Poetry: The 1950s to the Present

Thankful to my predecessor, Jim Cocola, for (among other things) his category "Poetry and Its Others," I begin this review with works that suggest new contexts and resulting ways of reading. I hope that they may also suggest new pathways through postwar U.S. poetry and the last century in general as well as construct bridges between existing trajectories, especially the continued difficulty integrating and relating white male and increasingly female canons, ethnic literatures, and competing canons of modernism, midcentury, and postmodernism versus a long modernist avant-garde.

i Poetry and Its Others

a. Race

Two works on racialized and racializing reading practices in a variety of genres and arts expose the politics of the questions we bring to interpretation. Phillip Brian Harper's Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture (NYU) tracks the interpretive assumptions that lead artists and critics to read works by African American artists as "narrative" and thus to "emplot" their work in a narrative of African American experience that "ground[s] art in a real-world racial order," disregarding techniques in which "alienation effects might register with optimal force." Harper details with painstaking precision how critics interpret a Kara Walker silhouette cut-out as referring to a lynched man, ignoring its oddly abstract, flattened aspects and the artificial space in which it is placed, or Billie Holiday's rough voice as an index of her hard life rather than a formal effect to be imitated. The critic Amiri Baraka, according to Harper, similarly overreads the influence of black artists on Cecil B. Taylor's music, deemphasizing other elements that are "profoundly abstract and so incapable of referentially evoking either racial experience or any other social factor," while writers Harper terms "narrative," such as Ntozake Shange and Alice Walker, "solicit realist interpretation by adhering to well-established protocols for realist narrative portrayal but in so doing reinforce the association of blackness with specific sociopolitical contexts." While Harper makes an oddly prescriptive argument for prose poetry as the art form most suited to breaking narrative expectations because it raises these expectations only to disrupt them, he demonstrates genuinely different assumptions. Whereas black artists write narratives that refer directly to a specific sociopolitical reality, white artists are read as "abstract." These practices reinforce construction of divergent black and white literary canons, maintaining the invisibility of white social conditions and the association of white artists' works with aesthetic innovation. While these reading practices are significant to recognizing the different sociopolitical conditions that inform art's production and meaning, particularly structures of oppression, they can prevent the common ground crucial to understanding and relating raced realities. Likewise, in describing a shift in Asian American poetry away from representation of immigrant conditions, Josephine Park recognizes a similar problem with interpretation of Asian American literature: "Like all minority literatures, Asian American literature is only legible through a political frame; and yet American poets of Asian descent have composed poem after poem that have nothing to do with the burdens of minority or postcolonial experience. … Whether or not this poetry should be considered Asian American is an open question" ("Asian American Poetry," pp. 101–13 in Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature).

William J. Maxwell's F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton) opens troubling ground on the state's influence on interpretive reading practice. Drawing extensively on the FBI files of African American writers (including Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, and contributors to important anthologies such as Alain Locke's The New Negro, Baraka and Larry Neal's Black Fire, and Dudley Randall's The Black Poets), Maxwell shows that the FBI believed African American letters had a subversive political message. This belief produced a "state of counterliterary exception" that extended beyond surveillance to the "active production of blackface counterintelligence," in the form of ghostwritten works (e.g., a threat letter to Martin Luther King Jr.; pamphlets that "digest[ed] and repurpose[d] the public voice of African American writers" to revamp the literary marketplace; personal prison narratives of individuals recanting black nationalism), recruitment and training of English...