Personal Effects, Public Effects, Special Effects: Institutionalizing American Poetry

Joe Amato

Lewis Department of Humanities
Illinois Institute of Technology
amato@charlie.cns.iit.edu

 

Jed Rasula. The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990.National Council of Teachers of English. 639 pp. ISBN 0-8141-0137-2. Hardcover $42.95.

 

Judging by its sheer heft, its blurbs, and its bulk of carefully-detailed appendices, one might expect that The American Poetry Wax Museum represents a major intervention in the ongoing struggles over American poetry. The second title in NCTE’s Refiguring English Studies series, it bills itself as an “innovative and irreverent” book that “oscillat[es] between documentary and polemic.” The inside book-jacket bio of Rasula details a curious trajectory, involving a Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz’s History of Consciousness program, a “stint as researcher for the ABC television series Ripley’s Believe It Or Not,” and a relocation to Ontario, Canada, where the now expatriate author teaches at Queen’s University.

 

Front matter includes a brief mission statement of this NCTE series, which aims to provide “a forum for scholarship on English studies as a discipline, a profession, and a vocation.” The Series Editor, Stephen M. North, is himself author of The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (Boynton, 1987), the first truly comprehensive attempt to survey the field of composition studies. North’s emphasis on and validation of “practitioner lore” launched a provocative challenge to then-prevailing notions of researcher expertise, and substantially bolstered the status both of composition studies and of its practitioners.

 

Rasula’s book thus emerges from a curiously recombinant domain of publishing practices within the English industry, a domain whose academic lineage is marked by the rocky ascent to legitimacy of composition studies, and with it the corollary effect that writing practices as such, including poetry, are a suitable subject for institutional interrogation. Which legitimation has in turn been reinforced by the present popularity of cultural studies — specifically, critical reception theory, an enterprise focused on unveiling the various social and cultural apparatuses of textual consumption. With North as custodian, then, and under the imprimatur of NCTE, we might expect from this unconventionally situated author a renegade challenge to prevailing orthodoxies.

 

And to a considerable extent, the book delivers on its promise. I’ll begin at the beginning, synchronizing my commentary with the text rather closely through Chapter Two to give some idea of its conceptual progression. A Polemical Preface” provides Rasula’s motivated macro view of what he is up to: his is “a study of the canonizing assumptions (and compulsions) that have fabricated an image of American poetry since World War II,” a “field of productive tensions . . . which are foreclosed prematurely by denials that they exist.” Concurring with Don Byrd’s appraisal that “‘poetic’ self-expression” has proliferated to the point of being a “cradle to grave opportunit[y],” Rasula alleges that it has been “anthologists and commentators” who have legislated this state of denials, compiling and categorizing in the service of a graven-cum-waxen image, “the enshrinement of the self-expressive subject” (4).

 

Chapter One: Though I found the opening salvo a bit mechanical and digressive in places, Rasula’s modus operandi is comprised of equal parts erudition and rhetorical aplomb, and a penchant for mordant observation: in accord with the NCTE series title, he refigures American poetry anthologies as museums of wax simulations whose “carceral” condition is such that each “talking head” is forced to “speak” courtesy of the wonders of voice-over technologies (yes, Baudrillard looms large in all of this, as do the lesser known Philip Fisher and Neil Harris). Poets along with their poetry are thus reduced to ventriloquial ploys employed by their curators both to pander to public taste and to promote various not-so-hidden, but often complex social-qua-literary agendas:

 

My concern, in elaborating this thesis of a poetry wax
museum, is to suggest that the seemingly autonomous
"voices and visions" of poets themselves have been
underwritten by custodial sponsors who have
surreptitiously turned down the volume on certain
voices, and simulated a voice-over for certain others.
Nothing defines the situation more succinctly than the
police phrase protective custody.
(33)

 

For Rasula, the “figure of the poet as cyborg” (another refiguring, incidentally, one owing to the work of UC Santa Cruz scholar Donna Haraway) signifies but one of many facets of a cultural imbrication best captured in buzzword. “For some time now,” he writes, “we have been citizens of a Cybernation,” the pun serving to connote an American collective consciousness construed as a “mental homeless shelter that harbors Dan Rather, Roseanne Barr, and Bullwinkle” (47). The Wax Museum is in fact itself transfigured, courtesy of further conceptual correspondence, into an orphanage “where mute icons of imaginative authority are sheltered along with the voices just out of their reach” (48). Chapter One concludes with a “coda” that transfigures again (or pe rhaps prefigures) the Wax Museum to evoke the greenhouse; in particular, Roethke’s invocation of same in “Child on Top of a Greenhouse.” “Greenhouses are controlled environments, sites of artificially induced vegetal animation” (53). Etc. Given its scholastic medium, the message of Chapter One is guaranteed both to illuminate and to exacerbate the public disputes that have lingered on among neoformalists, antiformalists, language poets, and others (where “formalist” is itself understood as a highly conflicted term). By the end of his first chapter, Rasula emerges as something of a latter day Pound, sans Pound’s annoying self-righteousness and unforgivable bigotry.

 

Chapter Two, “The Age of ‘The Age of'”: Part One of this two-hundred-fifty page chapter constitutes the beef. Rasula begins with a summary overview of Louise Bogan’s correspondence, arguing that, because she was a “fastidious observer,” had “significant contact with many of the more famous personnel of the poetry world,” and “was generationally situated so as to have a dual perspective on both the modernist and subsequent generations,” Bogan’s letters help to provide an accurate “sense of poetry in America as lives lived” (58). Well, yes. Someplace along the way, though, Bogan’s intimate voice recedes rather quickly into the background (to resurface at irregular intervals) as Rasula gradually builds his case against, as one might have expected, the New Critics and their New Criticism — to simplify enormously, a southern agrarian, religious, somewhat autodidactic collective led by John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. A quick paraphrase of Rasula’s argument might go something like this: Whereas many have illustrated how the New Criticism shaped the way English studies came to be practiced during the thirties, forties, and fifties, few have emphasized sufficiently the overarching, extratextual imperatives and consequences associated with this latter’s “public relations” role in servicing a constraining literary-academic enterprise, an establishment initially rooted in trade press publication and eventually forced underground — where, however, it has continued to shape academic practice.

 

My professorial mortarboard began to tip to one side as it grew increasingly clear to me in reading through Rasula’s careful indictment that New Critical hegemonic effects are yet unconsciously with us (i.e., us academics), the source of numerous anxieties and tacit alliances. Here Rasula indicates incisively, and with unprecedented historical clarity, how New Critical textual practices reinforced and informed more organizational motivations. New Criticism is successful in the postwar world precisely because this baby-booming “age of sociology” — an age in which “introspective compulsion” grows increasingly susceptible to an external, “managerial temperament” — demands explanation (122, 126). “Poetry fared well in the age of sociology,” Rasula observes, “because New Critical pedagogy constituted a veritable explanation industry, reassuringly in the hands of ‘qualified experts'” (127). Ultimately it is the “romance of technical efficiency” that validates and is validated by New Critical close readings and the like, a damaging functionalism” that reduces and trivializes the “traumas of history.” Among the most significant of such “traumas” in coeval literary terms was the awarding of the Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound in 1949, following as it did on the heels of treason charges against him (which were ultimately suspended on the grounds of insanity). Rasula’s analysis of “the Pound affair” manages to capture the contradictions manifested by the Fellows in American Letters (who presided ove r the award) without wishing away either the evils or the ambiguities of Pound’s actions, symbolic and otherwise.

 

One might argue that Rasula’s elaboration of New Critical influence itself contributes to such influence, that he has “paid homage” to the New Critics by accusing them of such far-reaching and pernicious effects. To be sure, there are other histories to be written, histories that have more to do with writers and artists whose work has never been regarded as “central” to prevailing academic or cultural orthodoxies. Any critique of orthodoxy risks a certain sort of reification, a reification of the center. One antidote is to introduce, as Rasula has done, a presumably marginal figure such as Louise Bogan — though Bogan’s marginality as a poet per se belies her access to poetry power brokers. And as I have indicated, Bogan figures into Rasula’s argument only irregularly after her initial appearance. One would therefore expect some resistance to Rasula’s argument from those who have an interest in revising historical “realities” to reveal the imposition of a center as a fiat of historical method.

 

Rasula’s evocation of the “age of sociology” includes a brief survey of those institutional consolidations (high-cultural, pop-cultural and geopolitical) that (re)constitute the American bandwidth. Part Two of Chapter One situates in the midst of this bandwidth those poetic imperatives that conspired throughout the fifties to promote the ascendancy of Robert Lowell as the “poet who personified the postwar American bard” (247). Auden’s arrival in New York and subsequent naturalization as a US citizen provides immediate sanction for the then current, now sometimes retrospective view that this marks the “Age of Auden” (and in subsequent mimicry, the “Age of Lowell”), an age initiated, in Rasula’s caustic formulation, by Auden’s “demonstrating to Americans how to import a poetry culture, much as horticulturalists imported French vine stock to get the California wine industry going” (148). Auden’s presence and influence worked to reinforce the “pedagogic and scholastic advocacy” of the New Critics, while the formation of a “centrist” position cleverly concealed its more avant-garde Modernist roots (145). To his credit, Rasula suggests a “nonaesthetic” reason for this development: race. If Lowell had been elected the prodigal son as if by default, it was certainly not without regard for the fact that he was a white Christian (male), whereas many of his contemporaries — Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen — were Jewish. Anthology-wise, this was indeed the age of the WASP.

 

Expertly weaving poetry and criticism from the fifties with critical studies of the period, Rasula chronicles the twists and turns of fifties establishment/ counter-establishment mores and poetic positionings, warts and all. The advent of the widely publicized and popular Beat movement, along with the controversies that ensued from its high profile, are viewed by Rasula as the historical springboard for the decade’s notorious, and defining, literary culmination: the “anthology war” inaugurated by the release in 1960 of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (revised and rereleased in the late seventies as The Postmoderns). The Beat and Black Mountain harshness that gives offense to the status quo of the academic elite is shrewdly and accurately cast as a function of these presumed upstarts’ collective tendency toward “theorizing a poetics” — and in this formulation Rasula offers us a convenient way of understanding the historical present of poetic practice. As for Lowell, he emerges under Rasula’s scrutiny both as id and superego of “Criticism, Inc.,” his life punctuated by genteel self-aggrandizement and manic outburst even as his poems themselves ultimately reveal the self-tortured persona grata and non grata congenial to conformist culture. In the terms he borrowed from Virginia Woolf in his acceptance of the National Book Award — terms which, as Rasula indicates, resonated well with establishment skepticism — Lowell may be seen with some sympathy neither as cooked nor as raw; he was simply overdone. In any case, I found Rasula’s contrasting of Lowell’s poetic self-construction with Charles Olson’s “Maximus” (to the latter’s advantage) instructive, if not altogether convincing; one is tempted simply to observe in this connection that boys will be boys.

 

Chapter Two’s concluding section is entitled “Conformity Regained,” the ironic evocation of Milton signaling an establishment coup de grace in this veritable epic of American poetry’s various struggles and perturbations. The section begins with a cursory review of “previously formalist poets” whose work underwent “dramatic stylistic and procedural changes” (269) as a result of sixties instigations — Merwin, Wright, Kinnell, Wilbur (not much change here), Bly, Eshleman (publisher of Sulfur) and Baraka. With Baraka, Rasula’s historical overview becomes the occasion for a sustained meditation on multiculturalism. I must admit to having felt a bit uneasy at first, what with Rasula’s observation that, given “the present conundrum of a revised canon in which it is essential that minorities be included” even as “their minoritarian features must not be essentialized,” “we now see the shameless opportunism of a curriculum designed to reflect political correctness” (279). What initially troubled me here was less the insight itself than Rasula’s adoption of “political correctness” as an easy pejorative, which gesture mirrors precisely the current conservative jeremiad against “(il)liberal” education.

 

But my discomfort was quickly dispelled as Rasula derived an alternative to such “tokenism” from a close reading both of Baraka’s process orientation and recent critical work by Nathaniel Mackey (another member of the UC Santa Cruz faculty). Rasula discusses in a footnote why Mackey’s concept of “creative kinship” has not caught on, suggesting that the influx of Continental theory, among other factors, has produced a “scholarly climate in which the admissible terms of affiliation are legislative, not creative” (282). In demonstrating the value of seeing the poet as subject of creative kinships, Rasula once again seizes on Olson as a powerful example, and throughout his discussion of ethno-aesthetic complexities he suggests that jazz and its history might serve usefully to reorient our thinking and our curricula. After some further exploration of the specifically WASPish ethnic character of the New Critical hegemony, Rasula concludes this chapter with a reference to Robert Duncan’s spirtual reading of poetic warfare, calling for poets and anthologizers not only to admit the “multiplicity of convictions at work in poetry,” but to “be at strife with [their] own conviction . . . in order to give [themselves] over to the art” (305).

 

Chapters Three, Four and Five together comprise a progressive illumination of the present situation of poetic practice in general and poetry anthologies in particular. Rasula borrows Chapter Three’s title, “Consolations of the Novocain,” from Karl Shapiro to indicate that American poetry suffers from the application of critical anesthesia. After surveying the relative dearth of informed studies of postwar poetry, Rasula diligently dissects what he calls the “default mode” of literary criticism in this period, whereby “readings are so ‘close’ that the critic’s own claustrophobia permeates the text” (318). He explicates the textual reduction (and subsequent redaction) of poetic practice to luxuriating lyrical egos, a reduction which produces a fatal(istic) reading of poetry as a social art to the extent that “the lyrical ego condemns itself to a prison of its own making” (329).

 

In Chapter Four, “Politics In, Politics Of,” Rasula mounts a complex overview and critique of poetry’s material basis vis-a-vis the ubiquitous and normative medium of television. Rasula’s argument throughout is predicated on his view that “poetry is not a linguistic oasis, and is not immune from the discursive norms of society at large” (366). Hence the question becomes one of how best to address such norms without ignoring materialist concerns. “Insofar as poetry has become synonymous with the free verse lyric,” he writes, “‘poetry’ is in dangerous competition with television,” for “the inscrutable rhetorical foundation of free verse abandons all the immunizing paraphernalia of prosody” (366). Poetry is apt to come up short if it aspires to the flashier projections of the tube. After a brief and enlightening foray into typography, Rasula turns his attention to the “mind-cure theology” of “industrial-communications society,” the exemplar of which becomes televangelism. “Watching television is keeping the faith,” he writes, and this leads to his most oracular, and enigmatic, assertion: “Poetry, unlike television, is not contingent on belief” (373). He is at some pains to show, largely through a 1942 essay by Welsh poet David Jones, that the art of poetry, unlike the art of war, is a “path of charities” (374). Building on the work of Manuel DeLanda and Paul Virilio to the effect that “we have inhabited an ‘eternity’ of war,” what Virilio calls “pure war” (374), Rasula offers a peculiarly sociobiological version of a crisis in the arts: “The lapse of poetry is more serious than any supposed competition with television suggests, for what is at stake is not simply cultural displacement but the erosion of a species’ [sic] trait” (377).

 

This would seem to accord very nearly with the radically empirical view of language practice evident in the work of William Burroughs (and others), where language becomes a viral social machine of self-replication akin to our genetic substrate. Although Rasula is quick to distinguish between poetry “as public event, which is to say commodity” — the only “kind of event recognized as public in the U.S.” (379) — and the poetic concerns of Olson and Williams, he nevertheless seems to allow precious little non-poetic space for resistance against the encroachments of popular-cum-militarized culture (the more hopeful elements of Michel de Certeau’s work come to mind here). It would seem that Rasula wants to safeguard a kind of political efficacy for poetic practice which he will not grant more popular media, and this despite his stated disavowal of any special status for poetic agency. This represents a curious romantic deviation from what is for the most part a pessimistically Foucauldian reading of the postwar technological era, a reading in which, to take one example, the movement of the humanities online is seen in part as an extension of the “military communications network” (376).

 

Rasula’s discussion of political poetry and language poetry warrants a few specific remarks. In a brief foray into the poetic thematic of war, Rasula invokes Duncan once again to the effect that his work exemplifies “the old and venerable journey” of “resolving public crisis in spiritual autobiography” (385); it is clear that Rasula feels a special affiliation with the Olson-Duncan lineage. He offers little here in the way of anatomizing specific examples of “topical” political poetry; as he puts it, the “risk run” by such poetry is that “it may prove to be expendable after its suit is resolved” (389). Yet the same may be said of more (and less) aesthetically-motivated work, finally, such as that of Lowell & Co., much of which clearly steered away from direct political confrontation with dominant fifties rhetoric (Rasula’s gist throughout much of Chapter Two). I would have preferred here more active consideration of war-oriented poetry, such as that of (Viet Nam War poet) W. D. Ehrhart (whose work, though hardly popular in demographic terms, is nonetheless predicated in large part on first-person experiential narrative); in fact, some discussion regarding the “literature of trauma” in general might have been to the point.

 

With this question of political poetry as a prelude, Rasula intervenes in the past two decades of controversy over language poetry-writing (term used advisedly — it’s a “fuzzy” construct, as Rasula indicates). Situating language writing over and against “low mimetic realism” — this latter marked by “the unexamined urge to find the soft emotional center of its issues” (393) — he emphasizes the “community of readers” that constitutes perhaps the signal achievement of such work (397). Rasula summarizes several of the aesthetic liabilities foregrounded by (and often in) language writing: that it “risks reifying distraction in a new complacency” (398); that, “once the soft lyric voice has been deconstructed or deposed, the remaining linguistic material is susceptible of further unforeseen subordinations” (410). Although “it is apparent from the existing body of language writing that poetic praxis and theoretical examination have rarely been so intimately bound together in American poetry” (405), the customary “separation of theory and practice” evinced even in language writing anthologies has resulted in a certain measure of “isolation and apparent autonomy” (405). Hence such poets have thereby “courted the spectre of preciousness, art for art’s sake, and esotericism” despite their theoretical assertions to the contrary (405). I would argue, on the other hand, that language writing may well have blurred the theoretical initiative as such, despite actual distinctions evinced by its various practitioners and anthologists; time will tell. Citing Maria Damon’s and Michael Berube’s studies of marginality, Rasula concludes by aligning, in brief, excerpts from Charles Reznikoff, Bob Perelman, and David Antin (this latter’s “skypoem”) to suggest that documentary “witness,” deconstruction of “the rhetoric of expert testimony,” and “a refusal of monumentality,” respectively, comprise evidence as to how “the most vital American poetry has operated on those margins that it has conscientiously allied itself with, rather than haphazardly submitted itself to” (408-413).

 

A critical establishment enamored of its capacity for celebrating the lyrical self provides the backdrop against which Rasula identifies and dismantles one of the real targets in his book, canonical method. Rasula’s frustration with scholastic inertia becomes the source of perhaps his most contentious remark, that “Poets may be justified in thinking of scholarly critics as educated halfwits” (317). He finally squares off against the orthodoxy by addressing what Ron Silliman has coined “canonic amnesia or Vendler’s Syndrome” (qtd. in Rasula; 333). Named after its chief purveyor, Helen Vendler of Harvard, Vendler’s Syndrome refers to the hegemony of “tastemakers” who authorize the who’s who of literary anthologies, and do so “imperiously presum[ing] unanimity (of taste) where none exists” (334). Rasula demonstrates how, in Vendler’s case, this assumption of edict coincides with a certain infantilization of students as well as those deemed unworthy of the editorial task (such as Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha!). In truth, Rasula does have an axe to grind with the Vendler-Harvard University Press establishment, which he reserves for a footnote (334); his remarks on this score are candid and unflinching. “The cost of those left out of the game is hard to assess,” he writes, and what is refreshing here, in my view, is his resistance to any “polite” appraisal of the poetry power center(s), his willingness to see indoctrination and oppression for what they are. Rasula elucidates the editorial and critical myopia of Daniel Hoffman’s Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, and continues his critique with a summary dismissal of Jay Parini’s Columbia History of American Poetry, which he calls “literary history as calculated (or — maybe worse — casual) obscurantism” (355). As he puts it, this kind of official literary history “inevitably reproduces private life as public event without accounting for its social (and sociable) dimension” (360). Because this fai lure is closely allied, in Cary Nelson’s words, with a “collapsing of modern poetry’s wild diversity” into a homogeneity that “mirrors the most simplistic of 1950’s North American political world views” (360), the only “solution” that presents itself to Rasula is to refrain from “thinking of solutions as happening only once” (361). Tactics of resistance, in this as in other areas, must be conceived as regular and ongoing practices.

 

The critical denouement represented by Rasula’s decimation of Vendler et al. is followed later in the text by an examination of four recent anthologies: J. D. McClatchy’s Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry; Eliot Weinberger’s American Poetry Since 1950; Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology; and Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990. Of the four, only McClatchy’s book fails (like the Vendler, Hoffman and Parini anthologies) “to be explicit about the strategies of consensus building” (464) — which is to say, only McClatchy’s relies on “awards and prizes” as the implicit measure of inclusion. But the crux of the matter here, for Rasula, is a “disabling nostalgia” that he finds “symptomatic of all four of these recent ambitious anthologies” (461). McClatchy’s nostalgia is simply a case of Vendler’s Syndrome — a yearning for the false consensus of the past. But for Weinberger, Hoover, and Messerli, the nostalgia is one which neutralizes the “practice of outside” by absorbing it into a “reverie of the outside, the experimental” (461). As Rasula asks, rhetorically, “what purpose is served by making an orthodoxy of the unorthodox?” (463).

 

“It’s now possible,” Rasula writes, “. . . to summarize the genealogical contours of contemporary American poetry” (440). In five or so pages, he presents an historical precis — the climax of his documentary narrative — which serves to demarcate what he calls the “four zones” of the contemporary American “poetry world”: the Associated Writing Programs; the New Formalism; language poetry; and “various coalitions of interest-oriented or community-based poets” (440). Rasula is careful to note that these four zones are “utterly disproportionate” in resources and the like, and that the fourth zone is “more heterogeneous and fluid than the others” (440).

 

As an alternative to current anthology practices, Rasula proposes, tentatively, a “certain cunning and guile” (464): to align more familiar, (let’s say) AWP writers with (let’s say) writers from the fourth zone. Crossing zones, that is, would seem to be the only provisional answer he can muster to this question of how best to generate a compilation, as opposed to a representative collection or display, and one that can challenge the authority of the AWP. Such an approach is undeniably viable, though it, too, is vulnerable to the more agonistic impulses of poetic discourse. Anthologists would invariably be open to the charge of “rigging” poetic “confrontations,” of “unfairly” deforming a given work’s contextual (not to say aesthetic) aims. Moreover, this charge would likely be leveled by all parties, not simply by those who enjoy privileged status (however this latter is defined), simply because there are no guarantees that more “experimental” work will fare well in readerly terms when compared and contrasted with more “accessible” samplings. One can already hear cries of “meet the new boss/ the same as the old boss.”

 

Rasula’s final chapter, “The Empire’s New Clothes,” begins with an examination of how poetry has “successfully been quantified and integrated into the marketplace” through the “vast domain” of (M.F.A.) writing programs operating largely under the aegis of the Associated Writing Programs (AWP; 419). Though “the workshop demeanor can hardly be said to derive unmodified from earlier poetic models of selfhood” (421), it is nonetheless the American “self-help” tradition, as this latter “readily settles into cultism,” that provides the social glue for more obscurantist workshop posturing (421). Elaborating on the recent critique of creative writing programs one finds in the work of writing specialists such as Eve Shelnutt (but with no mention, curiously, of Wendy Bishop’s substantive criticism of workshop format), Rasula argues not surprisingly that “we need to rethink the social role of creative writing” (424). Yet instead of emphasizing a revision of writing practices per se, Rasula addresses himself to the broadly “discursive function distributed throughout this network [that] requires a steady focus on the purported ‘needs’ of selfhood” (425). Because “poets speak only for themselves” in the prevailing mediocrity, statistically averaged, of the workshop environs, critics can no longer resort to “nominat[ing] representative figures”; hence the proper “critical vocabulary” for the present state of affairs “necessitates a shift from the aesthetic to the sociological and political” — Rasula’s study itse lf obviously serving as an example of such a shift (426-427).

 

Rasula turns his concluding gaze to “the case of Walt Whitman” as “curiously appropriate to the topic of anthologies” (472). Perhaps not so “curious,” for Whitman has in the past forty years been made to seem “appropriate” to just about everything peculiarly American. Whitman’s self-proclaimed “new Bible,” Leaves of Grass, is elucidated in the abstract as an anthology akin to the Bible itself, which latter text Rasula regards as “at once the most encompassing ontology in the West, and the definitive anthology” (473). Drawing on John Guillory’s work on canon formation and Alan Golding’s study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthologies, Rasula discusses the “nationalist rhetoric” underwriting anthology production, against which Whitman’s notion of “ensemble-Individuality” potentially augurs some relief. Because Whitman “secures the linguistic act” to “his sociopolitical prospect,” Leaves becomes a revisionary self-anthology which, unlike postwar American anthologies, constructively surfaces tensions owing to the “experimental” de- and self-regulation of its author-subject-citizen (474-5). Here I have but one reservation. Speaking as a poet myself, and to state the matter somewhat contortedly: however idiosyncratic or mediated (or appealing!) the gesture, recourse to a poetic past grounded in no less a figure than Whitman, coming as it does at the end of a sprawling historical study, sanctions a (conventional) historiographic first cause. We end where “we” — “we” poets, many of us — believe “we” each began; received poetic wisdom is reinstated, and in our end is our beginning. This kind of traditional reassurance seems to work against the critical thesis with which Rasula concludes his book, the thesis that “poetry can — and should — be our term for a language in crisis” (482).

 

Whatever my reservations, this is an extraordinary work. There are few punches pulled here, and almost nothing of the sort of connoisseur-based preciosity (not to mention self-indulgent tastemaking) that typically mars such treatises. Indeed, one sometimes gets the feeling that Rasula’s intervention in the scene of American poetry is less a historical blow-by-blow than a contemporary coming-to-blows. Rasula evinces at times more than a touch of Noam Chomsky’s investigative resourcefulness, unraveling establishment machinations and covert disinformation practices with unrelenting rigor, and regardless of the culprit’s publicly-endowed prestige. In fact, one of the unintended side-effects of Rasula’s remarkable effort may be that his disputatious, lengthy history proves too daunting, that its sheer scope and depth discourage even specialist readers. Yet this book should be studied, and restudied. Its very existence bears witness to the stubbborn durability of the ancient alphabetic art. Just as a certain anarchic anxiety (or pretension to same) may explain poets’ vociferous resistance to viewing poetry as a symbolic technology, an allied impulse toward vatic self-authorization prevents many from confronting the institutional bases of their calling in concrete and critical terms. Rasula’s book provides an occasion for poets and critics alike to reexamine their contiguous, conterminous, and often conflicting word processes. Given its critical unmasking of the discourses and institutions of canonization, the book itself stands as counsel against the panegyric impulse to label it a masterpiece of historical research and analysis. Perhaps one might observe, though, that the book also stands as an exemplar of applying to scholarship what Rasula calls poetry’s “privilege” — its “insouciant disregard for the exemplary pose” (483).