- Poetics of the Americas
Speaking in Buffalo in 1994, the Argentinean poet Jorge Santiago Perednik ended his talk on cultural resistance to the recent reign of terror in his country by saying “the struggle is impossible and for that reason it took place.” 1Without wanting to violate the cultural specificity of Perednik’s comment, I understand this also to mean that poetry, insofar as it resists reification as culturally sanctioned Poetry, is also impossible—and for that reason takes place. For the sake of this context, I would like to add America to this list, for America is impossible and for this reason, also, it exists.
Or Americas, for it is in the resistance to any singular unity of identity that the impossibility of America, of a Poetics of the Americas, may be said to dwell. The cultural space of this impossible America is not carved up by national borders or language borders but transected by innumerable overlaying, contradictory or polydictory, traditions and proclivities and histories and regions and peoples and circumstances and identities and families and collectivities and dissolutions—dialects and ideolects, not National Tongues; localities and habitations, not States.
But such an America is imaginary, for everywhere the local is under fire from the imposed standard of a transnational consumer culture and undermined by the imperative to extract it and export it as product.
In the United States we are particularly bedeviled by our own history of cultural resistance, often confusing the struggles for cultural legitimation of the last century with our own reversed roles in this one. I am thinking of the specific needs, a century ago, that gave rise to the invention of “American [End Page 1] literature” as an academic category within the university system that had only recently countenanced English, or British, literature as a suitable appendix to the study of the classics (primarily Greek and Roman works). At that time, there was a clear necessity for breaking away from the perceived limitations of “Island” English literature in order to build an audience for, and give a measure of respectability and legitimation to, certain New England and “middle-Atlantic” and southern English-language texts. “American” in this context was a strategic rather than an essential category; as a result, the multi-ethnic and polylinguistic reality of the U. S. was not accented in early formations of “American literature.” By 1925, William Carlos Williams, in In the American Grain,had given new breadth to the concept of America; yet his related insistence on an American speech suggested a false essence to a concept useful only as a negation: NOT English verse diction. That is, as a negative category American literature was a useful hypothesis. In contrast, for the present, the idea of American literature understood as a positive, expressive “totalization” needs to continue to be dismantled.
The problem here is twofold: the totalization of “America” and the globally dominant position of the U. S. Since the U. S. is the dominant English language (as well as Western) nation in the political, economic, and mass-cultural spheres, its monopolizing powers need to be cracked—from the inside and outside—as surely as one version of England’s grip on our language’s literature needed to be loosened in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The same logic that led to the invention of American, as distinct from English, literature now leads to the invention of, on the one hand, a non-American-centered English-language literature and, on the other, a poetics of the Americas. Any unitary concept of America is an affront to the multiplicity of Americas that makes U. S. culture as vital as it is. America is, to echo Perednik, an “unclassifiable” totality (“PCR”). For there is no one America. The U. S. is less a melting pot than a simultaneity of inconsolable coexistences—from the all-too-audible spokespeople of the state to the ghostly voices of the almost lost languages of the sovereign nations of Arapaho, Mohawk, Shoshone, Pawnee, Pueblo, Navaho, Crow, Cree, Kickapoo, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Zuni . . . though in truth there are no sovereigns, only sojourners.
For writing, or reading, to assume—and consequently “express” or “project...