1 Note on the text: the following pages are the script of a lecture given (or to be given) on various occasions (at UCLA, at UC Berkeley, at University of Washington, and at Notre Dame) this year and last year. On some of those occasions, another lecture has followed or will follow this one. This essay is thus not yet in publishable form, and does not include notes. It is being revised for publication as a separate essay and will appear as part of a chapter in my current book project. Please do not cite or circulate this version. Virginia Jackson AMERICAN POETRY IN PUBLIC In the middle of Ben Lerner’s 2014 10:04: A Novel --(and I should say that all of the texts I am going to talk about today have produced various degrees of public reaction in the US in the last two years—so what I will say is very much about a very contemporary version of American Poetry in Public, though my way of understanding the contemporary is historical, or at least depends on a nineteenth- to-twenty-first-century arc)—in any case, in the middle of Ben Lerner’s 2014 10:04: A Novel, the narrator, who identifies as a poet (just as by this point Lerner is a poet who identifies as a novelist, a self-consciousness indexed by the subtitle “A Novel”), this “I,” in any case, looks from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and sees what he calls “an urban experience of the sublime”: Bundled debt, trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal drinking water, the vast arterial network of traffic, changing weather patterns of 2 increasing severity—whenever I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of its possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body. What I felt when I tried to take in the skyline—and instead was taken in by it—was a fullness indistinguishable from being emptied, my personality dissolving into a personhood so abstract that every atom belonging to me as good belonged to Noor, the fiction of the world arranging itself around her. (108-109) Readers of nineteenth-century American poetry—or readers of Whitman anyway, since a lot of people read Whitman who don’t read much nineteenth-century American poetry—will recognize Lerner’s urban sublime as a version of the end of Whitman’s 1856 poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the last stanza of which appeared taped to doors and telephone poles in lower Manhattan in the days following September 11th, 2001. Lerner’s way of condensing that very nineteenth-century poem within the dystopic landscape of the twenty-first century certainly owes something to that stanza’s ad hoc inauguration of the new millennium, though nothing Lerner can find in his poetic landscape is a match for that stanza’s sheer beauty: You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers, We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward, Not any more you should be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us, We use you, we do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us, 3 We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also, You furnish your parts toward eternity, Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul. One of the things that Whitman’s lines can do that Lerner’s prose cannot do, of course, is to be lines rather than just sentences, verse rather than narration. That seems like a funny thing to say of Whitman, of all poets, since in 1856 there were so many complaints about Whitman’s long disobedient lines as not poetry. Many nineteenth-century readers agreed with one of my favorite of Whitman’s anonymous early reviewers that “Walt Whitman is as unacquainted with art, as a hog is with mathematics.” Yet from the vantage point of those people who posted these lines in response to 9/11 and from the vantage of Lerner’s surrogate in the novel he published less than two years ago, the odd, tipsy exhilaration of a hyperbolically apostrophic, lineated direct address to the deaf and dumb buildings of lower Manhattan looks like the kind of public poetry the twenty-first century can only imagine in retrospect. Side by side, you can see without reading which of these blocks of text is formatted as “poetry” and which is formatted as “prose.” The nineteenth-century lines appear to us now not artless but artfully, aesthetically framed next to the collapsing sentences about millennial collapse. The flickering utopian horizon of the promise that poetry, of all things, could restore to us the collective humanity the buildings within those lines lack may be receding into the century before modernism (or the historical events that produced modernism) deprived us of our faith in apostrophic collectivity, but Lerner’s character imagines Whitman’s nineteenth-century vision of a public organized by 4 poetry as salvageable for the future, as the lyric possibility we lost in the twentieth century and might now—at the brink of repeated economic and accelerating environmental decline--find a way to recover. In Lerner’s version of this complex historical imaginary, post-modern novelization ironically frames pre-modern lyricization, so that the portrait of the artist as a young man holds that artist’s aspirational embrace of a public made possible not only for but by poetry at the distance of a selfie stick. Lerner embeds the collapse of that distance and the abstraction of the first person into the collective work of selving in his narrative, so that at the end of the passage I’ve cited here, the famous opening of Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass almost comically becomes the relation between Lerner’s autobiographical character and his friend Noor rather than the relation between me and you (I celebrate myself/ And what I assume you shall assume/ For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you). This is to say that by framing Whitman’s antebellum lyrical heights within a novel set in Brooklyn Heights in the twenty-first century, Lerner also conforms to Bakhtin’s twentieth-century elevation of the genres of the many over the expression of the one, of the polyglot novel over the monologic lyric. Only at that multiplied distance is Lerner able to indulge in what the end of his paragraph calls “a mild lacrimal event” brought on by the “proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body.” This decidedly hipster affect at the edge of Brooklyn is the imaginary self-integration of the poem Lerner is not writing in the novel. The utopian vision of the communal body is already gone before it is 5 invoked, not only because it is stuck in the nineteenth century but because it is stuck in poetry. The idealization of the nineteenth century as a moment before poetry and its public drifted apart, before the poet turned into the hipster novelist, the moment when the lines on the right rather than the prose on the left attracted collective attention (before a poet had to become a novelist to sell books--though again that’s an illusion when it comes to Whitman, who did not gain much of a public until the twentieth century, and even then, only in fits and starts), all this is part of the zeitgeist Lerner’s prose has channeled to such cult acclaim. But we did not need to wait until last year for an expression of that spirit of the age, since public and private foundations (The National Endowment of the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Poetry Foundation, and the Library of Congress, to name just a few) have been launching highly capitalized projects “to raise poetry to a more visible and influential position in American culture” (to cite the Poetry Foundation website for decades now. Here is the central paragraph of the Foundation’s mission statement http://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/history-and-mission: The Poetry Foundation works to raise poetry to a more visible and influential position in American culture. Rather than celebrating the status quo, the Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry. In the long term, the Foundation 6 aspires to alter the perception that poetry is a marginal art, and to make it directly relevant to the American public. The simple use of “more” –“more visible and influential”-—betrays the pathos that is the basis of Lerner’s and, in fact, of a national contemporary ideal: what once was may again be. Nostalgia is always potentially redemptive. Our contemporary national discourse on poetry in public consistently frames nineteenth-century American poetry as the lost promised land, fondly recalling not only Whitman’s rebel ways but the mainstream Whittier and Longfellow as poets who had “a broad cultural influence that today seems more typical of movies or popular music than anything we can imagine possible for poetry” (as Dana Gioia, former Chairman of the NEA, rather wistfully wrote in 1993). The Poetry Foundation’s mission statement goes on to state that “the Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry. In the long term, the Foundation aspires to alter the perception that poetry is a marginal art, and to make it directly relevant to the American public.” So how would that happen? The word “poetry” appears four times in the two sentences, but what does the word mean? Even an organization as conservative in its approach as the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation does not just beg the question of the shifting definition of the term that gives it its name and has made possible its recent two hundred million dollar endowment from the estate of Ruth Lily.