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1. The Janitor’s Poems of Every Day: American Poetry and the 1930s
- University of Iowa Press
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1. The Janitor’s Poems of Every Day American Poetry and the 1930s . . . The dump is full Of images. Days pass like papers from a press. The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun, And so the moon, both come, and the janitor’s poems Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears, The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea. , “The Man on the Dump” Over the cobbled streets, past the two blocks of dump and straggling grass, past the human dumpheap where the nameless FrankLloydWrights of the proletariat have wrought their wondrous futuristic structures of flat battered tin cans, fruit boxes and gunny sacks, cardboard and mother earth. , Yonnondio: From the Thirties Perhaps the best-known American poem about waste since TheWaste Land, Wallace Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump” represents the dump as a site of ruin and recovery, of imagistic refuse and linguistic transformation, a site in which even the detritus of a collapsed capitalist economy can be converted into poetry. Stevens’s dump appears to be an eccentric if not unique site for poetic imagination in histories of modern American poetry; however, by the time that “The Man on the Dump” was published——the dump had become a conspicuous , contested terrain for literary and visual artists.1 Cubist, dadaist, and surrealist collage artists had recycled trash before the s, transforming discarded mass-produced objects whose value was otherwise exhausted. During the Great Depression, however, the dump registers more politically—not only as a symbolic site of the decay and disorder of American society but also as a public site for the reinvention of art and society. Tillie Olsen’s lyrical “lament for the lost,” Yonnondio, exemplifies such a revolutionary perspective on the “human dumpheap”: while she decries the lost potential of working-class lives stunted by a ruthless capitalist society, she also celebrates the creative resilience of these “nameless FrankLloydWrights of the proletariat” (). Unlike Marxist exposures of American Depression–era waste such as Olsen’s, in which “the 1 2 the janitor’s poems of every day janitor’s poems/Of every day” register as indictments of the capitalist social order, “The Man on the Dump” manifests Stevens’s skepticism about the political role of poetry. In its presupposition of the cultural marginality of poetry and its tentative endorsement of a marginal site for poetic production, Stevens’s poem nonetheless echoes more politicized literary treatments of waste. More specifically , “The Man on the Dump” evokes the problem of cultural memory that preoccupied writers during the Depression. Perhaps in no period of the nation’s history were there so many different stories vying to explain American culture than in the s, and perhaps at no time was the idea of culture itself more intensely debated. In representing the dump as a marginal but heterogeneous site of social and aesthetic discourses, Stevens dramatizes how cultural memory is constructed and contested. If the problem of cultural memory had preoccupied poets from the romantic era of postrevolutionary Europe through the post–World War I years of modernism , the Depression represented a more specific crisis of representation. On the one hand, the social authority of American capitalist institutions was radically contested. On the other hand, the Depression itself was notoriously resistant to narrative representation, despite the profuse documentary imagery by which the period has subsequently been remembered. The beginning of the Depression defied representation for anyone who was not an expert on finance capitalism, and the longer the Depression lasted, the more difficult it became to imagine its conclusion. This lost capacity to represent social reality exacerbated the more palpable threat of unemployment, poverty, and hunger. As Michael Denning writes, the Depression was “a curious crisis, marked not by upheaval, civil war, or coups d’état, but by an absence: the absence of work.” While disturbing images of overaccumulation—“idle factories and unemployed workers, hungry farmers and rotting, unpicked crops” (Denning )—became part of the popular consciousness, narrative accounts of such paradoxical juxtapositions were less persuasive. Popular metaphors of the Depression—from metaphors of psychic disorder like the euphemistic term “depression” itself, to the metaphors of natural disaster that supplanted them—evoked a collective loss of agency. And the predominant plot of the Depression was one of waiting—waiting on breadlines , waiting on roadsides and street corners, waiting in prison, waiting for nothing . This enigmatic resistance to narrative challenged poets...
