V. Nicholas LoLordo

Department of English
University of Nevada at Las Vegas
lolordov@unlv.nevada.edu

 

Review of: Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair, eds. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry.3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2003.

 

 

Authors are the sentimental background of literature.

 

–Laura (Riding) Jackson

 

poets are retreating into–or is it out of?–academia, beset by the
usual pit-bulls and well-meaning little old ladies in tennis shoes. And discovering
and assimilating new bastions of indifference and comprehension. What else?
That was some storm we had last week. The webs intersect at certain points where baubles
are glued to them; readers think this is nice. What else? Oh, stop badgering–
where were you in the fifties?

 

–John Ashbery, Flow Chart

 

Ten years ago, in his long poem Flow Chart, John Ashbery surveyed the literary landscape with a mild surmise: so much for the poetry wars. Yet the critic can hardly afford to greet missionary zeal with this melancholy bemusement. The position of the academic anthologizer is still more difficult. It has long since become common knowledge that the “anthology wars” (marked by the appearance of Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology The New American Poetry and Hall, Pack, and Simpson’s New Poets of England and America) divided American poetry into two armed camps. (A recent update on this tradition of conflict is provided by Marjorie Perloff’s “Whose New American Poetry?: Anthologizing in the 1990s.”) John Guillory’s work on canon formation assumes the university literature department to be the institutional locus of canonization, but to my mind such a claim becomes increasingly untenable in the post-WWII U.S. poetry scene, where the aforementioned anthologies, among others, testify to the co-presence of academic canons and anti-academic poets’ canons, a pairing best seen in the context of various related sets of polemic adversaries from the recent literary past: Beat vs. academic, raw vs. cooked, margin vs. mainstream, and so on.¹ Given this history, a basic problem remains for any teaching anthology published in 2003 that seeks to encompass the past century’s poetry: on the one hand, its own institutional frame is academic; on the other, it must acknowledge contemporary poetry’s foundational narrative of division, this blesséd or curséd break, seeking to contain (in both senses of the word?) both sides within its bipartisan pages. Jahan Ramazani seems to meet the challenge head on: he opens the second volume of the new Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry with substantial selections from Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Olson, a pairing straight from central casting. Olson’s harpoon, Bishop’s bit of ivory: the lady, in the role of minimus, gets more pages.

 

A prefatory observation: in what follows, I’ve chosen to neglect the question of cuts. Even a not entirely cynical critic might believe, with Marianne Moore, that “omissions are no accident,” while noting that they are also invisible to theory: the experience of classroom teachers is always invoked to explain them. We are more forthright about discovering neglected poetry of value than about discovering that what we once thought valuable no longer seems as necessary. The relative number of poets from Canada and Great Britain has dropped considerably in the latest Norton. (Writing, for this moment, as a Canadian, I note that Earl Birney, A.M. Klein, Irving Layton and Al Purdy have been expunged; P.K. Page, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje remain; Anne Carson has been added.) This particular set of cuts might suggest that gender was an important factor; but other decisions I find arguable obey different logics. To name only one: Ramazani is unwilling to remove even relatively minor poets associated with the New Criticism or with the Movement–to name a few: Ransom, Tate, Winters, Penn Warren, Delmore Schwartz, Davie, Amis–poets peripheral to the revival of modernist studies in whom I can hardly think my own generation of university teachers is heavily invested.

 

This newly revised Norton appears at a moment when “mainstream” poetry is marked by a bewildering heterogeneity, while questions of eclecticism, pluralism, rapprochement have been the subject of much debate at the “margins.” The entry of a number of writers identified with “Language-centered writing”–Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Charles Bernstein–into academic positions has been taken to mark the end of the movement as a cohesive avant-garde, yet in this “post-language” moment an oppositional understanding of the poetic field remains possible, as is indicated by, for example, the recent volume published by the University of Alabama Press, Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 90s, which collects critical and polemical work by writers very few of whom at date of publication had a volume of poetry in print from an established press. (I note two exceptions, Elizabeth Willis and Juliana Spahr. The original publication dates of these pieces span the era between the 2nd and 3rd editions of the Norton, 1988-2002.) And these oppositional understandings–those associated with, to list the most commonly used terms, radical innovative, experimental, or avant-garde practice–typically seek to legitimate themselves through readings of modernist tradition.

 

But such binaries can seem increasingly quaint, relics of the Poetry Wars–a battle that, as Jed Rasula has observed, anthologizers continued to reenact, as if in period dress, into the 1990s. The new Norton gives U.S. Eliot’s modernism carried on by Tate, Schwartz, and Lowell side by side with the modernism of Stein carried on by Zukofsky, Bernstein, and Hejinian; whether we speak of the modernisms of metaphor and of metonymy or of Symbolism and Objectivism, it would appear that both sides are fairly accounted for. Indeed, the book’s treatment of modernism registers as one of its most significant corrections. Added to the first volume of this new edition are Mina Loy, Charles Reznikoff, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen; the acknowledgment of experimental modernist registers–along with English-language modernist writing outside of the U.S., Britain, and Ireland–constitutes the revision’s primary accomplishment. But what is the position of this text, within the poetic field I’ve roughly sketched out? To whom does it speak?

 

Here, I will argue, the book’s selection of contemporary poets is of particular significance. For literary academics, the brand “Norton” and canonicity are synonymous; each published sigh or murmur of dissent, it might be argued, only confirms this status. Oxford’s recent set of anthologies of modern poetry (Cary Nelson’s American and Keith Tuma’s British and Irish) lays claim to much the same terrain, but the new Norton attempts to cover the entirety of English-language poetry since modernism. This should be seen in the context of Anglo-American modernism’s decline as a category–Norton both occupies this declining place and revises it. Another apparently fading category, at least within discussions of poetry and poetics, is instanced by a volume now almost ten years old, Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Note the properly postmodern indefinite article, which attempts to finesse the awkward fact that there is only one Norton anthology of such poetry! “From the modernism you want,” observed David Antin in a remark often quoted, “you get the postmodernism you deserve”; but the implicit abandonment of the latter concept by the Norton suggests that such teleological claims about literary history have been shelved: from a still-ideologically charged “modern,” we move to a neutral “contemporary.”

 

Which is not to say the anthology tries to be apolitical. The Norton now for the first time registers a meeting between postcolonial studies and twentieth-century poetry. Its first edition represented poetry from the U.S., Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; to the work of Derek Walcott in the 2nd edition, the 3rd edition adds poems of other English-language poets–African, Indian, and Caribbean (ten in all). In his preface, attached to both volumes, Ramazani summarizes the anthology’s mission: to present “an international vision of modern and contemporary poetry in English …. many key poets of the 20th century led migratory lives …. Like these transnational lives, literary influence has … continually crossed national boundaries, so that much modern poetry is transatlantic, and much contemporary poetry is in its bearings global.” A qualification follows: “Not that this anthology aims to give equal representation to every anglophone nation. Produced in the United States, its center of gravity is American” (1, xxviii).

 

This last phrase is intriguing. Certainly, the book’s literary-historical imagination–as in the Bishop/Olson juxtaposition–tends to work with the myths of American poetry. But my concern is with the rhetoric of “representation.” For Ramazani’s disavowal of “equal representation” is puzzling. What would be the internationalist political source of this reference to every anglophone nation; in what geopolitical terms are all anglophone nations commensurate? The very strangeness of this denial of equal representation calls attention to a politics of comparative representation characteristically invoked not in international, but in American contexts. In other words, the metaphor calls up the paradigm we know as identity politics–a particularly American paradigm. I want to suggest that the 3rd Norton is in this sense doubly American-centered; if its selection is consciously weighted in favor of poets from the U. S., at the same time contemporary “American values” govern the anthology as a whole. (Nationality is after all a predicate of poets as subjects before it develops the complexly nuanced meaning that issues in a term like “American poetry.”) In its treatment of recent poetry, the new Norton embodies a particular version of academic leftism: identity politics, a doctrine, as Guillory has argued, itself related to the tradition of American pluralism. The anthology’s place of origin and intended market, the North American university, governs not merely the numbers of poets, but the very language of representation underlying anthologization.

 

On one level this is hardly surprising: any overtly academic anthology will necessarily be governed by the representational logic of the academy. But if the dominant logic of the academy is pluralism, how do the pluralistic predicates of social identity interlock with poetic values? Poets exist for the anthology as subjects marked by the predicates of identity before they exist as the embodiment of any particular poetics. While the new Norton borrows a strategy from Allen’s anthology, that of including “poetics statements,” none of the younger American poets on whom I’ll be focusing have such statements included.

 

Ramazani’s account of the priorities that motivated changes made in the current Norton reinforces this logic of identity. Three priorities are particularly relevant to my concerns: First, to “represent the accelerated globalization of English-language poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in the work of postcolonial poets who creatively hybridize indigenous traditions with British and American influences”; second, to “welcome into the anthology what John Ashbery has called an ‘other tradition’–experimental poetry by modern avant-garde writers…extending to the contemporary avant-garde”; third, “to present various modern and contemporary poets who have only recently emerged into prominence” (xxix). Different notions of anthologizing agency are in play here: the Norton, accurately if perhaps inexplicitly, portrays itself as both judging and validating or reproducing received judgments. To “represent” postwar postcolonial poets acknowledges their having been present within anglophone poetry as an ongoing process of creative hybridization; the “welcome” extended to avant-garde poetry, somewhat differently, would seem to bring it into the fold while still preserving its separate status, apart from the polity of modern and contemporary poetry within or alongside which it exists; finally, the inclusion of “recently emerged” modern and contemporary poets indicates that the anthology sees itself as recognizing preexisting judgments–judgments, of course, which its own acknowledgment will considerably, at least for a time, solidify.

 

The Norton’s “emergent” poets have themselves been sorted into groups, and the criteria of their emergence prove to be primarily criteria of identity: “poets of the Harlem Renaissance and African American modernism,” “female modern poets…and their contemporary counterparts,” “poets of ethnic American minorities,” “poets of Ireland and Northern Ireland,” “poets of gay experience,” “poets influenced by European surrealism and East Asian literature,” “an influential poet of World War I,” and “an eminent Australian” (xxix). In such descriptions, identity and subject matter generally seem to coincide. But one should notice a crucial and neglected asymmetry. Poets who wrote at an earlier historical moment do not “emerge” as contemporary poets do, having been positioned within the literary field of their own moment; rather, revisions to literary history allow them to come into focus. The conditions of reception under which any poet will be seen to “emerge” are specifically contemporary ones, but the conditions that make available both contemporary and historical poets as the subjects of such a process vary. The poets of the Harlem Renaissance and of African-American modernism (and of which, one might ask, was Jean Toomer?) are, after all, African-American poets–and might thus be included within the set of “poets of ethnic American minorities.” Such a separation of terms here acknowledges, without examination, the fact that “modernism” and the “Harlem Renaissance” are complex signifiers, dense with sedimented aesthetic history. The notion of “ethnic American minorities,” by contrast, implying as it does a certain commensurability, evokes the discourse by which races are compared–the discourse of racism. This of course is not to accuse the anthology of any such attitudes, but to notice that category of minority identity is organized around the experience of oppression (one aspect of which, of course, might be under-representation at the level of canonical textbooks).

 

One must, then, derive the poetics of identity inductively from the examples at hand. Just as the anthology’s national breakdown does not aspire to equality, its breakdown of American identities does not seek to “represent” the current demographic diversity of the United States, or even of those Americans who write poetry; rather, the overall image of the canon is adjusted in the direction of contemporary values, and the nature of these values will be most clearly visible in the selection of new poets. As the conditions of canonicity change, they interlock with the (limited) availability of historical writers who embody these changing values. A list of the American poets under 50 included in the new Norton may suffice to suggest that we remain in this historical moment. These names are given in order of appearance in the second volume; I have appended to each name bracketed descriptions in the language of the anthology:

 

• Charles Bernstein [born “in New York City, his father the head of a dressmaking company”]
• Carolyn Forché [born “in Detroit, Michigan”]
• Jorie Graham [born “in New York, to an Irish American father and a Jewish American mother”]
• Joy Harjo [of “Muskogee Creek Heritage”]
• Gary Soto [a “Chicano writer”]
• Rita Dove [“African American”]
• Alberto Rios [a “Chicano poet”]
• Mark Doty [ born “in Maryville, Tennessee,” he “works in the tradition of American autobiographical poetry”]
• Thylias Moss [“African American”]
• Louise Erdrich [“French Ojibwa” mother and “German-born father”]
• Lorna Dee Cervantes [“Chicano/a,” “of Mexican and Native American ancestry”]
• Marilyn Chin [quoted: “I am a Chinese American poet”]
• Cathy Song [“born … in Honolulu, Hawaii to a Chinese American mother and a Korean American father”]
• Dionisio Martinez [born “in Cuba … he grew up in Glendale, California”]
• Henri Cole [“Beset with contradictions between his homosexuality and his Catholicism”]
• Li-Young Lee [born “to Chinese parents in Jakarta, Indonesia, [he] is one of the preeminent poets of the East Asian diaspora in the United States”]
• Sherman Alexie [“A ‘registered’ (in the bureaucratic jargon) Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, Alexie is a master of the trickster aesthetic”]

 

Insofar as individual poets, rather than poems, are selected for anthologizing, they become to a degree commensurate: one may be tempted to count them. (No prominent teaching anthology has yet decentered the poet.) Nevertheless, a list like the one I’ve just presented can hardly be produced, let alone discussed, without a certain awkwardness.² What stands out here, I hope, is not any sense that I’ve quoted insidiously, but rather the sheer variety of formulations that may be subsumed under the category of “social identity.” Any such collection of poets can only be seen as a marvelous example of diversity–yet the particular version of diversity as instantiated by the Norton deserves closer examination. The cited phrases that follow each name are meant to suggest the variety of national, racial, ethnic, class, and gender identities explicitly or implicitly predicated to the poet as subject. I cite language about every poet, language which may or may not suggest their affiliation with a “marked” identity. I do not introduce what seemed more interpretive comments: that Carolyn Forché writes a poetry “of psychological and sexual experience” (915), for example. If we attempt to reduce this bewildering complexity of identities to the question of marked and unmarked identities, among these seventeen American poets the “unmarked” identity of the white male is conspicuous by its relative absence–Doty, Cole, and Bernstein. And the former two of these poets are marked as interpreters of gay experience (Cole in the cited note, Doty in his authorship of the powerful “Homo Will Not Inherit.”) But Bernstein is not only the one straight white male among these poets; he is also the only experimentalist–the only one of these poets who, given the “two traditions” symbolically represented by the juxtaposition of Bishop and Olson, would be taken by critics generally to stand in the latter line (and the only one of these contemporaries whose “poetics statement” is included in the anthology).

 

The Norton, I would argue, gives its presumptive audience an alternative perspective on its own selection of recent poetry, as when Ramazani summarizes Bernstein’s stance: “Despite its pretense of diversity, ‘mainstream poetry’ assumes a restrictive norm in which a single voice expresses personal feeling” (909). In this sense the Norton, in however limited a sense, does attempt what Gerald Graff has referred to as “teaching the conflicts.” Given this opportunity, I’ll now take advantage of Ramazani’s (pluralist) generosity of spirit by introducing the wedge of a still more pointed quotation, from Bernstein’s “States of the Art,” the first essay in A Poetics: “Too often, the works selected to represent cultural diversity are those that accept the model of representation assumed by the dominant culture in the first place…I see my yiddishe mama on Hester street / Next to all the pushcarts I can no longer peddle” (6). The word “representation” marks the spot where political and anthological discourses coincide.

 

This is not to say that Ramazani sees himself as engaged in an aesthetics of partisan representation. Ramazani introduces the question of identity very differently in different contexts; moreover, the anthology’s headnotes are consistently concerned to assert that no single social identity can exhaust poetic motivation. Thus Gary Soto “both emerged from this cultural moment [Chicano nationalism] and felt distinct from it” (969); Rita Dove “wants less to separate the African American aesthetic from other cultural traditions than to offer a synthesis” (975); Li-Young Lee’s work “bears the imprint of his Chinese background [but] it should not be exoticized” (1040); Thylias Moss “says she avoids ‘imposing certain agendas’ on her poems, such as those of ‘identity’ politics” (999). These, of course, are admirable cautions–but, in the context of the anthology, a remark such as Moss’s is perhaps deceptive, insofar as it misidentifies its own adversary. To what extent might identity politics be primarily an “agenda,” imposed upon the poem with presumably crushing effect? At the most literal level, one might think of a poem that plays with precisely that question, Amiri Baraka’s “SOS,” which I’ll quote in full:

 

Calling black people
Calling all black people, man woman child
Wherever you are, calling you, urgent, come in
Black People, come in, wherever you are, urgent, calling
you, calling all black people
calling all black people, come in, black people, come
on in. (Reader 218)

 

Baraka’s lyric seeks to call black subjects into existence–more precisely, to hail “Black” subjects, in the specific Black Arts racial-nationalist sense of that designation. This brotherly hailing is itself a complex process; its double address is attested to by a palpable shift, emphasized by the final line-break, from the abstract, neutral repetitions of “come in” to the spoken–even ideolectal, I’d suggest, potentially Black–invitation: “come on in.” The poem’s very purpose, its insistence on its own status as performance (its own awareness, one might say, of the difference between address and apostrophe) poses a dilemma: can Baraka call directly and efficaciously to “all black people,” thus transcending the mediation not just of the white world but of the “poetry world”?

 

Such questions adamantly resist a formalist reading, pointing us back out into the world of publishers, audience, and ever-widening circles of context where the effect of a poem as such an action might conceivably be measured. But such poems are rare. Insofar as Ramazani chooses not to anthologize them–works that in a real sense reject the reader who cannot respond to such an address–he is consistent with the stance implied by Thylias Moss’s words. But in so doing he does not reject the discourse of identity politics: far from it. In the realm of poetry, identity politics is more usefully conceived of as an agenda whose effects are visible at the level of canon formation. In this sense, what individual poets think about identity politics doesn’t matter: the selection of contemporary poetry as a whole issues out of liberal pluralism, the scheme of representation by which our society negotiates the relations between competing identities. Ramazani’s own editorial remark is particularly revealing: he suggests that the “neoconfessional mode that seems to have lost much of its force for Anglo-American poets has been renewed and adapted by poets such as [Li-Young] Lee, Alberto Ríos, and Joy Harjo, who write poems that straddle the introspection of confessional poetry and the communal reach of ‘identity poetry’ ” (2, lxvii). Of course, one can find enormous numbers of American poets who still work in a neoconfessional mode, but what I find striking is how the sample of (non-Anglo-American) poets Ramazani has gathered privileges introspection over “communal reach,” a phrase, indeed, more aptly attached to Baraka’s “SOS” than to virtually any of the “identity” poems anthologized in this Norton.

 

The idea that the poem, possessed of “voice,” provides unmediated access to experience must also be maintained if the relation between particular subjectivities and particular lyrics is to remain stable. After all, the lyric poem–which, among other things, is the poem of a length amenable to anthologizing–has long been conceived of as the bearer par excellence of experiential particulars. Given such a conception, one might argue the liberal-pluralist canon logically follows. Indeed, the narrative of identity–of immigrant experience–is perhaps the literary genre par excellence in the contemporary American academy. I conclude by considering the poetics of identity–the way in which poetic language “represents” the subject–and by considering briefly, by way of contrast, a poet for whom identity is constituted within language.

 

Certainly, Ramazani does not regard identity as immutable. Yet if one looks for a recent poem in the Norton that treats the relation between language and identity as a problem, the pickings are slim. Poem after poem uses its particular diction, pared-down or lush, formal or colloquial, to narrate a slice of life. On one poetic occasion, however, the arbitrariness of the signifier does appear as a social fact–as does the institution where the anthology will be used. This is Exhibit A: Li-Young Lee’s “Persimmons” (1041-42):[e]

 

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose

 

persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.

 

The topic of “difference,” for Lee’s poem, begins with language: with two metrically identical English words (one Latinate, the other a corruption of an Algonquin name)–and with a scene of discipline by which the difference between the two words is enforced. Mrs. Walker, representing the educational institution, seeks to correct the boy’s imprecise use of language, or to enforce the status–slow, backward–to which such imprecision dooms him. The second stanza, as it unfolds in a kind of manual for the persimmon, continues to provide double evidence of mastery: the speaker’s assumed familiarity with the “exotic” fruit modulates into a display of familiarity with the musical resources of English. To “choose” persimmons, in this sense, is to select them as fit subject for lyric meditation–as the full-ripened signs of a particular ethnic identity.

 

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down.
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten.
Naked: I’ve forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.

 

Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

 

This dynamic–the linguistic failure of the immigrant speaker replaced by a mastery on other levels–characterizes the poem’s movement. Moving from scenic memory to more generalized recollections, the poet as language learner attempts to separate language from experience: pairs of near-homonyms are further confounded as they prove to stand for associated experiences. Yet again, the slippage of the signifier is halted by the introduction of primal, childhood realities: mother’s handiwork is an art of confident connectivity: once given form, her yarn will not unravel. The poem then returns to the schoolroom–and when teacher imagines, as teachers will, that her classificatory powers over the signifier extend to the referent itself, the poet gains a certain revenge:

 

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat
but watched the other faces.

 

The poem ends with the son’s return home, where he looks “for something I lost”–thus adult poet allegorizes immigrant child’s search for origins. Now blind, his father waits on the stairs as he searches for and finds his father’s precise painting of persimmons:

 

Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.

 

The precision of the father’s painting and the precision of his son’s poem are drawn together: “this” is “Persimmons.” Precision, incarnated in the persimmon, its subject, ripens with time; record of the hand, the father’s precision, passed on to the son, will stand. The adult speaking-self, throughout the poem, will clarify distinctions–will, quite exactly, “choose” precision, writing a masterful lyric organized around a central image. And so the slippery signifiers of childhood by poem’s end are nowhere to be found. The deictic This of presence is mobilized against loss, even as the question of loss is shifted from the linguistic register to the anticipated loss of a beloved parent who has already lost his sight. In the headnote to his selection of Lee’s poetry, Ramazani comments: “Imperfectly grounded in English as a child, the adult speaker, likewise unable to remember some Chinese words, is completely at home in neither language” (1039). Yet what Lee writes stabilizes the language of poetry in a lyric conclusion that takes shelter in tangible experience.

 

What makes the Norton‘s emphasis on such poetry seem a partial reading of the contemporary is its own treatment of historical modernism. After all, the writing of non-native speakers has come to be seen as increasingly fundamental to our definition of poetic modernism: Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Louis Zukofsky (all of whom in childhood used at least in part a language other than English)–modernist experimentation can be said to stem from the explosion of unified national poetic traditions. Indeed, all these aforementioned poets are included in the first volume of the new Norton. But the story this anthology tells us about our own moment is of the replacement of modernist mongrelism with a standardized workshop dialect–a dialect spoken by the current generation of immigrants, a dialect of which their mastery can signify successful poetic assimilation even as they thematize the ironies and complexities of double consciousness.

 

The larger irony here is that the contemporary experimental scene–if it can even be thought of as a single scene–is anything but an old boys club. Take, for example, Harryette Mullen. Hardly an obscure avant-gardiste, she teaches African-American literature at UCLA. In an essay first published in 1996, “Poetry and Identity,” Mullen suggested that “minority” and “experimental” poets were equally marginal with regard to the centers of poetic authority, though minority poets might be gaining ground. Her prediction looks prescient. Mullen’s own work is simultaneously traditional and experimental; I’ll quote a few stanzas from the book-length sequence Muse and Drudge:

 

hooked on phonemes imbued with exuberance
our spokeswoman listened for lines
heard tokens of quotidian
corralled in ludic routines

 

slumming umbra alums
lost some of their parts
getting a start
in the department of far art

 

monkey’s significant uncle
blond as a bat
took off beat path
through tensile jungle (Mullen 49)

 

The poem is perfectly “teachable”–and teachable within frameworks that Americanists, or African-American literature scholars, will be ready to use. Mullen’s quatrains are densely packed with cultural signifiers of African-American experience, yet almost never become abstract or preachy. Even more crucially, she does not assume the self-possessed speaking subject as the starting point of her verse; rather, the play of language generates positions which are quickly abandoned. The formation of the voice–most often, in this text, the African-American voice–is for Mullen a legitimately lyric subject. For sincerity, she substitutes signifying. The “monkey’s significant uncle” is a creation possible only in poetry, generated, as he is, out of play with concepts–from pseudo-Darwinian racism to African trickster mythology–and phonemes and from their unpredictable overlap. Monkey’s uncle, significant other, signifying monkey, and, finally, signifying other: the chain of displacements finally leads us to the otherness of signification–which is to say, of language–itself: not the “I” that speaks, but the languages that speak us as we speak and, so doing, are spoken for.

 

Mullen, or her spokeswoman, has heard those who have “found their voice” and are singing its melody (or malady?) on the quotidian stage of the self, the repeat performance of identity playing itself out. And yet offbeat paths are available to us, perhaps more of them now than ever. I won’t attempt to claim that had the Norton chosen such a path, at the turn of the millennium, it might have made all the difference–for how much power can a single anthology, however institutionally buttressed, really have? Rather, I’ll say, with Gertrude Stein, looking at the still-flourishing life of the poetic world that this otherwise admirable anthology has left for dead: “the difference is spreading.”

 

Notes

 

1. See Alan Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic (esp. 41-113) for the distinction between poet’s canons and school canons.

 

2. Joe Amato uses the identical tactic in reviewing Cary Nelson’s Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry. Offering a catalog very similar to my own, Amato remarks that “readers are likely to infer from these headnotes the now familiar, if problematic, equation at work throughout: viz., that a poet’s identity, as determined by her social experience–the structural and personal consequences of ethnic or racial lineage, gender, sexual orientation, familial circumstances, class status, occupation, place of birth, and so forth–corresponds to a poet’s social (and sometimes socialist) agenda, and accounts for the work’s having been written the way it is, and published (and critically received, or no), in the first place.” Amato’s review as a whole brilliantly exemplifies the difficulties in articulating commitments to both left politics and experimental poetics within the contemporary academy.

 

3. Interestingly, the persimmon as signifier of ethnicity (of, in this case, “Japanese-ness”) appears in the (in)famous Doubled Flowering, a collection of poems by the Hiroshima survivor Araki Yasusada–who, it was discovered after their publication in a wide variety of leading literary magazines, was an invented figure (most now would say Kent Johnson, though Johnson, who has been called the “Yasusada-poet,” has not taken credit for the work).

 

 Works Cited:

 

• Amato, Joe. “It Was the Best of Tomes, It Was the Worst of Tomes: Cary Nelson’s Anthology of Modern American Poetry.” Rev. of Anthology of Modern American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson. Jacket 11 (April 2000). <http://jacketmagazine.com/11/nelson-by-amato.html>.
• Ashbery, John. Flow Chart. New York: Knopf, 1992.
• Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.
• Golding, Alan. From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995.
• Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
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