A shift in contemporary poetics has begun, most evident in emerging leftist political critiques of the Language poets. These critiques tend to rely on the close attention to the political dimensions of poetry that the Language poets themselves helped to reintroduce into discussions of poetry in the late 1970s.
As the Language poets come under renewed scrutiny, new accounts of the relationship between poetry and politics will need to contend with their work while seeking ways to revivify the radical territory they previously occupied. In Crisis and the US Avant-Garde (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Ben Hickman argues that the literary criticism of the Language poets, or under their immediate influence, places too much faith in an Adornian insistence on the inherent politicization of artistic forms. Hickman calls into question this emphasis on linguistic form as a site of useful political intervention, claiming that such theories seldom produce concrete effects, while they nonetheless occupy space on poetry’s radical front. Hickman hopes to reground twentieth-century poetry in the history of political crises as they unfolded in the US between the Great Depression and the late-1970s financial crisis. Thematizing the poets under consideration through “crisis,” Hickman aims to reread the relationship between the political and the poetic not as an inherent property of language, but rather as an index of poets’ responses to and interventions in actual historical events: “how moments of political crisis can sharpen our sense of the historical force of poetry, and how American poems have sought to intervene in specific political upheavals.” In other words, Hickman hopes to escape abstract accounts of the politics of poetry by focusing on the politics of poets. Though Hickman attempts to pressure “both the speculative preoccupation with poetry’s relation to the commodity and historicism’s immovable ‘context,’” his metacritical and pedagogical focus is mostly concentrated on the former, which he associates with the Language poets and their followers. Hickman’s call for a post-Language renovation of political discourse in poetry feels both necessary and urgent, but his quarrel with Language poetry’s critical theory risks a misstep in his attempt to move past it.
Hickman sets about achieving this renewal through two primary strategies. In the first three chapters, he deploys biographical resources to complicate the reception histories of Louis Zukofsky, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Olson. In the final three chapters on Denise Levertov and Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and the Language poets, Hickman focuses more on social and historical contexts and the ways in which these poets became actors within them. Hickman’s project is primarily an effort at recontextualization; he offers compelling readings of individual poems, but the primary focus is on bringing new or neglected extratextual material to the conversation. Given this orientation, the success or failure of Hickman’s intervention tends to rely on the cogency of the biographical or historical context he brings into play.
In his first chapter, for example, where he offers an excellent reappraisal of Zukofsky’s “A-1,” steeped in its social context, Hickman counters narratives of Zukofsky’s career that trace a teleological trajectory from the failed poetry of commitment toward a more liberated aestheticism—one that pursues politics by means seemingly more congruent with the Language poets. Instead he offers a more nuanced depiction of the diverse and divisive inclusiveness of the literary left during the Great Depression, drawing attention to Zukofsky’s active participation in Marxist organizations. Hickman argues that critics as politically wide-ranging as Hugh Kenner, Eric Mottram, Barrett Watten, and Charles Bernstein have ignored “the awkward facts of [Zukofsky]’s activism within the Communist Party, the Soviet-sponsored League of American Writers, and New Masses…[including] his defence of Stalinism in the [1930s]” in order to posit structurally congruent accounts of Zukofsky’s development.[1] According to Hickman, closer attention to this history can help with “rediscovering the radicalism of Zukofsky’s early work,” while potentially exposing Zukofsky’s postwar output as allied with more reactionary modernist practices than many care to admit. Rather than recuperating Zukofsky’s A Test of Poetry (1948) as the extension of his earlier aborted Workers Anthology (1935) of radical verse, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis does, Hickman points to the ways in which Test “effectively co-opts class struggle into a bourgeois standard of aesthetic pleasure” nearly indistinguishable from the universalizing valuations of Ezra Pound’s aesthetic program in ABC of Reading (1934). For Hickman, the point is to recognize these contradictions in Zukofsky’s thought, and to use the critique of Zukofsky’s predilection for an “ahistorical sense of aesthetic order” as a caution against smoothing over the contradictions between his prewar political commitments and his postwar aesthetics—a warning Hickman quite clearly intends for poets such as DuPlessis and Bernstein.
Hickman’s political project is compelling, yet the project often fails to live up to its promise. Though in the introduction he professes a desire to not fall into the trap of an overdetermined historicism, his use of “crisis” as a conceptual category and his focus on poets’ responses to the historical crises in which they wrote implies a level of historical detail that never fully materializes. In the chapters on Zukofsky and Baraka, for example, the particular crisis each poet negotiates turns out to be more literary and personal than political or historical—at least in terms of the evidence Hickman presents. The Great Depression lingers in the unconscious of the opening chapter, only to surface as an element of aesthetic debates between Zukofsky and such figures as Pound and New Masses editor Mike Gold. Certainly these debates were invested in competing political responses to the Great Depression, but the larger economic crisis remains a background to the personal and literary narrative. Baraka faces a similar impasse between avant-garde abstraction and proletarian realism prompted by his adoption of third world Marxist philosophy in the 1970s. While Hickman details Baraka’s use of the music of John Coltrane to mediate this aesthetic conflict, the crucial historical and philosophical contexts that informed Baraka’s political shift are left unexplored, attributed vaguely to the conditions of African-American life in the US. To propose an account of poetry’s relation to politics through concrete historical crises and then to focus primarily on aesthetic crises does little to undermine Language-centric accounts of the a priori politicization of poetics.
The level of historical detail promised by the introduction and by Hickman’s commitment to “crisis” as a conceptual category surfaces only in the chapters on the Vietnam War and Language writing. In these two chapters, his focus on multiple literary actors helps to break his reliance on biographical detail, allowing the historical moment itself to act as the subject. Before getting down to his analysis of Levertov’s “Staying Alive” (1970) and Ginsberg’s Wichita Vortex Sutra (1966), Hickman adds historical texture through his citation of the expanding readership of poetry in the Vietnam War era, the New Left organizations that formed the backbone of the anti-war movement, the continental philosophers undergirding the intellectual motivation of these organizations, and how this confluence placed poetry in a unique position (both synchronically as a medium, and diachronically in the history of poetics) to comment on contemporary politics. Hickman manages to incorporate all these contexts while quoting poets as dissimilar as Robert Bly, Robert Duncan, Daryl Hine, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Basil Bunting. Such historical texture is what makes his account of poetry’s intervention in the Vietnam War palpable. The chapters that rely heavily on biographical detail, alternatively, do so at the cost of losing the historical graininess that Hickman deploys here with such force.
Nonetheless, Hickman’s careful attention to biographical particulars in discussions of poetry’s politics can help to mediate volatile debates that might lose sight of the historical contexts in which poetry is written. In the chapter on Olson, Hickman hopes to stake out new space for Olson’s politics in the gap between the “clean break” from politics proposed by Tom Clark’s hagiographic biography and accounts by critics such Robert von Hallberg and Heriberto Yépez that depict Olson as little more than a stooge of US imperialism. By returning to the archival material that concerns Olson’s break with his wartime employment in the Office of War Information, Hickman argues that Olson repudiated the imperialist policies of Roosevelt’s successors yet never fully abandoned the political as a mode of rhetoric or organization. The insertion into the collective record of Olson’s statements on US interventionism constitutes the primary value of Hickman’s reading.
Yet this focus on writers’ direct statements about their politics reveals another weakness of the project: in every chapter except the closing chapter on the Language poets, Hickman too often takes the writers at their word. Hickman’s trust emerges from his critique of deconstructive accounts of the politicization of language and his resulting treatment of the poems’ content as distinct from their form. While eschewing formal readings marks an integral part of Hickman’s rebuttal of the Language poets, his methodology leaves him open to accusations of naivety. Though Hickman is aware that “no reader wants to associate a poet they admire with dogmatic anti-intellectualism,” he fails to extend this critical suspicion to statements made by the writers in his study, except in his hypercritical account of Language poetry. This double standard marks his censure of Language poetics as an exercise in bad faith. A greater attention to poetic form may have allowed Hickman to complicate the claims of poets about their own political positions. Indeed, Hickman’s account of Zukofsky’s historicist formalism, posed in contrast to Pound’s ahistorical, universal formalism, suggests that Hickman could have incorporated formalist readings. Instead, Hickman trusts that poets’ statements about their political commitments are able to sufficiently account for the politics of their writing, as when Hickman dismisses Yépez’s accusations of imperialist tendencies in Olson’s writing because Olson resigned from the Office of War Information as a rejection of US interventionism.
Hickman pursues a number of valuable threads in his book, each of which potentially opens new avenues of research. Yet rarely do these threads—biographical evidence, literary history, political and economic context—cohere in the same argument. This may be as much a fault of the material as of the method. The one chapter where these multiple threads coalesce is in Hickman’s reappraisal of Rukeyser. In his reading, Hickman argues that Rukeyser’s shift from a poetry of witness in The Book of the Dead (1938) toward the more mythopoetically-engaged verse of Beast in View (1944) begins with her exile from the scene of combat during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War—and the subsequent impossibility of witness this distance enforced—which Rukeyser captures in the poem “Mediterranean.” Yet, rather than reading this shift as the movement from a poetics of commitment to a poetry of detachment, Hickman sees Rukeyser shifting her engagement toward a critique of the processes of mythmaking itself as they played out in the politics of the Second World War. While peers like Eliot, Pound, and Yeats used myth to privilege a universalized lost past not incompatible with the use of myth and mysticism in fascist propaganda, Rukeyser developed a “projective sense of memory” that “reminds us that the past has always had a future, and that we, concerned with our own, may use that past to overcome the currently impoverished imagination that prevents us conceiving it.” Hickman deftly ties together the gender and international politics of the Spanish Civil War, Rukeyser’s frustration with her distance from the conflicts of the late 1930s and early 1940s, mythopoetic trends in late-Modernist poetry, and her firm commitment to Leftist politics. As Hickman summarizes, “Rukeyser’s great achievement in the war years is to make a virtue of this distance, to create from it a space able to look beyond crisis, in which poetry can project different futures and possibilities from the same sources constituting our current reality.”
The trouble with Hickman’s methodology is that it requires such an exemplary figure as Rukeyser to cohere effectively. When he strikes a virtuosic balance between the personal, the political, and the poetic, Hickman’s readings convincingly reorient literary history. But this methodology never quite amounts to a compelling alternative to either the familiar formalist or historicist models he critiques. While Hickman’s focus on ways in which the poet’s politics can usefully critique accounts of the poem’s politics, his reliance on biography doesn’ t seem to offer anything profoundly new. What’ s missing from Hickman’s study is precisely the “projective sense” that Rukeyser’s poetry appears to hold for him—the ability to build a viable future from a “radically open and contingent” past. Crisis and the US Avant-Garde acts as a sign of the changing times—and it will undoubtedly call forth further studies in its wake that will attempt to concretely account for poetry’s politics—but it remains, like the models it critiques, too much tethered to the present.
Notes
[1] Likewise, in Hickman’s view, critics who offer more nuanced accounts of Zukofsky’s politics too often assume the presence of “two constitutionally opposed [literary] camps” in the 1930s. Critics like Eric Homberger and Mark Scroggins obscure “the period’s pluralism and spirit of debate, which Zukofsky, far from being the passive victim of editorial policy…participated in as a writer and editor.”
August 2018
This review appears in Chicago Review 61.3/4.