On the Walls and in the Streets: American Poetry Broadsides from the 1960s (review)

Poetry criticism in the nineties often has an air of the jeremiad. “What possible relevance does this archaic art form have to contemporary society?” asks Dana Gioia, complaining in the title essay of Can Poetry Matter? that poets have abandoned a public audience by writing only to fellow academics. ¹ James D. Sullivan creates for us a lost paradise of relevance, a decade when topical poetry was an instrument in political causes from the antiwar movement to black nationalism. Poetry in his cultural-studies approach matters literally in its material production, performance, and reception. Through mimeographing or photocopying, a poem could be transformed cheaply into posters or fliers, opening potentially different contexts of interpretation with each distribution. Sullivan analyzes the illustrations, notes, and print formats of the single-sheet broadside as they mediate the reader’s response to the poetic text.

At their most visceral, the sixties broadsides force historical context to the forefront: a war memoir is framed by photographs of Vietnamese villagers, or racial subtexts in a poem are emphasized by a reversed color scheme of white letters scrawled on a black background. Using Michel de Certeau’s concept of everyday practices that remain outside institutional control, Sullivan contends that buying a poetry broadside was a political tactic that could unite readers interested in disparate causes. Because the protest lay in disseminating the text rather than in simply reading its content, activists could use a poem whose themes seemed more ambiguous than the message they wished to communicate. In the context of a broadside to raise funds for the defense of the jailed radical Angela Davis, for example, even a poem that seemed pessimistic about the efficacy of protest could be read as a call for action and solidarity (50). Sullivan’s interpretations of the poems whet our curiosity as to whether many readers made these associations—a question that the occasional nature of the texts makes it difficult to answer.

How far could readers appropriate the cultural capital of a famous author’s name and text for their own agendas? Sullivan argues that when the poet laureate Robert Lowell addressed a radical student group at Harvard, the listeners persisted in making him the poet of their revolution even though he did not endorse their goals or read his most political lyrics. The poet retained control over the use of his work only when he makes no public appearance at all, as Lowell once did in refusing President Johnson’s invitation to the White House. When a poem was exhibited in a forum beyond an “armchair” volume (1)—the bête noire of Sullivan’s study— he asserts that it was nearly impossible to control the spread of strategic misinterpretations.

Sullivan himself challenges canons by mixing anthologized poems with pieces that he concedes may fall below a “given aesthetic threshold” but are often the “real life of the art,” satisfying a “cultural need” that other texts do not fulfill (11). He defends this assertion by tracing the sixties publications back to the earliest seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American broadsides: crude print ballads used to sell sensational stories or to publicize an event when the newspapers were too slow. Sullivan’s introductory coverage is intriguing, if a bit scattered; one wishes that he developed the link to the sixties prints in more detail.

The second half of the study traces the dissociation of poetry from social praxis as protest broadsides gave way in the seventies to expensive letterpress art designed for private display cases and library special collections. While Sullivan concedes the aesthetic pleasure of these artifacts and occasionally grants them some shock value, he uses a language of erotic betrayal to describe the aura they place around the text. By emphasizing the process of their production, these texts suggest an illusory immediacy between the poet and the reader (123), but they either serve as status symbols...