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EN 351: Contemporary American Poetry
"Crossroads: National and…
EN 351: Contemporary American Poetry
"Crossroads: National and Individual Identities in Contemporary American Poetry"
Olivia Hammer-Grant
Poetry Collages
Claudia Rankine (1963-present) 
MacArthur genius grant recipient, Rankine, is a poet and essayist working with experimental poetry to critique systems of racial oppression in the US. Rankine’s book-length poem, Citizen functions as a series of micro-aggressions progressive to macro-levels of racial injustice—such as police brutality against Black Americans.Citizen at times errs towards confessional poetry, as the “you” expressed throughout the poem’s many vignettes seems to draw parallels to Rankine’s personal life. These employment of the second person throughout instances of micro-aggressions force the reader to experience the inescapable and exhausting racial prejudices—both implicit and explicit—in the modern US.Indeed, Rankine calls Citizen an American lyric, for it is her personal response to the “National Anthem’s” “O’ say can you see?”—Citizen is the racial oppression and violence Rankine constantly witnesses.Citizen also assesses the relationship between visibility, invisibility, and hypervisibility in regards to race and systematic violence. Visibility does play a key role in the book, such as; when the man at the pharmacy doesn’t see the Black body before him; when the white woman refuses to sit beside the Black man on a train; when Rankine addresses Serena William’s visibly Black body in contrast to the invisible rules held against her. The concept of racial visibility becomes echoes in the design of the book itself—black text thrown against an overwhelmingly white page.Rankine and her husband, who helped design Citizen and is her frequent collaborator, also collected several images dispersed throughout the poem that capture Black bodies—images that often critique undiscussed violence done onto Black bodies.
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Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982)
Cha was born in South Korea during the Korean War, moving to Hawaii and then California when she was about ten years old. Cha attended a Catholic school, where she was particularly interested in history and French—aspects that informed her book-length project, Dictée. Cha initially began a career in film and performance art before developing an interest in linguistics and poetry in 1975. Cha’s studies in linguistics, literature, history, and film merge in Dictée—a poetic work, decolonizing white narratives through poetry, un-captioned images, and other collage-like mediums. The experience of reading Dictée is unmasterable, meant to reproduce the boundless and constant confusion and struggle of an immigrant. The books blends fact, fiction, and language; Korean, Cha’s first language—only appears on the first page—potentially a reference to the attempted erasure of identities through colonization and assimilation. Cha’s work is cacophonous, a mix of sound, language, and performance—a meditation on speech, communication, and the transmission and fluidity of language itself.Rooted in the avant-garde Dictée, utilizes seemingly disassociated images, narratives, and linguistic tools to craft a creolized reflection of heritage and the past. The book calls upon a lineage of influential women, not limited to the Muses, Joan of Arc, and Cha’s mother herself.The work introduces themes of longing, confusion, and alienation—of both the self and one’s identity. While it is impossible to derive a singular meaning from Dictée, the pastiche performs a sensation of wonder and hunger onto the reader.
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Black Arts Movement
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
Baraka (né Everett LeRoi Jones) not only was a notable contemporary poet, but also a vocal advocate in the Black Power Movement. Baraka's poems--much like his politics--called for an aggressive, violent overthrow of white power structures. A free verse poet, Baraka is extremely performative, sometimes setting readings to music that amplifies the poem's energy and political statements (see below).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh2P-tlEH_wBlack Art was a book of poetry written just as Baraka began becoming involved in the Black Power Movement. Many of these poems, therefore, reflected sentiments of anti-whiteness, oppression, oppressor. Out of poetry and politics, Baraka founded the Black Arts Movement, advocating for poems like “teeth” that bore tangible weight against white power structures and oppression (see “Black Art” and “A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand”).Baraka’s work is often considered misogynist, anti-Semitic, and Black-nationalistic. In fact, Baraka’s manifesto “The Revolutionary Theatre” calls for a violent reversal of power structures, as Black artists rewrite and retell whitewashed histories. Indeed, Baraka’s merciless dismantling of white-power structures called for “machinegunners” rather than poems that “scratch against silence slow spring” (27, 8). Therefore, it may be useful to view Baraka’s politics and writing as polar to O’Hara’s.
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Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
Brooks was a highly influential poet, becoming the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950, the first Black woman to be appointed Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1985-1986, and the first woman to be nominated to the American Academy for Arts and Letters in 1976. Brooks poems reflected a strong allegiance to Black identity and political consciousness.
Brooks published her first poem, “Eventide,” at the age of thirteen, and by the age of seventeen had regularly begun publishing poems in the Chicago Defender. In her youth, Brooks worked closely with the NAACP, an experience that lead her to compose poetry reflecting the Black urban population.The poem “We Real Cool” is punctuated with enjambed lines and monosyllabic words crafted into couplets. Each sentence is but three words and features two stressed syllables to one unstressed syllable. The poems structure mimics the structure and themes of jazz music—an art at the heart of Chicago’s Black culture.“We Real Cool” examines how an outsider may assume the speech, history, and identity of a group (presumably Black boys) playing pool. The speaker imagines the boys as rebels playing hooky and drinking. This such poem provides a voyeuristic view of the boys that is curious of the ways in which they may be critical or aware of limiting power structures—Brooks does all of this while enforcing the notion of the collective through the repetition of “we.”While Brooks’s earlier work dealt with racial issues, it wasn’t until the sixties that she began unapologetic critiques of systematic oppression in the US. During this time, Brooks stopped publishing through major business and instead chose to work with Black publishers.
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Audre Lorde (1934-1992)
Lorde was a self-proclaimed "black, woman, mother, warrior, poet" who fought against systems of racism, sexism, and homophobia through her poetry and essays, such as the exemplary feminist essays, Sister Outsider. Lorde's multitudes identity echoes throughout her poetry, where she calls upon the wisdom and humanity of mothers as key figures in social change. Coal is a collection of free verse poems just as intersectional as Lorde herself. Although Lorde resists poetic form, Coal still contains many formal, poetic tools. The poem "Coal" introduces many themes of intersectionality, interiority, and double-consciousness as the speaker as she centers herself as a poet and a Black woman. The line break between first two lines "I / is the total black,” therefore, reflects Lorde's double consciousness--her awareness to the many selves existing within the speaker (1-2). Here "black" is not only a skin pigmentation and identity, but also the color of coal beneath the Earth’s surface and the darkened words the speaker wields as a poet. In Lorde’s essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” she emphasizes poetry’s power to render internalized emotions visible through language. Lorde reproduces this argument throughout the poem—which serves as an ars poetica of sorts—as the speaker describes the different ways language emerges from their body. In “Coal,” this movement of forcing language from the body mirrors the metaphor of coal: a mineral that becomes a diamond under pressure. Here, both the body and language are "the total black, being spoken/From the earth's inside," which becomes in its idealized form, the jewel, diamond (2-3). Thus, in “Coal” the speaker uses language as means to break from beneath earth’s surface and systems meant to oppress her.Lorde’s poems often critique the ways in which second-wave feminism forgot Black woman. In Coal, Lorde depicts the Black woman’s struggle against patriarchal—and often white patriarchal—structures, while embracing the power of womanhood and femininity (see “The Woman Thing”).Lorde died of breast cancer when she was fifty-eight. Her work, The Cancer Journals, is known for helping destigmatize breast cancer. #
Emphatic Lyric "I"
Anne Sexton (1928-1974) # #
Sexton was a confessional poet, born just outside of Boston. Sexton did not complete college, marrying at nineteen and initially perusing a modeling career in 1928. Upon giving birth to her first child in 1954, Sexton developed severe post-partum depression. From that point onwards, Sexton was often institutionalized for her struggle with depression. Sexton had developed an interest in writing poetry as a teenager and her doctor advised her to return to her work to help manage her depression. Sexton’s depression persisted, however, and her struggle with mental health and motherhood became frequent themes throughout her poems. Unlike the other confessional poets, Sexton often gave an extremely intimate view of her personal trials and tribulations.Sexton—a second-wave feminist—wrote many poems that intimately assessed the female experience: from motherhood to menstruation and to abortion. Having likely undergone several abortions in her life, Sexton wrote about the complicated emotions following the termination of a child in the poem “The Abortion.” There, Sexton explores the tension between feelings of being removed and guilty in experiencing “loss without death” (26).However, many of Sexton’s poems dealt with her struggle to become a motherly figure to her daughters. In such poems, Sexton links her own struggle to reckon with herself to her inability to nurture and comfort her children—a sensation that leads to a level of removal from her own children. Sexton also writes of how her daughters are extensions of herself and that in them she resentfully sees a mirror image of herself. At times, Sexton indicated a view of her children as robbing her of her creative potential—that mothering her children came at the cost of her poetry. In fact, Adrienne Rich’s “To A Poet” is often considered an ode to Sexton, her merciless and bloody depictions of womanhood, and her children—whom Rich implies drained Sexton of life.Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for Live or
Die and committed suicide at the age of forty-six in 1974.
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
Plath was born to an affluent, German-American family in Boston. Showing early promise as a poetess, Plath published over fifty poems by the age of eighteen. Plath was a promising student at Smith College; however, during her studies, Plath’s mental health severely suffered and she first attempted suicide. This event marked Plath’s first institutionalization, which lessened her depression for some time. However, later in life—especially after becoming a mother and experiencing a cheating husband—Plath’s suicidal tendencies returned and she ultimately committed suicide at the age of thirty. References to Plath’s depression, many attempts at suicide, and struggle to claim control of her body appear throughout her poems—perhaps most notably in “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy.”When Plath was eighth years old, her father passed away—an event that severely influenced Plath’s poetry and mental health. Often in poems, Plath creates a world to address her recurrent feelings of abandonment in which she is a Jew persecuted by her father, a Nazi. Besides being punctuated with German language and Holocaust imagery, Plath’s poems feature lots of religious imagery—specifically mythological figures such as Nike and Apollo.Structurally, Plath’s poems exact expert, dramatic enjambment and function with a close attention to sound, internal rhyme, and slant rhyme—her poems become especially decadent when read aloud. Plath’s poems featured controlled, careful language, focused on the relationship between the internal and performative self. Often, Plath’s confessional poems focused on the depiction of the self and social issues through form, sound, and metaphors.Popular culture often romanticizes Plath as the beautiful, tortured woman who wrote dark, angsty, confessional poetry. Indeed, Plath’s poems are dramatic, drawing on gothic imagery and violence as her speakers grapple with control over their body and emotions. The speakers of Plath’s poems also display a self-conscious delight in claiming and indulging in their own pain (see “Cut”).
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1977) # #
Ginsberg was a queer, Jewish poet and activist for the radical left who had roots in the New York School poets. However, Ginsberg later moved to California, where he was a pivotal figure among the Beat Poets and the counter culture movement occurring throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Ginsberg’s poems presented a complicated relationship with popular culture and main-stream America: “America I’ve given you all and now I am nothing” (“America” 1). Howl works through Ginsberg’s complicated relationship with his country, examining moments of inclusion, exclusion, and mainstream distortion regarding American social and political systems.Ginsberg, inspired by romantic poets such as Blake, punctuates his poems with religious imagery: we see this in his repetition of angels and the words “Holy” and “Moloch.”
However, Walt Whitman also heavily influenced Ginsberg’s work. Throughout Howl, Ginsberg employs Whitmanic, lengthy lines, which he calls “each line of Howl is a single breath unit.” The effect of the long lines mimic a rant, reproducing the speaker’s overwhelming exhaustion vis-à-vis mid-century America.Howl is a chaotic rant against main stream America and a weighing of the multitudes Ginsberg contains: it is a trip through hell. The speaker in Howl appears defeated, yet nonetheless committed to furthering America: he hates America, he loves, America, and he is America. Therefore, as part of the counter-culture, the speaker has faith in his ability to guide the nation away from atom-bombs and unstable capitalist structures.Ginsberg often utilizes apostrophe throughout his poems—particularly in his addresses to America. These apostrophes are not only performative, but indicate the universal nature and address of Ginberg’s poems. And yet, the repetitious anaphora throughout “Howl” is reductive, demonstrating the exclusion of “othered” bodies in mainstream America. Here, the narrowing of the speaker’s address reflects a socio-political critique of the post-WWII nation: for a nation that professed, love, unity, and peace, America seemed to reject those they could not contain in its suburban, white picket fences.Indeed, Howl was a controversial text for its time, labeled obscene for its inclusion of drugs, explicit queer sexuality, communist/socialist political undertones, and a general critique against the cookie cutter molds perpetuated in post-WWII America.
Refashioning Language
Kenneth Goldsmith (1961-present)
Goldsmith is a conceptual writer, meaning that his poems draw from pre-existing language. Goldsmith sites his work as “uncreative-writing”—an adjustment to the modernization of language and rise of the internet that allows for the reconstructing and appropriation of pre-existing language. Indeed, Goldsmith’s book-length poems span from detailed accounts of his day, to transcriptions of weather and traffic reports, and to his widely controversial remix-performance of the autopsy of Michel Brown.Seven American Deaths and Disasters transcribes recordings—mainly radio and television broadcasts—from the JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and John Lennon assassinations, to the space shuttle Challenger disaster, to Columbine, to 9/11, and finally to the death of Michael Jackson (and somewhat Farrah Fawcett). The title of the work—which even borrows its title from a series of Andy Warhol paintings—introduces the creativity and subjectivity of Goldsmith’s project. While many Americans may identify these seven disasters as significant to them, clearly these seven have particular influence of Goldsmith himself; therefore, the work becomes somewhat personal.However, in a modern, digitized society, people have grown somewhat numb to once horrific disasters. Goldsmith successfully reshapes these disasters by transforming radio and television broadcasts into haunting, textual narratives. Indeed, when oral texts become visual, one can read rather than hear the panic and horror of those reporting on disasters. These moments trap the reader, encouraging them to think about the way language is constructed and its power in sharing and reproducing raw, emotional states.
Tommy Pico # #
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Pico is a queer, Native American poet from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, currently residing in Brooklyn, New York. Unlike most famous poets, Pico does not possess an MFA; his original publishing roots began on Tumblr and Twitter. Pico has released three book-length poems in the past three years, all of which feature a modernization of language—lines punctuated with pop-culture, internet slang, and forms and ideas borrowed from social media. Indeed, Pico’s language resembles that of a text message or tweet: Pico’s poetic alter-ego and speaker is his twitter handle, Teebs; he refers to himself as NDN rather than American Indian; employs conversational colloquialism such as “n shit,” “like,” and “thru.”However, amidst the texting shorthand and colloquialisms, Pico demonstrates a high level of poetic expertise and an awareness to the poetic canon. Pico’s use of enjambment is not only performative, but also representative his diverse identities and how they are both in unison and conflict. In Nature Poem, Pico forces a line break between “You can’t be an NDN person in today’s world” and “and write a nature poem” (67). These lines reproduce the struggle and limitations of not only being an American Indian, but also of being an “othered” poet.Nature Poem is a book-length poem explaining why Pico cannot write a nature poem. Teebs indicates that writing a nature poem would be to limit himself to the pastoral, clichéd, and submissive caricature of the American Indian. Within this argument, Teebs suggests that nature may not have a singular definition: rather nature—like language, history, and poetry—is fluid.Teebs does write nature into his poem, however not in the pastoral sense: he paints nature as a body historically abused, exploited, and claimed by white Americans. In personifying nature as an exploited body (Nature), Teebs creates a link to the systemic and historic abuse of American Indians.Pico also plays with the invisibility of NDNs in white narratives, which often refer to native populations as ghosts. Viewing history through the Anglo-American lens romanticizes Amerindian cultures as long decimated by abstract forces, while white Americans ignoring their own appropriation of Amerindian culture (56). Such passages also call into question: who writes history and for whom do they write it?In critiquing the white narrative of American Indians as extinct cultures, Teebs presents issues of high mortality rates and crime on NDN reservations: that the murders and suicides of his peers often go overlooked by greater American society.
Juliana Spahr (1969-present) #
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Spahr is an experimental poet focused on the transformation, language, ecology, and identity. Although Spahr’s politics are subtle, her opinions and critiques are present throughout her work; books and poems that examine climate change, collective and individual identities, capitalism, national response to crises, and the socio-political effects of colonialism.The Transformation is an experimental, book-length poem examining the effects of white imperialism on Hawaii—how a culture can become a creolization of differing forms of appropriation. Besides themes of ethnocentric violence, The Transformation examines the fluidity of sexuality, the difficulty of placing labels onto things, and the perpetuation ecological violence in Hawaii.In “Alphabet Poem,” Spahr uses the structure of the alphabet to critique and assess the formulaic, capitalist response to the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. Each line is a different headline to an article, or a statement from a TV broadcast.Spahr’s use of the alphabet could also be a way to impose structure a meaning to a seemingly senseless act of violence; however, this reading becomes murky considering that letters themselves are arbitrary signifiers.“Alphabet Poem” examines how deeply national identity is embedded in capitalism and how the media perpetuates falsely sincere messages regarding national atrocities. Indeed, headlines co-opted by Spahr are an overwhelming maze of sentimentality linked to Hollywood stars, war films, and other symbols of Anglo-American identity such as Christmas and Disney World.
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Confessional Poets: both Sexton and Plath struggled with motherhood, their art, and mental health. Both women committed suicide at a young age.
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O'Hara and Baraka used to be a part of the New York School of Poets until Baraka became more involved with Black Power politics. It is likely that in his manifesto "The Revolutionary Theatre" and "A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand," O'Hara and the other New York Poets are the complacent liberal artists and idealists whom Baraka critiques.
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O'Hara's poems are known for their zest and liveliness, while Plath's material is more macabre and cynical of life.
Sexton's poem, "The Abortion," uses the movement of a woman traveling southward to seek an abortion tracks the complicated feelings a woman may undergo when electing to terminate a pregnancy.
Both Plath and Pico weigh and explore the relationship between the internal and performative self: Plath in relation to her womanhood and mental health; Pico in relation to his identity as NDN.
Both Bishop and Pico at times view their surroundings as a body. While Bishop, who preferred nature, viewed the city as a grotesque body, Pico, a city-slicker, at times personified nature as a body as well.
Both Lorde and Sexton are applauded for helping destigmatize women's bodies and their natural (and diseased) functions.
Both Plath and Brooks were child poetic prodigies, publishing many poems before the age of eighteen.
Cha's Dictée and Spahr's The Transformation are bothexperiemental works built on the idea that certain identities and experiences are unmasterable. While Cha's piece focuses more on the immigrant experience, Spahr examines the impossibility of defining one's sexuality. Both works demonstrate a decentering of white colonist narratives
Pico's critique of race relations in the US appears to engage with Rankine's concept of hyper visibility and invisibility in relation to bothered bodies. Furthermore, both poets examine the relationship between micro and macro-agressions. Certain passages of Nature Poem also reference instances of police brutality against Black bodies.
In many ways, Pico is a modern O'Hara. In Nature Poem Teebs reveals the difference and tension between his private and performative selves; a tension that reflects a modernization of O’Hara’s personism. In fact, while O’Hara presents his poetry as similar to a phone call, Teeb’s language is reflects modernized forms of communication such as texting and tweeting. Both poets also feature a marriage of high and low brow culture throughout their poems.
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