US Poetry in the Age of Empire, 1979–2012 by Piotr K. Gwiazda (review)

Piotr K. Gwiazda’s US Poetry in the Age of Empire, 1979–2012 joins such other studies of empire and American literature as David S. Shields’s Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago, 1990) and Eric Wertheimer’s Imagined Empires (Cambridge, 1999). Unlike Gwiazda’s study, recent work on the topic of imperialism and American culture has tended to focus more on prose or other cultural media. Such work includes John Carlos Rowe’s Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism (Oxford, 2000), Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Harvard, 2002), Gretchen Murphy’s Hemispheric Imaginings (Duke, 2005), and Harilaos Stecopoulos’s Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898–1976 (Cornell, 2008). One exception is The Colonial Moment: Discoveries and Settlements in Modern American Poetry (Northern Illinois, 2004), in which I address colonization in the work of five poets, and another is Poems Containing History (Lexington, 2014), in which Gary Grieve-Carlsen focuses broadly on the idea of history and its relationship to twentieth-century American poetry.

In terms of period and genre, Gwiazda aims to update Robert von Hallberg’s American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980 (Harvard, 1985), which he regards as “the last book-length study that explicitly places American poetry against the imperial backdrop” (3). In particular, he offers a definition of civic poetry and an analysis of its methods and concerns in US culture during the last thirty years. The first three chapters are devoted to the work of well-known poets (Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, and Amiri Baraka), and versions of these chapters originally appeared in the pages of prestigious academic journals (College Literature, The Journal of Modern Literature, and Contemporary Literature). Having established his authority on contemporary poetry and the topic of imperialism, Gwiazda consolidates it in this book by extending his analysis to key works of six contemporary poets over the course of two more chapters. By organizing his book in this manner, Gwiazda offers an account of the development of civic poetry in response to contemporary events such as the Gulf War, 9/11, and recent economic turbulence that has plagued the domestic sphere (Occupy Wall Street).

Gwiazda believes nationalism and globalism to be intertwined with one another, rather than mutually exclusive. Instead of adopting a strictly trans-national approach, he sees the value of paying attention to national identity and national policies, including their relationship to “war, poverty, racism, and environmental degradation” (3). In particular, he zeroes in on the way poets use rhetoric to address their fellow citizens. “The intense feeling of alienation from their country,” he writes, “compels [some Americans] to write poems that expose today’s America as an imperial regime that engages in unilateral wars and promotes economic inequality. The same feeling also propels them to seek and develop new modes of identification with their fellow citizens” (9). Regarding such modes of identification, Gwiazda portrays poetry as “an affect producing tool” designed to “impart knowledge” and develop a public consciousness among readers (1–2). Regarding citizenship, he draws on the theories of empire and resistance developed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth. Overall, Gwiazda focuses on the way his chosen poets “ruminate upon America’s duplicities—its pretense to act in the name of peace and freedom while pursuing its own military and political agenda, its self-image as an exceptional nation despite its many domestic failures” (17).

In his chapter on Pinsky, Gwiazda focuses on the role of imagination in An Explanation of America (1979) and situates it in the context of the Viet Nam War. He notes that equivocation is at the heart of the poem when he quotes Pinsky’s powerful description of the United States as “The plural-headed Empire, manifold / Beyond my outrage or my admiration” (36). He concludes that Pinsky portrays “national identity as something improvised...