004.
Thompson, Deborah. "Keeping up with the Joneses: The Naming of Racial Identities in the Autobiographical Writings of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Hettie Jones, and Lisa Jones." College Literature 29, no. 1 (2002): 83-101. Accessed December 3, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25112622.
174
Trowbridge, John Townsend. "Reminiscences of Walt Whitman." Atlantic Monthly 89 (1902): 163–175. Online.
Walt Whitman Archive. “Periodicals,” “Walt Whitman by Samuel Hollyer,” “Bibliography.” Gen ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folson, and Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 29 November 2020, https://whitmanarchive.org/.
Watts, Alan. “Beat Zen, Square Zen” in The Portable Beat Reader. U.S.: Viking Penguin, 1992.
Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence: Volume V: 1890-1892. Ed. Edward Haviland Miller. United States: NYU Press, 2007.
–. Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn, 1855. The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 29 November 2020, https://whitmanarchive.org/.
–. Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn, 1856. The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 29 November 2020, https://whitmanarchive.org/.
–. Leaves of Grass. Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860-1861. The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 29 November 2020, https://whitmanarchive.org/.
–. Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891-1892). The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 29 November 2020, https://whitmanarchive.org/.
–. Specimen Days. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2007.
–. The Portable Walt Whitman. United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 2004.
Williams, William Carlos. Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets. Emily M. Wallace and James E. Breslin. United States: New Directions Books, 1985.
Wordsworth, William. William Wordsworth: The Major Works. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2000.
175 Zukofsky, Louis. “Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff.” Poetry, 37.5 (1931):. 272–285. Accessed December 3, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20577923.
176