THE POET FLÂNEUSE IN THE AMERICAN CITY: GWENDOLYN BROOKS, ADRIENNE RICH, DIANE DI PRIMA, AND AUDRE LORDE By KIRSTEN BARTHOLOMEW ORTEGA A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2006 Copyright 2006 by Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work developed under the thoughtful guidance and encouragement of Dr. Marsha Bryant, to whom I am profoundly grateful. She set an exceptional standard which I will continue to strive to achieve. I also thank my dissertation committee—Dr. David Leverenz, Dr. Amy Ongiri, and Dr. Brian Ward—for their insights and feedback throughout the process. As a whole, this project reflects the enduring support which I received throughout my time at the University of Florida. The generous Alumni Fellowship funded the research and allowed me to to focus all of my energy on writing. My parents, Karen and Bart Bartholomew, are responsible for preparing me for this project with a lifetime of educational support. I thank them for the model they set for me and the unconditional love and financial supplements which made completing the project possible. Heartfelt gratitude to my sister, Lindsey Bartholomew, and to Amy Walsh who listened to the years of anxiety and stress while I wrote and researched. Thanks as well to my graduate student friends, Jill Pruett and Julie Sinn, for being readers/editors, conference roommates, and beer buddies. Finally, this work would never have happened without the faith and sacrifice of my husband, Manuel (Freddy) Ortega. I am in eternal debt to him for making it possible for me to pursue my passion at the expense of some of his own dreams. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................1 Flânerie .........................................................................................................................5 Cities in American Poetry...........................................................................................20 The Labyrinthine City.................................................................................................27 Brooks, Rich, di Prima, and Lorde .............................................................................32 2 GWENDOLYN BROOKS: DETECTING FLÂNERIE .............................................38 Character Vignettes from an Unwilling Detective .....................................................52 Poetic Reconstruction .................................................................................................69 3 ADRIENNE RICH: RESISTING ARIADNE............................................................77 Flâneuse as Witness: “Frame”....................................................................................86 Visibility/Invisibility: Ghazal Poems .........................................................................92 Love in the Urban Labyrinth: Twenty-One Love Poems ..........................................100 4 DIANE DI PRIMA: PIRATING FLÂNERIE...........................................................110 Beatniking Poetry Traditions....................................................................................115 1950s Cultural Contexts ...........................................................................................120 Limitations of Appropriation....................................................................................131 5 AUDRE LORDE: ACTIVATING THE FLÂNEUSE ..............................................149 Razing the City as Revolution ..................................................................................151 Empowering the Invisible Margin............................................................................163 Protesting Economic Disenfranchisement................................................................170 6 CONCLUSION.........................................................................................................183 iv WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................188 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...........................................................................................196 v Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy THE POET FLÂNEUSE IN THE AMERICAN CITY: GWENDOLYN BROOKS, ADRIENNE RICH, DIANE DI PRIMA, AND AUDRE LORDE By Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega August 2006 Chair: Marsha Bryant Major Department: English At a time when the American ideal placed women in the domestic sphere of suburban homes, Brooks, Rich, di Prima, and Lorde were all writing from and about such urban centers as Chicago, Boston, and New York. Their poetry negotiates the overlap of public and private space, resisting social expectations for post-WWII women in the city streets and in the poetic tradition. These women poets inherit a patriarchal legacy of urban poetry that responds to Charles Baudelaire’s practice of flânerie as a method of observing and poetically responding to the city. This work examines ways that women undauntedly assert their private identities in public spaces, articulating poetic cities in order to redefine the physical city. The city is a vexed place for women, for their creative and cultural power is contained by social expectations, consumer culture, and the architectural design of urban vi spaces. As flâneuses, Brooks, Rich, di Prima, and Lorde are able to participate in the otherwise male-exclusive process of producing city culture. Their voices press both flânerie and urban poetry to incorporate perspectives that reflect different races, classes, genders, and sexualities to create a feminist urban poetics. Building off of work that genders flânerie by Anne Friedberg, Anke Gleber, and Deborah Parsons and off of urban theory of the city as labyrinth by Hubert Damisch, this work questions flânerie’s ability to both empower and prohibit women’s urban gaze. Each of the poets responds to, rejects, or revises flânerie according to her understanding of its ability to empower her feminist poetics. Together, the city poems of Brooks, Rich, di Prima, and Lorde validate women’s gazes in the city: they are watching, recording, and contributing to the construction of metaphoric cities. Although the power that flânerie provides women is tempered by its limitations, the perspective of a flâneuse provides a scaffold for establishing a poetic image of the city that reflects the heterogeneous crowd. vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In this work, I examine the work of four post-WWII women—Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Diane di Prima, and Audre Lorde—through the lens of flânerie to critique their contributions to defining a feminist urban poetics. These women’s poetry of and thoughts about the city reflect their struggles to define their poetics and lives as separate from what was expected of them as women by both the literary establishment and post- war culture more generally. The city, always a site of paradoxes, provides them freedoms which they are not allowed in suburbia; but the liberties they take by participating in flânerie (whether consciously or not), writing poetry of the city, and living public, urban lives, are contained and restricted by the city’s labyrinthine architectural and social structures as well as by the history and influence of modernist city poetry written by men. Flânerie can provide a method to interrogate various aspects of the city including crowd culture, crime, consumerism, neighborhood mapping, and the aesthetic construction of the city as it will last in our collective, cultural memory. At one level, urban poems by Brooks, Rich, di Prima, and Lorde suggest a corrective to Walter Benjamin’s limiting definition of the flâneur as necessarily white, male, and upper-class, enhancing the quintessential urban observer’s ability to interpret the heterogeneous twentieth-century city. As the seminal theorist of flânerie in the twentieth century, Benjamin’s definition of the flâneur—which he derives from Charles Baudelaire—establishes the archetype from which most critics evaluate flânerie. This dissertation establishes evidence of flânerie in women’s poetry in order to emphasize 1 2 valuable breaks that women poets make from Benjamin’s notion of flânerie which can make the practice relevant to current discussions of cities and poetry in American literature. I contribute to current studies of representations of urban space, feminist literary studies, and poetry studies by assessing both the limits and powers of flânerie, particularly for women poets. Although many respected critics (among the women: Susan Buck-Morss, Janet Wolff, and Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson) argue that women’s participation in flânerie is impossible, many twentieth-century poets either respond directly to Baudelaire’s model of writing the city or incorporate forms, perspectives, or images that imply flânerie. Brooks, Rich, di Prima, and Lorde all employ speakers who watch urban events anonymously, such as the unnamed narrator of Brooks’s “In the Mecca,” who moves