A Global "We"? Poetic Exhortations in a Time of Precarious Life

In his analysis of Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin shows that late nineteenth-century European poetry's retreat into a radical individuality is a response to changes in capitalism—in particular, new temporalities of machine work and "shocks" by the crowd (161). This essay brings together two poets, Sean Bonney and Myung Mi Kim, who write under conditions in which that crowd has disappeared. The hortatory mode used by their poems takes its ethical and political force not from the shock of encountering the crowd but from realizing that crowds themselves are in jeopardy. While some contemporary hortatory poems draw on historical norms of lyric poetry, my concern here is not the Anglophone lyric per se; the ballads and experimental open forms of poetry I look at below also reshape the rhetoric of calling, inviting, pleading, and cursing. Written from, and in tension with, centers of economic and political power in the United States and UK, these poems uncover a specific historical relation between contemporary poetry in English—in Kim's case, English and Korean—and the politics of the crowd. To orient these poems in relation to global capitalism today is to underscore the extent to which global capitalism renders its crowds precarious, capable of disintegration by informalized labor conditions, dispersal by a militarized police and a securitized state, or cooption by the politics of communitarianism and expulsion. In response to the globally induced vulnerability of collective life, the poets in this essay desperately conjure a globalized "we," a crowd to come.

Neither poet lays claim to an explicit, thematized "we," however. Suspicious of the totalizing and potentially totalitarian politics of the "we," both of them develop instead a formal and stylistic procedure for culling and gleaning the material that they include in their poetry.

I use the metaphor of commoning to describe this poetics, taking my cue from the titles of the two poetry collections in this essay, Bonney's The Commons and Kim's Commons. Their materials are never simply equal fragments juxtaposed across gulfs of difference, but, as the terms "gleaning" and "commoning" both imply, ones scored by economic precariousness and marked by historical and racialized positions of inequality. Nor are they the remnants of a high European tradition, preserved in modernist bricolage against their ruin. The porousness of the poem to its different materials varies in degree from Bonney to Kim, depending on the unique possibilities granted by their chosen forms. The conditions and locations in which the poems are situated are ineluctably specific: Bonney's cuckoo sings ballads about British and U.S. networks of finance; Kim's fractured and reconstituted Korean and English syntax is embedded in the violence of war and displacement. But both poets reinvent the forms they use through the poetic enactment of gleaning. In this way, the commoning of diverse poetic leftovers becomes the stockpile that powers a collectivity yet to come.

The invitation to a crowd is not so much marked by the imagination of a particular set of figures in Bonney and Kim as it is by their innovations within the hortatory modes of summoning, calling together, and inciting. The rhetoric of exhortation has been reinvigorated in contemporary Anglophone poetry written under global conditions of vulnerability, exile and migration, radical uncertainty, and expulsion from social life. Hortatory rhetoric is closely related to the trope of apostrophe, which Jonathan Culler argues "makes its point by troping not on the meaning of a word but on the circuit or situation of communication itself" (1977, 59). Epideixis, or the convention of praise that is constitutive of Greek lyric poetry, can often be combined with exhortation: The Song of Songs, for instance, balances devotion with invitation: "come, my beloved, / let us go out into the fields" (105). Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, notes that praise has the tendency to slip quickly into exhortation: "To praise a man is … akin to urging a course of action" (35). As early as Sappho and as late as Claudia Rankine, exhortation is one of the most recognizable ways that Greek, European, and Anglophone poetry talks to strangers, extending its intimacy...