History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935-1968 (Contemp North American Poetry)

History, Memory, and the Literary Left   Modern American Poetry, 1935–1968 by John Lowney contempor ary north americ an poetry series

history, memory, and the literary left

contemporary north american poetry series

Series Editors Alan Golding, Lynn Keller, and Adalaide Morris

History, Memory, and the Literary Left Modern American Poetry, 1935–1968 by john lowney

university of iowa press iowa city

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City  Copyright ©  by the University of Iowa Press http://www.uiowapress.org All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lowney, John, –. History, memory, and the literary left: modern American poetry, – / by John Lowney. p. cm.—(Contemporary North American poetry series) Contents: The janitor’s poems of every day: American poetry and the s — Buried history: the popular front poetics of Muriel Rukeyser’s “The book of the dead” — Allegories of salvage: the peripheral vision of Elizabeth Bishop’s North & South — Harlem Disc-tortions: the jazz memory of Langston Hughes’s Montage of a dream deferred — A reportage and redemption: the poetics of African American countermemory in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “In the Mecca” — A metamorphic palimpsest: the underground memory of Thomas McGrath’s “Letter to an imaginary friend” — The spectre of the s: George Oppen’s “Of being numerous” and historical amnesia. Includes bibliographical references and index.  --- (cloth) . American poetry—th century—History and criticism. . Right and left (Political science) in literature. . Politics and literature—United States—History— th century. . Poets, American—th century—Political and social views. . Depressions——United States. I. Title. II. Series. .   '.—dc  

        

For Ashley

Contents Acknowledgments and Permissions ix 1. The Janitor’s Poems of Every Day: American Poetry and the s  2. Buried History: The Popular Front Poetics of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead  3. Allegories of Salvage: The Peripheral Vision of Elizabeth Bishop’s North & South  4. Harlem Disc-tortions: The Jazz Memory of Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred  5. A Reportage and Redemption: The Poetics of African American Countermemory in Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca  6. A Metamorphic Palimpsest: The Underground Memory of Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend  7. The Spectre of the s: George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous and Historical Amnesia  Notes  Bibliography  Index 

Acknowledgments and Permissions Having spent quite a few years writing this book on American poetry and collective memory, I appreciate more than ever how scholarly books are collaborative efforts. I am fortunate to have had the support of a number of intellectual communities that have enhanced the experience of researching and writing this book. I want to acknowledge those whose generosity, enthusiasm, and wisdom have made this experience so gratifying. My colleagues in the St. John’s University English Department have collaborated on this project in innumerable ways, as they have continually reminded me how vital the relationship of research to teaching is. I thank especially Steven Sicari and Derek Owens, whose friendship and intellectual support since the earliest stages of this book have meant so much to me. My conversations with them and with Gregory Maertz, Willard Gingerich, Jennifer Travis, Robert Fanuzzi, Granville Ganter, and Lee Ann Brown have influenced my thinking about modernism and American cultural studies as the book has evolved. I also want to thank my undergraduate and graduate students at St. John’s, who continue to challenge me and confirm my purpose as an educator and scholar. This book has become what it is largely because of the classes in twentieth-century American and African American literature that I have taught at St. John’s. Finally, I am grateful to St. John’s University for the institutional support I have received while writing this book, specifically for the Summer Support of Research grants that have facilitated my research. I express my gratitude in particular to Jeffrey Fagen not only for his support of my work but also for his leadership as dean of St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. I thank the editors of the Contemporary North American Poetry Series for their vision and perseverance in making this series possible. Alan Golding, Lynn Keller, and Adalaide Morris have provided me with exemplary guidance as this project has found its home at the University of Iowa Press. Holly Carver, the director of the University of Iowa Press, has impressed me not only with her professionalism but also with her patience, kindness, and sense of humor. I also want to thank Charlotte Wright, Allison Thomas, Karen Copp, and the staff at the University of Iowa Press for their outstanding work in producing this book. I am especially appreciative of the copyediting work of Robert Burchfield. Walter Kalaidjian and the anonymous reader for the University of Iowa Press have enhanced this book with their thoughtful and thorough comments. I also want to acknowledge those who have read and responded to parts of this book ix

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at earlier stages of its development, including Joseph Skerrett Jr., Anne Herzog, Janet Kaufman, Edgar Dryden, Houston Baker Jr., Arnold Rampersad, Greg Fraser, John McCluskey Jr., William Maxwell, Michael Davidson, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. My colleagues in the New York Americanist Group provided an invigorating intellectual community as I was writing this book. I am especially grateful for the input of Jean Lutes, Tim Gray, Rachel Adams, Maria Farland, and Michael Trask. Finally, I express my deepest thanks to Rosemary Marangoly George, José Aranda, Randy Bass, Mark Sanders, David Jarraway, Jeffrey DeShell, Lisa Sheffield, Susannah Mintz, and Rocco Marinaccio for their intellectual encouragement through the duration of this project. I have presented much of the research from this book at conferences, and I want to acknowledge the organizations that have made this possible, including the American Studies Association, MELUS, the Modern Language Association, and the Modernist Studies Association. The most important organization for the development of this book has been the National Poetry Foundation. The dialogue that has taken place between poets and scholars at the National Poetry Foundation conferences has been invaluable for the study of twentieth-century American poetry and for my work in particular. My initial thinking about this book was inspired by the  conference, “The First Postmodernists: American Poets of the s Generation,” a conference that has had an extraordinary impact on s literary research. I thank Burton Hatlen for organizing these conferences as well as for his interest in my work. I am grateful as well to the William Carlos Williams Society for intellectual camaraderie and the opportunity to present research related to this book. I thank especially Christopher MacGowan, Bryce Conrad, Ian Copestake, Virginia Kouidis, Alec Marsh, Glen McLeod, Daniel Morris, Peter Schmitt, and Hugh Witemeyer. A number of poets and scholars have contributed to this book through their responses to my work, including Gene Frumkin, Jenny Goodman, Cary Nelson, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, James Smethurst, Lori Smith, and Lorenzo Thomas. Linda Oppen and William Rukeyser have been generous and helpful in responding to my queries about their parents’ work. My work has benefited from the helpful support of staff members at the following libraries: the St. John’s University Library; the Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego; and the following research collections of the New York Public Library: the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, the General Research Division of the Center for the Humanities, the Library for the Performing Arts, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

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I am thankful to my families, from my immediate family to my extended and in-law families, for their encouragement and patience as I was working on this project. My parents’ memories of the Great Depression and World War II inspired this project, and I am grateful to all of my relatives whose recollections of this period inform this book. I am especially thankful for the newest member of our family, Jasmine Cross Lowney, who has brought so much joy to her parents’ lives. Finally, this book would not exist without the intellectual insight, editorial judgment, and sensitivity of Ashley Cross, whose contribution to this book is inestimable. She has enriched my life so much that I cannot express my appreciation enough. I dedicate this book to her with all of my love. Parts of the following chapters have been published previously as essays that have been revised and expanded for this book. Parts of chapters  and  were published as “‘Littered with Old Correspondences’: Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and the s,” Arizona Quarterly . (Summer ): –, reproduced with permission of the Arizona Board of Regents. An earlier version of chapter  was published as “‘Truths of Outrage, Truths of Possibility’: Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead,’” in Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman, eds., “How Shall We Teach Each Other of the Poet?” The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser (St. Martin’s, ): –, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. Part of chapter  was published as “Langston Hughes and the ‘Nonsense’ of Bebop,” in a special issue of American Literature, ed. Houston A. Baker Jr., “Unsettling Blackness,” American Literature . ( June ): –, reproduced with permission of Duke University Press. Part of chapter  was published as “‘A Material Collapse That Is Construction’: Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca and the Poetics of Counter-Memory,” MELUS . (Fall ): –, reproduced with permission of MELUS. I am grateful to the editors of these journals and books for their permission to reprint these materials. I gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to quote from copyrighted works: Excerpts from “The Bight,” “Florida,” “Jéronimo’s House,” and “The Monument” from The Complete Poems –, by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © ,  by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpts from “The Chicago Picasso,” “In the Mecca,” and “The Wall” from Blacks, by Gwendolyn Brooks. Copyright © . Reprinted by consent of Brooks Permissions. Excerpts from Montage of a Dream Deferred, by Langston Hughes, from The

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Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Copyright © , estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from Letter to an Imaginary Friend, by Thomas McGrath. Copyright © . Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Excerpts from “Blood from the Stone,” by George Oppen, from New Collected Poems. Copyright ©  by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpts from “Of Being Numerous,” by George Oppen, from New Collected Poems. Copyright ©  by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpts from “Discussion of Another Language of New York” (George Oppen Papers, Microfilm Series : “Daybooks”) and “Notes, Jottings, Etc.” (George Oppen Papers, Microfilm Series : “Notes, Jottings, Etc.”), from the George Oppen Papers, Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego. Reprinted by permission of Linda Oppen. Excerpts from “Jerusalem the Golden,” by Charles Reznikoff, from The Poems of Charles Reznikoff –, ed. Seamus Cooney. Reprinted by permission of Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Copyright ©  by the Estate of Charles Reznikoff. Excerpt from “An Atlas of the Difficult World,” from An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems –, by Adrienne Rich. Copyright ©  by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. Excerpts from The Book of the Dead, by Muriel Rukeyser, from The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog with Jan Heller Levi (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, ). Copyright © by Muriel Rukeyser, Janet E. Kaufman, and Anne F. Herzog. Reprinted by permission of William L. Rukeyser. Excerpts from introduction to U.S. , by Muriel Rukeyser, from U.S.  (New York: Covici and Friede, ). Copyright © by Muriel Rukeyser. Reprinted by permission of William L. Rukeyser. Excerpts from Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Reprinted by permission of William L. Rukeyser. Excerpts from “The Man on the Dump,” by Wallace Stevens. Copyright  by Wallace Stevens and renewed  by Holly Stevens, from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, by Wallace Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

history, memory, and the literary left

1. The Janitor’s Poems of Every Day American Poetry and the 1930s . . . The dump is full Of images. Days pass like papers from a press. The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun, And so the moon, both come, and the janitor’s poems Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears, The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.  , “The Man on the Dump” Over the cobbled streets, past the two blocks of dump and straggling grass, past the human dumpheap where the nameless FrankLloydWrights of the proletariat have wrought their wondrous futuristic structures of flat battered tin cans, fruit boxes and gunny sacks, cardboard and mother earth.  , Yonnondio: From the Thirties

Perhaps the best-known American poem about waste since The Waste Land, Wallace Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump” represents the dump as a site of ruin and recovery, of imagistic refuse and linguistic transformation, a site in which even the detritus of a collapsed capitalist economy can be converted into poetry. Stevens’s dump appears to be an eccentric if not unique site for poetic imagination in histories of modern American poetry; however, by the time that “The Man on the Dump” was published——the dump had become a conspicuous, contested terrain for literary and visual artists.1 Cubist, dadaist, and surrealist collage artists had recycled trash before the s, transforming discarded mass-produced objects whose value was otherwise exhausted. During the Great Depression, however, the dump registers more politically—not only as a symbolic site of the decay and disorder of American society but also as a public site for the reinvention of art and society. Tillie Olsen’s lyrical “lament for the lost,” Yonnondio, exemplifies such a revolutionary perspective on the “human dumpheap”: while she decries the lost potential of working-class lives stunted by a ruthless capitalist society, she also celebrates the creative resilience of these “nameless FrankLloydWrights of the proletariat” (). Unlike Marxist exposures of American Depression–era waste such as Olsen’s, in which “the 1

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janitor’s poems/Of every day” register as indictments of the capitalist social order, “The Man on the Dump” manifests Stevens’s skepticism about the political role of poetry. In its presupposition of the cultural marginality of poetry and its tentative endorsement of a marginal site for poetic production, Stevens’s poem nonetheless echoes more politicized literary treatments of waste. More specifically, “The Man on the Dump” evokes the problem of cultural memory that preoccupied writers during the Depression. Perhaps in no period of the nation’s history were there so many different stories vying to explain American culture than in the s, and perhaps at no time was the idea of culture itself more intensely debated. In representing the dump as a marginal but heterogeneous site of social and aesthetic discourses, Stevens dramatizes how cultural memory is constructed and contested. If the problem of cultural memory had preoccupied poets from the romantic era of postrevolutionary Europe through the post–World War I years of modernism, the Depression represented a more specific crisis of representation. On the one hand, the social authority of American capitalist institutions was radically contested. On the other hand, the Depression itself was notoriously resistant to narrative representation, despite the profuse documentary imagery by which the period has subsequently been remembered. The beginning of the Depression defied representation for anyone who was not an expert on finance capitalism, and the longer the Depression lasted, the more difficult it became to imagine its conclusion. This lost capacity to represent social reality exacerbated the more palpable threat of unemployment, poverty, and hunger. As Michael Denning writes, the Depression was “a curious crisis, marked not by upheaval, civil war, or coups d’état, but by an absence: the absence of work.” While disturbing images of overaccumulation—“idle factories and unemployed workers, hungry farmers and rotting, unpicked crops” (Denning )—became part of the popular consciousness, narrative accounts of such paradoxical juxtapositions were less persuasive. Popular metaphors of the Depression—from metaphors of psychic disorder like the euphemistic term “depression” itself, to the metaphors of natural disaster that supplanted them—evoked a collective loss of agency. And the predominant plot of the Depression was one of waiting—waiting on breadlines, waiting on roadsides and street corners, waiting in prison, waiting for nothing. This enigmatic resistance to narrative challenged poets as well as novelists to develop new formal strategies to comprehend at once the elusive promise of revolutionary change and the disorienting disruption of cultural continuity. The Depression era remains one of the most compelling—and disputed— periods of American studies scholarship. While there has been renewed scholarly

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attention to s narrative prose, there has been less consideration of the Depression-era’s impact on American poetry. This book proposes a revised history of modern American poetry that is informed by ongoing scholarly reconsideration of s American culture. More specifically, I investigate the politicization of cultural memory that becomes so prominent in late modernist American poetry, from the socioeconomic crisis of the s through the emergence of the new social movements of the s. Concentrating specifically on Left writers whose historical consciousness was shaped by the Depression and World War II, this book articulates their challenging revisions of national collective memory as it redefines the importance of late modernism in American literary history. Stevens’s response to the memory crisis of the Depression, “The Man on the Dump,” exemplifies the s prominence of socioeconomic concerns even for poetry not usually considered “political.”2 The preoccupation with cultural memory recurs not only in poetry throughout the s but also in the poetry that recollects this period. This is especially true for poets whose historical consciousness was radically affected by the socioeconomic crisis of the Depression, particularly those born in the first two decades of the century, who not only succeeded the modernist generation of Stevens, Eliot, and Pound but began writing when the viability of their vocation was uncertain.3 Whereas s poetry contests the social roles that poetry can and should play, the poetry written in the aftermath of the Depression and World War II begins with the premise that the cultural value of poetry is unstable. Poetry informed by the politics of the Popular Front and the New Deal furthermore assumes that cultural memory—especially memory of social conflict—is plural and contestable. This introductory chapter investigates the problem of cultural memory during the s, as it was understood by poets whose social consciousness was galvanized by the Depression and as it has been subsequently conceptualized. The chapter concludes by suggesting how Stevens’s late modernist meditation on the cultural value of poetry is also an instructive response to the memory crisis of the Depression. The subsequent chapters examine more extensively how poetic sequences about the s relate subjective consciousness to politically charged sites of memory, beginning with Muriel Rukeyser’s Popular Front investigative documentary collage, The Book of the Dead (), and Elizabeth Bishop’s ethnographic surrealist Florida poems in North & South (). I then turn to longer palimpsestic poems that rethink the historical legacy of the s and s, from Langston Hughes’s postwar jazz sequence of Harlem history, Montage of a Dream Deferred (), to three long poems that relate the new revolutionary consciousness of the s to the writers’ formative years in the s: Gwendolyn Brooks’s apocalyptic narrative

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poem, “In the Mecca” (); Thomas McGrath’s epic “pseudo-autobiography,” Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts One and Two (completed ); and George Oppen’s Objectivist serial poem, “Of Being Numerous” (). Despite their birth dates and the impact of the Depression on their literary careers, the late modernist writers whom I study—Rukeyser (–), Bishop (–), Hughes (–), Brooks (–), McGrath (–), and Oppen (–)— are not all customarily associated with the s nor are they sufficiently understood as literary peers, as they have appealed to different audiences and critical constituencies.4 By examining these late modernist writers comparatively, I foreground the differences of gender and sexuality, of race and ethnicity, and of social class and region that their poetry negotiates while emphasizing how each developed poetic forms responsive to the cultural politics and socioaesthetic debates of the s. At the same time, my consideration of such a broad spectrum of late modernist writing calls into question formal and social boundaries that have limited scholarly dialogue about modern poetry. In assessing the politicization of memory underscored by late modernist poetry, I focus specifically on what French cultural historian Pierre Nora has defined as lieux de mémoire, “sites” or “realms” of memory, which he defines broadly as “any significant entity, whether material or nonmaterial in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community” (“From Lieux de mémoire” xvii). As demonstrated by the encyclopedic multivolume history of French national identity that Nora has edited, Les Lieux de mémoire (–), sites of memory include commemorative sites such as monuments or buildings, temporal sites such as historical eras or generations, or geographical sites such as regions, cities, or neighborhoods. My use of this concept is twofold: to articulate the Great Depression and the s generation as formative sites of memory and to elucidate the literary, historical, and political significance of the specific geographical sites of memory evoked by the late modernist poetry I consider. The problem of memory is, of course, fundamental to modernity and constitutive of literary modernism.5 As Richard Terdimann has written in Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis, the “memory crisis” so often identified with twentieth-century modernism can be traced to the aftermath of the French Revolution. Corresponding with the radical sociopolitical change initiated by the French Revolution was a profound sense of estrangement from the past, “a sense that their past had somehow evaded memory, that recollection had ceased to integrate with consciousness” (Terdimann –). This “memory crisis” was perceived at once as a problem of amnesia (too little memory) and a problem of

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recollection (too much memory). The growth of industrialization, urbanization, and mass culture in the nineteenth century furthermore intensified the disruption of traditional forms of memory that had occurred with the revolutionary social change of the late eighteenth century. The problem of memory, which was at once individual and collective, became an increasingly prominent critical concern of understanding the modern. From the literary preoccupation with memory in writers from Baudelaire to Proust, to the psychological investigation of memory by Freud, to the philosophical inquiry into subjective consciousness by Bergson, to the socioeconomic analysis of the commodity initiated by Marx, the memory crisis was also a “crisis of representation,” a preoccupation with “the function by which symbols . . . come to stand for some absent referent” (Terdimann ). The problem of temporality, of imagining a cultural past that seemed increasingly alien, was inseparable from the “crisis of representation” that challenged modernist artists and transformed disciplines of knowledge. With the growing realization that memory was neither natural nor reliable, that the past was an artifice subject to rhetorical manipulation, the memory crisis became displaced by the problem of historical representation. What Nora has defined as “sites of memory” take on increasing symbolic significance exactly because of such felt disconnection from the past in modern societies. This sense of estrangement is intensified rather than relieved by the proliferation of archival information available through mass culture as well as educational institutions. Nora differentiates memory from history quite sharply in his influential introduction to Les Lieux de mémoire, “Between Memory and History”: “The ‘acceleration of history’ thus brings us face to face with the enormous distance that separates real memory—the kind of inviolate social memory that primitive and archaic societies embodied, and whose secret died with them—from history, which is how modern societies organize a past they are condemned to forget because they are driven by change.” As nostalgic as Nora seems for a collective memory unmediated by the “sifting and sorting” of history (), “Between Memory and History” historicizes the modern transformation of memory that has intensified with the new media of the twentieth century. Modern memory, he writes, is primarily archival. The compulsion to collect, to preserve, and to organize documents in archives is itself compelled by the fear that the past is disappearing. The proliferation of archival materials does not relieve the individual sense of disconnection from a meaningful past, however. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the need to recollect the past, to preserve what had been lost to collective memory, was increasingly experienced as an individual constraint or duty, as Bergsonian philosophy, Freudian psychology, and Proustian

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autobiographical writing exemplify. As Nora argues, sites of memory take on significance precisely because modern memory is alienated, as the mediation of collective memory by archival knowledge creates a greater sense of discontinuity, rather than continuity, with the past: “Lieux de mémoire are fundamentally vestiges, the ultimate embodiments of a commemorative consciousness that survives a history which, having renounced memory, cries out for it (“Between Memory and History” ). While the places, figures, and texts that take on symbolic collective meaning indicate the will to remember, the will to resist collective amnesia, these sites of memory are themselves “created by the interaction between memory and history, an interaction resulting from a mutual overdetermination” (Nora, “Between Memory and History” ).6 Nora’s concept of memory revitalizes Maurice Halbwachs’s pioneering work on collective memory earlier in the century.7 Halbwachs’s formulation of collective memory asserts that memory is always socially constructed: while memory occurs within individual consciousness, it only becomes meaningful through the discursive frameworks of social groups. Because memory is articulated through language, which is inherently social, memory is by definition intersubjective. As the recollection of the past that links individuals within a social group, collective memory in turn sustains a shared group identity over time. Collective memory is not necessarily therefore the expression of a unified group identity, whether the group is identified with the nation or a more specific social entity. Halbwachs insists on the social plurality of collective memory, as he asserts in a phrase quoted by Nora: “there are as many memories as there are groups” (“Between Memory and History” ). Memory takes on significance through such local social groups as the family, the village or the neighborhood, the trade or the profession, but also through temporal constructs such as generations and through more abstract institutions, whether national or transnational. Personal memory, therefore, is multiple and often contradictory, as it is comprised of the dynamic intersection of the many group—or collective—memories that define an individual’s social existence. To historicize the collective memory of a nation, then, as Nora does, requires the same attention to social plurality.8 The national history comprised by Les Lieux de mémoire is a pluralist history or “rememoration,” as Nora writes, a “history in multiple voices” (“From Lieux de mémoire” xxiv). It recognizes and documents the politicization of memory that has transformed national symbols and instilled new sites with symbolic significance. A site of memory, Lawrence D. Kritzman writes in his foreword to the English-language edition of Les Lieux de mémoire, is “a polyreferential entity that can draw on a multiplicity of cultural myths that are appropriated for different ideological or

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political purposes” (x). Sites of memory, therefore, are themselves comprised of multiple collective memories. As the sites of memory that represent the s in this book suggest, their significance depends on the interpretive frameworks that give them meaning. While “America” had long been synonymous with the “memory crisis” of modernity, the disruptive experience of the Depression intensified the disorienting sense of cultural discontinuity. The s saw the proliferation of new mass media such as the radio, sound film, and photojournalism, which accelerated the development of a mass consumer culture even as the impact of mass unemployment, homelessness, and hunger was palpable. It also saw the unprecedented collection of documentary materials, which was at once a symptom of and an antidote to the problem of memory. Cultural memory—the “field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history” (Sturken )—was contested throughout the s, from the beginning of the Depression and the emergence of a proletarian avant-garde through the New Deal and the growth of the Popular Front. Given this politicization of memory, Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire is especially appropriate for cultural projects committed to restoring—and transforming—collective memory of the s. The complexly rendered sites of Rukeyser’s Gauley Bridge, Bishop’s Key West, and Hughes’s Harlem exemplify the imperative to reinvent poetry as a mode of critical memory in the s and s. The problem of cultural memory took on a new sense of urgency during the cold war, especially for Left poets whose own histories as political activists made them subject to political persecution. If one result of McCarthyism was the silencing of political dissent, however, another effect was the compulsion to return to the remembered scenes of revolutionary desire that had been suppressed. As the class conflict that was so prominent in the s became marginalized within the hegemonic national consciousness, poets as different as Brooks, McGrath, and Oppen represented personal memory of this repressed past in marginal sites of ruin, from the razed Mecca Building of Brooks’s South Side of Chicago, to the abandoned farmhouses of McGrath’s agrarian North Dakota, to the spectral streets of Oppen’s Brooklyn. Each of these sites recalls the traumatic experience of the Great Depression, whether directly or obliquely, and each writer is complexly engaged with the formation of countermemory that critiques hegemonic constructions of this past. The ruins of memory evoked in late modernist poetry are at once the ruins of utopian desire, of the revolutionary consciousness associated with the s, and the more tangible ruins of politically contested sites that were subject to cold war historical amnesia.

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recollecting the 1930s left Scholars of American cultural history have variously documented how national collective memory of the s was revised during the cold war. If traces of Great Depression socioeconomic conflict still scarred the body politic of the United States, both the remembered collapse of international capitalism and popular radical social democratic alternatives to this socioeconomic system were largely repressed.9 As Studs Terkel has documented in his oral history of the Great Depression, Hard Times, numerous working-class and middle-class parents in the s and s “protected” their children, and their own psyches, by repressing painful or shameful memories of poverty, joblessness, and hunger during the s. At the same time, prominent s Marxist intellectuals who repudiated their affiliations with the Left during the cold war rewrote their own histories in the process. A more general legacy of McCarthyism has been the distortion of Left cultural politics and aesthetic ideologies that had transformed the relationship of writers to their publics in the s and s. This process of “political amnesia,” as Alan Wald has written about the New York intellectuals, has had a lasting impact on American literary history.10 Even since the New Left revival of interest in Depression-era American culture during the s, literature of the s has largely been subjected to the political amnesia of the academy or studied reductively in relation to the merits or failures of Communism. In the past two decades, however, literary and cultural historians have rethought how and why the study of Depression-era literature has been so limited. Research by scholars such as Wald, Denning, Cary Nelson, Barbara Foley, Alan Filreis, Walter Kalaidjian, Paula Rabinowitz, Rita Barnard, Michael Davidson, William Maxwell, and James Smethurst has opened an expanded field of inquiry that has transformed American literary history. The questions raised by this scholarship have not only redefined the field of s literature but have challenged received assumptions about modernism as well. These questions include: What are the political and historical influences that have informed critical evaluations of s literature? How has an increased scholarly emphasis on racial and gendered social marginality changed our understanding of s literature? How have new approaches to popular and/or mass culture transformed the study of modernism as well as the s more specifically? Finally, how do the assumed temporal boundaries of the s obscure continuities with earlier and later literary movements? In his remarkably extensive and provocative study of s Left culture, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century,

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Denning articulates how the Popular Front has had a more profound impact on American culture than historians have tended to realize. Literary historians in particular have assumed that s American radicalism emerged as a temporary response to the Depression and to European fascism. According to the consensus that developed during the cold war, the interest in “proletarian literature” was limited to the early years of the Depression that preceded the New Deal. The Popular Front that emerged after the  shift in Soviet policy, which subordinated the revolutionary claims of class warfare to the formation of a united front with liberal and leftist organizations against fascism, was likewise shortlived, as it dissolved with the  Nonaggression Pact signed by Hitler and Stalin and the escalation of World War II itself. Denning argues instead that the Popular Front formed a more substantial and long-lasting historical bloc. Beginning with the revolutionary insurgency of the early s, this bloc grew to encompass a broad social movement of trade unionists and Communists, independent leftists and émigré antifascists, united by their commitment to social democratic electoral politics; to antifascist, anti-imperialist international politics; and to a civil liberties campaign that opposed lynching and labor repression. Denning emphasizes the lasting significance of the “proletarian avant-garde” that emerged in the early s for the literary culture of the Popular Front, as he refutes reductive equations of U.S. Left cultural production with the dicta of Soviet cultural policy. As important as Soviet policy was to the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) literary institutions such as the New Masses, and as notoriously formulaic as much of the revolutionary writing of the early s was, proletarian literature drew eclectically from international modernist and indigenous Left traditions, traditions that continued to inform socially conscious literature of the later s and afterward. As Denning suggests, the most important literary manifestation of the multiethnic movement of the Popular Front, then, is not the social realism usually identified with proletarian fiction, but a social modernism that variously fuses modernist formal strategies with the recognition of social crisis. Throughout The Cultural Front, Denning emphasizes how the development of mass culture, both the commercial culture of the mass media and the public culture of the New Deal, challenged artists and intellectuals to rethink who their audience was throughout the s. The impressive range of genres that Denning surveys—literary fiction and criticism; theater and film; jazz, folk, and classical music—suggests how distinctions between high and mass culture in the s were as increasingly tenuous as they were contentious. The public sphere for the arts was dramatically changed by the new culture industries that emerged

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from the s through the s. These included mass cultural forms based on new technologies such as narrative feature films, broadcasting, and sound recording. Writing was also affected by the increasing commercialization of the popular arts, as the tabloid, weekly newsmagazine, and newsreel transformed journalism, while the interdependence of pulp magazines, radio serials, and soap operas affected popular fiction. While cultural critics debated the effect of this commercial culture on both the high arts and the popular arts in the s, the overall effect was the blurring of such distinctions. Popular Front culture emerged from the simultaneous popularization of high cultural forms and the dissemination of “proletarian” and “folk” cultural forms. No less important to the Popular Front and to American society more generally was the New Deal governmental role in fostering a public culture. The federal government took on unprecedented importance for shaping national artistic and intellectual life by directly funding projects through the Works Progress Administration (WPA) programs during the Depression, by subsequently developing international cultural exchange programs during the war years, and by sponsoring higher education. Although not based on the profit motive of the burgeoning commercial culture, the New Deal programs likewise contributed to the development of a new mass audience and a new labor force of cultural workers. The Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, Federal Theater Project, and Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) succeeded in reaching a broader public for the arts than had ever been conceived in American history. With the emergence of the FWP in , the American “people” became the subject of documentary projects that would preoccupy writers through the remainder of the s. Such interest in American cultural traditions was hardly new, nor was it necessarily antithetical to the internationalism of the Left. Many of the writers who played prominent roles in the Popular Front, including Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks, Matthew Josephson, and Lewis Mumford, had written pioneering works of American cultural history that combined radical social criticism with the quest for a “usable past.” The scale of the FWP inquiry into American culture was unprecedented, however, as it brought radical and liberal writers together to work on projects that recorded the nation’s history, geography, and folkways.11 Denning underscores how models of twentieth-century literary periodization have contributed to misperceptions of the Popular Front, as these models have tended to follow broad narratives of cultural, social, and economic history: modernist/postmodernist, prewar/postwar, Fordist/post-Fordist, and so forth. Such epochal models diminish the significance of generational differences as well as

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specific events that inform literary production, particularly those that do not coincide exactly with the dominant narratives. As Denning writes, the Popular Front “stands, not as another epoch, but as the promise of a different road beyond modernism, a road not taken, a vanishing mediator. It was a moment of transition between the Fordist modernism that reigned before the crash, and the postmodernism of the American Century that emerged from the ruins of Hiroshima” (). As encyclopedic as Denning’s recovery of s Left culture is, however, his work typifies historical accounts of the period in one significant way: he pays minimal attention to poetry. Since the s, there have been a number of compelling studies of individual poets and of specific literary movements, networks of writers, journals, and institutions that situate formal practices within cultural studies of the s.12 There have been fewer attempts, however, to relate s poetry more comparatively or synthetically either to a distinctive generational consciousness or to the Popular Front. As the following chapters of this book substantiate, the divisive categories that structure American literary history, whether chronological, formal, or cultural, have precluded arguments for a generational consciousness among poets who emerged in the s, even though studies of fiction and cultural criticism of the period often begin with such a premise.13 Histories of twentieth-century American poetry have been premised mainly on the two general historical categories of modernism and postmodernism (or modernism and contemporary). While theoretical formulations of postmodernism and postmodernity have disagreed about the “beginnings” of postmodernism, depending on the disciplinary and historical criteria for definition, histories of American poetry have been remarkably consistent in locating the divide between modernism and postmodernism at the end of World War II. On one side of the divide is the generation of modernists who were born in the s and became widely recognized in the s and s, while on the other side are writers born in the s and afterward, writers who first became publicly prominent in the s and s. As a result of such normative definitions of modernism and postmodernism, poets whose literary reputations were formed in the s or s have fit neither of the dominant generational models. They have instead been relegated to such liminal zones as “the middle generation,” “modern poetry after modernism,” or “the first postmodernists,” or they have been shuttled back and forth, often in disregard of chronological logic, to one side of the divide or the other.14 Some poets whose publication records were interrupted by long periods of apparent silence, most notably the Objectivists, have had the distinction of being both modernist and postmodernist, while

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others have been (mis)read through narratives of progression from modernism to postmodernism, such as the “breakthrough narrative” so often invoked to explain the movement toward “freer” forms in poets such as Robert Lowell, John Berryman, or Adrienne Rich.15 And while there has been insufficient attention to African American poetry within comparative studies of modernist and postmodernist poetry, black writers have similarly been relegated to misleading historical categories within African American literary history. The importance of the Harlem Renaissance and the postwar civil rights movement as literary historical frameworks has had the unfortunate effect of occluding much of the poetry written during the s and s.16 In misrepresenting the generation of poets whose careers were most affected by the socioeconomic crisis of the Depression, and whose writing was consequently informed by the socioaesthetic debates responding to this crisis, dominant models of periodization for twentiethcentury American poetry have largely reinforced cold war narratives of s cultural politics. Because of this dominant literary historical paradigm, writers born in the first two decades of the century have often been situated within categories that diminish the historical specificity of their innovations. This is true not only of the writers this book studies but also of other significant poets whose careers follow a similar trajectory, such as Kenneth Fearing, Kenneth Rexroth, Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, Sterling Brown, Melvin Tolson, Margaret Walker, and Robert Hayden. One critic who has cogently—and insistently—challenged the parameters of modern American poetry scholarship is Cary Nelson. His provocative Repression and Recovery () has transformed the study of modern American poetry largely because he delineates how the academic categories that define this field are themselves informed by the massive repression of Marxist cultural discourse after World War II, which coincided with the ascendancy of the New Criticism in academic institutions. The remarkable range of writers represented in anthologies of modern poetry during the s and s suggests how intensely disputed the field of modernism was as it was beginning to be historicized (Nelson, Repression –).17 Nelson’s argument for a more complex literary history than the reduction of modern poetry to a limited number of canonical writers has had a substantial impact on modernist studies.18 His insistence on historicizing poetic form has likewise been influential, as he underscores the political ramifications of formalist approaches that divorce poetry from the sociohistorical contexts of its production and reception. The presumably ahistorical attention to modernist poetic form that distinguished cold war New Criticism, for example, masks a more disturbing process of literary historical erasure:

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Imagining that radical political poetry as a whole came to an end in America in —showing no evidence of vitality in the s and s—requires a whole series of fragmentations, repressions, and redefinitions. A number of highly interested moves, in other words, need to be installed as facts of nature. First, the general social and political challenges of black poets need to be subsumed under race and race made a matter of black self-interest rather than national concern. Then numerous individual poems and entire books [by radical poets] need to be forgotten. Finally, when Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, among others, appear, they need to be contained within autobiographical confession, their interests in history and sexual difference turned back on themselves rather than outward on American culture. (Nelson, Repression –) As successful as was this postwar process of repression of “the construction of a diminished, sanitized cultural memory” (Nelson, Repression ), many Left poets continued to publish books that reached readers who had been loyal to their writing since the s. They also reached younger readers who, by the s, were attracted to the testimony of a period that had become mythic largely because of the subsequent anti-Communist purge of Left intellectuals. Nelson makes a compelling case for rethinking the radical political poetry of the s more heterogeneously than it has been conventionally understood. Radical political poetry in the United States neither began with the Great Depression nor was it limited to the formulaic revolutionary verse of the Communist Party’s Third Period. The revolutionary poetry of the s had indigenous roots in American workers’ poetry, for example, but it would be misleading to dissociate “vanguard” poetry from the international avant-garde “revolution of the word.” One only has to examine the journals that transported cubism, futurism, vorticism, dada, and surrealism to American social contexts in the s and early s, such as the Little Review, Contact, Blues, and Pagany, to dispel the presumed dichotomy of experimental modernism and social radicalism.19 The initial phase of the Objectivist movement is an interesting example. The Objectivists were comprised primarily of several Jewish socialist poets (George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and Louis Zukofsky) who adapted the imagist poetics of Pound and Williams to their urban immigrant social milieu. The two publications that first represented Objectivism, however, the  special Objectivist issue of Poetry and the  “Objectivists” Anthology, both edited by Zukofsky, featured poetry that variously combined formal experimentation with radical social criticism.20 The Objectivist movement was coherent enough to attract the censure of Marxist critics who saw the disavowal of instrumentalist claims for

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poetry as apolitical.21 The variety of experimental strategies that distinguished Objectivist poetry in the s, exemplified by the long poems by Reznikoff (Testimony), Zukofsky (“A” ), and Oppen (Discrete Series), suggests that even a movement associated with a programmatic manifesto such as Zukofsky’s “Program: Objectivists ” (Poetry) resists reductive generalizations. The often maligned category of proletarian poetry is likewise less monolithic than its critics have assumed. Proletarian poetry is usually narrowly identified with the early s, with Communist publications like the New Masses and the magazines affiliated with the John Reed clubs, including the early Partisan Review; or with short-lived little magazines, such as the Rebel Poet (–), Contempo (–), the Anvil (–), Dynamo (–), or Challenge (–), and the anthologies that gathered poetry from these magazines. Yet as Nelson, Denning, Wald, and Kalaidjian, among others, have argued, the proletarian avantgarde had a broader and longer-lasting impact on American literature than its identification with Soviet cultural policy in the early s suggests. It is most accurate to define proletarian poetry in the more inclusive terms by which it came to be understood by the mid-s, as socially conscious poetry written with a Marxist understanding of class relations. With the publication of the anthology Proletarian Literature in the United States and the first American Writers’ Congress in , the proletarian movement enjoyed its most noticeable impact on American literary culture at exactly the moment when the Communist Party was formulating its Popular Front policy, which subordinated the revolutionary claims of class warfare to the formation of a united front with liberal and leftist organizations against fascism. Communist critics of the Popular Front saw the party’s new direction as a betrayal of its commitment to revolution, a sense of betrayal that was intensified by the contemporaneous revelations of the Moscow purge trials. For Marxist critics of the Popular Front in the United States, such as the Trotskyite editors of the new Partisan Review, the new CPUSA slogan, “Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism,” became a notorious indication of the party’s collusion with hegemonic New Deal interests. The Popular Front was nonetheless successful in sustaining interest in working-class subjects, even as it did so under the rubric of an antifascist democratic people’s culture rather than a revolutionary worker’s culture. Indeed, the Popular Front, especially in collaboration with WPA cultural programs, is often credited for the increased literary attention to marginalized social groups in the United States, even though the proletarian movement had already galvanized middle-class as well as working-class writers to rethink the subject matter, audience, and purpose of their writing.

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The impact of proletarian writing—particularly the growing consciousness of a working-class audience—can be seen throughout the proceedings of the first American Writers’ Congress. This April  congress, which was sponsored by the CPUSA and took place at the Mecca Temple in New York City, attracted over two hundred writers. Most of these were established writers who had “achieved some standing in their respective fields” and who had “clearly indicated their sympathy with the revolutionary cause,” as the call for participants stated, but the audience of about four thousand included many younger writers as well.22 In the foreword to the proceedings, Waldo Frank, who was elected chair of the League of American Writers that was formed at the congress, wrote that the writers present were drawn together “by the threat, implicit in the present social system, to our culture and to our very lives as creative men and women.” Given the political and social differences of the writers who attended the first congress, which included Communist and unaffiliated leftist writers, writers of workingclass and/or immigrant origins and those from more socially privileged backgrounds, young writers struggling to establish themselves and writers whose professional reputations were made in the previous two decades, there was considerable debate about the implications of the threat to their livelihood posed by the Depression. As Frank summarizes, however, the congress worked toward a shared commitment to “the beginning of a literary movement, both broad and deep, which springs from an alliance of writers and artists with the working class” (). The introduction to the proceedings by radical publisher and editor Henry Hart reaffirms this necessary alliance with the working class. The Depression had awakened writers from their culture’s “self-satisfied fantasies” to a growing recognition that their world was defined by class conflict and that their interests were inseparable from those of the “propertyless and oppressed” (Hart, Introduction ). Citing the example of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers in Europe, Hart appealed to the international revolutionary imperative of uniting with “the forces of progress against the prevailing dangers of war, fascism, and the extinction of culture” (Introduction –). As Hart’s account of the congress’s proceedings underscored, the need for American writers to ally themselves with the working class was closely related to the increasingly pressing need to fight against fascism, in the United States as well as abroad. Poverty, unemployment, fascism, and the growing war economy were interrelated manifestations of a global system of capitalist “barbarism” (Hart, Introduction ). The first American Writers’ Congress was hardly unified, however. The fact that only older, more established writers were initially invited to participate produced a generational division before the congress even took place. Because the

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proletarian literary movement was generated largely by younger writers and readers, this division was significant. As Malcolm Cowley later recalled, the “effect on the younger writers was to alienate them from the Communist party. Some of them became Trotskyites, some became independent radicals, and some sheared off from the movement entirely. There was a new war between literary generations that started at this First American Writers’ Congress” (“Thirty Years Later” ). Other divisions that represented ongoing differences within the Communist Left were evident in the paper topics. The papers represented significant differences among aesthetic ideologies, from Louis Aragon’s reflections on dada and surrealism in “From Dada to Red Front” to definitions of the revolutionary writer as different as John Dos Passos’s “The Writer as Technician” and Jack Conroy’s “The Worker as Writer.” More problematic social differences among the writers in attendance included the racial divisions addressed in papers like Langston Hughes’s “To Negro Writers,” Eugene Gordon’s “Social and Political Problems of the Negro Writer,” and Eugene Clay’s “The Negro in Recent American Literature,” all of which articulated the distinctive challenge of negotiating racial oppression and class exploitation.23 Other divisions included regional differences such as those discussed by Meridel Le Sueur in “Proletarian Literature in the Middle West.” Given that Le Sueur was the only woman writer represented in the congress’s proceedings, the marginalization of women within the party was also clearly evident. As active as many women writers were within the CPUSA, and as progressive as the party’s policy toward gender equality was, literary women were noticeably absent from positions of cultural authority.24 The figure of the revolutionary working-class writer was itself gendered male in the Communist discourse of proletarianism, often in explicit contrast to the effeminate bourgeois bohemian. The prototypical example of this masculinist discourse is Mike Gold’s notorious  New Masses editorial that defines the new “Jack London” or “Walt Whitman” as “a wild youth of about twenty-two, the son of working-class parents, who himself works in the lumber camps, coal mines, and steel mills, harvest fields and mountain camps of America” (“Go Left, Young Writers” ). Neither women’s labor nor women’s writing had a place in this vision of the proletarian vanguard.25 The most controversial paper delivered at the first American Writers’ Congress was Kenneth Burke’s “Revolutionary Symbolism in America,” which concentrated on the pragmatic concerns of building a revolutionary movement within the United States. At the time of the first congress, Burke was already known as a modernist writer of poetry and fiction, and his important critical study of modernist aesthetics, Counter-Statement, had been published in .

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Burke’s paper at the congress addressed the fundamental problem of persuading the middle class, including intellectuals like himself, as well as the working class of the need for revolutionary social change. Noting the power of consumer society, of advertising and Hollywood, to appeal to the desire of the masses, Burke proposed a more resonant cultural symbol to expand the revolutionary movement within the United States, the symbol of “the people” rather than that of “the worker.” In defining the significance of cultural symbolism for the purpose of propaganda, Burke articulated a theory of cultural struggle that was analogous to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony (Denning –). His counterhegemonic appropriation of “the people” as “the ideal, the ultimate classless feature which the revolution would bring about” (Burke ), however, met strong resistance at the congress. The concept of “the people” was too closely identified with fascist or anti-Communist organizations, Burke’s critics noted, often in explicit opposition to “the workers.” “The people” was neither a precise nor scientific enough Marxist concept, insisted Joseph Freeman; only “the workers” could signify the vanguard of revolutionary action (Hart, American Writers’ Congress – ). The contentious discussion of Burke’s paper suggested that not only was the “vanguard of revolutionary action” at stake in the cultural symbols by which it was defined, but the viability of a Marxist revolutionary movement in the United States was at stake as well. Despite the furor it provoked, “Revolutionary Symbolism in America” proved to be the most prescient paper delivered at the congress, as it articulated the Popular Front terms that would soon be embraced by the CPUSA.26 As divided as the first American Writers’ Congress participants were by their social backgrounds and experiences as writers, they shared an awareness of the changing class status of artists and intellectuals during the Depression. Because the market for books practically disappeared, and as opportunities for writing careers decreased, writers increasingly perceived that their plight was comparable to that of the working class, even as the federal government was beginning to supplement the marketplace in supporting writers and artists.27 The alliance with the working class was not only a revolutionary assertion but also a recognition of a transformed literary public. Writers were faced with the diminished resources of the book-buying public, and at the same time they were competing with the growing popularity of new modes of mass entertainment for the attention of working- and middle-class audiences.28 The necessity to rethink the literary public, whether out of political conviction or professional expediency, or both, affected poetry as well as more commercially viable modes of writing. As Joseph Harrington has written, the public for poetry was contested by poets

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and critics throughout the period identified with literary modernism in the United States, for the idea of “the public” itself was unstable. Various notions of “the public” informed poetry criticism: poetry was evaluated by its relation to the “reading public, to the public sphere, to public norms, to public service, to publication, publicity, popularity.” Poets and critics tended to see poetry as “either an alternative to or refuge from the public, as a vehicle or mode for participating in and engaging with the public, or as a way of negotiating or problematizing the separation of public and private spheres” (Harrington ). The problem of defining and relating to the public for poetry intensified during the Depression, especially on the Left, as the “alliance of writers and artists with the working classes” that Frank celebrated was as much a utopian dream as a strategic goal. There is only one essay devoted to poetry in the first American Writers’ Congress collection, Isador Schneider’s “Proletarian Poetry,” but it exemplifies the broader desire to transform the public for poetry. Schneider, a poet and a novelist who regularly wrote reviews and essays for the New Masses, begins with the premise that poetry, unlike prose, had already lost its audience and its social influence prior to the Depression. The decline of poetry corresponded with the rise of capitalism, “which aggrandizes the individual” and is thus hostile to the “social art” of poetry (Schneider ). The forms of poetry that had survived in the marketplace were either limited in their social scope (individualistic forms such as the lyric, for example) or, conversely, so difficult and obscure that they were inaccessible to a mass audience. In contrast with this “phenomenon of a poetry virtually without readers,” Schneider articulates a renewed commitment to poetry as a “social art.” He argues simultaneously for the renewal of a broad public for poetry and for the revolutionary purpose of proletarian poetry, as he asserts that revolutionary poets share two aims: “to prepare themselves for the new role of poetry” and “to make their poetry a weapon for the overthrow of capitalism” (Schneider ). The instrumentalist definition of poetry as a social art that Schneider articulates in “Proletarian Poetry” corresponds with much of the poetry collected in Proletarian Literature in the United States. This anthology gathered a representative sampling of poetry by writers who were committed to radical social change in the early s. Most of this poetry is comparable to the anthology’s collection of reportage in its emphasis on topics of immediate political interest. The range of social locations from which these poets write, however, not to mention the tonal variation of their revolutionary testimony, demonstrates the considerable impact of the proletarian movement on younger writers in the s. As the preface to the poetry section of Proletarian Literature states, no longer could

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proletarian poetry be characterized as “one long lamentation over the lot of the worker.” There are also “orations, descriptions, exhortations, narratives, reveries, satires, epigrams, songs. . . . From the simple tap rhythms of workers songs we go into echoing mazes of counterpoint; and from statements as direct as outcries we go into a diction as subtle, and at times, unfortunately, as obscure, as anything to be found in contemporary poetry” (Hicks et al. ). The poetry represented in Proletarian Literature embodied the tension between traditions that predated the s, between proletarianism and modernism, between the long tradition of workers’ poetry that preceded modernism and the tradition of experimentation that had emerged in the avant-garde movements of the s and s. Many of the poets in the anthology had established reputations before the Depression (for example, Maxwell Bodenheim, Kenneth Fearing, Langston Hughes, Alfred Kreymborg, and Genevieve Taggard), while others would become well known for their writing later in the s and afterward (for example, Kenneth Patchen, Edwin Rolfe, Muriel Rukeyser, and Richard Wright). What united this otherwise disparate group of writers was a belief in poetry’s persuasive power, its power especially to engage readers in the understanding of class oppression and the necessity to act against it. The poets represented in Proletarian Literature in the United States also shared the broader goal of creating a class-conscious cultural memory through locations, language, and imagery that foregrounded the experience of working people. This broader purpose links the occasional poetry of the proletarian movement with the more expansive interventions in the construction of cultural memory that I study in the following chapters. The Left cultural memory represented by Proletarian Literature was no more uniform than the modes of expression the anthology included, however, as it emerged from a broad range of workingclass sites.29 Represented in the anthology, for example, are the industrial and factory sites most often associated with proletarian poetry, from the Pennsylvania steel mills of Mike Gold’s “A Strange Funeral in Braddock,” to the Minnesota paper mills of Joseph Kalar’s “Papermill,” to the West Virginia coal mines of Norman MacLeod’s “Coal Strike.” Southern, western, and Appalachian rural sites of labor, whether agricultural or industrial, are featured in Hughes’s “Sharecroppers,” H. H. Lewis’s “I’ll Say,” Don West’s “Dark Winds,” and the folk songs by Ella May Wiggins (“Mill-Mother’s Song”) and Aunt Molly Jackson (“A Southern Cotton Mill Crime” and “Ragged Hungry Blues”). The Deep South is also the site of African American protest poetry as different as Wright’s “Between the World and Me” and the anonymous folk songs “Do Lak Alabamy Boys” and “Death House Blues.” The largest number of poems, however, represent urban

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sites of memory, particularly New York City. The ominous cityscapes of Stanley Burnshaw, Kenneth Fearing, Alfred Hayes, and Herman Spector, for example, evoke the bleak mood of The Waste Land, but they also commemorate the desperate struggles of the anonymous poor. Their precisely rendered scenes of working-class urban marginality are ironically or angrily juxtaposed to the more glamorous metropolis of Hollywood legend and the advertising billboard. Other poems in Proletarian Literature similarly render the absurdity of national cultural myths, ironically representing social mobility, for example, through negative sites of dislocation, as in Kalar’s “Worker Uprooted” or Charles Henry Newman’s “Uprooted.” Still others rewrite national cultural geographies through revolutionary sites of memory, such as Patchen’s “Joe Hill Listens to the Praying,” Edwin Rolfe’s “Poem for May First,” and Rukeyser’s “City of Monuments.” The heterogeneous social locations represented in Proletarian Literature underscore the regional and ethnic differences that still divided the nation in the s. While these social differences complicated revolutionary claims for working-class solidarity, they also foreshadowed the more pronounced social pluralism of the Popular Front, which the Roosevelt administration would itself embrace in its New Deal cultural programs.30 In commemorating these sites of social marginality, however, the poetry collected in Proletarian Literature in the United States also asserts its own social value as revolutionary testimony. By revaluing the experience of marginal social groups, this poetry simultaneously contests the cultural marginality of poetry within the United States more generally.31 The proletarian movement also transformed American literary history, as earlier writers were reread and revalued through a class-conscious lens. Nowhere is this more evident than in the revision of Walt Whitman’s literary reputation during the s. The recuperation of Whitman as a precursor to Left poetry transformed the cultural significance of his poetics: his work became at once romantic, proletarian, and protomodernist. Whitman was fashioned as an exemplary democratic, if not socialist, precursor to an extraordinary range of stylistic tendencies, from the proletarian poetry of Gold, Fearing, and Wright, for example, to the more expansive forms of Crane, Rukeyser, and McGrath. Whitman’s iconic status on the literary Left began in the s with the promotion of his protosocialist vision by Horace Traubel and intensified in the s. Whitman’s example was most evident in the early articulation of proletarian writing by Gold. In his  manifesto “Towards Proletarian Art,” Gold identifies Whitman as a “heroic spiritual grandfather” () whose democratic vision was an inspiration for proletarian culture. Gold, like subsequent proponents of the proletarian movement, defined Whitman’s literary persona in ruggedly masculine

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figurative language, implicitly contrasting the revolutionary vision of poems such as “Song of Occupations” with the sentimental reformist writing by women of Whitman’s time.32 As idealized as Whitman’s celebration of male working-class solidarity became by the s, there was considerable debate on the Left about the politics of his romantic individualism. Given that Whitman’s defense of individual freedom was as adamant as his advocacy of social equality, Left writers struggled to reconcile his individualism with the socialist vision implicit in his poetry and social criticism. While Marxist critics such as Granville Hicks, V. L. Parrington, and Newton Arvin variously argued that the ideas of “comradeship” and “solidarity” superceded his individualism, the homoeroticism of his poetry also complicated assessments of his legacy. Whitman’s homoeroticism was either repressed or distorted in most Marxist criticism, which is not surprising given the outlawing of homosexual acts by the Communist Party under Stalin in the s and the more general homophobia that accompanied the crisis of gender roles during the Depression. Arvin, however, directly addresses the question of homoeroticism in his  Whitman. Even though Whitman’s social vision was based on idealized love rather than class struggle, Arvin wrote, his idealization of fraternity could be adapted by the Left for its own purposes. Whitman, he concluded, translated his homoerotic desire into a democratic vision. Whitman’s example for the literary Left, then, was as controversial as it was inspirational. In reconciling his individualism with socialism, or his homoeroticism with socialism, his successors fashioned many Whitmans, often invoking him for specific political purposes.33 By the end of the s Whitman became more widely celebrated as an iconic “poet of the people.” As the quintessentially American writer who bridged liberalism and proletarianism, he became the prototypical poet of the Popular Front. The impact of proletarian poetry on American literary culture was more extensive and more lasting than the proliferation of autopsies of the proletarian movement in the late s would suggest.34 One indication of how proletarian poetry affected the more established modernist literary culture was the May  publication of a “Social Poets” issue of Poetry.35 Edited by Horace Gregory, the “Social Poets” issue at once pays tribute to the prominence of proletarian poetry as it aims to broaden its scope beyond the familiar topics and forms anthologized in Proletarian Literature in the United States. Poetry included many of the same poets published in Proletarian Literature (Gregory, Rolfe, Hayes, Fearing, David Wolff, Newman, and Rukeyser), as well as more unlikely candidates for the designation of “social poet” (such as R. P. Blackmur, Hildegarde Flanner, and Josephine Miles). Gregory’s “Prologue as Epilogue”; the essay by William

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Phillips and Philip Rahv, “Private Experience and Public Philosophy”; and the review essays in the issue all begin with the premise that “social poetry” reflects a widespread change of poetry’s relation to society and is thus not restricted to a single literary sensibility. Gregory’s “Prologue as Epilogue” is especially interesting in its precise claims for the historical sensibility of the poets represented in the collection. His defense of the designation of “social poetry,” rather than “revolutionary,” “proletarian,” or “Left” poetry, is simultaneously descriptive and tactical, as he argues that the social poetry of the s represents a dramatic transformation of “poetic belief ” that is most evident in younger, communist poets. While the new poetry of the s variously evoked a prevailing “mistrust” of a postwar society that was “bankrupt, hollow, dry,” the poetry of the s was responding to a dramatically different social world. Young poets responded less to the deficiencies of their predecessors than to the pressing events of their time, to the “economic disaster” of the Depression, the rise of fascism, and the highly publicized cases of social injustice in the United States (such as the Sacco and Vanzetti trial and the Scottsboro case), as well as to the “Americanization” of Marxist social philosophy (Gregory, “Prologue” –). Consequently, American poets sought new—more romantic—literary predecessors, from Whitman to Hart Crane, as their poetry became “less literary, more violent, more aware of a definite class conflict in an urban environment where hope of victory rests upon a prophecy to be found in Marxian dialectic” (Gregory, “Prologue” ). Gregory emphasizes the interaction of literary heritage and environmental factors in the formation of poetic belief, underscoring the simultaneous romantic idealism and modernist urban dissonance that distinguishes s “social poetry.” As Phillips and Rahv likewise point out in their essay, the modernism of s revolutionary poetry by writers such as Fearing or Gregory not only responds to the historical imperatives of its time; it is “aesthetic as well as social, and that as such it is a revolt within the tradition of poetry rather than against it” (“Private Experience” ). As Gregory suggests in the “Social Poets” issue of Poetry, the revolutionary poetry of the s is often distinguished by what Alan Wald has called a “melancholic romanticism.” Indeed, the poets whom I study in the subsequent chapters of this book suggest how the engagement with romantic poetics and structures of feeling persists in later poetry about the s as well. While Marxist poetry tends to be identified with social realism, there are significant aspects of romanticism that characterize the Left poetry of the s: “romanticism’s mode of vision and imagination organized about the goal of a social utopia; the Wordsworthian demand for simplicity in language; the desire to regenerate humanity

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by returning to some essential qualities deformed by contemporary values and social organization; and specific styles such as the meditative voice of the romantic lyric” (Wald, Exiles ). The blend of romantic and proletarian modes of expression characterized Left poetry prior to the s, as it developed as an indigenous American practice that coincided with high modernist dismissals of romanticism. The revival of romantic modes of expression during the Depression was more widespread, however, as it affected poets committed to modernist experimentation as well as poets working in conventional forms. The tropes of romanticism, especially of a “utopianism etched in preindustrial society” (Wald, Exiles ), were evident throughout Left poetry, even as the meaning of “revolutionary romanticism” was fiercely disputed.36 While Whitman figures most prominently in the “revolutionary” poetry of the s, Left poetry of the time also echoes the British romantics, as it recalls the revolutionary impulse of romanticism but also the disillusion that followed the French Revolution, often in sites of ruin that evoke the ruins topos of romantic poetry, from the rural site of Wordsworth’s lyric “The Ruined Cottage” to the urban site of Blake’s apocalyptic Jerusalem. This was especially the case for poetry that recalled the revolutionary promise of the s during and after World War II. As Wald notes, the distinctively melancholic tone of s revolutionary romanticism emerged from private doubts about the fulfillment of utopian desire as well as from the tension between individual expression and collective goals (Exiles –). The revolutionary desire expressed in s Left poetry—and within Left cultural discourse more generally—could not entirely conceal the anxiety writers shared about their vocation and its social purpose. on the dump No poem questions the relevance of romanticism during the Depression more evocatively than Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump.” Its sensibility is distinctly late modernist, which for Stevens is synonymous with late romanticist, in its self-conscious sense of belatedness to the epic ambition of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, John Keats and Walt Whitman. At the same time, it resonates with questions of representation that engaged Left writers during the s, especially during the Popular Front period in which Stevens composed the poem. With its self-consciously romantic diction, “The Man on the Dump” may seem like a peculiar intervention into Popular Front cultural politics. As I argue in the following pages, however, Stevens’s poem epitomizes the problem of historical amnesia that preoccupied late modernist poets. While the literary topos of the

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dump cannot help but echo the apocalyptic tone of The Waste Land, Stevens also evokes the more politicized representation of waste sites during the Depression. As Miles Orvell has written, the dump represents “the limit, the fringe of the city, the rough and worn edge of the machine made world.” Like the verbal and visual assemblages of William Carlos Williams, James Agee, Walker Evans, or Joseph Cornell, “The Man on the Dump” seeks “beyond the borders of the technological civilization . . . in some worn-out object the gist of authenticity” (Orvell ). While the artist on the dump signifies such a late modernist quest for authenticity, Olsen’s “human dumpheap” of “nameless FrankLloydWrights of the proletariate” represents an equally prevalent scenario in the s, one of deprivation, desperation, and improvisation. Whether as a sordid site of childhood poverty or a spectacular site of mass cultural junk, the dump signifies the social contradictions of the s.37 As a site of lyric revery, however, the dump also signifies the deflated social value of art in a time of socioeconomic crisis. Stevens defended the aesthetic autonomy of poetry throughout his career; that is, he questioned—and resisted—the corruption of poetry by marketplace demands. Significantly, though, Stevens felt compelled to defend the social value of art in response to Marxist socioaesthetics during the s.38 Citing his own example of “The Old Woman and the Statue” from Owl’s Clover, Stevens writes in “The Irrational Element in Poetry” () that the Depression had intensified the “pressure of the contemporaneous” felt by artists since World War I: “We are preoccupied with events, even when we do not observe them closely. We have a sense of upheaval. We feel threatened. We look from an uncertain present future toward a more uncertain future. One feels the desire to collect oneself against all this in poetry as well as in politics. If politics is nearer to each of us because of the pressure of the contemporaneous, poetry, in its way, is no less so and for the same reason.” In defending the distinctive value of poetry in such a time of social crisis, however, Stevens also implicitly critiques the failure of Marxist theory to account for the irrational, the unconscious, whether Freudian or Rimbaudian. The form of “resistance” that Stevens ascribes to poetry is not an “escape” from the “contemporaneous” but a more insightful comprehension of its irrationality: “Resistance to the pressure of ominous and destructive circumstances consists of its conversion, so far as possible, into a different, an explicable, an amenable circumstance” (“Irrational” ). Given his distrust of both documentary and sentimental approaches to everyday objects, Stevens’s foray into the trash heap for poetic material was unlikely. Nonetheless, his Depression-era poetry took seriously the challenge of salvaging a romantic vision of art’s social value from the wreckage of a collapsed economy.

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Stevens’s response to William Carlos Williams’s poetry in his preface to Williams’s Collected Poems, –, is instructive in this light. Defining, and defending, Williams as a “romantic poet,” he writes: “What, then, is a romantic poet nowa-days? He happens to be one who still dwells in an ivory tower, but who insists that life would be intolerable except for the fact that one has, from the top, such an exceptional view of the public dump and the advertising signs of Snider’s Catsup, Ivory Soap and Chevrolet Cars; he is the hermit who dwells alone with the sun and moon, but insists on taking a rotten newspaper.” In this portrait of the romantic artist that suggests the imagery of “The Man on the Dump,” the poet is located not in the midst of the public dump, but above it, in an “ivory tower.” According to Stevens, Williams’s perspective “on the dump” is one that blends the “unreal and the real, the sentimental and the anti-poetic” (“Williams” ). Like Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot, whom Stevens also describes as exemplary romantic poets, Williams’s most successful poetry results from a process of “hybridization” of such opposites, so that the “anti-poetic” images of the dump are transformed by the poet’s act of imagination.39 Not surprisingly, Williams was disturbed by Stevens’s positioning of him in an “ivory tower” above the “antipoetic” dump; he saw his poetry not in terms of such antitheses but in terms of a democratic inclusiveness (Mariani –). Stevens’s defense of the romantic imagination, however, suggests how “The Man on the Dump” similarly addresses s claims for a more socially responsible poetry.40 In suggesting how the dump itself, as well as its specific contents, is as much a product of a wasteful consumer culture as of an undervalued romantic poetic imagination, Stevens underscores how consumer capitalism diminishes not only those who live on its margins but the memory of their existence as well. In a brilliantly suggestive reading of “The Man on the Dump,” Henry Sussman argues that Stevens’s poem has the same epic ambition of Pound’s Cantos or Williams’s Paterson, as it represents on a smaller scale “a fictive setting for an allegory of poetic production” (). Sussman writes that the geographically marginal site of the dump is not only central for Stevens’s conception of poetic imagination, it is also central for modern American poetry, the poetry, that is, of an economic system that is structured on the production of “excess and superfluity.” “The Man on the Dump” affirms the poet’s heroic work in spite of all that the dump conventionally represents—incoherence, decay, and indifference (Sussman ). The dump is not simply a lowly dramatic scenario to enact the imaginative redemption of the material world, however; it is a “linguistic repository” (Sussman ) of cultural remains whose process of absorption and transformation itself becomes a metaphor for poetic production. A site of objects—of texts—

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whose value is either minimal or past, the dump evokes the marginality of poetry, and of cultural memory, in American society. But in a capitalist economy whose maintenance depends on the planned obsolescence of consumer goods, the discarded “janitor’s poems / Of every day” become the material for imaginative recycling, for the production of value from otherwise useless consumer waste. While Sussman’s reading of Stevens’s “allegory of poetic production” is persuasive, “The Man on the Dump” differs from the Cantos, Paterson, or The Waste Land in ways that are specific to its late-s site of poetic production. First, the figure of “the man on the dump” resonates throughout the Depression, usually gendered male but diminished to “an image of a man” (Stevens, Collected Poems ), a social type whose hunger, homelessness, and presumed unemployment render him more vulnerable, more pathetic, less masculine.41 However, the lyric speaker of “The Man on the Dump” is not the man “in the dump.” If the speaker identifies with the homeless man—speaking as “one”—he also accentuates the difference of his position, that of the “romantic poet . . . who still dwells in an ivory tower,” but with an “exceptional view of the public dump.”42 In appropriating the marginal vision of “the man on the dump,” in identifying with him as “one,” Stevens situates “romantic” poetry on the s dump as he erases the subjective vision, and social specificity, of the socioeconomically marginal man.43 As psychologically, socially, and politically complicated as Stevens’s marginal perspective is in “The Man on the Dump,” his poem also presents conflicting premises about the relation of present to past, and present to future, that are characteristic of the s. Stevens ironically dramatizes an encounter between an overdetermined romantic idea of the poetic imagination and an overdetermined material site. This unresolved conflict superimposes a high modernist premise, the premise informing The Waste Land and The Cantos—for example, that a continuous cultural past can be resuscitated through the willful act of imagination—upon a more skeptical protopostmodernist approach to the past, which asserts neither the authority of the past nor its continuity with the present. While “The Man on the Dump” expresses the desire to imaginatively supersede the mimetic function of documentary writing, it does so ironically, in an exhausted tone, in archaically romantic language. When, in the conclusion of Stevens’s poem, “One feels the purifying change,” when “One rejects / The trash,” what sort of transformation takes place? When one has rejected the belated, romantically inflated mimesis of “the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew,” and when one has rejected the equally belated but more mundane mimesis of the newspaper, does one then “see / As a man (not like an image of a man)”?

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The implied answer is that one cannot “reject / The trash,” as what one sees is always mediated by social constructions of value. One may see “As a man (not like an image of a man),” but to see “as a man” likewise depends on socially, culturally, and historically specific gender codes that differentiate the masculine “man on the dump” from the feminine moon; that differentiate masculine language, imagery, and space from its feminine counterparts; and that differentiate material production from the production of poetry. “One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail. / One beats and beats for that which one believes” (Stevens, Collected Poems ). And one asks questions, questions that echo romantic poetic tropes: “aptest eve,” “invisible priest,” “stanza my stone.” But they echo dissonantly amid the trash of “bottles, pots, shoes and grass.” The poetic archive of Keatsian—and Whitmanian—tropes offers neither a profound sense of connection with the cultural past nor a transcendence of the socioeconomic detritus of the dump. When one asks in conclusion, “Where was it one first heard of the truth?” (Stevens, Collected Poems ), one must return to the language of questioning and to the site of questioning, which are of course inseparable. The poem’s closing response to this question, “The the,” makes sense only as an incomplete process that is linguistically located, a process of making something from almost nothing, a process that inventively recycles devalued linguistic fragments. Given that this process is prematurely terminated with the final punctuation, however, one can also see “The the” as an ironically reified fragment of the poet’s raw material—language—but a fragment that nonetheless returns us to the desire to reinvent poetry, to reinvent a grammar that connects past with present, present with future, from the incoherent dump of cultural remains. Through its displacement of the dump’s marginal socioeconomic geography into a meditation on aesthetics, “The Man on the Dump” evokes the “mental theater” of the romantic ruin poem. Like the abandoned, decrepit site of Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage,” for example, the dump has a more profoundly lasting aesthetic value precisely because its utilitarian value is minimal. And like the more majestic but no less notorious ruins of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” which appear uninhabited except for the “vagrant dwellers” mentioned early in the poem, the dump’s value as a site of lyric meditation supersedes the presence of its displaced transients.44 From Spenser’s The Ruines of Time to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in which the poet arrives at the Roman Colosseum and Forum “to meditate amongst decay, and stand/A ruin among ruins” (qtd. in Goldstein ), the ruins topos in British poetry signifies at once historical impermanence and a national identity authorized by its genealogical heritage in classical antiquity. As Anne Janowitz discusses in England’s Ruin: Poetic Purpose and

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the National Landscape, however, the romantic ruin poem translates the narrative ruin poetry of the eighteenth century into lyric forms conceived in spatial rather than temporal terms. By the late eighteenth century, the ruin poem is less likely to be concerned with the violent events of the past that formed the ruins than with the poet’s act of contemplating the ruins. This internalization of ruin finds its formal expression in romantic fragment poems such as The Excursion (which contains “The Ruined Cottage”), in which formal incompleteness supplants the temporality of ruin.45 In the dialectical relationship between ruin and fragment that is initiated in romantic poetry, “the temporal figure of degeneration, spatialized, generates hope. Memory is superseded by longing” ( Janowitz ). Accompanying the romantic lyric’s internalization of ruin is an underlying anxiety about the increasingly autonomous and private social location of lyric poetry. Given the subsequent hegemonic identification of poetry with the lyric tradition, the romantic trope of poetic marginality resonates even among twentiethcentury poetry that repudiates romantic conventions. The most prominent precedent for late modernist poetry that evokes the ruins topos is The Waste Land. Eliot’s poem exemplifies the lasting significance of the dialectical pattern of ruin and fragmentation that emerges in romantic lyric poetry. In representing the ruins of urban modernity as waste, however, Eliot critically foregrounds the cultural discontinuity signified by twentieth-century ruins rather than the continuity of a national heritage associated with British landscape ruins. As Eliot’s topos of urban decay so influentially conveys, the modernist site of ruin is less likely to resonate nostalgically than to indict the present social order its degradation represents. Amid the wreckage of Eliot’s “Unreal City,” however, The Waste Land suggests a vision of community that recalls preromantic ruins topoi. In the aftermath of the imperialist frenzy of World War I, Eliot’s “fragments I have shored against my ruins” evoke the poem’s desire for a more cosmopolitan, aristocratic pan-Europeanism reminiscent of Renaissance poetry. Like Pound, whose Cantos are likewise comprised of multilingual fragments of poetry, Eliot seeks “in cultural materials a simulacrum of a nation without locating that nation as a geographical entity” ( Janowitz ). “The Man on the Dump” also suggests a transnational site for cultural renewal in such humble debris as “the box / From Esthonia: the tiger chest for tea” (Stevens, Collected Poems ). However, such references evoke less of a nostalgic utopian desire for cultural coherence than an ambivalent recognition of an emerging global consumer culture whose fragments are shored on the dump. Paradoxically, Stevens suggests, the haphazard waste of this consumer economy gains value only as it defies the inflated (“Cornelius

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Neposian”) rhetoric of its promotion, only as it is reinscribed within the dump’s economy of scarcity. If Stevens’s poem translates the refuse of the dump into an affirmation of poetic imagination, an affirmation as well of the analogous power of organic processes to transform the site of ruin, it does so ironically. Its fragmentary allusions to romantic tropes are themselves scattered among the poem’s debris, as worn in their associations as they are visibly out of place, typographically conspicuous, on the dump. Unlike The Waste Land, in which fragments of cultural memory offer potential patterns of coherence to compensate for the chaotic ruins of urban modernity, Stevens asserts the incompleteness of the romantic fragment, inscribed within the ruins topos of the dump. “The Man on the Dump” underscores the problem of historical amnesia as it resists its own obsolescence. In the representations of recovered local pasts that I study in the following chapters, sites of geographical and social marginality likewise displace cultural centers. The dump of cultural remains becomes a site for imaginative recycling, but rather than a site of nostalgic desire for master narratives, it becomes a site of provisional counternarratives that contest the hegemonic authority of national collective memory. In situating the problem of cultural memory on the marginal site of the dump, a site of both scarcity and excess that evokes the class conflict of the Depression, “The Man on the Dump” resembles the Left poetry that recollects the s. Stevens’s allusion to the dehistoricizing, spatializing impulse of the romantic fragment poem, however, also suggests significant differences from the subsequent generation of late modernist poetry. Unlike “The Man on the Dump,” Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, Bishop’s North & South, Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred, Brooks’s In the Mecca, McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend, and Oppen’s Of Being Numerous figure the s through sites of ruin not to assert the immortality of poetry or of an imaginary community (whether national or transnational) but to critically explore problems of temporality and collectivity. Rukeyser’s Popular Front long poem The Book of the Dead (), the subject of the next chapter, investigates a notorious Depression site of industrial scandal: the silicosis deaths of hundreds of miners employed in the Union Carbide hydroelectric project in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. Rukeyser’s strategies for representing Gauley Bridge invoke the documentary modes associated with s popular news media (investigative reporting, photojournalism, and documentary film) as well as the narrative strategies for representing place in the FWP’s American Guide Series. The title of the book in which The Book of the Dead was published, U.S. , itself echoes one of the most popular volumes from this series, U.S. One: Maine to Florida. However, the poem’s feminist dialogic structure

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foregrounds differences of gender, race, and class to counteract discourses of nationalism that elide such differences. In juxtaposing lyric and narrative poetic modes with documentary forms such as interviews, case studies, informant narratives, and transcriptions of congressional hearings, The Book of the Dead underscores the relation of poetry to other discursive forms. And in dynamically contrasting the narratives of the mostly African American workers and their families with more “official” versions of the Gauley Bridge catastrophe, Rukeyser transforms a site of social and geographical marginality into a site of memory that contests corporate and state interests in forgetting the past. Most significant, and often overlooked in commentary on The Book of the Dead, Rukeyser foregrounds the racial politics informing the cultural memory—and amnesia— of Gauley Bridge. The third chapter examines the salvage poetics of Bishop’s first book, North & South (). The Key West poems of North & South have been the subject of extensive critical analysis, but few readers have emphasized the late-s sociohistorical contexts of their composition and initial publication. Feminist criticism of Bishop has stressed how her experience of outsiderhood as a woman poet and a lesbian has informed her exploration of social marginality in sites like Key West. Only recently, however, have critics begun to relate her early writing to the discourses of marginality that informed s literary politics, even though her early work appeared most frequently in Partisan Review. Bishop’s Key West is at once desperately impoverished and eccentrically surreal. Key West’s location and economic history had long made it a destination for Caribbean and African American migrant workers, and in the s the island experienced a new influx of migrants: cultural workers supported largely by the WPA. Upon settling in Key West, Bishop does not so much depart from her earlier surrealist vision toward a more socially engaged poetics, as some critics have suggested; her Key West writing instead exemplifies what the cultural anthropologist James Clifford has called “ethnographic surrealism” (Predicament –). Bishop’s Key West is a peripheral contact zone in which unfamiliar if not “primitive” cultural practices of salvage coincide with the experimental arts of a shattered national culture. Bishop’s Key West writing is rhetorically inscribed by the conflicting positions of nation and region, cosmopolitan center and rural periphery, that linked ethnographic conventions with WPA documentary in the late s. As I argue, though, her reflexive practice of surrealist observation and ironic representation calls into question the rhetorical act of salvage it practices. Rather than allegories of salvage, her fables of the margins are more accurately described as allegories of allegories of salvage.

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Following the chapter on North & South, I discuss the critical memory of Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred (). Hughes’s book-length montage of Harlem history locates the African American “dream deferred” within an urban geography of ruins, but a geography that nonetheless continues to evoke the legendary promise of the “black Mecca.” In mapping a Harlem that had not yet recovered from the Depression, Hughes accentuates the necessity for a critical memory responsive to its time. The musical form that he chose to convey this critical memory was the still new—and controversial—jazz sound of bebop. While Montage invokes a polymorphous African American musical tradition familiar to readers of Hughes’s earlier blues and jazz poetry, it summons this tradition through bebop’s more defiant postwar mood. Harlem was no longer the center of refuge and hope associated with the New Negro Renaissance; although still a major destination for poor migrant blacks during the Depression, it had become better known nationally as the site of explosive riots in  and . This chapter investigates the continuity and controversy of Hughes’s work as a poet, intellectual, and social critic from the s through the cold war years in which he wrote Montage. Recalling both the promise of the New Negro Renaissance and the despair of the Depression, Montage evokes the bitter irony of continuing discrimination against blacks amid the claims of wartime nationalism. In adapting a musical form associated with a younger generation of black artists, however, Hughes succeeded in renewing the prominence of Harlem as a site of black memory, anger, and hope. Closely related to Hughes’s historical project is Brooks’s later long poem, “In the Mecca.” Chapter  articulates her revision of urban African American social and cultural history in her  book, In the Mecca. The Mecca Building on Chicago’s South Side, the subject of Brooks’s long narrative title poem, was built by the D. H. Burnham Company in . The Mecca Building was initially celebrated as a boldly innovative architectural prototype for luxury apartment living, but it gradually deteriorated into an overcrowded tenement housing thousands of poor blacks. It was eventually demolished in  after gaining considerable national notoriety as a symbolic example of urban decay. Brooks gained firsthand knowledge of life in the Mecca as a young woman in the s while working there for four months as a sales assistant to a spiritual adviser. Her recollection of this experience haunted her for years: In the Mecca was first drafted as a novel in the s and was subsequently redrafted many times before it was published within the politically charged context of the Black Arts movement. This chapter concentrates on Brooks’s narrative strategies for rewriting the history of the Mecca, in contrast to the mass media representations that publicized

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the building before it was razed. The poem “In the Mecca” is a digressive, discordant narrative that portrays the everyday struggles of the building’s inhabitants in a challenging array of voices and styles. It accentuates the fragmentary, ephemeral aspects of Mecca life, stressing the sense of disconnection that paradoxically links its characters—disconnection from place, from community, and from the past. By foregrounding the persistent inequities of race, gender, and class that had linked her origins as a writer during the s Chicago Renaissance to her active role in the Black Arts movement, Brooks underlines the need for reconstructing urban communities and their histories. In presenting a dialogic counternarrative to the dominant—and often dehumanizing—discourse of urban decline, Brooks also underscores the continuities, as well as the discontinuities, between the utopian vision of the progressive Left in the s and of the revolutionary black nationalism of the s. The next chapter examines an ambitious long poem that has attracted less critical attention than the other texts I have selected, Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend. In the final section of Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Part Two, completed in , McGrath relates the memory of his rural North Dakota childhood to the poem’s present as “a metamorphic palimpsest.” This trope crystallizes the stratified sites of memory that structure McGrath’s “pseudoautobiographical” epic journey: from the Dakotas to college in Louisiana, from teaching in Maine to “War and the City”—the Aleutians and then New York and Los Angeles—and back full circle to the childhood site that is barely recognizable as an adult. The figure of “a metamorphic palimpsest” evokes the poem’s philosophical and literary method of reclaiming a working-class past that is also autobiographical. The poem’s Marxist revolutionary vision incorporates Hopi, Christian, and classical Greek myths of renewal, while its narration of history foregrounds the labor and materials of writing, erasure, and revision. This chapter addresses the problem of historical memory in McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend and in the construction of his literary reputation. As McGrath’s friend and most incisive Marxist reader E. P. Thompson has noted, McGrath’s long poem begins with the problem of a public poet addressing a public that recognizes neither him nor the history he narrates. This lack of recognition can be partially attributed to McGrath’s earlier persecution by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). However, the labor history that he narrates, especially the radical agrarian history of the Dakotas, was also obscure to a younger generation of readers. Concentrating on the politicization of memory in Letter to an Imaginary Friend, especially Part Two, I examine how the apparent anachronism of this past is itself important to the poem and its

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reception. McGrath underscores how one result of the systematic destruction of the organized Left in the United States during the cold war was a cultural amnesia of the very history his poem documents. The final chapter addresses how “Of Being Numerous,” the title poem of George Oppen’s  Pulitzer Prize–winning book, confronts the repressed cultural memory of the s. As Oppen wrote of his generation in “Blood from the Stone,” “The Thirties” recur as a “spectre // In every street,” as a reminder that “In all inexplicable crowds, what they did then / Is still their lives” (New Collected Poems ). Oppen was affiliated with the Objectivist movement in the early s, but after publishing his first book, Discrete Series (), he dedicated himself to political activism rather than writing. He did not write poetry again for twenty-five years. Oppen’s return to writing after a quarter century of literary silence, which included activism within the Communist Party during the Depression, combat in World War II, and political exile in Mexico during the cold war, has been crucial for rethinking the significance of both the Objectivist movement of the s and its subsequent postwar disappearance from literary history. “Of Being Numerous” figures the “spectre” of the s in an urban environment that is as alienating as it is familiar. As familiar as New York—and especially Brooklyn—is for Oppen in the memories it evokes, it is also imbued with an elegiac consciousness of loss. The problem of reconstructing the past is intensified by the political events of the s, particularly the growing opposition to the Vietnam War. As much as the s recalled the state of social crisis that he had experienced in the Depression, the emergence of the New Left and the new social movements had transformed the literary public as well as progressive politics. The New York City of “Of Being Numerous” is a complex and often discordant palimpsest where the ruins of lives, buildings, and neighborhoods all but eclipse the poem’s occasional moments of utopian promise. Beginning with the question of Oppen’s silence and his return to poetry, this chapter analyzes how his richly intertextual serial poem underscores the problem of historical amnesia through its fragmentary structure of recollection. “Of Being Numerous” resembles the other poetry of this study in its elegiac articulation of a specific cultural geography. In locating the repressed memory of the s in the metropolitan scene of post–World War II U.S. cultural hegemony, however, Oppen underscores the global—as well as national—significance of American historical amnesia.

2. Buried History The Popular Front Poetics of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead There are roads to take she wrote when you think of your country driving south to West Virginia Gauley Bridge silicon mines the flakes of it heaped like snow, death-angel white —poet journalist pioneer mother uncovering her country: there are roads to take  , “An Atlas of the Difficult World” There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.  , The Life of Poetry

As Adrienne Rich’s “An Atlas of the Difficult World” () suggests, Muriel Rukeyser’s work as “poet journalist pioneer mother” (Rich ) has not been forgotten. Since the late s, Rukeyser has been celebrated as an iconoclastic “pioneer mother” of contemporary feminist poetry, and her work as an activist “poet journalist,” from her investigative journalism in Scottsboro, Alabama, and Barcelona in the s to her protest against the Vietnam War in the s, has ensured her an enduring presence on the literary Left. She has been acclaimed also for her moral seriousness as a Jewish writer, her intensity as a teacher, her strength as a single mother, and her honesty in writing about the female body and sexuality. She has likewise been praised for the unusual breadth of her intellect, as her lifelong interest in science, technology, history, and anthropology informed her poetry as well as her biographical studies of the early modern English navigator and astronomer Thomas Hariot and the twentieth-century American physicist Willard Gibbs. With new paperback publications of her poetry and prose appearing in the s, the significance of her work has become increasingly recognized by literary scholars as well as poets who have learned from her example.1 It is easy to forget, then, that in any history of modern poetry until recently, Rukeyser’s work has been only vaguely remembered if not forgotten among “the buried, the wasted, and the lost” writing of her generation.2 Like many modernist women writers, and like many writers who were affiliated with the Left in the s, her reputation has been subject to the political fluctuations of literary criticism, particularly in the academy. Not only was she castigated 34

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during the McCarthy era for her affiliations with the Communist Party during the s, she was publicly ridiculed for her feminism, her sexuality, her multidisciplinary interests, and her Whitmanesque visionary poetics. She was dismissed by New Critical readers for those same qualities that have since attracted readers to her work. It is ironic, but not surprising, that a poet who dedicated her life to articulating voices and experiences that might otherwise disappear from collective memory would find her own life’s work so vulnerable to literary historical amnesia. Nowhere is Rukeyser’s determination to excavate “the buried, the wasted, and the lost” more pronounced than in the long poem that Rich quotes in her “Atlas,” The Book of the Dead (). As the initial poem in Rukeyser’s second volume of poetry, U.S. , The Book of the Dead maps an early Depression site of industrial disaster that otherwise might have disappeared from her country’s history: the silicosis deaths of hundreds of miners employed in the Union Carbide hydroelectric project in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. In commemorating a site that corporate and government officials would have preferred to forget, The Book of the Dead demonstrates the political necessity for remembering— and rethinking—the past, particularly the national past, that Rukeyser asserts in her  meditation on the sociocultural value of poetry, The Life of Poetry: “If we are free people, we are also in a sense free to choose our past, at every moment to choose the tradition we will bring to the future. We invoke a rigorous positive, that will enable us to imagine our choices, and to make them” (). The Book of the Dead asserts the democratic responsibility of “choosing our past” through its juxtaposition of first-person workers’ narratives with such documentary forms as journalistic reporting, transcriptions of congressional hearings, biographies, and personal interviews. Engaging its readers in a dialogic process of documenting, interrogating, and revealing the discursive practices by which national history is constructed, Rukeyser’s long poem is an important Popular Front intervention into national identity formation. Most significant, and often understated in readings of The Book of the Dead, Rukeyser foregrounds the racial politics informing the cultural memory—and amnesia—of Gauley Bridge, where the majority of mine workers were black migrant laborers. She does so not only by contrasting the stories and testimony of black workers and their families with more official versions of their demise but also through the metaphor of whiteness—the “white glass” of silica. The symbolic associations of this metaphor proliferate with the poem’s accumulation of voices defying Union Carbide’s systematic silencing of witnesses. Rukeyser furthermore inscribes this narrative of recent labor history within the region’s—and the nation’s—longer struggle for

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racial justice, embodied in the figure of John Brown. In surveying the ruins of this “scene of power” (), Rukeyser insists that a Marxist revolutionary politics in the United States is also a racial politics. Rukeyser originally intended to write a more expansive historical poem about the Atlantic coastal region that highway U.S.  traversed. She explains in a note to the initial publication of U.S. : “The Book of the Dead will eventually be one part of a planned work, U.S. . This is to be a summary poem of the life of the Atlantic coast of this country, nourished by the communications which run down it. Gauley Bridge is inland, but it was created by theories, systems and workmen from many coastal sections—factors which are, in the end, not regional or national. Local images have one kind of reality. U.S.  will, I hope have that kind and another, too. Poetry can extend the document” (U.S.  ). The working papers that Rukeyser compiled for this project outline a plan to write a historical poem as comprehensive as Hart Crane’s The Bridge or William Carlos Williams’s later Paterson. As she suggests in the published note to U.S. , the proposed poem’s scope is historically and geographically vast, covering the earliest years of European settlement through the s, from Maine to Key West. Among the historiographic prototypes that she had consulted to organize this history were Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History and Williams’s “The American Background.”3 This ambitious scope is retained primarily in the introductory and concluding poems that frame the documentation of the Gauley Bridge tragedy. While The Book of the Dead concentrates mostly on the local, contemporaneous manifestations of silicosis in West Virginia, the poem “extends the documents” by which Gauley Bridge became notorious in the s by emphasizing socioeconomic “factors which are, in the end, not regional or national.” It furthermore underscores the enduring significance of Gauley Bridge through the mythic structure of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. With its cyclic structure of burial and rebirth and its descent into an underworld, Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead recalls modernist quest narratives with similarly mythic structures, most notably The Waste Land. Unlike The Waste Land, however, The Book of the Dead identifies with the mother figure of the Egyptian myth, Isis, and locates the potential for rebirth neither in an idealized past nor in a spiritual vision of a redeemed present but in a revolutionary vision of the material world it documents. Rukeyser’s method for representing Gauley Bridge invokes the documentary modes associated with s popular news media (investigative reporting, photojournalism, and documentary film) as well as the narrative strategies for representing place in the FWP’s American Guide Series. The title of U.S.  itself echoes one of the most popular volumes from this series, U.S. One: Maine to

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Florida. More specifically, though, her rendering of Gauley Bridge adapts the methods of what William Stott has summarized as “radical documentary reportage” in Documentary Expression and Thirties America (): exposé, quotation, case studies, informant narratives, and participant observation. With its rhetorical imperative of making a case for radical social change by revealing the specific socioeconomic conditions of Gauley Bridge, The Book of the Dead is a social documentary not unlike the documentary books that proliferated in the late s and early s, such as Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces (), Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor’s An American Exodus (), Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam’s  Million Black Voices (), and Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (). While The Book of the Dead most resembles Let Us Now Praise Famous Men with its modernist juxtapositions of genres and discourses and its selfconsciousness about documentary representation, Rukeyser herself emphasizes the impact of documentary film, with its collaborative interaction of imagery, music, and the language arts, on her poetry and on the arts of the s more generally (Life of Poetry –). Unlike the majority of documentary texts produced in the late s, though, such as the influential films directed by Pare Lorenz for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), The River and The Plow That Broke the Plains, The Book of the Dead does not represent social conflict primarily through the lens of (New Deal) nationalism. As recent studies of The Book of the Dead have noted, its dialogic structure instead foregrounds differences of class, gender, and race to counteract discourses of nationalism that elide such differences.4 In juxtaposing lyric, narrative, and mythic poetic modes with more prosaic documentary genres, The Book of the Dead foregrounds the dialogic relation of poetry to other discursive forms. In doing so, it responds to the radically changed social field for literary expression during the Depression, which challenged romantic and high modernist premises of poetic subjectivity, language, form, and audience. The Book of the Dead, as Cary Nelson has written about s Left poetry, is at once a “form of social conversation and a way of participating in collaborative political action” (“Poetry Chorus” ). The dialogic structure of Rukeyser’s poem is as motivated by what Richard Terdiman has called the “memory crisis” that constitutes modernity, however, as it is by her more specific documentary goal to give voice to the inarticulate, to make visible the overlooked, to commemorate the forgotten of her time. As Terdiman writes in Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis about Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of language, Rukeyser’s poetic practice aims to “reassert the mediations linking social objects and signs to the

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cultural system in which their meanings become meaningful” (). Terdiman argues that Bakhtin’s dialogism is a “memory model” that recalls the social history conveyed through a culture’s language; the dialogic structure of The Book of the Dead likewise restores to cultural memory a site whose narratives would otherwise be marginalized if not forgotten. As the direct address of Rukeyser’s recurring travel motif accentuates—“These are roads to take when you think of your country” ()—The Book of the Dead insists on the readers’ engagement in rethinking the cultural significance of Gauley Bridge. By dynamically relating individual acts of remembering to the formation of collective memory within The Book of the Dead, Rukeyser translates a site of social marginality into a site of memory that contests official interests in forgetting the past. The collection of lectures that Rukeyser assembled into the remarkable defense of poetry that she published in , The Life of Poetry articulates an instructive argument for the social purpose of documentary poetry such as The Book of the Dead. Rukeyser writes in The Life of Poetry that poetry is a form of social action that transforms collective memory. The cultural work of poems is comparable to that of “monuments,” as poems “offer the truths of outrage and the truths of possibility” (Life of Poetry ). Rukeyser cites Melville as the exemplary poet of outrage, whose encounter with the Civil War transformed him into a writer “who saw aspects of wars to come, veteran of a knowledge in some ways strange to his time, like the veterans of our own age of the war in Spain” (Life of Poetry ). Responding to the same divisive violence as Melville, as well as to the “contradictions” of his own sexuality and identity, Whitman is the poet of possibility in American culture, “whose fight for reconciliation was of profound value as a symbol. The fight was the essential process of democracy: to remake and acknowledge the relationships, to find the truth and power in diversity, among antagonists” (Life of Poetry ). In addition to these two exemplary poets, who were widely known if not sufficiently appreciated, Rukeyser also underscores the “submerged” sources of poetry that are less frequently acknowledged: [I]n this society, perhaps more than in any other, because of all the arrivals which brought its people to it, determined to live differently from before, there is and has been a great submergence. In many families, we were parented by the wish to move differently, to believe differently—that is, more intensely—from the past and the past place. Many came freely, inviting all the risk. I think of those others—stolen from beside African rivers, seduced by promises of land and work, who reached harbor and found the homestead underwater, the work a job of conscription; and those in Mexico who

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were promised an American education, and arrived to find themselves signed to four years at the hottest place in the assembly line; and those newly come from the camps of Europe who wake in the Louisiana swamp. . . . What of the others—born to mine-towns and the cave-in under the house floor, driving the night trucks packed with high explosives, anonymous in the schoolrooms, the outcast teacher among the very young? Their songs have been lost as the songs of the unborn. (Life of Poetry –) This “buried history” represents possibility for Rukeyser, even as she acknowledges the betrayal of these anonymous “others” in a tone of outrage. It is the choice of the poet—and his or her culture—to remember or to forget the “buried history” that the poet inherits: “They are among us, the voices of the present, the famous voices and the unacknowledged, and the voices of the past. We may choose; we are free to choose, in the past as well as now, and there is a tradition at our hand” (Life of Poetry ). The range of vernacular traditions that Rukeyser cites in The Life of Poetry—Navajo chants, African American blues, chanteys and cowboy songs, the songs on “work gangs, prison gangs, in the nightclubs, on the ships and docks” ()—represents a veritable Popular Front of anonymous collective expression, a poetry of unrecognized “possibility” that variously answers the “failure between poetry and its people—its writers and audience” in the United States (). Such vernacular songs are at once bridges to traditional modes of collective expression and products of modernity. The unprecedented availability of such a multitude of vernacular traditions in the s and afterward speaks to the promise provided by new media and recording technologies, which enable not only an intensified appreciation of geographically specific folk traditions but also a greater awareness of global interrelatedness: “We have, for the first time in our history, among all the longing for communication which we can see everywhere: communication with the secret life of the individual, communication through machines, communication between peoples— we have the sense of the world—a real and spiritual unity which offers greater newness than America, greater explorations, and wealth of human meanings and resources that has never before been reached” (Life of Poetry ). Among the “undefined possibilities, new meanings for multiplicity, and new meanings for unity” (Life of Poetry ) that present themselves to the modernist poet is the importance of testimony, particularly in times of social crisis. Rukeyser’s concept of writing as testimony is traditional in its relation to Judaic theological, ethical, and political thought.5 Her definition of the poem as an act of testimony in The Life of Poetry is secular and broadly humanist, however, as related

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to the documentary culture of the s as to Judaic tradition. She compares the social purpose of testimony to the personal revelation that occurs through confession, whether “to a priest or a psychiatrist.” Testimony is “the confession to oneself made available to all”: “This is confession as a means to understanding, as testimony to the truths of experience as they become form and ourselves. The type of this is the poem; in which the poet, intellectually giving form to emotional and imaginative experience, with the music and history of a lifetime behind the work, offers a total response. And the witness receives the work, and offers a total response, in a most human communication” (Life of Poetry ). Rukeyser’s definition of poetry is explicitly opposed to the formalist terms of the New Criticism, which, she argues, diminishes the emotive impact of language in its analysis of the poem as a static object. She instead defines poetry as a “process, in which motion and relationship are always present,” a dynamic process of perpetual transformation (Life of Poetry –). Noting the paradigm shift toward relational understandings of knowledge that transformed other areas of twentieth-century thinking, such as Einsteinian physics, Freudian psychology, or Marxist social theory, Rukeyser insists on a critical language for the arts that accounts for how “a poem, a novel, or a play act emotions out in terms of words” (Life of Poetry ). She defines the reader’s role in this dynamic process as that of “witnessing,” which “includes the act of seeing or knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence” (Life of Poetry ). Adapting Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotic model (of sign, object, and interpretant) to the experience of poetry, Rukeyser writes that “witness” is a preferable term to “reader” or “audience” because its “overtone of responsibility” suggests a more meaningfully interactive relationship between poet, poem, and audience (Life of Poetry –). The Book of the Dead exemplifies this dynamic notion of poetry, as it positions its readers as active “witnesses” in the construction of historical meaning. The reception of U.S. , and of Rukeyser’s s and s writing more generally, suggests how controversial her innovative dialogic practice was.6 The reception of The Book of the Dead in particular was furthermore informed by the specifically gendered and racialized contexts of s documentary writing. As Walter Kalaidjian has argued, the subject, social content, and regional setting of The Book of the Dead disrupt the universal stances of both bourgeois humanism and classical Marxism. The criticism of her work in Partisan Review most blatantly shows that conflicts about Rukeyser’s Marxist politics were also thinly veiled attacks on her authority as a woman writer, as indicated by the title of the most notorious condemnation of her work, “Grandeur and Misery of a Poster

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Girl,” an unsigned editorial that was published in Partisan Review in .7 This article, while ostensibly criticizing the trajectory of her writing career from “New Masses proletarianism to neo-Americanism” (), ridicules her bisexuality and her physical appearance as it condescendingly portrays her as an unprincipled opportunist. Her earlier Marxist poetry is denigrated no less harshly than her more nationalist wartime writing: for example, the editorial claims that her initial success occurred because she “rode the bandwagon of proletarian literature, flew in an airplane like a character in Auden’s work of that period, and cried Yes like Molly Bloom to the working class” (). Such rhetoric reveals a not so subtle assumption that governs the editorial, that a leftist but independent modernist woman writer is imaginable only as a second-rate imitation of her more serious male predecessors. “Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl” may be extreme in the viciousness of its character assassination, but the primary target of its criticism, the woman poet as public intellectual, is hardly unprecedented. If the marginalization of “the woman question” on the s Left has until recently been perpetuated in literary histories of the period, the reception of Rukeyser’s early writing suggests how class conflict itself was represented in the language of sexual difference. As Paula Rabinowitz documents in Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America, class struggle within Communist Party rhetoric was “metaphorically engendered through a discourse that re-presented class conflict through the language of sexual difference. The prevailing verbal and visual imagery reveled in an excessively masculine and virile proletariat poised to struggle against the effeminate and decadent bourgeoisie” (). The antifeminine—and homophobic—claims for “proletarian realism” that Mike Gold pronounced while editing the New Masses exemplify this gendered discourse.8 The class position of middle-class women, such as Rukeyser, who wanted to become politically active in the Communist Party was especially problematic: “Hopelessly outside of the working class because she was not hungry, the female intellectual was ideologically inscribed rather than materially determined. Given the hostility of most s American Marxists to ideas (as opposed to action), their valuing of deed over word, the bourgeois woman represented the epitome of false consciousness” (Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire ). The masculinist discourse of class struggle also complicated representations of working-class women during the Depression. Such masculinist rhetoric that characterizes Gold’s manifestos for proletarian realism was less prevalent in the later s, however, as more women became involved as activists within the Popular Front. Representations of working-class women became more prominent at this time, although these representations were often conventional portrayals

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of mothers and children. Most notable were the representations of migrant mothers such as Ma Joad in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and in the Hollywood film version of the novel, or the “Migrant Mother” photograph in Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s documentary book, An American Exodus —representations that appealed to traditional notions of family to portray the agonies of migrant laborers.9 More troubling for radical middle-class women who sought to represent working-class female subjects was the recognition of social boundaries that differentiated the privileged from the underprivileged. Because modes of documentary reporting, whether literary or photographic, fictionalized or journalistic, were closely associated with the regulatory mechanisms of the state, encounters between socially privileged intellectual women and working-class women were inevitably fraught with suspicion if not resentment. Rabinowitz summarizes the resulting sense of alienation experienced by radical women intellectuals in her discussion of the photographer Margaret Bourke-White: “Writings by and about radical women intellectuals, whose metaphoric annihilation as actors in the historical movement of the proletariat was doubled because of both class and gender differences, stressed that they were always ‘foreigners’ among the American people and within the American Left” (“Margaret BourkeWhite’s Red Coat” ). While middle-class women had an increased degree of mobility in the s, particularly in such fields as social work, journalism, and photography, their encounters with the poorer women who were the subjects of their work tended to reinforce their own privileged status, even as their professional authority was not respected by their male peers. What differentiates Rukeyser’s representation of working-class women in The Book of the Dead from popular images of impoverished mothers in the late s is that she does not limit their representation to the domestic sphere; she presents them in public arenas such as the organizational meetings of the Gauley Bridge Defense Committee and the courtroom as well. Furthermore, her self-consciousness about her position as a socially privileged narrator—a consciousness that also extends to the role of her colleague, the photographer Nancy Naumberg—makes us continually aware of her class position. This self-consciousness is intensified by the racial dynamic of white investigative reporters gathering information from black migrant workers. In one of the most memorable Popular Front testimonies to black migration,  Million Black Voices, Richard Wright asserts: “We black folk, our history and our present being, are a mirror of all the manifold experiences of America. What we want, what we represent, what we endure is what America is. If we black folk perish, America will perish” (). As confrontational as Wright’s stance appears,

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his statement also reflects the important change in approach to “the Negro question” taken by the Communist Party in the late s. With the party’s affirmation of Communism as “twentieth-century Americanism,” party spokesmen argued increasingly that African Americans were representative of the working class rather than of a distinctive national identity, and that African American experience should be considered integral, rather than peripheral, to transforming American society. As the Popular Front Americanist discourse of interracial solidarity diminished what was historically specific about black nationalism as an oppositional tradition, it also positioned African American culture more centrally within U.S. history. In his study of the Communist Party’s role in Harlem, Mark Naison explains the impact of this Popular Front strategy: “By defining Black America’s struggle for cultural recognition as a source of creative energy for the entire nation, party spokesmen helped give their white constituency a sense that they had a personal stake in black empowerment and that cultural interchange between the races represented a defining feature of the American experience, something to be celebrated and dramatized rather than hidden” ().10 The number of African American migration narratives that emerged at this time testifies to the growing interest in this history. Among the texts that dramatized African American migration were the documentary book by Wright and the photographer Edwin Rosskam; the popular history by Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, They Seek a City; novels such as Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s later Invisible Man; poetry such as Langston Hughes’s One-Way Ticket; painting such as Jacob Lawrence’s series, Migration of the Negro; and music such as the Chicago blues popularized by Muddy Waters. As Michael Denning has argued, the appeal of the African American migration narrative was enhanced by the uncertainty of the Depression: “The ideological crisis of the depression was in part a crisis of narrative, an inability to imagine what had happened and what would happen next” (); migration provided a narrative resolution to stories of poverty and desperation that seemed otherwise relentless. For white writers committed to revolutionary change, however, affirming that African Americans were representative of the American working class was one thing; depicting how they were representative was another problem altogether. This challenge is born out in a number of proletarian novels, such as the Gastonia novels of Mary Heaton Vorse, Fielding Burke, and Grace Lumpkin, in which the relative silence of black characters belies the claims made for multiracial unity. More often than not the presence of black characters in proletarian fiction tells us more about the white characters’ ability, or inability, to combat racism on behalf of workingclass solidarity.11

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While Gauley Bridge may not have the mythic resonance of such Depressionera sites of labor history as the Carolina Piedmont, Kentucky’s Harlan County, or California’s agricultural valleys, the atrocious story of industrial exploitation was well known at the time that Rukeyser wrote The Book of the Dead. In short, as many as two thousand miners died of silicosis because the project’s parent company, Union Carbide and Carbon, chose to maximize its profits rather than taking the proper precautions necessary to protect its workers from deadly silica dust.12 In  a subsidiary of Union Carbide, the New Kanawha Power Company, contracted the Dennis and Rinehart Company to dig a tunnel from Gauley’s Junction to Hawk’s Nest, Virginia. This project was intended to divert water from the New River for a hydroelectric plant, which would then sell the power to another subsidiary of Union Carbide, the Electro-Metallurgical Company. In excavating the tunnel, the company discovered a massive deposit of pure silica, a valuable mineral for the electro-processing of steel. This hydroelectric project, which was initially licensed as a public utility, was quickly transformed into a profitable silica mine, as Union Carbide shipped the silica to the ElectroMetallurgical steel-processing operation in Alloy, West Virginia. Rather than employing the known precautions for mining silica, such as the use of hydraulic water drills and safety masks, the company instead cut costs by drilling the tunnel dry without equipment to protect the workers. When the families of sick and dying workers subsequently filed lawsuits seeking compensation from Union Carbide, the company furthermore concealed the facts of the miners’ illness by bribing doctors to misdiagnose their symptoms and by paying a local mortician to bury the dead workers in a cornfield. The grim facts of Gauley Bridge first emerged in the mid-s, but only after the radical press uncovered information that was otherwise either ignored or actively suppressed by Union Carbide officials. The New Masses and the People’s Press, a radical Detroit labor tabloid, were the first to publish information about Gauley Bridge. The New Masses initially publicized the disaster in a moving narrative by the novelist and screenwriter Albert Maltz, “Man on a Road” ( Jan. , ), which was subsequently reprinted that year in the anthology Proletarian Literature in the United States. Maltz narrates an initially mysterious but disturbing encounter with a taciturn hitchhiker near Gauley Bridge, who is silent about the source of his despondency until the end of the story, when he reveals in a letter to his wife (transcribed by the narrator) that he is dying of silicosis. The New Masses followed this story with a more detailed two-part investigative article by a New York social worker who investigated the Gauley Bridge situation, Philippa Allen (writing under the pseudonym Bernard Allen), entitled “Two

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Thousand Dying on the Job” ( Jan.  and , ). Within a year, when a congressional inquiry about the conditions of Gauley Bridge was instigated by New York congressman Vito Marcantonio’s bill to compensate the silicosis victims, the story became widely publicized in mass-circulation newsmagazines and movie newsreels. Silicosis became the subject of numerous reports in medical journals and the topic of federal conferences and congressional investigations. It was even the subject of a popular  blues song by Josh White (using the pseudonymn Pinewood Tom) entitled “Silicosis Is Killing Me.” In , the same year that U.S.  was published, the problem of silicosis became even more widely known as the subject of a major Hollywood film based on the best-selling English novel by A. J. Cronin, The Citadel.13 Silicosis was well known as an industrial health risk prior to the revelations of Gauley Bridge, but the public understanding of silicosis was radically transformed in the s. As an industrial disease that was chronic, that often developed years after workers were exposed to it, and whose symptoms were not always clear, silicosis was somewhat mysterious; it was neither consistently diagnosed by medical professionals nor fully understood by the lay public prior to the s. With the publicity that emerged as a result of the Gauley Bridge investigation, however, silicosis became increasingly understood as a social crisis rather than a specifically medical problem related to industrial work. Labor leaders, social workers, and political activists challenged industrial and medical experts to explain the disease in terms that were accessible to the public. Because of this agitation, the discourse for explaining silicosis was translated into the language of human suffering and class conflict—silicosis became symbolic of the exploitation of workers. As a disease resulting from industrial work, it underscored the socioeconomic complicity of industry, finance, and medicine. Moreover, the Gauley Bridge investigation not only called into question the objectivity of medical diagnosis, it also challenged a basic premise of modernity, “that technological innovation and the growth of industry would produce general improvements in the quality of people’s lives” (Rossner and Markowitz ). While the public response to silicosis foreshadows the later environmentalist objection to the presumed association of industrialism with progress in the s and afterward, the changed popular perception of silicosis that took place during the Depression also makes clear the specific sociopolitical contexts of medical discourse. The labor movement of the s had a radical impact on the public understanding of such work-related diseases as silicosis. This transformation was short-lived, however: by the s silicosis had disappeared from public view, returning to the professional realm of medicine.14 In The Book of the Dead, Rukeyser emphasizes

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the specific sociopolitical and sociohistorical contexts of silicosis. While her documentary poem locates the site of Gauley Bridge within an expansive vision of American history and ultimately moves toward a transnationalist vision of socialist redemption, she also accentuates the specific conditions that obscured understanding of the workers stricken with silicosis. The Book of the Dead can be distinguished from other documentary representations of Gauley Bridge not only in its attention to female as well as male voices who offer their testimony but also in its subtle awareness of the racial dimensions of the workers’ oppression. Because most of the workers at Gauley Bridge were neither white nor longterm residents of the area in which they died, their deaths were barely noticed in the local media at first, and the cause of their deaths was disputed long after silicosis became a familiar term in front-page headlines. Rukeyser underscores how their lives were rendered expendable as their blackness rendered them invisible. Given the racial politics of Gauley Bridge, it is not surprising that this challenge of representing black workers without suppressing their voices informs the dialogic narrative structure of The Book of the Dead as well. The most comprehensive study of the Gauley Bridge tragedy, Martin Cherniack’s The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Disaster (), makes very clear how important racial politics were in the initial response to workers’ claims. Cherniack, a physician with expertise in occupational disease, emphasizes how racial politics have informed local memory of this historical incident even generations later. He tells a remarkable tale of official concealment of information, concealment that assumes that black migrant laborers’ lives have little value. In his investigative study of “America’s worst industrial disaster,” Cherniack found that not only had Union Carbide officials neglected to save incriminating information about the deaths of workers but also that residents of the region were reluctant to blame the company. Union Carbide left extensive records about the New Kanawha Power Project to the University of West Virginia state historical collection: in these files there are no documents related to the tunnel, to allegations of silicosis, or to the legal actions taken on behalf of the workers (Cherniack ). Given the national prominence of this event, which took place in an area very conscious of local history, Cherniack expected to uncover a different story when he interviewed Gauley Bridge residents who were old enough to remember the s. To his surprise, Cherniack found that these informants did not blame Union Carbide either.15 When asked why so many people died during and after the project’s completion, most reiterated the company’s initial explanation: black workers died not from silicosis but from pneumonia resulting from their own selfdestructive behavior (such as drinking or gambling outdoors before open fires).

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The statistics cited by Cherniack explain why such dismissive accounts of so many deaths could persist. Given the vastness and difficulty of the construction project, it is remarkable that Union Carbide was able to assemble the workforce to complete this project as efficiently and inexpensively as it did. In fact, fewer than  percent of the workers involved in the New Kanawha Power Project were long-term local residents. The majority of the workers were migrant laborers, who were quick to seek work in this early year of the Depression (). Almost two-thirds of these migrant laborers were southern blacks (Cherniack ). Of the construction workers who spent all or most of their time working within the tunnel, that is, the workers who were most exposed to danger and disease, a disproportionately large number were black (Cherniack ). The story that Cherniack unravels is certainly one of corporate greed and deceit that cost many workers their lives, but the racial politics dividing the workers and the local region make this tale more complicated. It is a tale of local distrust of, if not contempt for, migrant laborers. It is also a tale of racial segregation, in the local towns and in the camps built by the Virginia construction company (Dennis and Rinehart) hired by Union Carbide. Permanent residents of the Gauley Bridge area viewed the southern employees of this company as socially inferior to the northern Union Carbide/New Kanawha staff. The local disdain for black migrants was especially pronounced. Dennis and Rinehart, furthermore, was so notorious for its abusive treatment of black laborers that northern blacks were not even hired, as they would be presumably more likely to resist physical coercion. Black workers were subject to more abusive labor conditions than white workers, such as being physically forced to return to work in tunnels still thick with dust after explosions. They were also subject to inferior living quarters: there was inadequate housing available for black workers and their families in the local towns, and the construction company camp housing for blacks was extremely overcrowded (Cherniack –). Given Cherniack’s detailed assessment of responses to the Gauley Bridge disaster through the s—in the radical press, in mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, in feature movies and newsreels, and in popular fiction and songs— it is surprising that he says nothing about The Book of the Dead. The fact that Rukeyser’s poem does not exist in this, the most comprehensive account of the medical and social significance of Gauley Bridge, suggests how marginalized poetry has remained in American cultural history. It also suggests how radically transgressive Rukeyser’s documentary method is: poetry and investigative reporting, poetry and social history, and, for that matter, poetry and science persist as the mutually exclusive discursive categories that Rukeyser spent a lifetime trying

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to bridge.16 The Book of the Dead reports the same facts that investigative reporters such as Cherniack have uncovered. It does so through a montage of narrative, lyric, and didactic modes juxtaposed with a wide range of documentary modes: first-person testimony of a previous independent investigator, the social worker Philippa Allen; portraits, vignettes, and interviews with and first-person testimony of local workers and their family members; and quotations from congressional hearings, medical reports, and Union Carbide stock reports. The poem’s representation of Allen’s testimony before the congressional committee establishes this dialogic pattern. When she is asked about her authority as a witness (“You have met these people personally?”), she answers straightforwardly, “I have talked to people; yes” (). This simple affirmation of her authority is juxtaposed with a similarly matter-of-fact report of statistical information: According to estimates of contractors , men were employed there period, about  years drilling, . miles of tunnel. . . . The rock through which they were boring was of a high silica content. In tunnel No.  it ran –% pure silica. (–) The subsequent juxtaposition of personal testimony with official accounts in The Book of the Dead reveals the processes by which the workers’ claims were dismissed. Through the personal testimony in “Absalom,” we are reminded that when faced with so many workers’ deaths, the company lawyers and doctors “called it pneumonia at first / They would pronounce it fever” (), a diagnosis immediately contradicted by the subsequent medical report of “The Disease.” This popular misconception is reiterated in “The Cornfield” by the local undertaker, the aptly named H. C. White, who tells about “Negroes who got wet at work,/shot craps, drank and took cold, pneumonia, died,” but whose own credibility is subsequently undercut by the fact that “Rinehart & Dennis paid him $ / a head for burying these men in plain pine boxes” (). We find out from a white engineer who had contracted silicosis that there were “Negroes driven with pick handles” () to work in the tunnel, many of whom did not survive. Underlying such abusive treatment, the first thing we are told about the workers in “Praise of the Committee” is: Most of them were not from this valley. The freights brought many every day from States

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all up and down the Atlantic seaboard and as far inland as Kentucky, Ohio. After the work the camps were closed or burned. () In stating so directly the wider implications of this local tragedy, the congressional testimony that Rukeyser quotes refigures the very geography of U.S.  with which the poem begins, a geography of migrant laborers whose life stories, if not their lives, are rescued from the same oblivion as the camps that were “closed or burned.” The first section of The Book of the Dead, “The Road,” invokes the rhetorical strategies for representing place that were followed by the FWP guidebooks. Highway U.S.  was the first road selected for the highway route series of the American Guide Series. Like the state guidebooks published in the American Guide Series, the guidebooks to historic transcontinental roadways (U.S. One, The Ocean Highway, and The Oregon Trail ) provided mile-by-mile descriptive accounts of local sites, supplemented by quotes from earlier travelers’ impressions of these roadways. In accentuating the social history of these highways more than their natural scenery, in demarcating notable aspects of the built environment such as industry and architecture, the highway guides sought to reclaim an optimistic image of the road from the more distressing images of social suffering associated with the Depression. The national symbol of the road as a medium for democratic opportunity and westward expansion had been displaced by the stories of dislocation, destitution, and homelessness documented by Depression-era reporters. The American Guide Series—and the highway route series in particular—redefined the road as a site of a progressive national history through its emphasis on purposeful movement.17 These books also showed how the automobile was radically transforming the nation’s geography in the s, creating a new vision of the nation’s history based on highway travel rather than river or railroad travel. U.S. One () mapped a particularly long history, as the highway remained “as it was in Colonial and early Federal days the chief line of communication between the centers of the Atlantic Seaboard States” (FWP, U.S. One xi). Most important for The Book of the Dead, this north-south highway was also crucial during the Civil War, from Pennsylvania, where it “traverses the territory in which first rose the opposition to the institution of slavery that was to culminate in the bitterest internal struggle of the nation,” to the Civil War battlefields of Virginia, where it “traverses an area that has seen more bloodshed than has any other on the North American Continent” (FWP, U.S. One xi–xii).

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In its direct address to “you,” traveling by automobile through “your own country,” the opening section of The Book of the Dead addresses the reader with a rhetoric of national purpose that informed the diverse local projects initiated by the FWP. Underlying the presumably nationalist rhetoric of Rukeyser’s poem, however, is a subtle interrogation of what “you” means “when you think of your country” (). The FWP’s state and regional guidebooks were written to promote tourism, especially tourism in places that had been remote until the New Deal construction of highways provided easier access. The guidebooks supplemented this geographical access with historical access to what would otherwise remain illegible to tourists. While the initial impetus for the American Guide Series was as much promotional as documentary, the process of gathering and reporting historical information raised questions of representation that were inevitably political. Although researchers eschewed local myths and legends for local archival “facts,” the production of the guidebooks made writers necessarily aware of how ideologies inform the selection and presentation of historical materials. The writing of local histories offered a means for rethinking and rewriting the past, for questioning old paradigms that the multiplicity of newly discovered facts contradicted. Such attention to local difference superseded the more systematic study of regional socioeconomic patterns; nonetheless, writers were able to address episodes of labor history, for example, that had been omitted from dominant historical narratives. According to William Stott, the FWP guidebooks produced “an idiosyncratic America, a country of anecdote” (), in which “all facts are created equal” () and local “heroes” were juxtaposed with better known national figures.18 Even with their ideological appeal to liberal nationalist ideals, the guidebooks did contribute to a more pluralist understanding of American history that contested the myth of a unified national “heritage.” It is this populist history that Rukeyser “extends” in The Book of the Dead. As “The Road” moves from its initial invocation of “your country” toward a more specific focus on the local sites surrounding Gauley Bridge, Rukeyser accentuates those texts that authorize national unity: These are roads to take when you think of your country and interested bring down the maps again, phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend, reading the papers with morning inquiry. () The stress on “interested” that begins the second line of the poem underscores the rhetorical doubleness of this initial invocation. “Interested” can imply the tourist’s

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consumerist response to “your country” or the activist’s political engagement. From the official means for defining modern nationhood that follow—maps, statistics, newspapers—the narrative goes on to emphasize the social differences that contradict such unity, especially the class differences that divide Gauley Bridge and also distance the narrator from this locality. Whereas the traveler seems at first to be a typical tourist, enjoying the luxury of a “well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety,” Rukeyser disrupts any bourgeois notions of objectivity associated with tour guides by insisting that we reflect on our own positions as readers. The privileged class position and metropolitan vision of the speaker become increasingly evident: neither the speaker nor the reader is exempted from the power relations underlying “your tall central city’s influence” and the “centers removed and strong” (). The verbal mapping of West Virginia that follows accentuates how this imbalance manifests itself locally: on the one hand are stark mining towns, while on the other are posh tourist resorts. The tourist narrating this poem, traveling with the “dear friend” whom we soon discover is a photojournalist, is, of course, also the “poet journalist” whose own self-reflection reminds her readers to consider their investment in the narrative—“Here is your road, tying/you to its meanings” (). This plurality of “meanings” is a social plurality of historical conflicts embedded within the harsh physical environment. And the “scene of power” that the poet proceeds to map relates the local geographical features of Kanawha Falls—“always the water / the power flying deep” ()—to the violent history of a region complexly related to the formation of the nation. Rukeyser’s precisely rendered history of West Virginia in the second section of The Book of the Dead, as concise as it is, resembles the comprehensive introductory overviews of state history found in the American Guide Series, although it makes no attempt to hide its point of view in selecting what is most important. This section, “West Virginia,” maps first the English settling of the western “frontier” and displacement of the local Mohetons, whose presumed disappearance foreshadows the burial of silicosis victims in “The Cornfield”: Found Indian fields, standing low cornstalks left, learned three Mohetons planted them; found-land farmland, the planted home, discovered! () From this ironic commentary on manifest destiny, Rukeyser underscores the violent history of this “war-born” site, as she briefly notes the battles of the Revolutionary War and describes the crucial position of Gauley Bridge on the NorthSouth “frontier” of the Civil War. Most notable is the capitalized—and revised— reference to

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the granite    precursor  sabres, apostles       War’s brilliant cloudy    . () No figure symbolized the radical ideal of interracial solidarity for the Popular Front more than John Brown. From Mike Gold’s Life of John Brown (), to Stephen Vincent Benét’s Pulitzer Prize–winning long poem John Brown’s Body (), to Jacob Lawrence’s series of history paintings, The Life of John Brown (), Brown’s martyrdom inspired numerous mythic, even hagiographic, portraits of his heroic example. Rukeyser herself published a long poem entitled The Soul and Body of John Brown in , and she celebrated his legacy in The Life of Poetry as a “man who cut through to the imagination of all . . . that meteor, whose blood was love and rage, in fury until the love was burned away.”19 In establishing a prototypical presence for Brown early in The Book of the Dead, Rukeyser suggests that the historical moment that she documents represents a “moment of crisis” (Life of Poetry ) comparable to that to which Brown dedicated his life. As witness, historian, and investigative reporter who speaks for workers who inherit a history in which their voices have not been recorded, Rukeyser affirms her potential to change the present through the orchestration of prior historical narratives. At the same time, she acknowledges the complexity of her inscribed position within this narrative “scene of power.” The narrative journey of The Book of the Dead, from “The Road,” to “West Virginia,” and then to “Gauley Bridge,” documents not only the wasted lives of miners but also the documentary poet’s process of gathering, recording, and reporting information. The poet’s initially self-conscious stance becomes more assertive only when additional voices provide collective support for her point of view. “Gauley Bridge” underscores how tentatively the narration begins, as it makes us aware that the presence of the camera is especially intrusive. This section develops the poem’s major trope, the trope of glass, which is at first the documentary photographer’s medium for exposing—and correcting—the touristic commodification of place: the photographer “follows discovery/viewing on groundglass an inverted image” (). Yet glass is also the very medium through which everyday commerce is conducted: “the public glass” behind which the owner of “the commercial hotel” keeps his books; the “postoffice window,” with its “hive of private boxes”; the bus station restaurant, with its “plateglass window” and “April-glass-tinted” waitress (); the “beerplace” where this waitresss is herself objectified by “one’s harsh night eyes over the beerglass” (). As Walter Kalaidjian argues, glass plays an even more crucial role when we are reminded of its production:

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On the one hand, as it showcases the distinctive signs and functioning of consumer society, glass serves in The Book of the Dead as a specular medium for reification and modern commodity exchange. On the other hand, however, insofar as the product glass (silicon dioxide) retains within itself the material history of America’s abusive silica mining practices . . . it is susceptible to Rukeyser’s poetic critique. Here her strategy is to return glass to its specific “life-process” of industrial production. (–) As a medium for reification, glass also exposes how the social relations of Gauley Bridge are racialized. Furthermore, the camera’s “groundglass” exposes how representations of Gauley Bridge are necessarily racialized as well. Before reaching the town’s “many panes of glass/tin under light,” “Gauley Bridge” begins with a bleak, almost blank image of “empty windows” on an “empty street,” with “the deserted Negro standing on the corner” (). The characterization of the black man as “deserted” suggests at once the abandonment of Gauley Bridge and the more specific betrayal of the African American migrant workers who had worked there. The significance of the latter is reinforced through the identification of “the Negro” with the train that “comes from a long way away” (). The “whistling” of the train resonates with the symbolic legacy of African American deliverance from slavery as well as with the more contemporaneous association with migration, particularly with those men who “came riding freights” to Gauley Bridge, “got jobs here/and went into the tunnel-mouth to stay” (). The image of “the deserted Negro” takes on further significance only with the testimony of these very people that the camera initially objectifies. Immediately following the image of “the deserted Negro,” however, is a reminder of the camera’s limitations. Nearby, where “nine men are mending road for the government,” a boy running with his dog “blurs the camera-glass fixed on the street” (): this blurring suggests that the camera cannot neatly frame the lives it is documenting. This foregrounding of the photographer’s interaction with her subject, which indicates how the camera eye can evoke but not contain the lives it documents, is reiterated in the subsequent contrast of visual perspectives, between the “eyes of the tourist house” and the “eyes of the Negro, looking down the track” (). The initial tour of Gauley Bridge does not conclude with a false sense of objective distance, however, even as it maps the segregated geography of the town’s region. The poem instead shifts the narrative lens directly toward the reader: What do you want—a cliff over a city? A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses? These people live here. ()

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This interrogation of the reader’s position as consumer of the travel narrative sets up the collage of documentary, narrative, and lyric modes through which the Gauley Bridge tragedy is revealed. As the evidence from congressional testimony and informant narratives accumulates, the narrative voice of the poet becomes increasingly assertive in translating this evidence into the elegiac mythic discourse of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. We can see this blending of documentary and mythic discourses in the third-person narrative of “The Face of the Dam: Vivian Jones,” told through the consciousness of a locomotive engineer whose train had carried silica from Gauley Tunnel to Alloy. This narrative begins by stressing Jones’s vision: On the hour he shuts the door and walks out of town he knows the place up the gorge where he can see his locomotive rusted on the siding, he sits and sees the river at his knee. () From this precisely rendered clock time of the present that introduces and structures “The Face of the Dam,” the poem transports us to Jones’s memory of the “white glass” mined at Gauley Bridge. The memory of the suffering that emerges is rendered repetitively, in counterpoint to the narrative description of his movement around the Hawk’s Nest site. This seemingly obsessive return to the past is punctuated by the narrator’s reminder of the present time every quarter hour. The dramatic effect of this dialectical movement from memory to present-tense description is to intensify our awareness of the psychological burden of this past until the distinction between past and present is blurred. “The Face of the Dam” eventually subsumes traumatic memory and present observation within the heightened poetic language of its conclusion, an elegiac incantation on whiteness: the whiteness of the “glass,” the whiteness of the snow, the whiteness of the now-dammed river, the “white dropped water” that has “done its deathwork in the country . . . O proud O white O water rolling down.” In contrast to “Gauley Bridge,” Jones’s narrative is not a story of glass as a medium for consumerism but one of glass literally—involuntarily—consumed: “hundreds breathed value, filled their lungs full of glass.” This “glass” eventually consumes the workers who breathe it. Valuable for corporate investors, deadly for the workers who mine it, this “white glass” becomes the medium for underscoring the racist social system that underlies the negligent labor practices of Union Carbide. The first mention of the silica’s whiteness conspicuously reminds us that the remnants of slavery, if barely visible, are as present as Jones’s memory of the mining project: immediately juxtaposed with the “white glass” showing “precious

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in the rock” is the image of an “old plantation-house (burned to the mud),” now a “hill-acre of ground” where a “Negro woman throws / gay arches of water out from the front door” (). As The Book of the Dead subsequently proceeds through the “eyes of the Negro” more than “the eyes of the tourist house,” the local stories and songs of witness form a composite narrative of countermemory that transforms the segregated geography of Gauley Bridge into a “nation’s scene” () that otherwise would have remained obscured. Rukeyser represents the testimony of Gauley Bridge survivors through a range of genres and rhetorical modes familiar to readers of documentary reportage in the s. In addition to the participant observation of Philippa Allen and the exposé quotation of the congressional hearings, where the workers’ claims stand in stark contrast to the apologists’ defense of Union Carbide, The Book of the Dead dramatizes the deadly impact of silicosis through individual case studies and informant narratives.20 The individuals whose stories the poem represents are first introduced not in isolation from each other, though, but within the collective context of the Gauley Bridge Defense Committee, which filed suits on behalf of the workers and their families. “Praise of the Committee,” which immediately follows “The Face of the Dam: Vivian Jones,” introduces these individuals as actors in the public arena of the committee, beginning with two women: Here are Mrs. Jones, three lost sons, husband sick, Mrs. Leek, cook for the bus cafeteria, the men: George Robinson, leader and voice, four other Negroes (three drills, one camp-boy) Blankenship, the thin friendly man, Peyton the engineer, Juanita absent, the one outsider member. () As sick as the men are, their voices are empowered by the collective determination of the committee: “These men breathe hard / but the committee has a voice of steel” (). The informant narratives of the individuals named in “Praise of the Committee” enhance the poem’s case for radical social change through their appeal to emotion. Varying the form and tone of each speaker’s informant narrative even as she foregrounds their relation to the collectivist vision of the poem, Rukeyser draws from documentary conventions that were well established by the late s. Informant documentary narratives were ubiquitous during the Depression, not only in radical journals but in general newsmagazines. The interest in informant narratives can be explained largely by the enormous popularity

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of pulp confession literature since the s. While the pulp magazine True Story was the most popular venue for working-class readers of “true confession” stories, the increasing publication of vernacular writing in avant-garde little magazines was another source of growing interest in informant narratives. The best-known source for informant narratives on the literary Left prior to the Depression was the New Masses, after Mike Gold became its sole editor in . Envisioning a proletcult movement like that he had seen in the Soviet Union when he visited in , Gold challenged “worker-correspondents” to send Confessions—diaries—documents— The concrete— Letters from hoboes, peddlers, small town atheists, unfrocked clergymen and schoolteachers— Revelations by rebel chambermaids and night club waiters— The sobs of driven stenographers— The poetry of steel workers— The wrath of miners—the laughter of sailors— Strike stories, prison stories, work stories— Stories by Communist, I.W.W. and other revolutionary workers. (Editorial, New Masses [ July ], qtd. in Denning ) Gold’s list reads like a catalog of sources for proletarian fiction in the s, including his autobiographical Jews without Money. Gold and other radical writers, though, also experimented with poems based on the found materials of worker correspondence. Perhaps the best-known example of worker-correspondence poetry is Tillie (Lerner) Olsen’s exposé of exploitative textile labor, “I Want You Women Up North to Know,” which informs us in a headnote that it is “based on a letter by Felipe Ibarro in New Masses, Jan. th, ” (Nelson, Repression and Recovery ). Gold was the most prolific composer of worker-correspondence poems, as he transformed workers’ letters into poems that were published in his column in the Daily Worker during the s, sometimes transcribing them with minimal editorial change aside from adding line breaks and stanzaic form, and sometimes assembling fragments of various letters into longer poems (Nelson, Repression and Recovery –). Two of Gold’s worker-correspondence poems were features in Proletarian Literature in the United States, a year after their initial publication in the first issue of Dynamo. Worker-correspondence poems, like proletarian fiction, presented the challenge of working within rather predictably formulaic structures. They shared another problem with documentary informant narratives more generally, though,

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the problem of representing the vernacular language of the informant. As Stott writes, “The aim of informant documentary—to let the unimagined members of society ‘speak for themselves in their essential character,’ as W. T. Couch put it [in the introduction to the WPA collection of life stories, These Are Our Lives]— was seldom realized. And this for two reasons: first, the people who spoke up, the literate ones, wrote about themselves according to formulas they knew from their reading; second, the people who did not speak up, the illiterate or inarticulate ones, were hard—though not impossible—to capture in print” (). One solution to the problem of representing the voices of the illiterate or inarticulate was to foreground the act of translation. The short story that introduced the devastating impact of silicosis to a national reading public, Albert Maltz’s New Masses story “Man on a Road,” exemplifies such a strategy. Maltz, who was well known as a novelist, short story writer, and Hollywood screenwriter before he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, writes a documentary fictional narrative of an unidentified driver who picks up a downtrodden hitchhiker near Gauley Bridge. While the anonymous narrator serves as a representative middle-class socially conscious driver passing through West Virginia, the true mystery of the story is the source of the hitchhiker’s despondency. His appearance is not unlike that of other workers “going into the pit at six in the morning or coming out of a steel mill or foundry where heavy work is done,” except that his eyes have a disturbing “glazed quality.” Like a man dying from cancer, his eyes have an “absent look as though behind the blank, outward film there was a secret flow of past events on which his mind was focused” (Maltz ). This account of the man’s eyes also describes the story’s narrative structure: the narrator tries fitfully to find the source of the withdrawn hitchhiker’s despair until, finally, the “secret flow of past events” erupts in the story’s conclusion. His attempts to engage the hitchhiker in conversation are met variously with silence or the briefest of polite responses, except for one telltale fit of coughing. In the story’s conclusion, though, after the driver buys the hitchhiker a cup of coffee, the source of his agony is revealed. It appears in the form of a letter that the hitchhiker asks the narrator to transcribe and send to his “woman.” This letter, which the narrator transcribes in the man’s “own script,” is quoted in its entirety. The idiosyncratic vernacular spelling and grammar make the miner seem naive as he explains his silicosis, but the letter also reveals his awareness of the company’s liability for his illness: Hit all comes frum thet rock thet we all had to dril. Thet rock was silica and hit was most all of hit glass. The powder frum this glass has got into the lungs

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of all the men war worked in thet tunnel thru their breathin. And this has given to all of us a sickness. . . . There is in all ova a hondred men war have this death sickness frum the tunel. It is a turible plague becus the doctor says this wud not be so if the company had gave us masks to ware an put a right fan sistem in the tunnel. So I am agoin away becus the doctor says i will be dead in about fore months. (–) The language of this barely literate man is presumably more emotionally powerful because it appears in his “own script.” The narrator is clearly moved by the letter, as he says upon completing his transcription that he feels “pity and love for him, and a cold, deep hatred for what had killed him” (). He is transformed from an outsider trying to penetrate the surface of the man’s “glazed” mask into a participant-observer in his cause through the act of transcription. The miner in turn is likewise moved when he reads the transcribed letter, as he speaks directly about his emotions to the narrator for the first time. The story becomes an allegory of the potential for solidarity across divisions of social class: the intellectual is awakened to action by the emotional impact of the miner’s testimony, while the miner is empowered by the intellectual’s ability to translate this presumably raw emotion into legible form. Their interdependence, however, does not diminish the telling difference between them, the ungrammaticality of the letter that the narrator so faithfully transcribes. The cost of representing the miner’s “own script” is the reminder of his limited ability to express himself. In the poems told through the voices of workers, Rukeyser does not erase the scriptural markers of their class difference, but she tends not to accentuate these differences for sentimental effects. The poems that transcribe the workers’ language in The Book of the Dead represent a plurality of rhetorical strategies that neither diminish nor exalt the poet-journalist’s role in reshaping her material. As Michael Thurston writes, the first-person workers’ poems “establish a tension between the condescending sentiment of Caldwell and BourkeWhite and conscious resistance to that sentiment, a tension Rukeyser links to a deliberately coalitional political model congruent with the Popular Front” (). The first-person poems that follow “Praise of the Committee,” “Mearl Blankenship,” “Absalom,” “George Robinson: Blues,” and “Juanita Tinsley” exemplify this dialogue of vernacular narrative forms. The poem that is closest in form to a worker-correspondence poem is also the first poem told through the voice of a laborer at Gauley Bridge, “Mearl Blankenship.” Unlike the other workers who are quoted in The Book of the Dead, Blankenship did not testify before Congress;

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Blankenship’s story is quoted from Rukeyser’s interview with him. Significantly, though, Rukeyser varies the narration of his story to foreground how the media of delivery inform not only the worker’s self-presentation but also the generic conventions that signify social class. The poem is actually more of a case study than a pure informant narrative, as the narrator situates Blankenship’s voice within settings that correspond with the grim story he tells of silicosis. He initially stands facing the fire of a stove: “Little warmth, no words, / loud machines” (). He is later positioned in a setting that explicitly relates the outer scene to his inner state of physical decline: He stood against the rock facing the river grey river grey face the rock mottled behind him like X-ray plate enlarged diffuse and stony his face against the stone. () These scenes correspond with the two narrative modes of Blankenship’s story: the story he tells Rukeyser orally, and the story he tells in a letter he composed for newspaper publication. The brief story he tells Rukeyser is placed in quotation marks, thus clearly differentiating his words from the poet’s, but his vernacular narrative is told in language that corresponds with the poet’s compressed rendering of physical detail: “‘then I’m asleep in the dream I always see: / the tunnel choked / the dark wall coughing dust’” (). When the letter is quoted at length, however, its awkward formality resembles the letter of “Man on a Road.” While it is not written in condescending dialect spelling like the letter in Maltz’s story, its misspellings, idiosyncratic punctuation, and run-on sentences—“I have lost eighteen lbs on that Rheinhart ground / and expecting to loose my life / & no settlement yet & I have sued the Co. twice” ()—signify Blankenship’s unfamiliarity with formal letter writing. The letter is left to stand on its own, though, without the poet’s response and without a concluding account of her interaction with Blankenship. While Rukeyser’s lack of concluding intrusiveness respects the writer’s language, the contrast of the letter with Blankenship’s oral expression draws attention to the medium of expression as much as the message. His letter reads like a worker-correspondence poem, but the graphic signs that signify inarticulateness are belied by the intensely poetic language that is quoted earlier. “Mearl Blankenship” concludes with an open-ended, unpunctuated plea for

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help. It also opens into the monologue that follows, “Absalom.” “Absalom” represents the first voice of a woman from Gauley Bridge, Dora Jones, whose husband and sons were afflicted with silicosis. More significant, “Absalom” situates her monologue in juxtaposition with the prophetic discourse of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Given its strategic placement in the long poem, “Absalom” represents both a politically important monologue in itself and a dramatic turning point in the poem’s feminist revision of The Waste Land, which becomes increasingly evident in the burial scene of “The Cornfield” and the descent into and ascent from the underworld in “Power” and “The Dam,” respectively. While Jones’s narrative evokes “the sentimental maternalism of Popular Front representations of women” (Denning qtd. in Thurston ) as much as a “distinctively feminist rendering of social empowerment” (Kalaidjian ), the authority of her testimony is intensified through the mythic language of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Jones speaks with a directness and a sense of purpose from the very first line of “Absalom”: “I first discovered what was killing these men” (). As an informant narrative (which Rukeyser composed from the congressional testimony of Philippa Allen and Dora Jones’s husband, Charles), “Absalom” evokes none of the apparent naïveté or tentativeness associated with the letters of “Man on a Road” or “Mearl Blankenship.” She speaks as certainly about the inequities of medical care in a capitalist economy—“‘I tried to get Dr. Harless to X-ray the boys . . . but he would not see Shirley / He did not know where his money was coming from’” ()—as she does about the source of her husband’s and sons’ disease. And if her appeal for compensation becomes familiarly sentimental when she quotes her youngest son—“‘Mother, when I die, / I want you to have them open me up and / see if that dust killed me’” (–)—her case is established through the confidence and assertiveness through which she states the facts of his demise. There is a tension, then, between the elevated incantation of “My heart my mother my heart my mother” and the empirical data through which Jones makes her case. It is only through the cumulative burden of the deaths she has experienced that her appeal begins to converge with the prophetic voice. The lines of lamentation from the Egyptian Book of the Dead express the deep sorrow implicit in her testimony, as they return us to the poem’s symbolic economy of “crystal” whiteness: “I open out a way, they have covered my sky with crystal / I come forth by day, I am born a second time.” The dialogue of Dora Jones’s narrative statement with the oblique but resonant chant of lamentation likewise takes on greater significance as the poem evokes the collective significance of her example. Hers is an individual but representative case, but she speaks—knowingly—on behalf of not only her family but others affected by silicosis. If it is

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her son’s dying words that inspire her to testify—“He shall not be diminished, never; I shall give a mouth to my son”—it is the strength of knowing that the “whole valley is witness” that translates this desire into political action (). The witness whose monologue speaks most ironically to the lethal power of whiteness is that of George Robinson, a black migrant driller who is identified in “Praise of the Committee” as the workers’ “leader and voice,” who “holds all their strength together:/To fight the companies to make somehow a future” ().21 His initial description of Gauley Bridge in “George Robinson: Blues” contrasts sharply with the narrator’s first impressions of the town with its “deserted Negro.” His monologue begins: “Gauley Bridge is a good town for Negroes, they let us stand around, they let us stand/around on the sidewalks if we’re black or brown” (). His definition of a “good town for Negroes” indicates the degree of official harassment a black man might expect in such a segregated town, but his tone is more ironic than we first suppose, as his account of Union Carbide labor practices goes on to substantiate. Significantly, Robinson’s testimony is written in the form of a blues poem. Of the many examples of “our buried poetry” () that Rukeyser discusses in The Life of Poetry, she pays the greatest tribute to the blues: “From the Negroes of this country issue a wealth of poetry, buried in that it never touches its full audience; it touches few poets; but it passes, as song, into the common air at once, stirring forever those who hear blues and shouts, the dark poetry” (). As she writes of Bessie Smith, “that woman of the songs, whose body made music, whose death in blood and denial hangs over our singers” (Life of Poetry ), the pain expressed by so many blues singers corresponds with the treatment they receive by a social system quick to capitalize on their talent— on their labor—but slow to provide necessary support in time of need: “In full possession of their triumph and their song, their powers realized, these singers in a moment are surrounded by the doorless walls of an ambivalent society” (Life of Poetry ). Rukeyser affirms the cultural power of the blues as a distinctively African American form of collective expression, but she emphasizes as well the impact of the blues on American poetry and culture more generally. While she acknowledges the widespread popularity of the music, she also notes how the verbal ingenuity of blues lyrics has been underappreciated. Only Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes had begun to demonstrate the inventive possibilities for translating “the amazing mixture of keen poetry and vulgarization” into written poetic form (Life of Poetry ).22 Rukeyser’s assessment of the blues as “buried poetry” exemplifies the Popular Front enthusiasm for African American vernacular expression. The Communist Left’s privileging of vernacular music, storytelling, folk humor, and even religious rhetoric as forms of black national

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expression can be traced to the Black Belt Nation thesis of black southern “peasant” culture in the s. Of course, the valorization of such “folk” forms also can be related to earlier black nationalist claims for vernacular expression as the basis for a distinctively African American art, even though writers such as Brown and Hughes disagreed about the impact of urbanization and commercialization on the blues tradition. By the later s, though, the interest in such vernacular forms of expression was intensified not only by the popularity of activist blues singers such as Josh White and Huddie Ledbetter but also by the collection and recording of music in the South by folklorists, anthropologists, and musicologists.23 Rukeyser follows the lead of previous white leftist poets who had appropriated the blues as a poetic medium, such as Kenneth Fearing and Sol Funaroff. She does so, however, not to acknowledge the interracial reach of the music’s urban popularity but to foreground the capability of the blues as a medium of collective resistance. George Robinson’s blues testimony is centrally positioned within The Book of the Dead to underscore the exemplary tradition of African American resistance to “white” authority. The blues are the expression of Robinson’s leadership: the traditional resources of black vernacular expression are his potent means to “somehow make a future.” “Surrounded by the doorless walls of an ambivalent society” like Bessie Smith, Robinson’s blues testimony exposes how systematic such “ambivalence” is. He conveys every absurdly dehumanizing detail in an understated manner that indicts as it delineates the pervasiveness of the “white dust.” While Rukeyser’s rendering of the blues form is loose, the end rhyming and repetition of key words and phrases reinforce the awful absurdity of Robinson’s representative predicament: When the blast went off the boss would call out, Come, let’s go back, when that heavy loaded blast went white, Come, let’s go back, telling us hurry, hurry, into the falling rocks and muck. The water they would bring had dust in it, our drinking water, the camps and their groves were colored with the dust, we cleaned our clothes in the groves, but we always had the dust. () Robinson’s blues concludes with an image of whiteness that is as ironic as it is disturbing in its parody of racial coding:

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As dark as I am, when I came out at morning after the tunnel at night, with a white man, nobody could have told which man was white. The dust had covered us both, and the dust was white. () The price for such racial equality is, of course, the lives of black and white miners alike. If, on the surface, both appear white in their shared experience as laborers, the lack of value ascribed to their lives by their employer suggests a commonality more often associated with black lives in the United States. The white appearance of the workers, the virtual erasure of blackness in the deathly silica dust, certainly speaks to the systematic “whitewashing” of black workers’ claims at Gauley Bridge. Yet the commonality compelled by shared adversity also suggests a potential for interracial alliances to contest the white supremacist thinking that Robinson so incisively mocks.24 The monologue of Juanita Tinsley that immediately follows Robinson’s blues reiterates the importance of song as a form of remembering. Tinsley, a middleclass resident of Gauley Bridge who became a member of the Defense Committee, reflects on the gulf between the idea of “America” she had inherited and the reality that she witnesses: I know in America there are songs, forgetful ballads to be sung, but at home I see this wrong. () As “this wrong” is too brutal for “forgetful ballads to be sung,” Tinsley refuses to forget: seeing “wrongly,” bearing witness to what the corporate powers would prefer she forget, is a subtle act of resistance in itself. The abusive power that she has witnessed not only compels her to act on behalf of its victims, it transforms her vision of her “place”: When I see my family house, the gay gorge, the picture-books, they raise the face of General Wise aged by enemies, like faces the stranger showed me in the town. I saw that plain, and saw my place. () As she recognizes that her “place” as a middle-class resident of Gauley Bridge is not exempt from the suffering she has witnessed, she also recognizes that her

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“place” as a woman is not confined to the domestic sphere of “home.” Her “place” in history is likewise transformed: she becomes an agent of change in both “America” and “at home” rather than the passive inheritor of a family legacy. Her opposition of “America” and “home,” of the national and the local, is furthermore complicated by the chorus of voices the poem orchestrates. As the poem amplifies the national—and international—significance of Gauley Bridge, these voices coalesce around the figure of “white glass” that signifies the profits of Union Carbide and the deaths of its workers. From the appalling mass burial scene of “all the anonymous” in “The Cornfield,” “white and wired by thorns, / old cornstalks, snow, the planted home” (), The Book of the Dead transports us to the sites of corporate and government power most invested in the hydroelectric project’s development. It is in these sites—the silica storage and processing site of Alloy, the power plant, the dam, and again in Congress—where whiteness accumulates its symbolic power. The view from these official sites contrasts dramatically with the testimony of those subject to the lethal power of “white glass.” The angry testimony of a dying engineer who had worked for the New Kanawha Power Company, Arthur Peyton, who notes “the white white hills standing upon Alloy,” concludes with a crescendo of allconsuming glass: “the long glass street . . . my face becoming glass . . . our street our river a deadly glass to hold . . . the stream of glass a stream of living fire.” When removed from its site of production, translated into to its “crystalline” commercial form in “Alloy,” the silica glass becomes noxiously mystifying in its whiteness: “a blinded field of white / murdering snow” (). “Alloy” represents an “audacious landscape” of the industrial sublime, but this vision is not only undercut by the reminder of lives lost in the process of production, “forced through this crucible,” but also in the farther-reaching impact of the “dust that is blown from off the field of glass” (). If there is any doubt about the poem’s implication of white supremacy with abusive labor practices, the description of the material site of “Power” that follows “Alloy” makes this clear: “The powerhouse stands skin-white at the transmitters’ side / over the rapids the brilliance the blind foam” (emphasis added). From the description of the “power-house,” the poem returns to its opening address to the reader: This is the midway between water and flame, this is the road to take when you think of your country, between the dam and the furnace, terminal. () As impressive an engineering accomplishment as the dam is, its awesome power cannot conceal the devastating social cost of its construction. While the dam

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harnesses the power of the “white” water of the river in springtime, this whiteness is conveyed as an “excess of white. / White brilliant function of the land’s disease” (). This “scene of power,” this “valley’s work, the white, the shining” (), enriches Union Carbide stockholders, as the poem’s subsequent quotation of the stock report confirms. At the same time, however, its “excess” also galvanizes the revolutionary desire that is figured in the mythic Phoenix from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. In returning to the site of national government—“power on a hill”—toward the conclusion of The Book of the Dead, Rukeyser infers the sickness of the national body politic from its neglect of those suffering from silicosis: No plane can ever lift us high enough to see forgetful countries underneath, but always now the map and X-ray seem resemblent pictures of one living breath one country marked by error and one air. () The congressional inquiry into the power companies’ financial culpability is blocked as the breathing of stricken miners is blocked, but not before the poem has marshaled further evidence of the national scope of silicosis: Widespread in trade, widespread in space! Butte, Montana; Joplin, Missouri; the New York tunnels, the Catskill Aqueduct. In over thirty States. A disease worse than consumption. () The words of the subcommittee investigating the silicosis deaths have little impact: these “Words on a monument./Capitoline thunder . . . cannot be enough.” In response to the futile words of this official commemoration, the poem counterposes its own monumental Phoenix: “dead John Brown’s body walking from a tunnel / to break the armored and concluded mind” (). Brown, the heroic figure whose “whole life becomes an image reaching backward and forward in history, illuminating all time” (Life of Poetry ), returns us to the poem’s introductory survey of local West Virginia history, to the “granite SITE” where Brown’s accomplices had been executed, but the history of this site has been rewritten. Not only is his heroic example more meaningful for the locality of Gauley Bridge that has been mapped in the course of the poem, it is likewise more necessary for the national—and international—workers’ struggle that Gauley Bridge represents.

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When the concluding title poem of The Book of the Dead reiterates the poem’s opening refrain—“These roads will take you into your own country” ()— this refrain is also rewritten, insisting on the reader’s active role as “witness” much more forcefully. “These roads” constructed for commerce, including the commerce of tourism, are also the roads traveled by anonymous migrant workers like the miners who died at Gauley Bridge. The Book of the Dead transforms their otherwise obscure journeys into an urgent matter of collective responsibility: What three things can never be done? Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone. The hills of glass, the fatal brilliant plain. () The Book of the Dead assures that “your own country” can neither “forget” nor “keep silent” these workers’ defiant narratives of countermemory. It also situates their testimony within the broader context of a transformed national history, an America that is a “photograph of power” more than a “ridge of discovery” (), and an international history that allies the mountains of West Virginia with the “hero hills / near Barcelona” (). In foregrounding the documentary means by which it maps a geography of revolutionary desire—“to photograph and to extend the voice, / to speak this meaning” ()—The Book of the Dead insists that its lasting meaning lies at once in the specificity of voices it documents and the collective power that their dialogic juxtaposition represents.

3. Allegories of Salvage The Peripheral Vision of Elizabeth Bishop’s North & South Dreams, works of art (some) glimpses of the always-moresuccessful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important.  , letter to Anne Stevenson At the end of the same year in which Muriel Rukeyser drove to West Virginia to investigate Gauley Bridge (), her former Vassar classmate Elizabeth Bishop traveled for the first time to what is now the southernmost end of U.S. , Key West, Florida. Key West would not only become Bishop’s home after this visit, it would also become the site most associated with the idiosyncratic geography of her first book, North & South (). Because of the postwar publication date of North & South, Bishop’s Florida is not usually associated with the cultural geography of the s;1 however, the Florida Keys that she visited in the winter of – evoked the apocalyptic rhetoric of natural disaster so often associated with the Depression itself.2 The ferocious Labor Day hurricane of  had decimated the Overseas Railway that linked the Keys to the Florida mainland, leaving Key West temporarily isolated, accessible only by boat. While the hurricane had inflicted little damage on Key West itself, its deadly impact was almost as notorious in the Left media as that of Gauley Bridge. The strongest hurricane in the recorded history of the Keys up to that point, with winds that reached two hundred miles per hour, the Labor Day storm leveled entire islands and even demolished the rescue train that had been sent to evacuate the Keys. Among the unsuspecting victims who were swept to sea by the storm’s fifteento-twenty-foot tidal wave were hundreds of veterans who had been hired by the WPA to construct the U.S.  Overseas Highway bridges that would connect Key West to mainland Florida.3 The avoidable death of these veterans, many of them angry “bonus marchers” who had been shipped to the Keys from Washington, D.C., so outraged Key West’s most famous literary resident and World War I veteran, Ernest Hemingway, that he wrote a scathing account of the federal government’s negligence for the New Masses.4 The New Masses seems like an unlikely venue for a writer so skeptical of 67

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collectivism as Hemingway, but the publication of “Who Murdered the Vets?” in the CPUSA journal, which featured such revolutionary poetry and reportage as Rukeyser’s, is less extraordinary than literary histories of American modernism might suggest, especially after the emergence of the Popular Front. To locate the Florida of Bishop’s North & South in the same literary historical geography as Hemingway’s or Rukeyser’s s writing might seem like another matter altogether, though. If the Key West of Bishop’s poetry seems far removed from Hemingway’s bitter invective about the federal government’s callous neglect of its Florida employees, it seems even more distant from the righteous indignation of Rukeyser’s exposé of Gauley Bridge. When she first visited Key West, however, Bishop was working not only on the surrealist allegorical poems that would be published in North & South but also on a fictional portrait of a disillusioned worker not unlike other WPA temporary employees, appointed to the Sisyphean task of keeping a public beach clear of trash. This story, “The Sea & Its Shore,” was published in the same British journal, Life and Letters Today, that—like the New Masses —was publishing Rukeyser’s Spanish civil war reportage.5 Bishop’s interaction with such Key West luminaries as Hemingway is well documented, but to mention her in the same breath as Rukeyser or other “revolutionary” writers of her generation is much less common. As scholars and critics of Bishop and Rukeyser would have it, their professional paths crossed occasionally, but they occupied entirely separate literary spheres.6 Such apparent distance between two writers who were not only classmates at Vassar but co-conspirators as editors of the rebellious student literary journal Con Spirito can be explained partially by Bishop’s own ambivalence about Rukeyser’s career. Her comments about Rukeyser in letters or interviews range from competitive antipathy to self-disparaging admiration of her socially conscious work. Rukeyser’s public life was, after all, “one heroic saga of fighting for the underdog: going to jail, writing about silicosis, picketing alone in Korea, also thinking very deeply about POETRY & motherhood”; Bishop, in contrast, could claim that she “was an industrial worker for the Navy during World War II & cleaned binoculars” (letter to Robert Giroux, Feb. , , One Art ). As this ironic but anxious reflection on Rukeyser’s (and her own) career suggests, even in the last year of her life the literary politics of the s and s were not as distant from Bishop’s consciousness as they have been for subsequent generations of her readers. When asked in a  interview with Ashley Brown about the impact of “the Marxist s” on writers, Bishop replied: “I was always opposed to political thinking as such for writers. What good writing came out of that period, really? Perhaps a few good poems; Kenneth Fearing wrote some. A great deal of it seemed

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to me very false. Politically I considered myself a socialist, but I disliked ‘socially conscious’ writing.” While Bishop distances herself from her “socially conscious” contemporaries, she is careful to relate her criticism of facile political poetry to her own experience of poverty: “I was very aware of the Depression—some of my family were much affected by it. After all, anybody who went to New York and rode the Elevated could see that things were wrong. But I had lived with poor people and knew something of poverty at firsthand” (Brown ). Bishop was hardly underprivileged as she “rode the Elevated” in the s, but she was less secure financially—and socially—than most of her Vassar peers.7 As Adrienne Rich wrote in her influential  review of Bishop’s The Complete Poems –, the “experience of outsiderhood, closely—though not exclusively— linked with the essential outsiderhood of a lesbian identity,” enabled Bishop “to perceive other kinds of outsiders and to identify, or try to identify, with them” (“Eye” ). Questioning how her own vision of Bishop had been obscured by the literary reputation constructed by Bishop’s male contemporaries, a reputation based on “her triumphs, her perfections, not . . . her struggles for self-definition and her sense of difference” (“Eye” ), Rich emphasizes how Bishop “was critically and consciously trying to explore marginality, power and powerlessness, often in poetry of great beauty and sensuousness” (“Eye” ). Rich’s insistence on Bishop’s exploration of marginality has been extraordinarily important for feminist criticism of Bishop’s writing, and her argument is certainly instructive for differentiating Bishop from such established modernist poets as Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens.8 Only recently, however, have critics begun to relate her early writing to the discourses of marginality that informed s literary politics, particularly Popular Front literary politics, even though her early work was featured in Left literary anthologies and journals such as Partisan Review.9 Although Bishop distances herself (in retrospect) from her more politicized Vassar peers in the s, she does so because of their political naïveté (Brown ). Her “firsthand” experience of poverty as a child made her suspicious of sentimental idealizations of the “proletariat.” Yet when asked in the same  interview why she was attracted to Key West, she remembers its poverty when she first arrived: “The town was absolutely broke then. Everybody lived on the W.P.A. I seemed to have a taste for impoverished places in those days” (Brown ). As a young writer, Bishop identified not only with “impoverished places” but also with the socially marginal residents of these places. This identification with social marginality is complicated by her class consciousness, however. If she experienced social marginality as a lesbian writer—that is, if she was publicly silent (silenced) about her sexual identity—she was also self-conscious about the

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degree of economic privilege that allowed her to pursue her vocation as a poet during the Depression. She was an outsider within a vocation that signified privilege, and her sense of marginality was intensified by the cultural devaluing of poetry during the Depression. While this consciousness of being an outsider and an insider, and of writing socially conscious poetry that is not conventional political poetry, informs her earliest writing, it was intensified and complicated by her immersion into the intercultural contact zone of Key West.10 The Key West of Bishop’s poetry is a fluid site of migrant—and transient— labor. It is also a site of perpetual ruin and renewal, especially during the tumultuous Depression and war years. Its location and economic history had long made it a destination for Caribbean and African American seamen and factory workers. In the s the island experienced an altogether different influx of migrants, the cultural workers who were supported largely by the WPA. Upon settling in Key West, Bishop does not so much depart from her earlier surrealist vision toward a more socially engaged poetics; her Key West writing instead exemplifies what James Clifford has called “ethnographic surrealism.” According to Clifford, modern ethnography prior to its professionalization as a social science shared with surrealist literary practice an attitude of ironic “participant observation among the artifacts of a defamiliarized cultural reality,” whether those artifacts were the unfamiliar objects of “primitive” cultures or the “scrambled and rearranged” cultural refuse of the Paris Marché aux Puces (Predicament ). As a radical practice of questioning cultural norms, of rethinking received cultural categories, ethnographic surrealism not only rejects familiar distinctions between high and low culture but also “delights in cultural impurities and disturbing syncretisms” (Predicament ). For Bishop, Key West was a ready-made site of “defamiliarized cultural reality,” a peripheral contact zone in which unfamiliar if not “primitive” cultural practices of salvage coincide with the experimental arts of a shattered national culture. In salvaging ephemeral moments of unlikely cultural encounter, in salvaging inventive (cross-)cultural acts of survival, from the omnipresent threat of disaster, Bishop also salvages a s site of memory that resonates with the contested discourses of class and cultural conflict. As distant as Key West was from literary centers such as New York City, its appeal to artists was legendary by the s. This appeal was enhanced by the federal government’s role in funding artists as part of its revival and promotion of Key West as a tourist resort. Key West was so decimated by the Depression that the city declared bankruptcy in . Approximately  percent of Key West’s population depended on federal relief for subsistence at that time. By the time Bishop arrived in Florida in the later s, however, Key West had been

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transformed into a mecca for the arts—sponsored by the WPA. As the  American Guide Series enthusiastically explains, the solution to the dire economic condition of Key West was “one of the Nation’s most interesting experiments in community planning.” The state and federal governments provided funding to make Key West “the American winter resort of the tropics, competing with Bermuda and Nassau.” Much of this funding was allocated directly to the arts: FERA [Federal Emergency Relief Association] artists, transferred from other sections, covered walls of public buildings, cafes, and night clubs with murals, and recorded upon canvas and copperplate the manifold life of the island community. Classes in handicraft were organized to teach persons on relief new ways of livelihood through use of native raw materials. These products, on sale at a number of shops, include ash trays, buttons, buckles, and pins carved from the hard shell of coconuts; palm-fiber hats, purses, and rugs; novelties made from shells and fish scales, and Spanish drawnwork. Pageants and operas were presented under the auspices of the Relief Administration; unemployed writers produced descriptive literature designed to attract the more conservative visitors who passed through on their way to the Bahamas. (FWP, Florida –)11 As one writer observed after the New Deal revival of Key West’s economy: “It was Greenwich Village, Montparnasse, Provincetown—on a little tropical island” (Elmer Davis ). While the economic recovery of Key West was interrupted by the  hurricane, the island retained its appeal for artists as a refuge of not only tropical beauty but of racial diversity and social tolerance. Because of its proximity to Cuba, Key West had long attracted Cuban workers and émigrés, including revolutionary nationalists who were seeking to overthrow the Spanish government in Cuba in the late nineteenth century. Since the s Key West has become best known as a resort for gay and lesbian tourists; it has long been a refuge for gay and lesbian artists. The earlier history of Key West’s settlement also informs the salvage aesthetic of North & South. Notorious for its colorful history of reckless adventurers, its initial wealth and notoriety in the nineteenth century were literally based on the salvage of wrecked ships. Key West was most famous as a resort for pirates before it was bought by an Alabama businessman from its Spanish owner in . After the island became U.S. territory, it was settled by New Englanders and English Bahamians who sought their fortune in the wrecking trade, which became a regulated industry by the s.12 Because so many ships ran aground on the reefs near Key West or were damaged by hurricanes, salvaging was an

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enormously profitable enterprise. According to the FWP American Guide Series on Florida, Key West was the richest city per capita in the United States in the s (FWP, Florida ). Wrecking brought fabulous wealth to the island’s growing population: “The men wore silk top hats, the ladies served suppers on fine china, on occasion, gold plates. All the wealth was wrecking wealth. Indeed, much of the exotic furnishings that filled the houses, and the formal clothes the people wore, came directly from the foundered ships” ( Joy Williams ). The wrecking trade was eventually diminished by the construction of lighthouses in the Florida Keys, and Key West subsequently experienced a series of dramatic economic booms and busts. By the s all of the industries that had sustained the island’s economy—cigar manufacturing, pineapple canning, sponge fishing, and tourism—were failing. But despite the escalating presence of the U.S. Navy since the Spanish-American War, the island did not lose its outlaw reputation, especially during the Prohibition years. Hemingway, for example, portrayed Key West as a mythic site of opportunity during the early s. The waters around Key West represented the “last wild country,” wrote Hemingway. The Gulf Stream was the last remaining frontier in the United States, an “unexploited country” where “you are more alone than you can ever be hunting and the sea is the same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats” (“Blue Water” ). The island of Key West itself represents a different aspect of the frontier for Hemingway, a contact zone that is at once cosmopolitan and isolated from the mainland United States. In an essay on Hemingway’s Key West novel, To Have and Have Not, Alfred Kazin even compares the American “outpost” of Key West to the s Paris community of American expatriates. As in post–World War I Paris, it was impossible to ignore the appalling economic disparity that divided Key West: Like the Paris of , Key West is at once an outpost of a culture and its symbol. It is a home for disabled and unemployed veterans, a night resort for writers who talk great books, a harbor for the sleek yachts of newer millionaires. Being a tip of the continent, it is an open door to Cuba, a window on the Gulf Stream, the Florida of the boom all over again, albeit a little tarnished; and a bit of Latin America. It is by Key West that Hemingway went home, and it is Key West, apparently, that remains America in cross-section to him; the noisy, shabby, deeply moving rancor and tumult of all those human wrecks, the fishermen and the Cuban revolutionaries, the veterans and the alcoholics, the gilt-edged snobs and the hungry natives, the great white stretch of beach promising everything and going nowhere. (qtd. in Rowe –)

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Given the social contradictions of Key West during the s, it is no wonder that it appealed to Bishop’s ironic surrealist sensibility. Key West was a site of dramatic transformation for Bishop’s poetics. The nature and significance of this transformation have been interpreted quite variously by her readers, however. Key West was the site of her most direct encounter with the poetry of Stevens, the modernist poet whom Bishop considered the greatest influence on her poetry in the s (Brown ). It is also where she was most engaged with the theory and practice of surrealism, which she had begun to study while living briefly in France. Finally, Key West was the site of her transition from “the Eurocentric aesthetics of her early poems toward a more socially embedded and class-conscious art,” as Betsy Erkkila writes (–), the site in which an awareness of racialized cultural difference emerges as a significant correlative to Bishop’s class consciousness. As I suggest in this chapter, Bishop’s preoccupations with Stevens’s poetics, with surrealism, and with the multiracial social milieu of Key West are neither unrelated nor separable in her innovative response to what Partisan Review portentously—or pretentiously—called the “situation in American writing” in the late s. Bishop’s initial trip to Florida coincided with her growing interest in Stevens’s poetics, at the time when he felt most compelled to defend the value of poetry in response to Marxist critics of his writing. Like Stevens, Bishop was troubled by the cultural marginality of poetry during the s and s, but his defense of poetry seemed remote from the Key West that captivated Bishop. Her more reticent but daring experiments with lyric voice and perspective are most evident in contrasting her more surreal early poems with Stevens’s magisterial “The Idea of Order at Key West,” although comparison of her Florida poems with the “dreadful sundry” of Stevens’s Florida more generally reveals how her vision revises his vision as she learns from his poetics.13 As telling as the rhetorical differences between their Florida poems are, Bishop’s late-s Key West differs economically, socially, even geographically from the “sepulchral south” to which Stevens bids “farewell” in Ideas of Order (“Farewell to Florida,” Collected Poems ). While Stevens’s Key West so often evokes the mythic appeal of an edenic tropical haven, a New World Mediterranean refuge from the northern austerity of New England, the marginal geographical and social site of Bishop’s poetry is at once delightfully surreal and desperately impoverished. Bishop had read the French surrealists quite intensively when she lived in Paris in , and her early writing frequently evokes the uncanniness and displacement of surrealism, particularly as she explores the blurred state between waking and dreaming. While Bishop’s surrealism is hardly the radically experimental assault on linguistic conventions associated with French surrealism, the definition of

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surrealism that Clifford relates to modern ethnography certainly applies to Bishop’s sensibility: “an aesthetic that values fragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions—that works to provoke the manifestation of extraordinary realities from the domains of the erotic, the exotic, and the unconscious” (Predicament ). Her trust in the creative potential of the unconscious differentiates her poetic vision from Stevens’s in the s, as she wrote in her notebook: “What I tire of quickly in Wallace Stevens is the self-consciousness—poetry so aware lacks depth. Poetry should have more of the unconscious spots left in” (qtd. in Page, “Off-Beat Claves” ). While Bishop does not distinguish sharply between the conscious and the unconscious, neither does she attribute to the unconscious a revolutionary power to transform experience. She insists instead on the “alwaysmore-successful surrealism of everyday life”: There is no “split.” Dreams, works of art (some) glimpses of the always-moresuccessful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important. I can’t believe we are wholly irrational— and I do admire Darwin—But reading Darwin one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his endless, heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic—and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels that strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. (letter to Anne Stevenson, Jan. , , qtd. in Millier ) Bishop’s strategies for conveying the “surrealism of everyday life” differ from the more radical surrealistic attacks on language, as her poems rarely defy linguistic and syntactic conventions. Her poetry instead heightens the interaction of unconscious and conscious modes of perception through such formal strategies as shifting perspectives, skewed proportion, or juxtaposition of unusual elements, or through attention to incongruous scenes, events, or figures.14 Her reflection on Darwin suggests another dimension to the “peripheral” vision of her poetry, however. Like Darwin, Bishop delights in the surprising encounter with “facts” and “details” that defy reason, that resist classification, particularly social details that evoke an otherness that challenges the observer’s own cultural norms. “Sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown,” Bishop’s Key West writing is embedded with rhetorical contradictions that exemplify the mixed motives of ethnographic surrealism. The rhetorical stance, if not the actual practice, of modern ethnography has conventionally been one of salvage, in which the ethnographer, through the act

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of writing, saves a threatened “primitive” culture from possible extinction. The “allegory of salvage” that informs modern ethnographic writing, Clifford writes, follows a premise that is rooted in the Western pastoral tradition: “The other is lost, in disintegrating time and space, but saved in the text” (“On Ethnographic Allegory” ). The allegory of salvage informs much of the s documentary writing supported by the New Deal as well, although the rhetorical motive was more often nationalist than primitivist. As Susan Hegeman writes, “In ‘salvaging’ the otherwise ‘buried cultures’ of the American landscape,” New Deal documentary projects such as the FWP guidebooks “helped produce the sense of an overarching ‘America,’ a new perception of national coherence” (– ). At the same time, however, the ethnographic writing on regional and immigrant cultures that proliferated in the s had the opposite effect of increasing dissent about the divisions and hierarchies that constituted American culture. Bishop’s Key West writing is, inevitably, rhetorically inscribed by the conflicting positions of nation and region, cosmopolitan center and “primitive” periphery, that linked ethnographic conventions with documentary in the late s. Her reflexive practice of surrealist observation and ironic representation calls into question the rhetorical act of salvage it practices. Rather than allegories of salvage, her fables of the margins could be more accurately described as allegories of allegories of salvage. Bishop’s explorations of social marginality, including the poet’s marginality, often take place on shoreline sites that are quite literally marginal. The word margin itself first meant “coast” or “shore”; analogously, the margin of a page, like the shoreline, is a space defined only in relation to the larger whole, but a space outside official rules and regulations. Bishop’s early fable about writing, “The Sea & Its Shore,” which she completed soon after her first visit to Key West, perhaps best exemplifies how she conflates the littoral with the litter-ary, the margins of sea and shore with the margins of poetry. This story dramatizes the mundane, but obsessive, work of Edwin Boomer, a man who works on “one of our large public beaches . . . to keep the sand free from papers.” Given the identification of Boomer’s initials with Bishop’s and the closeness of his last name to her mother’s family name (Bulmer, pronounced “Boomer”), this story is usually read as an autobiographical fable about the young writer’s anxiety about her vocation. And given that Boomer lives in a house on the beach that is “more like an idea of a house than a real one” (Collected Prose ), this story is also often read as a fable about home and homelessness.15 As such, it not only reflects on Bishop’s childhood but also foreshadows subsequent literary fantasies of withdrawal into mysterious houses, from the contemporaneous prose fable “In Prison”

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to her much later poem about her “crypto-dream-house,” “The End of March” (Complete Poems ). However, such biographical interpretations of “The Sea & Its Shore” diminish how it parodies not only Depression-era popular conceptions of social marginality—“Boomer” is also a term for a transient worker— but also modernist efforts to transform such temporary work as Boomer’s into lasting works of literary art.16 “The Sea & Its Shore” was the initial piece in the  New Letters in America, edited by Horace Gregory.17 Included in this collection are political poems by writers who were identified primarily with the Communist Left, such as Rukeyser, Harold Rosenberg, T. C. Wilson, and David Wolff. However, “The Sea & Its Shore” exemplifies what Gregory identifies in his introduction as a new development in the late s, the emergence of a new form of literary fable, politically conscious but influenced by W. H. Auden and earlier European modernists such as Arthur Rimbaud and Franz Kafka, who are both represented in New Letters in America with new translations of their writing. Gregory does not claim that any of the narratives included in New Letters were consciously constructed as fables, but that their fictional worlds defy the expectations of social realism: “Their truth is of another sort; it is a kind that takes for granted that mere physical action, in narrative and word, does not tell the entire story.” This makes them not less but more socially contemporaneous than the “pragmatic naturalism” associated with proletarian writing: “In some, a moral is implied, but not the moral perhaps that we would have expected ten or fifteen years ago, but a moral that has been created out of the experiences of the last seven years” (Gregory, Introduction ). Gregory hesitates to define the younger writers in the collection as a new “school,” but he suggests that a reassessment of modernist formal experimentation, including the more politicized s “ventures toward the ‘pure’ social document or reportage,” was already in progress (Introduction ). The only literary critical essay included in New Letters, William Phillips and Philip Rahv’s “Literature in a Political Decade,” exemplifies Gregory’s reconsideration of a modernist legacy that had been diminished, if not demolished, by polemical proponents of “proletarian realism” such as Mike Gold. Phillips and Rahv describe the s in the past tense, particularly as they identify the literary Left as a “‘school,’ with its inner laws, its conventions, and its fixed tenets” (“Literature” ). The “mood of the thirties,” they write, “required objectivity, realism, and an interest in the social manifestations of individual life” (“Literature” ), best exemplified not by the proletarian writers but by the writing of “fellow travelers” such as James Farrell, Henry Roth, or Edmund Wilson. In proclaiming that “American literature has completed another cycle of its development”

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and that “the revolutionary trend of the thirties did not profoundly transform the literary consciousness of America” (“Literature” ), Phillips and Rahv blame the anti-intellectualism of American culture for the literary Left’s socioaesthetic failure. Their postmortem to the proletarian sensibility of the s dismisses as well the literary regionalism associated with the Popular Front, appealing instead to a future revolutionary literature informed by a renewed engagement with the cosmopolitan vision of European modernism. Phillips and Rahv’s call for the “Europeanization of American literature” (“Literature” ) was evident not only in the inclusion of writings by Rimbaud, Kafka, and Auden in New Letters in America, it was also evident in the changing editorial policy of Partisan Review, which during the late s and early s featured Stevens and Bishop among its most frequently published poets. While Bishop would hardly have contested such a cosmopolitan vision of modernist literary practice, her Key West writings also explore the marginal social geographies associated with Popular Front regionalism. There is quite a distance, however, from both the Trotskyist internationalism of Partisan Review and the pragmatic nationalism of the Popular Front in her ironic identification with figures of social marginality. Nowhere is Bishop’s skepticism toward inflated—and masculinist—claims for the redemptive value of political art more evident than in “The Sea & Its Shore.” The protagonist’s name in “The Sea & Its Shore,” Boomer, would have evoked contradictory responses during the s. It would have suggested to most a figure of a bygone era, the turn-of-the-century itinerant railroad worker who had since been displaced by increased mechanization and a depressed economy. The life of the boomer might have been romanticized as an unbound, carefree life of adventure, when in fact, prior to the s, such workers had little job protection and therefore little choice but to seek employment wherever it could be found. Given the short-term conditions of such manual labor as railroad work, boomers were often hired even if they had questionable pasts, whether related to excessive alcohol consumption, problematic domestic lives, or labor activism. Thus the popular image of the boomer was that of a hard-drinking, irresponsible, mobile young man whose identity might be reinvented at each new stop.18 This popular image of the boomer, often identified with the life of the hobo, informed perceptions of transient workers during the early years of the Depression, even though the life stories of these workers were likely to contradict such stereotypes, whether they were based on romantic idealization or dismissive condescension. Bishop’s protagonist himself evokes the popular image of the boomer with his excessive drinking, his apparent lack of immediate family connections, and his rather uncertain identity, but these very qualities also suggest Bishop’s

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own self-image as a young “transient” poet, attempting to fashion a life through work that likewise seemed archaically romantic to many during the Depression. What makes any identification of Bishop with Boomer problematic, and interesting, however, is the gendering of her protagonist. The popular image of the boomer is of course male, just as the popular image of the transient worker was male: female transients were virtually erased from the historical record.19 The shoreline site of Bishop’s story accentuates the ironic gendering of her protagonist even further. The threshold of sea and shore is a familiarly romantic site of meditation, with Walt Whitman’s “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” being the best-known prototype for the poet’s identification with the “drift and debris” of the beach. If the figure of the solitary meditative poet in the shoreline poem is conventionally gendered male, the gendered connotations of shoreline intellectual work are somewhat more ambivalent. As John Stilgoe has examined in Alongshore, the popular image of the shoreline in the United States has often been one of lawlessness, of ruthless wreckers and profiteering bootleggers—such marginal employment exists outside the boundaries of middle-class decorum if not outside the law. However, the shore has also been a site where middle-class women have enjoyed an unusual degree of intellectual and physical mobility. During the nineteenth century, women played prominent roles as naturalists exploring the shoreline to collect and classify coastal life forms. From the extraordinary interest in marine aquariums of the s and s through the publication of Augusta Foote Arnold’s popular  guidebook The Sea-Beach at Ebb-Tide, marine biology offered women intellectual work that was also physically vigorous. With the professionalization of the natural sciences by the turn of the century, however, women’s roles were diminished. Nonetheless, as Stilgoe explains, the search for shoreline botanical and zoological specimens provided an intellectual rationale for relatively unrestrained physical activity—hiking on beaches, climbing rocks, wading in tide-pools—that was otherwise denied women in Victorian America (–). As Kate Chopin’s The Awakening perhaps most familiarly dramatizes, the liminal zone of the shoreline was an experimental theater with implications beyond scholarly activity. With a protagonist who is gendered male, Bishop’s “The Sea & Its Shore” suggests how women have been erased from the histories of such work that he performs—manual, scientific, and literary. But her story also represents an experimental theater in which gender roles are questioned. Her protagonist is ostensibly a trash man, not a domestic “janitor” but a “boomer” assigned to outdoor labor. However, his work of collecting and classifying shoreline specimens, the salvage work that falls outside his job description, is not as specifically gendered, especially given that these specimens are the

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often anonymous “literary” texts that he cannot resist. When one of these texts is addressed to a correspondence school writing instructor named Mr. Margolies, who in another story is actually the author playing the role of Mr. Margolies, the identification of Edwin Boomer with Elizabeth Bishop becomes more and more complicated. Bishop’s portrait of the artist as trash collector is initially a collage composed of contrasting perspectives and moods. He is first identified with the ocean’s “priest-like task” of “pure ablution round earth’s human shore.” His effort is portrayed as a heroic, if doomed, attempt to preserve the beach from the detritus of modernity, as he supplements the ocean’s natural force, no longer sufficient in itself because “the tempo of modern life is too rapid. Our presses turn out too much paper covered with print, which somehow makes its way to our seas and their shores, for nature to take care of herself.” From a distance, however, Boomer is hardly “priest-like”; instead, the image of him on his nightly rounds is a “picturesque sight, in some ways like a Rembrandt,” as he walks the beach “with his lantern and his stick, and a potato sack on his back to put the papers in.” This quaint postcard image of the impoverished worker undercuts the initial (mock) heroic image, as Boomer is reduced to a decorative image of “local color” on the otherwise barren shoreline landscape. Most of “The Sea & Its Shore,” however, is narrated through Boomer’s consciousness. Boomer lives “the most literary life possible” (Collected Prose ), but what’s peculiar about this “literary life” is the arbitrariness of what he reads. The multifarious pieces of paper that appear on the beach, from illegible scraps of newspaper to that “threatening poem of the Ancient Mariner and the Albatross”—“many times” (Collected Prose )—have many practical uses as well. Not only reading “material,” the papers that Boomer collects also provide warmth, whether tucked under his coat, insulating his house, or lit on fire. The materiality of paper is as aesthetically fascinating as the language printed on it: Boomer notes the changing colors and consistencies of aging newspaper and even fashions the occasional paper sculpture when he is drunk enough (Collected Prose –). The distinction between reading material and the material substance of paper breaks down, just as the distinction between Boomer’s “literary life” and his litter-ary life becomes less meaningful. Ultimately, “Either because of the insect armies of type so constantly besieging his eyes, or because it was really so, the world, the whole world he saw, came before many years to seem printed, too” (Collected Prose ). What lasts among the scraps of paper Boomer collects is a matter of his critical judgment (a judgment made even more arbitrary by his excessive drinking)—the remaining scraps become the material for “fitful illumination,” literary

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“kebabs” (Collected Prose ). Although he “made no distinction between the bewilderments of prose and those of poetry” (Collected Prose ), Boomer does distinguish between different categories of writing that he saves. The three categories include () anything about himself, () anything about other people who fascinate him, and () “the items he could not understand at all, that bewildered him completely but at the same time interested him so much that he saved them to read” (Collected Prose ). The final category eventually subsumes the first two. Among the items he places under the category of bewilderment is the letter addressed to the correspondence school writing instructor, Mr. Margolies. The writer of this letter explains that he wants “‘to write like all the Authors’”; however, he is perplexed by “‘how those Authors write such long stories of , or , words in those magazines, and where do they get their imagination and the material’” (Collected Prose ). This letter tells Boomer more about his work than he cares to admit: “But what was the answer? The more papers he picked up and the more he read, the less he felt he understood. In a sense he depended on ‘their imagination,’ and was even its slave, but at the same time he thought of it as a kind of disease” (Collected Prose –). If Boomer has no “childish desire” to become an “Author,” his job as literary executor of his anonymous estate fills him with a similar anxiety of dependency on “their imagination.” Yet his ruminations about this dependency are themselves perplexing. What does “its slave” modify? If “its” modifies “their imagination,” in what sense is this collective imagination of “the Authors” objectified? And what responsibility does Boomer have for this dependency on “their imagination,” whether he is “its slave” or “it is a kind of disease”? Are Boomer’s “self-riddles” pathetically solipsistic, the obsessive musings of an imagination fueled by alcohol, or is the question of individual imagination irrelevant, given the increasingly pervasive intertextuality of the writing “material,” through which a sandpiper becomes a “point of punctuation against the ‘rounded, rolling waves’” (Collected Prose ) and the sand itself becomes “printed paper” (Collected Prose )? This letter that so perplexes Boomer is itself transcribed from another text, Bishop’s narrative of Depression-era “literary life” entitled “The U.S.A. School of Writing,” which was drafted in  but remained unpublished during her lifetime. In this autobiographical narrative about working as a correspondence school writing instructor after graduating from Vassar, Bishop assumes the role of Mr. Margolies, the name of a previous instructor at the school. This story is primarily a satiric portrait of one of her colleagues at the school, a rather naive advocate of proletarian social realism who continually tries to convince the “anarchist” narrator to join the Communist Party. Yet the story’s reflection on the

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“primitive” student writing endured by Margolies also indicates Bishop’s developing consciousness of a working-class aesthetic quite different from her colleague’s “realism.” The letter that so disturbs Boomer—and disturbs Bishop/ Margolies as well—is written by “a Mr. Jimmy O’Shea of Fall River,” who represents “the nearest approach to a classical primitive style” of any of the U.S.A. students. Despite its meticulously consistent formulaic syntax, which “enabled him to make exactly a page of every sentence” (Collected Prose ), its attention to detail is nonetheless less rigorous than that of “primitive painters”: “Where primitive painters will spend months or years, if necessary, putting in every blade of grass and building up brick walls in low relief, the primitive writer seems in a hurry to get it over with. . . . The primitive painter loves detail and lingers over it and emphasizes it at the expense of the picture as a whole. But if the writers put them in, the details are often impossibly or wildly inappropriate, sometimes revealing a great deal about the writer without furthering the matter in hand at all” (Collected Prose ). Such careful attention to detail that Bishop associates with primitive painting characterizes her developing method of composition, just as its obsessiveness characterizes Boomer’s janitorial art. Bishop is, of course, less interested in a photographic mimesis of grass and brick than in representing the complex act of perceiving. The exact image of a “blade of grass” is less important than the “leaves of grass” that inform one’s perception. In Bishop’s writing, a fragment of text may reappear in a new context, transformed by its relocation, as a found object is transformed by its placement in a collage. The repetition of a phrase, a line, a fragment, or even an entire letter—the circulation of text from one location to another—typifies Bishop’s salvage art of revising and recycling, which becomes a prominent method of composing for her. If the pathetically naive letter that Bishop quotes in “The U.S.A. School of Writing,” and quotes again in “The Sea & Its Shore,” is neither “wildly inappropriate” nor a “detail” emphasized “at the expense of the picture as a whole,” the fact that it is salvaged “reveals a great deal” about each story’s protagonist. As moved as Bishop is about the “common feeling of time passing and wasted, of wonder and envy, and partly sincere ambition” (Collected Prose ), she is disturbed enough by the pathetic dedication of writers like O’Shea that she quits her position at the U.S.A. School of Writing the very week that she receives his letter. Boomer, on the other hand, finds temporary solace in burning the documents he receives, which, unlike the professional writer, is what he is paid to do. The act of salvaging for Boomer itself violates the terms of his employment as it mocks conventional notions of property—private and public. His position as the destroyer of “litter” inverts as

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it resembles the “anarchist” salvage art of Bishop/Margolies, whose appropriated fragments transgress bourgeois codes of literary property as their confusion of the litter-ary with the literary calls into question poetic conventions of quotation.20 Bishop’s reflexive fable is ultimately as unclassifiable, and almost as anonymous, as the documents that Boomer relegates to the category of bewilderment. North & South includes a number of allegories of salvage that question their own practice, not unlike “The Sea & Its Shore.” The poem from North & South that corresponds most closely with Boomer’s “self-riddles” is Bishop’s most celebrated literary assemblage from the s, “The Monument.” While this poem is less ethnographically surrealist than playfully indeterminate in its “monumental” art of salvage, it dynamically enacts an inquiry into the social roles of art that is as subversive as it is derivative. As such, it foreshadows the rhetorical complexity of Bishop’s more ethnographic Key West writing. Conceived in Provincetown but completed when Bishop was living in Key West, “The Monument” articulates a defense of art in what appears to be an uninhabited landscape of sea and sand. Yet the shoreline vision from Bishop’s notebook that Brett Millier relates to the poem’s conception suggests how this vision is more social, more dialogic, than it first appears: “Perhaps it is because I haven’t been on this beach for so long, I can’t quite believe in the landscape. Dune, beach, sun, sky—longitudinal—there is a “flats” look about them, a long “set,” or corridor. At the ends—the East is the end—or through a crack which may appear at any minute, I expect to see darkness, or twilight, full of traffic, cumbersome objects, lumber, buildings, noise, confusions” (Bishop, qtd. in Millier ). Constructed of scraps of wood superimposed upon the shoreline surfaces of sand, sea, and sky, Bishop’s monument evokes Max Ernst’s surrealist technique of frottage, the creation of design through rubbing (a pencil, for example) over a surface placed beneath the paper. In the notebook where Bishop sketched an image of “The Monument,” she wrote, “Take a frottage of this sea” (qtd. in Page, “Off-Beat Claves” ). Within this very same notebook is her initial response to Stevens’s Owl’s Clover. “The Monument” is often read as a direct response to Stevens’s defense of art in Owl’s Clover, and if not a “trash can at the end of the world” (Stevens, Opus Posthumous ), “The Monument” does indeed convey an “ends” of the world vision that is open to “cumbersome objects, lumber, buildings, noise, confusions.” Rather than elevating the formal play of “dune, beach, sun, sky” above such “confusions,” the poem dialogically relates the marginal site of the shoreline to the social “traffic” of voices and perspectives that animate “The Monument.” From its introductory question—“Now can you see the monument?”— through its closing direct address to the viewer-reader—“Watch it closely”—

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“The Monument” constructs a dialogue about the “ends” of art. It plays not only with visual perspective in questioning what the object of art might be, but it also plays with our expectations of what a “monument” might mean. A monument is most familiarly an official memorial, an object that commemorates a historically important event or a life, but it can also denote, less grandly, a simple boundary or position marker. That is, a monument creates expectations of a social significance beyond its presence, a relation between the object and a specific past that it commemorates, but this depends on the awareness and consent of its viewers. No matter what its origins or presumed purpose, however, a monument establishes spatial relations between the surrounding landscape and itself by its very spatial presence. Like Stevens’s jar in “Anecdote of the Jar,” it transforms the spatial perception of its site through its orienting presence; its official purpose of commemoration is less predictable than its act of transforming the space in which it is located. The word monument also has more obscure, more ominous connotations: given that its earliest usage referred to burial vaults, it is not surprising that monument more generally signifies a warning or portent. Finally, and importantly for a poem entitled “The Monument,” a monument may also imply a written tribute or a written legal document. A monument thus establishes a dynamic, not necessarily stable relation between present and past, and between the object and its surroundings. “The Monument” initiates its dialogic mode of perception in its first two lines: “Now can you see the monument? It is of wood/built somewhat like a box. No” ().21 It goes on to describe a structure haphazardly composed of multiple interlocking boxes rather than a structure that is more uniformly coherent. We are immediately introduced to the question of perspective, as well as to the question of voice, as this initial corrective anticipates the dialogue that follows. We become engaged in the process of constructing the monument, which is, significantly, made out of an organic substance, wood, that is itself subject to the transformative effects of the “elements” of sunlight, sand, and sea. However, this monument is not simply an austerely abstract play of line and shape, as its decorative elements give it the “homelier” effect that the poem later relates to the organic process of decomposition. The combination of ceremonial language— its ornamental “fleur-de-lys,” “ecclesiastical” boards, and “slanted poles like flagpoles” ()—with the more rough-hewn but precise imagery of woodwork suggests either a past grandeur in disarray or a “primitive” attempt to create such grandeur. Either way, so much more depends on our construction of its significance than on any determinate “monumental” status. “The Monument” does establish dominion over sea and sky—the sea and sky

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are monumentalized—in the subsequent description, whose perspective resembles the “longitudinal” perspective of Bishop’s Provincetown notebook. But this “view” that is “geared . . . so low there is no ‘far away’” is disrupted by the quoted voice: “Why does that strange sea make no sound? Is it because we’re far away? Where are we? Are we in Asia Minor, or in Mongolia?” () As disorienting as this sudden shift of perspective may be, as arbitrarily exotic as “Asia Minor” or “Mongolia” may appear, it is curious that in the same letter that Bishop writes to Moore criticizing Owl’s Clover, she invites her to a movie— Son of Mongolia: “Have you seen the film Son of Mongolia? . . . It is taken in Mongolia, with a native cast, and set in the most beautiful scenery—great icy plains, and ruined palaces, with many fat little horses (like Ming horses) running around, and there are some very strange sights: a native wrestling match mingled with queer dancing, and gorgeous painted palace doors opening to reveal a tank bristling with guns, etc.” (One Art ). As the “traffic . . . noise, confusions” suddenly disrupt the abstractly sublime vision of the Cape Cod “ends,” the “strange sights” of Mongolia conclude Bishop’s reflections on Stevens’s “monumental” poem. Similarly, the poem’s surprising intrusion of the question of location—“Where are we?”—complicates our perception of the place of “the monument.” The poem’s shoreline vision, like that of Bishop’s salvage art more generally, is not one of escape or retreat to a site of sublime transcendence. Its introduction of exotic Asian place names instead produces a “dis-orienting” vision that can include the contemporary imagery of a contemporary Soviet film about Mongolia as well as the archaically poetic imagery of church and royalty. This method of composition, as in “The Sea & Its Shore,” juxtaposing anonymous quotations with obscure allusions, commemorates as well the poem’s implicit interlocutor, and Bishop’s mentor, Moore. “The Monument” is composed of a dialogue of perspectives, of meditations on its meaning, that evokes but also undermines a romantic idealization of the object: An ancient promontory, an ancient principality whose artist-prince might have wanted to build a monument to mark a tomb or boundary, or make

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a melancholy or romantic scene of it . . . “But that queer sea looks made of wood, half-shining, like a driftwood sea. And the sky looks wooden, grained with cloud. It’s like a stage set; it is all so flat!” () On the one hand, there is the descriptive voice that speculates, imaginatively, on the “artist-prince” who “might have wanted” to construct a monument for any number of purposes, whether artistically “romantic” or princely pragmatic. On the other hand, in contrast with this Kubla Khanesque vision is the more skeptical, more empirical vision of the quoted voice, which emphasizes the theatrical effect created by the frottage of wood. This emphasis on materials, on the physical construction of the monument and its immediate sensational effect on the viewer, characterizes the quoted passages that follow as well. The monument is simply “piled-up boxes . . . a temple of crates in cramped and created scenery.” The monument becomes annoying to this viewer for its apparent inconsequentiality and its total transformation of its shoreline site, for its apparent meaninglessness and for its obliteration of meaning beyond itself. But this “artifact / of wood,” like the sea and sky that define it, is itself forever changing. The monument re-creates itself in its process of decomposition; the viewer renews its “life” through the act of questioning, the act of finding meaning, or the act of recomposing the objects that were themselves presumably objects found and recomposed. As the dialogue of voices produces the monument, the interaction of object and decoration produces dialogue: “The crudest scroll-work says ‘commemorate’” (). The “scroll-work” is material for writing, for composing, for commemorating the act of commemorating. The “bones of the artist-prince may be inside,” but such a quest for origins, for authority, for authorship, for the identity of the monument, is immaterial to its “homely” dialogic structure: But roughly but adequately it can shelter what is within (which after all cannot have been intended to be seen). It is the beginning of a painting, a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument, and all of wood. Watch it closely. () Like romantic ruin poems such as Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage,” the significance of this “shelter” exceeds its utilitarian value. Yet “The Monument” does not grieve for the dispossessed domestic world that was “within” Wordsworth’s

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cottage; it instead commemorates as it displaces the icon of modernist poetics, the self-sufficient aesthetic object. Bishop’s “shelter” is “homely” precisely because it is dialogically composed, inhabited by quoted voices. A structure always subject to change, this “shelter” is composed of a syntax of possibility, of words of “wood,” words of “would.” To “say ‘commemorate’” is neither to idealize a past gone by nor to belittle its shaping presence, but to rethink the ever-changing power dynamic between public commemoration and (inter)subjective acts of countermemory. The salvage art of “The Monument” and “The Sea & Its Shore” anticipates Bishop’s better-known explorations of shoreline marginality in her Key West poetry. While “The Sea & Its Shore” is as autobiographically reflective as it is parodically reflexive, the new world of Key West challenges Bishop to take into account an unfamiliar dynamic of social and cultural difference. Bishop’s initial impressions of Key West are not unlike those of other tourists, as she describes the striking colors of the sea to Marianne Moore in precise but whimsical terms— “all spotted and striped, from dark black-blue to what my aunt calls ‘lettuce’ green.” But her Key West is hardly an idealized tropical paradise. Instead, her initial reflections are ethnographic, especially in their attention to peculiar local uses of language. Even as Bishop writes to Moore about the “wonderful plants and trees,” she notes, “For some reason, all the trees in the Key West front yards are labeled, just like in a museum, so it is all very instructive. The landlady just presented me with a ‘Devil Rose,’ and some ‘Heavenly Beans.’” If Bishop’s humorous depiction of Key West as a bizarre botanical “museum” appeals to Moore’s eye for exotic detail, it also suggests her own interest in a local history that is anything but “natural” to her. Her descriptions of Key West residents are likewise attuned to amusing if not “instructive” examples of naming, as she describes to Moore her landlady, “Mrs. Pindar,” and her neighbor, Mr. Gay, whose “room is filled with what he calls ‘novelties,’ which he keeps in cigar boxes; they are all leaves and seed pods, etc. They all seem to have such violent names: he just gave me a ‘Rose of Hell,’ and there are ‘Woman’s Tongue,’ ‘Crown of Thorns,’ etc.” (One Art ). Like the specimens that Edwin Boomer collects in “The Sea & Its Shore,” Bishop’s first impressions of Key West are as suggestively allusive as they are disturbingly mysterious. In her letters to Moore, however, Bishop also sees Key West as a potential antidote to what she fears are the solipsistic tendencies of such “fables” as “The Sea & Its Shore” and “In Prison.” She recognizes how the unfamiliar but inviting everyday world of Key West would demand a more socially engaged, if impressionistic, prose style: “Perhaps Mr. Gay will make me more Katherine Mansfield-ish!” (One Art ).

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Bishop’s Florida is initially characterized by such “novelties” as Mr. Gay’s, whose names reveal as they conceal the violent history that informs them. The name of the state itself is deceptive, but suggestive of its very deception, as the beginning of her poem “Florida” shows: The state with the prettiest name, the state that floats in brackish water, held together by mangrove roots that bear while living oysters in clusters, and when dead strew white swamps with skeletons, dotted as if bombarded, with green hummocks like ancient cannon-balls sprouting grass. () Florida’s name evokes so many contradictory states: a fertile state of blooming, of being covered with flowers, but also a state of excessive ornamentation (as in “florid” prose); a state of health (that is, of a ruddy, “florid” complexion), but also an unhealthy state of advanced decay (the “florid” stage of a disease). The opening description of “Florida” suggests how these contradictory states coexist: the image of “Florida” takes shape in the borderlines between pretty and “brackish,” “living” and “dead,” fertile growth and violent destruction, “held together” in dependent clauses that themselves skirt the boundaries of imagistic description and decorative metaphor. Bishop’s Florida, like the Key West she describes to Moore, is a state of linguistic and psychic instability. It is a transient state whose sights and sounds convey such instability: The state full of long S-shaped birds, blue and white, and unseen hysterical birds who rush up the scale every time in a tantrum. () It is also a state in which names of “fading shells,” otherwise empty, echo a violent “buried” past: Job’s Tear, the Chinese Alphabet, the scarce Junonia, parti-colored pectins and Ladies’ Ears, arranged as on a gray rag of rotted calico, the buried Indian Princess’s skirt; with these the monotonous, endless, sagging coast-line is delicately ornamented. () Like the “Woman’s Tongue” among Mr. Gay’s “novelties,” the “Ladies’ Ears” she finds along the beach suggest how Bishop is attuned to the gendered implications

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of naming. The natural historian/poet’s attention to the peculiarly “florid” names associated with what would appear on a map to be a “monotonous, endless, sagging coast-line” heightens our awareness of her selections: the “Ladies’ Ears” connect the exotically eclectic names evoking ancient civilizations—including the militantly female but “scarce” figure of the “Junonia”—with the local indigenous figure of the vanquished “Indian Princess,” whose “buried” but present spirit is commemorated in the “homely” image of “a gray rag of rotted calico.” From the detritus of this history emerges a “careless, corrupt state” whose legacy of conquest and slavery is neither confined to the past nor buried. Moving from descriptive surfaces to the mythic figure of the “Indian Princess,” “Florida” concludes with a more somber recognition of a divided social landscape figured in the “cold white” moonlight. The racial connotations of this landscape are conveyed through the graphic image of black on white in a mapped Florida: “all black specks / too far apart, and ugly whites; the poorest / post-card of itself.” As “delicately ornamented” as “Florida” appears, its surface hardly conceals the desire to repress such a poor “post-card of itself.” It is ultimately the voice of the “Indian Princess” with which the poem identifies, the voice heard in the “calls” of the “alligator,” which “whimpers and speaks in the throat / of the Indian Princess” (). The Florida that Bishop depicts in her letters to Moore is a polyglot site of marvelous found objects, sea grapes and castor-oil beans, “Woman’s Tongue” leaves and stingaree “danger bones,” valued as much for their aesthetic appeal as for the anecdotes that describe their discovery (One Art –). Key West in particular is a site of brilliantly red-flowered Royal Poinciana trees, houses with “scrollwork that looks as if it were cut from paper” (One Art ), and a cat who “looks just like Picasso’s Absinthe Drinker” (One Art ). As she becomes more settled in Key West, though, Bishop is increasingly fascinated by its racialized social difference. The Cuban and African American homes that she observes initially at a distance are charming in their spareness, as she describes the cottage that she would eventually commemorate in “Jerónimo’s House”: “Down the street is a very small cottage I can look right into, and the only furniture it contains beside a bed and a chair is an enormous French horn, painted silver, leaning against the wall, and hanging over it a pith helmet, also painted silver.” In contrast to such picturesque details whose social significance remains mysterious to the voyeuristic traveler, Bishop speaks with more authority, but with no less wonder, about “the Negroes.” She writes to Moore: “The Negroes have such soft voices and such beautifully tactful manners—I suppose it is farfetched, but their attitude keeps reminding me of the tone of George Herbert” (One Art ).

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While Bishop’s “simple fancies about the Negroes” are “farfetched” enough for Moore to “mock” her (One Art –), her interest in everyday African American life is more serious, if naive, than her fanciful comments to Moore suggest. A later  letter to Moore exemplifies how Bishop self-consciously, even selfmockingly, blends the exoticizing language of poetic description with the social scientific discourse of racial classification: “My chief delight at present is the Negro—mulatto, rather—carpenter we have working on the house, Milton Evans. He looks Miltonic—epic, at least—a ‘chieftain’ type, with an enormous head (he must wear a size  straw hat), long bony features and deep-set eyes. He is by far the smartest, most conscientious person I have talked to here yet. He catches on to my most ‘modern’ ideas right away, and yields to them with great dignity” (One Art ). While the elision of the literary with the anthropological—the “Miltonic” with the “‘chieftain’ type”—is striking in its simultaneous glorification and objectification of Evans, even more telling is Bishop’s surprise that he is receptive to her “‘modern’ ideas.” Milton Evans unwittingly embodies her unusual dual interest in seventeenth-century poetry and prose and contemporary “social writing,” whether the poetry and aesthetics of such established leftist writers as Auden, Christopher Caudwell, or Louis MacNiece, or more popular prose such as the FWP collection American Stuff. The primitivist discourse that informs her description of Evans, that assumes an opposition of the “Negro” to the “modern,” is made more evident in the same letter when Bishop discusses William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain, which she also read in her first year in Key West. She was “rather disappointed in it,” but she thought “some of the remarks about Negroes were very good.” She continues, “I want very much to attempt something about them myself—those I have anything to do with here are all so good. Their cheerfulness is amazing—as Cootchie, the maid here, said to me the other morning, ‘That’s why I like colored folks—they never commit suicide’” (One Art –). Bishop’s letters to Frani Blough are more explicit about her fascination with “Latin” and “Negro” life in Key West. She describes the “Rumba nights” at Sloppy Joe’s in vivid detail, including the Key West rumba champion, who is “really wonderful, very very Latin, and fat, really more exactly like a Lachaise in the flesh than anyone I have ever seen” (One Art ). Bishop’s interest in African American music, whether performed locally or recorded, is even more pronounced in her letters to the musicologist Blough. Discussing her interest in Bessie Smith, Bishop even proposes to write an article on “‘modern American ballads’—the Negro ones are the best” (One Art ). As Bishop identifies more with Key West as “home” during the late s and early s, a transient in an equally transient community, it becomes an

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increasingly complex site of social—as well as geographical—marginality in her writing. Bishop eventually did write poems about racial tension and oppression in Key West, some of which were published in North & South. Among her experiments with voice and point of view is a sequence of blues poems, “Songs for a Colored Singer,” first-person lamentations about love and betrayal, money and poverty, and motherhood and war that she composed with Billie Holiday’s voice in mind. More specific to Key West is the elegiac “Cootchie,” which situates the funeral of the African American maid in a starkly racialized landscape of “eggwhite” skies and “sable” faces (). Like the later “Faustina, or Rock Roses,” which is also about a black (Cuban) maid whom Bishop knew, this poem inventively dramatizes the tense but intimate relations of a black servant and her white mistress; its tone is vaguely ominous but socially penetrating about the gulf that divides these women who inhabit the same domestic space. While these poems certainly complicate monolithic notions of class conflict as well as racial conflict, Bishop’s most extensive articulation of an ethnographically surrealist approach to Key West’s social complexity can be found in the one essay she published about Florida, a commemorative tribute to the Cuban American “primitive” painter Gregorio Valdes. Like “Florida,” “Gregorio Valdes” was published in a  issue of Partisan Review. Betsy Erkkila describes Bishop’s essay as “at once a proletarian portrait and an attempt to define a popular, communal, workingclass art” (). Such claims might seem extravagant for an essay as casual in tone as “Gregorio Valdes”; however, the context of its initial publication was certainly politically charged. The summer  issue of Partisan Review in which “Gregorio Valdes, –” appeared began with Philip Rahv’s scathing critique of Popular Front cultural politics, “Twilight of the Thirties,” and concluded with the equally alarmist antifascist, anti-Stalinist statement of the League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism (LCFS). Over twenty additional pages of this issue are dedicated to “the situation in American writing,” a series of questions posed by the editors and answered by John Dos Passos, Allen Tate, James T. Farrell, Kenneth Fearing, Katherine Anne Porter, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, John Peale Bishop, Harold Rosenberg, and Henry Miller. Rahv’s opening essay argues that the Western democracies were not as distant as they claimed from the totalitarian states they ostensibly opposed, whether fascist or Stalinist. The threat to literary expression was practically as dire in the democratic nations that were more intent on preparing for war than in protecting the values for which they would presumably be fighting. In the United States, for example, “most of the artists and ‘thinkers’ are voluntarily subjecting themselves to a regimen of conformity, are ‘organically’ as it were—obediently

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and at times even with enthusiasm—adapting their products to the coarsening and shrinking of the cultural market” (“Twilight” ). Rahv identifies this “withering away of literature” with the Popular Front acquiescence to the “new nationalism, this bombast about the ‘American way of life,’ this so-called ‘rediscovery of our democratic past’” (“Twilight” ), that is, to the potentially fascist force of bourgeois nationalism rather than the revolutionary aims of socialist democracy. While the LCFS reinforces Rahv’s argument for intellectual freedom with more concrete evidence of government censorship of modernist experimentation (for example, in the WPA projects), the writers who address “the situation in American writing” represent a wider range of political positions. The editors, however, pose a number of rather pointed questions about “literary nationalism” that are implicitly critical of Popular Front affirmations of an American “usable past.” There is a general consensus among the writers about the dangers of nationalist conformity, but there is, not surprisingly, far less agreement about the professional status, allegiance, and responsibility of writing. This is especially true among the poets, who either mock or dismiss the relevance of question number four: “Have you found it possible to make a living by writing the sort of thing you want to, and without the aid of such crutches as teaching and editorial work? Do you think that there is any place in our present economic system for literature as a profession?” (“Situation in American Writing” ). Like “The Sea & Its Shore,” “Gregorio Valdes” renders “the situation in American writing” absurd through its ironic yet affectionate portrait of the professional “primitive” artist. In narrating Valdes’s transformation from “G. Valdes, Sign Painter” to “G. Valdes, Artist Painter,” Bishop’s essay maps her own changing perceptions of the artist’s relationship to his or her social location. The essay begins with a precise description of the location in which Bishop first encountered Valdes’s painting: The first painting I saw by Gregorio Valdes was in the window of a barbershop on Duval Street, the main street of Key West. The shop is in a block of cheap liquor stores, shoeshine parlors and poolrooms, all under a long wooden awning shading the sidewalk. The picture leaned against a cardboard advertisement for Eagle Whiskey, among other window decorations of red-andgreen crepe-paper rosettes and streamers left over from Christmas and the announcement of an operetta at the Cuban school—all covered with dust and fly spots and littered with termites’ wings. (Collected Prose ) While Bishop goes on to describe the picture in similarly precise physical detail, the social environment of Key West sets the stage for its significance. The initial

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description of Duval Street assumes an audience unfamiliar with Key West, but the more specific details surrounding the painting—“all covered with dust and fly spots and littered with termites’ wings”—convey at once the social vitality of a community and its impoverished decadence. The painting does not stand out from the barbershop clutter; it enhances the social details from which it emerges. It “charms” Bishop not by its initial appearance but by the gradual impression it makes on her in her walks past the barbershop; the painting’s significance increases with her immersion into its social environment. When she decides to visit Valdes’s “studio,” she is similarly struck by the blend of physical decay and whimsical ornamentation. The “decayed, unrentable little house” where he works has “holes in the floors and weeds growing up through the holes,” but the walls are covered with postcards and newspaper pictures of animals and religious subjects (Collected Prose ). As Bishop begins to describe Valdes himself, her details become more ethnographic: she relates his background as a cigar factory worker, sign painter, ice-cream peddler, and photographer to the migrant history of the Cuban community in Key West. Yet her description of his home exhibits a capacity for wonder that corresponds with the “naive” perspective of his paintings. She remarks that the “bareness of a Cuban house, and the apparent remoteness of every object in it from every other object, gives one the same sensation as the bareness and remoteness of Gregorio’s best pictures,” but it is the unlikeliness of the decorative objects that catches her eye. While there is an organic relation between the home’s interior design and the spareness of the paintings, how does one account for such an object as the “wonderful clock” that Bishop describes in exquisite detail? “The case was a plaster statue, painted bronze, of President Roosevelt manipulating a ship’s wheel. On the face there was a picture of a barkeeper shaking cocktails, and the little tin shaker actually shook up and down with the ticking of the clock” (Collected Prose ). Bishop’s prosaic explanation for the object’s presence—“I think this must have been won at one of the bingo tents that are opened at Key West every winter” (Collected Prose –)—is exceeded by the comically bizarre yet politically suggestive detail of its description. While “Gregorio Valdes” revels in the eccentric visual details of Valdes’s social environment as well as his paintings, Bishop’s portrait of the artist concentrates as much on his struggle to make a living as his accomplishments as an “Artist Painter.” While she self-consciously portrays Valdes in painterly, even exotic terms that resemble the vivid artifice of his paintings, she does so ironically to contrast such images with the difficult conditions of his life. When she first describes his appearance, for example, “he looked a little like the Self-Portrait of El Greco.” Immediately following this she explains how Valdes’s communication

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with her in English suggests a deference to Anglo linguistic authority that is representative of the social status of Cubans in Key West (Collected Prose –). And when Bishop describes him on his deathbed—“He looked like one of those Mexican retablo paintings of miraculous cures”—she is quick to add more soberly that “only in his case we were afraid no miraculous cure was possible” (Collected Prose ). “Gregorio Valdes” is a “proletarian portrait” in that Valdes’s work as a visual artist is inseparable from the socioeconomic history of Key West. In contrast with the New York Artists’ Gallery exhibition catalog of his paintings that she quotes, which celebrates the naively “primitive” qualities of his mimetic aesthetic, Bishop relates his work to a more ingeniously pragmatic response to the tourist trade. She writes of Valdes’s daughter’s memory of her father: She told me . . . how when the battleships came into Key West harbor during the war he had made a large-scale model of one of them, exact in every detail, and had used it as an ice-cream cart, to peddle Cuban ices through the streets. It attracted the attention of a tourist from the North and he bought it, “for eighty dollars.” She said that when the carnivals came to town he would sit up all night by the light of an oil lamp, making little pinwheels to sell. He used to spend many nights at his studio, too, when he wanted to finish a sign or a picture, getting a little sleep on the cot there. (Collected Prose ) Like many Cubans who had settled in Key West, Valdes had spent his life traveling between Cuba, Tampa, and Key West, working long hours whenever the opportunity arose in order to support his family in a regional economy that was unpredictable at best. Such a migrant, marginal existence, subject to the vagaries of the United States’ imperial foreign policy in the Caribbean, renders the aesthetic judgment of his paintings in the New York art market absurd if not irrelevant. In his own estimation, and within the everyday struggle to make a living, his work as a sign painter is not qualitatively different from his work as an “artist” even though his painting is implicated within a tourist economy that makes such distinctions. Bishop does not celebrate the finished paintings, as she admits that he is “not even a good ‘primitive,’” even though his copies of photographs sometimes succeeded in making “just the right changes in perspective and coloring to give it a peculiar and captivating freshness, flatness, and remoteness.” What she admires instead about Valdes—that his life and work are “all of a piece” (Collected Prose )—can be said about her commemoration of him as well. The controlling metaphor of Bishop’s “piece” is the Traveler’s Palm. Bishop writes that there is only one of these trees in Key West, but when she commissions Valdes to paint a picture of her house, she asks him to add a Traveler’s Palm to the painting.

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As the solitary Traveler’s Palm links the otherwise unlike migrant lives of the two artists, it affectionately evokes a fluid Key West social dynamic that enables such paths to cross. Like “Gregorio Valdes,” many of Bishop’s Key West poems are concerned with home and homelessness. Her poems so often evoke the precariousness, the fragility, and the transience of the shelters where the socially marginal, and often solitary, figures of her poems live. While Bishop surely projects her insecurity about her own marginality and solitude onto the homes she represents in her poems, she does not equate the social contingency of these domestic spaces with her own relatively privileged position as a writer, even if her identification with socially marginal homes provides some solace from her own sense of insignificance. The poem from North & South that most closely corresponds with the socioaesthetic vision of “Gregorio Valdes” is “Jerónimo’s House,” which was published with “Cootchie” and “Seascape” in Partisan Review (September ) as part of Bishop’s Key West “tript-itch” (Bishop qtd. in Millier ). While these poems all relate the ever present threat of violent tropical weather to an irrational economy of racialized exploitation, “Jerónimo’s House” limns a lyric architecture that defies the apparent poverty of its materials. The contrast between the whimsical, “My house, my fairy / palace,” and the material, “of perishable / clapboards with / three rooms in all,” emerges in the first sentence of this dramatic monologue. What disrupts this opposition between such lyric and materialist linguistic economies, however, is the house’s relation to place, which is at once organic and self-reflexive in its composition: “my gray wasps’ nest / of chewedup paper / glued with spit.” As the spare lines of the poem belie the emotional weight of its descriptive language, the humble materials of Jerónimo’s house belie the ornamentation of its construction, from its exterior “veranda/of wooden lace” to its colorfully decorative interior, with its “red and green / left-over Christmas /decorations,” its “pink tissue-/paper roses,” and its “old French horn/repainted with / aluminum paint,” which is removed each year to play in the “parade / for José Martí.” As in “Gregorio Valdes,” such domestic details not only evoke an ethnographically precise decorative aesthetic, they also evoke a more translatable art of making do with limited material means. Jerónimo’s first-person tour of his house self-consciously assumes an audience that sees only an “old French horn” rather than its cultural and political significance. While such minimal means of cultural expression that decorate the house are invisible to outsiders, their necessary portability ensures their endurance. “At night you’d think / my house abandoned,” he says, but a closer look reveals “the writing-paper” and “the voices of / my radio // singing flamencos.” The writing paper and music are not

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simply ornamental, however; they define his existence more than his (temporary) house does. “When I move/I take these things,” he says, “from/my shelter from / the hurricane” (). Like the poet who composes the portrait of his house, the migrant worker/artist assumes and affirms a cultural aesthetic that can withstand natural—or unnatural—disaster. By the early s residents of Key West required shelter not from hurricanes but from the onslaught of the U. S. Navy. After Pearl Harbor especially, the navy’s growing presence radically transformed the island’s culture. Bishop feared that she would lose her White Street house, as she wrote to Charlotte Russell in : “It is impossible to live here any longer. The Navy takes over and tears down and eats up one or two blocks of beautiful little houses for dinner every day. Probably the house on White Street will go, too. . . . They are just tearing down all the good work the government has been doing here in the last ten years, and when the war is finally over, Key West will be more ruined than ever” (One Art ). Military imagery occurs throughout the Key West poems of the early s that were published in North & South, despite Bishop’s anxious introductory disclaimer that the poems were all written prior to the war.22 Bishop’s fear of dispossession sharpens her sense of itinerancy, which she conveys in ruined scenes of isolation. This is especially the case in poems dedicated to intimate friends, where the sense of imminent displacement is intensified by regret. For example, the poem she dedicated to Thomas Edwards Wanning, “Little Exercise,” is both a literary and military exercise in imagining disaster. The violent imagery of a lightning storm converges with the self-consciously artificial imagery of warfare in the conclusion of this exercise. What is left in this apocalyptic “battle-scene” is not a resignation to disaster but a willed image of solitary survival, an image that is at once pathetic, fortuitous, and resourceful: “Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat / tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge; /think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed” (). More painful is the final poem of North & South, “Anaphora,” written “in memory of Marjorie Carr Stevens,” her partner with whom she shared a Key West home in the early s. This poem, which begins with the familiar but wondrous act of waking up with a lover to the morning light, follows the daily course of the sun “through the drift of bodies . . . through the drift of classes” to an image of solitary desolation that projects the poet’s own sense of displacement onto an iconic figure of s social ruin: “the beggar in the park / who, weary, without lamp or book / prepares stupendous studies” (). If this “anaphoric” figure conveys a tired image of a time and place that seems irrevocably past during the war years, the placement of this poem at the end of North & South conveys not only a weary nostalgia for a Key

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West prior to the navy’s “invasion,” it also underscores the intertextual relation of the volume to leftist discourses of dispossession and homelessness. Bishop lived at times in Key West until , and the few postwar poems she wrote about the place return to the scenes of wreckage and salvage that were so prevalent in her s writing. These scenes are at once marvelously descriptive and painfully introspective. Bishop composed one of the final poems she wrote about Key West on her thirty-seventh birthday in . This poem, “The Bight,” evokes Bishop’s continuing ambivalence about Key West as a source of poetry, an ambivalence that corresponds with her own sense of her productive role as a poet. “The Bight” depicts an entirely different shoreline site than the deserted beach of “The Sea & Its Shore.” The “awful but cheerful” activity portrayed in “The Bight” more closely resembles the decaying clutter of “Florida,” as it dramatizes how the metaphoric process of creation is at once one of discovery and “bewilderment.” Bishop acknowledges how the commercial ideology of tourism informs her vision, as she celebrates the idiosyncratic images that defy ready categorizations. She wrote to Robert Lowell in  about the view of Key West harbor that she describes in “The Bight”: “When somebody says ‘beautiful’ about Key West you should really take it with a grain of salt until you’ve seen it for yourself. In general it is really awful & the beauty is just the light, or something equally perverse” (One Art ). The italicized emphasis on “awful,” which reappears in the closing line of the poem, suggests how conscious Bishop is of this word choice. Awful traditionally conveys a sense of the sublime, a sense of wonder, of dread, of reverence, but, of course, the “awful ” image of Key West that Bishop differentiates from its beauty is also one that is colloquially associated more negatively with excess. What is “awful ” about Key West is precisely its “perverse” difference from conventional beauty; its resistance to conventional modes of visual composition is itself “perversely” sublime. Bishop elaborates on Key West’s sublime indifference to beauty when she goes on to describe the harbor to Lowell after a recent hurricane: “The water looks like blue gas—the harbor is always a mess, here, junky little boats all piled up, some hung with sponges and always a few half sunk or splintered up from the most recent hurricane. It reminds me a little of my desk” (One Art ). It is precisely this image of “blue gas” water and the “junky” harbor that begins “The Bight”: One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire one could probably hear it turning to marimba music. The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves. ()

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The transformation of dredge work to the “marimba music” of “off-beat claves” is distanced by the conditional clause, “if one were Baudelaire.” If the “correspondences” that follow are less self-consciously literary than derivative of prior images of Bishop’s Key West, the incongruous language that describes the everyday images of “the bight” is “off-beat” enough itself to resist such exhaustion. The ominous image of water, “the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible,” ignites a series of similes that are as recklessly absurd as they are potentially violent: “pelicans . . . like pickaxes,” “man-of-war birds” with “tails like scissors,” “sponge boats . . . with the obliging air of retrievers,” “shark tails . . . like little plowshares,” on the “fence of chicken wire along the dock” (). Each of these similes domesticates an animal or animates a domestic object, but as the “man of war bird” most emphatically suggests, these “correspondences” also make us aware of the figurative dimensions of everyday language. Even the “dredge,” which “brings up a dripping jawful of marl” (–), evokes simultaneously a process of digging, of pulling material to the surface, and a process of opening, of deepening the very source of such material. “The Bight” concludes with figurative play on correspondences: rather than the explicit comparison between the scene of the harbor and the poet’s desk, though, these “old correspondences” more implicitly connect the littoral wreckage with the “litter” of “unanswered letters”: Some of the little white boats are still piled up against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in, and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm, like torn-open, unanswered letters. The bight is littered with old correspondences. () Like Edwin Boomer’s more tortured art of trash collection in “The Sea & Its Shore,” the salvage art of “The Bight” is a tentative but candid art of acknowledging loss, a process that is simultaneously one of composing the wreckage of this loss into something “awful but cheerful” (). The “correspondences” between the scene of shipwreck and the mysterious “torn-open, unanswered letters” are “awful but cheerful” in their exposure of the very processes by which this “litter” is tentatively recycled. In acknowledging doubt whether the boats will ever be salvaged, the letters ever answered, in acknowledging that the “last bad storm” is not the last bad storm, “The Bight” conveys a sense of “awe” for the acts of daily perseverance that permeate the poem, and a sense of “cheer” that the “old correspondences” are not necessarily oppressive in their weight of obligation, but are instead a source of potential connection. “The Bight”

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ultimately finds solace in recognizing that a shattered Key West can remake itself from the wreckage of hurricane, Depression, or navy. In intertextually salvaging a Key West from the ruins of the war years, Bishop fashions a site of memory, a site of “old correspondences,” that is as “perversely” resilient as it is painfully transient.

4. Harlem Disc-tortions The Jazz Memory of Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred In terms of current Afro-American popular music and the sources from which it has progressed—jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and be-bop—this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and disc-tortions of the music of a community in transition.  , introduction to Montage of a Dream Deferred That is where Bop comes from—out of them dark days we have seen. That is why Be-bop is so mad, wild, frantic, crazy. And not to be dug unless you have seen dark days, too. That’s why folks who ain’t suffered much cannot play Bop, and do not understaind [sic] it. They think it’s nonsense.  , “Bop”

Langston Hughes’s  montage of “contemporary Harlem” concludes with a motif that recurs throughout the poem and throughout his career: “Dream within a dream / Our dream deferred” (Collected Poems ).1 Hughes locates this African American “dream deferred” within a geography of broken promises, a geography both separate from and contained within the social inequities of Manhattan and, by extension, the national postwar world. In surveying the ruins of a Harlem still suffering from the Great Depression, a Harlem that had become a national symbol of black urban unrest after , Hughes underscores the necessity for a critical memory responsive to its historical moment. As his introductory statement to Montage of a Dream Deferred indicates, the musical form he chose to render this critical memory was the still controversial jazz sound of bebop. While Montage invokes a polymorphous African American musical tradition familiar to readers of Hughes’s earlier blues and jazz poetry, it summons this tradition through bebop’s more defiant postwar mood. Hughes’s 99

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introduction anticipates a readership divided in its understanding of bebop. On the one hand, he can assume an identification of bebop with Harlem in explaining how the poem’s dissonance relates to the social world it represents. On the other hand, the academic, even bureaucratic sound of “a community in transition” appeals to a public less familiar with Harlem than, for example, the African American readership of his weekly Simple columns in the Chicago Defender. Such a conflicted sense of his audience, figured more blatantly in the contrasting language of the introduction and of Simple’s rendition of “bop,” is symptomatic of the struggle that occupied Hughes not only in his postwar writing but throughout the s and s as well: the struggle to negotiate conflicting formations of a progressive public sphere, from the multiracial social democracy associated with the Popular Front to black cultural nationalist formations, whether within or outside the orbit of the Communist Left. Because bebop itself demonstrates such discord in both its performative practice and its reception, it is an especially compelling mode for Hughes’s “disc-tortions” of postwar Harlem. As an avant-garde performative mode that invokes a tradition of African American resistance, even as it suggests an apparent discontinuity with the past, bebop resonates throughout Montage as a mode for reclaiming Harlem as a site for both black cultural pride and militant anger, a site of memory that recalls the utopian promise of the New Negro Renaissance but also appeals to the postwar skepticism of a younger generation of black artists.2 Hughes’s Montage exemplifies the ongoing importance of what Houston Baker defines as “critical memory.” In his essay included in the  Black Public Sphere collection, Baker discusses recent pluralist formulations of the public sphere that take into account exclusions of subordinated social groups from the dominant bourgeois public. He cites in particular feminist social theorist Nancy Fraser, who emphasizes the importance of both identity politics and the mass media for the formation of “subaltern counterpublic spheres.” Such counterpublic spheres constituted by subordinated social groups serve two important functions: they function as spaces for the invention and circulation of counterdiscourses, and they function as bases for critical action within broader public spheres against the privilege of dominant social groups.3 Given the history of black exclusion from official spheres of decision making in the United States, African American political struggle prior to the s was articulated largely through counterpublic organizations, ranging from the black church, to the activities and publications of civil rights organizations, to debates within black literary and academic circles. Such organizations have strengthened black counterpublics and increased pressure for African American inclusion in mainstream

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public discourses.4 Baker takes as his primary example the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. to question the relation of counterpublic to official public spheres in African American history. Reclaiming the radical political work of King from more conservative constructions of his legacy, Baker argues for the role of critical memory for not only rethinking the past but also for furthering progressive social change: “The essence of critical memory’s work is the cumulative, collective maintenance of a record that draws into relationship significant instants of time past and the always uprooted homelessness of now” (“Critical Memory” ). King’s own oratorical strategies illustrate this function of critical memory, as Baker writes: “King’s sensibility was metaphysical. It was one of montage, or after the example of Romare Bearden in the graphic arts, collage. It was capable of both effecting and expressing a peculiar synthesis between seemingly disparate walks of American life” (“Critical Memory” ). Like King’s sermons or Bearden’s collages, Hughes’s jazz portrait of postwar Harlem also conveys “a peculiar synthesis between seemingly disparate walks of American life”; however, Baker’s argument about King and his contested legacy could also apply more generally to Hughes’s cultural work during and immediately after World War II. The dialogic sequencing of poems throughout Montage suggests how Hughes is dramatizing a Harlem “community in transition” through his translation of bebop’s rapid rhythmic and harmonic changes. The sudden, unpredictable shifts in voice, mood, and dramatic scene convey a sense of anxiety, fragmentation, and urgency. Whereas the rhythms of bebop provide the formal continuity of Montage, its thematic continuity emerges through the recurring motif of the dream deferred, a motif deeply rooted in African American history but also a motif that had taken on greater urgency during the war years.5 What makes Montage so compelling, though, as a formally innovative long poem and as a representation of postwar Harlem is its formal and thematic discontinuity, the tensions it produces rather than the temporary relief of these tensions, the questions it raises rather than the tentative answers. This discontinuity underscores the often conflicting, even contradictory relations between public and counterpublic spheres, within black Harlem, within New York City, within the United States, and internationally. The continuities and discontinuities between established public and emerging counterpublic spheres are implicit not only in Hughes’s bebop sequencing of poems but also in the sites where the poems were initially published. Among the publications where these poems first appeared were the journals that defined the Harlem Renaissance—and Hughes’s reputation— in the s: Crisis, where “Brothers” first appeared in , and Opportunity, where “Ballad of the Landlord” appeared in . Hughes’s ongoing commitment

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to the radical Left was evident by “Projection,” which was published in the New Masses as “Projection of a Day” in , and by three topical poems that were published in the winter – issue of Harlem Quarterly: “Green Memory,” “Relief,” and “World War II” (originally titled “World War”). African American journals that published his poems shortly before the publication of Montage included Negro Digest (“College Formal: Renaissance Casino,” ) and Phylon (“New Yorkers,” “Shame on You,” and “Passing,” ), which had also appointed Hughes as a contributing editor. Montage also included several poems that were published in the “Negro Poets Issue” of Voices, a New York–based poetry journal. Hughes edited the winter  “Negro Poets Issue,” which included his review of Brooks’s Annie Allen and four poems from Montage: “Juke Box Love Song,” “th Street,” “Casualty,” and “Joe Louis” (originally titled “The Champ”). Finally, one of the most enduring poems of Montage, “Theme for English B,” first appeared in the journal where Hughes had more of his s writings published than any other magazine, Common Ground, which was sponsored by the Common Council for American Unity to promote an understanding and appreciation of racial and ethnic diversity within the United States. Like the dialogue of performative styles that takes place throughout Montage, the implicit dialogue of literary publics suggests Hughes’s simultaneous appeal to emergent black counterpublics and more established African American and Popular Front publics. Hughes was remarkably productive in the late s, even as he was becoming increasingly subject to official surveillance and censure for his associations with the Communist Party. The range of book projects published in the postwar years preceding the McCarthy hearings suggests his defiant commitment to a social democratic public sphere that is international in scope, but open to emergent local and national formations. In particular, his work as a writer, translator, and editor suggests his ongoing dedication to the formation of an international black public sphere. In addition to Montage (written in  and published in ), Hughes published Simple Speaks His Mind in , his first collection of the weekly columns he had been writing for the Chicago Defender since . He was also busy working on a number of collaborative projects at this time, all published in : One-Way Ticket (a collection of poems illustrated by Jacob Lawrence); Cuba Libre: Poems by Nicolás Guillén (which Hughes translated with Ben Frederic Carruthers); and the groundbreaking anthology entitled The Poetry of the Negro – (which he coedited with Arna Bontemps). The selections in this popular anthology were “representative of the Negro’s own poetic expression and of the poetry he inspired others to write” (Hughes and Bontemps, Preface viii).

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It thus included black American poetry, poetry by black Caribbean and African writers, and poetry by white writers about blacks, from William Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” and Walt Whitman’s “The Runaway Slave” to Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Trial” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “Songs for a Colored Singer.” Although some reviewers objected to the internationalist approach of this anthology, and others objected to its inclusion of white writers, The Poetry of the Negro succeeded in introducing a wide spectrum of black poetry, especially poetry by younger writers, to a larger audience. Among the writers most substantially represented were poets who had recently published their first books, such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Margaret Walker. During this period, Hughes was also engaged in a number of more popular cultural productions, working in media as diverse as Broadway musical theater, opera, and children’s books. As these projects suggest, Hughes’s “social art” worked toward the formation of a public sphere that contested not only the dominant formations of American nationalism but also divisive distinctions between high and popular culture. From the early years of the cold war until the present, Hughes has been subject to competing claims for his legacy, claims that often obscure his radical response to the Depression and war years. During the cold war, Hughes himself was complicit in obscuring his affiliations with the Communist Left, not only in his guarded testimony to Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent SubCommittee on Investigations but also in the representation of his life’s work in The Langston Hughes Reader () and Selected Poems (), both of which omit his most radical writing.6 Such selective memory—or political amnesia—is common within African American literary studies more generally, which has tended to valorize the s era of the Harlem Renaissance, despite the continuity of literary debates through the s: debates about primitivism, nationalism, and class politics that were initiated in the mid-s occupied African American intellectuals through the next decade and beyond.7 This disregard for Depressionera African American poetry in particular has resulted not only from the literary historical problem of periodization, which contrasts the literary accomplishments of the Harlem Renaissance to the presumably inferior (social realist) writing of the s Left, but also from the implicit anti-Communist bias that informs this premise. The powerful testimony of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison in the s has often served as sufficient evidence for the party’s detrimental manipulation of black writers.8 There is considerable continuity in Hughes’s thinking about his art from his  manifesto, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” through the s, however. Not only does “The Negro Artist” initiate Hughes’s argument for the “interdependence of poetic form and political

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expression” (Thurston ), it also articulates the commitment to social democracy exemplified by his earlier poems in Left journals such as the Messenger and Workers Monthly. Hughes’s affirmation of the blues and jazz as exemplary forms of African American cultural expression allies his art with “the low-down folks, the so-called common element,” who “do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else” (“Negro Artist” –). These “folks,” who “furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations” (“Negro Artist” ), do not represent a primitivist fantasy of a rural black southern culture untainted by modernity but the everyday life of the black urban masses, the working people who “live on Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago” (“Negro Artist” ). The critical response to Hughes’s second collection of poems, Fine Clothes to the Jew (), which featured blues poetry in the vernacular language of such “low-down-folks,” demonstrated how controversial his literary commitment to the black masses was. More assertively than most of his Harlem Renaissance peers, Hughes defined the social commitment of the artist to the masses through the linguistic practice of his art, through making working people the subject rather than the object of his art. The Marxist claims that Hughes espoused in the s likewise dismiss bourgeois ideas of art as they assert the artist’s alliance with the proletariate. The more explicitly political “social poetry” that he wrote during the Depression is similarly derived from vernacular language and other forms of folk expression. Hughes underscores the continuity of his poetry in a  essay, “My Adventures as a Social Poet,” published in Phylon, the scholarly journal founded in  by W. E. B. Du Bois at Atlanta University, and which he subsequently quoted at length in his prepared statement for McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations.9 In this retrospective account of his public life as a writer, Hughes asserts that the subject matter of his poetry was dictated by the fact that he had been “born poor—and also colored—in Missouri” (“My Adventures” ). As a result of this representative experience of “poverty and Jim Crow,” his poetry was by necessity “social”: Some of my earliest poems were social poems in that they were about people’s problems—whole groups of people’s problems—rather than my own personal difficulties. Sometimes, though, certain of my personal problems happened to be also common to many other people. And certainly, racially speaking, my own problems of adjustment to American life were the same as those of millions of other segregated Negroes. The moon belongs to everybody,

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but not this American earth of ours. That is perhaps why poems about the moon perturb no one, but poems about color and poverty do perturb many citizens. (“My Adventures” –) Hughes’s commitment to democracy was consistent throughout his career, and his “poems about color and poverty” were disturbing because they contested the limitations of American democracy and threatened those who were invested in the institutions that sustained these limitations. They were disturbing as well because of the experimental vernacular forms by which he expressed his social criticism, as the examples of his “adventures” indicate. Among those threatened by his poetry were religious authorities such as the African American minister who prohibited him from reading his blues poetry in his church, state authorities such as the Cuban immigration officials who prohibited his landing in the country after he had translated Guillén’s poetry, anti-Communists who objected to his writings about his travels to the Soviet Union, and evangelical Christians who harassed him for years after the publication of “Goodbye, Christ.” As “My Adventures as a Social Poet” attests, Hughes challenged his American audiences to extend the democratic principles of the Constitution to blacks, and to working people more generally, who had been denied their fundamental rights as citizens. In his speech to the first American Writers’ Congress, for example, he spoke as a representative “American Negro writer” who sought to “unite blacks and whites in our country, not on the nebulous basis of an interracial meeting, or the shifting sands of religious brotherhood, but on the solid ground of the daily working-class struggle to wipe out, now and forever, all the old inequalities of the past” (“To Negro Writers” ). As militantly Marxist as this appeal to working-class struggle is, and as sarcastic as his rhetoric about “the noble Red, White and Blue” is in this speech, Hughes insists on the promise for democracy in the United States as well as internationally, “an America that will be ours, a world that will be ours” (“To Negro Writers” ). He also frequently related the plight of African Americans, especially in the Jim Crow South, to the social conditions of poor people elsewhere in the world. This was especially the case later in the s, when he spoke as a representative of “the people who have long known in actual practice the meaning of the word Fascism.” Blacks in the Jim Crow South, Hughes wrote in his speech to the second International Writers’ Congress in Paris ( July ), knew all too well the practices of “Nordic supremacy and economic suppression” that were increasingly occurring on a “world scale” (“Too Much of Race” ). “All the problems known to the Jews today in Hitler’s Germany, we who are Negroes know here in America,” Hughes

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asserted at the third American Writers’ Congress (). There was one important difference, however: “Here we may speak openly about our problems, write about them, protest, and seek to better our conditions. Jews in Germany may do none of these things. Democracy permits us the freedom of a hope, and some action towards the realization of that hope” (“Democracy and Me” ). As limited as the opportunities for black writers were at this time, and as costly as the price of protest was for Hughes himself, his insistence on the exemplary promise of democracy in the United States exemplified not only the pragmatic claims of the Popular Front but also an undying hope for social progress that sustained him through the s, even as he became increasingly subject to organized harassment and official interrogation for his past affiliations with Communism. Hughes was indeed the black writer most associated with the Left in the s, even though he never joined the CPUSA. He was, for example, the author and translator published most frequently by the New Masses in the s. He also served as president of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, which was affiliated with the Communist Party. He furthermore wrote poems on behalf of many Left causes. The best known of these are the poems collected in Scottsboro Limited (), which he published to raise funds for the Scottsboro defense. Later in the s he wrote a number of poems on behalf of the republic and the International Brigades in Spain as he covered the civil war for the Baltimore AfroAmerican. Hughes’s work also appeared in a range of publications associated with the Communist Left through the s (Smethurst –). These included the New Masses, which published the initial version of “Projection” from Montage in ; his  collection Jim Crow’s Last Stand, published by the Negro Publication Society of America; and the journal Negro Quarterly, edited by Ralph Ellison. His work also appeared in African American publications that were run or influenced by members of the Communist Party, even though they were not directly attached to the CPUSA, such as Harlem Quarterly, which published several poems from Montage in its winter – issue. His work was also featured in publications that were influenced by the Left but not directly related to the CPUSA, such as Negro Story, and more mainstream African American publications that included editors, publishers, and/or reporters and columnists who were active on the Left, such as the Chicago Defender. Contrary to the later testimony of black writers who left the party, the CPUSA supported specifically African American cultural practices, following the Black Belt Nation thesis that blacks were a nationality or national minority within the United States. This emphasis on specific African American cultural institutions and practices took place within an internationalist context that provided new audiences for black

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writers and new opportunities for collaboration (such as translation projects) among writers of color. It also promoted an anticolonialist and anticapitalist politics that linked blacks in the United States not only with Africa and the Caribbean, as was the case with the cultural nationalist movements of the s, but with people of color worldwide. As James Smethurst has written, Hughes’s poetry of the s and s was consistent with Left politics in its “urban, internationalist, and popular culture aesthetic” (), as he deployed a wide range of forms associated with commercial mass culture, such as jazz, urban blues, radio, film, Broadway musicals, popular journalism, and advertising. His poetry of this period exemplifies the new relationship of African American poetry to vernacular culture that was fostered by the Left in the s. While Hughes had experimented with urban vernacular forms throughout the s, the blending of “high” and “popular,” or “mass,” culture, with an assumed audience of the “black masses,” became much more pronounced in the poetry he wrote as he became increasingly affiliated with the radical Left. This poetry foregrounds the problem that distinguished African American poetry of the s and s more generally, the problem of representing an “authentic” folk (or popular) experience to an “authentic” folk (or popular) audience. In contrast to the powerful example of Sterling Brown’s Southern Road, which situates authentic folk expression within a rural southern black culture, Hughes’s poetry dramatizes this problem within the urban flux of recent black migrants. Throughout his work, Hughes argued for his writing’s authenticity in representing vernacular speech (and folk forms), but he also argued that his function was not just to interpret the experience of African American people to the rest of the world but to themselves as well. As Steven Tracy has emphasized in his analysis of Hughes’s blues poetry in particular, there is an inherent conflict between “poetry” and “folk poetry” in his work. Hughes saw his poems fulfilling a different function than the folk forms themselves, and thus assumed the need to distance himself from the rural folk in order to interpret them to themselves (Tracy –). In mediating the “folk” and his black (largely middleclass) audience, he sought to demonstrate the significance of folk culture for this audience. While this tension is most explicitly articulated in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” it persisted into the s. Hughes’s Simple stories, for example, evoke this relation of the African American writer to a middle-class audience and to black folk culture, with the dramatic contrast of Jesse B. Semple or “Simple” (the urban voice of the folk); Joyce (his middle-class alter ego, who represents white bourgeois values); and Boyd (the narrator, the intellectual who mediates between Jesse and Joyce). Montage likewise exemplifies

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the development of modernist forms that are rooted in both mass culture and folk expression, as bebop itself was, even as it expresses its resistance to dominant cultural values more indirectly. If Hughes’s cultural work was both national and global in its orientation and impact, it was also specifically located within the community where he had made his home, Harlem.10 Montage exemplifies the broader movement toward urban experience that was taking place in African American poetry, including such detailed representations of local community histories as Robert Hayden’s Paradise Valley (Detroit), Brooks’s Bronzeville, and Melvin Tolson’s Harlem. By the s Harlem was, of course, no longer the center of refuge and hope associated with the New Negro Renaissance. Although still a major destination for poor migrant blacks during the Great Depression, Harlem had become better known nationally as an explosive site of urban racial conflict, first in  and then in . The  riot—one of many in black urban communities across the United States that year—took place after a white policeman had shot a black soldier in a conflict involving a black woman. The socioeconomic causes for such social volatility had been well known since the publication of the  Report on the Harlem Riot: poverty, job discrimination, housing segregation, limited educational opportunity, and police insensitivity and brutality.11 Given that black unemployment in New York was one and a half to three times the rate for white New Yorkers during the Depression, the irony of fighting white supremacy in Europe during the war while facing such abusive conditions at home was too painful to ignore. Hughes’s s writing variously registers this bitter irony of continuing discrimination against blacks (at home and abroad) amid the claims of wartime nationalism. In registering this irony, however, Hughes continued to evoke the mythic status of Harlem as a black Mecca. The idea of Harlem as a black Mecca is associated most often with the early years of the Harlem Renaissance, but it is an idea that lasted through the economic despair of the Depression. Harlem was, of course, one of many northern destinations for blacks during the Great Migration. What distinguished it from other urban black communities in the North was its cosmopolitanism. By the s Harlem had become an important entertainment, publishing, and intellectual center that was known to blacks worldwide. But like New York City more generally, Harlem was also an important destination for immigrants, most of whom came from the Caribbean. Proponents of African American cultural nationalism, as well as of Pan-Africanism, underscored Harlem’s multinational dimension, often with a rhetorical appeal for cultural pluralism that paralleled European immigrant claims for what Randolph Bourne called a “trans-national

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America.”12 This rhetoric of cultural pluralism is most prominent in The New Negro anthology, which, despite its limited coverage of the Garvey movement and of radical socialist politics, is still often considered the definitive text of the Harlem Renaissance. Alain Locke’s introduction to this anthology portrays Harlem as a cosmopolitan cultural capital whose significance for “Aframerican” nationalism resembled that of the newly emergent national capitals of Europe, such as Dublin or Prague (“New Negro” –). Although not all of the contributors to The New Negro agreed with Locke’s formulation of cultural nationalism, the vision of Harlem as the international cultural center for peoples of African descent— the “home of the Negro’s ‘Zionism,’” as Locke (“New Negro” ) writes—is echoed elsewhere in the anthology. Most notably, James Weldon Johnson writes in the essay that would become the introduction to his definitive  history, Black Manhattan : “Throughout coloured America Harlem is the recognized Negro capital. Indeed, it is Mecca for the sightseer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, the adventurous, the enterprising, the ambitious, and the talented of the entire Negro world; for the lure of it has reached down to every island of the Carib Sea and penetrated even into Africa” (). Johnson’s trope of the black Mecca recurs in s histories of Harlem as well, even as these histories register the disastrous socioeconomic impact of the Depression. Much of the interest in Harlem history was generated by New Deal FWP initiatives. Among the many projects on African American history and folklore supported by the FWP were studies of the history of New York blacks and of the cultural life of Harlem in particular. Drawing from research done for the FWP, Claude McKay, who had himself immigrated to Harlem from his native Jamaica, wrote in Harlem: Negro Metropolis (): Harlem is a piece of New York. And exactly as New York is not the typical American city, similar to one in the Middle West or the Southeast, so Harlem is no black Chicago or Durham, N.C. But as the metropolis of New York attracts America and the rest of the world, so does Harlem, in a lesser sense, make its appeal to the Negroes of America and of the world. . . . Harlem is more than the Negro capital of the nation. It is the Negro capital of the world. And as New York is the most glorious experiment on earth of different races and divers groups of humanity struggling and scrambling to live together, so Harlem is the most interesting sample of black humanity marching along with white humanity. (–) Roi Ottley, also working with FWP research materials, addressed a public several years later that was much more concerned with the war in Europe than with

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the everyday struggles of black Americans. The very title of Ottley’s social history of Harlem, “New World A-Coming”: Inside Black America (), suggests a bolder stance toward civil rights, even as its implied equation of Harlem with “black America” evokes the more mythic associations of “the Negro capital of the world.” Beginning with an epigraph from Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son”— “Well, son, I’ll tell you: / Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair”—Ottley opens his book by reminding readers of Harlem’s exemplary role in progressive social movements, while reiterating the familiar theme of its cosmopolitanism: Harlem, a bite off Manhattan Island, is called the Negro capital. But it is more—it is the nerve center of advancing Black America. It is the fountainhead of mass movements. From it flows the progressive vitality of Negro life. Harlem is, as well, a cross-section of life in Black America—a little from here, there, and everywhere. It is at once the capital of clowns, cults, and cabarets, and the cultural and intellectual hub of the Negro world. By turns Harlem is provincial, worldly, cosmopolitan, and naïve—sometimes cynical. From here, though, the Negro looks upon the world with audacious eyes. () Describing Harlem’s multicultural “worldliness” later in his book, Ottley concludes: “[O]ne might say, the Black Metropolis is more heterogeneous than any one section in the United States” (). Ottley, however, even more than McKay, draws attention to the alarming contrast of wealth and poverty that characterized everyday life in the United States, New York City, and Harlem itself. He argues that despite the “slum-shock” resulting from the practices of segregation and discrimination that have defined Harlem life, blacks were united by their collective struggle for moral, economic, and political rights. “Scorched beyond normal recognition in the crucible of a segregated life,” Ottley writes, “Negros become slum-shocked. They get distorted perspectives, and become hardened or callous. War is sometimes an intangible peril that is dwarfed by the stern realities of living. Yet this great dark mass of people of unknown potentialities is loudly assertive of its aspirations” (–). Published the same year as the second outbreak of violence that literally “scorched” Harlem, “New World A-Comin” foreshadows Hughes’s expression of collective black anger several years later. But Ottley also evokes the “slum-shocked” weariness that had characterized Harlem life throughout the s. While Ottley’s and McKay’s uncompromising social histories of a Harlem still reeling from the Great Depression are less familiar than the earlier, more optimistic claims of Locke or Johnson, they speak more directly to the socioeconomic circumstances in which bebop emerged. As the now legendary narratives of the

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“bebop revolution” have insisted, the formation of a bebop counterpublic corresponded precisely with the wartime mood of black disappointment and rage that Ottley describes.13 Even such a judicious student of African American music as Ralph Ellison, himself a musician and an important influence on Hughes’s understanding of bebop, detected a “revolutionary” sound emerging in wartime Harlem.14 Recalling the atmosphere of experimentation at Minton’s Playhouse as “a continuing symposium of jazz, a summation of all the styles, personal and traditional, of jazz,” Ellison wrote that one could also hear “the first attempts toward a conscious statement of the sensibility of the younger generation of musicians as they worked out the techniques, structures, and rhythmical patterns with which to express themselves” (). In a more recent account of bebop’s “politics of style,” Eric Lott incisively relates this dissonant sensibility to its sociohistorical context: “[I]n the mid-forties, [Charlie] Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, [Bud] Powell, Thelonious Monk, and the rest were tearing it up with such speed and irreverence—sometimes so acrobatic as to feel unfinished, often world-historical—that prewar life seemed like a long, long time ago. . . . Brilliantly outside, bebop was intimately if indirectly related to the militancy of its moment. Militancy and music were undergirded by the same social facts; the music attempted to resolve at the level of style what the militancy fought out in the streets” (). Bebop was the innovative expressive form of a new generation of black jazz musicians coming to terms with the social contradictions of the war years. Like Ellison, and like Hughes before him, many of these musicians had themselves migrated to Harlem from the South and Midwest. And, like earlier expressive forms of the Harlem Renaissance, bebop’s hybrid style reflected the social heterogeneity of Harlem while registering the jarring but liberating impact of a new urban environment. Improvisation became a means for negotiating but also inventing new racial—and interracial—identities (Lott –). Yet as Lott writes, bebop was also aggressively modernist in a way that earlier forms of African American music had not been. Not only was its “relationship to earlier styles one of calculated hostility,” its social position apart from both the black middle class and any white mainstream consensus “gave aesthetic self-assertion political force and value” (Lott –). As socially disruptive as bebop appeared to both its proponents and detractors, its perceived relation to politics was complicated by the timing of its emergence. Bebop indeed evolved in early s Harlem nightclubs such as Minton’s and Clarke Monroe’s Uptown House as “part of an isolated black underground, an ‘in-group’ expression that allowed relatively undisturbed experimentation away from white eyes” (Erenberg ).15 And because it did not reach a wider public

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until immediately after the war, it appeared to emerge as a fully formed movement. Its sound was perplexing, if not threatening, to many listeners because its historical development had been obscured by the events of the war, including the recording ban from  to . Furthermore, because bebop’s emergence coincided with a revival of New Orleans jazz, its reputation as a “revolutionary” expressive form was intensified. Bebop displaced swing in debates about postwar jazz, debates defined by the familiarly oppositional terms of progressives versus traditionalists, or modernists versus “moldy figs,” as the revivalists came to be known.16 While the popular social resonance of bebop was informed by the postwar hysteria that associated it with such “un-American” behavior as sexual promiscuity, illegal drug use, and juvenile delinquency, its contested reception among jazz enthusiasts resembled, more so than it differed from, the reception of the earlier swing movement. As recent cultural historians of the “Swing Era” have emphasized, jazz had taken on a newly defined, and often fiercely contested, political significance with the emergence of jazz magazines and professional music criticism in the s. Much of the jazz criticism in these periodicals was written by Popular Front and New Deal intellectuals who celebrated the music’s African American roots and saw its potential for fostering an American culture based on social democracy, ethnic and racial pluralism, and an urban utopianism of changing sexual and cultural identities. In contrast with radicals who saw swing as a vehicle for greater equality, more conservative business forces tried to keep the music as “white” as possible to ensure the largest mass market. While the segregationist logic and discriminatory practices of the music industry set the stage for the bebop revolt, the terms for articulating the social and political significance of black music were established in debates about swing in the late s. Even bebop’s association with a subculture more invested in stylistic signs of nonconformity (such as language and dress) than in the music’s cultural legitimacy was comparable to the earlier popular press about jitterbugs. The debate about bebop’s social significance among the cognoscenti seemed so familiar that the jazz trade magazine Down Beat could write about the bop controversy that “history was repeating itself. . . . Same story, different characters” (qtd. in Gendron, “Short Stay” ). There was, however, one crucial if understated difference between the popular media attacks on bebop and the earlier criticisms of swing: the attacks on bebop were explicitly aimed at the black musicians themselves, whereas the most prominent public figures of swing, who were white, had been treated more respectfully (Stowe –). The “story” may have been the “same,” but the racial “difference” of these “characters” made the bebop controversy more politically charged.

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If the Swing Era had popularized jazz as an art form enjoyed by white as well as black consumers, bebop certainly resisted the commercial logic of this tradition. With its seemingly calculated defiance of the marketplace, with its privileging of creative autonomy in disregard of audience expectations of the popular entertainer, bebop could be characterized as an avant-garde mode of social modernism. By the later s, however, the subversive qualities of bebop had themselves become commercialized. As Scott DeVeaux writes in The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History, the idea of the jam session as the arena of “jazz in its purest state—an uncorrupted, unmediated, and uncommercial form of musical expression,” and the more mythic idea of the jam session as a sign of alienation, “the province of embattled, marginalized artists,” not only enhanced bebop’s avant-garde cache, it also heightened its commercial appeal (–). Even “the most visible signs of resistance—the subcultural wardrobe, the impenetrable lingo, the refusal to play the expected role of entertainer—defined a place for bop in the marketplace” (DeVeaux ). This growing public prominence in turn made the musicians more likely subjects of police repression. As the McCarthyist hysteria about social deviance intensified during these early years of the cold war, bebop musicians were increasingly targeted as symbolic figures of racial and generational rebellion. And as political and police authorities increasingly associated jazz with illegal drug use, jazz musicians were identified with Communists as agents of moral decay and threats to national unity. Jazz clubs were infiltrated by undercover agents, and numerous musicians were convicted of illegal drug possession, losing their New York City cabaret cards and, as a result, their livelihood.17 While bebop may have sounded militant under these repressive circumstances, it was first and foremost the product of African American professionals who were struggling to make a living. Ralph Ellison’s assessment of bebop in the early s underscores how its innovative sound had everything to do with the racial logic of the marketplace: “[T]he ‘changes’ or chord progressions and the melodic inversions worked out by the creators of bop sprang partially from their desire to create a jazz which could not be so easily imitated and exploited by white musicians to whom the market was more open simply because of their whiteness” (–). Black musicians had seen the expansion of opportunities in the Swing Era, only to experience the reemergence of patterns of segregation during the war that eroded those opportunities. DeVeaux concludes: “Bebop was a response to this impasse, an attempt to reconstitute jazz . . . in such a way as to give its black creators the greatest professional autonomy within the marketplace” (). Hughes’s Montage is a similar attempt to reconstitute jazz poetry.What was new about his representation of postwar Harlem was also what was “revolutionary”

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about bebop: critical awareness of a changing public sphere that was not only transforming the relationship between artist and audience but also between past and present. Bebop, for Hughes, evokes a tension between established public and emergent counterpublic spheres. One only has to compare Hughes’s introductory explanation of bebop in Montage to that of his Simple columns to see how racially coded bebop’s reception was. While his assessment of Harlem as “a community in transition” in Montage suggests a sociological detachment from his subject, Simple’s explanation in the Chicago Defender maps a different scenario for bebop’s emergence: “That is where Bop comes from—out of them dark days we have seen. That is why Be-bop is so mad, wild, frantic, crazy. And not to be dug unless you have seen dark days, too. That’s why folks who ain’t suffered much cannot play Bop, and do not understaind [sic] it. They think it’s nonsense— like you. They think it’s just crazy crazy. They do not know it is also MAD crazy, SAD crazy, FRANTIC WILD CRAZY—beat right out of some bloody black head! That’s what Bop is” (“Bop,” qtd. in Rampersad ). Whereas the introduction to Montage elucidates the technical devices appropriated from bebop for a general public audience that may not be totally sympathetic with Hughes’s experimental form, Simple’s explanation assumes that such “nonsense” needs no translation. His explanation assumes a black public sphere that is intimately familiar with bebop’s emergence as an expressive form, a “mad, wild, frantic, crazy” form that evokes the violent racial conflict of its time but is also rooted in the “dark days” of the blues tradition.18 Montage similarly evokes a continuity of African American performative traditions even as it foregrounds a continuity between past and present. In underscoring this continuity as well as the oppressive socioeconomic conditions that obscure its recognition, Montage recovers a cultural memory of resistance—and hope—from the “slum-shocked” despair of the Depression and war years. The opening sequence of poems in Montage, which begins a section Hughes entitled “Boogie Segue to Bop,” exemplifies how Hughes blends the confrontational, discordant “nonsense” of bebop with more established black performative traditions.19 Introducing the motif of the “dream deferred” as both an unspoken premise for black cultural expression and a direct challenge to rethink its contemporary resonance, “Dream Boogie” presents the sudden shifts in voice, tone, and mood that characterize the entire volume. It begins with a series of questions that reflect on its own process of composition: Good morning, daddy! Ain’t you heard

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The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred? Listen closely: You’ll hear their feet Beating out and beating out a— You think It’s a happy beat? () Introducing the boogie-woogie rhythm that recurs in Montage’s subsequent “boogie” poems, “Dream Boogie” stresses the disparity between the joyfulness associated with its rhythm and the seriousness of the “dream deferred” (Tracy –). By interrupting the regular rhythm with the italicized question, the poem sets up the disruptive, dialogic, interrogative pattern that generates the entire sequence. Following the example of bebop, this disruptive pattern forces us to listen more precisely to continuities and discontinuities in the sequence’s metrical “feet,” continuities and discontinuities that operate thematically as well, as the subsequent poem, “Parade,” suggests. Whereas “Dream Boogie” introduces the “dream deferred” through the abstract discourse of music, a dialogic discourse of jazz styles whose political implications are embedded within the formal transitions that the poem accentuates, “Parade” maps out these implicit racial conflicts in more straightforwardly oppositional terms of “black and white.” Following the first-person participant’s description of the parade is a more ominous trail of “Motorcycle cops, / white,” who “will speed it / out of sight / if they can” (). The presence of these “Motorcycle cops” intensifies the resolve of the parade participants: Marching . . . marching . . . marching . . . noon till night . . . I never knew that many Negroes were on earth, did you? I never knew! PARADE!

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A chance to let PARADE! the whole world see PARADE! old black me! () With the dramatic repetition of “marching,” following the earlier repetition of “on foot,” “Parade” transforms an official public celebration into a politically charged commentary on wartime race relations. “Marching . . . marching . . . marching” most obviously evokes the wartime experience of black veterans, but the presence of white policemen reminds us how this commitment to progress is by necessity a march for black civil rights as well. The deliberate procession of community leaders becomes an act of defiant pride that is not totally disconnected from the aggressively disruptive approach of “Dream Boogie,” whose closing allusions to the “nonsensical” street language of bebop seem otherwise distant from the formal ritual of the parade. The more straightforward descriptive approach of “Parade” ends on a note of affirmation that celebrates “the whole world” of blackness, including the counterpublic world of “Dream Boogie,” an affirmation of solidarity that also acknowledges internal difference within Harlem and within the speaker’s subjectivity. The third poem of Montage, “Children’s Rhymes,” reiterates the political thrust of “Parade” as it blurs the distinction between serious social criticism and bebop “nonsense.” It also accentuates the generational divide between the performative styles of “Dream Boogie” and “Parade.” “Children’s Rhymes” contrasts the observations of an adult remembering the playful rhymes of his or her childhood with the more skeptical rhymes of the new generation of children: When I was a chile we used to play, “One—two—buckle my shoe!” and things like that. But now, Lord, listen at them little varmints! By what sends the white kids I ain’t sent:

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I know I can’t be President. () The contrast of the adult’s memory of childhood innocence with the politically charged rhymes of the “varmints” is striking. While weary of the tension and violence that results from urban overcrowding—“There is two thousand children / in this block, I do believe!”—the speaker manages to retain a sense of humor even in anger: “Some of these young ones is cert’ly bad— / One batted a hard ball right through my window / and my gold fish et the glass.” What is most alarming about the children’s rhymes is their casual disdain for the promises of the “American dream.” “What’s written down / for white folks / ain’t for us a-tall,” they continue, “Liberty And Justice— /Huh—For All.” These children have internalized the bitter lessons of the “dream deferred” at an early age; yet, significantly, they have translated that bitterness into the group expression of song. As important as the divide between generations is in “Children’s Rhymes,” between the weary but comic voice of the adult and the wary but defiant song of the children, this divide is mediated by the concluding lines of the poem: “Oop-pop-a-da! / Skee! Daddle-de-do!/Be-bop.” Like the conclusion of “Dream Boogie,” the conclusion of “Children’s Rhymes”—“Salt’ peanuts//De-dop!” ()—translates the conflicted feelings and modes of expression that divide two generations of Harlemites into the “MAD crazy, SAD crazy” “nonsense” of bebop. The initial sequencing of poems in Montage suggests how its dialogic procession maps a geography of a “dream deferred” that is rooted in the long history of black struggle, but Hughes also maps a complex geography of rapidly changing Harlem cultural life. Throughout Montage, various public images of Harlem—whether utopian or dystopian, subtly nuanced or blatantly stereotypical—are contrasted with the specific voices and visions of Harlem residents. Their insiders’ perspectives form a geography of proper names (of people, places, events, and so forth) that locate memory within the heterogeneous social history of Harlem specifically and New York City more generally. The political implications of such a geography become dramatically evident in the sequence of poems that opens the second section of Montage, “Dig and Be Dug.” The series of poems beginning with “Movies” and continuing to “Neon Signs” locates the place names of popular entertainment sites within an intricate but explosive political web of violent power relations. “The Roosevelt, Renaissance, Gem, Alhambra: / Harlem laughing in all the wrong places” (), begins Hughes’s indictment of racist Hollywood stereotypes, an indictment substantiated by the divisively alienating effects of such mass cultural images in the following poem,

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“Tell Me.” The political analogue to this Hollywood version of blackness is presented in “Not a Movie,” whose geography of racist violence more familiarly contrasts Harlem as a site of African American hope to the dehumanizing treatment of black citizens below the Mason-Dixon Line (). If “Not a Movie” offers a sobering corrective to the “crocodile art” of Hollywood, the subsequent poem in this sequence, “Neon Signs,” raises more interesting questions about the social and political place of bebop in Harlem. The capitalized names of jazz clubs stand in loud contrast to the lower-cased list of Harlem movie theaters: the prominence of these names suggests not just the importance of bebop to the formal structure of Montage, it also affirms the importance of these jazz clubs to the social geography of a changing Harlem. Hughes’s straightforward but emphatic rendering of “neon signs,” with minimal exposition of what these seemingly mystical names signify, presents an insider’s counterpublic perspective of Harlem night life. This perspective affirms bebop’s emergence as the expressive form responsive to the graphic, almost mythic violence of “Not a Movie,” as well as to the less politically motivated but no less troubling violence of the local “broken glass / in the early bright” (). The social tension evoked by the “rebop/sound” () of “Neon Signs” is more specifically defined as a symptom of class struggle in the concluding sequence of poems in “Dig and Be Dug”: “Ballad of the Landlord,” “Corner Meeting,” and “Projection.” It is furthermore an ongoing struggle that links the postwar sound of bebop to the Popular Front Left of the Depression years. “Ballad of the Landlord” is more reminiscent of Hughes’s s social poetry than any other poem in Montage. It was in fact originally published in the December  issue of Opportunity and subsequently in Hughes’s Jim Crow’s Last Stand, a  pamphlet of poems published by the CPUSA Negro Publication Society of America that combined topical protest poems with “aggressively demotic” African American forms of expression (Rampersad ). The pamphlet included several poems that foregrounded the sociopolitical implications of commercializing vernacular forms, such as “Note on Commercial Theatre.” “Ballad of the Landlord” begins as a conventional folk ballad, written in the vernacular language of a Harlem tenant, as it catalogs the legitimate complaints he voices to his unresponsive landlord. When he answers the landlord’s threat to evict him with his own threat, “You ain’t gonna be able to say a word / If I land my fist on you,” the poem switches to the italicized voice of the landlord: Police! Police! Come and get this man!

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He’s trying to ruin the government And overturn the land. () This excessive response to the tenant’s anger echoes the mode of address that begins the folk ballad, “Landlord, landlord, / My roof has sprung a leak” (), but it translates the confrontation of tenant and landlord into a political threat to the national social order. The association of the property owner with the police and the government is simply presumed, as it is in the title: the tenant does not even own his own story. And the poem is hardly subtle as it ironically contrasts the legitimate complaints of the tenant that begin the poem with the harsh penalty he pays for threatening the landlord: arrest, incarceration, and a ninetyday prison sentence. Corresponding with the poem’s exposure of social injustice is the breakdown of the ballad form. The mellifluous rhythm of the tenant’s voice is obliterated by the rapid-fire execution of (in)justice: “Copper’s whistle! / Patrol bell! / Arrest.” Following this staccato expression of the tenant’s bout with the police is the concluding newspaper headline, which reduces the poem to the generic formula of “MAN THREATENS LANDLORD” (), erasing the distinctive voice of the tenant in the process. The routine frustration and outrage evoked by “Ballad of the Landlord,” which combines the traditionally rural African American form of the folk ballad with the more dissonant urban sound of the tenant’s encounter with the law, is answered quite differently in the two poems that follow. As powerless as the voice of the individual tenant seems in “Ballad of the Landlord,” the brief poem “Corner Meeting” evokes a contrasting scene of persuasion, as it celebrates the collective power of public political agitation. Rather than contrasting the traditional with the modern, this poem underscores the continuity of public speech even as the means of persuasion become more technologically advanced: “Ladder, flag, and amplifier: / what the soap box / used to be.” More important than the means of persuasion is the call-and-response interaction of the speaker and his listeners. The speaker “catches fire / looking at their faces,” while his words “jump down to stand / in listeners’ places” (). “Projection” paints an entirely different picture of potential collective unity from “Corner Meeting,” however. The vision of temporary collective unity effected by the call-and-response scenario of “Corner Meeting” is followed by a wildly comic jazz vision of a Harlem divided as much by allegiances to popular cultural styles as to religious institutions. “Projection” was first published in the New Masses () as “Projection of a Day.” This first version of the poem ended with a reference to “My Simple Minded Friend,” Simple (or Jesse B. Semple), the hero of Hughes’s column in

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the Chicago Defender. This was the only instance when Hughes referred to Simple in his poetry (Rampersad, notes to Hughes, Collected Poems ). While this reference was omitted from the version of the poem he published in Montage, the intertextual allusion suggests how Hughes was attempting to link the publics for his writing in the s. “Projection” posits the possibility of “Peace” and harmony only after the marriage of such unlikely partners as the “Savoy” and the “Renaissance,” the “Abyssinia Baptist Church” and “St. James Presbyterian,” “ Edgecombe” and “ West rd.” Only when such divides are bridged will “Manhattan Island . . . whirl / like a Dizzy Gillespie transcription / played by Inez and Timme” ().20 This surreal vision of a bebop paradise is of course the poet’s “projection” of a more peaceful postwar Harlem. Like the sequence of poems that begins “Dig and Be Dug,” from “Movies” to “Neon Signs,” it presents an insider’s geography of Harlem culture that is as wryly appreciative of its social heterogeneity as it is wary of its explosive divisions. Bebop is invoked in the more ominous atmosphere of “Early Bright” that follows “Dig and Be Dug.” From the (mock-)utopian jazz vision of “Projection,” we are introduced to the more familiar subcultural image of bebop in “Flatted Fifths”: “Little cullud boys with beards / re-bop be-bop mop and stop.” These initial “flatted fifths” signify an “Early Bright” scenario where distinctions between public and private are obscured, blurred by a police culture of surveillance suspicious of all forms of racially and sexually coded social transgression. Even the “be-bop boys” are not as self-assured as they appear: they are instead “little cullud boys with fears / frantic,” who “kick their draftee years / into flatted fifths and flatter beers.” If the music can momentarily transform these flat beers into “sparkling Oriental wines / rich and strange / silken bathrobes with gold twines” (), even such imagery of exotic luxury is subject to the paranoid fantasy of an official culture suspicious of any signs of nonconformity. In this repressive logic of officially defined difference, young black musicians, interracial couples, illegal drug users, and homosexual men and women occupy a threatening social space made common simply by the shared experience of official repression. While this implied alliance of social outcasts suggests the latent idealism of the multiracial Popular Front, the emphasis on gendered, sexual oppression also adumbrates the new social movements that in the early years of the cold war were still counterpublic spheres of “underground” activity. While bebop figures as the soundtrack for the atmosphere of imminent violence in “Early Bright,” the social logic of oppression in Montage is multivalent and unpredictable. The economic basis of class oppression is dramatized by “Tomorrow,” which echoes the desire for revolutionary socioeconomic change

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suggested by earlier poems like “Ballad of the Landlord.” It evokes this recurring desire in a seemingly mundane moment of frustration, however, frustration provoked by inflated postwar cigarette prices: Tomorrow may be a thousand years off: TWO DIMES AND A NICKEL ONLY says this particular cigarette machine. Others take a quarter straight. Some dawns wait. () While this momentary craving for nicotine suggests how the impact of a “dream deferred” is experienced physiologically, the heavily accented concluding rhyme of “straight” and “wait” suggests how multivalent the repressive apparatus denying the dream can be. The presumably thwarted desire for cigarettes is figured symptomatically within a discriminatory moneyed economy in need of radical change. The vision of this long-awaited “tomorrow,” however, can hardly obscure the social implications of “straight,” whether applied to musical performance, drug use, or other normative definitions of behavior. The poem that immediately follows “Tomorrow,” ironically entitled “Mellow,” situates the jarring emphasis on “straight” and “wait ” within the everthreatening logic of racial segregation that polices sexuality. There is nothing subtle in this poem about the social prohibitions that attract “white girls” to “black celebrities.” The appeal of such transgressive relationships is precisely the threatening atmosphere in which they occur, the “high tension wall / wired for killing,” which “makes it / more thrilling” (). The alluring danger of social nonconformity is reiterated in the different context of “Gauge,” a simple catalog of “underworld” terms for marijuana that makes us rethink the implications of its title. Does “gauge” signify a form or instrument of measurement, or does it signify more specifically the size of a shotgun? Given the illegality of marijuana use, and given its association with blacks by the law enforcement establishment, especially the black musicians Montage celebrates, the connection of measurement—of official forms of control—to the threat of violence is inescapable. It

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suggests the internalized structure of social discipline that bebop both ironically echoes and transgresses. This realm of internalized restraint and potential repressive violence is evoked more sinisterly, and more specifically, in the homophobic scene of the subsequent “Café:  ..” This poem locates us initially within the social logic of an officially sanctioned atmosphere of surveillance: “Detectives from the vice squad/with weary sadistic eyes/spotting fairies.” If such “degenerates,” as “some folks say,” are perceived as a threat to the social order, a threat analogous to Communists in the hysterical logic of McCarthyism, the conclusion of the poem situates us in an indeterminate position, neither comfortably within nor outside this logic: “Police lady or Lesbian / over there? / Where ?” (). The concluding questions, whose speaker is not identified, heighten the poem’s anxiety about gendered categories rather than relieving any tension about who is a “fairy” or a “Lesbian.” This subversion of sexual identification not only mocks and provides an antidote to McCarthyist homophobia, it opens the possibility for alliances between the figures of “Early Bright” who defy the pressure to play it “straight.”21 It seems like quite some distance from the “be-bop boys” of “Jam Session,” “Be-Bop Boys,” and “Tag,” the sequence of poems that concludes “Early Bright,” to the introspective musings of the poem that follows, “Theme for English B.” Yet the transition from the violent beat of “Early Bright” to the quieter rhythms of the subsequent section, “Vice Versa to Bach,” exemplifies the remarkable tonal range of Montage, which not only conveys the social complexity of a Harlem divided by generational, class, and cultural conflicts but also the contradictory ways this complexity is perceived by different audiences. “Theme for English B” represents one student’s subjective response to life in Harlem; however, the socially constructed process of identity formation that it dramatizes corresponds with the polyphonic “community in transition” that emerges more fully in the remaining pages of Montage. And as the subsequent poems about interracial relations elaborate, the questions raised by the speaker of the poem are hardly confined to the classroom “theme.” They are questions about the possibility for meaningful interracial dialogue and, by extension, for interracial political alliances, not only in Harlem but nationwide. “Theme for English B” was initially published in Common Ground, which was founded by Louis Adamic and M. Margaret Anderson in  to explore “through a diversity of literary forms . . . from various angles, the racial-cultural situation and its problems which—perhaps especially acute at this time—have developed in the U.S.” (“Editorial Aside” ). The journal’s primary goal was to foster a multiethnic democratic culture in the United States. It sought not only to “overcome intolerance and discrimination because of foreign birth or descent,

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race or nationality” but also to “further an appreciation of what each group has contributed to America . . . to encourage the growth of an American culture which will be truly representative of all the elements that make up the American people” (Adamic ). While this journal was sponsored by a New Deal liberal organization, the Common Council for American Unity, it employed many prominent Popular Front intellectuals and published numerous “minority” writers, particularly younger writers who have since become well known.22 It furthermore became increasingly committed to addressing issues of racial injustice under the leadership of the writer, lawyer, and labor activist Carey McWilliams, whose scholarship on migrant workers in California focused on racial divisions between white Americans and people of color more than the work of Adamic, which had concentrated primarily on European immigrant groups (Denning –). Hughes’s first publication in Common Ground, “Evenin Air Blues,” appeared in a  issue that featured a series of articles on the United States and Latin America, including a long excerpt from McWilliams’s book on Mexican migrant workers, Shadows on the Land. A year later Hughes’s “Merry-Go-Round” would appear with Roi Ottley’s essay “A White Folks’ War?” and numerous essays on the impact of the war, including reflections by Japanese Americans on the significance of Pearl Harbor (). Among the Hughes poems that were published in subsequent issues were several of his celebrated “Madame Poems” and a number of topical poems, from “Beaumont to Detroit: ” () to “Ballad of the Seven Songs: A Poem for Emancipation Day” (). “Theme for English B” was published in the final issue of Common Ground () with a drawing by Jacob Lawrence. Even in the liberal environment of Common Ground, Hughes, who was named to the journal’s editorial board the same year that he started his Simple columns for the Chicago Defender (), was considered too confrontational by some readers of his essays on racial discrimination (Rampersad –). His articles “What Shall We Do about the South?” () and “White Folks Do the Funniest Things” () attracted more attention from readers than any other articles published in the journal. “What Shall We Do about the South?” was published in the first of a special series of articles entitled “Democracy Begins at Home.” Hughes’s essay was the first of several pieces about southern racial segregation and discrimination in the winter  issue. It was Hughes’s subsequent more satirical essay on segregation that riled the most readers, however, so much so that Anderson was compelled to respond in a “Letter to the Reader” (). The complaints were familiar but disturbing. “Deeply as I am interested in seeing the needs of the Negroes among us well served, I regret to see COMMON GROUND

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becoming predominantly devoted to discussion of Negro needs,” wrote one reader (M. Margaret Anderson ). Another wrote that “the impression of each number is that there is little good in the country, nothing, in fact, but a dream which has never been fulfilled. . . . If you are talking about common ground, I should think a little would belong to the majority.” Other letters were pointed more directly—and offensively—at Hughes. A reader from North Carolina wrote: “Hughes is purposely offensive and his counsel of truculence could be followed only to the disadvantage of all concerned, and especially of the negroes [sic] who attempted the experiment. One smart-aleck negro can do more harm to the negro cause in a community than an entire company of night riders” (M. Margaret Anderson ). So much for common ground! In defense of the journal, Anderson eloquently articulated the argument that “democracy begins at home,” stressing the urgency of setting an example to those abroad who were quick to point out the limitations of American democracy, from the internment of Japanese Americans, to the wage discrimination against Mexican migrant workers, to the ongoing practices of discrimination and segregation that Hughes addressed, in the military as well as in the South. The question of audience that troubles the “only colored student” in the class of “Theme for English B” is thus not altogether different from those questions that occupied Hughes throughout the s and throughout Montage. Who is his audience in this era of incipient anti-Communist hysteria? What can he presume about an audience, however liberal or even progressive, that is not predominantly black? What is the appropriate discourse for an audience whose power he distrusts but must nonetheless respect? And what is the relation of one’s subjective vision to a public sphere in which every word can be (mis)judged? The answer to these questions emerges in the brilliantly disjointed rendition of Harlem’s similarly contradictory position within New York City: It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you: hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page. (I hear New York, too.) Me—who? (–) While the “writer” of this “theme” cannot fully identify himself with the intellectual worldview of his instructor, the formal discourse of this composition distances him from Harlem as well, a Harlem that is itself figured outside but within hearing distance of New York. The poem establishes a “common ground” between student and instructor in the music of “Bessie, bop, or Bach,” but its subtle

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conclusion underscores how the interdependency of “we two” is hardly based on social equality: Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me. Nor do I often want to be a part of you. But we are, that’s true! As I learn from you, I guess you learn from me— although you’re older—and white— and somewhat more free. () As “composed” as the speaker is in qualifying his assessment of his white teacher’s authority, the accentuation of “I guess” and “somewhat more free” is too ironic to ignore. The writer’s page is “part of you” by necessity, that is, if he wants to succeed within a context of “white” authority. If the poem affirms the possibility for mutual recognition of a multiracial “American” public, its ironic closure underscores the restraints that at once limit and necessitate a black counterpublic discourse. The montage of a subjectivity “in transition” in “Theme for English B,” a subjectivity composed more pragmatically by the immediate demands of its rhetorical situation than by a securely fixed notion of a Harlem “identity,” finds its correlative in the dialogic “dream” play that makes up the remainder of Montage. Such “dreams” include the utopian, if sometimes nostalgic, proletarian vision of interracial and intercultural cooperation, from the “mingled/black and white” of “Subway Rush Hour” (), to the African American and African Caribbean solidarity of “Brothers,” to the experience of racial hatred shared by blacks and Jews in “Likewise.” But if the poet sometimes thinks that Harlem Jews also “must have heard / the music of a / dream deferred” (), this music is an African American music whose syncopated rhythms remind us that this “dream” is “colored” black and blue. The poems of black religious expression as well as the bebop and boogie poems identify this dream with African American cultural forms most explicitly; however, even poems that express the “American dream” in otherwise bourgeois terms map a geography of desire that locates Harlem as a central site of African American culture. This can be seen in “Deferred,” the montage of Harlem voices that represents the collective aspirations of a “community in transition” analogous to the subjective vision of “Theme for English B.” “Deferred,” which follows the most expansive protest poem in the first edition of Montage, “Freedom Train,” begins with a humble desire for education that echoes “Theme”: “This year, maybe, do you think I can graduate? . . . To get

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through high at twenty’s kind of late— / But maybe this year I can graduate” (). Following this are similarly humble desires: a stove, a new suit, a bottle of gin, a television set, or a radio. Such material desires are counterposed with dreams of marital happiness, heavenly reward, and career success, even dreams to “take up French” or “take up Bach” (–). These dreams represent the range of social class aspirations that divide the Harlem of Montage, but they coalesce within the volume’s signature sound of frustration: Montage of a dream Deferred. Buddy, have you heard? () While the conclusion of Montage looks forward to an uncertain future for Harlem—“What happens to a dream deferred?” ()—the final sequence of poems powerfully reiterates this thematic motif within a postwar Harlem geography of unresolved conflicts. This geography is marked by generational difference but also by the social differences of an ever-changing immigrant and migrant population. The poem entitled “Good Morning,” however, emphasizes that the differences in culture and language that divide people of color arriving in New York are less important than the common barriers they face. Written in the voice of a lifelong resident of Harlem who had witnessed the arrival of migrants from “Georgia Florida Louisiana” and immigrants from “Puerto Rico . . . Cuba Haiti Jamaica,” who had “watched Harlem grow . . . from river to river” into a “dusky sash across Manhattan” (–), “Good Morning” concludes with a sober yet provocative rendering of the poem’s refrain: I’ve seen them come dark wondering wide-eyed dreaming out of Penn Station— but the trains are late. The gates open— Yet there’re bars at each gate. What happens to a dream deferred? Daddy, ain’t you heard? ()

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By returning to the mode of address that begins Montage, “Good Morning” reaffirms the counterpublic potential of African American music, especially bebop. The dramatic repetition of “ain’t you heard,” however, accentuates the reader’s position, and the necessity to respond, more urgently than ever. The testimonial voice of “Good Morning” speaks for as it speaks to the poem’s montage of Harlem “dreams deferred.” A geography of desire, a geography of disappointment, a geography of militant rage, a geography of “dark” meditation, Hughes’s Harlem extends beyond the city’s physical boundaries defined in the concluding poem of Montage: “Between two rivers / North of the park” (). Hughes’s “dream within a dream” foregrounds the role of critical memory not only for reclaiming a past but for translating the “nonsense” of emergent counterpublic expressive forms into a language of utopian possibility.

5. A Reportage and Redemption The Poetics of African American Countermemory in Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca From the Chicago Loop, where sunlight off the lakefront strikes the shining towers, State Street runs straight south, wide, busy with streetcars and heavy trucks. Quickly the buildings get shabby—little stores selling auto parts, a junkyard crammed with rusting wreckage. The city is harsh: concrete streets, brick building walls, black steel viaducts. Beyond nd Street the faces of the people are black. This is the South Side Negro section. Here the street is quieter, the sun is hazy and dirty and pale.   , “The Strangest Place in Chicago”

Only months before the publication of Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred, Harper’s magazine published a lengthy article by John Bartlow Martin on “one of the most remarkable Negro slum exhibits in the world” (), the Mecca Building on Chicago’s South Side. The narrative journey that begins this article, from the shining towers of the Chicago Loop to the shabby tenements of the South Side, where even the sun is dirty, follows what would become a familiar rhetorical path for describing deteriorating urban neighborhoods, the racialized discourse of urban decline. Perhaps no other building symbolized post–World War II urban decline more starkly than the Mecca Building. Built by the D. H. Burnham Company in , the Mecca was at first celebrated as a boldly innovative architectural prototype for luxury apartment living. With its atrium courtyards, its skylights and ornamental iron grillwork, its elaborate fountains and flower gardens, it was a major tourist attraction during the Columbian Exposition. Beginning with the movement of Chicago’s wealthy to the North Side at the turn of the century, however, and culminating with the economic devastation wrought by the Great Depression, it gradually became an overcrowded tenement. By  the Mecca Building had become notorious not because of its architectural magnificence, but because of the poverty of its remaining inhabitants.1 It was demolished shortly afterward so that its final owner, 128

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the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), could expand its new campus, designed by the renowned modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Before the Mecca Building was obliterated, it had become the subject of national media attention as a monument to the problem of urban decline, which was increasingly becoming identified with black communities. It subsequently became the subject of one of the most important books associated with the Black Arts movement, Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca. Brooks’s collection of poems, which begins with an epigraph from Martin’s “The Strangest Place in Chicago” but contests its racial rhetoric of decline, consists of two sections: a long narrative title poem, which was planned and drafted in the s but not completed until , and a second section of more topical poems, “After Mecca,” written in the midst of the – Chicago Freedom movement. Dedicated to “the memory of Langston Hughes; and to James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Mike Alexandroff, educators extraordinaire,” this volume is exceptionally important in Brooks’s political transformation as a writer, as it registers her growing commitment to an increasingly activist, cultural nationalist position in the Chicago black community. This stance is most evident in “After Mecca,” which includes such uncompromising poems on African American urban life as “Boy Breaking Glass,” who “has not Congress, lobster, love, luau, / the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty” (), and “The Blackstone Rangers,” whose “country is a Nation on no map” ().2 “After Mecca” also includes poems celebrating African American cultural heroism, such as “Medgar Evers,” “Malcolm X,” and “The Wall,” written for and read at the dedication of the Wall of Respect, a South Side public mural commemorating African American history that became a prototype for the burgeoning community mural movement. The title poem of In the Mecca likewise appeals to the mood of urban crisis experienced most acutely by inner-city blacks in the late s but evoked as well by critics of modernist urban planning.3 Rather than presenting a presumably disinterested “statistical report” on urban poverty, Brooks wrote that she was interested in writing about the Mecca with “a certain detachment, but only as a means of reaching substance with some incisiveness.” She aimed in her long poem to “present a large variety of personalities against a mosaic of daily affairs, recognizing that even the grimmest of these is likely to have a streak or two streaks of sun” (Report ). “In the Mecca” reconstructs the vanished world of the Mecca in a dialogic narrative of countermemory that disrupts more official accounts of the building’s history. Brooks’s representation of the Mecca resembles neither the utopian space its designers had envisioned nor the dystopian place it became in the national news media before its demise. Instead, Brooks’s long poem, like In the Mecca as

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a whole, interrogates the dystopian discourse of urban decline so often invoked to characterize postwar African American life. A palimpsest of perspectives that superimposes the language of s radical black nationalism on the Mecca’s “mosaic of daily affairs” that Brooks had first witnessed in the s, Brooks’s reconstruction of the Mecca from its postwar ruins is an “incisive” intervention into the construction of African American cultural memory. This chapter situates the problem of cultural memory within the broader question of Brooks’s evolving literary public as she composed In the Mecca. Brooks’s reconceptualization of her public in the late s was profound, as her work as a writer, teacher, and activist increasingly supported the formation of a black nationalist counterpublic. Like Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred, however, In the Mecca registers her engagement with multiple publics. Her work in the s exemplified what Nancy Fraser has identified with subaltern counterpublics: the significance of “interpublic relations,” of the “interactions among different publics” (“Rethinking” ). According to Fraser, “Subaltern counterpublics have a dual character. On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics. It is precisely in the dialectic between these two functions that their emancipatory potential resides” (“Rethinking” ). While such militaristic language might not suit Brooks, her negotiation of multiple publics in the late s was clearly responsive to this dialectic. She continued to play an important civic role in the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois—she was honored as the Illinois poet laureate, succeeding Carl Sandburg, the same year that In the Mecca was published—but her relation to her more “official” roles was provisional if not ironic. Such creative tension between black counterpublics and the “wider publics” was not new to her writing, though; it can be traced to her earliest years as a writer, with her affiliation with the Popular Front literary Left in Chicago. In the Mecca revisits the cultural politics of the Popular Front as it asserts a black nationalist counterpublic. The problem of “interpublic relations” is most pronounced in the long title poem and the two poems that directly address Brooks’s different publics, “The Chicago Picasso” and “The Wall.” As I suggest through my specific attention to these poems, In the Mecca addresses the conflicted black public sphere of the late s through its dramatic representation of contested urban space. In foregrounding the specific but representative African American history of Chicago’s South Side, Brooks insists on the political importance of cultural memory in the formation of a progressive black counterpublic. In the Mecca is usually identified as the book that enacts Brooks’s literary

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“conversion” to the Black Aesthetic in the late s.4 While In the Mecca was generally well received and even nominated for the National Book Award, its direct affirmation of black nationalist cultural politics divided her audience. As Haki Madhubuti has commented, In the Mecca “‘blacked’ its way out of the National Book Award” (introduction to Brooks, Report ). It was also the last book that Brooks would publish with Harper and Row before committing herself politically and financially to publishing with African American small presses, such as Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press and Madhubuti’s Third World Press. Although In the Mecca is responsive to the revolutionary ethos of the Black Arts movement, the historical consciousness of Brooks’s title poem is informed by her experience of the Depression years, when she began her career as a writer and experienced everyday life in the Mecca firsthand. The Depression represented an important turning point in African American cultural discourse about the city as well as a turning point in national consciousness of urban poverty and decline. As the Depression devastated African American urban communities, the utopian vision of the city as a promised land for migrants was displaced by a dystopian vision: impoverished, deteriorating black urban communities became increasingly identified with the African American “dream deferred.”5 In the Mecca underscores the continuity of this dystopian consciousness that emerges in the Depression, so powerfully evoked in Richard Wright’s Native Son, with the dystopian vision of urban deterioration that motivated the Black Arts movement a generation later. In presenting a dialogic counternarrative to the dominant—and often dehumanizing—discourse of urban decline, Brooks underscores the continuities, as well as the discontinuities, between the utopian vision of the progressive Left in the s and that of the revolutionary black nationalism of the s. Brooks is often portrayed as a poet whose early writing is either apolitical or far removed from the Popular Front Left in its social concerns. Her sociopolitical development as a writer is, however, crucial for understanding the politics of memory that informs In the Mecca.6 Brooks published her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, in . She was already an accomplished writer, though, when she graduated from the then new two-year Chicago city college, Warren Wilson College, in . By the time of her graduation, she had published her writing regularly in the Chicago Defender since , and Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson had commented favorably on her poetry. Given such affirmation of her writing and her additional experience in newspaper reporting, she was cautiously optimistic about her job prospects after she completed college, even though the unemployment rate in Chicago, especially among African Americans,

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was still daunting.7 Like so many of her contemporaries during the Depression, particularly on the severely depressed South Side of Chicago where she lived, Brooks found it difficult to secure a job that would suit her ability as a writer. As she sought work as a reporter, she had to settle for a series of short-term jobs that were unsatisfying and often demeaning. Among these jobs was one that would haunt her for many years to come. After inquiring about a job with the Illinois State Employment Service, she was sent to work as a sales assistant to a “spiritual adviser” who sold patent medicines door to door in a South Side apartment building that had seen better times, the massive, deteriorating Mecca Building on Dearborn and State streets. Brooks’s employer, E. N. French, “had a fantastic practice; lucrative,” she wrote. “He had us bottling medicine as well as answering letters. Not real medicine, but love charms and stuff like that he called it, and delivered it through the building; that was my introduction to the Mecca building” (Interview ). While Brooks’s employment in the Mecca Building lasted only four months—she was fired when she refused a promotion to assistant minister (Kent )—the experience left a lasting impact on her. As she later recollected, “In the Mecca were murders, loves, lonelinesses, hates, jealousies. Hope occurred, and charity, sainthood, glory, shame, despair, fear, altruism.” For many years afterward she sought the appropriate form to convey this compelling range of everyday dramas that she had experienced at the Mecca. “To touch every note in the life of this block-long block-wide building,” she wrote, “would be to capsulize the gist of black humanity in general” (Report ). She initially planned to write a novel about the Mecca, shortly after the publication of her novella Maud Martha () and not long after the building itself had been razed. After numerous subsequent drafts of her Mecca narrative, first in prose and then in poetry, were rejected by her publisher, Harper and Row, she finally published the long poem “In the Mecca” in her celebrated but controversial  book of the same name.8 Given Brooks’s increasing public presence as an advocate for African American self-determination in the late s, and given her own statements on the political transformation of her poetics at the time, In the Mecca seems less like a reflection on her s youth than an anticipation of the activist poetics that Brooks sustained (and that sustained her) for the rest of her life. The divide between the Popular Front era of Brooks’s formation as a socially conscious writer and the Black Power era of In the Mecca seems vast, even though the composition of her Mecca narrative encompasses this time period. Any continuity between the Brooks who began publishing her poetry in the s and the Brooks who became identified with the Black Arts movement is obscured by the still resonant

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narrative trajectory of her career that emerged in black nationalist criticism after the publication of In the Mecca. This trajectory presumes a progressive development from the assimilationist modernist poetics of her early books to the revolutionary vernacular poetics of black nationalism after . Although versions of this trajectory oversimplify the social and political consciousness that informs Brooks’s early books, it certainly accounts for her reconceptualization of the public for her poetry in the late s. The first African American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize (in ), Brooks received national and international acclaim early in her career for her formally complex portrayals of African American urban life. Her subtle rendering of the subjective consciousness of African American women in her early books, A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen, and Maud Martha, has appealed especially to black and feminist reading publics. While her poetry went on to address civil rights issues that were nationally recognized during the s and early s, her reputation as a political poet did not fully emerge until the late s. This political transformation is usually attributed to her encounter with the younger radical writers (particularly Amiri Baraka) she met at the  Second Annual Writers’ Conference at Fisk University, after which she dedicated herself to a more direct, vernacular expression of collective black experience. The  Fisk conference took place in the historic Jubilee Hall and was dedicated to the topic of “the black writer and human rights.” The writers who presented included historians Lerone Bennett and John Henrik Clarke, novelists Ronald Fair and John O. Killens, playwrights LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Ronald Miller, and poets Margaret Danner and Brooks. Brooks was both energized and challenged by the younger radical writers and their audience at Fisk. As she wrote in Report from Part One, she had “never been, before, in the general presence of such insouciance, such live firmness, such confident vigor, such determination to mold or carve something DEFINITE” (). She cites especially the dynamic presence of Baraka, who arrived as she was concluding her reading. When she called attention to his arrival, “there was jubilee in Jubilee Hall.” While Baraka’s presence at Fisk had a well-known impact on Brooks’s subsequent dedication to a more politicized public art, her reading was preceded by another event that has received less attention. The poet who read before Brooks was “another Old Girl, another coldly Respected old Has-been” (Report ), her longtime friend and contemporary Margaret Danner. Danner was introduced by a young male student who, as George Kent reports, described “the glories of poetry in the black man’s struggle during the Harlem Renaissance in literature, its decline from glory, and the need for it now to align with the black man’s

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struggle” (). Danner was not about to let this historical slight of her own generation, not to mention the accomplishment of women poets, go unanswered. She reproached the student for “not reading the poems that we have struggled so many years to bring to our public. . . . All that you have to do is read the poetry,” she concluded, reminding him and her audience of the historical impact of African American poetry since the Harlem Renaissance (qtd. in Kent ). Brooks followed Danner’s reading with an introductory statement that expressed wholehearted support for her. She then proceeded to read selections from her newest poems, “Malcolm X” and “Boy Breaking Glass,” followed by selections from poems that illustrated Danner’s claims, early poems from A Street in Bronzeville such as “kitchenette building,” “the mother,” and “Negro Hero” (Kent ).9 Brooks and Danner were part of a literary generation that was galvanized by the socioeconomic crisis of the Depression. As Margaret Walker wrote in a  review essay for Phylon about younger writers of the s and s, the period in which Brooks began to publish her poetry was one of opportunity as well as social protest for African American writers: Summing up the period, generally speaking, we can see that the New Negro came of age during the Thirties. He grew away from the status of the exotic, the accidentally unusual Negro, the talented tenth of what the white audience chose to consider an otherwise mentally infantile minority group whose masses were illiterate, disenfranchised, exploited, and oppressed. Negroes became members of a new school of writers who were no longer isolated because of color, who were integrated around the beliefs that created the New Deal. They were the poets of social protest who began to catch a glimmer of a global perspective, who as spokesmen for their race did not beg the question of their humanity, and who cried out to other peoples over the earth to recognize race prejudice that is as dangerous as the atomic bomb in the threat to annihilation of culture and peace in the western world. (“New Poets” –) Nowhere was this dual sense of racial pride and interracial activism more pronounced than in Chicago, where Walker herself resided in the s, first as a student at Northwestern University and later as a writer employed by the FWP. While Walker emphasizes the impact of the New Deal on African American writers, the impact of the literary Left was equally if not more important. As scholars such as Bill Maxwell, Bill Mullen, Lorenzo Thomas, and James Smethurst have variously demonstrated, the interaction of black nationalism with international socialism, and particularly communism, has had a complex if largely

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unappreciated impact on African American poetry. Chicago was an important center of radical African American activism and affiliation with the Communist Left, especially during the Popular Front period. The  National Negro Congress in Chicago was particularly important in developing a broad coalition of black and white radicals who were united in their opposition to racism. The first meeting of this congress attracted about five thousand people, who represented liberal, Communist, and other radical organizations from all over the country. Its broad purpose was to protest demeaning mass cultural images of blacks as well as to advance African American culture and culture workers. It also organized for specific political goals such as African American access to jobs at decent wages and the right to join trade unions, aid to African American farmers, relief for needy families, the right to education and jobs for young people, equal rights for women, and opposition to war and fascism. As Bill Mullen has written, the Chicago Renaissance is inseparable from this milieu of radical interracial activism that the National Negro Congress represented. The movement is best defined, he writes, as “the fruit of an extraordinary rapprochement between AfricanAmerican and white members of the U.S. Left around debate and struggle for a new ‘American Negro’ culture” (Mullen ). Among the cultural organizations that emerged from the National Negro Congress was the South Side Writers’ Group, organized by Richard Wright. The group consisted of writers who were Brooks’s most prominent mentors and peers, including Walker, the poet Frank Marshall Davis, the playwright Ted Ward, and the poet and critic Edward Bland. While Brooks was not part of the South Side Writers’ Group and did not meet Wright until the mid-s, when he served as a reader and advocate for the Harper and Row publication of A Street in Bronzeville, her literary and social consciousness was shaped by her affiliation with the cultural Left on the South Side. Brooks was a member of the League of American Writers whose early work appeared in publications associated with the Left, such as the Defender, Negro Story, and the Cross Section anthologies edited by Edwin Seaver, one of the founders of the New Masses. More important to her formation as a writer was her literary and intellectual community: the progressive African American community of artists and intellectuals associated with the South Side Community Center. The Art Center was a nationally recognized site for the development of African American visual arts in the s and s and an important center of community activism as well.10 Brooks took part in a poetry workshop at the Community Center taught by Inez Cunningham Stark, a progressive proponent of modernism who had been a reader for Poetry, that transformed her understanding of modernist poetics. This class

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included Brooks’s future husband, Henry Blakely, and some of her closest literary friends, such as Danner and Margaret Burroughs, who had previously been associated with her in the Chicago National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Youth Council. Brooks also took part in the  Interracial South Side Cultural Conference that was cosponsored by the Community Center and the Communist-influenced Abraham Lincoln Center. While Brooks is infrequently identified with the Popular Front, her own testimony, as well as her education as a writer, underscores the significance of her affiliation with the cultural Left in her development as a writer.11 As important as the interaction of African American cultural politics with the interracial Popular Front was to the Chicago Renaissance, and to Brooks’s development in particular, the historical distance between the prewar years and the years in which she composed In the Mecca is also significant. Not only was the radical social milieu of the Chicago Renaissance decimated by cold war anticommunism, but the city itself changed dramatically as new waves of African American migrants from the South sought work and housing there. The literary portrait of Chicago that emerges in the s is indeed bleak, as African American writers tended to document the destructive impact of the Depression on their city in bluntly naturalistic terms; however, this dystopian vision of the “dream deferred” was countered by a utopian dream of revolutionary social change that would arise from the wreckage of urban black communities. The utopian vision that motivated African American and interracial progressivism proved to be shortlived, though, as it could not withstand the McCarthyist assault on the Left. Cold war anticommunism destroyed progressive alliances between African American middle-class institutions and more radical cultural and political organizations, particularly those affiliated with the Communist Party. Many African American radicals left the South Side, and numerous Marxist writers and artists left Chicago, either temporarily or permanently, during the late s and early s.12 The figure who most famously embodies the aspirations and disappointments of the African American literary Left in Chicago, Richard Wright, left the country altogether, moving to Paris in exile. The anti-Communist assault on African American cultural institutions in Chicago was extraordinarily disruptive, but the demographic changes brought on by the second Great Migration provided another set of challenges to the South Side and to the city more generally. Chicago continued to attract African American migrants even when jobs were not plentiful. As one migrant from Mississippi characterized the city’s legendary appeal, wherever “one stopped on the way . . . the mecca was Chicago” (qtd. in Grossman ). By the s Chicago’s

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black population was growing dramatically. According to Nicholas Lemann, “During the s, the black population of Chicago increased by  per cent, from , to ,. In the s, it grew by another  per cent, to ,; at one point , black people were moving to Chicago every week” (). Most of these migrants were poor and uneducated, and many had been displaced from agricultural labor in the South (with the increasing use of the mechanical cotton picker) and had no choice but to seek employment elsewhere. Chicago offered the hope of jobs and education, but it hardly offered the reality of equal opportunity to jobs, education, and especially housing for African Americans. Chicago exemplified on a massive scale the racial discrimination, segregation, and inequality that limited opportunity for urban African American working people after World War II. As a result of the structural inequality of cities like Chicago, the s discourse of urban decline became increasingly racialized. The postwar years saw an increased migration of rural blacks to northern cities nationwide. Chicago, like other urban centers, continued to be a “Mecca” for southern blacks, but the lack of housing and jobs for unskilled workers resulted in greater crowding in inner-city neighborhoods. The demolition of deteriorating buildings and neighborhoods for redevelopment projects did not result in adequate new housing for the urban poor; slums instead grew larger and more concentrated with the absorption of people displaced by demolition, while dehumanizing large public housing projects themselves became slums. With the movement of white families to the suburbs, and with the decrease in the flow of immigrants to cities, urban poverty was increasingly seen as a “Negro” problem: the slum problem had become a ghetto problem. By the s, Robert Beauregard writes, the discourse of urban decline was defined by “a single theme that unified its various fragments and turned urban decline into a society-wide problem. The theme was race, the problem was the concentration, misery, and rebellion of Negroes in central cities, and the reaction was one of fear and eventually panic. Commentators could no longer avoid racial prejudice and institutional discrimination” (). Nor could civil rights activists avoid the specific socioeconomic problems of African American urban communities. The plight of African Americans in Chicago became nationally recognized when Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference convened in Chicago for the –  Chicago Freedom movement. The protest against segregated housing in Chicago that King led was met with such violent antagonism by white counterprotesters that riots broke out in several neighborhoods during the summer of . Brooks’s “In the Mecca” registers the apocalyptic mood of social crisis

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that King confronted in Chicago. “In the Mecca” offers testimony not only to the dispersed community of the Mecca but also to the ongoing significance of the racial discourse that rationalized its destruction. A  Life magazine photographic essay on the Mecca’s last days exemplifies how the discourse of urban decline is racialized and also often more blatantly racist in its representations of urban black life. The initial photo, which Brooks submitted to her publisher as the jacket cover for her book (but was denied permission to use by Life), depicts a solitary child dwarfed by the immensity of the building’s courtyard, empty except for refuse littering the floor. The explanatory paragraph below all but attributes the decline of the building to the arrival of black tenants: “It was a mecca for Chicago’s rising rich until the South Side became less stylish. By  the first Negro tenants had moved in. The building’s noisy jazz activities gave a name to the Mecca Flat Blues and the apartment steadily trumpeted its way downhill. I.I.T. bought it in  but could not wreck it until the  occupants could find homes in Chicago’s crowded Negro area. Since September I.I.T. has collected no rent from the  remaining tenants and hopes to have them all moved out by year’s end.” This brief historical narrative of the Mecca’s transformation from “Chicago’s showiest apartment” to its “most celebrated slum building” suggests an almost inevitable decline that follows the “first Negro tenants” (“Mecca” ). The one-sentence explanation of the years between  and  implies a causal relationship between black noise—“the building’s noisy jazz activities”—and urban decline. With the arrival of black tenants, the “apartment” becomes a synechdoche for its “noisy” inhabitants, as it “trumpeted its way downhill.” Rather than a response to urban poverty, the blues are instrumentally related to a “steady” process of decline, a stubbornly slow process, however, that stands in the way of progress. The subsequent photographs in the article include several portraits of elderly residents, who themselves stand in the way of IIT’s plans for urban renewal (or urban removal, from their perspective). But most of the photographs concentrate on the building itself, highlighting the contrast of faded elegance and current chaos, which is most evident in the article’s second image, a gracefully arched entrance above the sign, “This Building to be Vacated and Wrecked.” In the subsequent images, the human presence of the building’s tenants can be seen only through the signs of its disrepair: an interior of an apartment with a bullet-damaged window, the result of “a random shot fired by hoodlums” (“Mecca” ); or a stairway with decorative railings and paintless, graffiti-covered walls, the “handiwork of swarms of children who have overrun Mecca in recent years” (“Mecca” ). Such dehumanizing language to characterize the children of the Mecca is even

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more evident in the Harper’s article by John Bartlow Martin, “The Strangest Place in Chicago.” Martin, who would become Robert Kennedy’s urban policy counselor after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., articulates a liberal discourse of urban decline that is nonetheless condescending. Outside the Mecca, Martin writes in his initial description, “An old man pulls a handcart filled with junk across an empty lot. From a deep hole tunneled under the sidewalk emerges the head of a little Negro boy, playing. The sidewalk is cracked and broken.” The inside of the building is equally decrepit, and its inhabitants are likewise conveyed in degrading terms, whether they be children or adults. The visitor is assaulted by a “powerful odor . . . a smell compounded of urine and stale cooking and of age.” Even the atrium skylights are obscured by dirt and darkness: they let in only “the kind of unreal light found underseas.” The only recognizable human activity inside this gloomy, musty setting is a janitor patching broken tile. Otherwise, all that can be heard is: “the sound of distant human voices— women talking, a baby squalling, children screaming, men muttering, no words distinguishable. Spittle splats flatly on the tile floor, falling from a great height, spat by a man or a woman standing on an upper balcony. All day long people stand at the balconies . . . gazing out at other people facing them across the well in silence, gazing down at the floor far below, spitting, small human figures in a vast place” (Martin ). Whereas the Life article foregrounds the contrast of solitary Mecca residents with their squalid surroundings, in “The Strangest Place in Chicago” any human presence is at first subsumed within the building’s overall atmosphere of decay. From the impressionistic literary journalist’s perspective, the spectacular squalor of the Mecca speaks only through the signs of its physical degradation. The initial voices of its residents are presented as indecipherable utterances whose significance can be gauged only in relation to the “vast” emptiness of the Mecca. With “no words distinguishable,” these voices are a muted version of Life’s “noisy jazz.” When the residents’ voices are eventually distinguished from each other in “The Strangest Place in Chicago,” they are done so in terms that accentuate their degradation: a child crying “Mummy, Mummy”; the “high mad cackling laughter of an old man”; a woman yelling at a child who is urinating from a third-floor balcony (Martin –). The article goes on to profile individual Mecca residents in more depth, and their stories variously follow a common plot of hopeful migration to Chicago from the South, disappointment over limited employment and housing opportunities, and despair during the Depression, which left them stranded in a building scheduled for demolition since its purchase by IIT in . Martin situates the Mecca residents within a historical narrative

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of considerable sociological detail, but their individual stories of hardship are muted by the alarming din with which he frames the story. On the one hand, there are undisciplined children, shouting, crying, running madly, armed with improvised weapons, throwing garbage at each other; on the other hand, there are elderly people, trapped, resigned, silent, or unintelligible. The story concludes with an especially pathetic example of unintelligibility: an old woman in a rocking chair, muttering loudly, but her “words are not intelligible, it is just a human voice, muttering, and it is impossible to tell whether in anger or in joy, it is only sound” (Martin ). Brooks’s empathetic participant/observer’s narrative stance in representing the Mecca world contrasts sharply with the more detached mass media representations that had commemorated the building’s decline before it was razed. In fact, her poetic representation of the Mecca reads as if she is responding directly to Martin’s conclusion, “it is just a human voice . . . it is only sound.” Her poem suggests that such unintelligibility is a failure of the listener rather than the speaker. Following the quotation of Martin’s article are epigraphs that contest the authority of his point of view. Brooks first quotes an anonymous “Meccan” who questions the presumably factual accounts of the building’s population: “‘How many people live here? . . . Two thousand? oh, more than that. There’s  apartments and some of ’em’s got seven rooms and they’re all full.” She follows this epigraph with two additional insider perspectives from the South Side, both of which implicitly interpret the Mecca’s lasting significance for the later s. The first is an ominous abbreviated comment by Richard “Peanut” Washington, a Blackstone Ranger, who says “‘there’s danger in my neighborhood.’” The final epigraph translates this apocalyptic tone into more resolutely political terms, as Russell Meek, a Chicago activist, says, “‘There comes a time when what has been can never be again’” (). The collage of quotations that begins In the Mecca, combined with the initial dedication to Brooks’s mentors (beginning with Langston Hughes) and the subsequent tribute to the students of her South Side writing workshops, establishes a multigenerational resonance to Brooks’s narrative. This documentary collage furthermore evokes a genre that was popularized in the s by such writers as Hughes, although the quotes themselves underscore the inadequacy of documentary accounts that diminish the testimony of insider voices.13 By juxtaposing such voices to Martin’s description of the Mecca, Brooks introduces the dialogic pattern that structures her narrative palimpsest of the Mecca. Like Martin’s story, “In the Mecca” shows how a utopian architectural space has become a dystopian site; however, Brooks’s poem foregrounds how even the most idealistic plans of modernist urban design cannot be dissociated

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from the contradictions inherent in a racist society. The digressive, discordant narrative form of “In the Mecca” ironically contrasts with the building’s monumental design, but Brooks is ultimately less concerned with the architectural history of the Mecca than with the stories of those who live there. With its emphasis on the local, and the personal, on the multiple idiosyncratic stories that redefine the collective memory of the Mecca, Brooks’s poem foregrounds orally transmitted forms of remembering that are often erased from dominant historical narratives. More specifically, her dialogic reconstruction of the Mecca counters reductively racist sociological narratives of urban decline. “In the Mecca” revolves around the story of a domestic worker’s quest for her lost (and, as we ultimately find out, abducted and murdered) child, but through this story the poem portrays the everyday struggles of Mecca inhabitants in an array of voices and styles. These voices mix colloquial urban diction with more formal African American traditions of oratory, sermon, and proverb. Brooks’s poem is, paradoxically, both elevated and intimate in its localized mode of address. The narrator’s stance combines the synoptic, lofty vision of the epic poet with the more provisional, vernacular voice of the oral storyteller. This narrative stance corresponds with the dialogic interplay of speech acts that convey the social plurality of the Mecca world. Moreover, there is no linguistic hierarchy of speech acts that organizes the narrative; as Gayl Jones writes, “In Brooks’s poetry there is no such hierarchy because any kind of language may occupy any space; indeed, different languages may almost occupy the same space” (). Unlike the popular journalistic representations of the Mecca, Brooks does not sharply differentiate the “distinguishable” utterance from the “indistinguishable,” whether from positions of moral or scientific (sociological) authority. She instead foregrounds how each character—as well as the narrator—is constructed by conflicting discourses. The opening page of “In the Mecca,” a single sentence situated apart from the rest of the narrative, demonstrates how Brooks’s mixed mode of address is paradoxically inviting and disorienting at the same time: “Now the way of the Mecca was on this wise” (). This opening sentence sounds authoritative, even prophetic, as it conflates Christianity and Islam. It echoes the New Testament language of Matthew :—“Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise” (Doreski )—but its allusive resonance of the holy place of Islam also underscores the narrator’s ironic stance toward the Chicago Mecca. The location and temporality of the narrator are furthermore unspecified, while this speech act points to a specific site with its indeterminate deictic indicators. “Now” could refer to the narrator’s present, thus suggesting a retrospective assessment of the Mecca’s past, or it could refer to the time indicated by the past-tense verb form

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“was.” “Now” could also serve the narrative purpose of drawing attention to the importance of the story that follows, whether it be a command, request, or warning addressed directly to the audience or a term suggesting a transition in an ongoing narrative. The initial effect is one of questioning temporality, the “now” of the present and the “now” of the remembered past, but also of questioning how narratives represent the past. “Now” draws attention to the urgency of the moment, yet it also suggests a continuity between the narrated past and the narrator’s present. The rest of the first sentence likewise raises unsettling questions about the locality of the opening statement, especially about the narrator’s position in relation to the social world she is representing. The “way of the Mecca” could imply purpose, direction, a course of action, or it could imply more mundanely, more naturalistically, the condition, and physical locale, of the Mecca as it was. The temporality of the statement is foregrounded through the question of its locality; to write of a world that no longer physically exists, but a world whose memory is contested, is to raise the question for whom one is writing. The narrator is positioned neither certainly inside nor outside the Mecca; the audience’s position and the speech act itself are likewise unsettled by the question of what defines insider knowledge. What is eventually “wise” about “the way of the Mecca” is the narrator’s empathetic understanding and judgment, but the limitations of such outsider “wisdom” are also evident. If the narrator of “In the Mecca” is distanced from insider wisdom about the social world she recollects, distanced even by the “wise” tone by which an insider’s account may be conveyed, her retrospective representation of the Mecca positions readers similarly. Rejecting the condescendingly moralistic or impressionistically spectacular visions of mass media representations of urban decline, Brooks instead makes her readers aware of their complicity in constructing a narrative that can contain the heterogeneous voices of the Mecca. Like the initial sentence of the poem, which is both authoritative in its tone and disorienting in its ambiguity, the subsequent introductory passages evoke linguistic tensions that exist throughout the poem. The poem proceeds with a statement directly addressed to the reader, establishing a more explicit context for the subsequent narrative of countermemory: Sit where the light corrupts your face. Mies Van der Rohe retires from grace. And the fair fables fall. () “Truth is the significance of fact,” wrote Mies van der Rohe (qtd. in Harvey ), but the language of Brooks’s opening explodes the rationalist foundations of such

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a modernist urban vision. Technological efficiency does not in itself produce improved social conditions, nor can “truth” be ascertained apart from the power relations in which it is embedded, especially when the “truth” in question exists only in contested memory, memory of a community displaced by a project designed by Mies van der Rohe himself. This paradoxical opening introduces a narrative that continually challenges readers’ expectations with its dense wordplay. If the corrupt light evokes the contrast of hope and despair in prior representations of the Mecca, Brooks’s fables refuse to rest with simple oppositions of corrupt and fair. The poem accentuates, and denaturalizes, the racial associations of metaphors of light and darkness introduced in this opening. The “light” that “corrupts your face” draws attention to the lightness or darkness of “your face.” And the “fall” of “the fair fables” raises the question of how narratives representing such dystopian worlds as the Mecca are “fair,” suggesting that fairness is a matter of hegemony rather than of truth or accuracy. Brooks’s characters live in a world of economic restriction, but their narratives represent an unpredictable array of responses, personal and political, to this world that defy totalizing “fables.” The introduction to the narrative’s protagonist demonstrates the blend of demoralizing poverty and idiosyncratic vision that characterizes the residents of Brooks’s Mecca: S. Smith is Mrs. Sallie. Mrs. Sallie hies home to Mecca, hies to marvelous rest; ascends the sick and influential stair. The eye unrinsed, the mouth absurd with the last sourings of the master’s Feast. She plans to set severity apart, to unclench the heavy folly of the fist. () The story of Mrs. Sallie, who is first designated by the more public, official name one might see on her mailbox (“S. Smith”), is immediately situated in the context of racial and class inequality. In contrast to the humiliation of her job as a domestic worker, of preparing “the master’s Feast,” Mrs. Sallie’s Mecca apartment is a “marvelous” refuge. But this refuge is also defined by the “sick and influential stair” she must climb, with “influential” suggesting how the physiological and psychological effects of poverty are interwoven. The densely charged language that follows in the description of Mrs. Sallie likewise blends the physiological with the psychological, but not to suggest that she is absolutely determined by

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the limitations of her social class and impoverished surroundings. Mrs. Sallie’s response to her social position, and to the racism that defines this position, is deliberate: she “plans / to set severity apart, / to unclench the heavy folly of the fist” (; emphasis added). As empathetic as the narrator’s understanding of Mrs. Sallie’s mode of coping with her world is, the description of her that follows does not “set severity apart” in indicating the psychological cost of her resignation: Infirm booms and suns that have not spoken die behind this low-brown butterball. Our prudent partridge. A fragmentary attar and armed coma. A fugitive attar and a district hymn. () The jarringly disconnected images suggest a character who is herself “fragmentary,” tormented by “fugitive” repressed emotions. The dissociated sensual imagery is interspersed with language referring to those moral codes that define her mode of perseverance. Mrs. Sallie’s “prudence,” here mocked in the narrator’s playfully familiar description of “our prudent partridge,” is revealed more fully when she is inside her apartment: Now Mrs. Sallie confers her bird-hat to her kitchen table, and sees her kitchen. It is bad, is bad, her eyes say . . . .................... Her denunciation slaps savagely not only this sick kitchen but her Lord’s annulment of the main event. “I want to decorate!” But what is that? A pomade atop a sewage. An offense. First comes correctness, then embellishment! And music, mode, and mixed philosophy may follow fitly on propriety to tame the whiskey of our discontent! () The simple description of her kitchen as “bad” sparks a chain of associations that reveal Mrs. Sallie’s “prudence” as part of a moral code that is based in Christian faith, but which is more properly defined by class and gender codes of

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“propriety.” This emphasis on propriety, on “correctness” first, and “then embellishment,” defines Mrs. Sallie’s strength as a frugal mother who makes the most of her limited means, but it also unveils the limitations of a moral code based on the bourgeois appearance of goodness rather than on actual social and economic justice. It suggests, that is, how social codes of “propriety” relate to the possession (or lack) of property. She recognizes that poverty dictates her denial of desire—to decorate is “an offense,” a “pomade atop a sewage”—but this recognition reinforces, rather than challenges, her repressive adherence to moral “correctness,” to “propriety.” The first section of the poem, which traces Mrs. Sallie’s ascent to her fourthfloor flat, concentrates on the dreams of the neighbors she passes, even if these dreams are as modest, as transitory, as contingent as her initial desire for a moment of rest. Neither the characters that Mrs. Sallie encounters on her way home nor her nine children can be understood in stereotypical terms; they are conveyed with psychological complexity, often paradoxically. Their public personae are belied by the often contradictory motivations that underlie their self-presentation. The description of Hyena, a “striking debutante,” most blatantly reveals a contrast between public appearance and private motivation: “a fancier of firsts. / One of the first, and to the tune of hate, / in all the Mecca to paint her hair sun-gold” (). Her self-fashioning as a “striking debutante” with “sun-gold” hair concisely accentuates how racism structures codes of feminine beauty, yet her “tune of hate” suggests her complicity with the mode by which she distinguishes herself from other black women. Not all of the characters who appear in the beginning of the poem are so obviously self-centered as Hyena is. However, those who seek to authorize their identities in narratives of transcendence, whether religious or secular, are also ironically undermined. “Old St. Julia Jones,” for example, professes her faith in Christ through the sensual metaphors of “incense” and “vintage” (). Prophet Williams is also “rich with Bible” but reeks / with lust for his disciple”; more ominously, however, he is responsible for his wife’s violent death, a responsibility that the narrator extends to her “kinswomen”: Ida died in self-defense. (Kinswomen! Kinswomen!) Ida died alone. () Even the young poet Alfred, a schoolteacher who believes in the religion of art, who “reads Shakespeare in the evenings or reads Joyce,” later

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. . . goes to bed with Telly Bell in , or with that golden girl, or thinks, or drinks until the Everything is vaguely a part of One thing and the One thing delightfully anonymous and undiscoverable. () As harshly as he judges himself—“so he is weak” / is weak, is no good”—his is a “decent enough no-goodness,” at least in contrast with the more delusional goodness of his neighbors. His metaphysical speculations are themselves selfindulgent, however, in the context of the Mecca. As he wonders about the ancient “gods,” “what was their one Belief? / what was their joining thing?” (), his revery is interrupted by an arrestingly different sound: “A boy breaks glass and Mrs. Sallie / rises to the final and fourth floor” (). This break between the poet’s meditations and Mrs. Sallie’s preparation of her family’s dinner—ham hocks, greens, yams, and cornbread—sets the tone for the quest that sustains the rest of the narrative. Counting her children at dinner, she notices her daughter’s absence and asks, “WHERE PEPITA BE?” (). The child’s disappearance changes the poem’s mood from tentative calm to impending violence. The narrative proceeds more rapidly, more unpredictably, from dialogue to monologue, from spoken monologue to interior monologue. The characters respond to the news of the child’s disappearance with separately internalized visions of violence, but their narratives are linked by their shared emphasis on racial oppression. The transformation of Mrs. Sallie’s other children is, not surprisingly, most striking. Their characters are idiosyncratically differentiated at first. For example, there is Yvonne, who dreams of love, and whose defiant reason for chewing Doublemint gum parodies her mother’s code of propriety: It is very bad, but in its badness it is nearly grand, and is a crown that tops bald innocence and gentle fright. () Then there is Melodie Mary, who “likes roaches, / and pities the gray rat,” whose sympathy for such unacknowledged everyday victims identifies her vision quite closely with the narrator’s. In contrast, her brother, Briggs, “adult as a stone / (who if he cries cries alone)” (), is consumed by anger. For him, Immunity is forfeit, love is luggage, hope is heresy.

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Gang is health and mange. () As distinct as each of their characters is, Mrs. Sallie’s children are united in their hatred of what their poverty denies them: [they] hate sewn suburbs; hate everything combed and strong; hate people who have balls, dolls, mittens and dimity frocks and trains and boxing gloves, picture books, bonnets for Easter. Lace handkerchief owners are enemies of Smithkind. () When they are summoned to look for their sister, the children likewise react to her disappearance with visions distinctive to their characters, but they share a sense of deprivation, of feeling . . . constrained. All are constrained. And there is no thinking of grapes or gold or of any wicked sweetness and they ride upon fright and remorse and their stomachs are rags or grit. () The neighbors that Mrs. Sallie and her children ask for help likewise are instantly transformed by the news of the child’s disappearance. Their descriptions of Pepita, their speculations of what happened, and their evasions of questions tell us more about their characteristic modes of dealing with fear than they tell us about the lost child. As Gayl Jones states, the question “‘Where is Pepita?’ often becomes ‘Where am I?’” (). The first tale significantly is a great-greatgrandmother’s recollection of slavery, while the second is a religious man’s meditation on the Nazi death camps, linking the loss of the black child with “all old unkindnesses and harms” () in a parody of the Twenty-third Psalm. Each subsequent tale—whether of incidental violence, sensational crime, religious passion, isolation, retribution, or drunken delusion—evokes the fears, desires, and dreams of its teller. And each stands out in sharp relief from the more abstract, unresponsive “Law,” which arrives but “does not quickly go / to fetch a Female of the Negro Race” and instead asks “a lariat of questions” (–). Most notably contrasted with the Law are the young poets whose angry voices resonate among the more disparate, more desperate outbursts of their older neighbors. There is, again, the introspective Alfred,

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. . . (who might have been an architect) [who] can speak of Mecca: firm arms surround disorders, bruising ruses and small hells, small semiheavens: hug barbarous rhetoric built of buzz, coma and petite pell-mells. () The initial portrait of the “untalented” artist of “decent enough nogoodness” () is modified considerably by the more detailed presentation of his later vision as the resident poet of the Mecca. Because he “can speak of Mecca,” because he has the language, the “barbarous rhetoric,” to express the “small hells” but also the “small semiheavens” of Mecca life, his voice increasingly converges with the narrative voice of the poem. Alfred not only intimately knows the architecture, history, and everyday social life of the Mecca, he also understands the need for a vision that can integrate this local knowledge with a broader understanding of the African diaspora. His admiration for Léopold Sédar Senghor is conveyed in a meditative vision that is romantic, at times escapist, but nonetheless resonant in its affirmation of negritude: Believes in beauty But believes that blackness is among the fit filters. Old cobra coughs and curdles in his lungs, spits spite, spits exquisite spite, and cries, “Ignoble!” () Senghor’s poetry represents for Alfred not only “beauty” but also pride and prophetic vision. Most of all, though, “negritude” represents the potential for black solidarity: Senghor “speaks for others, for brothers” (). Such a vision of solidarity seems as remote as it seems necessary for the poet of the Mecca. Alfred’s affirmation of “negritude” does not match the revolutionary directness of the poet Don Lee (Haki Madhubuti), however, whose uncompromising black nationalist stance is introduced shortly after. Amid growing fears that Pepita might be dead, Lee appears without an introduction: Don Lee wants not a various America. Don Lee wants a new nation under nothing. ()

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He wants instead “new art and anthem,” a “new music screaming in the sun” (). The appearance of the known black nationalist poet in this mix of fictional characters, especially following the intrusion of the Law, reminds readers that Brooks’s reconstruction of the fallen Mecca is no poetic exercise in nostalgia. There are a number of characters in the Mecca who call for retributive violence, but the inclusion of Lee’s black nationalist stance among the apocalyptic calls for bloody upheaval situates the conflicts of “In the Mecca” within the racial politics of the s, as Brooks connects the remembered past to the more defiant present. As R. Baxter Miller writes, “the Lee in the poem lives at the midpoint between mimesis and reality” (), but he occupies a space in the poem that differs from that of the other Mecca tenants. His apocalyptic, but utopian, vision reaffirms how the struggles defining Brooks’s characters are confined neither temporally nor spatially to their lives in the Mecca. The incipient violence that constantly threatens their existence is likewise not confined to the urban slum; it is instead endemic to a nation structured by racial oppression. The violently apocalyptic vision of “In the Mecca” is ultimately tempered by the quieter voice of the murdered child Pepita, who is finally discovered beneath a cot “in dust with roaches” (), the victim of hateful, purposeless violence. Her murderer is a man who also “looks at the Law unlovably,” but whose hatred is murderous and suicidal. As in “Boy Breaking Glass,” in which the child’s “broken window is a cry of art” (), or even “The Blackstone Rangers,” who “exulting, monstrous hand on monstrous hand,/construct, strangely, a monstrous pearl or grace” (), the conclusion of “In the Mecca” looks to an unlikely source of poetic expression, the poignant voice of the murdered child, to convey the urgent need to listen closely to the dispossessed. While sounding the alarm for action, Brooks ultimately speaks for the voiceless, the child who . . . never went to kindergarten. She never learned that black is not beloved. Was royalty when poised, sly, at the A and P’s fly-open door. Will be royalty no more. “I touch”—she said once—“petals of a rose. A silky feeling through me goes!” Her mother will try for roses. () Mrs. Sallie may not be able to save her daughter’s life, but her “try for roses” is an act that validates her own life as it commemorates her daughter’s. The conclusion of “In the Mecca” subtly affirms the need for active transformation, both

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of self and society, even if it seems too late, even if it is provoked by tragic loss ( Jones ). If the linguistic and rhetorical complexity of “In the Mecca” is often imposing, the poem nonetheless registers Brooks’s transformed social vision for poetry, a vision that celebrates those performative acts that meet the urgent needs of the historical moment, that are necessarily destructive as they are creative. “In the Mecca” accentuates the fragmentary, ephemeral aspects of Mecca life, stressing the sense of disconnection that paradoxically links its characters—disconnection from place, from community, and from the past. Such local, specific experiences that are nonetheless linked by shared patterns of oppression and failed hopes also evince the bitter ironies of rational urban planning, from Burnham to Mies van der Rohe. By foregrounding the narratives of those displaced by “urban renewal,” Brooks underscores the need for not only reconstructing urban communities but also the collective memory of these communities. Rather than the authoritatively detached rendering of the Mecca as “one of the most remarkable Negro slum exhibits in the world,” Brooks dialogically represents this world in the imagined voices of the Mecca residents. The complexity of this vision is nowhere more evident than in the characterization of the Mecca’s resident poet, Alfred, who by the poem’s conclusion is no longer the self-absorbed sensualist we first encounter on “the sick and influential stair.” Like Brooks’s poetic (re)vision of the Mecca, his concluding vision synthesizes a local knowledge of his community, in all of its dystopian despair, with a more comprehensive understanding of the historical need for the poet’s utopian social role: I hate it. Yet, murmurs Alfred— who is lean at the balcony, leaning— something, something in Mecca continues to call! Substanceless; yet like mountains, like rivers and oceans too; and like trees with wind whistling through them. And steadily an essential sanity, black and electric, builds to a reportage and redemption. A hot estrangement. A material collapse that is Construction. () The same poet who initially escapes the Mecca through literature and philosophy, who “reads Joyce or James or Horace” and “thinks, or drinks until the

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Everything / is vaguely a part of One thing” (), has found a language and a vision in the very world where he lives. As much as he “hates” the Mecca, he comes to recognize an “essential sanity, black and electric,” that characterizes the Meccans despite their physical environment. Only with this recognition can the Mecca build “to a reportage and redemption.” Brooks’s “reportage” of “material collapse” is apocalyptic in its fierce vision of “hot estrangement.” The poem’s “Construction” of the Mecca, however, resists the building’s erasure from historical memory as it redeems “an essential sanity, black and electric” that transcends the Mecca’s material history. Brooks writes in Report from Part One how the experience of celebrating black self-determination in the late s changed her understanding of poetry’s social role: “My aim, in my next future, is to write poems that will somehow successfully “call” (see Imamu Baraka’s “SOS”) all black people: black people in taverns, black people in alleys, black people in gutters, schools, offices, factories, prisons, the consulate; I wish to reach black people in pulpits, black people in mines, on farms, on thrones, not always to “teach”—I shall wish often to entertain, to illumine. My newish voice will not be an imitation of the contemporary young black voice, which I so admire, but an adaptation of today’s G.B. voice” (). If the title poem of In the Mecca suggests a continuity of Brooks’s increasingly revolutionary historical vision with her Popular Front formation as a socially conscious poet, the sequence of poems that follows the title poem, entitled “After Mecca,” more dramatically evokes Brooks’s “conversion” to black nationalist poetics. These poems represent more intently a politicized vision of urban public space, from the explosive streets and alleys of “Boy Breaking Glass” or “The Blackstone Rangers” to the apocalyptic “noise and whip of the whirlwind” in “The Second Sermon on the Warpland.” “After Mecca” can in fact be read as a coherent sequence that maps an increasingly expansive and comprehensive vision of urban public space (Taylor –). It begins with a pair of portraits of young people, one female and one male, responding to the constrictions of poverty in Chicago, “To a Winter Squirrel” and “Boy Breaking Glass.” Following these depictions of youthful frustration are the commemorative portraits of recent African American cultural heroes, “Medgar Evers” and “Malcolm X.” These heroic portraits set the stage for the subsequent urban settings of “After Mecca”: the contrasting public sites of the two dedication poems, the official public site of “The Chicago Picasso” and the black counterpublic site of “The Wall.” Next is the sequence of poems about the South Side gang with whom Brooks worked in poetry workshops, “The Blackstone Rangers.” The tripartite sequence of “The Blackstone Rangers” not only contrasts the official police image of the Rangers

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with their self-representation, it also contrasts again the gendered experience of urban poverty by young men and young women. Finally, “After Mecca” concludes with the apocalyptic cityscapes of “The Second Sermon on the Warpland,” which closes with the precisely rendered proletarian portrait of “Big Bessie,” who “stands—highly—under the unruly scrutiny, stands in the wild weed” (), the enduring hero of the poem’s prophetic vision of collective black perseverance and strength. The poems from “After Mecca” that most dramatically convey Brooks’s reassessment of her public after  are the two dedication poems, “The Chicago Picasso” and “The Wall.” “The Wall,” which she wrote for the dedication ceremony of the  South Side African American community mural, the Wall of Respect, is an especially important statement of her commitment to the Black Aesthetic. “The Wall” represents not only a public affirmation of black solidarity but also an implicit response to the dedication that she had delivered less than two weeks earlier in August , “The Chicago Picasso,” written for and read at the unveiling ceremony for the colossal cubist sculpture that Picasso constructed for the city of Chicago. Read together, “The Chicago Picasso” and “The Wall” exemplify how Brooks negotiates the multiple publics of a racially divided Chicago. While the two dedication poems represent dramatically different relations of the poet to her audience, they are not as diametrically opposed to each other in their response to modernist aesthetics as Brooks’s readers often assume. John Callahan, for example, writes in a cogent essay on Brooks’s reconception of her audience after  that the two poems are “polar companions. The first, ‘The Chicago Picasso’ (August , ), is valedictory, a leave-taking from the modernist, Western poetics of her former work. The second, ‘The Wall’ (August , ), announces and embodies Brooks’s allegiance to a spoken poetry in the tradition of African village culture” (). The occasions of each poem certainly elicit contrasting responses to public art from Brooks, and the economic, social, and political circumstances of the composition of the Chicago Picasso and the Wall of Respect could hardly be more different. I would like to suggest, however, that Brooks’s responses to the two works challenges her readers to conceive of a pluralistic modernist heritage rather than a racially exclusive “high modernism” that sees African diaspora art only as material to be reshaped by Euro-American artists. Like “In the Mecca,” the public poems of “After Mecca” recall the social modernism of the Popular Front even as they assert an Afrocentric aesthetic. Brooks’s stance in “The Chicago Picasso” is that of a mediator between abstract modern art and the general populace that resists such art. Invited by Mayor Richard Daley to read a poem at the unveiling of Picasso’s fifty-foot-high steel sculpture

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at the Civic Center Plaza, Brooks was as perplexed by its cubist abstraction as her audience. Brooks prefaces “The Chicago Picasso” with an excerpt from the Chicago Sun-Times’s description of the ceremony. This excerpt evokes both the official pomp of the ceremony and the audience’s enthusiastic but bemused response: “Mayor Daley tugged a white ribbon, loosing the blue percale rap. A hearty cheer went up as the covering slipped off the big steel sculpture that looks at once like a bird and a woman.” Beneath this Sun-Times excerpt are three simple descriptive sentences, in parentheses, italicized, and indented several more spaces: (Seiji Ozawa leads the Symphony. / The Mayor smiles. / And , See.). These opening statements set the scene for the meditation on “Art” that follows: “Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms. / Art hurts. Art urges voyages— / and it is easier to stay at home” (). But the objective mode and the visual appearance of the opening statements also situate the written poem in a more complex relation to modernist aesthetics. The Sun-Times excerpt and the straightforward descriptive sentences establish a reportorial distance from the official occasion at which Brooks spoke, but the collage form of the poem’s opening embraces the cubist construction of Picasso’s sculpture. The capitalization of “See” furthermore accentuates the power of difficult art to heighten vision. This blend of documentary reportage and cubist collage resembles the opening of “In the Mecca”; like the long poem, it also evokes s conventions of documentary collage. The opposition of such demanding “Art” as Picasso’s to the every “man” who would rather “stay at home, / the nice beer ready” seems at first like a familiar opposition of the modernist to the populist, but Brooks’s identification with this audience complicates such a reductive dialectic. Her emphasis on the marketplace in which “Art” is exchanged and received furthermore implicates her own work—including the poem she presents in the dedication ceremony— within her meditation on the Chicago Picasso. The story of the Chicago Picasso itself defies any simple classification of modernist art’s socioeconomic relation to its publics. There was, in fact, considerable uncertainty about the cost and financing of the sculpture even after it was unveiled to the people of Chicago. Chicago was one of two cities in the early s that approached Picasso about constructing a monumental public sculpture. The other was Marseilles. According to Picasso biographer Ronald Penrose, who served as an intermediary between the artist and the architects representing the city of Chicago, Picasso was honored that “the two cities famous for their gangsters, Marseilles and Chicago, should be the first to ask him for monuments” (Picasso ).14 He agreed to construct the sculpture for Chicago, but, as was his custom, he refused to accept a commission

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or even discuss payment during the process of construction. Several foundations in Chicago, including the Art Institute of Chicago, raised enough money to pay for the sculpture’s construction and to offer Picasso a generous fee. After the sculpture was unveiled, William Hartmann, representing the city, visited Picasso and told him how enthusiastically it was received by the residents of Chicago. Picasso refused the $, check that Hartmann had brought him, telling him that he wanted the sculpture to be his gift to the people of Chicago (Penrose, Picasso –). As imposing as the sculpture may have been to its initial viewers, Picasso’s populist gesture defied the stereotype of the aloof elitist artist associated with modernism. While the scale of this monumental sculpture was unprecedented for Picasso, its design evoked several different phases of his development as an artist, beginning with his early experiments with cubist form. The idea of a sculpture built in steel, “composed of the profiles and surfaces of sheet metal, with open spaces contained in the gaps between them and areas enclosed by iron rods,” is related to his cubist constructions of the early s (Penrose, Sculpture ), and the lyric “transference of the idea of a musical instrument to the head of a woman” evokes his wire and iron rod constructions of the later s (Penrose, Sculpture ). The Chicago sculpture, then, resonated with Picasso’s early cubist formal experimentation (in painting as well as sculpture), which itself was inspired by his engagement with African sculpture, particularly West African masks, in the first decade of the twentieth century. As problematic as was the European appropriation of “primitive” African sculpture, the formal innovations of cubism, which the Chicago Picasso evokes on a monumental scale, owe much to African traditions of design. To define the “Art” of “The Chicago Picasso” in opposition to the Afrocentric collective expression of “The Wall” risks effacing the profoundly important African impact on Western modernism. “The Chicago Picasso” underscores the social, economic, and political contexts by which art is valued, exchanged, and received. In identifying with the “commonrooms” where “we belch, or sniff, or scratch,” Brooks distances herself from the institutional authority that is invested with the power to convert art into “Art.” Yet the metaphor that embodies this process is as commercial as it is aristocratic: “But we must cook ourselves and style ourselves for Art, who / is a requiring courtesan” (). “Art” such as the Chicago Picasso is a “requiring courtesan” not because “she” demands so much from her clients but because of the socioeconomic conditions of her presentation. The metaphor of the “requiring courtesan” signifies on the Sun-Times article, which reenacts the moment when “the covering slipped off ” the sculpture that resembles a woman. Just as

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this reported uncovering syntactically effaces the agency of the sculpture’s patronage, Brooks’s poem displaces the social-class anxiety of the crowd’s response to “Art” onto the “requiring courtesan” herself, rather than onto the socioeconomic conditions that determine her value. Brooks identifies as much with the provocative presence of the Chicago Picasso in her own public role in the poem as with the “commonrooms” of skeptical beer drinkers. As an official spokesperson for “Art,” and as one of Chicago’s most respected artists, her reputation precedes her onto the stage of the Civic Center Plaza, as the self-consciousness of her stance so keenly signifies. Her concluding answer to the poem’s opening question— “Does man love Art?”—is at once affirmative and distant. Such “requiring” art as Picasso’s ultimately exists for our appreciation like a “Flower” exists—“as innocent and as guilty, / as meaningful and as meaningless as any / other flower in the western field” (). The capitalization of “Flower” does not elevate the common to the status of “Art,” nor does it diminish the impact of the sculpture. It instead accentuates the process of enhanced seeing that takes place in the heightened attention to the object, whether flower, sculpture, or poem. This process conveyed through the language of the poem, through its alliteration and other sonic devices as well as its imagery and visual cues, also encompasses the sharply rendered sociopolitical scenario in which the poem is delivered. While “The Chicago Picasso” enacts an “official” civic role and represents an established public for a writer identified with a modernist aesthetics, “The Wall” celebrates and exemplifies collective forms of black expression that resist the exclusionary logic of the dominant civic public sphere, if not the “western field” of “Art.” Brooks begins “The Wall,” as she begins “The Chicago Picasso,” with an epigraph from a popular journalistic account of the dedication ceremony. But unlike the Chicago Sun-Times epigraph that introduces “The Chicago Picasso,” the epigraph for “The Wall” evokes the national, if not international, black public represented by Ebony magazine. This epigraph states simply: “The side wall of a typical slum building on the corner of rd and Langley became a mural communicating black dignity” (). The African American public outside of Chicago became aware of the Wall of Respect through the  Ebony article that Brooks quotes, several months after its dedication.15 But while “The Wall” is frequently characterized as the poem that registers Brooks’s “conversion” to a black nationalist poetics, few of Brooks’s readers have related her poem to the extraordinary historical significance of the Wall of Respect. The Wall of Respect did indeed transform an otherwise desolate corner into a site of communal pride, but it did much more than that. As the product of an evolving social democratic vision of African American public art, it implicitly invokes an international tradition

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of activist mural art, in which Chicago had figured so prominently, as it celebrates the African American cultural heroes represented in its panels. As the first and foremost accomplishment of the community mural movement that emerged in the late s, however, its impact would also be as profound in urban ethnic communities across the United States as it was locally in Chicago. The history of African American mural art prior to the Wall of Respect parallels Brooks’s own trajectory as artist and civil rights activist. The period in which public art became most prominent in the United States was of course the New Deal period of the late s and early s. The WPA Federal Art Project (FAP) popularized mural art across the country, employing numerous artists to paint public murals of local and national histories. A tradition of African American mural art was already under way prior to the WPA support of the arts, however. This tradition emerged from the example of Aaron Douglas’s painting as well as the growing interaction of African American artists with the Mexican mural movement. Like Douglas, younger painters such as Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, and John Biggers would evoke an African symbolic legacy within their narrative representations of African American history. And like the Mexican muralists, many of whom had themselves documented African American life, they shared a belief in the social activist role of art, commemorating specific events and heroic figures of black history to raise collective consciousness of the African American past.16 While the WPA sponsored few murals specifically about African American history, a number of prominent African American artists (such as Archibald Motley, Woodruff, Alston, and White) were involved in the FAP. This was especially the case in Chicago, as the Illinois FAP had a greater participation of African American artists than any other urban FAP. The early career of Charles White exemplifies the collaboration of the FAP with such African American cultural institutions as the South Side Community Art Center, which was itself officially part of the WPA Community Arts Center Program. White was both an organizer of the South Side Community Art Center and one of the first African American artists hired to work in the Mural Division of the Illinois FAP. He worked in the Mural Division with Archibald Motley and several white artists who had studied mural painting in Mexico with Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siquieros. The Chicago artists, Edward Millman, Edgar Britton, and Mitchell Siporin, sought to translate the revolutionary social philosophy of the Mexican mural aesthetic into a Whitmanian democratic socialist vision of the United States. White’s work in particular represents an African American revision of this cultural nationalist aesthetic, as his murals depict scenes of black historical struggle and

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portray black cultural icons. While rooted in a historical consciousness of African American slavery and struggle, White’s mural aesthetic exemplifies as well the dynamic cultural interaction of Mexican avant-gardism, with its own valorization of indigenous and “folk” traditions, and WPA support of the vernacular arts. White, like other African American Chicago artists affiliated with the Communist Left during the s and s, such as Margaret Burroughs, Elizabeth Catlett, and Hale Woodruff, moved to Mexico City during the cold war, studying at the Grafica Popular printmaking center, which had been established in  as an institutional center for the Mexican mural movement. With the end of the FAP, the primary source of funding for socially conscious murals no longer existed in the United States, and art schools were largely dismissive of such public art. There was one significant exception to the postwar decline of public murals, however: African American institutions, particularly southern colleges, sponsored a number of projects dedicated to African American history. The most direct link between the New Deal social murals and the community mural movement of the late s was indeed the mural art supported by black colleges. Many of the artists who provided leadership for the community murals of the s and afterward were in fact trained at black colleges. Nowhere was the support for African American mural art more significant than at the Hampton Institute, where White was invited to paint his important mural, The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy (), and where a number of prominent postwar mural artists studied and practiced. One of the most important catalysts for African American mural painting at Hampton was the Viennese Jewish émigré Victor Lowenfeld, a psychologist by profession who had also been trained as an artist. In his art courses, Lowenfeld taught the example of the Mexican muralists to students who painted murals collectively. Among his students in the s were John Biggers, who went on to teach mural painting at what is now Texas Southern College in Houston, and Samella Lewis, who later collaborated on murals in Columbus, Ohio, with William Walker, one of the chief planners and painters of the Wall of Respect (Barnett –). What was most unprecedented about the Wall of Respect was that it was a collective effort by and for the community in which it was painted. Unlike murals in institutional settings, its outdoor public setting was accessible to all, even as it was under construction. The mural was organized by the newly formed Organization for Black American Culture (OBAC), which had been conducting workshops in the visual, literary, and performing arts.17 The inspiration for the Wall of Respect can be largely attributed, however, to the painter William Walker, who had grown up in Birmingham, served in the air force, attended the

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Columbus (Ohio) College of Art and Design, and worked as a sign painter and muralist in Memphis and Nashville before settling in Chicago. Like Brooks, he bridges two generations of activist public art. His articulation of his commitment to a social democratic artistic practice also resembles Brooks’s later vision. He attributed his interest in community murals to his earlier experience in the South: “It was in Memphis that I first became aware of the fact that Black people had no appreciation for art or artists—they were too busy struggling to survive. I then decided that a Black artist must dedicate his work to his people. . . . In questioning myself as to how I could best give my art to Black people, I came to the realization that art must belong to ALL people. That is when I first began to think of public art” (qtd. in Barnett ). As crucial as Walker’s work as an organizer, teacher, spokesman, and painter was, the creation of the Wall of Respect was truly a collective community enterprise. The mural received no official sanction or sponsorship. While it was composed by more than twenty painters, photographers, and writers affiliated with OBAC, there were no individual signatures on the mural. The community was involved in the process of construction at every stage, from approving the heroes who were depicted to interacting with the artists as they worked. Until its destruction by a suspicious fire in , the Wall of Respect was a vital site for community expression, a gathering place for speakers, poets, and musicians. By that time, it had inspired African American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Asian American artists across the country to reclaim their cultures, histories, and neighborhoods through the collective expression of community murals.18 TheWall of Respect differed from previous murals by African American artists in its composition and purpose, as its motto made clear: “This wall was created to honor our Black heroes and beautify our community” (Barnett ). It was originally comprised of four sets of heroic portraits: leaders, athletes, musicians, and poets. Rather than a historical narrative that celebrated progress within the American system, it underscored the necessity for black self-determination. Alongside heroes such as Frederick Douglass, Harriett Tubman, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. DuBois were contemporary political leaders such as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown. Among the contemporary cultural heroes were Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks herself, scowling, it appears, above the revolutionary nationalist words of Baraka’s “S.O.S.” And if the immediate purpose of the mural was to “beautify” an impoverished neighborhood, to counter the destruction wrought by violent racial conflict in Chicago, the Wall of Respect itself became an act of resistance, an act of reclaiming a building that had been condemned for urban renewal.19

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The poem Brooks read at the dedication ceremony enacts the participatory, communal poetics of its occasion; but like the mural her poem celebrates, Brooks also underscores the politics of representation. She represents the dedication ceremony, and her participation in it, not only as a communal celebration addressed to those present but also as testimony to an event of historical significance to a wider public. The poem begins with a ceremonial declaration of unity, as she speaks in the first-person plural: “A drumdrumdrum. / Humbly we come.” Just as quickly, though, she demarcates the local socioeconomic boundaries of oppressive exclusion that compel this call for unity: “South of success and east of gloss and glass” (). Brooks’s rendering of the gathering is journalistically precise in its descriptive detail, but it also generates a dramatic tension between those present at the ceremony and outsiders who may not recognize, for example, that “Val” is Val Gray Ward, the actress and organizer of a black theater group, the Kuumba Workshop, or that “Walter” is Walter Bradford, the younger poet with whom Brooks worked as a mentor for youth groups, including the Blackstone Rangers street gang. The activist artists Brooks names, such as Edward Christmas, the painter of her portrait on the Wall of Respect, are themselves commemorated like the cultural heroes painted on the mural. But the poem does not elevate their status in commemorating them; instead, it celebrates their interaction with the unnamed black men and women whose own creative potential is heightened through their collective expression of pride and anger. When Brooks represents herself as a participant in the dedication ceremony, she does so not as a distinct voice but as the site of collective interaction. The language of the poem itself enacts a participatory dynamic as the physical site of the Wall of Respect is conveyed in language that is at once concrete and figurative: Behind me, Paint. Heroes. No child has defiled the Heroes of this Wall this serious Appointment this still Wing this Scald this Flute this heavy Light this Hinge. () The dramatic urgency of this historical moment is conveyed through the run-on montage of paradoxical figures, figures of implicit action contained within architectural materiality, figures that open to the heroic examples of the past as well as to the promise of a new future. The poem “hinges,” so to speak, on this dynamic interaction of cultural memory and the renewed potential for creative collective action. “The Wall” does indeed represent a space of black counterpublic

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“regroupment,” to return to Nancy Fraser’s language. But it is as well a site of agitation toward and within larger publics, whose legal and political authority to “dispossess” is “revised” () by the very presence of the Wall of Respect and its figures of collective resistance. “The Wall” represents a remarkable moment of collective hope and conviction that may now seem as remotely past as the Wall of Respect itself, which exists today only in fragments that were salvaged from the  fire that destroyed it. Like “In the Mecca,” which transforms the ruins of the Mecca Building into a site of critical memory—“a reportage and redemption”—“The Wall” enacts a lasting testimony to a site of memory whose inspiration has outlasted its material existence. Yet “The Wall” also enacts a dedication to an activist poetics of testimony that Brooks practiced for the rest of her life. While the publics for Brooks’s writing are indeed multiple, and while the legacy of her work will continue to be contested, her poetry should continue to have a lasting impact because it insists on the political necessity of articulating and sustaining a critical cultural memory. In underscoring the continuities, as well as the discontinuities, between the Depression-era Popular Front and the radical black nationalism of the s, In the Mecca constructs a cultural memory that is as formally challenging as it is politically incisive.

6. A Metamorphic Palimpsest The Underground Memory of Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend North Dakota is everywhere.  , Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Part Two Here is a poet addressing not poets only but speaking in a public voice to a public which has not yet learned to listen to him. Hence not only the poetry but also the reasons for the failure in public recognition demand attention. . . , “Homage to Thomas McGrath”

In the concluding section of Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Part Two, Thomas McGrath relates his North Dakota childhood to the poem’s present as “a metamorphic palimpsest.” Looking back on his life story, he writes: Time interposes A discontinuous strata, the sediments of the summer: What was and what is slide along old fault lines, history Condenses its marble heroes a metamorphic palimpsest Hardens between the farmhouse and here: and I dive Into the night-rock . . . ()1 This trope of the poet’s underground vision is at once geological, archaeological, and mythic. It crystallizes the stratified sites of memory that structure McGrath’s long poem: from the Dakotas to Louisiana, from “the coiling Kennebec River” in Maine to “War and the City” ()—to the Aleutians and then New York and Los Angeles—and back full circle to the childhood site of the farmhouse, recalled and reconstructed from the distant sites of the poem’s composition, listed in the conclusion of Part Two as: “North Dakota-Skyros-Ibiza-Agaete-Guadalajara, ” (). The trope of “a metamorphic palimpsest” evokes as well the poem’s literary and philosophical method of reclaiming a working-class history that is also autobiographical. As a structural principle, the “palimpsest” suggests a form of multiple superimposed surfaces, of present writings transforming previous writings, but it also suggests the material of writing itself—the surface on which 161

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it is discovered or recovered, erased or revised. Linguistically polyphonic and encyclopedically allusive, Letter is a “palimpsest” of an enduring Marxist revolutionary vision that also incorporates Hopi, Christian, and Greek myths of renewal, while its narration of history foregrounds the labor and materials of writing, erasure, and revision.2 As Michael Davidson has written in Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word, the palimpsest has been an important trope for representing both history and consciousness in modernist writing. It figures most prominently in the revisionary mythic writing of H. D.—in her long poems Trilogy and Helen in Egypt and in her novel entitled Palimpsest—but it also describes the self-consciously material and intertextual character of modernist poetry more generally.3 As Davidson points out, however, the palimpsest is usually read as an ahistorical figure of intertextuality. He argues instead for a reading strategy that is as attentive to the discursive frame of the text’s present as to its relationship to previous literary texts. Davidson reads the “materiality” of modern poetry through Walter Benjamin’s notion of the modern ruin that is “immanent in mass-produced commodities, an allegory of modern materiality’s impermanence and ephemerality.” The textual self-referentiality of the palimpsest becomes “a recognition of transitoriness and ephemerality in a world committed to the illusion of progress and permanence” (Davidson ). Davidson’s argument applies to the historiographic long poems that emerged out of the socioaesthetic debates of the s, such as Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead or Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred, which accentuate the political implications of cultural memory. The problem of cultural memory takes on renewed significance during the cold war, especially for Left poets whose literary careers were threatened. As the class conflict that fueled the political struggles of the s became less pronounced within the national consciousness after World War II, personal memory of the repressed past is increasingly represented palimpsestically in marginal sites of ruin, from Brooks’s Bronzeville to Oppen’s Brooklyn. This is especially true for socialist poets, such as McGrath, who figure the disintegration of the Left in disjunctions between national memory and local countermemory. The years in which McGrath wrote Part Two of Letter to an Imaginary Friend were among the most prolific of his long writing career. Not only did he complete this ambitious long poem, which he later expanded into four parts, he also published his New and Selected Poems () and The Movie at the End of the World: Collected Poems ().4 Despite such sustained work, McGrath is usually seen as a poet of the s. Even though his first book was not published

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until , and even though he was younger than a “New American Poet” such as Charles Olson, McGrath is usually identified with an “Old Left” whose Marxist poetics seemed remote from the new social movements of the s. As McGrath’s friend and most incisive Marxist reader, the British labor historian E. P. Thompson, has noted, Letter to an Imaginary Friend begins with the problem of a poet “speaking in a public voice to a public which has not yet learned to listen to him” (), a poet whose political stance was often dismissed by reviewers in the s and s as a vestige of an earlier era.5 This lack of recognition can be partially attributed to McGrath’s earlier persecution by HUAC and his subsequent blacklisting, which limited where he could teach or publish.6 However, the labor history that Letter narrates, especially the radical agrarian history of the Dakotas, is also obscure to readers in the aftermath of the McCarthy era. In the politicization of memory enacted by Letter, McGrath underscores how one result of the systematic destruction of the organized Left in the United States during the cold war was a national amnesia of the very history his poem documents. The most extensive critical readings of Letter—particularly those of Reginald Gibbons, Terrence Des Pres, Frederick Stern, and Thompson—have recovered much of this history, including the history of McGrath’s composition of Letter.7 In the following pages, I concentrate more specifically on the problem of historical amnesia that McGrath redresses in his self-referential long poem, a problem of the poem’s projected public that is at once rhetorical and political. In representing a specifically remembered but subsequently erased local past, McGrath’s “metamorphic palimpsest” recuperates a radical tradition that was barely visible in the s. “North Dakota / is everywhere,” writes McGrath in the beginning of Letter, Part Two (). This assertion becomes a resonant motif for the entire long poem, a centripetal site of memory that answers the centrifugal geography of the poem’s sites of composition. If “Dakota is everywhere,” an enduring “condition” (Letter ), it is also nowhere to “a public which has not yet learned to listen” to McGrath’s testimony. North Dakota is the marginal site in which private memory encounters public amnesia, the site of disappearance that compels the poem’s recurring act of return. This pervasive state beyond public recognition becomes the poem’s figure for cold war political repression, the underground site whose public anonymity is at once an indictment of this repression and a tactical response to its consequences. “Dakota” becomes a specifically regional geography of memory that also maps an outlaw history of a democratic socialism whose utopian promise likewise seems beyond “public recognition.” In figuring the marginal site of North Dakota as “everywhere,” Letter not only recovers the agrarian social

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history of the poet’s childhood, but it also relocates the American long poem’s presumed relation to national memory to a transnational history of socialist struggle.8 Letter is “not simply autobiography,” McGrath wrote, but is instead a “pseudo-autobiography,” as “representative” in its stance as it is “personal,” emphasizing “those moments when my life line crosses through the concentration points of the history of my time.” What distinguishes Letter from other ambitious long poems of its time, and what has also limited its audience, is not so much the eccentricity of its political, historical, and regional geographical frames of reference as its insistence that the sociohistorical “condition” it surveys is a representative “legend of these times,” that North Dakota is everywhere (“Note” ). McGrath articulates the problem of his long poem’s historical and geographical legibility as a problem of the poet’s ambiguous class position: Letter is not a poem that comes out of the sensibility of the city middle-class intellectual. The city is in the poem, of course, but there is a lot, too, of the backlands and of place—that “Dakota” which is central to the poem. There is other material in the poem which seems to me more or less new. Work, for example, is not something which most poets write about. Also communality or solidarity—feelings which are perhaps more important to us than romantic love—never appear in our poetry. Perhaps I have begun to identify them. The attitudes toward these materials, also, are not those of the petty bourgeois intellectual no matter how alienated. (“Note” ) The relationship of work and communality to the specific place where McGrath spent his childhood is crucial for understanding the worldview of Letter. E. P. Thompson has written that the history of the Dakotas, and of McGrath’s family in particular, provides almost a “parable of capitalism” (). Thompson writes, “Here a civilization was planted, with immense hardship, in one generation; struggled to maintain itself in the face of dust bowls and mortgages in the next; and gave way to collapse and emigration in McGrath’s own generation” (). From the experience of McGrath’s immigrant Irish grandparents, who settled as homesteaders in a North Dakota where the Sioux had just been displaced, to McGrath’s own experience of growing up during the Depression, this family history hardly conforms to the “American dream” of upward mobility and prosperity so often associated with the rural Midwest. It instead coincides with a turbulent period of agrarian history in which farmers became politically organized to resist exploitation by banks, grain companies, and railroads. From the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century to the radical farm organizations

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of McGrath’s childhood, the history of the Dakotas in particular is distinguished by the organized struggle of farmers to protect their interests from corporate power and federal control. The most radical of these organizations, the socialist Nonpartisan League, achieved its greatest political success in North Dakota. Running on a platform that included increased rights for farmers and industrial workers, the end of monopoly business, graduated income and inheritance taxes, and national ownership of public transportation and communications, the Nonpartisan League won control of the North Dakota legislature during the late s. While this electoral success was short-lived, its impact was lasting, as the Nonpartisan League succeeded in implementing such progressive legislation as the creation of a state bank and a public granary system.9 The radical tradition of the Dakotas informs the utopian vision of Letter, as does the resurgent labor movement of the s and s. Letter looks back to the radical movements of McGrath’s ancestors and his youth not nostalgically or elegiacally, but to “link with the revolutionary past in order to create, invent, rescue, restructure, resurrect that past.” As McGrath notes, the need to “locate ourselves on the map of ourselves and our time” has become an increasingly important impulse for postwar American poetry more generally (“McGrath on McGrath” ). This is especially true for poets in the rural West, who confront a past that is, paradoxically, more “alive and close at hand” than that of the urban East but also more obscure to the metropolitan public. Western poets of the generation following McGrath—such as Robert Bly, William Stafford, or Richard Hugo—have shown that the “central experience” of their time can be located in rural places as well as the city, places that are simultaneously “local and international” (“McGrath on McGrath” ). Writing in the s and s, however, McGrath writes with less assurance of public recognition of the rural western history he narrates. The history of the Dakotas, which in Letter is at once a geography rendered through precise memory and a redemptive vision of future possibility, is very much a history of marginality—geographical, social, and historical. While the West is “a place of wounds” for McGrath, of genocidal wars and of exploitation of agricultural labor, this autobiographical past is American history, even if this history is repressed—or “paved over”—in the metropolitan literary centers of the East (“McGrath on McGrath” –). Letter locates the value of work and communality most prominently in the western agrarian experience of McGrath’s childhood. The “pseudoautobiographical” stance of his long poem, however, is informed as much by his extensive engagement with Marxist theory and anthropology as with American and European modernism. Throughout his life as a writer, McGrath consistently

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advocated a materialist theory of art that underscores the rigorous labor of writing. He writes in a polemical essay entitled “The Frontiers of Language” that poetry is a “trade,” a socially significant vocation rather than a bourgeois avocation. As a politically engaged vocation, poetry requires more than “just bloody inspiration, or good feeling or high thinking.” McGrath writes: “I can die a martyr on all the barricades in the world, and it will not make me a revolutionary poet unless I learn my trade. . . . [I]t begins first of all in knowing what the trade is, learning what the hell the language has been—it’s always changing, dying, being reborn.” If language is the material of the poet’s trade, then it is imperative that the poet make something “new” from this material. The poem cannot be “just an attempt to say over again the things I’ve learned to say, even if I’ve learned to say them fairly well. . . . [A]s workers, as cultural workers for the revolution and all that jazz, we’ve got to bloody well produce (“Frontiers” ). In making his case for a formally and linguistically experimental Marxist poetry, McGrath distinguishes between two forms of political poetry, the “tactical” and the “strategic.” The tactical is the more familiarly “proletarian” form of political poetry that purposively addresses an immediate occasion or event, exemplified by the poems in McGrath’s  International collection, Longshot O’Leary’s Garland of Practical Poesie. The more expansive category of the strategic poem, on the other hand, has been less universally accepted among Marxist critics because its purpose is not to “direct” consciousness, but to “take in as many contradictions as possible,” to “expand our consciousness.” Letter is McGrath’s most extensive strategic poem, as it aims not only to expand but to “create consciousness” (Interview with Gibbons and Des Pres ). Interestingly, McGrath does not limit such “revolutionary” work to socialist poetry, as he cites as examples not only a long poem like Pablo Neruda’s Canto General (“Frontiers” ) but also The Waste Land, which has a “real revolutionary content; not in a positive sense, but because it reports a certain . . . breakdown of values” after World War I, specifically among “the intellectuals who were in alliance with the ruling class” (Interview with Gibbons and Des Pres ). It is understandable how such an affirmation of the “revolutionary content” of The Waste Land would have been a controversial claim in the pages of the New Masses, where McGrath first articulated his theory in the late s. Yet even though McGrath’s claims are based on the poem’s formal power to “create consciousness,” his approach to poetry is not formalist, as his emphasis on the specific sociohistorical impact of The Waste Land suggests. As openly eclectic as his concept of the strategic poem appears, and as defiant as it is of critics who equate poetry with the poet’s politics, McGrath’s approach to the intellectual work of poetry is a historical materialist approach, based particularly

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on the writings of a s British Marxist who was as influenced by anthropological theory as by Marxist socioaesthetics, Christopher Caudwell. Caudwell’s Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry () was, according to McGrath, “the most important book by a Marxist on the subject of the arts” (Interview with Gibbons and Des Pres ).10 Thompson has concurred with McGrath that Illusion and Reality provided the most complex Marxist argument for the function of the artist available at the time, as it presented an antiutilitarian “materialist vindication of the primacy of spiritual forces in human development.” Caudwell articulates the function of poetry as “partly ‘adaptive,’ socializing and adapting the ‘instincts’ to changes in material being; and partly that of summoning up the spiritual energies of the group prior to any collective action” (Thompson ). While Caudwell’s impact on the arts was foreshortened by his early death in the Spanish civil war, and while he has not had the lasting impact on Marxist literary theory as his Frankfurt School contemporaries, Illusion and Reality was well received by Marxist critics and Popular Front poets alike when it was first published.11 Caudwell’s inquiry into the origin and function of art attracted renewed interest during the postwar years. The discovery of the Lascaux cave paintings and the subsequent publication of G. R. Levy’s The Gate of Horn (), which studied totemism and cave art, generated new attention to Caudwell’s formulation of the ritualistic role of art.12 Of particular importance to McGrath is Caudwell’s historical materialist explanation of poetry’s dynamic role in returning the poet and the poet’s audience to an otherwise lost sense of communality. Caudwell’s formulation of the sources of poetry draws from anthropological theories of ritual collectivity, from James Frazer and Emile Durkheim to the Cambridge Hellenists (particularly Jane Harrison), which also influenced poets such as Eliot in the early decades of the century.13 Caudwell argues for a more practical economic function for art, however, as his Marxist approach links the anthropological study of poetry’s ritual function to its socioeconomic relation to divisions of labor. As he argues, the development of poetry corresponds with the complexity of the organization of labor on which it is based. For example, the ritualistic role of poetry among hunting and gathering cultures is based on a more collective form of expression than that of more complex societies because labor is less differentiated. In “primitive” cultures, poetry’s social basis in rituals of work, such as the harvest, is not only integral to this work but constitutive of collective identity: For poetry describes and expresses not so much the grain in its concreteness, the harvest in its factual essence—which it helps to realise and which are the

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conditions for its own existence—but the emotional, social and collective complex which is that tribe’s relation to the harvest. It expresses a whole new world of truth . . . which has been brought into being by the fact that man’s relation to the harvest is not instinctive and blind but economic and conscious. Not poetry’s abstract statement—its content of facts—but its dynamic rôle in society—its content of collective emotion—is therefore poetry’s truth. (Caudwell ) It is only with an increasing division of labor that poetry moves farther away from everyday life, that it becomes associated with leisure rather than work. Paradoxically, however, the more technically complex poetry that emerges from this increasing class differentiation indicates not only the poet’s alienation from society but also the desire to (re)connect with the “collective emotion” of poetry. Modern poetry thus represents “man withdrawing from his fellows into the world of art, only to enter more closely into communion with humanity” (Caudwell ). The appeal of Caudwell’s socioaesthetic vision for McGrath lies very much in its utopian impulse.14 As Caudwell explains, the poet’s withdrawal into the unconscious connects him or her to a collective consciousness of shared symbols. Through the subsequent projection of this fantasy world in poetic language, the poet engenders a collective experience of shared emotional attitudes, a transformative experience that can potentially produce social action. It is only with the emergence of revolutionary communism that the poet’s alienated social position changes, however, as the movement from bourgeois culture to communism is a movement as well toward “the social solidarity of primitive communism” (Caudwell ). Significantly, this greater correspondence of poetry with society does not imply a more “primitive” form of poetry, as the transformation of a bourgeois society into a communist society cannot negate its own history. The relation of poetry to society would resemble that of “the primitive tribe,” but with the important difference “that the tremendous growth of the productive forces has differentiated poetry from the other arts, the arts from the sciences, and changed poetry itself from the poetry of a tribe to the poetry of individual men.” In becoming collective, Caudwell argues, “poetry in the era of communism will not become less individual but more so. This individuation will be artistic— carried out by the change of the social ego, not personal and dream-like—carried out by the reduction of the social ego to unconsciousness” (Caudwell – ). Caudwell’s utopian vision of a collectivist poetry that is not “less individual but more so,” that embodies the linguistic complexity of its emergence, informs the palimpsestic autobiographical method of Letter. More important, and more

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distinctive to McGrath’s writing, however, is the relation of poetry’s “primitive” ritualistic relation to group work to its more ambiguous—and more alienated— status within bourgeois society. In Letter, the collective labor of the harvest that McGrath remembers from his childhood evokes a mythic sense of “solidarity” not unlike that of Caudwell’s “primitive communism.” His recovery of this solidarity is a necessary antidote to the sense of alienation with which he begins Letter. McGrath began writing Letter in Los Angeles a year after his appearance before HUAC in . McGrath refused to cooperate with the committee as it questioned him about his involvement with the Communist Party, as a writer and as an activist. His statement eloquently defends his right not to cooperate, citing his ethical responsibilities as an educator and a poet as well as his constitutional rights as a citizen.15 Shortly afterward, he lost his teaching job at Los Angeles State College, despite protests by his students and colleagues. He began working as a documentary film writer and editor but was soon blacklisted from the film industry as well. At the same time, he was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the Communist Party in the United States, as he disapproved of the party’s advocacy of the Popular Front during and after the war. By the time that he was persecuted for his involvement in the party by HUAC, he was no longer an active member. Given the sense of beleaguered alienation McGrath experienced in the early s, it is no surprise that the opening montage of Letter evokes such desolate scenarios of isolation. The quotation that opens Letter is as ominous as it is disorienting: “‘From here it is necessary to ship all bodies east’” (). This initial quotation, whose speaker and listener, location and occasion, are not identified, introduces the problem of memory that underlies the poem’s autobiographical quest. The mysterious context of these words, quoting McGrath’s close friend and fellow Communist poet Don Gordon, is in fact quite specific to McGrath’s situation of being blacklisted, unemployed, and disillusioned in cold war Los Angeles (Des Pres ). Because the quotation is unattributed, however, its context implicit rather than explicit, it conveys a heightened sense of dread. It suggests a traumatic memory whose specificity cannot be acknowledged but whose recurrence cannot be repressed. This disembodied quotation introduces not only the convergence of the “representative” and the “personal,” it also introduces the poem’s palimpsestic method, as the montage of voices that emerges in the opening lines is matched by a profusion of coinciding spatial and temporal constructs: “I am in Los Angeles, at  Marsh Street, / Writing, rolling east with the earth, drifting toward Scorpio” (). From the poem’s location of composition—Los Angeles, with its mythic associations, followed by the mundanely specific street address—to its

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cosmological movement in time and space “toward Scorpio,” the opening of Letter conflates memory, history, and myth. The narrator’s memory is implicated within a history structured by the binary opposition of east to west, an ideologically charged opposition that resonates nationally and globally, that during the cold war had such a direct impact on McGrath’s life as well as on international politics, but an opposition that the poem complicates through its initial temporal and spatial discontinuity. This opposition of east to west also evokes the history of the U.S. West, which is both the mythic site that attracted McGrath’s ancestors and a site of memory that often contradicts its mythic appeal. The mythic vision of the West is suggested in the poem’s subsequent quotation of a tragic migratory tale: “They came through the passes, they crossed the dark mountains in a month of snow, Finding the plain, the bitter water, the iron rivers of the black North. Horsemen, Hunters of the hornless deer in the high plateaus of that country, They traveled the cold year, died in the stone desert.” () As in The Waste Land, such a mythic “stone desert” becomes an objective correlative for both the poem’s historical consciousness and the narrator’s subjective consciousness, a site of exile that registers the disjunction between the heroic struggles of a mythic past and the present struggle to render this past meaningful. Unlike The Waste Land, however, Letter does not anchor its subjective consciousness within an authoritative literary tradition. The quoted mythic passage offers no notes or any other clues about its source—it is, according to McGrath, a narrative of his own invention (Engel ). While parodying the scholarly impulse to definitively locate the sources of quotations, Letter underscores its intertextual method as well as the dialogic consciousness constructed through its narrative memory. McGrath writes of this “long journey ago”: “I do not know what end that journey was toward./—But I am its end. I am where I have been and where / I am going. The journeying destination—at least that” (). The problem of memory, of mapping one’s own “journey,” is also a problem of subjectivity, a subjectivity constituted by the very divisions of time and space that disrupt the poem’s narration. The narrative “I” that is the present “end” of the journey, the “journeying destination” of the poem’s composition, is as multiple, as complexly inscribed by conflicting narratives, as the opening page on which it asserts itself.

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McGrath’s return to his childhood past in the opening of Letter continually registers the divide between the remembered past and the narrative present, but not as an autobiographical narrative of individual exile. The individual trajectory he begins to narrate in Part One—“And at the age of five ran away from home. / (I have never been back. Never left.)” ()—evokes the earlier experience of his immigrant family as well as the more collective experience of his peers, whether regional, political, or simply generational, whose relation to “home” is as inflected with alienation as his is. Most important, Letter represents this experience linguistically, registering a discord between language and landscape that is as restorative of an intimate relation to place as it is distant to one far removed from the poem’s Dakota site of memory. For example, his initial portrait of his father is both reverently inventive and irreverently absurd, as McGrath remembers his own first experience of running away from home. “Leaving the ark-tight farm in its blue and mortaged weather,” he finds himself . . . adrift in the turkey wind Or pocked with the guinea-print and staggering script Of the drunken-sailor ducks, a secret language; leaving Also my skippering Irish father, landlocked Sinbad, With his head in a song-bag and his feet stuck solid On the quack-grass-roofed and rusting poop deck of the north forty, In the alien corn: the feathery, bearded, and all-fathering wheat. () From the “turkey wind” to the “guinea-print and staggering-script / Of the drunken-sailor ducks,” the boy’s aimless journey is depicted in homely images of flight, the “secret” vernacular language inscribed on the landscape that the poet has “never left.” These images of flight are contained syntactically within the metaphor of the “ark-tight farm,” a metaphor that simultaneously evokes a protective communality and an unpredictable waywardness. The imagery of sailing that more absurdly but no less powerfully inscribes the Dakota farm marvelously conveys both the displacement his Irish immigrant family had experienced and the wandering verbal imagination McGrath inherited from his family, from his father especially. The poem’s narrative disjunction between past and present corresponds with this disjunction between language and place, between the (im)migrant’s expectations and an alien geography that necessitates linguistic invention. In the retrospective movement of the poem, in the “underground” journey back to childhood, the North Dakota landscape becomes a linguistically hybrid

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wonderland, composed not only of a language remembered from childhood but also of a palimpsest of dialects and sociolects that evoke the poet’s subsequent experience and the historical consciousness that translates this experience. The alliterative description of riding in the family buggy—“Jouncing and bouncing on the gumbo roads / Or slogging loblolly in the bottom lands” ()—exemplifies this linguistic act of bricolage, as the “gumbo” roads and the “loblolly” slogging quite literally signify an inventive mixture of elements. The buggy itself is at once a vehicle of escape, of imaginative flight, and a vehicle of connection to family and place. It transports the poet from the raucous family journeys of his childhood to more disturbing but mythic images of flight: “the bucking redball freights or riding the blinds cold / Or sick and sea-sawed on the seven seas / Or in metal and altitude, drilling the high blue” (). These images of flight reiterate the sense of sorrow that motivates the poet’s reflections on his past, that connects his departure from home to a subsequent historical consciousness of unthinkable loss—“Through Dachau and Thaelmann / Rolfe in Spain” ()— to the present sound in “far Los Angeles” of “The Flying Dutchman in the dry river / Mourning,” the haunting sound of an arid landscape, “Empty except for footnotes/Of journeying far friends near” (). The very same image of the buggy that transports him through these “passages of the dark” reminds him, however, that it is precisely the poetic propensity to express this loss that he has inherited from such a “goddamned gallimaufry of ancestors” (). These memories of family communality, the ritual scene of song and storytelling, both “Stain and sustain” () him in this “Mourning” time that occasions the poem. From the recollected moments of childhood communality, McGrath goes on to give voice to “a Custer’s Massacre of sad sacks / Who sang in my ear their histories and my own.” Bringing “these harvest dead / Into the light of speech” (), Letter, Part One, commemorates an array of figures from McGrath’s youth whose impact was lasting, from the Wobbly migrant farmhand Cal, the romantic hero of Part One, III, who taught him “when to laugh and when to be serious” () and whose example as a labor organizer also taught him class consciousness, to the “immortal girls, the summer manifestoes” () he lustily celebrates in Part One, IV, who initiated him into “the continent of guilt and forgiving, where love is” (). Part One likewise commemorates figures who personify the poet’s consciousness of later historical moments he experiences, such as the stoical “war hero” Cassidy, who had “worked on the high steel in blue Manhattan / And built the topmost towers” (), but who in the Aleutian camp is reduced to the position of “shit-burner” (); or Mac, the New York waterfront labor organizer who becomes the “image of exile” () in Mexico after the war. It is the memory of

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the darkest days of the Depression, however, that represents an especially profound sense of communality, memory that coincides with McGrath’s quixotic experience of “higher learning.” Upon arriving at the state university in Fargo, with only his father’s “Advice and ten dollars— / The money to last for a year, the advice for a lifetime” (), McGrath’s class consciousness is reawakened by a dean who insists that McGrath live in a new freshman dormitory—“Built by himself and some other learned doctors / And later to be presented to the college itself / When it was paid for” ()—a dormitory that he cannot afford. To the student who has just arrived from his family’s farm, the dean’s very words said “nothing but money, money. A conversation / We could not enter” (). If money is a language that inhibits conversation across the divide of social classes, the collapse of the economy that McGrath experiences during his subsequent college experience in Moorhead, Minnesota, “flattens” the differences between rich and poor. McGrath’s surreal rendering of this frozen “horizontal” mockutopia represents an inverse of the American dream: “Oh, all was equal then! / Like cattle caught in a storm, our sterns to the polestar / We humped for warmth together” (). While this vision of “equality” is as apocalyptic as it is utopian, a collectivist vision based on an equality of suffering, it does solidify a political consciousness already skeptical of American republicanism: “That’s when I saw for the first time / Iron-jawed George, Jefferson with his flutes and farms / And radical Madison—all of them deader than mackerel” (). The frozen despair that McGrath witnesses likewise heightens the irony of his literary heroes during his college years, Proust and especially Eliot, who, he writes, was “with me as I crossed the river, on my way to school,/Where the unemployed fished, the fish badly outnumbered” (). By the time that the economy has totally collapsed, “The fish are eating the unemployed” (). His education as a writer has clearly just begun. The Depression had a devastating impact on McGrath’s family. It was a struggle for a family like his, renting a small farm, to make a living even during periods of national economic prosperity, but the prolonged drought of the mid-s exacerbated the already difficult conditions.16 “Home,” when McGrath returns from college, is “where the loss is” (). His father’s response in the poem typifies the blend of sadness, anger, and enduring hope of Dust Bowl farmers: “Can’t be bad times forever,” my father said. “Between them Washington goddamned politicians, Bankers and debts—they turn a man anyway but loose. Grasshoppers, rust and dust storms, mortgages and foreclosures, But we’ll make it, Old Timer. We’ll make her yet.” ()

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The “loss” McGrath’s family experiences is not only a loss of confidence in the home they had worked so hard to establish but a loss of connection to the very land they had cultivated as well. The image of a North Dakota farm that follows from this loss evokes such disconnection: “Stark in the pouring light, on a page of snow, / The black alphabet of a farm lies jumbled together / Under its blue spike of smoke” (). The “stark” black and white image of the farm in the moonlight contrasts sharply with its “jumbled” incoherence. If the farm’s exterior can be outlined clearly from a distance, if the economic terms of its threatened existence are “stark,” the interior language of loss is more difficult to comprehend. The sense of doom so mournfully inscribed on the “page of snow” does not erase the barely legible but evocative “black alphabet” of the farm’s “jumbled” social existence. The image of the farm as a hieroglyphic text conveys the narrator’s distance from a site that no longer signifies a secure continuity. This “black alphabet” also evokes a lost sense of self, as the self that has returned to a home besieged by economic insecurity is itself “jumbled,” divided by loss. The narrator observes: The long procession of my pawky selves: My journeying small souls: helved, greaved, and garlanded With the blue weather and the bronze all-favoring Light of those first fine summers. Saw, behind The daffy caucus of gopher-hunters and swimmers: Walking delegates to the ego’s founding convention: Runaways Shapes out of sleep Voyagers . . . ..................................... Never came back; never left . . . And now returned in the long cortege of myselves. (–) This “cortege” of selves indicates an irreconcilable break from a pastoral world of childhood, in which a more unified self corresponds with a nurturing agrarian landscape. This break is evoked by the courtly diction of this “cortege” (“helved, greaved, and garlanded”), which suggests that the poet’s identity is divided by the uncertainty of his changing class position as a scholar; however, this excessively romantic diction also suggests that such a pastoral ideal is itself a product of the “pawky” boy’s romantic reading and imagination. Similarly, the

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more political diction of which this self is composed, the “daffy caucus” and “Walking delegates to the ego’s founding convention,” undercuts any association of a unified individual ego with any “founding” Jeffersonian agrarian ideal. What is lost is not only an idealized boyhood but also a more profound sense of “Communitas” that is simultaneously mythic and grounded in a historical consciousness of place. The Depression-era “Communitas” that Letter commemorates most vividly is the unspoken solidarity of male laborers engaged in collective endeavor. This sense of communality is sharpened by the oppressive conditions in which they work. McGrath recalls most vividly working on a logging crew, felling trees in the North Dakota winter, knowing that the loggers’ very livelihood is threatened: “The solidarity of forlorn men / Firm on our margin of poverty and cold” (). The commemoration of this work is elegiac in its tone. Letter mourns the end of an era in this Dakota “margin” as it celebrates the communal ideal embodied in the collective work of physical labor: Those were the last years of the Agrarian City City of swapped labor Communitas Circle of warmth and work Frontier’s end and last wood-chopping bee The last collectivity stamping its feet in the cold. () This idealized “last collectivity” is recollected in an “anguish” of “exile” that is deeply felt by the poet because it is collective. This song of anguish resonates in a landscape frozen in memory: So, carried my anguish around like a poem cast In bronze: Where verdigris grew like moss on a standing stone, And sometimes I read its name in the flowing tree of the North, The midnight river of boreal light. In the screel of snow And the iron singing of the wheels of the gravel wagons Where the WPA farmers worked on the roads Sometimes I seemed to hear. () As self-consciously mythic as the “poem cast / In bronze” appears to be, with the metaphor of the “standing stone” evoking Yeats’s elegiac “Easter, ,” the “WPA farmers” locates this vision in a specifically remembered historical context. The

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harsh irony of the “iron singing,” the mechanized song of impoverished farmers employed by the federal government, is inscribed in the very roads that hastened the farmers’ obsolescence. While the narrator first returns home from college, “Shipwrecked/in the snow of the north forty” (), and the “blizzard of lost identities” () that emerges from this shipwreck conveys an irreconcilable sense of disconnection from home, a self divided, the shipwreck also sets the stage for temporary connections to more improvised communities, a self multiplied, who can adapt to the unpredictable social upheaval of the Depression years. His return to college brings him to such an improvised “home” far from the expected site of higher learning, “Camp Depression.” This educational “community,” a derelict outpost on the margins of the college town, is based on the shared experience of suffering, of hunger and want: A string of cabooses, Remnants of vanished trains, crouch in a square Like the pioneers’ covered wagons, a tight perimeter Against the Comanche winter. () This frontier gathering of “pilgrim souls” () represents a different form of lost communality than the “Agrarian City,” as it is shaped by the immediate pressures of a historical moment that was as promising as it was oppressive. From the retrospective moment of the poem’s composition, from the “starry wreckage” () of the cold war s, “then was a different country” (). While “then” represented McGrath’s first exposure to Marxist theory and his initiation into the Communist Party, this “country” is more ramshackle than organized.17 It is depicted as a marginal “pioneer” community improvised out of mutual need, united by a desperate desire for revolutionary social change: Music under the dogged-down Dead lights of the beached caboose. Wild talk, and easy enough now to laugh. That’s not the point and never was the point. What was real was the generosity, expectant hope, The open and true desire to create the good. () Such “Wild talk,” which was “the talk of the states those years” (), represents not so much an organized revolutionary movement as a collective “dream” (), however romantically it is recollected. To speak of this dream, as McGrath insists in an interplay of lyric reflection and passionate polemic, is not to reduce “the

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People” to vaguely populist terms: “To talk of the People / Is to be a fool. But they were the sign of the People,/Those talkers” (). This “sign” manifested itself in not only “talk”: as “Sentimental” as their “Concern for injustice” appears in retrospect, “some of them died of it, giving blood to the dream. / And some of them ran away; and are still running” (–). If this revolutionary dream “Went underground about ” (), deep underground in “the tertiary deposits” (), it is here revived in a “landscape of romance, all iron and sentiment / Under the prose of snow!” (). Reflecting on his polemical act of recovering this past as much as on the revolutionary “sentiment” of the Depression, McGrath insists on the “romantic” power of the poet to (re)make the landscape, to uncover the submerged dream from the numbing “prose of snow,” to recover a history buried but not dead. The improvised community of “Camp Depression” that McGrath commemorates accrues utopian value in the reconstruction of an “underground” history. This “underground” history is implicated within global patterns of radical transformation as the narrative moves toward “War and the City,” toward the numbing despair of World War II and the subsequent cold war anxiety of Manhattan. Prior to these concluding sections of Part One is the recollection of a more romantically optimistic vision of “the commune: of pure potential” (), a communality found in the chance encounters of migrants—“refugees”—on the western road. Reconstructing his own migration from South to North with his first wife, Marian, newly married and finished with his graduate work in Louisiana, he locates this journey within a phantasmagoric world of global geography: The stars shift and maps are redrawn: of islands Blown up at sea, of frontiers soft as chalk, Of archipelagos adrift, blazing, and the façades of cathedrals Famous . . . Redrawn in fire . . . As I went toward the North Europe bled and burned. For each state line that I crossed Nations were sold and collapsed. They died in the oily smoke Of the high summer—the poor— died out in the country Which before they’d never had money enough to see. () The extraordinary wartime transformation of islands and archipelagos seems surreal because the violence is so distant. The subsequent mathematical equation

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of “each state line that I crossed” with European nations “sold and collapsed” underscores the contrast of physical space—traversed, observed, experienced— with such abstract divisions of this space as states and nations. This equation— the singular subject traversing an abstract map of state and nation—contrasts even more sharply, however, with “the poor” who appear in the following sentence, the common denominator of a burning European warfront and a western American scene of unemployment. “They” are grammatically ambiguous but dramatically omnipresent, whether European or American, dying “in the oily smoke / Of the high summer.” The reconstructed landscape of the road is international, not the romanticized American road of opportunity or even its Depression inverse: And the roads were black with men. Toward Fresno, toward Dijon Toward Terre Haute, Bonne Terre, toward Paris, toward Warsaw, toward Medicine Hat the roads were alive. Refugees International winter: The long night-running toward another shore. () The “International winter” of migration is not without its romance, however; nor was the profound sense of love that this memory evokes peculiar to the newlywed husband and wife. Despite the hunger and hardship of the road, “love seemed enough.” It was enough to “say love: and all those masterless men / To become their masters in the commune of mystical toil” (). Like the communality of the woodchoppers, this “mystical” solidarity was enhanced by desperation, experienced intensely even if not verbally expressed: Still, it was said. We said it, if no one heard it. And, going north through the summer in what was the end of a life (Though it seemed a beginning), the crazy jungles, the wild People on the roads—that was my true country: And still is so—the commune: of pure potential. () The “commune: of pure potential” goes “underground” with the onslaught of war and the postwar assault on communism that Part One goes on to narrate. Despite the occasional tremors of such “potential,” the experience of the war years and their aftermath leaves McGrath with a more pervasive sense of “unnamable loss” (). What is lost is not only the “love” that sustained his marriage but the communality generated by the revolutionary potential of the s: “The massive and central grief, the great secret loss of the war: / The cantrip and singing

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circle dreaming against the cold” (). Replacing the “true country” of refugees is a “Country of strangers” (), whether in the North Dakota “home” with its “houseful of ghosts” () or in the Los Angeles of bitter exile from which he writes Part One. It is only the memory of solidarity that sustains the poet in his exile. In composing a collective myth from the ruins of the s, however, McGrath also sustains the “underground” vision of “the commune: of pure potential.” Part Two of Letter begins in a location far from the Los Angeles address where Part One concludes: Skyros, Greece, “This town where Theseus sleeps on his hill—/ Dead like Crazy Horse.” As this conflation of classical Greek and American Indian figures suggests, Part Two begins with the premise that “North Dakota / is everywhere,” a specific site of autobiographical memory but also a symbolic site of “poverty,” of the “dialectic of money” (), a “condition” (). Preceding the opening lines of Part Two is a montage of three epigraphs—quoting Bertolt Brecht, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Fats Waller—a juxtaposition of texts that itself exemplifies the dialogic method of Letter as well as its eclectic frame of reference. The first and last of these epigraphs call for collective solidarity— and ingenuity—in the face of institutional authority. The first, Brecht’s utopian “Everything or nothing! All of us or none,” is echoed by the more pragmatic voice of resistance in the third epigraph, the concluding line of “The Joint Is Jumpin’”: “Don’t give your right name! No, no, no!” (). Between these epigraphs is a lengthier quotation of Lévi-Strauss that speaks more directly to the poem’s “pseudo-autobiographical” rhetorical position of marginality: [L]uck, chance, and talent are of no avail, and the man who wishes to wrest something from Destiny must venture into that perilous margin-country where the norms of Society count for nothing and the demands and guarantees of the group are no longer valid. He must travel to where the police have no sway, to the limits of physical resistance and the far point of physical and moral suffering. Once in this unpredictable borderland a man may vanish, never to return; or he may acquire for himself, from among the immense repertory of unexploited forces which surrounds any well-regulated society, some personal provision of power; and when this happens an otherwise inflexible social order may be cancelled in favour of the man who has risked everything. . . . Society as a whole teaches its members that their only hope of salvation, within the established order, lies in an absurd and despairing attempt to get free of that order. () This quotation evokes a “perilous margin-country” not altogether different than the legendary “Western [sic] frontier,” the “unpredictable borderland” of U.S.

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expansionism, the “Dakota” that is “everywhere” but everywhere mystified. Within this liminal state lies the possibility to reinvent oneself, to redefine one’s relation to the social order, yet as the concluding sentence suggests, this very possibility is contained within an ideology that simultaneously encourages and delimits the desire to “get free of that order.” Such is the position from which McGrath surveys the cold war wreckage of the Left in Letter—outside yet within a geographically expansionist “established order”—a wreckage that recalls the lost agrarian world of his childhood, itself the result of the migration—or invasion— of Euro-American immigrants to the “Indian” territories of the Great Plains. The Lévi-Strauss epigraph is in fact more specifically germane to McGrath’s “metamorphic” recollection of his Dakota childhood than the poem indicates. The source of this epigraph, which is identified neither in McGrath’s text nor in most critical readings of Letter, is Lévi-Strauss’s complex autobiographical reflection on his anthropological research in Brazil, Tristes Tropiques. The subtitle of the English translation of this book, An Anthropological Study of Primitive Societies in Brazil, belies the philosophical and imaginative range of Lévi-Strauss’s thinking, as the book takes up nothing less than the subject of anthropology and the meaning of the “primitive.” Not only does the epigraph relate to the autobiographical stance of Letter, Part Two, but the structural complexity of Tristes Tropiques likewise corresponds with the palimpsestic self-referentiality of Letter. In the quoted passage, Lévi-Strauss is comparing the “absurd and despairing” western traveler’s desire to transgress the social order to American Indian initiation ceremonies, in which individuals subject themselves to an extreme physical ordeal in order to attain a visionary experience. In either case, whether the traveler be the American Indian adolescent or the anthropologist or poet in quest of the “primitive,” any presumed antithesis of the individual and society is false, as this dialectic emerges from the social group that sanctions such desire. The passage is from an early chapter of Tristes Tropiques entitled “The Quest for Power,” which situates the author’s meditations on his professional “adventures” within larger questions of international tourism, exoticism, and colonialism. Reflecting on his own “shame and disgust” to be narrating the story of his Brazilian “expeditions” (Tristes Tropiques ), Lévi-Strauss concedes: “I understand how it is that people delight in travel-books and ask only to be misled by them. Such books preserve the illusion of something that no longer exists, but yet must be assumed to exist if we are to escape from the appalling indictment that has been piling up against us through twenty thousand years of history” (Tristes Tropiques ). Aware of his own implication as an anthropologist within this international network of power, he writes elegiacally about the disappearance of “authentic”

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primitive cultures, which have been either corrupted by the pressures of global commodification and homogenization or erased altogether. Even so, the appeal of “exotic” adventure persists, despite the knowledge that travel “can only bring us face to face with our historical existence in its unhappiest aspects” (Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques ): the poverty and the waste, the exploitation of people and resources, resulting from colonialism and international capitalism. Tristes Tropiques self-consciously enacts what James Clifford has identified as the dominant rhetorical mode of ethnography, the “allegory of salvage.” While the assumption that the outsider can restore a threatened culture’s “authenticity” through translating its practices into writing is questionable on many grounds, salvage ethnography is not unlike other pastoral modes of representation. As Raymond Williams has demonstrated in his incisive sociohistoric analysis of the English pastoral tradition in The Country and the City, the pastoral is not necessarily conservative of the dominant social order, as it can also function counterhegemonically in its assertion of radical alternatives. The pattern of retrospection that mourns the loss of an idealized place, where “authentic” social relations were presumably possible, is by definition nostalgic, but nostalgia can also function as a powerful mode of social criticism. While ethnographic writing can hardly avoid such pastoral allegorical structures that have so often informed European and American representations of “other” cultures, Clifford proposes that anthropologists can counteract the redemptive rhetoric of salvage through textual openness to different histories and through foregrounding their own textual practices (“On Ethnographic Allegory” ). Tristes Tropiques, which systematically disrupts its own allegorical structure to defamiliarize the ethnographer’s salvage art, exemplifies one such possibility. Not only is Tristes Tropiques the most self-referential of any work of anthropology, according to Clifford Geertz (), its “palimpsest” of genres foregrounds the relation of ethnographic writing to a wide range of discursive modes. It is at once a travel book that selfconsciously deploys the rhetoric of earlier travel writers; an ethnography that recounts Lévi-Strauss’s fieldwork; a philosophical discourse that rethinks Rousseau’s idea of the social contract through study of the “primitive” cultures of the Amazon; a reformist tract that critiques the impact of Western imperialism on the non-West; and a Proustian symbolist narrative that is as concerned with the narrator’s conceptualization of the past as with the events that are remembered (Geertz –).18 Tristes Tropiques is, as Geertz writes, above all a mythic quest story that is as much the story of its own construction as of the anthropologisthero’s journey(s), a story based on the failure of the narrator’s quest, his discovery of the absolute otherness of the primitive Other (–).

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In recollecting his various travels as an anthropologist, Lévi-Strauss ultimately rejects the opposition of “authentic” and “corrupted” cultures for a more complexly layered vision of cultural contact. A vivid example of this palimpsestic vision emerges in a memory he recounts of wandering the streets of Lahore. Disappointed in his quest for the “real Lahore,” he finds himself in a scene that corresponds with his own consciousness as a traveler: “No sooner was I out of this labyrinth than I came to the area where huge avenues have been sketched out among the ruins (due, these, to the riots of the recent years) of houses five hundred years old. So often, however, have these houses been destroyed and patched together again, so absolute is their decrepitude, that the notion of period has no meaning in their context. And that is how I see myself: traveller, archaeologist of space, trying in vain to repiece together the idea of the exotic with the help of a particle here and a fragment of debris there” (Tristes Tropiques ). The “patched together” houses epitomize the process of fragmentation and ruin that Lévi-Strauss elegizes throughout Tristes Tropiques, the process by which cultural differences are subsumed within an expansive commodity culture. Yet this narrative of disintegration, or “entropology,” as Lévi-Strauss writes (Tristes Tropiques ), does not totally diminish the present moment of invention and transformation that he observes. The “patched together” houses also exemplify his concept of bricolage, a different form of salvage art, the inventive art of making do with whatever materials that are available (Lévi-Strauss, Savage Mind – ). While this architectural figure for bricolage defies any coherent concept of cultural authenticity and historical periodization, Lévi-Strauss’s comparison of this process with the act of recollection is especially apropos to McGrath’s renewed reconstruction of his life in Letter, Part Two. The remembered sight of these houses is no purer, no less subject to the distortions of desire, than “the idea of the exotic” that the anthropologist vainly seeks to sustain. The “patched together” houses and the writer’s recollection of them are similarly products of bricolage, of improvised reconstructions of pasts from “fragments of debris.” While the recollected image is itself a product of inevitable decline, the reconstructive act of recollection is as insightful as it is imaginative: “Forgetfulness has done its work among my recollections, but it has not merely worn them thin, not merely buried them. It has made of these fragments a construction in depth that offers firmer ground beneath the feet and a clearer outline for the eye” (Tristes Tropiques ). As Clifford has written, it is precisely such geological metaphors that Lévi-Strauss employs in Tristes Tropiques that “transform empirical surface incongruities or faults into legible history” (Predicament ). McGrath’s trope of the “metamorphic palimpsest” suggests a similar process, a process in which “forgetfulness”—

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particularly the historical amnesia of the hegemonic consumer culture—both compels and shapes the act of recollection. Like Tristes Tropiques, Part Two of Letter recovers from the ruins of North Dakota a memory that is transformed into “legible history.” Part Two of Letter revisits the site from which McGrath surveyed the wreckage of the revolutionary utopian vision of Part One. Los Angeles becomes the dystopian site of collective exile, neither promising nor reassuring of communality in its postwar capitalist frenzy. This Los Angeles is a hellish wasteland, the final destination of a debased American dream, a grotesque antithesis of “the commune: of pure potential”: Windless city built on decaying granite, loose ends Without end or beginning and nothing to tie to, city downhill From the high mania of our nineteenth century destiny—what’s loose Rolls there, what’s square slides, anything not tied down Flies in . . . () What “flies in” to the postwar Los Angeles McGrath derides is capital, the capital that shapes the highly stratified “vertical city,” from the smog-choked lower levels of hell “where the color of labor is dark” () to the “Cadillac country” of “the leather priests of the hieratic dollar.” Above all are the agents of death and destruction, the masterminds of a defense industry that generates the most insidious form of capital as well as McGrath’s harshest invective: “Scientists who have lost the good of the intellect, mechanico-humanoids / Antiseptically manufactured by the Faustian homunculus process” (). The cold war language of these “Necrophiles. / Money protectors” (), “Singing of overkill, kriegspiel, singing of blindfold chess” (), pollutes the very air of public discourse; nonetheless, the myth of America contained in this language still attracts those dreamers undaunted by the desolation of a decade earlier: The land failed them; or else they failed the land. And turned westward their canvas-covered argosies Freighted with dreams: the Daniel Boones of the last myth Toward free land and free labor, the commune and round dance Journeying . . . But a myth’s not as good as a mile. Came to the echoing

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Horns of Disneyland, faintly blowing; to the jockeys of nightmare The dream-scalpers and the installment purchase blue-blood banks Of the Never-Never Plan. The dream had ended but they didn’t know it— Rootless at Hollywood and Vine slumbering in rented shoes. And still there ! —chained to the chariots of Scythian kings . . . () The syntax of this westward journey itself conveys the ideological “freight” of the myth of America. The journey has no subject, only vague movement; the agency of the travelers is subsumed by the dream. At the end of the journey is the ultimate simulacrum of a mythic California, the consumerist paradise of Disneyland. And at the end of the “dream” lies the illusion of still purposeful movement, “rootless” but “chained” to an ideology of nomadic servitude. Los Angeles becomes the metaphoric landscape of cold war America in Part Two, a landscape of repressed loss and mindless consumerism, a landscape in which “the Revolution” is “Decaying as fast as the American Dream” (). It is a landscape from which the radical labor movement has disappeared, in which workers have been “corralled in the death camps of money / Stoned in a rented dream frozen into a mask / Of false consciousness” (). It is a landscape of “Sleepwalkers in nightmare, drifting the battlefields of a war / They don’t even know is happening.” “Everything’s been Los Angelized” (), concludes McGrath, paved over, buried in the refuse of cold war consumerism. The Los Angeles neighborhood McGrath revisits is itself symptomatic of the historical amnesia that Letter counteracts. Like “a part-time ghost,” he returns to a Marsh Street of “wrecked houses and the blasted courts of the dream/Where the freeway is pushing through” (). Even the garden he remembers, the domestic site of hope that helped sustain him in a time of deep despair, has been ransacked and ruined: What was transportable had been taken long away. Among the detritus, rockslides, confessions, emotional moraines— Along the dream plazas and the alleys of the gone moon— Some stragglers and wildlings: poppy, sorrel, night-blooming Nothing. And found finally my own garden—where it had been— A pissed-upon landscape now, full of joy riding Beer cans and condoms all love’s used up these days Empty wine bottles wrappers for synthetic bread. ()

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Out of this geography of wreckage, out of this run-on sentence of a garden gone awry, McGrath finds some semblance of hope. Even in the face of such desolation, he pays tribute to the desperate communality of those like himself who had fled to Los Angeles, “mavericks in lonesome canyons, singing / Into the desert,” who comprise the renegade “Crazy Horse Resistance and Marsh St. Irregulars, / Building the Ramshackle Socialist Victory Party (RSVP) / and Union of Poets” ().19 The poet who “remembers and resurrects” () this improvised community, this “Ramshackle” party, also inscribes within the blasted landscape itself a sign of utopian promise, however remote, however mysterious: Observe. Sky-writing pigeons, their Blue unanswerable documents of flight, their Unearthly attachments. Observe: these last poor flowers, their light-shot promises, That immortality, green-signature of their blood . . . () If the pigeons’ “documents of flight” are “unanawerable,” and if the “greensignature” of the desiccated garden is itself erased by the encroaching concrete of the freeway, the poet who sings for the “imaginary city petrified / Megalopolitan grief homesteads of lost angels anguish” () ensures that the spirit of this place, however ephemeral, outlasts its burial. As witness, archaeologist, geologist, the poet is the salvage artist who makes “poems out of wreckage, terror, poverty, love” (), poems that in mourning a collective past renew its potential. From the “petrified/Megalopolitan grief ” of Los Angeles and New York in Part Two, McGrath returns to the site of memory from which he departed in Part One: to the stark And empty boyhood house where the journey first began . . . —to search there, in the weather-making highs, in the continental sleep For the lost sign, blazed tree, for the hidden place The century went wrong: to find in the Wobbly footprint Cal’s Country . . . () This return to North Dakota reiterates and elaborates on the redemptive topoi of Part One, of “labor and a place” (), but with the greater poignancy of lapsed time. The North Dakota farm that McGrath revisits in Part Two, V, is still the

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“old / Dominion of work and want” (), but it is otherwise alien. The transformation of the land is evident in the very road on which the poet arrives: The road outside the window was “our” road Once. It is now anybody’s road. It is the road On which everyone went away. () The road marks the transformation of a home into a site of dispossession and dispersal, a site in which the memory of a collective “everyone” gives way to the alien present of “anybody.” The site of memory that McGrath surveys of course contains earlier acts of dispossession, earlier departures, those of the Sioux, whose presence in the lifetime of McGrath’s parents seems less remote, and more significant, in this moment of reflection. It is here that the “frontier” contact of Euro-American and Sioux receives its fullest treatment in Letter, as a sign of a past that is as submerged as it is close in the poet’s retrospective glance: And what’s here—on the little bluff Over the little river? A way station, merely; A halfway house for the Indian dead—analphabetic Boneyard . . . It was here the Sioux had a camp on the long trail Cutting the loops of the rivers from beyond the Missouri and Mandan East: toward Big Stone Lake and beyond to the Pipestone Quarry, The place of peace. A backwoods road of a trail, no tribal Superhighway; for small bands only. Coming and going They pitched camp here a blink of an eye ago. It’s all gone now—nothing to show for it. Skulls Under the permanent snow of time no wind will lift Nor shift . . . —these drifting bones have entered the rock forever . . . () The “analphabetic / Boneyard” is made legible to a world that would prefer to forget it, as the telling of the Sioux history that predated his family’s arrival in

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the region defies the concluding claim that “it’s all gone now.” The archaeologistpoet uncovers the “drifting bones” that “have entered the rock forever,” mapping the land with their submerged presence. This brief historical narrative of the Sioux settlement depicts an ironic geography, from the “place of peace” where they had set up camp to the trail that is no “tribal / Superhighway,” a geography that reflects as much on the poet’s quest for his past as on the alienation that compels him. Within the ironic mode of commemorating the Sioux settlement is a more intimate mode of renewing this past, as McGrath reflects on the memories of his parents and grandparents, on the rare moments of friendly contact that preceded “Wounded Knee— / The last fight.” McGrath’s reminder of how recent this past is in the Dakotas returns us, however, to a present that mocks such memory: “South Dakota has stolen the holy / Bones of Sitting Bull to make a tourist attraction!” (). The poem’s return to a present that debases the past of American Indians and Euro-American settlers alike leads to a political conclusion that extends far beyond the local site McGrath observes: From Indians we learned a toughness and a strength; and we gained A freedom: by taking theirs: but a real freedom: born From the wild and open land our grandfathers heroically stole. But we took a wound at Indian hands: a part of our soul scabbed over: We learned the pious and patriotic art of extermination And no uneasy conscience where the man’s skin was the wrong Color; or the vowels shaped wrong; or his haircut; or his country possessed of Oil; or holding the wrong place on the map—whatever The master race wants it will find good reasons for having. () The “freedom” gained by McGrath’s ancestors is paradoxical but not entirely illusory, as this freedom grew out of the struggle to survive under adverse conditions, a struggle that required the knowledge, as well as the “toughness and strength,” of the land’s indigenous inhabitants. The series of colons that punctuates this history suggests that this process of “gaining a freedom” was an incontrovertible series of cause-and-effect events, a series of events marked by a sense of historical inevitability; however, the rhetorical relation of each clause (“A freedom . . . but a real freedom”) also suggests a logic of guilty rationalization, of masking the fundamental hypocrisy of a heroism based on theft. Given the

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escalating Vietnam conflict at the time McGrath was composing Letter, Part Two, and given the poem’s insistent critique of American imperialist expansionism, the conclusions drawn from this archetypal heroism are devastating. The narrator identifies himself with his ancestors, and the “soul scabbed over” from stealing American Indian lands signifies a collective mechanism of psychological repression that is perhaps as inevitable as it is dishonest. As this reflection on “frontier” history elaborates on the resulting pattern of expansion and denial, however, the narrator distances himself from the “we” who “learned the pious and patriotic art of extermination,” as he indicts the “master race” mentality of global imperialism and domestic oppression, in which any moral logic of “good reason” is falsified by the acquisitive imperative of “having.” While the “Indian is the first / Wound” (), the forced departure of Dakota farmers that McGrath revisits is more painful because it is so directly remembered. The North Dakota to which McGrath returns to teach (North Dakota State University at Fargo from  to ) is a land of “ghosts.” He describes the “abandoned farmhouses” with the scientific detachment of an astronomer: “burnt-out suns, and around them/The planetary outbuildings dead for the lack of warmth” (). This tone, however, cannot mask the alarming absurdity of the simile’s temporality, as these houses are haunted by ghosts of a quite recent past. The inhabited farmhouses observed by McGrath are likewise haunted by a memory of communality that seems quite distant from their present isolation. Each farmhouse in this prairie landscape is illuminated by a yard lamp that “beacons and beckons / Across the neighbor and empty fields: Come ye over. / But no one comes” (). In place of the customary sociability of rural neighbors is a more horrifyingly surreal image of domesticity, which underscores both the divide and the enduring connection between the “first wound” and the poem’s present: The houses blacked out as if for war, lit only With random magnesium flashes like exploding bombs (TV Courtesy REA) Cold hellfire screams Tormented, demented, load the air with anguish invisible Over the sealed houses, dark, a troop of phantoms, Demonic, rides: the great Indians come in the night like Santa Claus down the electronic chimneys whooping and dead. ()

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From the perspective of the outsider on the road, these “blacked out” houses each contain their own phantasmagoric wars, wars that recapitulate the “first wound” as absurdly but as mythically as the arrival of “Santa Claus.” While the arrival of “the great Indians” is represented by such a festive simile, which infantalizes the television viewers who await their magical gifts, the violent descriptive language of the wars suggests that this scene is also somewhat sadomasochistic, obsessive in its desire for “demonic phantoms.” This scene represents the need to revisit, over and over, the “first wound” that had so recently “scabbed over” in the Dakotas, but the dominant mood of this scene is one of darkness, of loneliness, of a commonality of disconnection from the other households watching the same television show. The “Dakota” that “is everywhere” is found in the “magnesium flashes” of darkened living rooms but also in the more sinister extension of the “first wound,” the nuclear missiles not far from the site that McGrath surveys, in “Minot/Grand Forks/sleeping their murderers’ sleep” (). It is ultimately McGrath the salvage artist, however, who testifies to a different Dakota, found in the material ruins of forgotten families uprooted by the Depression. In the debris of abandoned farmhouses, he presents the most moving scenes of thwarted dreams, of signs of hope that outlasted the lives of those who fled. In the wreckage of an abandoned farmhouse, he revisits the agrarian world of his parents and grandparents, the world supplanted by the televised simulacra of “frontier” life. The farmhouse that McGrath surveys in Part Two, V, has deteriorated so rapidly under the harsh Dakota seasons that the signs of human habitation are already buried in the detritus of birds and rats. Its most visible signs of its prior residents are in the storage areas of cellar and attic. In the cellar are “nests of Mason jars: crocks; jugs—an entire / Breakable culture abandoned archæological disjecta / Membra lost processes.” Even more revealing than this “breakable culture,” its disconnection from historical memory conveyed in an increasingly illegible run-on sentence, are the remains found in the attic, with its “secret histories like deadmen’s bones/Unburied in the gap-throated old-fashioned trunks’ dark fathoms” (). Here are the “aging and ageless photographs, unfixed in time,” and letters, which Talk all dark in a language of leaving and loss forgotten Tongues foreign sounding —words of love and hunger. ()

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As mysterious as such language appears, as remote and “foreign” as the expression of loss is in the context of this abandoned farmhouse, McGrath reminds us that these signs can be explained sociohistorically. The signs of the farmers’ hurried departure are signs not of their bankruptcy. “Spiritual props to the interest rate in the Farmers’ First / National Bank of West Nowhere Dakota” (), their presence is reduced to that of relics of a time long past, displaced by the agribusiness interests that supplanted them. This history is of course neither ancient nor inevitable. It is not just the economic betrayal of a generation that included McGrath’s parents that he critiques, but the subsequent historical amnesia of this betrayal. He compares this process of collective amnesia, significantly, to the repression of the American Indians’ presence on the same land. They are “Forgotten. / Lost as the last Indian: / Who were good men in their time: a century or a cemetery ago” (). The history of North Dakota that McGrath witnesses in Letter, Part Two, is as much a history of a utopian dream as a history of this dream’s dissolution: My grandfather saw the beginning and I am seeing The end of the old free life of this place—or what freedom There was: the round song at least: the solidarity In the circle of hungry equals. () This solidarity is itself a sign of the dream’s enduring appeal as it is a sign of its imminent decline, as McGrath commemorates a last, but lasting, moment of solidarity, a moment in which the need for solidarity is intensified by the challenge posed to the collective existence of “the circle of hungry equals.” If McGrath is skeptical not only of the dream’s endurance but of his own memory of the past, he never ceases to locate this thwarted utopian desire within a broader national mythos: And it’s only The nostalgia for the living dead and for abandoned places that moves me. (America is terribly old, saith the poet: Jim Wright) Aye. Because nothing endures. Marsh Street the Indians —gone under The pluralistic concrete where the new freeway blinds through. ()

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The ironic figures of opportunity and progress—the “pluralistic concrete where the new freeway blinds through”—underscore the deceptive language of a nationalism that is based more on an economy of planned obsolescence than on any purposeful freedom of movement. What lies submerged beneath the “pluralistic concrete” is the poet’s testimony to not only what is “dead” and “abandoned” but what “endures” through an underground memory that resists such erasure, a countermemory to a national history that “[s]eems only a simple catalogue of catastrophe leading here” (). What endures the “catalogue of catastrophe” that comprises so much of Letter is the poem’s recurring return to the North Dakota that “is everywhere,” the utopian desire rooted in a place that is sustaining not for its local distinctiveness but for its representative history: Man is the fate of his place, and place the fate of the man And of time A beginning then to know one’s place. () In offering “as guide this total myth, / The legend of my life and time” (), McGrath ultimately affirms the utopian desire that manifests itself as much in the palimpsestic space of the poem’s present as in its retrospective site of memory.

7. The Spectre of the 1930s George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous and Historical Amnesia To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. . . . Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.  , “Theses on the Philosophy of History” In  George Oppen completed his first poem since the publication of his first and then only published volume of poems, Discrete Series (). This poem, which was originally entitled “To Date” and later retitled “Blood from the Stone,” is at once an autobiographical reflection on those experiences most crucial to Oppen’s life and a meditation on constructions of time. The quarter century of literary silence between Oppen’s first book and his return to poetry had included labor organizing in New York for the Communist Party during the Depression, combat in Europe during World War II, and political exile in Mexico during and after the McCarthy era. It is not surprising, then, that “Blood from the Stone” addresses the relationship of memory to history. The haunting presence of the past is especially pronounced when Oppen recalls his earlier years in New York: The Thirties. And A spectre In every street, In all inexplicable crowds, what they did then Is still their lives. ()1 Oppen’s reemergence as a poet was very much a return to the “spectre” of the s. This return is informed by the vivid memory of a past subject to cold war historical amnesia—memory that is both profoundly personal and resolutely social, that is, as Oppen writes, “Still our lives” (emphasis added). Like Walter Benjamin’s materialist historian, Oppen “seize[s] hold of a memory as it flashes 192

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up at a moment of danger,” restoring utopian desire to “the city’s intricacies” in “Blood from the Stone” even as he confronts the more traumatic memory of war and its aftermath that distances him from “The Thirties.” “Blood from the Stone” is at once a return to a site of memory made strange by years of exile and an avowal of the significance of this strangeness. Its deceptively simple concluding line, “These were our times” (), underscores both the contradictory plurality of memories that complicate our apprehension of the past and the collective experience that endows it with meaning. As Oppen’s initial consideration of a past punctuated by literary silence, “Blood from the Stone” foreshadows his subsequent meditations on the past in the books he published in the s, The Materials (), This in Which (), and Of Being Numerous (), which won the Pulitzer Prize in . Nowhere is the problem of historical—or political—amnesia more pronounced than in Oppen’s long serial poem “Of Being Numerous,” which evolved in drafts for many years prior to its publication (first as “A Language of New York,” published in This in Which, and then as “Another Language of New York”). “Of Being Numerous” locates the repressed memory of the s in an urban environment that is at once familiar and alienating. The New York that Oppen encounters when he returns from Mexico to live in Brooklyn is hardly the same city where his wife, Mary, and he had made their home in the s and early s. As familiar as the city is for Oppen in the memories it evokes, it is also imbued with an elegiac consciousness of elapsed time. The problem of reconstructing the past is furthermore complicated by the political events that increasingly commanded Oppen’s attention in the s, particularly the growing revolt against state authority during the Vietnam War. As Oppen gradually came to realize, the s represented a return to the state of social crisis that he had experienced in the Depression, but a return with the challenging difference of the New Left and the new social movements, whose progressive politics more often conflicted than coincided with working-class social values in the United States. The New York City of “Of Being Numerous” is an often incoherent, contradictory palimpsest where the fragmentary ruins of lives, buildings, and neighborhoods all but obscure the poem’s momentary glimpses of utopian promise. Beginning with the question of Oppen’s silence and his return to poetry and New York City, this chapter examines how “Of Being Numerous” accentuates historical amnesia through its fragmentary structure, from its fractured syntax to its dialogic serial form, comprised largely of juxtaposed quotations. By evoking the discontinuities between past and present as well as the mediation of the past through the present, “Of Being Numerous” underscores the urgent need to “articulate the past historically” (Benjamin, “Theses” ).

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When asked about his response to the Depression in his  Contemporary Literature interview with L. S. Dembo, Oppen calmly asserts the sense of urgency he felt to commit himself to political action: “I think it was fifteen million families that were faced with the threat of immediate starvation. It wasn’t a business one simply read about in the newspaper. You stepped out your door and found men who had nothing to eat. I’m not moralizing now . . . but for some people it was simply impossible not to do something” (). George and Mary Oppen dedicated several years to organizational activity for the Communist Party, beginning with their work in organizing the unemployed in Brooklyn for the Workers’ Alliance. While their involvement in CPUSA organizational work was limited primarily to the years –, and while George Oppen was subsequently the recipient of numerous medals for his service in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II, he was under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from  to  (DuPlessis, introduction to Oppen, Selected Letters xiv– xv). Threatened with the likelihood of a prison sentence if they did not cooperate with FBI officials and HUAC in –, George and Mary Oppen decided to move to Mexico, largely to protect their daughter, Linda (born in ), from the possibility of her parents’ imprisonment. In Mexico City, they joined radical friends of theirs who were fleeing FBI and HUAC inquiries into their involvement with the Communist Party, and they lived in Mexico among other U.S. émigrés and political refugees until . While in Mexico, George Oppen designed furniture for a cabinetmaker shop and attended art school, but he apparently did not write at all (DuPlessis, introduction to Oppen, Selected Letters xvii). It is precisely Oppen’s twenty-five-year silence—and the dramatic silences within his subsequent poetry—that has made his insights on cold war American history so compelling to his readers.2 And it is the very questions about literary history that his career as a writer raises that problematize the still dominant historical narratives of postwar American poetry. The Objectivist poetry of the s, like other Left poetry of the period, was largely a casualty of the academy’s “political amnesia” until the s resurgence of interest in s writing. In an influential essay entitled “Third Phase Objectivism,” Ron Silliman even attributes the experimental extremism of the New American Poetry in the late s and early s to the presumed absence of any American literary avant-garde since the generation of Pound and Williams in the s.3 Oppen’s return to writing poetry coincides with what Silliman defines as a “third phase objectivism,” which, if not a renewed literary movement, was a return of the Objectivist poets to the public eye. This return provoked a reexamination of both the Objectivist movement of the s (the first phase) and its subsequent postwar absence from

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literary history (the second phase). As Oppen became a more public figure, at least within the limited public for avant-garde poetry, he represented an important bridge between the social revolt of the s and that of the s. He was aware, however, of the generational divide between his experience and that of younger poets when he began writing again in the s. In a  letter Oppen wrote to his sister and publisher, June Oppen Degnan, he wondered specifically how younger readers would react to such topics as “the Infantry, skilled workers, row boats, people in trailer camps, the unemployed movement in the thirties, a family, marital love, children, the old codgers of Southern California, the H Bomb” (Selected Letters ).4 Oppen feared such topics might be considered archaic or, worse, that their significance might not register at all for younger readers. His anxiety testifies to the transformation of the public for poetry that took place after the McCarthyist purge of Left intellectuals and artists like himself. Oppen recognized, that is, the challenge of translating a lifetime of experience that might seem alien to readers who would too readily accede to a version of history that discredits such “proletarian” or “populist” topics that he cites.5 The questions Oppen raised about his poetry when he returned to writing, and about the experience that compelled him to write, complicate the generational paradigm still widely assumed in histories of postwar American poetry. And they complicate the reductively oppositional terms so often invoked to define the cold war publics for poetry, which Oppen himself described as the “war-games of the Beats and Academics.”6 Oppen’s decision to stop writing poetry during the Depression was based on what he saw as conflicting political and literary convictions. “It’s a narrow public for poetry,” he asserted in a late interview: “It always will be. We didn’t dream of addressing the crowds with poetry. And we distinguished . . . between poetry and politics” (Oppen and Oppen ). Oppen’s decision to stop writing coincided with the Communist Party’s affirmation of the Popular Front, but this decision was not precipitated by the party’s cultural politics. His distinction between poetry and politics was actually quite insistent throughout his life. The changing— and disputed—resonance of this distinction suggests, however, how the “public for poetry” has itself been so radically transformed since the s. In his  interview with Dembo, Oppen elaborated on his decision to give up writing to commit himself fully to political activism: “If you decide to do something politically, you do something that has political efficacy. And if you decide to write poetry, then you write poetry, not something that you hope, or deceive yourself into believing, can save people who are suffering. That was the dilemma of the thirties. In a way I gave up poetry because of the pressures of what for

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the moment I’ll call conscience” (). Whereas his decision to devote himself to political activity was very much a response to the socioeconomic imperatives of his time, his commitment not to write instrumentalist political poetry was also based on an epistemological premise that informed his poetics throughout his lifetime. As he explains in his  essay, “The Mind’s Own Place,” this epistemological premise was also an ethical imperative: “It is possible to find a metaphor for anything, an analogue: but the image is encountered, not found; it is an account of the poet’s perception, of the act of perception; it is a test of sincerity, a test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness. . . . The distinction between a poem that shows confidence in itself and in its materials, and on the other hand a performance, a speech by the poet is the distinction between poetry and histrionics. It is a part of the function of poetry to serve as a test of truth” (). Oppen’s poetry provides no easy answers to the contradictory epistemology that informs his poetics, that while consciousness is inherently social, or intersubjective, there are inherent limitations in consciousness to how much one can comprehend and honestly articulate. To argue whether Oppen resolves this contradiction between his political and aesthetic commitments is less important, it seems to me, than to examine how he variously addresses its implications.7 What distinguishes Oppen’s poetry is the extent to which it engages readers to reflect on how language, on the most elemental levels of syntax, mediates perception. As critics such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Alan Golding, Burton Hatlen, and Michael Davidson have demonstrated, his serial poems extend this inquiry to patterns of relation between sentences (and sentence fragments), between sections within poems, and between poems and their intertexts.8 This is especially the case with “Of Being Numerous,” which demonstrates how Oppen’s expectations for poetry’s social role are nothing less than rethinking the grounds for community through the interrogation of linguistic patterns of relation.9 Because the trajectory of Oppen’s life appears to be one of either political activism or writing, his readers have sometimes been too quick to oppose the political to the poetic. His thinking about modern poetry, however, in his poetry, essays, letters, and interviews, consistently insists on a social, if not political, understanding of poetic form. His thinking is analogous to the claims Walter Benjamin makes in “The Author as Producer,” an address that he gave at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris in , the same year Oppen published Discrete Series. In this address, Benjamin questions the dichotomy of content and form, politics and aesthetics, on the Left: “on the one hand, the correct political line is demanded of the poet; on the other, it is justifiable to expect his work to have quality. Such a formulation is of course unsatisfactory as long as

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the connection between the two factors, political line and quality, has not been perceived ” (“Author” ). To account for the sociopolitical impact of literary form, Benjamin asks a question that resituates the relation of writing to the conditions of production that structure social relations: “Rather than ask, ‘What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?’ I should like to ask, ‘What is its position in them?’ This question directly concerns the function the work has within the literary relations of production of its time. It is concerned, in other words, directly with the literary technique of works” (“Author” ). Benjamin cites two primary examples to explain the significance of the text’s position within the conditions of “production of its time.” The first is documentary photography and writing “whereby poverty is made an object of consumption” (“Author” ). In positioning its readers as passive recipients rather than active participants in the production of meaning, in aestheticizing poverty for middle-class consumption, such texts do little more than reinforce the unequal social relations they are presumably critiquing. “An author who teaches writers nothing, teaches no one. What matters, therefore, is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers—that is, readers or spectators into collaborators” (“Author” ). The alternative example that Benjamin cites is that of Brecht’s epic theater, which transforms a familiar medium of entertainment into an experimental “laboratory.” Adapting the technical conventions of popular theater, radio, and film for the interrogation of social relations, Brecht succeeded “in changing the fundamental connection between stage and public, text and performance, director and actor” (“Author” ). Through tactical devices of interruption, defamiliarization, and alienation, Brecht engaged his audience as producers of meaning, transforming the relations of author, text, and audience in the process. His work extended the minimal expectation for the revolutionary writer, “the demand to think, to reflect on his position in the process of production” (“Author” ). Much of Oppen’s writing addresses a slightly different question than the question Benjamin asks in “The Author as Producer.” Rather than “What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production in its time?” or “What is its position in them?” Oppen demands our consideration of the work’s position in the relations of production not only in its time but of time, that is, of the historical construction of the past and its ideological significance. Brecht was the European Marxist poet whose example mattered most to Oppen, precisely because Brecht’s poetry stood out among the more instrumentalist verse that was

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sponsored by the Communist Party. Brecht fulfilled the demand for rigorous writing that Oppen shared with Benjamin—“to think, to reflect on his position in the process of production.” Oppen also looks to Brecht’s poetry, however, to reflect on his own position in the s.10 In the one essay he wrote to assess the legacy of modern poetry for his own work in the s, “The Mind’s Own Place,” Oppen cites Brecht to discuss the relation of poetry to politics: “Bertolt Brecht once wrote that there are times when it can be almost a crime to write of trees. I happen to think that the statement is valid as he meant it. There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning” (). Oppen is referring to Brecht’s poem “An die Nachgeborenen” (To Posterity): “Ah, what an age it is / When to speak of trees is almost a crime / For it is a kind of silence about injustice” (Brecht ). And while he is ostensibly citing Brecht to address the political imperatives of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the s, he is referring indirectly to his own decision to abandon poetry for direct political action during the Depression. Brecht wrote “An die Nachgeborenen” in – when he was in political exile from the Nazi regime in Svendborg, Denmark. The poem appeared in the last collection of new poems that Brecht published in his lifetime, Svendborger Gedichte (Svendborg Poems), a collection that was initially entitled Poems in Exile. “An die Nachgeborenen” resonates for Oppen not only because it meditates on the viability of writing poetry in times of social crisis but also because it does so through the bitter experience of political exile. Oppen cites “An die Nachgeborenen” in “The Mind’s Own Place” not so much to explain his own experience in the s, however, but to defend the act of writing poetry in the s: It happens, though, that Brecht’s statement can not be taken literally. . . . The actually forbidden word Brecht, of course, could not write. It would be something like aesthetic. But the definition of the good life is necessarily an aesthetic definition, and the mere fact of democracy has not formulated it, nor, if it is achieved, will the mere fact of an extension of democracy, though I do not mean of course that restriction would do better. Suffering can be recognized; to argue its definition is an evasion, a contemptible thing. But the good life, the thing wanted for itself, the aesthetic, will be defined outside of anybody’s politics, or defined wrongly. (–) Oppen’s distinction between the political and the aesthetic is not a disavowal of poetry’s social significance. As he subsequently makes clear, poetry should aspire to a more lasting social significance than the transitory role of instrumental uses

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of language: “It is possible that a world without art is simply and flatly uninhabitable, and the poet’s business is not to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to seek to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth” (Oppen, “Mind’s Own Place” ). It would be misleading to read this statement as an assertion of an aesthetic realm for poetry apart from everyday social struggle or as a rationalization of Oppen’s own desire to write poetry “at the moment that the house next door is burning.” Like the Frankfurt School critical theorists who were his contemporaries, Oppen articulates, however tentatively, socioaesthetic criteria for assessing poetry. In doing so, he locates poetry’s value within the realm of utopian rather than pragmatic or tactical thinking.11 Nowhere are the implications of this understanding of poetry’s social significance more evident than in “Of Being Numerous.” “Of Being Numerous” was Oppen’s most extensive serial poem since Discrete Series. Like Discrete Series, it articulates “a language of New York” that is at once local and cosmopolitan. “Of Being Numerous” differed in tone and purpose from contemporaneous New York poems, however, as Oppen insisted in his working papers. He wrote that the “themes” of his work in progress were “that which ‘Is dead and it is not dead’—the permanent,” and “‘the meaning of being numerous,’ ‘The shipwreck of the singular,’Amor fati—confronted, not ‘answered.’” He then remarks that his approach to New York was unlike that of other contemporaneous New York poems: “the pr[e]occupation of the attempt to deal with these things ‘looks quite . . . curious,’ ‘and satirical wit will not serve.’ This seems to have confused a number of people who have seen the poem; that it is a poem about N Y which is neither satirical nor over-awed, but simply shares the problem” (“Discussion”). “Of Being Numerous” is arguably not a poem of place at all, at least as place had come to be understood in such long poems as William Carlos Williams’s Paterson or Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems. When asked about the importance of place in his poetry, Oppen responded: “No, I have no theory of the need for a locality at all. It would rather frighten me to be too dependent on a locality” (“Interview with George Oppen” ). Unlike poetry that foregrounds its research into local history, Oppen’s apprehension of place is subject to the epistemological limitations that characterize his poetics more generally. Oppen was explicit about the difference of his long poem from Paterson : “Another Language—which could mean also other than Williams’ of Paterson” (“Discussion”). And he expressed his reservations about Olson’s Maximus Poems in the only review essay that he published, which discussed Maximus from Dogtown and The Distances as well as Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish and Other Poems, – and Michael McClure’s Dark Brown. Olson, more so than Williams, was susceptible

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to the “audible presence of Pound,” and, “if we look to poetry as a skill by which we can grasp the form of a perception achieved, then nothing can so deaden the impact of poetic discourse as to be uncertain which of two men is speaking” (Oppen, “Three Poets” ). Locality is less important, Oppen suggests, than the sincerity of the poet’s perception. Oppen’s criticism of Maximus from Dogtown is predicated on his disdain of the dominant rhetorical stance of The Cantos. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Nicholls, among others, have argued, “Of Being Numerous” enacts a critique of the ethics as well as the aesthetics of the “ego system” that structured Pound’s Cantos and subsequent long poems such as Paterson and The Maximus Poems. Oppen himself said in his interview with Dembo: “Pound’s ego system, Pound’s organization of the world around a character, a kind of masculine energy, is extremely foreign to me” (). And while “Of Being Numerous” posits, at times, an agonistic relation between the poet and the world, it critiques this relation through its dialogic structure, through its rhetorical strategies of selfquestioning as well as through its extensive quotation, whether implicit or explicit, of voices and texts. “Of Being Numerous” is composed largely of quotations, beginning with its first section, which quotes a Plato scholar (Robert S. Brumbaugh) and Mary Oppen’s discussion of the post–World War II long poem by the French poet Yves Bonnefoy, Du mouvement at de l’immobilité de Douve. As George Oppen wrote in his dedication of the book to Mary, her “words . . . are entangled inextricably among my own.”12 Other words that are “entangled inextricably” but quoted more overtly (with inverted commas) are selections from Oppen’s previous writings and from philosophers such as Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein. Interwoven among these fragments of literary and philosophical discourse are quotations from conversations and letters of Oppen’s friends, particularly from younger writers who challenged him to expand his conception of his audience. This intersubjective, intertextual structural dynamic anticipates the more explicit disavowal of the “masculine energy” of Pound’s “ego system” in the later sections of the poem. Notable among the quotations of poetry in “Of Being Numerous” are writings by male poets that address the threatening power of female otherness, from Williams’s “The pure products of America” () to Blake’s Jerusalem—“. . . a Female Will to hide the most evident God / Under a covert . . .” (). Yet “Of Being Numerous” is comprised as well of quotations from conversations and correspondence with women, from Mary Oppen and June Oppen Degnan to younger writers such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Diane Wakoski. Through this dialogue of masculine and feminine points of view, “Of Being Numerous” moves increasingly from an

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abstract national public, or, more concretely, the New York public of the streets, from which the poet is initially alienated, to the interior social spaces of more intimate social relations. This movement toward the domestic space of malefemale interactions does not mark a retreat from the public, though; it instead undermines the grounds for firmly differentiating a masculine public from a feminine private sphere. While relations between lovers, even between husband and wife who have shared a life together, and especially between generations, between father and daughter who relate to the world they have inhabited together so remarkably differently, are no less informed by “The boundaries / Of our distances” (), these relations intimate a feminized vision of resilience and renewal that contests the masculine authority of the modernist epic hero. The New York that we first encounter in “Of Being Numerous” is a site of alienation more than a familiar site of memory for Oppen. This sense of alienation is intensified by the poet’s consciousness of time, of age, of change, both personal and cultural.13 Thus the themes of historical continuity and discontinuity, of generation and succession, recur with sometimes surprising urgency throughout the poem. The urban milieu that emerges in “Of Being Numerous” is not entirely different from the New York of Discrete Series: in both poems a dominant sense of alienation, or disconnection, compels the poem’s exploratory movement toward a sense of communal participation, or connection, however tentative or limited. The alienation depicted in Discrete Series, often conveyed through obscure images of the city’s material presence or of barely perceptible physical gestures, is expanded into a more totalizing condition in “Of Being Numerous.” Perhaps the most telling image of alienation in Discrete Series, the image of the solitary driver in traffic—“the face, still within it,/Between glasses— place, over which / time passes—a false light” ()—foreshadows the metropolis that is introduced in “Of Being Numerous”: A city of the corporations Glassed in dreams And images. (–) This “city of the corporations” is the center of international finance, but it is most notably the site of mass culture, of consumer capitalism, the site where “dreams” are transparently manufactured. The modification of “Glassed / in dreams” is complexly multiple, however. If the city is “Glassed / in dreams,” glassed in the commercial but pluralist ideology of the “American dream,” the corporations

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are also “Glassed/in.” As transparent as the corporate sites of production appear, they are also enclosed, separate from the consumers of the dreams they manufacture. Their transparency is as deceptive as the promises conveyed through the “dreams / And images” they promote. The means of production lie remotely apart from the individual consumers who are themselves “Glassed / in” these “dreams / And images” and as a result are as presumably alienated, as isolated, as the disembodied driver of Discrete Series. If the “city of the corporations” appears at first to be “impenetrable,” the New York City that materializes in “Of Being Numerous” is composed of multiple points of entry, multiple perspectives, and multiple sites of memory that negate this initial premise. The more dynamic site of inventive social interaction that emerges in sections  and , for example, contrasts sharply with the abstract rendering of the “city of the corporations.” Section  begins with a direct affirmation of the city’s invigorating energy: “The emotions are engaged / Entering the city / As entering any city.” As universally shared as this excitement of “entering the city” appears to be, however, the “language of New York” that emerges is nonetheless still a language of us and them: “We are not coeval/With a locality / But we imagine others are.” Imagining “others” are “coeval / With a locality” is a strange conflation of time and space that only makes sense in an environment where the duration of localities is limited, an environment where localities have emerged within the lifetimes of their residents, whether from previously uninhabited sites or from the destruction and renewal of localities. Such a transient sense of “locality,” charged with the anxiety that “others” are more rooted than “we” are, is at once a source and a symptom of the alienation the poem foregrounds. It is also constitutive of the collective “populace” that “flows / Thru the city,” a “populace” of immigrants and migrants. “Populace” is a curiously abstract term that seems to reconfirm the poet’s distance from the “others” of New York, but section  concludes by posing the problem of this distance as a collective problem, a problem of language: “This is a language, therefore, of New York” (). Language here is as much a source of division as connection. Neither the referent of “This” nor the logical necessity of “therefore” is exactly clear; they speak to the problem of the entire poem as much as to the statement that precedes them. What is clear, though, is that the poem proposes “a language of New York” rather than “the language” or “languages” of New York: as reluctant as the poet is to assert “a language of New York,” this statement nonetheless underscores that there is “a language of New York,” a language that articulates the shared experience of dislocation and difference. This language in fact “flows” into the next section of the poem: the sentence that concludes section  begins the next

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section, where the “populace” is transformed into “the people.” This more empathetic and conventionally populist term of collectivity negates the coldly distant tone of section . And the New York of “the people” that emerges is a city of continual renewal, of “the old / New to age as the young / To youth” (–). The spatial correlative to this temporal “flow” is the liminal urban space of “stoops and doors,” the interactive social space where boundaries between “dwelling” and street, between domestic and public, between us and them, are superseded by the shared experience of urban habitation. It is in this dynamic social space of “the people,” where “petty alibi and satirical wit / Will not serve” (), that the poem can begin to articulate “the meaning / Of being numerous” (). As a site of “creative destruction,” in which “the city of the corporations” and the “world of stoops” are more related than their mutually unintelligible “languages” might first suggest, as a site where invention and renewal are also synonyms for obsolescence and displacement, New York City is also a site of amnesia. To articulate “a language of New York,” particularly a language of “the people,” requires a syntax and structure that can both convey the ephemerality of social memory and counteract its loss. Section  poses the problem of social memory starkly but mysteriously with its description of “The great stone/Above the river / In the pylon of the bridge,” followed by a verse paragraph comprised simply of the date “” (). Given the spareness of the description, in which the number “” simply appears “Frozen in the moonlight,” the date stands at once for a historically momentous event and for nothing other than its material existence in the stone. As Michael Davidson has noted, the bridge is most likely the Brooklyn Bridge, so “” would thus signify the date of the pylon’s construction (). The introduction of the Brooklyn Bridge at this moment of the poem “bridges” not only the boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan but also private memory and public history (the Oppens lived near the bridge in Brooklyn Heights), and thus the individual and the collective. It would also foreground the intertextual relation of Oppen’s long poem to such predecessors as Hart Crane’s The Bridge and Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” But section  is resolutely silent about the significance of “”: it underscores the problem of constructing meaning from the past—the emptiness of this signifier is as instructive as the plurality of possibilities it evokes. As visible as this imprint of the past is, “” accentuates the otherness of the past, particularly a past that precedes personal memory. And while “” establishes an “insider” perspective on the city’s historical significance, the composition of inside and outside is itself obscure; as such, section  reiterates the problem of “locality,” of social difference, that is introduced earlier.

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The differences that complicate a conceptualization of “the people” are themselves numerous in “Of Being Numerous.” Most notable are the divisive differences of class, of generation, and of gender, which coalesce in the national conflicts about the Vietnam War and the new social movements of the s. Even in public spaces where differences are routinely negotiated in the city, the poet’s language of “the people” is disorienting. The subway section of “Of Being Numerous,” section , perhaps best illustrates the problem of memory that haunts the poem’s quest for “a language of New York.” The subway is a site whose significance to New York poetry is perhaps surpassed only by the Brooklyn Bridge: Louis Zukofsky’s “Mantis” and, again, The Bridge, for example, are important prototypes for imagining the subway as a profound site of urban encounter. Section  begins with an apparent proposition about language, “The roots of words/Dim in the subways” (), only to diverge suddenly into a chaos of discourses: There is madness in the number Of the living ‘A state of matter’ There is nobody here but us chickens Anti-ontology— He wants to say His life is real, No one can say why. (–) Rather than a site in which the poet’s consciousness of “the people” is intensified by the enclosed shared space of the subway train, this site of “madness” is a cacophony of voices whose coexistence seems more coincidental than meaningful. While this section reasserts the ontological problem with which the poem is preoccupied, this problem is rendered absurd by the intrusion of the comic vernacular, “There is nobody here but us chickens.” The language of the subway is disembodied, antisocial if not “anti-ontological,” a language of coexistence at best, but also a language fraught with dread. Who is the speaker of “He wants to say / His life is real”? And what is the relation of “No one can say why” to this statement? These statements appear to be voices of doubt reverberating in the poet’s mind rather than voices overheard. “No one can say why” works

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doubly as the beginning of the next sentence as well, “No one can say why/It is not easy to speak,” intensifying the sense of doubt about language. But whether these statements are thought or spoken, spoken by the poet or others, seems inconsequential if there is no dialogue (listening as well as speaking) taking place: “It is not easy to speak//A ferocious mumbling, in public/Of rootless speech” (). “It is not easy to speak” stands at once starkly alone and as a “hinge” that connects the two verse paragraphs to which it is syntactically related.14 The poem dramatizes the very question that these concluding lines foreground. How can the poet “speak,” or represent, the “ferocious mumbling” that is the public “speech” of “the people” in the subway? Or, conversely, how can the poet “speak . . . in public” of such “rootless speech”? How can he translate such “mumbling” into a meaningful public discourse? The line break after “public” is perhaps more expressive than any of the language “spoken” in this section. While “in public” signifies a social contract that regulates the “ferocious mumbling” of the subway, the “public / Of rootless speech” renders both the social contract and the meaning of such “mumbling” dubious. To speak of “the people” if not for “the people” raises the problem of audience, of the public for poetry that had changed so radically during Oppen’s lifetime, as well as the problem of representation, both aesthetic and political, that preoccupied and divided Left writers in the s but had taken on new dimensions by the s. Oppen foregrounds this problem of historical discontinuity through his quotation of other writers in “Of Being Numerous.” A quotation from a letter he received from Rachel Blau DuPlessis, for example, is the point of departure for the poem’s elaboration of the poet’s relationship to “the people”: “‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase.’” This quoted proposition cogently articulates the central socioaesthetic problem of the poem, and while the act of quotation itself enacts a dialogic principle of composition, the response to the quotation returns us to the poet’s self-consciousness about his art: Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me Have made poetry. () In contrast with the solitary reflections of the “meditative man” is the more ecstatic “Urban art, art of the cities, art of the young in the cities” (). Nowhere is Oppen’s consciousness of generational difference more apparent, and nowhere is his defense of his own inquiry so insistent, than in his portrayal of the “New arts” of the s:

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. . . New arts! Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists! But I will listen to a man, I will listen to a man, and when I speak I will speak, tho he will fail and I will fail. But I will listen to him speak. The shuffling of a crowd is nothing— well, nothing but the many that we are, but nothing. (–) “Of Being Numerous” questions the collaborative art of the “audience-as-artists,” of street theater, happenings, and other improvisatory group performances precisely because such art does not meet the dialogic principle of conversation, of listening as well as speaking, implied in the poem’s collage structure. While the “shuffling of a crowd” is no substitute for a meaningful interaction with “the people,” the poem proposes neither the interior monologue of the “isolated man,” who is “dead, his world around him exhausted” (), nor the idealization of the representative common man or woman as an alternative. The dramatic opposition of the “Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists” with the “isolated man” translates the dialectic of the collective and the individual into a generational conflict about the poet’s relation to his or her public. This exaggerated generational opposition proves to be false, however; not only is “Of Being Numerous” a collaborative intergenerational project in its quotation of voices and letters, it proceeds to foreground dialogue across generations as a constitutive feature of a renewed vision of community. This becomes clear in the section that immediately follows the failure of the “isolated man”: Speak If you can Speak Phyllis—not neo-classic, The girl’s name is Phyllis— Coming home from her first job On the bus in the bare civic interior Among those people, the small doors Opening on the night at the curb Her heart, she told me, suddenly tight with happiness. (–) The stark repetition of “Speak” accentuates the difficulty—and necessity—of initiating dialogue, and of reenacting that dialogue, across the divides of generation

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and gender. The second “Speak” is at once a repetition of the poet’s (the “speaker’s”) command to himself and an appeal to “Phyllis.” The qualification of her name—“not neo-classic”—differentiates Oppen’s “Phyllis” from the objectification of female figures by male writers such as Williams, the author of the “neoclassic” Phyllis who appears in the Idyl of Paterson IV. Oppen’s story of Phyllis is not extraordinary, except perhaps to her, as she returns home from her first job, but her experience is dignified through the incorporation of her perspective. Her story is neither set apart from the poet’s voice nor subsumed within it— there are no quotation marks, but her words are indicated by “she told me.” Her story—and the poet’s retelling of her story—becomes meaningful through the act of dialogue, of exchange, of speaking and listening. If this story may not seem profound, it is nonetheless illustrative of the socioaesthetics that “Of Being Numerous” articulates. “I too am in love down there with the streets / And the square slabs of pavement,” Oppen writes, “To talk of the house and the neighborhood and the docks // And it is not ‘art.’” To speak so directly of love risks sentimental excess, but the “square slabs of pavement” return us to the materiality of the streets. Likewise, the elements of “house” and “neighborhood” and “docks” remind us of the socioeconomic bases of community. “So small a picture” as this may not be perceived as “art” because of the utter directness of emotional statement, but it is also “not ‘art’” because its elements are imbued neither with the pretense of beauty nor with the will to power. This verbal “picture” represents instead an alternative space for art, or “not ‘art,’” the liminal urban space of “the small doors / Opening on the night at the curb,” and the interpersonal space of dialogue between the young woman and the poet who commemorates this exchange (). The failure of the “isolated man” and of the “dithyrambic, artists-as-audience” alike is a failure as well of historical consciousness, that is, a failure to recognize the ideological implications of opposing the individual to the collective in American history. Neither the isolated self nor the self subsumed within group consciousness represents an adequate response—aesthetically or politically—to the apocalyptic vision of American society that Oppen articulates in the subsequent sections of the poem. Section , for example, represents the consumer culture of Oppen’s time within a longer pattern of historical amnesia that has shaped the United States. As this section obliquely proposes, American history is driven by an assumption of expansionist sovereignty, by an exceptionalist sense of entitlement, that informed the ideology of manifest destiny in the nineteenth century and persisted into the Vietnam era of “Of Being Numerous.” Section  represents an acquisitive mentality that manifests itself in the consumer

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society of the present: “unable to begin / At the beginning, the fortunate / Find everything already here.” While this opening statement suggests a general inability to return to “the beginning,” an inability to imagine, remember, or acknowledge the past, it quickly orients its criticism to “the fortunate” who wield power in American society, the “shoppers,/Choosers, judges,” who “develop/Argument in order to speak.” As this section of the poem indicates, American capitalist power has sustained itself through a rhetorical manipulation of language that “Of Being Numerous” so insistently resists. And while the poem asserts that those who wield this power “will come to the end / Of an era / First of all peoples,” it is not entirely clear whether “they” will become extinct first or will remain “First of all peoples” at “the end” (). The conclusion is also cautious in stating its own relation to this narrative of American manifest destiny and its decline: “And one may honorably keep / His distance / If he can” (–). As forceful as its critique of American capitalist ideology is, section  suggests that no one is immune from the impact of this ideology. In contrast to the apocalyptic scenario of section  is the memory of wartime solidarity that initiates the next section of the poem. This group solidarity, which is improvised out of necessity in a truly desolate landscape, nonetheless counteracts the previous bleak portrayal of a nation on the verge of self-destruction: I cannot even now Altogether disengage myself From those men With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents, In hospitals and sheds and hid in the gullies Of blasted roads in a ruined country. () The vivid memory of community that Oppen conveys here is conventional enough, as the intense experience of male camaraderie compelled by their heightened consciousness of mortality is a staple of war literature. The resonance of this World War II scene, at this point of the poem and throughout the poem, is complex, however. As a response to section , it affirms the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of group solidarity in moments of crisis. The dehumanizing experience of war likewise intensifies the memory of individuals, “Muykut and a sergeant / Named Healy,” “those men” () with whom this experience was shared. But this memory is also divisive: not only is this experience of community specifically male, it is also a generational experience whose relevance was often dismissed by young people who opposed the Vietnam War. The lasting

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but distant memory of World War II is furthermore remote from the poem’s conceptualization of “the people.” It can hardly compensate for the sense of alienation conveyed through the present urban scene that follows: How forget that? How talk Distantly of ‘The People’ Who are that force Within the walls Of cities Wherein their cars Echo like history Down walled avenues In which one cannot speak. () The intense memory of war invalidates the more abstract notion of “the people” that the poem has pursued. The capitalization and quotation marks of “‘The People’” in this instance furthermore remind us of the distance, and potential mystification, implicit in this abstraction, especially in totalitarian regimes since World War II. While there is apparent parallelism between the two sections of the poem, between the “blasted roads in a ruined country” and the “walled avenues” of New York City, section  poses the more difficult question of how to account for the continuity of lives, such as Oppen’s, that span such divergent worlds. In contrast to the vivid memory of community during the war, “‘The People’” of the present are, paradoxically, more distant. “‘The People’” represent the life force of the city, but they are contained (within cars, within walls, within the grid of the city), isolated, and divided from each other. Even the rare, and thus notable, simile that occurs in section , “Wherein their cars/Echo like history,” seems false, rendering “history” a far less resonant “vehicle” for conveying the significance of the past than memory. The parallelism of past and present in section  masks a more disturbing discontinuity that resists articulation. The sections that address the Vietnam War in “Of Being Numerous” represent the poem’s sharpest indictment of the brutal hypocrisy of American hegemony. These sections, –, also represent a turning point in the poem’s crisis to articulate “a language of New York” that can register the contradictions of a divided society. Oppen’s response to the Vietnam War, and to war more generally, in “Of Being Numerous” is informed by his experience in World War II.

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Oppen chose to fight in the war, even though his work exemption as a pattern maker for an aircraft firm would have protected him from the draft.15 As deep as his commitment was, as a Jew, to actively oppose the Nazi regime, he was deeply conflicted afterward about his decision to leave his wife, Mary, and their young daughter, Linda, to fight in the war. Oppen was seriously wounded in battle when a shell exploded in a hole where two other soldiers and he were taking refuge: the two men were killed, while Oppen survived his many shrapnel wounds (Mary Oppen ). Although he was honored by the army for his bravery, his activism in France after the war complicated his status. Oppen, like numerous soldiers in Asia and Europe, was not sent home for many months after the war had ended. Following the precedent of mass demonstrations of soldiers seeking to return home from Asia, Oppen helped organize soldiers who were awaiting departure to the United States from Le Havre, where he had stayed to recover from his shrapnel wounds. Mary Oppen partly attributes the FBI’s later persecution of the Oppens when they were living in California to this organizational work, which was followed by their active opposition to the Korean War (Mary Oppen ). Given the trauma of his war experience and the guilt he felt for abandoning his family to fight in the war, it is not surprising that Oppen returns to the memory of his war experience in his poetry. He addresses this experience most explicitly in the serial poem that follows “Of Being Numerous,” “Route,” which recalls Mary “reading letters she knew were two weeks / late and did not prove I was not dead while she read,” and asks, “Why / did I play all that, what was I doing there?” (–). The intensity of his ambivalence about his war experience is even more evident in a letter he wrote to John Crawford as he was completing “Of Being Numerous.” In this letter, Oppen recollects one of “the two decisive dreams” in his life, a disturbing wartime nightmare that questioned his being as a soldier: “I dreamed that I shouldn’t be trying to kill people, hero or no hero. Or not as part of an army. And it damned near killed me” (Selected Letters ). Oppen never overcame the guilt he felt for leaving his family behind to fight in the war,16 and he returned to the question raised by his wartime dream on other occasions,17 but his inquiry into war in “Of Being Numerous” is tempered by his decisive insistence on how unjust the Vietnam War was. Oppen wrote frequently about the Vietnam War in his letters and working papers when he was composing “Of Being Numerous,” and he was angry enough about President Johnson’s military policy in Southeast Asia that he participated in antiwar demonstrations in . The war also affected his writing, as he questioned, again, the viability of writing poetry when the need for political action

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was so urgent. Unlike his s crisis of conscience, however, Oppen continued to write, and the questions he raised about writing in a time of social crisis became integral to the palimpsestic structure of “Of Being Numerous.” In a  letter to his niece, he wrote bluntly about the war’s impact on his writing: “I’m finding it difficult to write poetry—An eerie feeling writing poetry with the war going on. I don’t know if I can. A lot of resistance, a lot of doubt, too much as things stand to induce people to throw away a few million lives of young men. . . . HAVE people recognized the amount of lying that has been done? enough to just not believe it?” As this letter exemplifies, Oppen was as angry about the government’s duplicity as he was about the military action itself. He foregrounds the government’s deceitful betrayal of democracy, even as he recognizes the brutal impact of U.S. military policy in Vietnam: “I don’t even KNOW how many people have been burned alive, how many half-burned children” (Selected Letters ). As outraged as he was about the war, and specifically about the government’s lying about the war, Oppen persevered in writing “Of Being Numerous.” He was defensive about writing poetry, but he was also realistic enough in his analysis of the antiwar movement in – to justify writing.18 In contrast to the tone of outrage is the more stoical tone he expressed in a letter to his sister, June: “I think we must decide to live thru this—the napalm and the rest. Easy enough to throw oneself away with horror but I don’t suppose that’s really what we want to do. To manage to live with it, to live thru it, if we get to, without however deceiving oneself. To speak calmly and carefully of hell. I have no great knack for it” (Selected Letters ). Oppen’s letters indicate his uncertainty about the appropriate response to the war; they also exemplify the honesty and rigor of his self-questioning. The problem of the poet’s response to the Vietnam War, and to war more generally, recurs throughout “Of Being Numerous.” While this conflict is not fully resolved, the sections that address the war most directly, –, ultimately confirm the resolve to “live thru it . . . without however deceiving oneself.” The distance between the “ferocious mumbling” of the subway noise that concludes section  and “the air of atrocity” that begins section  is vast. Not only do they represent two contrasting sites, the subway of “ferocious mumbling” and the warplane of “the air of atrocity,” they represent two publics spheres. The seemingly anarchic public of the subway, as incoherent and vaguely threatening as it appears, represents a vital interaction of “the people,” where otherness is spontaneously negotiated. The imperialist public of the U.S. military in Vietnam, on the other hand, represents mechanical, dehumanizing acts of routine murder, where otherness is invisible but obliterated. Section  in fact directly opposes “the air of atrocity” to the unseen people on the ground:

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It is the air of atrocity An event as ordinary As a President. A plume of smoke, visible at a distance In which people burn. () As calmly “distant” as the tone of this section is, there is no mistaking its target. The military “air of atrocity” is identified with the power of the president, whose accountability for the burning “people” is implicit but unquestionable. Yet the act of brutal destruction is itself obscured by its evidence: the “plume of smoke” is “visible at a distance,” but it also signifies the distances between those who drop the bombs—and those who authorize the bombing—from the people who burn as a result. The repetition of the generic term “people” is significant here: The poem neither distinguishes between soldiers and civilians, or adults and children, who burn, nor defines them as others. It instead suggests a continuum of the Vietnamese victims of U.S. bombing and the common “people” who are the subject of the poem. Section  is both matter-of-fact in its statement and oblique in what it is saying; its stance subtly mocks the self-righteous but deceitful rhetoric of U.S. military spokesmen during the war. The more precise meaning of “the air of atrocity” is withheld until the next section: “Now in the helicopters the casual will / Is atrocious.” The poem’s anger toward the U.S. government is likewise more explicitly revealed here: “Insanity in high places” conflates the insanity of the soldiers in helicopters with the insanity of those in “high places” who authorize their actions, most notably the president. Following this direct statement is a more obscure image of the helicopters: “The fly in the bottle” (). This clause stands alone, spatially separated from the rest of the poem and syntactically fragmentary. The image of the “fly in the bottle,” although not placed in quotation marks in the poem, is appropriated from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: “What is your aim in philosophy?—To shew the fly out of the fly-bottle” (qtd. in Hatlen, “Opening Up the Text” ). Oppen attributes this quote to a conversation he had with his son-in-law, the philosopher Alexander Mourelatos: “I think of the phrase . . . as a quotation from you, not as a quotation from Wit[tgenstein] because that was the moment when we understood each other” (Selected Letters ). This expression of intergenerational, familial solidarity—“Whatever our differences, we are not those insane flies” (Selected Letters )—suggests the pattern of embedding philosophical discourse within domestic conversation that is initiated in the poem’s beginning. This appropriation of Wittgenstein’s image

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furthermore evokes the political purpose of Oppen’s poem: the isolation of the line itself accentuates the sense of fragmentation and estrangement that results from “insanity in high places.” As Burton Hatlen has written, this image recalls the problem of separation that recurs throughout “Of Being Numerous” (“Opening Up the Text” ). The concluding lines of section  make this especially clear: “Insane, the insane fly // Which, over the city / Is the bright light of shipwreck” (). Language is at once a symptom and the only means to counteract “the bright light of shipwreck.” The image of the fly in the fly-bottle in Philosophical Investigations is moreover concerned with the specific problem of language accentuated by sections –, as it occurs in a long series of meditations on the problem of understanding and communicating pain, of reconciling the experience of bodily pain with the pain of others. The “atrocity” of the war, which takes the problem of separation to a deadly, dehumanizing extreme, is embodied in “the insane fly”: “fly” can be read as both verb and a noun, as act and as the reified subject of the act. As this section makes clear, to “speak calmly and carefully of hell,” as Oppen wrote to his sister about the Vietnam War, does not shield one from its “bright light.” Only through the interrogation of the military “insanity” that perpetuated the Vietnam War can “Of Being Numerous” recognize a meaningful commonality between the poet and the “riders / Of the subway.” Paradoxically, the very act of imaginatively inhabiting “the air of atrocity” engenders a distance from this “insanity” but also a more compassionate recognition of its “infectious” power. The section that follows “the bright light of shipwreck” ponders the compelling but deceptive appeal of war, not just the spectacle of the Vietnam War but the recurring phenomenon of war. And while this section  begins with an implied opposition of the poet to “They” who “await / War, and the news / Is War,” this opposition is temporary. The appeal of war is ideological, the effect of propaganda whose promises are inevitably illusory: “That the juices may flow in them / Tho the juices lie.” The “news” of war is furthermore not new; the equation of war narratives with “history” is itself ideological but also ancient. The fascination with war, though, however delusional, is what connects the poet to the subway riders. This shared obsession with war is born of a shared consciousness of mortality. “But who escapes / Death,” the poem asks, “Among these riders / Of the subway.” Significantly, “they” and “I” become “we” through an allusion to a poem, a poem whose relation to war is neither stated nor direct: They know By now as I know

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Failure and the guilt Of failure. As in Hardy’s poem of Christmas We might half-hope to find the animals In the sheds of a nation Kneeling at midnight . . . () The metaphorical resonance of these “Draft animals, beasts for slaughter” () during the Vietnam War is clear enough without knowledge of Hardy’s poem, “The Oxen.” The fact that Oppen invokes a poem that was written during World War I, though, makes it an especially significant intertext for “Of Being Numerous.” World War I was not only the war between imperialist states that foreshadowed the global conflicts that shaped Oppen’s life, it was also the war that would redefine the United States as a world power. “Of Being Numerous” does not situate its story of “half-hope” in a specific national site of redemption, however, whether the British site of Hardy’s poem or the American site of Oppen’s childhood. The generic “nation” where the sheds are located represents the problem of nationalism more so than the presumably protective shelter of a national identity: “the animals,” after all, are “beasts for slaughter.” “The Oxen” is linguistically specific to the rural locale of Hardy’s childhood, but it evokes an existential condition that is especially pertinent to “Of Being Numerous,” the adult’s longing for the intensely felt experience of youth. Hardy’s poem contrasts the distant but powerful memory of the speaker’s naive childhood belief in the “folk” story of the oxen, kneeling on Christmas eve, with the more skeptical era of his adulthood: So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If someone said on Christmas Eve, “Come; see the oxen kneel, “In the lonely barton by yonder comb Our childhood used to know,” I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so. (Hardy ) “These years” represent the speaker’s old age, and they represent modernity, but they also represent the more immediate, and more ominous, presence of the war that informs the speaker’s nostalgic longing for his childhood. “The Oxen,”

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like Hardy’s more explicit poems of World War I, resonates so powerfully precisely because of the correspondence between intensely felt personal memory and the apocalyptic public event of war. Like Oppen’s, Hardy’s response to war is informed by a vision of recurrent patterns of destruction based on a lifetime of experience. Oppen’s allusion to “The Oxen” appeals less to memory than to the present crisis of conscience evoked by “Of Being Numerous” that is at once personal and national. Nonetheless, Hardy’s poem does invoke the memory of childhood, and the collective memory of folk wisdom, as momentary antidotes to despair. However fleeting memory is in “The Oxen,” and however tenuous Oppen’s renewal of this antidote is, the allusion to Hardy’s poem reaffirms the social power of poetry, of narrative, of language, to alleviate the pain of “Failure and the guilt / Of failure” (), to transform experience that is individually felt into a shared perception of this experience. This shared perception is notably not defined in opposition to an other, whether the national other in wartime or the anonymous others the poet encounters in everyday urban life. The allusion to “The Oxen” redresses the bitter tone of indignation that divides the poet from “the people” in the Vietnam War poems of “Of Being Numerous.” It also confirms Oppen’s resolve to “live thru” the Vietnam War rather than “throw oneself away in horror.” Section  also marks a point of departure, in tone as well as subject matter, for the second half of the long poem. No longer are “the people,” as an abstract concept, a subject of inquiry. And while sections – return to the idea, and ideology, of the American nation, the poem arrives at a resolution that resists the idea of an exclusive national identity. It is difficult not to read section  as an ironic commentary on the Puritan heritage of the United States, given “the air of atrocity” that represents American imperial power in Vietnam: In this nation Which is in some sense Our home. Covenant! The covenant is: There shall be peoples. () “Covenant” evokes at once the Puritan roots of America’s “divinely ordained destiny” and the Old Testament prototype for this vision (Hatlen, “Opening Up the Text” ). Oppen distances the social vision of his poem from the imperialist associations of the national “covenant” more subtly than the use of the exclamation point, however. The statement that precedes “Covenant!” not only qualifies his identification with “this nation” as a “home,” it also questions the

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idea of identifying “home” with nationality, given the indeterminacy of “Our.” And there is, of course, a huge difference between the capitalized “Covenant!” emphatically followed by an exclamation point, a punctuation mark especially notable because of its absence elsewhere in Oppen’s poetry, and the lowercase “covenant.” The word covenant signifies most broadly a formal agreement, or compact, between two or more people. Its evolution as a term in English has long, and divergent, theological and legal histories. In legal history, it has come to signify a written agreement by two or more parties, or a contract, but it also refers to the common-law act of recovering damages for breach of a contract. “Of Being Numerous” is drawing attention to the religious and the secular, the capitalized and lowercase, associations of “covenant” as well as their conflation in American history, but it is also enacting a revision of the initial “Covenant,” a secularization if not an act of recovering the damages of this contract. One of the earliest uses of covenant (cited in the Oxford English Dictionary), although now obscure, is also pertinent to Oppen’s poem: a promise made to oneself, a statement of personal resolve. The covenant of “There shall be peoples” revises the language of the poem as well as American society. In adopting a language of social pluralism, of “peoples” rather than “the people” or “the People,” “Of Being Numerous” resolves, however provisionally, the opposition of the poet to the social totality, opening the poem to a less determinate, more permeable “language of New York.” It also undermines both an exclusionary construct of nationality and the primacy of nationality altogether. The closest that “Of Being Numerous” comes to directly articulating its aesthetic principles is in section , which begins with the statement, “It is difficult now to speak of poetry.” As the only prose section of the poem since the dramatic repudiation of both the “isolated man” and the “dithyrambic, audienceas-artists” in section , section  is noteworthy for its renewed attempt to define the social significance of poetry. Oppen seems to resolve the opposition of the “isolated man” and the “dithyrambic, audience-as-artists” through the identification of the poet with the craftsmanship of the solitary “workman” in section ; however, this section also echoes earlier sections that disavow the idea of poetry as either a solitary or specifically male activity. Section  begins in a subjunctive voice of what poetry “would have to tell” if it were to account fully for the social and psychological complexity of even a single life. From this meditation on “what art is,” Oppen locates “poetry” more specifically in an interior space of solitude, of “rooms and of what they look out on and of basements, the rough walls bearing the marks of the forms, the old marks of wood in the concrete, such solitude as we know” (). This imagined space identifies the

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work of poetry with the “forms” of the carpenter or mason, whose “marks” represent the precision of his work and the care for its lasting strength. Yet the “rough walls” and the “old marks” also evoke the passage of time, the generations of inhabitants that these walls have sheltered. They evoke the “dark rooms / Of the past—and the immigrants” and “the children of the middle class” who have succeeded them (). They also signify “That denial / Of death that paved the cities . . . Generation / for generation” (). If the imagined rooms of section  appear empty, they are nonetheless marked by the imprints of their prior inhabitants; likewise, the “solitude” of this space is offset by the shared experience of “what we know.” Within this interior space the poet imagines “Someone, a workman bearing about him, feeling about him that peculiar word like a dishonored fatherhood has swept this solitary floor, this profoundly hidden floor— such solitude as we know” (). It is difficult now to speak of poetry in terms other than the activity of the “workman.” And it is difficult to imagine a more humble alternative to the “dithyrambic, audience-as-artists” than that of the solitary sweeper. The syntax of this statement, however, hardly allows us any comfort in identifying the craftsmanship of poetry with that of the “workman”: “that peculiar word” has no specific referent, nor is it clear whether the “word” or “a dishonored fatherhood” is the subject of the sweeping. The indeterminacy of “that peculiar word” is heightened by the suggested psychological trauma of “a dishonored fatherhood,” and the repetition of “such solitude as we know” evokes a sense of stasis more than a dramatic resolution to the difficulty of speaking of poetry. To return to the image of the solitary workman as a figure for the poet, whether as a representative figure of a proletarian portrait or an alienated figure more reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting, does not provide a satisfactory answer to “such solitude as we know,” even as the poem insists on the commonality of physical and mental labor. Oppen appears to identify the work of the poet with the masculine labor of the “workman,” or artisan, in section . This affirmation of masculine precision is more explicitly opposed to an image of women’s work in the section’s conclusion: One must not come to feel that he has a thousand threads in his hands, He must somehow see the one thing: This is the level of art There are other levels But there is no other level of art. ()

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A more conventionally masculine image of the objectivist poet is hard to imagine, as Oppen contrasts the “art” of poetry, of “seeing the one thing,” to the feminine work of sewing or weaving. The poet is gendered male and his work is purposeful, even heroic, in its ability to focus on “the one thing.” The contrasting sensation “that he has a thousand threads in his hands” evokes uncertainty, indecision, or vagueness. This feminine image of work—or art—that is scattered, labyrinthine, decentered, is at once threatening (hence the imperative “One must . . .”) and necessary (“He must somehow see . . .”). The image of precision that is masculine labor is reinforced, it seems, by the repeated assertion of the “level of art,” as “level” suggests the carpenter’s tool for measurement as well as the measurement of position, or of value or importance, itself. Yet “There are other levels,” and the image of “a thousand threads in his hands” evokes the network of associations that comprise “what art is” in the first paragraph of this section. To “see the one thing” is not to see it in isolation but to apprehend its relation to that which makes it meaningful. The objectivist art of seeing implies rather than denies the social and psychological complexity from which “historic and contemporary particulars” (Zukofsky, “Program” ) take on significance. To “speak of poetry,” then, is to articulate an interdependency of conventionally male and female modes of experience and knowledge. The “art” of poetry is furthermore a dialogic art, a dialogic interplay of male and female voices that is both synchronic and diachronic. “Of Being Numerous” insists that poetry is not only not a linear art, it is an art of memory that instructs us to pay as much attention to subtle “threads” of repetition as to its dialectical movement of thought. The meditation on “art” in section , for example, echoes the earlier definition of art, or, more precisely, of what “is not ‘art,’” that concludes section , the everyday “talk of the house and the neighborhood and the docks” that emerges from the poet’s interaction with a young woman “coming home from her first job” (). It also anticipates the more intensive concentration on gendered modes of perception that conclude the poem. The subsequent sections of “Of Being Numerous” that accentuate male-female relations reiterate the difficulty of “speaking” for these relations while underscoring the mystery, and the power, of that which resists linguistic appropriation. One of Oppen’s working papers is especially relevant to the problem of representing the experience of women. Among the papers that are labeled “Notes, Jottings, Etc.” are a number of meditations on the status of women during the s and s in which he is writing and in the past, especially the past that he had experienced in his lifetime. Oppen is at times forthright in assessing the

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destructive social implications of women’s subordinate status: “[O]f ‘women’s lib,’ I would say: high time. The incapacitation of women has been a tragedy forever, it seems, and for all of us. The child of the slave-woman, or the woman nearly a slave: the child’s first and deepest love and dependence, perhaps the only love the new-born infant knows he learns later is the love of a slave, a helpless person—He does not recover from this” (“Notes, Jottings”). At other times, however, he is much more tentative in his observations about women and in particular about his authority to speak for women’s experience. One page in particular stands out for its inquiry into the experience of women during the Depression and World War II years. This typed page, which is addressed to “Rochelle” and is heavily marked with handwritten revisions and questions, is notable for its self-interrogation as well as its claims for women’s unrecognized historical significance, particularly in times of social crisis: in the thirties, the unemployed movement: the women were most directly, most primitively locked into the tragedy—the women with infants. The men had ways of escaping—of play-acting, of swaggering— and in war-time France: it was the women, the women above all were confronted with the brute fact of the death of infants of the terrible facts of trying to keep the babies alive . . . The men could escape more often into a swashbuckling—a “politics” But, yes, it is also true that there is often a gap—a gap in communication—between me [or “men”] and american women. . . . But yes, on the whole, or often I become aware that there are situations from which women in the US—(so far)—have been excluded (protected from) and there is sometimes a gap, a non-communication. (“Notes, Jottings”) Oppen asserts the unrecognized heroism of women in extreme situations, a heroism that is born out of necessity but also, paradoxically, out of the supposed weakness that limits women’s mobility, their protection from the public sphere of “politics.” At the same time, however, Oppen questions his authority to speak on behalf of women, particularly American women, who are “excluded (protected from)” conventionally male spheres of activity. Interestingly, Oppen seems not to identify himself, and his own relations with women, as “American.” And he is quick to add in the same document that “you might also remember that I have lived some  years with Mary Oppen. Just how do you imagine that I might systematically under-rate women?” Nonetheless, because of the “gap, a non-communication” that has resulted from women’s “exclusion,” he admits the risk of sounding patronizing even while praising the resilience of women

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(“Notes, Jottings”). The tension between articulating the experience and language of women while recognizing this “gap” or “non-communication” becomes increasingly pronounced in the concluding poems of “Of Being Numerous.” The final sections of Oppen’s poem locate interactions between men and women within more intimate interior sites, from the house and backyard of father and daughter (sections –), to the bedroom of husband and wife (sections –), to the hospital room of a dying old man and his nurse (sections –). Like the sidewalk site of section , however, these are also liminal sites between “the known and the unknown” (). For example, the sections that reflect on the father’s relation to his daughter locate the familial dynamic of “being numerous” within transitional temporal moments, when “the house on the low land / Of the city / Catches the dawn light” (), or peripheral spatial locations, “behind their house, behind the back porch” where are “the little woods” (). Oppen acknowledges the “baffling hierarchies / Of father and child” () and questions his own authority to speak from his patriarchal position: “My daughter, my daughter, what can I say / Of living?” It is not the experiential difference of father and daughter that he emphasizes, though, but their interdependence: “We seem caught / In reality together my lovely / Daughter” (). Father and daughter “seem caught,” as the pause at the line break accentuates, but “in reality” they are “caught . . . together”; while they are subjected to and separated by the “baffling hierarchies” engendered by their familial relation, “together” they share an existential “reality” that defies the conceptual closure of conventional male and female categories. The celebration of female beauty in section  likewise introduces a conventional dynamic of patriarchal power, the male gaze that captures “the beauty of women,” only to undermine the stability of this position. The poet initially frames the “beauty of women” within a painterly vision of the female body’s “perfect” otherness; however, women’s “desire” exceeds such containment: And the beauty of women, the perfect tendons Under the skin, the perfect life That can twist in a flood Of desire Not truth but each other The bright, bright skin, her hands wavering In her incredible need

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 Which is ours, which is ourselves . . . () Women’s “desire” disrupts the static image of “perfect” beauty, syntactically as well as visually, and “her incredible need” cannot be contained within the structure of the poem, as the syntax of her desire “floods” into section . Yet the movement from “the beauty of women” to the “desire” of one woman transforms the poem into a more intimate meditation on male-female sexual relations. This meditation is no longer visually objective, and no longer emotionally detached, but the relation of the two sections underscores at once the psychological autonomy of desire and the profound need for interpersonal connection that compels desire. “Her incredible need” is formally separate from the speaker but syntactically dependent on their togetherness; the white space between sections  and  represents a liminal space between solitude and communion. Significantly, though, the mutuality of their desire is not defined as a union but as a plurality, “Which is ours, which is ourselves.” The speaker incorporates the desire of his beloved within the first-person plural voice, but the plurality of “selves” underscores their difference as it suggests a dynamic process of continual selfinvention enacted through their reciprocal desire. The meditations on gendered social relations that conclude “Of Being Numerous” also return to the traumatic experiences that informed the historical consciousness of Oppen’s generation. Oppen returns to the past, to the Depression and war years especially, to reconsider and revise the very language of this remembered experience. While this pattern of return and revision is implicit in the reflections on his marriage and family, it is explicit in the intertextual allusions to earlier writings, such as the quotation from the first poem of Discrete Series (“‘approached the window as if to see’”) that begins section  (). Oppen also returns to Depression-era motifs in celebrating the heroism of women in times of social crisis, most prominently in section . This “courage of women” () resists conventionally gendered distinctions between public and private spheres, even as the marginalization of women in historical memory can be attributed to these very distinctions. Section  begins with lines that Oppen appropriated from a young writer, Jo Pacheno: “Like the wind in the trees and the bells / Of the procession” (). It is neither immediately evident nor later disclosed that these lines were written by a woman; however, they exemplify “the problem of the ‘I’ in feminine poetry” that preoccupied Oppen as he composed “Of Being Numerous” (Selected Letters ).19 The anonymous objectivity of these lines could not be more different

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from the self-consciousness that Oppen associates with women’s poetry. In contrast with the profusive assertion of self in section —“Find me / So that I will exist” ()—Pacheno’s lines, like the poetry of Emily Dickinson, represent “some sense of the distances and the realities around the ‘I’” (Selected Letters ). The meandering “procession” of images that follows these lines is by turns lyric and vaguely apocalyptic. This indeterminate series of images, of the “wind in the trees and the bells,” of “the wind and the voices of men and women / To be carried about the sun forever,” has no apparent purpose or destination beyond the movement of the wind itself. Even the syntax of the long first sentence seems arbitrary, as the elements of the procession are “carried” through the nine fragmentary lines that open the poem toward no apparent conclusion. If the accumulation of images in this opening sentence follows no intrinsic logic, it does recall motifs that have recurred through the “procession” of poems that comprise “Of Being Numerous.” And the “end” of this opening sentence, juxtaposed with the quotation that follows, suggests a deeper intertextual pattern that informs the tonal modulations as well as the imagery of the poem: Among the beautiful particulars of the breezes The papers blown about the sidewalks ‘. . . a Female Will to hide the most evident God Under a covert . . .’ () The quoted lines are from William Blake’s long prophetic poem Jerusalem, chapter , plate .20 Jerusalem, which was composed in the midst of the Napoleonic wars and the ensuing period of reaction, dramatizes the struggle between the creative imagination and the destructive powers of war and vengeance, between Los (the figure of the poet) and Albion (the English people). Its prophetic stance of the poet redeeming a fallen people recalls the Old Testament book of Ezekiel, in which Ezekiel, appealing to Jews during the Babylonian Exile, prophesies the destruction of Jerusalem and the subsequent recovery and regeneration of Israel. Although the quoted fragment from Jerusalem may appear to be as arbitrary as the “papers blown about the sidewalks,” Blake’s prophetic poem of urban ruin is indeed a suggestive intertext for Oppen’s apocalyptic vision of American society in the s. What does Oppen’s quotation from Jerusalem have to do with the image of “papers blown about the sidewalks” that precedes it? The image of the papers seems like an appropriately urban example of “found art.” It is, however, also an appropriation of the art that Oppen found most resonant for his vision of New York, the poetry of Charles Reznikoff. Nowhere is such imagery more prevalent

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in Reznikoff ’s poetry than in the book published by the Objectivist Press the same year that Discrete Series was published, . Reznikoff’s book was entitled Jerusalem the Golden. Like Discrete Series, Jerusalem the Golden featured a long serial poem that evoked the desolation of New York City in the Depression. Unlike Oppen, Reznikoff imbued the New York streets and subways of his long poem with an explicitly Jewish sense of exile. Reznikoff ’s book even includes a poem that rewrites a passage from the book of Ezekiel, “Lament of the Jewish Women of Tammuz,” which deftly translates Ezekiel’s diasporic consciousness into an autumnal landscape of fallen “scattered” leaves (Complete Poems :).21 As Norman Finkelstein has written, the poems of Jersusalem the Golden evoke such Jewish diasporic themes as “linguistic difference, geographic displacement, and historical rupture” implicitly as well as explicitly, in their imagery as much as in their allusions to Jewish scripture (“Tradition and Modernity” ). They often do so through the quotidian urban imagery that also resonates throughout “Of Being Numerous,” imagery of everyday ruin and waste, but also of survival and salvage, including the lines that Oppen frequently cited as the most memorable in modern poetry: “Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies / a girder, still itself among the rubbish” (Reznikoff, Complete Poems :).22 Such “rubbish” is scattered throughout Jerusalem the Golden, so much so that the organic and human detritus of the city is frequently conflated: the “handfuls of white petals” that blow from the trees are “like confetti” (Reznikoff, Complete Poems :), and “If a naturalist came to this hillside, / he’d find many old newspapers among the weeds/to study” (Reznikoff, Complete Poems :). More often, though, Reznikoff’s images of debris are simply described, precisely observed in their urban setting, whether still or animated, much as they are in “Of Being Numerous”: “These days the papers in the street/leap into the air or burst across the lawns” (Reznikoff, Complete Poems :) . . . “Among the beautiful particulars of the breezes / The papers blown about the sidewalks” (). The metonymic juxtaposition of Reznikoff’s urban pastoral imagery with the prophetic stance of Blake is certainly more disjunctive than continuous: the intertextual correlation of Jerusalem the Golden with Jerusalem is at least as obscure as Blake’s allegorical revision of the book of Ezekiel. When read as a dialectical juxtaposition of Reznikoff ’s and Blake’s poetics, however, these allusions underscore the dramatic tension between the imagist and prophetic stances of “Of Being Numerous.” In Reznikoff ’s understated observation of the social misery he witnesses in urban life, his poetry evokes the controlled outrage of such poems as Blake’s “London.” As Stephen Fredman has written, the poetry of Reznikoff, like that of Blake, is motivated by the desire to “find paradise within the urban

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wasteland.” Unlike “Blake’s apocalyptic determination to wage mental and sexual warfare for the sake of resacralizing the blighted landscape,” though, Reznikoff ’s immanentist poetics suggest “that paradise already inheres in whatever landscape we come upon in daily life” (Fredman, Menorah –). “Of Being Numerous” adheres primarily to the immanentist poetics of Reznikoff ’s urban serial poems, but Oppen also evokes the apocalyptic vision and the palimpsestic structural density of Blake’s Jerusalem. Blake’s long prophetic poems evolved through multiple stages of composition: writing and sketching, etching, and finally printing from the etched plates. Like “Of Being Numerous,” Jerusalem foregrounds the historical process of its composition and revision, a process that lasted more than a decade. It does so through the structural layering of image and text and through the accrual of allusions to the traumatic historical events of its time.23 “Of Being Numerous” renews the prophetic vision of Jerusalem, a vision that emerges as well from the poet’s psychic struggle of the creative imagination and the internalized forces of destruction (Los and the Spectre of Urthona). Oppen quotes Blake’s long poem, though, not only to underscore the prophetic dimensions of “Of Being Numerous” but also to question the masculinist romantic vision of the imagination exemplified by Jerusalem. The passage from Jerusalem that Oppen quotes bemoans the power of the “Female Will” to usurp the authority of divine vision: “There is a Throne in every Man, it is the Throne of God / This Woman has claimed as her own & Man is no more!” (Blake ). The “Female Will” is identified with Vala, the “Veil” of illusion that blinds men to the truth of divine vision. This identification of the “Female Will” with deception, and ultimately with the threat of death and selfannihilation that Los must resist, contrasts not only with the “veiled” words of female vision that open the poem but also with the image of female strength that follows the quotation of Blake as well. In response to the quotation from Jerusalem, the poem asks, “Is it the courage of women / To assume every burden of blindness themselves” (). This question inverts the claims implied in the statement about “Female Will”: rather than the bearers of blindness, women are instead subjected to the “burden” of the blindness ascribed to them in patriarchal discourses. The “courage” to bear this “burden” is heroic if unrecognized, but Oppen also underscores the psychic cost of such courage. The image of “young women//Carrying life/Unaided in their arms” that illustrates this cost is as bleak as it is compassionate: In the streets, weakened by too much need Of too little

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And life seeming to depend on women, burdened and desperate As they are. () The image of women “burdened and desperate” in their everyday struggle to nurture and protect their children recalls the iconic images of the Depression and war years that Oppen cites in his working papers. As much as these images evoke a radical collective memory of struggle, however, they risk the reinscription of women in conventionally tragic roles that were increasingly interrogated by feminists in the s. The “gap in communication” that renders such images suspect is a generation gap as well as a gender gap. “Of Being Numerous” does not counter this image with more contemporary images of women’s empowerment, though Oppen does underscore gendered differences even while representing collective experience (“For us / Also each / Man or woman / Near is / Knowledge” []). “Of Being Numerous” does, however, identify with a feminized vision of the poet that is far removed from the prophetic authority of Jerusalem. “Of Being Numerous” concludes with three poems that evoke the experience and vision of nurses. Unlike the intimate relationships of father and daughter or husband and wife in the previous sections, the understated encounter between a nurse and a dying old man in sections  and  is as anonymous as it is intimate. The questions the poem asks about the nurse’s relationship to the dying patient reiterate the problem of separateness in the starkest terms. After positing that the nurse is the “last / Who will know him,” the poem negates this proposition: the nurse will “Not know him,” but will instead be the “last / Who will see him / Or touch him” (). The very concept of interpersonal “knowledge” is at stake as “Of Being Numerous” concludes, as the distance that recurs in the most intimate moments of contact, even the most profound moments of contact such as this deathbed scene, underscores that the common ground of knowledge is our mutual experience of isolation. Poetry, or language more generally, cannot bridge this divide between nurse and patient, between self and other; however, it can alleviate the psychic pain of isolation through the re-cognition of the differences that separate us. The figure of the nurse is perhaps the most conventional representation of feminine valor, with its implied ethic of self-sacrifice and unconditional care for those in need. It is so conventionally understood as women’s work that it is easy to overlook the fact that Oppen does not identify the nurse in the poem by any indication of gender. While the patient is “a very old man,” the nurse is identified only as “Nurse.” So what do these questions about the nurse-patient relationship have to do with the last section of the poem, which is comprised of a

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prose quotation identified in a headnote by “Whitman: April , ”? Although the addressee of this quotation is not identified, it is taken from a letter Walt Whitman wrote to his mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, during the Civil War. This letter is, of course, itself the testimony of a nurse, as Whitman writes from his position in Washington, D.C., in attending the wounded and dying Union soldiers in military hospitals. A week later he would write: “Mother, it is serious times—I do not feel to fret or whimper, but in my heart & soul about our country, the army, the forthcoming campaign with all its vicissitudes & the wounded & slain—I dare say, Mother, I feel the reality more than some because I [am] in the midst of its saddest results so much” (Whitman to Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, Apr. , , Correspondence ). Whitman first went to Washington after his brother George, who had enlisted in the Union army, was wounded in . He then settled in Washington and for several years visited the military hospitals, writing letters for injured and illiterate soldiers, offering solace to the dying through his words (including his poetry) and physical embrace, playing the role of “father and mother to these helpless and lonely war orphans, and brother as well” (Miller, introduction to Whitman, Correspondence ). Whitman was intensely affected not only by the physical suffering he witnessed but also by the deep emotional attachment and painful separation he experienced in ministering to the soldiers. He was so affected that he himself became seriously ill, as a result of the psychological strain he had experienced as well as exposure to disease, only a month after the letter that Oppen quotes. To recover from his illness, he returned to his family home in Brooklyn, not far from where Oppen lived as he wrote “Of Being Numerous,” where he completed his volume of Civil War poems, Drum Taps. Oppen’s quotation of Whitman’s letter returns us to the public sphere of national politics, to the “great bronze figure, the Genius of Liberty” atop the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The quoted letter notes especially that when the sun is setting, it “shines on the headpiece and it dazzles and glistens like a big star: it looks quite // curious’” (). The fact that this understated colloquial description of “the Genius of Liberty” (the “Statue of Freedom”) was composed on Patriot’s Day, during the most brutal period of the Civil War, is as ironic as it is “curious.” The quotation of Whitman’s letter situates “Of Being Numerous” within a national historical framework that is implied more than it is stated throughout the poem. The social upheaval of the Vietnam War era is superimposed not only onto Oppen’s memory of war and revolutionary struggle but also onto the Civil War and Revolutionary War dates of Whitman’s letter. Like the earlier allusions to Hardy and Blake, Whitman’s letter reminds us that “Of

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Being Numerous” is very much a war poem. Cary Nelson has written that “as the whole problem of the interplay between poetry and history in America culminated in Whitman’s Civil War writings, so it culminates again in the poetry of the Vietnam War” (Our Last First Poets ). Because of the rhetorical duplicity that rationalized the escalation of military force in Southeast Asia, “the whole medium of public discourse becomes a mode of deception, and not even poetic utterance is innocent” (Nelson, Our Last First Poets ). The war called into question even the Whitmanian tradition of a “compensatory poetic of open forms” (Nelson, Our Last First Poets ). Many of the most ambitious interrogations of the Vietnam War by American poets in the s, such as Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” Denise Levertov’s “Staying Alive,” or Adrienne Rich’s “Shooting Script,” reveal the limitations of Whitman’s visionary democratic poetics through the rhetorical structure of their poems. Nowhere is the question of Whitman’s idealist democratic legacy addressed more rigorously than in “Of Being Numerous.” “Of Being Numerous,” however, situates the problem of Whitman’s democratic legacy within a longer debate about his reputation. No poet was more admired by the s Left than Whitman, and the poet who was so frequently evoked in the s for his democratic vision was very much a revival of this contested figure. He was venerated by some writers as a romantic and others as a protoproletarian poet in the s, and his influential example was recognized by writers as otherwise different as Rukeyser, Hughes, and McGrath. The politics of Whitman’s poetics were debated intensely on the Left, as his passionate defense of individualism was not easy to reconcile with his professed solidarity with working people. By the Popular Front period of the later s, however, Whitman was celebrated as a figure who could bridge liberal and Marxist social philosophies. Whitman’s poetry, Newton Arvin wrote in his  study of Whitman, anticipated a socialist vision even as it spoke in the democratic language of his day. Most important, though, Whitman “was himself quite literally one of the people: his identification with them was primitive, spontaneous, and complete. . . . As a result the thought of equality is for him not a rational or programmatic one mainly: it is personal, naïve, concrete, and intimate” (Arvin ). The fashioning of Whitman as an iconic poet of the people furthermore figured prominently in Popular Front debates about poetry’s social function, about poetry’s relation to its audience, and about the problem of difficulty in Left poetry, debates that are integral to the form and content of “Of Being Numerous.” The problem of Whitman’s reputation was also complexly gendered. While his poetry was dismissed for its romantic (and feminine) sentimentality

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by modernist writers such as Pound and Eliot and later by the New Critics, it was admired for its ruggedly masculine representation of working men by proletarian writers such as Gold. The homoeroticism of Whitman’s writing, of course, complicated assertions of his masculine authority as a radical poet, while the eroticized male solidarity that he idealized largely excluded women from his democratic vision. To recall Whitman, then, as either the disillusioned poet of the Civil War or the revolutionary poet of democracy, as Oppen suggests, is to underscore the contradictions of his legacy as much as the inspiration of his vision. The excerpt from Whitman’s letter that Oppen quotes represents a moment of relief from the unbearable burden of war, a moment of calm in a period of intense national and personal trauma. While the excerpt foregrounds Whitman’s attention to the “curious” image of “the Genius of Liberty” at sundown, the Civil War is no more a backdrop to this passage than the Vietnam War is to “Of Being Numerous.” It is the chaos of violent conflict that makes the process of observation a meaningful act of affirmation, an act of resistance to the nihilism of war. Oppen has stated that the “curious” end of his long poem is partly “a joke on Whitman,” but that it also signifies “an awareness of the world, a lyric reaction to the world” (Interview with Dembo ). This “lyric reaction” is inherently intersubjective—and intertextual—as the epistolary form and Oppen’s quotation of Whitman’s words underscore. Oppen later wrote in a letter about the quotation that the word “curious” also contains the root “curia: care, concern” (Selected Letters –, n.). The implicit figure of the (male) poet as nurse, the figure of “care” and “concern,” links the Whitman quotation to the poems that immediately precede it. As incongruous as Whitman’s observation of “the Genius of Liberty” appears, though, Oppen’s appropriation of his language also responds to invocations of Whitman during the Vietnam War as well as to earlier Popular Front formulations of his national significance. The fragile wartime figure of the older poet, immersed in the trauma of damaged lives, is hardly the brashly masculine figure of “Song of Myself.” It is far removed from the youthfully optimistic poet whose expansive vision of American democracy was so frequently—and sometimes facilely—invoked by successors who lamented the betrayal of this vision in subsequent periods of social crisis, from the Depression to the Vietnam War era. The “spectre” of Whitman that concludes “Of Being Numerous” is instead both curiously tentative and curiously apt. In defamiliarizing the iconic poet of the American “people,” Oppen not only suggests an affinity with the poet transformed by the trauma of war, he also suggests the need to question the cultural mythologies by which war is justified and by which nationalist constructs of literary history are perpetuated.

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In a letter to his daughter, Linda, that he composed shortly after the publication of his Collected Poems (), Oppen explained the historical trajectory that has since defined his literary reputation, from the social and political turmoil of the Depression and war years, to the subsequent cold war repression of the Left in the United States, to the resulting political amnesia of the s Left. Writing in a tone that is as characteristically caring as it is resolute, he commented on his Left contemporaries who were blacklisted. “The list . . . of people ruined or injured,” he wrote, “would be a very long list. . . . and some . . . had been ruined before they became what they meant to be and would have become.” Among the poets he cited whose careers were disrupted or ruined by anti-Communist blacklisting was Tom McGrath.24 He goes on to delineate those who were blacklisted in other professions, concluding that “there were very many, they were very many[.] The public and the juries refused to believe (because it was frightening to believe) that the FBI, the CIA, the police, the judges—the whole of government— lied” (letter to Linda Oppen Mourelatos, Nov. , , Selected Letters –). As matter-of-fact as this assessment of the McCarthy era appears, it suggests the urgency of Oppen’s recollection of the past in his poetry, an urgency shared by the other late modernist poets I have studied in this book. In remembering those who were “ruined or injured” and also the historical process by which their stories were either forgotten or rewritten, Oppen underscores the lasting power of political amnesia as well as the necessity to disclose its impact. The “history of the time” (Selected Letters ) that he interrogates is as provisional and contradictory as the syntax of his poetry. This history is also plural—“our times,” as he writes in “Blood from the Stone”—as are the sites of memory that are evoked in the poetry that this book has discussed. Nonetheless, the “spectre” of the “Thirties” that appears on the streets of Oppen’s Brooklyn is not as far removed from the ruined sites of Tom McGrath’s North Dakota, Gwendolyn Brooks’s Mecca, Langston Hughes’s Harlem, or even the earlier sites of Elizabeth Bishop’s Key West and Muriel Rukeyser’s Gauley Bridge as most literary histories have presumed. These late modernist American poets hardly agreed on the “history of the time” they had experienced, but they all demonstrate the distinctive power of poetry not only to witness its “times” but also to salvage sites of memory that might otherwise be diminished or forgotten. As poets whose historical consciousness was profoundly shaped by the experience of the Depression, World War II, and the cold war, they represent a distinctive generational impact on U.S.—and international—literary history. They also represent a vision of social democratic possibility, of a public that would neither believe nor accept the lies of government institutions, which makes their poetry as urgently significant as ever.

Notes 1. the janitor’s poems of every day . “The Man on the Dump” was first published in Southern Review  (Autumn ) with eleven additional Stevens poems under the collective title of “Canonica” (–). It was subsequently included in Parts of a World (). . The reception of Stevens’s poetry during the cold war—that is, the formation of his canonical literary reputation—suggests how the very issues that compelled his defense of poetry in the s disappeared from critical discourse, especially in the academy. See Filreis – for a concise overview of Stevens’s cold war reception. Stevens’s encounter with Marxist critiques of his work in the s, especially Burnshaw’s critiques of his poetry in the New Masses, has received increasing attention in recent years, however, as it has become clearer how crucial the s were for his subsequent articulations of the social responsibility of poetry. See Bates; Filreis; Lentricchia; Longenbach, Wallace Stevens; and Teres, “Notes.” . Generations are notoriously difficult to define, and literary generations are especially problematic. While I do not propose a rigid chronological category of “late modernist” or “s” writers, I follow the generational concept that Denning articulates in The Cultural Front (–). Denning cites the discussion of the “Depression cohort” in The American Perception of Class by Vanneman and Cannon. They define a generation by the years in which young people enter the labor force: hence, the Depression generation or Popular Front generation, as Denning writes, includes those born from  to  (–). . Rukeyser and Bishop, for example, attended Vassar College together and were both subsequently drawn to sites of geographical and social marginality when they started publishing their poetry in the s. While Rukeyser is commonly associated with the modernist documentary aesthetic of the s, however, Bishop is usually defined as a postmodernist formalist poet. Hughes is identified most often with the s Harlem Renaissance, even though he was still quite young when he established an international reputation as a “social poet” in the s. Brooks, even more than Hughes, appears mostly in critical studies of African American poetry rather than in comparative studies of modern poetry. Like Bishop, she is rarely associated with the s Left, although her work was also informed by the cultural politics of the Popular Front. McGrath and Oppen are more readily identified with the s, McGrath for his long affiliation with the Communist Party and Oppen for his involvement with the Objectivist movement and his brief affiliation with Communism. Both writers, however, published their most substantial work several decades later. Despite the changing affiliations and anomalous publication records that inform these writers’ reputations, they are linked not only by the impact of s cultural politics on the beginnings of their literary careers but also by the revival of interest in the s that occurred in the s. 231

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. The scholarship on memory is vast. My approach to the problem of memory emphasizes cultural or collective memory rather than psychological concepts of memory, but the scholarship that relates the problem of cultural memory to modernity is itself extensive. Texts that I have found especially useful for theorizing this relation are the critical approaches informed by Marxist theory of Bakhtin, Benjamin, Berman, Harvey, Huyssen, Jameson, and Terdimann. The relation of memory to history has become an increasingly important topic in historiography: in addition to Nora’s work, see Kammen, LaCapra, Le Goff, Lowenthal, and Thelen. Cogent critical surveys that situate the problem of cultural memory in interdisciplinary contexts include Boyarin, Connerton, Fentress and Wickham, Lambek and Antze, and Sturken. . The most compelling criticism of Nora’s articulation of lieux de mémoire concerns the opposition of memory to history that informs his argument. For example, Dominick LaCapra and Maria Sturken both suggest that the attempt to differentiate memory from history is itself misguided: this relationship is, more accurately, “supplementary” (LaCapra ) or “entangled” (Sturken ) rather than oppositional. According to LaCapra, Nora idealizes memory as an essential mode of feeling, reiterating Claude Lévi-Strauss’s problematic distinction between “hot” and “cold” societies (–). Sturken likewise questions the assumption of a memory crisis that distinguishes modernity: “Throughout history, the most prominent characterization of memory has been the idea that it is in crisis. . . . Indeed, Plato saw the development of writing itself as a threat to individual memory” (). While these critiques underscore the problem of differentiating memory from history, Nora’s project does attempt to historicize memory, to account for the transformation of collective memory as it has become increasingly subject to processes of commodification. Sites of memory do not occupy a privileged realm of memory that exists outside of history, as much as the collective desire to imbue them with transcendent meaning might suggest. Instead, the symbolic power of sites of memory depends on their “capacity for change, their ability to resurrect old meanings and generate new ones along with new and unforeseeable connections” (Nora, “Between Memory and History” ). . For an incisive summary of Halbwachs’s sociological work and its subsequent influence, see the introduction to On Collective Memory by Coser (–). . Critics of Nora’s project have cited the limitations of situating the dynamic interaction of history and memory within a specifically national geography, as he projects France not only as the subject of his study but as the embodiment of modernity. See, for example, the essays by Lambek and Antze and by Boyarin. Nora’s work has received far less attention in North American scholarship than in French scholarship, where the study of memory has had a greater impact on literary studies than it has in American or British literary studies. The concept of lieux de mémoire was first introduced to North American literary scholars in a special “Memory and Counter-memory” issue of Representations  (Spring ), edited by Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn. This issue includes an English translation of “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” by Marc Roudebush and a

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series of important essays on memory and history. The most significant application of Nora’s work to American literary studies so far is the outstanding collection of essays on African American history and memory edited by Fabre and O’Meally. . The metaphor of the “invisible scar” first occurs in Bird’s historical account of American cultural memory of the Depression. It also informs Rabinowitz’s feminist reconsideration of American radicalism in Labor and Desire. . Wald discusses this process of “political amnesia” in his introduction to The New York Intellectuals (–), citing the political trajectory of such prominent “antiStalinist” intellectuals as Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, William Phillips, and Lionel Trilling. For broader studies of the impact of McCarthyism on the cultural politics of the Left, see Buhle, Caute, Isserman, and Schrecker. . The most thorough study of s “documentary expression” remains Stott’s influential  study. More recent reconsiderations of documentary writing during the Depression include Browder; Peeler; Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented ; and Staub. On the history of the FWP, see Mangione and Penkower. Recent reassessments of New Deal literary culture can be found in Denning, Hegeman, and Szalay. . Critical studies of individual poets of the s, in addition to those cited in the following chapters of this book, include the books by Barnard on Kenneth Fearing and Nathanael West; Filreis on Stevens; Fredman on Charles Reznikoff; Gabbin and Sanders on Sterling Brown; Scroggins on Zukofsky; and Wald’s The Revolutionary Imagination, which considers the poetry of Sherry Magnan and John Wheelwright. Studies of literary movements that address Marxist cultural politics include the work on Objectivism by Davidson, Heller, and the critics included in DuPlessis and Quartermain. Smethurst recovers the range of socioaesthetic strategies that distinguished African American poetry in the s. There have been numerous studies of Partisan Review that discuss its importance for literary modernism. See especially Alexander Bloom; Cooney; Gilbert; Teres; and Wald, New York Intellectuals. Comparative studies that assess the cultural politics and aesthetic ideologies of s poetry include Harrington; Kalaidjian; Nelson, Repression and Recovery and Revolutionary Memory; and Wald, Exiles. Each of these comparative studies is valuable as well for its documentation of periodical publications for poetry in the s. Also important for the poetry of this era is Schweick’s groundbreaking study of World War II women’s poetry, which includes chapters on Rukeyser, Bishop, and Brooks. . See especially the historical studies of Left prose fiction by Aaron; Foley; Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire ; Rideout; and Shulman, who also examines the poetry of Rukeyser and Hughes. For studies that relate s cultural criticism to the history of Left literary institutions and practices, see James D. Bloom, Irr, Kutulas, and Murphy. . Bawer characterizes the generation of poets who followed the imposing example of Eliot as the “Middle Generation.” The poets that exemplify this belated relation to high modernism in his book are Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman. Longenbach likewise situates “modern poetry after modernism” in the shadow of Eliot and argues that the “postmodern impulse” emerges with the

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first poets who came of age “with a strong sense of modernist accomplishment” behind them, most notably Hart Crane (). As Longenbach also notes, for poets who follow Stevens’s engagement with romantic poetics, the categories of late romantic, late modernist, and postmodernist are practically synonymous. Literary critics and historians who have concentrated on the imagist tradition of Pound, Williams, and H.D. have tended to identify the emergence of postmodernism with the publication of The New American Poetry (), edited by Donald M. Allen. The anomalous trajectory of the Objectivist poets, who began publishing in the s and early s, disappeared from the public eye from the later s through the s, and reemerged in the s, has complicated such distinctions. Fredman notes, for example, that the “modernist” Oppen was born only two years before the “postmodernist” Charles Olson (“And All Now Is War” ). The poets who began publishing in the s, particularly the Objectivists, were featured as “the first postmodernists” at the important  National Poetry Foundation Conference at the University of Maine, “The First Postmodernists: American Poets of the s Generation.” Such distinctions between modern and postmodern poetry depend on (often presumed) relations of poetic form with epochal historical narratives, between modernism and modernity and between postmodernism and postmodernity. See Blasing – and my introduction to The American Avant-Garde Tradition (–) for analyses of the often contradictory premises underlying differentiations of postmodern from modern poetry. Late modernism has likewise been defined as a transitional period that correlates cultural production with social history. See, for example, Jencks and the studies of postmodernist fiction by McHale and by Wilde. While I use the term “late modernist” to distinguish generations of modernists more than general formal differences between the poetry of these generations, I also assume the sense of belatedness that Longenbach identifies with “modern poetry after modernism” as well as the critical response to the high modernist aesthetics of mastery that Tyrus Miller articulates in his insightful study of late modernist fiction. . Longenbach (Modern Poetry) discusses the prevalence of the misleading “breakthrough narrative” in studies of postwar poetry. See especially –. . Smethurst makes this case with thorough documentation in The New Red Negro. . As strongly as Nelson asserts the resilience of Left poetry after World War II, however, it is interesting that the subtitle of his book, Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, –, reaffirms the epochal parameters that have long defined Anglo-American modernism. . This impact is most evident in the expanded canon of poetry represented by such anthologies as the recent Anthology of Modern American Poetry that Nelson has edited. Recent editions of American literature teaching anthologies such as the Heath Anthology and the Norton Anthology likewise show an increased attention to the social and political heterogeneity of modern poetry. The influence of Nelson’s work can also be seen in the new research on Left poetry completed in the s, including important

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research by former graduate students of Nelson’s such as Ford, Harrington, and Thurston. . In addition to Repression and Recovery, see Denning and Kalaidjian on the little magazines that introduced the European, and particularly Russian, avant-garde movements to American audiences. . Among the writers who were included in the Objectivist issue of Poetry was the British poet Basil Bunting, who would be associated with Objectivism throughout his writing career. The other poet most frequently identified with Objectivism, Lorine Niedecker, was not represented, but she began her long friendship with Zukofsky with a letter to him about the Objectivist issue of Poetry. The Objectivist issue of Poetry also included a number of poets who were not otherwise affiliated with Objectivism but whose work represented the political and literary spectrum of the radical Left, including Norman MacLeod, Kenneth Rexroth, and John Wheelwright. . See, for example, “How Objective Is Objectivism?” Dynamo . (Summer ): –, which includes Charles Henry Newman’s review of Williams’s Collected Poems, – and Herman Spector’s review of Reznikoff ’s Jerusalem the Golden and Testimony. . Malcolm Cowley quotes the invitation to participate in the first American Writers’ Congress in “Thirty Years Later” (–), where he recollects the events of the congress in a forum with Kenneth Burke, Granville Hicks, and William Phillips, moderated by Daniel Aaron. . See Kelley, Maxwell, and Naison on the complex relations of Communism and African American cultural politics. . For detailed discussion of the status of women writers in the CPUSA, see Coiner; Foley; Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire ; and Rosenfelt. The anthology of radical s women’s writing edited by Nekola and Rabinowitz, which includes poetry, prose fiction, and nonfictional prose, documents how active women writers were on the Left during the Depression. . It is worth pointing out, however, that the heroic worker of Gold’s popular proletarian novel, Jews without Money (), is the mother of the autobiographical protagonist, not the father. Rabinowitz suggests that the masculinist rhetoric of Gold’s polemical writing overcompensates for the reversal of gendered roles in his novel (Labor and Desire , n.). . Evidence of the Communist Party’s Popular Front policy can be seen in the proceedings of the second and third American Writers’ congresses: The Writer in a Changing World (), ed. Henry Hart; and Fighting Words (), ed. Donald Ogden Stewart. For a documentary history of the League of American Writers, see Folsom. . For an incisive analysis of the paradoxical class status of American writers during the Depression, see Szalay’s introduction to New Deal Modernism (–). . One manifestation of the anxiety writers felt about the diminishing marketplace for literature was the number of forums on the problem of audience during the s. See, for example, the  forum in the New Quarterly, “For Whom Do You

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Write? Replies from Forty American Writers”; and the  Partisan Review forum, “The Situation in American Writing.” . As Marinaccio has noted, however, this poetry also exemplifies the hegemonic persistence of nationalist discursive traditions, particularly the secular jeremiad tradition, even as it espouses an internationalist revolutionary ideology. For an interesting selection of prominent writers’ conceptions of “Americanism” in the s, see the  Partisan Review and Anvil symposium, “What Is Americanism?” . As Susman and, more recently, Hegeman have argued, the idea of American culture—or cultures—was intensely debated during the Depression, as the problem of “uneven modernity” became one of the most important political and social topics addressed by the New Deal (Hegeman ). The emergence of conflicting concepts of culture, including the “revision of historical thinking, challenging teleological models of human advancement by suggesting a range of possible sites, possible ways of doing things and being human” (Hegeman ), challenged nationalist as well as internationalist master narratives. The idea of “America” had long been synonymous with mass modernity, especially to those outside the United States, and the ideology of Americanism variously informed modernist theory and practice. Such mass cultural products as movies, jazz, and skyscrapers were important models for modernist formal experimentation. The uneven development of modernity in the United States was also an important feature of American modernism, however. What made the United States seem so advanced to other nations also “heightened the experience of difference among Americans in different regions” (Hegeman ). The highly industrialized urban core of the Northeast and upper Midwest differed dramatically from the more extensive but remote rural periphery before the New Deal. Rural regions not only had limited access to the basic modern infrastructure of urban centers, such as electricity, but also limited access to consumer goods and mass culture. In the wake of World War I, cultural critics such as Brooks, Frank, and Randolph Bourne articulated the tension between American nationalism and the “buried cultures” it covered, while artists such as Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, William Carlos Williams, and Hart Crane developed modernist forms responsive to this contrast of urban core and rural periphery, a contrast that was figured temporally as well as spatially between modern and more “primitive” cultures. The contrast of core and periphery was exacerbated by the Depression and became increasingly prevalent in s literature, whether writers articulated these differences politically or ethnographically. The documentary projects sponsored by the New Deal, which provided justification for federally funded modernization programs as they mapped the cultural terrain of remote regions in the United States, not only employed artists but also popularized a documentary practice that had previously served the political purposes of the cultural Left. As William Stott has written, the New Deal appropriation of documentary modes of social criticism “made the weapon that undermined the establishment part of the establishment” (). While the New Deal promoted a pluralist model of American culture that encompassed regional differences, its exposure of

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social divisions and hierarchies also intensified dissent about American culture. The same logic that defined the United States as a plurality of regional cultures could, after all, also be applied to the competing class cultures that divided the nation. The tension between regionalist and Marxist concepts of American social divisions was hardly abated by the New Deal or the Popular Front. The plurality of social locations that was evident in proletarian poetry, even if these locations were subsumed within an internationalist revolutionary consciousness, anticipated the broader cultural concern with sites of social marginality during and after the s. . The correlation of social marginality with the cultural marginality of poetry in the United States is theorized in two important books: Damon’s The Dark End of the Street, which argues that the American literary avant-garde has emerged primarily from the literary interaction with social marginality; and Mackey’s Discrepant Engagement, which argues for the correspondence of aesthetic marginality and social marginality in experimental writing (especially African American, Caribbean, and Black Mountain poetry). Harper also makes a compelling case that postmodernist subjective and textual decenteredness is anticipated by the earlier s engagement with socially marginal experience by writers such as Nathanael West, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Djuna Barnes, and Anais Nin. . See Garman and Golding, From Outlaw to Classic –, on the sexual politics of Whitman’s canonization in the s. Garman explains the limitations of this masculinist fashioning of Whitman’s working-class hero, which has persisted well beyond the s. He also notes that there are two important exceptions to this tendency on the s Left: Hughes, who challenged the Whitmanian hero’s whiteness in poems such as “Let America Be America Again”; and Olsen, who complicates the proletarian vision of the male working-class hero with her uncompromising portrayal of domestic violence in Yonnondio. . In the early s alone, Whitman was the subject of numerous political poems, including Rukeyser’s “Theory of Flight” (Dynamo, ); Gold’s “Ode to Walt Whitman” (New Masses, ); and Stephen Vincent Benét’s “Ode to Walt Whitman” (in his book Burning City, ). For analysis of these political portraits of Whitman, see Golding, From Outlaw to Classic –, and Wald, Exiles –. . See especially the polemical  essay by Rahv, “Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy.” . See also the  New Letters in America edited by Gregory. . See, for example, the debates about communism, romanticism, and modernism that occurred in the New Masses in . . A protoypical example of this proletarian childhood wasteland can be found in Mike Gold’s popular and influential autobiographical novel, Jews without Money (). In a chapter entitled “A Gang of Little Yids,” Gold presents a Lower East Side of Manhattan that is at once a spectacular site of abundant activity, a “free enormous circus” (), and a site of brutal deprivation: “No grass . . . no big living trees, no flowers, no bird but the drab little lecherous sparrow, no soil, loam, earth. . . . Just

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stone. It is the ruins of Pompeii, except that seven million animals full of earth-love must dwell in the dead lava streets” (). Any open space on the Lower East Side, Gold writes, was a “fairy tale gift to children” (). Such a fairy tale emerges on a vacant lot near Delancey Street, which was being torn up to build Schiff Parkway. The language with which Gold recalls this pastoral space is unabashedly romantic, a rhetoric of what Denning has defined as the proletarian pastoral sublime: “Shabby old ground, ripped like a battlefield by workers’ picks and shovels, little garbage dump lying forgotten in the midst of tall tenements, O home of all the twisted junk, rusty baby carriages, lumber, bottles, boxes, moldy pants and dead cats of the neighborhood—every one spat and held the nostrils when passing you. But in my mind you still blaze in a halo of childish romance. No place will ever seem as wonderful again” (). The romance of this “little garbage dump lying forgotten in the midst of tall tenements” is intensified because it is contested space, the site of gang warfare as well as imaginative revery. This idealized space is as fleeting as the stunted lives of Gold’s childhood comrades. For an incisive overview of the proletarian “ghetto pastoral” that relates the pastoral rhetoric of Jews without Money to subsequent examples of the genre, see Denning –. The romantic vision of wasted potential that informs the proletarian bildungsromans of Gold and Olsen has a prolonged life in the more corrosive social criticism of subsequent s fiction, from the critical realism of Nelson Algren’s Somebody in Boots () to the apocalyptic satire of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (). As Barnard has argued, Algren’s angry burlesque of the “Chicago Century of Progress” at the end of Somebody in Boots, which contrasts the gaudy spectacle of the  World’s Fair with the adjacent squalor of “Tenement Town,” foreshadows West’s more extravagant satire of Hollywood excess in The Day of the Locust. Midway through the novel, West’s protagonist, Tod Hackett, finds himself unexpectedly amid an incoherent panoply of absurd scenarios as he roams the backlots of elaborately detailed Hollywood sets, only to find himself in the “final dumping ground” of these sets, the “dream dump” that comprises the collective unconscious of an emergent mass society. West’s critique of this consumer society is implicit: the lower-middle-class midwesterners “who come to California to die” rebel because they are as bored as they are disappointed. Yet West’s catalog of incongruous items in the studio junkyard is not unlike Algren’s “zigzag riot of fakery” (); the “dream dump” depends on the very lack it purports to fill: “[N]o dream ever entirely disappears. Somewhere it troubles some unfortunate person and some day, when that person has been sufficiently troubled, it will be reproduced on the lot” (West ). Meanwhile, the actors who work on this “dream dump” are buried in its wreckage, as the scenery for the battle of Waterloo collapses around them (West –). See Barnard’s discussion of West’s critique of s consumer society, particularly in The Day of the Locust (–), as well as her compelling argument about the dump as a site that signifies the socioeconomic instability of the s (–). . See especially Stevens’s most explicitly political sequence of poems, “Owl’s

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Clover” (), which answers the critique of his aestheticism by New Masses critic Stanley Burnshaw. In “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue,” Stevens affirms the artist’s role in embracing and perpetuating change, but this inevitable process of organic change is more gradual, less predictable, and more responsive to imaginative desire than the apocalyptic vision of revolutionary change he mocks. . See Stevens’s  review of Moore’s Selected Poems, “A Poet That Matters” (Opus Posthumous –). . Stevens’s defense of poetry in the s also answers, if not rationalizes, the separation of work from art, of vocation from avocation, in his own life. Insurance lawyer by day, poet by night, his life typified the schizophrenic compartmentalization of the economic and the aesthetic characteristic of the bourgeois capitalist world in which he lived. As Lentricchia has argued, this division is also gendered: the public sphere of material production is coded masculine, and the domestic sphere of leisure—and of artistic production—is coded feminine: The issue of Stevens’ sexual identity as a writer—his effort to phallicize poetic discourse—is not just related to but just is the canonical modernist issue of poetic authority: the cultural power—or, increasingly, for the poetic modernist—the cultural powerlessness of poetry in a society that masculinized the economic while feminizing the literary. In the context of Stevens’ America the nonutilitarian emphasis of aesthetics and literary theory since Kant and the early Romantics— initially . . . a critique of capitalist values on behalf of a higher usefulness in the healing of self-alienated bourgeois man . . . becomes, by the testimony of the modern poets themselves, the mark of poetry’s social irrelevance. () This feminization of poetry, which devalues both the feminine and the poetic, is also evident within the radical Left in the s, as class conflict is itself represented through the language of sexual difference. With the proletariat figured in metaphors of masculine virility and the bourgeoisie in terms of effeminate decadence, poetry is not only feminized but rendered politically suspect, unless it affirms proletarian revolutionary struggle. Rabinowitz delineates how this conceptual opposition of proletarian masculinity to bourgeois femininity informed s leftist literary politics and writing, particularly women’s fiction. See Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire, especially –. . “The Man on the Dump” evokes the well-known figure of the transient “marginal man” variously commemorated in s novels, whether as the embittered solitary male hero in novels like Conroy’s The Disinherited or Algren’s Somebody in Boots, or within the uprooted families of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or Olsen’s Yonnondio. Susman discusses the prominence of the “marginal man” in his essay “The Culture of the Thirties.” He quotes Frederick J. Hoffman’s introduction to Marginal Manners (): “The age of the Great Depression . . . was of course the time of the marginal man malgre lui. Time and again, he moves by necessity from place to place, vainly seeking employment, dreadfully aware of his lack of status, his emotional reaction varying from extreme despair to extreme anger” (Susman –). Social responses

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to the figure of the “marginal man” were complicated by popular misconceptions about transient workers during the Depression. Whereas hoboes had previously been romanticized for their independence and mobility, the large number of homeless, unemployed transients during the early years of the Depression was unprecedented. By the later s, however, the romanticized male transient had become a comic figure as well, most famously in Gregory La Cava’s  film My Man Godfrey, where a presumably destitute “forgotten man” salvages a living with his fellow trash-pickers on a city dump. See Barnard’s discussion of how this film satirizes upper-class perceptions of poverty during the Depression (–). . The new Hartford house that Stevens and his wife bought during one of the hardest years of the Depression () afforded such a view. As Stevens relates in a  letter to James A. Powers, this large colonial home was located “on one of the slopes of Prospect Hill; the declivity runs towards a public dump, surrounded by Jews, and Jewesses” (Letters ). And on the dump lived a legendary man not unlike the hero of his poem. His daughter, Holly, writes: “During the Depression in the thirties a man said to be a Russian refugee built a shack out of old boxes, tin cans, etc., on this dump and lived there, as a semi-hermit, for several years” (Letters ). In “Refiguring Stevens: The Poet’s Politics,” Lisa M. Steinman examines how Stevens’s poem demonstrates that actuality is always transformed by the discourses in which it is represented. Steinman writes: “If Stevens’ critics ask what has become of the actual Hartford shanty town, surely Stevens’ point . . . is that no style would capture the ‘actual’ Russian who lived in a dump on Albany Avenue in ” (). . Stevens’s subsequent comments to Powers reveal more bluntly, although comically, his social distance from “the man on the dump”: “About the only other thing in connection with the house that might be of interest to you is the fact that, because of the depression, there are so many burglars about that, instead of living in a neighborhood that is poorly lighted, the neighborhood is in reality brilliantly lighted. People actually go to bed leaving lights burning all over the house in order to fool the bums” (Letters ). . See McGann’s reading of romantic “displacement” in “The Ruined Cottage” and “Tintern Abbey” in The Romantic Ideology (–). . Other important studies that relate the romantic fragment poem to the ruins topos include Goldstein, Levinson, and McFarland. 2. buried history . Editions of Rukeyser’s writing that appeared in paperback during the s include Out of Silence: Selected Poems, ed. Kate Daniels (), which includes The Book of the Dead in its entirety; A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, ed. Jan Heller Levi (), which includes selections of Rukeyser’s prose as well as her poetry; and The Life of Poetry (rpt. ). In  the University of Pittsburgh Press published a fine new edition of her Collected Poems, ed. Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog with Jan Heller Levi. All quotations from The Book of the Dead are from this edition and will

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be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. Rukeyser’s writing has also been the subject of increasing critical attention, as evidenced by the first book-length collection of essays and tributes dedicated to her life and work, “How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?” ed. Herzog and Kaufman (). . Until quite recently, Rukeyser’s work was also omitted from major teaching anthologies, such as The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. And even though two important s collections of women’s writing took their titles from Rukeyser poems—No More Masks, ed. Florence Howe and Ellen Bass (), and The World Split Open, ed. Louise Bernikow ()—her work has not been consistently represented in collections of women’s writing, either. For detailed discussions of Rukeyser’s reception and the publication history of her books, see Cooper; Daniels, preface to Rukeyser, Out of Silence, and “Muriel Rukeyser and Her Literary Critics”; Flynn; and Kertesz. . Notes, outlines, and several drafts of poems for U.S.  can be found in the Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Berg Collection, the New York Public Library. . For studies of The Book of the Dead that emphasize Rukeyser’s revision of nationalist historical narratives as well as modernist quest narratives, see especially Davidson –, Kadlec, Kalaidjian –, Shulman –, and Thurston –. Kadlec’s essay is the most extensive and incisive inquiry into the racial politics of Rukeyser’s representation of the Gauley Bridge disaster, although my argument disputes his premise that “Rukeyser restores a universalizing whiteness to the blackened workers” () who were afflicted with silicosis and testified before the congressional committee. See also the essays on The Book of the Dead by Hartman and Wechsler in “How Shall We Teach Each Other of the Poet?” which underscore Rukeyser’s innovative documentary poetic response to both the social modernity of the s and modernist poetics. . The relation of Rukeyser’s poetics to her Jewish heritage is complex, as her attitudes toward Judaism changed in response to the events of her lifetime. Her parents were both Jewish, spoke Yiddish at home, and belonged to a reform synagogue, but they were not especially observant of Jewish religious traditions. Rukeyser herself wrote proudly of her identity as a Jew, especially in response to Nazi anti-Semitism, and she was a strong supporter of the state of Israel later in her life, but she kept her distance from organized religion. For insightful essays that relate her poetics to Jewish tradition, see Herzog and Kaufman. For biographical information about her Jewish identity, see also Rukeyser, “Education of a Poet”; Daniels, “‘Searching/Not Searching’”; and Wald, Exiles –. . For an overview of the critical reception of U.S. , see Kertesz –. See also Kalaidjian – and Thurston – for analyses of the literary political significance of this reception. . “Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl” was presumably written by Delmore Schwartz, the poetry editor of Partisan Review at the time, according to Dwight McDonald (Kertesz ). This editorial became the subject of numerous letters, which the editors published and discussed under “The Rukeyser Imbroglio.” The two letters

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that Partisan Review published in their entirety, by Rebecca Pitts and F. O. Matthiessen, defend Rukeyser’s work as they condemn the libelous assault on her character. For an informative analysis of “The Rukeyser Imbroglio,” see Brock. . Rabinowitz discusses Gold’s polemical writings during the early s in her cogent overview of the gendered discourse of s leftist literary criticism (Labor and Desire –). . On Popular Front representations of working-class women, see Denning – and his chapter on migrant narratives (–), especially –. . In addition to Naison, see Buhle, Kelley, and Maxwell for detailed studies of the relation of African American cultural politics to the Popular Front. For a brief but incisive elaboration of the Popular Front approach to “the Negro question,” see Foley –. . Foley cites a number of examples in addition to the Gastonia novels; see –. . It is unclear exactly how many workers at Gauley Bridge died from silicosis. As Rukeyser herself documents, Union Carbide concealed evidence of the workers’ illness and paid for the secret burial of workers who had died from the disease. Because many of the workers were migrant laborers who were not immediately diagnosed with silicosis, it is impossible to state with certainty the number of deaths. Estimates range from several hundred to two thousand. For the most detailed source of information on the Gauley Bridge disaster, including the subsequent concealment of evidence by Union Carbide and its subsidiaries, see Cherniack. . Gauley Bridge was also the subject of a later novel by Hubert Skidmore, Hawk’s Nest (). For additional information on the media coverage of Gauley Bridge, see Cherniack and Rossner and Markowitz. . See Rossner and Markowitz for a thorough sociopolitical analysis of the changing perception of silicosis in the twentieth-century United States. . As Cherniack explains, many residents of the Gauley Bridge area were reluctant to blame Union Carbide because the company has provided so many local jobs. He also explains how difficult it had been in the past to research the story of Gauley Bridge. For example, a historian who planned to write a history of the tunnel project in the early s had to abandon this project after receiving numerous death threats (Cherniack ). . Rukeyser discusses the “meeting-place” of poetry and science in The Life of Poetry –. . The most thorough assessment of the American Guide Series is Bold, who devotes a substantial chapter to the history of the highway route series. See also Penkower – and Mangione –. . The guidebooks did not efface the nationalist design that informed their production, though. As Bold argues, by making the case that local landscapes are interesting because of their histories, the guidebooks fostered national unity through an implicit appeal to American cultural confidence (–). They furthermore enhanced this confidence in national unity through their “management of difference”: potentially

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divisive social difference is naturalized as “local color” within “a harmonious landscape defined as the ‘nation’” (Bold –). . The Soul and Body of John Brown was initially published as a pamphlet with etchings by Rudolph C. von Ripper. It is reprinted, without the illustrations, in Collected Poems –. See Thurston – on the significance of Brown to The Book of the Dead. Denning discusses Brown as a figure of Popular Front “pan-ethnic Americanism” in The Cultural Front –. See also James D. Bloom on Brown’s importance to the s Left, particularly to Mike Gold, in Left Letters –. . I am using the term “informant narrative” as the inclusive category that Stott discusses in Documentary Expression and Thirties America (–). As he writes, the names for first-person documentary narratives from the s that can be included within the category of the informant narrative were numerous: “‘worker narrative,’ ‘folk writing,’ ‘folk-say,’ ‘folk history,’ ‘vernacular literature,’ ‘notes from a diary,’ ‘Letter from America,’ ‘a personal experience,’ or, simply, ‘a document’” (). . “George Robinson: Blues” is actually based on the congressional testimony of a worker named George Robison, although Rukeyser consistently refers to him as “Robinson” throughout The Book of the Dead. . For Rukeyser’s discussion of technical aspects of blues poetry, see The Life of Poetry –. . As Smethurst discusses in The New Red Negro, much of this folkloric “collecting” was done by scholars affiliated with the Left, although much of it was funded by WPA projects as well. See Smethurst – for a detailed analysis of the changing ideological significance of “folk” forms of expression for African American poetry in the s and s. . In his analysis of Rukeyser’s treatment of the congressional records concerning Gauley Bridge, Kadlec makes a compelling case that Rukeyser erases the racial dimensions of the disaster in its appeal to working-class solidarity. Kadlec’s argument is especially persuasive in questioning Rukeyser’s affirmation of x-ray technology as a medium of analysis, but, as Thurston argues, Rukeyser foregrounds Robinson’s blackness through the blues medium of expression (Thurston ) as she accentuates the symbolic whiteness of the silica that poisoned black workers. See Thurston – and Shulman – for cogent critiques of Kadlec’s argument. 3. allegories of salvage . Bishop published poems that were collected in North & South as early as . While Bishop is usually identified as a postwar poet because of the belated publication of her first book, reviewers of North & South were more likely to relate her writing to the literary politics of the s and early s. For example, the one review of North & South most frequently cited as condescendingly dismissive of her (feminine) “charming little stained-glass bits,” Oscar Williams’s New Republic review, is actually critical of poems that seem too predictably “politically correct.” Williams writes: “I feel that such poems of class consciousness as the one on Cootchie, Miss Lula’s servant,

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and ‘Songs for a Colored Singer,’ are a bit too easily on the expected side, charming little stained-glass bits here and there not saving the poems from a charge that the poet is defending the oppressed because it’s the thing to do” (). . Denning examines the political significance of metaphors of natural disaster in his chapter on migration narratives in The Cultural Front. In addition to the Dust Bowl imagery of arid plains and blinding dust storms popularized in The Grapes of Wrath and elsewhere, the Mississippi River floods provided metaphors of disaster for writers and blues singers throughout the s. As Denning writes, the rhetoric of natural disaster often displaced political analysis of the Depression (–). . The Overseas Highway through the Florida Keys was eventually completed in . . Hemingway’s condemnation of the Roosevelt administration is uncompromising, even for the New Masses. He clearly allies the Roosevelt administration with the interests of wealthy property owners, as he explains how “wealthy people, yachtsmen, fishermen, such as President Hoover and President Roosevelt, do not come to the Florida Keys in hurricane months. . . . There is known danger to property. But veterans, especially the bonus-marching variety of veterans, are not property. They are only human beings; unsuccessful human beings, and all they have to lose is their lives. They are doing coolie labor for a top wage of $ a month and they have been put down on the Florida Keys where they can’t make trouble” (“Who Murdered the Vets” ). For an informative account of the hurricane and Hemingway’s response to the veterans’ deaths, see Reynolds –. . Life and Letters Today was published in London and edited by Winifred Ellerman Macpherson (Bryher). Life and Letters Today published several poems that Bishop included in North & South, beginning with “The Man-Moth” (March ), as well as “The Sea & Its Shore,” which appeared in the Winter  issue. The journal published Rukeyser’s “Barcelona, ” in its Autumn  issue. . Even the most extensive biography of Bishop to date, Millier’s Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, mentions Rukeyser only in passing, as one of Bishop’s college classmates () and as one of the Vassar writers who happened to be honored with Bishop in a  ceremony at the college (). Conversely, Bishop does not even appear in the index of the most extensive studies of Rukeyser’s writing: Kertesz, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser, and Herzog and Kaufman, “How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?” . As unstable as Bishop’s childhood was, she was supported by Bishop family money when she attended Vassar and received a modest legacy left by her father after she reached the age of twenty-one. She was not as wealthy as the majority of her peers at Vassar, though, and her legacy did not provide sufficient income to support her as a writer after she finished college. As Millier suggests, Bishop was at once anxious about her finances and self-conscious about her desire to dedicate herself to writing poetry during the Depression (–, –). . In “The Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon,” Travisano traces the importance of

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Rich’s argument for feminist studies of Bishop such as the essays collected in Lombardi, Elizabeth Bishop, and book-length studies by Goldensohn; Harrison; Lombardi, Body and the Song ; and Merrin. For a more skeptical critique of the biographical emphases of Bishop criticism, see Hammer. . Recent studies of Bishop’s politics that stress her engagement with s socioaesthetic debates include Erkilla; Longenbach, “Elizabeth Bishop’s Social Conscience”; and Palattella. . I am adopting the term “contact zone” from Mary Louise Pratt’s study of the improvisational social interactions that take place in European colonial encounters with social “others,” particularly in the New World. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Pratt studies primarily eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial travel writing, but her brief analysis of neocolonial “contact zones” likewise emphasizes how “subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other,” relations that are also asymmetrical relations of power (–). . For more detailed information about the federal government’s impact on s Key West, see Boulard and Writers’ Program, Guide to Key West. . The standard book on wreckage laws was written by a Key West city judge, William Marvin. This book, A Treatise Upon the Law of Wreck and Salvage, became the standard authority in the admiralty courts of the United States and Great Britain (Williams ). . Stevens meditates on “the dreadful sundry of this world” in “O Florida, Venereal Soil” (Collected Poems –). Critical readings of Bishop’s response to Stevens’s poetics have tended to reiterate her skepticism about his heroic ideal of the imagination, whether they are rethinking outmoded critical paradigms about Stevens or affirming her postmodernist difference from his writing. Feminist readings in particular have stressed Bishop’s subversion of Stevens’s masculine lyric subjectivity, a subjectivity informed by the traditional authority of the male poet to master, to control, to order experience. See especially the essays by Brogan and Page in Lombardi, Elizabeth Bishop. For a range of approaches to Bishop’s response to Stevens’s poetics, see the special issue of the Wallace Stevens Journal . (Fall ). The essays by Gelpi and Goodridge present interesting contrasting perspectives on Bishop’s response to Stevens’s Florida. . See Richard Mullen, especially –, for an insightful overview of Bishop’s adaptation of surrealist practice and formal devices in her writing. While Bishop’s surrealist practice and her interest in social marginality and cultural difference are usually treated separately, McCabe lucidly relates Bishop’s “homemade art” to LéviStrauss’s concept of bricolage (–). . Readings of “The Sea & Its Shore” that relate it to Bishop’s development as a poet include Costello –; Kalstone –; Lombardi, Body and the Song –; McCabe –; Millier –; and Travisano, Elizabeth Bishop –. . Blasing –; Longenbach, “Elizabeth Bishop”; McCabe –; and Page, “Elizabeth Bishop” variously examine how Bishop’s consciousness of social marginality during the s informs her revision of modernist notions of tradition.

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. “The Sea & Its Shore,” originally published in Life and Letters Today, was one of only three reprints Gregory included in New Letters. . For a brief overview of a typical boomer’s work life, see Grant’s introduction to Brownie the Boomer: The Life of Charles P. Brown, an American Railroader. . There were certainly numerous women who were transient workers during the early s, but unattached women were returned to their families by relief agencies rather than treated independently (Crouse ). The number of female transients is thus unclear, as unattached women were less likely to apply for aid from relief agencies and therefore were not counted. . Bishop’s anxiety about her apparent appropriation of an image from Marianne Moore’s “The Frigate Pelican” in “The Sea & Its Shore” suggests how close the author actually is to her protagonist. Her anxiety is especially interesting given that she followed Moore’s example of incorporating unattributed quotations into her poems and stories. She wrote in a  letter to Moore: This morning I have been working on “The Sea & Its Shore” . . . and I am suddenly afraid that at the end I have stolen something from “The Frigate Pelican.” I say: “Large flakes of blackened paper, still sparkling red at the edges, flew into the sky. While his eyes could follow them, he had never seen such clever, quivering maneuvers.” It was not until I began seeing pelicans that my true source occurred to me. I know you speak of the flight like “charred paper,” and use the word “maneuvers.” I am afraid it is almost criminal. I haven’t the book here and I wonder if you will tell me just how guilty I am and forgive what was really unconscious. (One Art ) As the editor of Bishop’s selected letters, Robert Giroux, points out, Moore does not use the word “maneuvers,” although she does use the image of “charred paper” (One Art ). . All quotations of Bishop’s poetry are from Complete Poems and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. . Roman examines Bishop’s response to the militarization of Key West in her valuable study of her “World War II–Cold War View.” See especially –. 4. harlem disc-tortions . All quotations of Hughes’s poetry are from Collected Poems and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. . While the scope of this essay is limited to Hughes’s relation to the younger generation of jazz musicians emerging in the s, his extraordinary impact on younger black writers has not been sufficiently recognized. On Hughes’s importance for experimental writing, see Nielsen’s outstanding study of African American postmodernism, especially –. . Baker cites Fraser’s “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” published in the collection edited by Bruce Robbins, The Phantom Public Sphere. See also Fraser’s more extensive Unruly Practices:

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Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. The Phantom Public Sphere presents a multidisciplinary range of post-Habermasian approaches to contemporary public culture. See especially Robbins’s introduction to the collection. . See Dawson’s cogent analysis of the twentieth-century political evolution of the black counterpublic in “A Black Counterpublic.” . Critical studies of Montage that address the socioaesthetic implications of bebop for its form include those by De Jongh, Jemie, and Tracy. . As Hughes’s biographers, Faith Berry and Arnold Rampersad, have noted, Hughes himself chose to suppress much of his radical work after repeated harassment by anti-Communist organizations in the s and s. While Hughes also omitted evidence of his pro-Communist sympathies from his autobiographies, he continued to publish radical social protest writings in magazines and newspapers throughout this period of anti-Communist harassment. See Berry’s introduction to Good Morning Revolution. Ford makes a compelling case that this transformation of his literary identity exemplifies Hughes’s ability to sustain his career by pragmatically appealing to different audiences. Not only did he continually revise poems to suit new rhetorical situations, he likewise fashioned new identities to suit the cultural marketplace. While Ford is excessively skeptical about Hughes’s leftist political commitments, the conclusion of her argument, that his work is best understood by its multiplicity rather than its uniformity, is an important corrective to reductive claims about Hughes. . The most influential literary histories of the Harlem Renaissance, most notably Huggins and Lewis, have argued that the end of the Renaissance coincided with the decline of white patronage during the Depression. For arguments that stress the continuity of s literary politics with the greater emphasis on social class in the s, see Graham, Hutchinson –, Maxwell, James A. Miller, Smethurst, Raymond Smith, Thurston, and Young. . See Smethurst’s introduction to The New Red Negro (–) for an incisive analysis of how and why s African American poetry has been overlooked by literary scholars. He also notes that literary histories that have suggested a continuity of the New Negro Renaissance with the s tend to ignore the s. As a result, writers who first published in late s or s are often identified with the postwar period and its presumed retreat from vernacular forms and eschewal of political protest. . See Rampersad’s discussion and quotation of Hughes’s statement and his subsequent interrogation by Roy Cohn and McCarthy (–). . For a detailed analysis of the impact that the Communist Party had on Harlem cultural politics, see Naison. See especially his chapter on the Popular Front and Harlem intellectuals (–) and his brief discussion of Hughes (–). . On the socioeconomic conditions that informed the Harlem riots, see Anderson, Capeci, Greenberg, and Osofsky. . Recent comparative studies of American modernism that emphasize the interracial and intercultural dimensions of the Harlem Renaissance include Douglas, Hutchinson, and North.

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. As DeVeaux has documented in “Constructing the Jazz Tradition,” the “bebop revolution” has been constructed primarily by scholars who have approached the history of jazz from sociological perspectives, such as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Sidney Finkelstein, and Eric J. Hobsbawm (Francis Newton). On the other hand, musicologists, from swing proponents such as Leonard Feather and Barry Ulanov to influential scholars such as Gunther Schuller and Martin Williams, have tended to see the transition from swing to bebop as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Recent work by writers of the “New Jazz History”—for example, DeVeaux, Erenberg, Stowe, and the scholars collected in the volumes edited by Gabbard—is concerned with the reception of jazz as well as its practice. DeVeaux, Erenberg, and Stowe in particular address the cultural conditions in which such polarized explanations of bebop have themselves emerged. . Hughes was close enough to Ellison at the time in which he wrote Montage that he dedicated the volume to his wife, Fanny, and him. In an interview with Arnold Rampersad, Ellison attributed this dedication to his knowledge of bebop: “I had called his attention to what was happening in the vernacular—be-bop and so on” (Rampersad ). The friendship between Hughes and Ellison barely lasted the publication of Montage and Ellison’s Invisible Man a year later (Rampersad –). . For a firsthand account that corroborates Ellison’s assessment of the early days of bebop, see Dizzy Gillespie’s reminiscence of Minton’s Playhouse in to BE, or not . . . to BOP –. . The derisive appellation of “moldy figs” to describe the revivalists first appeared in a  Metronome editorial (Gendron, “‘Moldy Figs’ and Modernists” ). On the critical reception of bebop throughout the s, see the two essays by Gendron. . Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday are the best-known victims of police repression during the antidrug crusade of the late s and early s, but see Erenberg – for an incisive account of the systematic targeting of black jazz musicians during this period. . If Hughes’s appropriation of bebop does not represent a radical departure from the African American expressive traditions he had popularized in his earlier writing, the agitated sound of Montage struck many of his contemporaries as a departure from the more straightforward “populist” rhetoric of his best-known verse. For example, the Marxist poet Don West cited the title itself as an indication of this departure, suggesting that the structural principle of the montage somehow conflicted with the more accessible “people’s language” of Hughes’s poetry (). Another critic similarly wrote that the references to bebop were unnecessarily obscure for such an otherwise powerfully direct work of social criticism (Parker). Yet if this critic feared that “any reader . . . who is unfamiliar with the raw and dizzy rhythms of the contemporary version of jazz” would be disoriented by Montage (Parker ), critics more attuned to the history of jazz and blues poetry took Hughes’s evocation of bebop more seriously. The question of Hughes’s audience figures as prominently but registers quite differently in assessments of Montage’s form by African American reviewers, particularly in journals

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that had a substantial black readership. Celebrating the fact that Montage defies the “tendency . . . to write about Harlem primarily for the white reader,” Frank Marshall Davis wrote that its style is “disarmingly simple—so simple that often the brilliant artistry may be overlooked. Yet this conversational simplicity makes for the charm and readability that produces a wide audience” (–). Such unqualified praise was the exception among readers who debated whether the bebop form of Montage was continuous with Hughes’s earlier “folk art.” Disagreements about what made Montage formally innovative depended on the reviewer’s understanding of bebop’s relation to the history of black music. For example, Arthur P. Davis wrote that Hughes employed a “technique with which he had been experimenting since ,” but the technique that Davis goes on to describe is that of the bebop “jam session” (–). Arna Bontemps likewise noted the formal continuity of The Weary Blues with the jazz of Montage, but, he added, because Harlem was “ years older . . . naturally, its music had grown more complicated” (). Critics who situated Montage within a developing but continuous tradition of black music were most likely to note the correspondence of bebop’s dissonance with Harlem’s growing frustration. If these readers identified Hughes’s disjointed sequence with the unnerving restlessness of a music associated with an alienated black subculture, others saw his Montage as a more calculated attempt to cash in on the youthful appeal of this same movement. J. Saunders Redding was perhaps the most direct in his criticism of Hughes’s “experimentation” with “the jarring dissonances and broken rhythms of be-bop,” in contrast with the earlier “smooth and relatively simple rhythm of jazz.” With bebop opposed to jazz in this comparison, Redding appears to question whether Hughes’s bebop rendition of Harlem could be considered poetry. While Redding objected to Hughes’s “too great concern for perpetuating his reputation as an ‘experimenter,’” his criticism nonetheless registers what sounded threateningly new about the “jarring dissonances” of bebop (). . There were initially six sections of Montage, although Hughes later omitted the section headings when the poem was reprinted in its entirety in his Selected Poems. In examining its structure as a long poem, I will refer to the section headings from the initial publication of Montage, although the poems I quote are the final versions published in Collected Poems. Rampersad delineates Hughes’s revisions of Montage in the notes for Collected Poems –. . According to Rampersad, “Inez” refers to Inez Cavanaugh, who worked as a publicity agent for Duke Ellington before opening a nightclub in Paris, while “Timme” most likely refers to Baron Timme Rosenkrantz, a Danish jazz afficionado who wrote for Down Beat in the late s. See Rampersad’s notes to Hughes, Collected Poems , where he annotates the network of contemporary names that Hughes included in different versions of “Projection.” . On the psychosexual implications of “Café:  ..,” see Nero, Shoptaw, and especially Jarraway, who cogently relates the “mystery” of Hughes’s sexuality to the problem of “deferred subjectivity” in Montage. The significance of Hughes’s ambiguous sexuality has attracted considerable attention in recent years, especially in the wake of

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Rampersad’s biography. See Nero for a critique of Rampersad’s evasive account of Hughes’s homosexuality. Chauncey – and Garber each tentatively relate Hughes to the gay subculture of Jazz Age Harlem. . See Rampersad –, – on Hughes’s literary affiliation with Common Ground, for which he also served on the editorial board. Denning makes a compelling case for the lasting impact of this journal, which, during its decade-long existence (–), published black writers such as Arna Bontemps, Melvin Tolson, Margaret Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Chester Himes. 5. a reportage and redemption . See Kenny J. Williams, especially , for a concise explanation of the now obscure history of the Mecca Building, which is omitted even from official documents such as the major biographies of D. H. Burnham. . All quotations from In the Mecca are from Blacks and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. . The best-known example of such criticism would be Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. See Harvey – for an incisive overview of postmodernist critiques of “the modernist idea that planning and development should focus on large-scale, metropolitan-wide, technologically rational and efficient urban plans, backed by absolutely no-frills architecture” (). Beauregard surveys the role that racial politics increasingly played in the post–World War II discourse of urban decline. See especially –. . Brooks’s readers have generally followed her account of her turn toward black cultural nationalism. She cites the  Second Annual Writers’ Conference at Fisk University as the event that drew her toward the Black Arts movement (Report –). The sometimes exaggerated division of Brooks’s career into an early period characterized by “a private, internal, and exclusive assessment of the identity crises of twentiethcentury persons” and a later period informed by “a communal, external, and inclusive assessment of the black communal experience” (Clark ) tends to underestimate the political significance of her pre- writings. The two collections of critical essays on Brooks’s writing, edited by Mootry and Smith and by Wright, provide contrasting assessments of Brooks’s career through the s and s. The collections of tributes to Brooks, edited by Brown, Lee, and Ward and by Madhubuti, likewise emphasize the long-term influence of Brooks’s writing, teaching, and activism. For arguments that underscore the transformative impact of the Black Arts movement on Brooks’s political consciousness, see, for example, Baker, “Fluorescence of Nationalism”; Clark; Gayle; and Hansell. Even those poets and critics who argue most intently for her “conversion” to black nationalism, however, emphasize that she does not disavow her earlier writing. Callahan, for example, makes an especially compelling argument for Brooks’s sustained commitment to a more participatory, oral Afrocentric poetics after , but he also notes that Brooks “does not foreswear her prior voice” () even as

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she rethinks her audience. For critical studies of Brooks’s career that variously stress the continuity of her Afrocentric vision, see Joyce, Spillers, and Kenny J. Williams. For an insightful critical review of Brooks’s reception, see Lindberg, who surveys how Brooks’s literary reputation has been constructed and contested by feminist and black nationalist critics. . See Scruggs, introduction to Sweet Home, for a cogent summary of this shift toward a dystopian vision of the city in African American literary history. While the utopian vision of the “beloved community” continued to inspire African American social activism after the Depression, most notably in the sermons and speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., it coincided with a harsher assessment of the socioeconomic conditions of African American urban life. As Scruggs notes, even histories of African American literature that predate the Black Arts movement, beginning with Sterling Brown’s The Negro in American Fiction (), emphasize the dramatic shift in urban consciousness that takes place during the s. . Kent documents Brooks’s involvement with the cultural Left in the s and s, but he does not ascribe an overtly political purpose to her early work. For correctives to the diminishment of the political milieu of Brooks’s early writing, see the analyses of A Street in Bronzeville by Bill Mullen (–) and Smethurst (–). . The unemployment rate exceeded half of the employable African Americans in Chicago during the Depression. Approximately one-third of all black families in Chicago received direct relief (Kent ). Brooks’s family was not among those who endured unemployment or received relief, but her father had to take on additional part-time jobs to make ends meet after his full-time salary as a porter had been cut substantially by his employer, the McKinley Music Publishing Company (Kent ). . On the various drafts of “In the Mecca,” see Kent –, – and Melhem –. . See Kent – for a detailed account of Brooks’s participation in the conference. . See Bill Mullen – for a brief history of the South Side Community Art Center. Brooks discusses the importance of the Art Center as a haven for progressive blacks in the s in Report –. . As Bill Mullen notes, however, Brooks’s recollections of the s and s have hardly been consistent about her political affiliations. For example, she does not mention her participation in the League of American Writers in Report from Part One, although she is included as a member of the league by its historian, Franklin Folsom (Mullen , –, n.). . The list of radical writers who left Chicago during the early cold war years is long (Wright, Chester Himes, Willard Motley, Frank Marshall Davis, and Horace Cayton were among the most prominent) and includes some of Brooks’s closest associates, such as Margaret Burroughs, who along with the painters Charles Wright and Elizabeth Catlett, found refuge in Mexico City. See Bill Mullen – for an incisive

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analysis of the impact of anticommunism on the African American cultural Left in Chicago. . Doreski emphasizes the political significance of Brooks’s serial epigraphs in her chapter on In the Mecca in Writing America Black (–). Her reading of In the Mecca offers a compelling account of Brooks’s documentary practice. . The Marseilles sculpture was never constructed, however. . The Ebony article included several pages of photographs of the Wall of Respect, from its first stages of construction to its dedication ceremony. The initial photograph shows the boarded-up building before it was painted, with a caption that states: “Except for routine gang inscriptions, the side wall of an old building at rd and Langley Ave., in the heart of Chicago’s near South Side, was simply another barren symbol of slum life.” The subsequent account of its transformation celebrates the collective work of OBAC in “communicating black dignity” (“Wall” ), with photographs and quotations of painters such as Jeff Donaldson and William Walker, who were instrumental in the planning and production of the mural. Also quoted is one intellectual and activist whose example is commemorated on the Wall, the historian Lerone Bennett Jr., who underscores the unprecedented significance of the mural’s public presence in a black community: “For a long time now it has been obvious that Black Art and Black Culture would have to go home. The Wall is home and a way Home” (“Wall” ). The Wall of Respect was subsequently featured on the cover of the Summer–Fall  issue of Arts in Society, a special issue on “the Arts and the Black Revolution.” A photograph of the Wall also appeared in the April , , issue of Time. . For historical overviews of African American mural painting, see Barnett and the essays in Collins and Goldman and in Prigoff and Dunitz. . See David Lionel Smith for an insightful overview of the impact of OBAC on the Black Arts movement. . Many of the same artists who worked on the Wall of Respect in Chicago, including Walker, worked on the Wall of Dignity and the Wall of Pride in Detroit in . Other African American murals followed the example of the Chicago Wall of Respect, including the Wall of Respect in Atlanta and the Wall of Respect in St. Louis, both constructed in the early s. . As it became a rallying point for community activism, its composition evolved with the growing radicalization of black nationalism, as new panels were added in  that included a raised fist asserting black power and images of black oppression by the Ku Klux Klan and the police. In  a new mural was begun across the street to accompany the Wall of Respect. This new mural, the Wall of Truth, was more specifically dedicated to themes of oppression and confrontation. There was no mistaking its purpose, as its inscription read: “We the People/Of this community/Claim this building in order/To preserve what is ours” (Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft ). The sense of determined pride and community solidarity generated by the Wall of Respect, and later the Wall of Truth, succeeded in forestalling demolition until their buildings were destroyed by fire in .

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6. a metamorphic palimpsest . All quotations from Letter to an Imaginary Friend will be cited parenthetically in the text. . McGrath describes the correspondence of these worldviews with his Marxist materialist vision in Letter as a palimpsest in his  interview with Gibbons and Des Pres: “I think the way I see the world is as if it were a palimpsest: here’s this writing, and underneath that is other writing, and underneath that is other writing. But this is the kind of palimpsest in which the writings are all about the same thing. But they’re done in different ways, you know: the Hopi, Christianity, and I don’t deny there must be many, many others” (). . Davidson invents the term “palimtext” to describe modernist writing “in its collaborative, quotidian, and intertextual forms” (). While my argument is informed by Davidson’s materialist reading of modern poetry, I retain the more familiar generic term “palimpsest” to discuss McGrath’s long poem. . Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts I & II was published by Swallow Press (Chicago) in . McGrath resumed writing his long poem in the s, and Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts Three & Four was published by Copper Canyon in . Only since the  Copper Canyon publication of Letter to an Imaginary Friend have all four sections been available in a single volume. While McGrath considered the poem complete after he finished Part Two, he later described Letter as a more open-ended long poem than he had first conceived. While working on Part Three, he wrote: “Poe was % wrong. It is the ‘short ’ poem which is a contradiction in terms. In reality there are only long poems and the void. It is true that what we appear to get are ‘aphorisms, epigrams, songs, song-like poems’ and so on. But these are only fragments of the long poem which the poet somehow failed to write, that long poem which he will go on trying to write by fits and starts his whole life long” (“McGrath on McGrath” ). While there is considerable formal and thematic continuity between the four sections, Parts Three and Four are looser in form, more tragicomic in tone, and more densely allusive of Native American (especially Hopi) and Christian mythologies than Parts One and Two. My emphasis on Parts One and Two is not meant to question the overall coherence of Letter but to concentrate specifically on McGrath’s engagement with the problem of historical memory during the s and s. For considerations of the formal and philosophical relations between the four parts of Letter, see Butwin; Des Pres; Gibbons; Jacobson; Stern, “Revolutionary Poet”; Thompson; and Wakoski. . Reviews of McGrath’s  New and Selected Poems exemplify how critics identified him with the Depression-era Old Left. Richard Howard, for example, writes in Poetry: “[T]he ideology in which McGrath is lodged—a sham profundity of alienation which repudiates the present and its capitalist possibilities in favor of ‘a grammar of the Public Good’—keeps his poetry from being his own even more cruelly than because it derives from other men’s. His ‘beliefs’ trap McGrath in a stockroom of images, a merciless repertory of metaphors, so that we are left, after twenty-five years

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of his work, with the sense of this poet’s inability to see that things are what they are” (). Even a critic more inclined to appreciate McGrath’s political poetry, Hayden Carruth, sees a decline in his writing after World War II: “McGrath was the one authentic poetic voice of revolutionary America in our time, I believe. . . . Then, however, in the late forties and fifties McGrath’s work became more and more acceptable, ticking off rhymes academically, and today he appears to lack all style and subject. It is easy enough to relate this to the decline of the Left, and no one would think of blaming McGrath for what has happened. It is simply a pity” (). Kenneth Rexroth wrote a more favorable account of McGrath’s postwar poetry for the New York Times Book Review, but he likewise blames cold war anticommunism for McGrath’s reputation: “Probably it is those distinguished blacklists, and just living in Los Angeles, where everybody is on somebody’s blacklist, that has kept McGrath from his due. . . . It is the other peoples’ opinions which have kept him from being as well known as he deserves, for he is a most accomplished and committed poet” (). . McGrath appeared before the HUAC in  and refused to cooperate with the committee’s questioning of him. He was subsequently fired from his faculty position at Los Angeles State College and worked many short-term jobs before he found another faculty position (at C. W. Post College) in . According to McGrath, he was also blacklisted from journals (such as Poetry) that had previously published his work. On the impact of McCarthyism on his career, see his interview with Des Pres and Gibbons –, –; his interview with Stern –; and Thompson. . While there were few critical studies of McGrath’s writing published prior to the s, there are several more recent collections of essays and memoirs that indicate the impact of McGrath’s writing on contemporary poetry. For additional responses to McGrath’s writing, see the book collections edited by Stern and by Gibbons and Des Pres, the latter of which was first published as a special McGrath issue of TriQuarterly  (Fall ), edited by Gibbons; and the special McGrath issues of North Dakota Quarterly . (Fall ), edited by Fred Whitehead, and Poetry East / (), edited by Richard Jones. . Most of McGrath’s readers have related Letter to the specifically American tradition of the long poem initiated by Whitman, but the socioaesthetic vision of McGrath’s poetics is emphatically international. While Letter underscores the ideological impact of American cultural mythologies, especially of the West, McGrath’s “Dakota” is as much a “condition” as a place, as symptomatic of international capitalism as it is distinguished by its local history of resistance. Likewise, McGrath’s Marxist poetics are as attuned to European and Latin American traditions of political poetry as to Anglo-American traditions of the long poem. See David Haven Blake and Thompson for compelling arguments about the limitations of reading McGrath in a specifically national tradition. . For brief overviews of the radical history of the Dakotas, see Des Pres – and Thompson –. For more extensive considerations of North Dakota politics, see Stock, Rural Radicals, especially – and –, and Main Street in Crisis.

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. McGrath was interested enough in Caudwell’s aesthetics that he proposed to write a thesis on Caudwell during his Rhodes Scholarship study at Oxford in – (a scholarship that he was awarded in  but was deferred until after the war). Not surprisingly, this topic was not approved by his thesis committee, nor was the second topic that he chose, the literary criticism of T. S. Eliot. On his year of study at Oxford, see McGrath’s interview with Des Pres and Gibbon –. . See Klaus for a concise overview of Caudwell’s reception through the s. As Klaus points out, Caudwell was valorized by Left intellectuals in the s because of his heroic death in Spain. Illusion and Reality in particular was favorably reviewed by W. H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice as well as by Communist critics. For more extensive studies of Caudwell that assess the revived interest in his aesthetics since the s, see Pawling and Sullivan. . In addition to Klaus, who summarizes the postwar Marxist debates about Caudwell’s aesthetics (–), see Thompson – on the significance of postwar discussions of paleolithic cave art to these debates. . In addition to the book-length studies of Caudwell by Pawling and Sullivan, Manganaro and Solomon relate Caudwell’s Marxist socioaesthetics to the schools of modern anthropology that influenced his thinking. . Pawling underscores the utopian dimension of Caldwell’s aesthetics, relating his thinking to that of the Frankfurt School philosopher Ernst Bloch (–). . McGrath’s statement was reprinted in North Dakota Quarterly . (Fall ): –. . McGrath explains how difficult it was for his family to make an adequate living during the s in his interview with Des Pres and Gibbons (–). . McGrath discusses his introduction to the Communist Party while he was a student at the University of North Dakota in his interview with Des Pres and Gibbons (–). . For a more comprehensive study of Lévi-Strauss’s relation to French symbolist writing, see Boon, especially –, where he compares the recollective narration of Tristes Tropiques to that of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. . See Frumkin, who was McGrath’s student at Los Angeles State, on the “Marsh Street Irregulars” and this period of McGrath’s life in Los Angeles. 7. the spectre of the 1930s . All quotations from Oppen’s poetry are from New Collected Poems and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. . Oppen’s twenty-five-year silence figures as prominently as his writing in many assessments of his significance as a poet. For an especially thorough and insightful reflection on the importance of silence in Oppen’s career and in his poetry, see DuPlessis, “The familiar / becomes extreme.” . Silliman’s argument corresponds with Oppen’s own assessment of the reception of Objectivist poetry in the s. In a  letter to Serge Fauchereau, Oppen wrote:

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“As to the current interest in the Objectivists: they were rather wiped out, weren’t they? by the generation of the Academics. The Academics having now disappeared without a trace, we seem rather to have been stumbled on by the young poets who must have wondered what if anything could have been going on between themselves, that is between their appearance and Pound, Williams, Eliot, and Stevens, who are at least three generations before them” (Selected Letters ). While the Objectivists were not entirely invisible to younger writers in the s, the promotion of the New American Poetry as an avant-garde movement presumed no knowledge of the s Objectivist movement. In his introduction to The New American Poetry, the anthology that introduced the San Francisco Renaissance, Black Mountain, New York School, and Beat poets to a broader public, Donald Allen briefly mentions a “wide variety of poets of the second generation, who emerged in the thirties and forties . . . Elizabeth Bishop, Edwin Denby, Robert Lowell, Kenneth Rexroth, and Louis Zukofsky, to name only a few very diverse talents.” He argues, however, that it is the next generation of poets represented in The New American Poetry who, “following the practice and precepts of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams,” have “gone on to evolve new conceptions of the poem.” These poets are “our avant-garde, the true continuers of the modern movement in American poetry” (Allen, Preface xi). For considerations of the continuities (and discontinuities) between the Objectivists and the New American Poetry, see Altieri; Fredman, “‘And All Now Is War’”; Heller; and Lowney. . June Oppen Degnan, Oppen’s half-sister, was the publisher of the San Francisco Review and copublisher, with New Directions, of The Materials and This in Which, Oppen’s second and third books. In quoting Oppen’s letters and his working papers from the Archive for New Poetry, I follow the editorial principles that DuPlessis delineates in Selected Letters (xxv–xxvii). . Oppen was aware of the public significance of his experience prior to the s, however. For example, when he wrote to James Laughlin in  to inquire about the possibility of publishing his poetry, he underscored at once their shared generational experience and the contemporary relevance of his new work: “Hardly for the neatness of coincidence, or the pure sense of old times, but it is true that I have some feeling of an historical spiral in emerging from the fifties in so nearly the curve in which we all found ourselves flung out of the twenties” (Selected Letters ). . Oppen questioned whether such an emphasis on opposing literary affiliations obscured more pressing political issues. In a letter to June Oppen Degnan, shortly after President Kennedy’s assassination, he wrote: “I saw LeRoi Jones—who has been feeling very left-rebellious—at the [Lita] Hornick party. . . . The war-games of the Beats and Academics look a little silly—with the vandals outside, I told him. And we agreed” (Selected Letters ). . See Michael André Bernstein for a brief but cogent explanation of the significance of this contradictory epistemology for Oppen’s poetics. For more extensive considerations of the epistemological and ontological premises of Oppen’s poetics, especially as his writings are informed by Heidegger, see Chilton and Nicholls. For

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contrasting accounts of whether Oppen’s poetry of the s resolves this contradiction, see Hatlen, “Not Altogether Lone,” and Perloff. . For the most comprehensive discussions of Oppen’s serial poems, see DuPlessis, “George Oppen,” and Golding, “George Oppen’s Serial Poems.” For extensive readings of “Of Being Numerous” that address the significance of its serial form, see Hatlen, “Opening Up the Text”; Hooker; McAleavey; and Perloff. See also the analyses of Discrete Series as a prototypical serial poem by Conte (–) and Shoptaw. Davidson examines the intertextual relation of Oppen’s poetry to his working papers in his discussion of “palimtexts” in Ghostlier Demarcations (–). . Golding makes this case about the form of Oppen’s serial poems most incisively, as he defines the primary subject of Oppen’s poetry as “exploring the limits of verbal, political, and human connection or relation” (“George Oppen’s Serial Poems” ). Nicholls likewise correlates the linguistic opacity of Oppen’s writing with the problem of collectivity or community, as he persuasively correlates Oppen’s poetic inquiry into the problem of collectivity with the philosophical inquiry of Jean Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community. . Oppen discusses the politics of Brecht’s poetry in several letters as well as in “The Mind’s Own Place.” See especially his  letter to Max and Anita Pepper (Selected Letters –), his  letter to Linda Oppen Mourelatos (Selected Letters –), and his  letter to Philip Levine (Selected Letters –). Mary Oppen also singles out Brecht’s writing in discussing her husband’s assessment of political poetry during the s. She writes that when they answered the Communist Party’s appeal to intellectuals to join the “united front to defeat fascism and war,” they did so “not as artist or writer because we did not find honesty or sincerity in the so-called arts of the left.” She adds, however, that she would “make an exception for Bertolt Brecht and for some Soviet movies” (Mary Oppen ). . Several essays in The Objectivist Nexus articulate the relation of Objectivist poetics to Frankfurt School socioaesthetics. See especially the introduction by DuPlessis and Quartermain, which examines how Oppen’s poetics evoke the Marxist utopianism of Ernst Bloch. For more extensive inquiries into the correspondence of Oppen’s writing with Frankfurt School critical theory, especially that of Benjamin, see Finkelstein, Utopian Moment, and Seed. . See Davidson, Notes  on the importance of quotation in “Of Being Numerous.” Oppen also dedicated his Collected Poems to Mary with the same dedicatory statement. . As Perloff has written, the poem evokes the modernist topos of “the exile’s return.” She argues that “Of Being Numerous” accentuates the divorce, rather than the synthesis, of poetry and politics through its syntax and lexicon. While I disagree with her reading of the poem’s trajectory as a withdrawal from human contact, her emphasis on the exiled poet’s alienation from the city represents an important corrective to more optimistic claims about the poem’s “populist” vision. . See Charles Bernstein, who defines the “hinge” in Oppen’s poetry as an

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innovative line break that differs from enjambment or juxtaposition in that it produces extraordinary tension between syntax and the words’ semantic polyvalence. . Oppen moved with his family from New York, where he was working for Grumman Aircraft, to Detroit in . Because he had changed jobs, he lost his military exemption and was drafted into the army. For biographical accounts of Oppen’s experience in World War II, see Mary Oppen; DuPlessis, Introduction; and Davidson, Introduction. . Oppen was more decisive about his guilt later in his life. He says in the interview with Hatlen and Mandel that his decision to fight in the war “was a mistake . . . was unnecessary and wrong. . . . It was essentially at Mary’s expense, or partly at Mary’s” (George Oppen and Mary Oppen ). . See, for example, his explanation of this dream in an April , , letter to his daughter, Linda (Selected Letters –). . Oppen revised his assessment of the antiwar movement and the New Left in the later s. He wrote to Rachel Blau DuPlessis in : “I totally misunderstood and mis-predicted to myself what would happen in the Vietnam War. . . . I do, tho, begin to think that the situation in this country truly is a revolutionary situation” (Selected Letters –). . Oppen discusses this problem in a  letter to John Crawford (Selected Letters –). See DuPlessis’s explanatory note on Oppen’s appropriation of Pacheno’s poetry in Selected Letters , n.. . See Davidson, Notes . Oppen acknowledges the importance of Blake for his own poetry in a  letter to David Ignatow (Selected Letters –). There has been little critical attention to Oppen’s interest in Blake, however. For suggestive claims about the importance of Blake’s example as a prophetic poet for Oppen, see Hooker and Taggart. Neither, though, elaborates on the specific impact of Blake’s poetry on Oppen’s poetics. . Reznikoff ’s identification with Ezekiel was deepened by the fact that “Ezekiel” was Reznikoff ’s Hebrew name. . Oppen actually consistently misquoted these lines whenever he recollected their resonance. See, for example, the foreword to Reznikoff, Poems –, where he misremembers the lines as “the girder, still itself / among the rubble.” Franciosi discusses these lines in an insightful essay on the intertextual relation of Reznikoff ’s poetry to that of Oppen, Zukofsky, and Niedecker. . See the introduction to Jerusalem by Paley for an overview of the poem’s composition. . See Oppen’s brief essay on McGrath, “Note on Tom McGrath.”

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Index Adamic, Louis,  Agee, James, ; Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,  Alexandroff, Mike,  Algren, Nelson: Somebody in Boots, n, n Allen, Philippa, – Alston, Charles,  American Writers’ Congress, –, – amnesia: and African American literary history, –; historical, –, –, , –, –, –, ; and Native American history, –; political, , , . See also memory Anderson, M. Margaret, ,  Arnold, Augusta Foote: The Sea-Beach at Ebb-Tide,  Arvin, Newton: Whitman, ,  Auden, W. H., –,  Baker, Houston, – Bakhtin, Mikhail, – Baldwin, James,  Baraka, Amiri, , ,  Barnard, Rita,  Baudelaire, Charles,  Bearden, Romare,  Beauregard, Robert,  bebop, –, –, ; contrasted with swing, , n. See also Hughes, Langston Benét, Stephen Vincent: John Brown’s Body,  Benjamin, Walter, , –; “The Author as Producer,” – Bennett, Lerone,  Bergson, Henri,  Berryman, John,  Biggers, John, –

Bishop, Elizabeth, , –, ; and African Americans, –; critical reception of, n, –n; ethnographic surrealism of, , , –; and Key West, , , –; as lesbian writer, –; and Moore, , , , –, n; and the s Left, –, –; and primitivism, –, –; and Rukeyser, –, n; salvage art of, , , –, –; and social marginality, , –, –; and Stevens, , –, –, n; and World War II, –. WORKS: “Anaphora,” ; “The Bight,” –; Complete Poems –, ; “Cootchie,” ; “The End of March,” –; “Faustina, or Rock Roses,” ; “Florida,” –; “Gregorio Valdes,” –; “In Prison,” –, ; “Jéronimo’s House,” –; “Little Exercise,” ; “The Monument,” –; North & South, , , , ; “The Sea & Its Shore,” , –, , , ; “Seascape,” ; “Songs for a Colored Singer,” , ; “The U.S.A. School of Writing,” – Bishop, John Peale,  Black Arts movement, –, –, –, – Black Belt Nation thesis, –, – Blackmur, R. P.,  Blake, William: Jerusalem, , , –, ; “Little Black Boy,”  Blakely, Henry,  Bland, Edward,  Blough, Frani,  Bly, Robert,  Bodenheim, Maxwell, 

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Bold, Christine, –n Bonnefoy, Yves,  Bontemps, Arna, ; They Seek a City,  Book of the Dead, , ,  Bourke-White, Margaret, ; You Have Seen Their Faces,  Bourne, Randolph: “Trans-National America,”  Bradford, Walter,  Brecht, Bertolt, , –; “An die Nachgeborenen” (To Posterity), – Britton, Edgar,  Brooks, Gwendolyn, , , , , – , , ; and African American countermemory, –, –, – , –; and Black Arts movement, –, –, –, –, –; and Chicago, –, –; critical reception of, n, –n; at Fisk University Writers’ Conference, –; and Hughes, –; literary publics of, –, –, , ; and Mecca Building, , –, , –, , –; Popular Front affiliations of, –, –, –, n. WORKS: Annie Allen, , ; “The Blackstone Rangers,” , , ; “Boy Breaking Glass,” , , , ; “The Chicago Picasso,” , , –; In the Mecca, , –, –, , –; “In the Mecca,” , –, –, –, –, ; “Malcolm X,” , , ; Maud Martha, , ; “Medgar Evers,” , ; Report from Part One, ; “The Second Sermon on the Warpland,” –; A Street in Bronzeville, , , , ; “To a Winter Squirrel,” ; “The Wall,” , , , , , –, – Brooks, Van Wyck, 

Brown, John, –, ,  Brown, Sterling, , ; Southern Road,  Burke, Fielding,  Burke, Kenneth, –; “Revolutionary Symbolism in America,” – Burnham, D. H., ,  Burnshaw, Stanley,  Burroughs, Margaret, ,  Byron, George Gordon: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,  Caldwell, Erskine: You Have Seen Their Faces,  Callahan, John,  Catlett, Elizabeth, – Caudwell, Christopher, ; Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry, – Cherniack, Martin, – Chicago, –, –; and urban decline, . See also Brooks, Gwendolyn; Chicago Renaissance; Popular Front Chicago Defender: Brooks’s writing published in, , ; Hughes’s writings published in, , , , , ,  Chicago Freedom movement, , – Chicago Renaissance, , – Chopin, Kate: The Awakening,  Christmas, Edward,  Clarke, John Henrik,  Clay, Eugene,  Clifford, James, , , –, – Common Council for American Unity, ,  Common Ground, , – Communist Party of the United States, , , –, , , ; and African American culture, –, –; and “the Negro question,” –; and “the woman question,” 

index

Conroy, Jack, ; The Disinherited, n; They Seek a City,  Cornell, Joseph,  Cowley, Malcolm,  Crane, Hart, ; The Bridge, , , ; and Whitman,  Crisis,  Cronin, A. J.: The Citadel,  Danner, Margaret, –,  Darwin, Charles,  Davidson, Michael, , ,  Davis, Frank Marshall,  Degnan, June Oppen,  Denning, Michael, , –, , n Depression. See Great Depression Des Pres, Terrence,  DeVeaux, Scott,  Dickinson, Emily,  documentary, –, –, . See also Rukeyser, Muriel Doolittle, Hilda. See H.D. Dos Passos, John, ,  Douglas, Aaron,  Du Bois, W. E. B.,  DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, , ,  Ebony,  Eliot, T. S., , , , , n; and McGrath, , , n; and ruins topos, –; and Rukeyser, , ; and Stevens, , –, –; The Waste Land, , , –, –, , , ,  Ellison, Ralph, , , ; on bebop, , ; Invisible Man,  Erkkila, Betsy, ,  Ernst, Max,  Evans, Walker, ; Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,  Fair, Ronald,  Farrell, James, , 

281

Fearing, Kenneth, , –, –, , ; and Whitman,  Federal Art Project, – Federal Writers’ Project, , ; American Guide Series, , , –, , –n; American Stuff, ; Florida, –; and Harlem, –; U. S. One: Maine to Florida, , –,  Filreis, Alan,  Finkelstein, Norman,  Fisk University Writers’ Conference, – Flanner, Hildegarde,  Foley, Barbara,  Frank, Waldo, ,  Fraser, Nancy, , ,  Fredman, Stephen, – Freeman, Joseph,  Freud, Sigmund,  Funaroff, Sol,  Garman, Bryan, n Gauley Bridge, –, n, n. See also Rukeyser, Muriel Geertz, Clifford,  Gibbons, Reginald,  Gillespie, Dizzy,  Ginsberg, Allen: “Wichita Vortex Sutra,”  Gold, Michael, , , , , ; Jews without Money, , n, –n; Life of John Brown, ; and Whitman – Golding, Alan,  Gordon, Don,  Gordon, Eugene,  Gramsci, Antonio,  Great Depression, –, –; and cultural memory, –, , ; and literary public, –, ; natural disaster metaphors of, , n; and vocation of the writer, –

282

index

Gregory, Horace, ; “Social Poets” issue of Poetry, – Guillén, Nicolás, ,  Halbwachs, Maurice,  Hardy, Thomas, ; “The Oxen,” – Harlem, –; as black mecca, –; economic impact of the Great Depression on, –. See also Hughes, Langston Harlem Quarterly,  Harlem Renaissance, , , –; and the s Left, –, n Harrington, Joseph, – Hart, Henry,  Hatlen, Burton, , ,  Hayden, Robert, , ,  Hayes, Alfred, ,  H. D.,  Hegeman, Susan, , n Heidegger, Martin,  Hemingway, Ernest, –, n; on Key West, ; To Have and Have Not,  Hicks, Granville,  Holiday, Billie, , n House Un-American Activities Committee, , , ,  Hughes, Langston, , , , , , – , , ; and African American vernacular expression, –; and bebop, , –, –, –n; and Brooks, –; and Common Ground, , –; Communist affiliations of, , –, n; critical memory of, –; critical reception of, n, –n; and Harlem, , , –, –; literary publics of, –, ; and sexuality, –, –n; Simple stories of, , , , , –, ; and Whitman, n. WORKS: “Ballad of the Landlord,” , –, ; “Ballad of the Seven Songs: A Poem for

Emancipation Day,” ; “Beaumont to Detroit: ,” ; “Bop,” , ; “Brothers,” , ; “Café:  ..,” ; “Casualty,” ; “Children’s Rhymes,” –; “College Formal: Renaissance Casino,” ; “Corner Meeting,” –; Cuba Libre: Poems by Nicolás Guillén, ; “Deferred,” –; “Democracy and Me,” ; “Dream Boogie,” –; “Evenin’ Air Blues,” ; Fine Clothes to the Jew, ; “Flatted Fifths,” ; “Gauge,” –; “Good Morning,” –; “Goodbye Christ,” ; “Green Memory,” ; Jim Crow’s Last Stand, , ; “Joe Louis,” ; “Juke Box Love Song,” ; Langston Hughes Reader, ; “Likewise,” ; “Madame Poems,” ; “Mellow,” ; “Merry-Go-Round,” ; Montage of a Dream Deferred, , , , –, –, –, , ; “Movies,” , ; “My Adventures as a Social Poet,” ; “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” –, ; “Neon Signs,” , ; “New Yorkers,” ; “Not a Movie,” ; “Note on Commercial Theatre,” ; “th Street,” ; One-Way Ticket, , ; “Parade,” –; “Passing,” ; The Poetry of the Negro, –; “Projection,” , , –; “Relief,” ; Scottsboro Limited, ; Selected Poems, ; “Shame on You,” ; Simple Speaks His Mind, ; “Subway Rush Hour,” ; “Theme for English B,” , –; “To Negro Writers,” ; “Tomorrow,” –; “Too Much of Race,” ; “What Shall We Do about the South?” –; “White Folks Do the Funniest Things,” ; “World War II,”  Hugo, Richard, 

index

Jackson, Aunt Molly,  Janowitz, Anne, – Johnson, James Weldon, –, ; Black Manhattan,  Jones, Gayl, ,  Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Amiri Josephson, Matthew,  Kadlec, David, n, n Kafka, Franz, – Kalaidjian, Walter, , , , – Kalar, Joseph, – Kazin, Alfred,  Keats, John,  Kent, George, – Key West, –. See also Bishop, Elizabeth Kierkegaard, Søren,  Killens, John,  King, Martin Luther, Jr., , – Kreymborg, Alfred,  Kritzman, Lawrence, – LaCapra, Dominick, n LaCava, Gregory: My Man Godfrey, –n Lange, Dorothea: An American Exodus, ,  Lawrence, Jacob, ; The Life of John Brown, ; Migration of the Negro,  Le Sueur, Meridel,  Leadbelly. See Ledbetter, Huddie League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism, – League of American Writers,  League of Struggle for Negro Rights,  Ledbetter, Huddie,  Lemann, Nicholas,  Lentricchia, Frank, n Levertov, Denise: “Staying Alive,”  Lévi-Strauss, Claude, n; and bricolage, ; Tristes Tropiques, – Levy, G. R.: The Gates of Horn, 

283

Lewis, H. H.,  Lewis, Samella,  Locke, Alain, –; “The New Negro,”  Lorenz, Pare: The Plow That Broke the Plains, ; The River,  Lott, Eric,  Lowell, Robert, , ,  Lowenfeld, Victor,  Lumpkin, Grace,  MacLeod, Norman,  MacNeice, Louis,  Madhubuti, Haki, , – Maltz, Albert, , –; “Man on a Road,” – marginality: of poetry, , , , n; social, , , –, –, , n, n Martin, John Bartlow: “The Strangest Place in Chicago,” –, – Marx, Karl,  mass culture, ; and the s, –, ,  Maxwell, William,  McCarthyism, , , –, –, , , , , . See also House Un-American Activities Committee McGrath, Thomas, , –, ; Caudwell, influence on, –, n; Communist affiliations of, , , , n; critical reception of, –, n, –n; and Eliot, , , n; and Great Depression, –; and Lévi-Strauss, –, –; literary publics of, –; and Los Angeles, –; Marxist poetics of, –; and Native American history, –; and North Dakota, , , –, –, –; palimpsest form of, –, n; and Whitman, . WORKS: “Frontiers of Art,” ; Letter to an

284

index

Imaginary Friend, , , –, –; Longshot O’Leary’s Garden of Practical Poesie, ; “McGrath on McGrath,” ; The Movie at the End of the World, ; New and Selected Poems,  McKay, Claude, –; Harlem: Negro Metropolis,  McWilliams, Carey,  Mecca Building, –, –. See also Brooks, Gwendolyn Melville, Herman,  memory: contrasted with history, , ; and countermemory, –; critical, –, –; cultural, of modern poetry, –; and Great Depression, –, , ; impact of mass culture on, ; and modernism, –. See also amnesia Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, , –,  migration narratives,  Miles, Josephine,  Miller, Henry,  Miller, R. Baxter,  Miller, Ronald,  Millman, Edward,  modernism, –, –, –; African American, –; late, –, –, –n; and memory, –; and s, – Monk, Thelonious,  Moore, Marianne, ; and Bishop, , , , –, n Motley, Archibald,  Mourelatos, Alexander,  Mullen, Bill,  Mumford, Lewis,  mural art, –; African American, – Naison, Mark,  National Negro Conference,  Naumberg, Nancy, 

Negro Digest,  Negro Quarterly,  Negro Story, ,  Nelson, Cary, , –, , , , –n Neruda, Pablo: Canto General,  New American Poetry, ; and Objectivism, –n New Criticism, –, ,  New Deal, , , , , , , , –n; Key West, revival of, – New Left, , , n New Masses, , , –, –, –, ,  New Negro, , . See also Locke, Alain Newman, Charles Henry, ,  Nicholls, Peter,  Niedecker, Lorine,  Nora, Pierre: “Between Memory and History,” –; criticism of, n, n; and Halbwachs, ; and lieux de mémoire, – North Dakota, –; radical agrarian history of, . See also McGrath, Thomas Objectivism, –, –; and New American Poetry, –n; and  special Objectivist issue of Poetry, , n; and “Objectivists” Anthology, ; political amnesia of,  Olsen, Tillie, ; Yonnondio: From the Thirties, –, , n, n Olson, Charles, ; Maximus Poems, – Oppen, George, , –, ; and Blake, –, n; on Brecht, –, n; Communist affiliations of, –; critical reception of, n; and Great Depression, –; literary publics of, , –; literary silence of, –; on male-female social

index

relations, –; Marxist aesthetics of, –; and New York City, , –; and Objectivism, , ; and Vietnam War, –, –, n; and Whitman, –; and Williams, –, ; on women’s experience, –; and World War II, –, n, n. WORKS: “Blood from the Stone,” , –, ; Collected Poems, ; Discrete Series, , , , , –, ; The Materials, ; “The Mind’s Own Place,” , –; Of Being Numerous, , ; “Of Being Numerous,” , , , –; This in Which, ; “Three Poets,”  Oppen, Mary, , , , , n Opportunity,  Organization for Black American Culture, – Orozco, José Clemente,  Orvell, Miles,  Ottley, Roi, –, ; “New World A-Coming”: Inside Black America,  Pacheno, Jo, – palimpsest, –, n. See also McGrath, Thomas Parker, Charlie, , n Parrington, V. L.,  Partisan Review, , , , , –; and Rukeyser, – Patchen, Kenneth, – Peirce, Charles Sanders,  Penrose, Ronald, – periodization, literary, –, –n; of African American poetry, ; of modernism, –; of Objectivism, –; and Popular Front, –; of postmodernism, – Perloff, Marjorie, n Phillips, William, –, –; “Literature in a Political Decade,” –;

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“Private Experience and Public Philosophy,”  Phylon, ,  Picasso, Pablo, –; “Chicago Picasso,” – Plath, Sylvia,  Popular Front, –, , , , –, , , , , , , , ; in Chicago, , –; interracial solidarity of, , , ; women’s role in, – Porter, Katherine Anne,  postmodernism, –, –n Pound, Ezra, , ; Cantos, , , , ,  Powell, Bud,  Pratt, Mary Louise, n proletarian literature, , –; Proletarian Literature in the United States, , –, ,  proletarian poetry, –, n; and cultural memory, – Proust, Marcel, ,  Rabinowitz, Paula, , – Rahv, Philip, –, –; “Literature in a Political Decade,” –; “Private Experience and Public Philosophy,” ; “Twilight of the Thirties,” – Rakosi, Carl,  Randall, Dudley,  Rexroth, Kenneth,  Reznikoff, Charles, –, –; Jerusalem the Golden, –; Testimony,  Rich, Adrienne, ; on Bishop, ; on Rukeyser, –; “Shooting Script,”  Rimbaud, Arthur, – Rivera, Diego,  Rolfe, Edwin, –,  romantic ruin poem, –, – romanticism: and marginality, ; and

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s poetry, –; and ruins topos, –. See also Stevens, Wallace Rosenberg, Harold, ,  Rosskam, Edwin:  Million Black Voices, ,  Roth, Henry,  Rukeyser, Muriel, , –, , –, , , ; and Bishop, –; and the blues, –; critical reception of, –, n, n; on cultural memory, –; documentary poetics of, –, –, –, –, –; feminism of, –, ; and Gauley Bridge, , , –, –; as Jewish writer, , –, n; racial politics of, –, –, , –, –; and testimony, –; and vernacular traditions, ; and Whitman, . WORKS: “Absalom,” , , –; “Alloy,” ; Book of the Dead, , –, –, –, –, ; “The Book of the Dead,” ; “The Cornfield,” , , , ; “The Dam,” ; “The Disease,” ; “The Disease: After-Effects,” ; “The Face of the Dam: Vivian Jones,” –; “Gauley Bridge,” –; “George Robinson: Blues,” , –; “Juanita Tinsley,” , –; The Life of Poetry, , –, , ; “Mearl Blankenship,” –; “Power,” , ; “Praise of the Committee,” , ; “The Road,” – ; The Soul and Body of John Brown, ; “Statement: Philippa Allen,” ; “The Trial,” ; U.S. One, , –; “West Virginia,” – Sandburg, Carl,  Schneider, Isador, ; “Proletarian Poetry,”  Scottsboro defense,  Seaver, Edwin,  Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 

silicosis, –, –. See also Rukeyser, Muriel Silliman, Ron, “Third Phase Objectivism,”  Siporin, Mitchell,  Siquieros, David Alfaro,  Smethurst, James, , , n Smith, Bessie, , ,  South Side Community Center, – South Side Writers’ Group, – Spanish Civil War, ,  Spector, Herman,  Spenser, Edmund: The Ruines of Time,  Stafford, William,  Stark, Inez Cunningham,  Stein, Gertrude,  Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath, , n Stern, Frederick,  Stevens, Marjorie Carr,  Stevens, Wallace, , ; and Bishop, , –, –, n; critical reception of, , n; and Marxism, , n; and romantic ruin poem, –; and romanticism, –; and waste, –, –; on Williams, . WORKS: “Anecdote of the Jar,” ; “Farewell to Florida,” ; Ideas of Order, ; “The Irrational Element of Poetry,” ; “The Man on the Dump,” –, –; “The Old Woman and the Statue,” , –n; Owl’s Clover, , , , –n Stilgoe, John,  Stott, William, , , –n Sturken, Maria, n Sussman, Henry,  swing, – Taggard, Genevieve,  Tate, Allen,  Taylor, Paul Schuster: American Exodus, , 

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Terdimann, Richard, –, – Terkel, Studs: Hard Times,  Thompson, E. P., , ,  Thurston, Michael,  Tolson, Melvin, ,  Tracy, Steven,  Traubel, Horace,  True Story,  Turner, Frederick Jackson: The Frontier in American History,  Valdes, Gregorio, – Vietnam War, , , –, –, –, n Voices,  Vorse, Mary Heaton,  Wakoski, Diane,  Wald, Alan, , , –; and political amnesia,  Walker, Margaret, , , – Walker, William, – Wall of Respect, , , –, n, n Waller, Fats,  Wanning, Thomas Edward,  Ward, Ted,  Ward, Val Gray,  Waters, Muddy,  West, Nathanael: The Day of the Locust, n White, Charles, – White, Josh, ,  Whitman, Walt, , , –; Civil War correspondence of, –; and homoeroticism, ; and s Left, –, –, n; and socialism,

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–, . WORKS: “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” ; “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” ; “Runaway Slave,” ; “Song of Myself,” ; “Song of Occupations,”  Wiggins, Ella May,  Williams, Raymond: The Country and the City,  Williams, William Carlos, , , , ; “The American Background,” ; In the American Grain, ; Paterson, –, , –, ; “To Elsie,”  Wilson, Edmund,  Wilson, T. C.,  Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ; Philosophical Investigations, – Wolff, David, ,  Woodruff, Hale, – Wordsworth, William, –, –; The Excursion, ; “The Ruined Cottage,” , –, –; “Tintern Abbey,”  worker-correspondence poems, – Works Progress Administration, , – World War II, , –, –, – Wright, Richard, , –, , , ; Native Son, , ;  Million Black Voices, , –; and Walt Whitman,  Yeats, W. B.: “Easter, ,”  Zukofsky, Louis, , –; “A,” ; “Mantis,” ; “Program: Objectivists ,” 

contemporary north american poetry series

Industrial Poetics: Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture By Joe Amato Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry Edited by Thomas Gardner University of Wisconsin Press,  Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community By Timothy Gray History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, – By John Lowney Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews By Nathaniel Mackey University of Wisconsin Press,  Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie By Lytle Shaw

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