City Poems and American Urban Crisis: 1945 to the Present 9781350055780, 9781350055810, 9781350055797

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: City Poems and American Urban Crisis
1 Writing around Williams: Paterson and Experimental Urban Poetics
2 Community and Crisis in Los Angeles Poetry
3 The “Curious” Languages of New York: George Oppen and Critical Urban Theory
4 Reading “Bronzeville”: Poetics of Neighborhood I
5 Organizing “El Barrio” and the “Loisaida”: Poetics of Neighborhood II
6 Poetry and Progressive Planning
Notes
Introduction: City Poems and American Urban Crisis
1 Writing around Williams: Paterson and Experimental Urban Poetics
2 Community and Crisis in Los Angeles Poetry
3 The “Curious” Languages of New York: George Oppen and Critical Urban Theory
4 Reading “Bronzeville”: Poetics of Neighborhood I
5 Organizing “El Barrio” and the “Loisaida”: Poetics of Neighborhood II
6 Poetry and Progressive Planning
Index

Citation preview

City Poems and American Urban Crisis

Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics Series Editor Daniel Katz, University of Warwick, UK Political, social, erotic, and aesthetic—poetry has been a challenge to many of the dominant discourses of our age across the globe. Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics publishes books on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics that explore the intersection of poetry with philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, political and economic theory, protest and liberation movements, as well as other art forms, including prose. With a primary focus on texts written in English but including work from other languages, the series brings together leading and rising scholars from a diverse range of fields for whom poetry has become a vital element of their research. Editorial Board: Hélène Aji, University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre, France Vincent Broqua, University of Paris 8 – Vincennes/Saint Denis, France Olivier Brossard, University of Paris Est Marne La Vallée, France Daniel Kane, University of Sussex, UK Peter Middleton, University of Southampton, UK Cristanne Miller, SUNY Buffalo, USA Miriam Nichols, University of the Fraser Valley, Canada Aldon Nielsen, Pennsylvania State University, USA Stephen Ross, University of Warwick, UK; Editor, Wave Composition Richard Sieburth, New York University, USA Daniel Tiffany, University of Southern California, USA Steven G. Yao, Hamilton College, USA Titles in the Series: Affect, Psychoanalysis, and American Poetry, John Steen City Poems and American Urban Crisis, Nate Mickelson Forthcoming Titles: A Black Arts Poetry Machine, David Grundy Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism, Samuel Solomon Queer Troublemakers, Prudence Chamberlain

City Poems and American Urban Crisis 1945 to the Present Nate Mickelson

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Nate Mickelson, 2019 Nate Mickelson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mickelson, Nate, author. Title: City poems and American urban crisis : 1945 to the present / Nate Mickelson. Description: London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Series: Bloomsbury studies in critical poetics | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018019120 (print) | LCCN 2018021449 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350055803 (ePub) | ISBN 9781350055797 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350055780 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: American poetry–20th century–History and criticism. | Cities and towns in literature. | Urban poor in literature. | Civil rights in literature. Classification: LCC PS310.C58 (ebook) | LCC PS310.C58 M53 2019 (print) | DDC 811/.509321732–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019120 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5578-0 ePDF: 978-1-3500-5579-7 eBook: 978-1-3500-5580-3 Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Within each of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust. —Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Contents Acknowledgments viii List of Abbreviations xii Introduction: City Poems and American Urban Crisis 1 1

Writing around Williams: Paterson and Experimental Urban Poetics 27

2

Community and Crisis in Los Angeles Poetry 57

3

The “Curious” Languages of New York: George Oppen and Critical Urban Theory 93

4

Reading “Bronzeville”: Poetics of Neighborhood I 121

5

Organizing “El Barrio” and the “Loisaida”: Poetics of Neighborhood II 149

6

Poetry and Progressive Planning 177

Notes 205 References 213 Index 229

Acknowledgments My work on City Poems has benefited from the kind encouragement of more colleagues and friends than I can name. The book would not have been possible without their support. The editors and staff at Bloomsbury have provided clear and enthusiastic guidance throughout the publication process. I  thank them for their patience with my questions and the support they have offered along the way. Series editor Dan Katz pushed me to stand behind my arguments. His strong advocacy for cross-disciplinary thinking has made me a better scholar. City Poems started as my dissertation at the Graduate Center, City University of New  York. I  could not have begun the project without the support of my committee. I am indebted to my adviser and committee chair, Ammiel Alcalay, for support, guidance, and encouragement provided at all stages of this project. Ammiel opened more lines of inquiry than I  will be able to pursue in three careers. Tom Angotti helped me identify urban planning resources early. I  am grateful for the time and energy he offered to help me refine my understanding of city planning. David Richter supervised an orals list I devised on hermeneutics. Our conversations then and since then have enhanced the way I  read. In addition to the members of my committee, I  also owe debts to the English faculty at the Graduate Center and Hunter College, including Mario DiGangi, who gave me confidence to pursue an interdisciplinary project; David Greetham, who encouraged my investigation of Brooklyn Bridge Park; and Jeff Allred and Gary Schmidgall, who supervised my master’s thesis and convinced me I had something to say. I would not have finished this project without the advice and friendship of my fellow students in the English program, especially Megan Paslawski, Erin Nicholson Gale, Charlotte Thurston, David Letzler, and their partners. I had the good fortune as a graduate student to contribute to the founding of Stella and Charles Guttman Community College. I appreciate the trust Toni Gifford, Tracy Meade, Stuart Cochran, and Scott Evenbeck placed in me and the guidance Howard Wach, Marissa Schlesinger, Elisa Hertz, and Carolee Ramsay have provided in ensuing years. The unfailing personal and professional support of Nicola Blake, Tracy Daraviras, Forest Fisher, and Molly Makris has been more

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important than they know. Guttman students teach me every day that in order to read a poem you have to make it your own. City Poems is dedicated to the memory of my student, Shawn Depusoir. Beyond Guttman, Caity kept me on my feet at crucial moments, Emily modeled thoughtful engagement with the world, James insisted I could finish the dissertation and now the book, and Robert challenged me to listen for and commit to the ideas hiding in my words. Most importantly, I thank my family, Diane, Mark, Joshua, Bill, Katie, Reanne, Xander, Pixie, and little Elizabeth, for giving me the courage start on this path. No doubt there is something of Wyoming in my readings. My husband, Sameer, has boundless patience and energy. His questions sustain me in my work and remind me of the deeper meanings to be found in the everyday. The poets and publishers below granted permission to use excerpts from published and unpublished works. I gratefully acknowledge their generosity. Excerpt from “Learning from the 60s” from Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1984, 2007 by Audre Lorde. Reprinted with the permission of Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency on behalf of the author’s estate. Excerpts from “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower” by William Carlos Williams. Copyright © 2001 by the Estate of William Eric Williams and Paul H. Williams. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpts from Paterson by William Carlos Williams. Copyright © 1992 by William Eric Williams and Paul H. Williams. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpts from The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson. Copyright © 1983 by the University of California. Reprinted with the permission of the Copyright Clearance Center on behalf of the University of California Press. Excerpts from Maximus to Gloucester and an unpublished letter to William Carlos Williams by Charles Olson. Works by Charles Olson published after his death are copyright of the University of Connecticut. Used with permission. Excerpt from “The Shrouded Stranger” by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg, LLC. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpts from unpublished letters to William Carlos Williams by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © Allen Ginsberg, LLC. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC. Excerpts from “The Hill” by Holly Prado. Copyright © 1985 by Holly Prado. Reprinted with the permission of the poet.

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Excerpt from Letter to an Imaginary Friend by Thomas McGrath. Copyright © 1997 by Copper Canyon Press. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. Excerpt from “Violence, Art & Hustle” from Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors by Wanda Coleman. Copyright © 1996 Wanda Coleman. Reprinted with the permission of Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Excerpt from “Poetry Lesson Number One” and “Down the Rabbit Hole” from Heavy Daughter Blues by Wanda Coleman. Copyright © 1987 by Wanda Coleman. Reprinted with the permission of Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Excerpts from “Exiled to the Outskirts,” “They Will Not Be Poets,” and “Paper Riot” from Mercurochrome by Wanda Coleman. Copyright © 2001 by Wanda Coleman. Reprinted with the permission of Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Excerpt from “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” by Martin Heidegger. Copyright © 1949 by Regnery Publishing. Reprinted with the permission of Regnery Publishing. Excerpts from Discrete Series, “Blood from a Stone,” “The Building of the Skyscraper,” “Rationality,” “Debt,” “Workman,” “The Poem,” “A Language of New  York,” “Route,” and “Of Being Numerous” by George Oppen. Copyright © 2002 by Linda Oppen. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpts from “the children of the poor,” “The Womanhood,” “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon,” “Two Dedications,” “The Second Sermon on the Warpland,” and “The Third Sermon on the Warpland” by Gwendolyn Brooks. Copyright © 1987 by Gwendolyn Brooks Blakely. Reprinted by consent of Brooks Permissions. Excerpts from Yerba Buena by Sandra María Esteves. Copyright © 1980 by Sandra María Esteves. Reprinted with the permission of the poet. Excerpts from “The Bowery Project” from A Handmade Museum by Brenda Coultas. Copyright © 2003 by Coffee House Press. Reprinted with the permission of Coffee House Press. Excerpts from “Two Derelicts” and “The Ruins” from The Key to the City by Anne Winters. Copyright © 1986 by the University of Chicago. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Chicago Press.

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Excerpts from “A Sonnet Map of Manhattan” from The Displaced of Capital by Anne Winters. Copyright © 2004 by the University of Chicago. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Chicago Press. Excerpt from “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning” by Paul Davidoff. © 1965 by the Journal of the American Institute of Planners, Taylor & Francis Group. Reprinted with the permission of Taylor & Francis Group, Informa Group Plc. Excerpts from The River:  Books One, Two & Three by Lewis MacAdams. Copyright © 2007 by Lewis MacAdams. Reprinted with the permission of Blue Press. I am also pleased to acknowledge the editor and publishers of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies for permission to include material from an earlier article, “Writing around Paterson: Critical Urban Poetics in Williams, Olson and Ginsberg,” in Chapter 1.

Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used. Full bibliographic information for these sources appears in the References section. B

Blacks by Gwendolyn Brooks

CP1, CP2

The Collected Poems, vols. 1 and 2 by William Carlos Williams, edited by Christopher MacGowan

GAC

Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect by Robert Sampson

NCP

New Collected Poems by George Oppen, edited by Michael Davidson

NP

Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings, edited by Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero

P

Paterson by William Carlos Williams, edited by Christopher MacGowan

YB

Yerba Buena: Dibujos y Poemas by Sandra María Esteves

Introduction: City Poems and American Urban Crisis

American cities have undergone alternating periods of growth and decline since the end of the Second World War. Each period of decline has been defined in popular discourse through the language of crisis. In the 1940s and 1950s, for example, blighted central business districts and deteriorating neighborhoods sparked national debate on the state of what was then termed the inner city. The crisis deepened—and took on a revolutionary cast—in the 1960s as civil rights activism intersected neighborhood-based movements for social change. Protests and community organizing created small-scale, sometimes temporary improvements in some cities, while police violence and reactionary city planning initiatives made existing problems worse. In the 1970s and 1980s, short-sighted decisions to devolve fiscal responsibility for public programs from the federal government to states and cities triggered cycles of disinvestment, bankruptcy, and narrow interventions to promote economic growth. Crisis feeds growth, which feeds crisis. These cycles accelerate as cities pursue policies, including privatizing infrastructure and offering preferential tax arrangements to large corporations, which compromise public resources and community well-being in order to attract investment and human capital. The overlapping physical, social, and financial crises of the last seventy years continue today as intensifying race- and class-based segregation in cities across the United States are reinforced by increasingly exploitative, neoliberal approaches to city planning and development. Some commentators describe these cycles of growth and decline in terms of inefficiency rather than exploitation (Glaeser 41–67; Kotkin 5–18). Others argue that investment in cities inevitably turns to exploitation as profit-seekers approach the urban landscape—land, buildings, and public infrastructure— as a means for extracting surplus value (Harvey, Rebel Cities 42–53). Richard Florida’s shifting analysis of the city over the past twenty years suggests

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that these perspectives are more similar than they seem. Florida urged city leaders in The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) to compete with other cities to attract  “creative-class” workers and industries with lifestyle amenities and financial incentives. In The New Urban Crisis (2017), by contrast, he concludes that the kinds of development he promoted in his earlier work have contributed to rising urban inequality. Florida grounds both forms of his analysis in an assumption that crisis is an aberrant state that cities can correct through largescale interventions of various kinds. This assumption “smothers the actual causes of discontent [and] stifles an awareness of how cities might be different” (Beauregard 245). Whether states of crisis result from bureaucratic inefficiency, capitalist exploitation, some other cause, or some combination of causes, their persistence in twenty-first-century American cities signals that our existing policies and practices must change. Progressive city planners have advocated for a different approach since the 1950s. Their efforts center on the claim that individual residents have never and will never benefit from city planning projects that substitute abstractions— the city, the public good, economic growth—for the individual people they affect.1 Rather than proposing physical interventions or large-scale financial arrangements, progressive planners argue that the best way to disrupt cycles of growth and crisis is to reorient urban discourse and city planning practice to the goal of enhancing residents’ capacities to structure their communities and everyday lives. Peter Marcuse has been a leading voice for this approach since the 1970s. In his recent work, he urges planners, activists, residents, academics, and progressive city leaders to stand together in insisting on the urgent need for change. Marcuse identifies three tactics progressive planners can use to catalyze collective action. First, they must expose the underlying causes of existing material and cultural deprivation in cities. Second, they must propose alternatives grounded in locally determined objectives. Finally, they must politicize the problems and solutions among allies in communities across the city and elsewhere (“Whose Right(s)” 37). In other words, Marcuse calls for planners to reimagine themselves as interpreters of urban life rather than as technicians of the city and to reconceive their work in terms of how they might invite others to join them in co-constructing visions of the future rather than in terms of how they can convince leaders to endorse their solutions. Strong resistance to the substance of Marcuse’s call to action from public intellectuals such as Florida, Glaeser, and others suggests that progressive arguments for collaborative, community-centered planning need augmentation. This is work for poets and for readers of their work.

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Indeed, poets have long approached cities in ways that mirror Marcuse’s progressive call to action. American poets, in particular, have turned increasingly to cities as settings and subject matter for experimental poetics since the 1940s. For example, in Paterson and The Maximus Poems, respectively, William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson endeavor to expose the deep roots of unfolding urban crises by arraying archival research in modernist and postmodernist poetic forms. Similarly, George Oppen and Allen Ginsberg assert anti-capitalist critiques of the city by integrating personal experience with political philosophy and spiritual practice in order to identify the causes of urban suffering. Other city poets propose community-based political action. Wanda Coleman, Jayne Cortez, and Gwendolyn Brooks, for example, emphasize the power of communities to transform oppressive circumstances through their close, poetic attention to the neglected neighborhoods of Los Angeles’s Watts and Chicago’s Bronzeville. Still others, including Lewis MacAdams, whose book-length poem The River chronicles the ongoing restoration of the Los Angeles River, and Miguel Algarín, Pedro Pietri, and Sandra María Esteves, whose powerful Nuyorican poetics galvanized communities across New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, politicize what’s at stake for residents in urban policy and planning decisions. These city poems and others offer complex accounts of lived experience in American cities and lay groundwork for political change. Further, they bring communities together across geographic and cultural distances into shared understanding of previously submerged visions of urban possibility. Despite the practical knowledge city poems offer, they have not been approached as a means of analysis or tool for collective action outside small circles within the academy. In fact, since Walter Benjamin’s influential readings of Baudelaire, even literary and cultural critics have typically treated poems as symptoms of larger-order processes rather as sources of insight in themselves. The wide circulation of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric and the resurgence of interest in spoken word performance, driven in part by the success of lyrically dense hip-hop like Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, suggest that poetry’s political possibilities are beginning to be taken more seriously by the general public. While I  am fully invested in poetry’s relevance to a broad range of political questions, the purposes of this book are more specific. My primary arguments are that city poems function as a mode of critical urban analysis and that city poets and progressive planners can—and should—work alongside one another to enact urban change. As a basis for these arguments, I  engage throughout the book with city poems from different times, places, and positions in cycles of urban crisis. My readings demonstrate how poets

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use Marcuse’s tactics—how they expose aspects of urban experience invisible to other modes of analysis, propose alternatives to the status quo, and politicize the need for change—in order to focus our attention on acts of resistance already underway and outline the progressive possibilities of broader movements. City poets show us what urban experience feels like for residents who face different opportunities and circumstances than we do and introduce us to urban futures we can construct together. Their work disrupts conventional discourses of urban crisis and invites us to join in the difficult work of political transformation.

Poetry and political action: An Army of Lovers Contemporary poets Juliana Spahr and David Buuck take up the debate on poetry’s political usefulness in An Army of Lovers, a collaboratively written novel published in 2013. Set in San Francisco and Oakland during the Occupy Movement, An Army documents the efforts of two poet-activists, Koki and Demented Panda, to collaborate on a work that will analyze what it “mean[s]‌ to be poets in this time . . . of wars and economic equality and environmental collapse” (13). Koki and Panda meet regularly in a city park they describe as a “complex cipher of the unstable relationships that define the present crises and their living within them” and predict their poem will catalyze political action in their communities because it will be grounded in lived urban experience (14). They struggle with the poem at first and find that rather than encouraging their writing, meeting in the park immerses them in a surreal urban chaos. During one of their writing sessions, the “plot of land” where they meet transforms into an “enormous food court,” then a “soundstage for gigantic live entertainments,” then a “fake neighborhood staged for counterinsurgency training exercises,” before catching fire and being inundated with raw sewage from a burst pipe (35–38). These disasters leave Koki and Panda in a state of “knowing lostness,” resigned to the painful possibility that poetic experimentation—whether grounded in urban conditions or not—might be politically impotent (38). Their work is interrupted in the novel’s middle chapter by a dinner party scene involving peripheral characters:  Mel, a 45-year-old poet and professor; Terri, his wife; and their friends Nick and Laura. The scene, as Kevin Killian notes in a back-cover blurb, is reminiscent of a Raymond Carver story. Mel lampoons claims for poetry’s relevance to politics while downing homemade cocktails: “There is no sense in thinking that if we just find the right form, then the politics will be there. If we just make it lyrical, then it will really move people.

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Or if we just make it experimental, then it will really shake things up” (85). The others challenge Mel’s cynicism by citing examples of poetry that has served political ends—the Marxist critique of Louis Zukofsky’s A, Muriel Rukeyser’s investigation of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel tragedy in The Book of the Dead, and Claude McKay’s sonnet “If We Must Die,” which, as Nick explains, played a part in fomenting a prison rebellion. They argue that at the very least poetry gets people thinking and talking about political and social problems they wouldn’t otherwise engage. Mel rejects their arguments and insists, in a rephrasing of the much-quoted line from Auden’s elegy for Yeats, “I mean, poetry. It doesn’t really do much and that is what makes it so fucking nothing” (87). He concludes that however political the examples of Zukofsky, Rukeyser, and McKay might be, poetry is too divorced from material reality to have concrete effects. Koki and Panda persist with their collaborative experiment after the dinner party scene despite the chaos of their early attempts. Their efforts are rewarded in the second half of the novel. On what they agree will be their last visit to the park, they pause to meditate on the city surrounding them:  “with each breath, they dropped into being relaxed, bright, and natural, dropped into being with the small plot of land, with its still smoldering trash and rot as well as its regenerative energies and resilient ecologies.” Their meditation centers on the urban character of the moment, figured primarily in sound: “the high-pitched screeching of the heavy-rail public transit system careening along the overpass, not as a source of anxiety but as something simply there, a melodic fact that made their arms and legs become even more relaxed” (126). Released from the pressures of protest, Koki and Panda experience themselves and their project in a new way: they are participants in a complex urban system situated within even larger national and planetary systems. This growing awareness of the context of their work invigorates their collaboration by moving them outside the contradictions Mel cites in his drunken harangue. Sloughing off fears about their project’s direct political effects, they pledge to gather collaborators in a new experiment that will engage directly with the urban character of social, political, and economic injustice. Their renewed efforts enact a logic more fully developed in Doris Sommer’s study of public literacy projects. Koki and Panda reason that inviting other community members into their struggle to write a political poem will expand the community’s “experience of freedom into a shared, or common, sense that supports enlightened politics” (Sommer 137). They predict that because the resulting poem will be rooted in shared experiences of writing, reading, and living in Oakland and San Francisco in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the work of creating it will produce solidarity and social

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action. They envision “hundreds of thousands of participants . . . shoulders to it now, leaning ever toward what will have had to have been done to become that which we cannot yet dare envision” (138–144). The trajectory of Koki and Panda’s experiment dramatizes the three claims for poetry’s social and political effects that form the core of this book. First, Koki and Panda’s intentional use of a city park as an element of their collaboration suggests that reading, exchanging, and interpreting poetry in public can shape a community’s awareness by exposing the political possibilities of the present moment. By expanding their collaboration to include all comers, the poets invite community members to practice the kind of psychogeographic mapping Guy Debord insists is a necessary starting point for progressive political art (Debord, “Introduction to a Critique”). Second, their persistence with the project attests to city poetry’s capacity to propose alternative arrangements of resources and power, especially those “which we cannot yet dare envision.” Their work enacts what Jacques Rancière describes as an aesthetic “redistribution of the sensible,” demonstrating that existing social and political structures are contingent rather than predetermined and permanent (“The Aesthetic Dimension” 8). Third, and most important, Koki and Panda’s invocation of “regiments of lovers” who will join in their collaboration as it progresses locates poetry’s vitality as a means for politicizing action in and through the communities it calls into being. Participants in their “army of lovers” will choose to participate despite the risks of its provisional nature. Enacting shared vulnerabilities, their interactions will produce what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney term an “undercommons” or “fugitive public,” a self-organizing assemblage that defines itself according to emergent practices rather than in opposition to a dominant authority (63–64).

City poems and aesthetic theory Spahr and Buuck locate readers in the midst of an ongoing urban crisis in An Army of Lovers and test the usefulness of poetry as a mode of engagement and analysis through Koki and Panda’s experiment. Mel’s critique of their efforts has roots in longer debates about aesthetic theory. Beginning with Walter Benjamin’s readings of Baudelaire, in fact, city poetry has played a central role in these debates, serving as a test case and example of the politics of aesthetic experience. Benjamin identifies Baudelaire as an archetypal poet of modernity because his work shocks readers with depictions of alienation they recognize without fully

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realizing why. If the poems of Les Fleurs du Mal focus on “lost women” and “outcasts,” Benjamin explains, they do so because degradation and alienation are urban capitalism’s inevitable products (“On Some Motifs” 193). Baudelaire’s Paris is “agonizing” because its pace and density make public interactions too dangerous to pursue (“Paris” 22). It is a city where capitalism’s persistent crises limit the time and space available for genuine human connection—such as Koki and Panda’s collaborative poetics—so much so that the only position available to residents of the city is that of the alienated consumer of the urban spectacle. As Frederic Jameson explains, Benjamin uses insights gleaned from Baudelaire’s city poems as evidence of the “emergence of modernism from a new experience of city technology which transcends all the older habits of bodily perception” (84).2 For Benjamin, Les Fleurs du Mal is a symptom of a broader transformation of the social and political order. In particular, Baudelaire’s city poems signal that the processes of capitalist modernity have reduced the poet’s “aura”—and thus the liberatory dimension of aesthetic practice—to a defensive, if virtuosic, voyeurism (“On Some Motifs” 189). The poet’s “aura” has a double function in city poetry. First, it separates the poet from the world he observes, protecting him from the risks of immersion in the crowd and ensuring that his engagement with the city will function as a conduit through which  the reader might share in his experience (“On Some Motifs” 200n). Second, it is a tool the poet uses to endow material reality with a capacity to respond to human attention. The poet’s auratic gaze, in other words, brings the city to life by “investing it with the ability to look [back] at us in return” (“On Some Motifs” 188). Baudelaire’s “Les Sept Vieillards” dramatizes the reduction of this second function. The speaker of the poem passes an old man walking with a cane in an alley early in the morning. He notes the man’s decrepitude, his “tattered, yellow clothing,” and the way his “eyes, with bile injected / Seemed with their glance to make the frost more raw,” and feels both drawn to him and repulsed (112). Haunted by the man’s appearance but unable—or unwilling—to act, the poet retreats to his room “chilled with fright” (113). For Benjamin, “Les Sept Vieillards” shows us that the old man is beyond our reach, that there is no possibility that the poet or his readers can bring him into their community. In fact, the encounter with the old man shows implicates us in his condition and suggests that we are as vulnerable as he is to the city’s exploitative structures. Baudelaire puts us in the speaker’s shoes in the final stanza: “Vainly my reason for the helm was striving: / The tempest of my efforts made a scorn. / My soul like a dismasted wreck went driving / Over a monstrous sea without a bourn” (113). As the poet’s troubled “striving” suggests, he is not a visionary observer writing

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from outside the chaos of the everyday. Instead, he is an individual immersed in the struggle of urban life. Theodor Adorno responds to Benjamin’s theoretical critique in “On Lyric Poetry and Society.” While he sees similar contradictions in urban modernity, he reaches a different conclusion about poetry’s relation to the politics of social change. Adorno agrees with Benjamin, for example, that poets register “social antagonism[s]‌” others may not notice and “give voice to what ideology hides” (“On Lyric Poetry” 45; 38). Further, he agrees that poetry offers no escape. Moving beyond Benjamin, he argues that in addition to identifying the effects of capitalism’s emerging crises, poetry has a “social nature” that enables it engage poets and readers in exploring “the dream of a world in which things would be different” (40–41). According to Adorno, poets like Baudelaire immerse themselves in the particularities of everyday life and then transform their experiences into “something universal” by giving them “aesthetic form” (38). The transformation of everyday experience into poetry produces similar effects as Benjamin’s “aura”: it enables poets to describe social relations with uncommon insight and provides a way for readers to gain access to the “universal” relevance of their individual experiences. Poetry retains its capacity to affect readers’ political consciousness, for Adorno, because its transformations are rooted in language, an aesthetic medium that “establishes an inescapable relationship to the universal [or aesthetic] and to society” (43). Language binds us together as a society, simultaneously constituting our subjectivities and structuring our relationships. As an intensified use of language, poetry functions in a similar way. It is a social art that enacts an “aesthetic test of [the] dialectical proposition” that society is continually remade through individual actions (44). Adorno specifies that the “aesthetic test” initiated in the writing of a poem extends into the interpretive activities of readers. Once the process of interpretation and response is underway, he explains, “it does not let itself be stopped at the poem’s behest” (Adorno 38). Indeed, the reader’s work continues well after the initial “shock” of reading to discovering “how the entirety of society, conceived as an internally contradictory unity, is manifested in the work of art” and assessing “in what way the work of art remains subject to society and in what way it transcends it” (38–39). The “thought” readers develop after their encounter with the content and form of a poem preserves poetry’s political possibilities and releases it from Benjamin’s symptomatic mode of interpretation. Herbert Marcuse places even greater emphasis than Adorno on the ways audiences are affected by their encounters with poetry and art. He argues that artworks make us aware of the “repressed potentialities of man and nature”

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by sublimating or transforming the “given reality . . . in accordance with the demands of [an] art form” (7). He departs from Adorno, and also from Benjamin, in suggesting that our aesthetic responses to individual works are what constitute the work’s “dissenting force” (8). For Marcuse, poems and other artworks do more than diagnose the contradictions of a given political order or expose what ideology conceals. They direct our attention to the future, making “perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life” (72). Marcuse’s point is that art is relevant to social action because it changes how we feel, think, and reason about the world.3 It does this by introducing an “aesthetic dimension” that supplements the conscious and concealed dimensions of experience that Benjamin and Adorno critique. The “aesthetic dimension” of an artwork is its “sensuous substance,” the location where audience and artist come together and interact, for example: the surface of a painting, melody of a song, or play of language in a poem. Artists construct this dimension by “sublimat[ing]” the “transmitted cultural material” they have in common with their audiences—colors, shapes, sounds, symbols, etc. (Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension 64–66). Since artworks exist in and through the “cultural material” they transform, they attract attention in multiple ways. In the case of poetry, for example, they produce Adorno’s “dream of a world in which things would be different” by combining familiar words, phrases, and references in new and disruptive ways (Adorno 40–41). Marcuse’s “aesthetic dimension” is a starting point for practical political action because it functions as a scene or space where everyday activities, such as Baudelaire’s walks through nineteenth-century Paris, and structural critiques, such as Benjamin and Adorno’s dialectical analyses, can coexist. Poets create these kinds of spaces when they confront readers’ acceptance of existing arrangements of power and show them a “fictitious world [that] restructures consciousness and gives sensual representation to a counter-societal experience” (Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension 44). While Marcuse acknowledges that “art cannot change the world,” he insists that it can “contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world” (32–33). Like Marcuse, Jacques Rancière argues that aesthetic experience can disrupt our understanding of existing sociopolitical relations and bring into view alternatives that are typically invisible. Even so, he describes the political potential of the “aesthetic dimension” in different terms. Rather than relying on dialectical critique or Marcusian synthesis, Rancière redefines the relationship between aesthetics and politics altogether. Specifically, he argues that politics and aesthetics address the same object: “the sensible delimitation

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of what is common to the community [and] the forms of its visibility and of its organization” (The Politics of Aesthetics 13). Being “sensible” means being accounted for in decisions that affect the conditions of one’s life. For example, a neighborhood is “sensible” in relation to the city when decision makers consider the effects a new highway or some other “locally unwanted land use” might have, and individuals are “sensible” when they are empowered to participate in make decisions that affect their communities. New York’s South Bronx is perhaps the best-known example of a neighborhood that remains “insensible” in citywide decisions about infrastructure. The construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway there in the 1950s destroyed local businesses and communities that had thrived for decades (Berman 290–296). Greenwich Village, by contrast, is an example of a neighborhood that has been “sensible.” Activists including Jane Jacobs proved this when they opposed and ultimately defeated Robert Moses’s plans for the Lower Manhattan Expressway in 1962 (Flint 137–178).4 According to Rancière, aesthetic and political acts address the “distribution of the sensible” in the same way, by identifying “who can have a share in [and] take charge of what is common to the community” (The Politics of Aesthetics 7–8). Rather than merely critiquing exploitative structures or organizing audiences into hopeful communities, artworks and the experiences they induce redistribute power and responsibility. Rancière develops his argument for the political usefulness of aesthetic experience through discussion of the ideal city of Plato’s Republic. The Platonic city, he explains, is characterized by a strict partitioning of “identities, activities, and spaces.” It is an “orderly world governed by a hierarchy.” (The Politics of Aesthetics 8; 13)  Residents assume roles and responsibilities in accordance with their capacities and social characteristics. Those who are excluded from political participation are excluded because they “do not have the time to devote themselves to anything other than their work” (The Politics of Aesthetics 7–8). Not only do they lack the capacity for political participation, in other words, but since every resident has a role to play and since every role is necessary for the proper functioning of the city, they are under an ethical obligation to fulfill their role and nothing else.5 The structure of the Platonic city shows that the roots of politics lie in the initial apportionment of roles and responsibilities rather than in any ensuing struggle for power. In Rancière’s words, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time” (The Politics of Aesthetics 8). The relevance of this claim to his aesthetic theory is that it relocates the question of whether artworks have

Introduction

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political efficacy from discussion of the contradictions or alternatives they might expose to a more central position. Artworks change who and what are visible in a community and thereby rearrange their audiences’ sense of what actions might be politically meaningful. That those in power frequently object to works that lay bare uncomfortable realities only reinforces this claim. Rancière shares with Marcuse the sense that artworks prompt their audiences to develop new ways of experiencing everyday reality. Rancière’s aesthetic theory differs from Marcuse’s, however, in its explanation of how artworks produce political effects. Whereas Marcuse—and Adorno before him—argues that the poet’s “sublimation [of] cultural material” in a given work is what creates political opportunities, Rancière claims that it is the structure of a work, the way its elements are organized, that drives aesthetic experience and generates its political meanings: “The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle. It is the dream of an art that would transmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations” (The Politics of Aesthetics 59). Just as the “distribution of the sensible” determines which residents of the Platonic city fulfill which roles, the relationships among the elements of a work of art determine the work’s political efficacy. Rancière is undoubtedly cognizant of the contradictions Benjamin, Adorno, and other theorists identify. Like Marcuse, however, he focuses on the ways artworks draw our attention to alternatives “immanent” in a given system rather than on their capacity to expose its deficiencies (The Politics of Aesthetics 46). Explaining his approach in another context, Rancière writes, “I have taken a different path; these phrases do not describe a lived situation but reinvent the relation between a situation and the forms of visibility and capacities of thought that are attached to it” (“The Aesthetic Dimension” 17). Rancière’s argument for poetry’s political capacity deepens Benjamin, Adorno, and Marcuse’s assertions that the political relevance of an artwork grows from its immersion in particular circumstances and communities at particular historical moments. Twentieth-century aesthetic theory offers different ways of engaging with city poems. Benjamin argues that Baudelaire’s work signals the emergence of a new, debilitating form of urban modernity. His poems are symptoms of broader structural disruptions. Adorno reframes Benjamin’s argument to claim that poems challenge us to consider new ways of interpreting the contradictions of Paris’s wealth. For Marcuse, reading works like Les Fleurs du Mal opens up an “aesthetic dimension” in our experience that enables us to recognize the

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vulnerabilities we share. Awakened to the contingency of our own positions within the social hierarchy, we are more likely to consider progressive modes of social engagement. Going beyond Marcuse, Rancière asserts that aesthetic works disrupt the “distribution of the sensible” that enables the powerful to prioritize their desires ahead of the health and safety of those under their authority. His theory suggests that city poems broaden the political sphere by infusing everyday actions with transformative potential. Like Koki and Panda, Rancière invites us to use aesthetic experience as a way to cultivate power and resources we share in common.

Varieties of American urban crisis As I note above, the American urban crisis has proceeded through four overlapping phases since the 1940s: the physical crisis and urban renewal of the 1940s and 1950s, the social crisis and revolutionary protests of the 1960s, the financial crisis and cycles of  disinvestment and profiteering of the 1970s and 1980s, and the neoliberal crisis and accelerating race- and class-based segregation that emerged in the 1990s and continues today. Each phase has been defined, in part, by an underlying theory of how cities grow and change. During the 1940s, city planners and urban theorists conceived cities as “constantly evolving organisms subject to [natural] processes of growth and decay” (Judd 3). Originally articulated by sociologists at the University of Chicago, this view holds that a city’s physical environment determines its residents’ psychosocial characteristics and, therefore, that its social and economic well-being are functions of physical conditions (Scott and Storper 2). Chicago School urban theory, as it has come to be known, influenced decades of city planning practice. The theory’s physical determinism drove the rise of rational-comprehensive city planning, a movement that emerged in American cities after the Second World War and remains dominant today. The main tenets of rational-comprehensive planning are the following: (1) physical form determines social and economic relations, (2)  economic growth always serves the public interest, and (3) a “neat, logically constructed process of plan development engineered by technically trained planners” is the best method for maintaining political neutrality (Angotti 11). As a result of the predominance of Chicago School theory and rationalcomprehensive planning practice, American cities from the 1940s through the 1960s were reshaped through large-scale urban renewal projects, with many poor and minority neighborhoods being razed in order to promote new economic

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development (Hall 222–227). The Federal Housing Act of 1949 is perhaps the clearest expression of this approach. Conceived in response to fears about slowing growth in downtown business districts, the Act authorized unprecedented intervention in the urban environments and encouraged cities to transform themselves through aggressive redevelopment. As Robert Beauregard explains, the discourse of crisis that surrounded the Act’s passage and implementation— including rhetoric that identified the presence in a neighborhood of workingclass and minority communities as an indicator of decline—proposed a “spatial fix for our more generalized insecurities and complaints” about the emerging contradictions of American society at the time (22). Though the specific language of the Act required cities to dedicate a majority of funds to affordable housing, large percentages of urban renewal investments up to the present have been allocated to “higher and better uses,” such as office buildings, stadiums, conference centers, and luxury apartments.6 Far from strengthening the urban fabric, these projects displaced vibrant communities and destroyed low-income and minority neighborhoods while doing little to slow the relocation of wealthier city residents to the suburbs.7 The deepening racial and socioeconomic divides of the twenty-first century indicate that American cities are still recovering.8 The second phase of the crisis began in the early 1960s as resistance to urban renewal intersected with the broader civil rights movement. It was characterized by conflicting theories of the purposes cities served, specifically, whether their primary function was social or economic. Neighborhood-based groups such as the Black Panther Party (in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and elsewhere) and, several years later, the Young Lords (in New  York and Chicago) built constituencies among the urban poor by calling for and enacting community-oriented solutions to local problems. Some of their activities flared into full-scale uprisings, as in Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhood in 1965 and in cities across the country in subsequent years, while others developed into political movements, including one that resulted in Carl Stokes’s election as Cleveland’s first black mayor. As the broader civil rights movement gained momentum, critical urban theorists and city planners attempted to shift public discourse about urban crisis. They publicly challenged the purposes and outcomes of rational-comprehensive city planning and conducted research to bring the social implications of the urban crisis to public attention. Studies such as Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960), Herbert Gans’s The Urban Villagers (1962), and Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of American Cities (1961), for example, asserted that projects authorized under the 1949 Housing Act were unjust, racist, and ineffective. Relatedly, Paul Davidoff implored city planners to reconceive their

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role in relation to the public interest. His influential 1965 article “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning” argued that existing planning practices “discouraged full participation by citizens in plan making” and foregrounded the fact that different segments of the urban population have competing needs and interests (193). Davidoff ’s work inaugurated a progressive turn in the field of city planning that prioritizes community involvement in planning processes and the pursuit of social and environmental justice as primary objectives. Similarly, Manuel Castells, Henri Lefebvre, and David Harvey outlined influential critical urban theories in The Right to the City (1968), The Urban Question (1972), and Social Justice and the City (1973), respectively. Based on research into the relationships between land use, commercial investment, and residents’ daily lives, their work exposed ideological flaws in rational-comprehensive conceptions of cities and challenged planners to reconsider the kinds of interventions that might benefit urban communities. At the same time that critical alternatives and social movements were gaining traction, changes in national economic policy during the Nixon and Ford administrations crippled city finances. The American urban crisis shifted into a third phase when, as a result of these changes, federal resources were reallocated from social welfare programs to economic development. Large-scale neglect of minority and working-class neighborhoods wreaked havoc across the country. Government and private landowners neglected businesses and buildings in Chicago’s Bronzeville, New  York’s Lower East Side and South Bronx, and Los Angeles’s Compton and Watts to such a degree that these neighborhoods “became increasingly removed from the economic mainstream” (Hackworth 24). The financial crisis was seared in the public consciousness through events such as Cleveland’s 1969 Cuyahoga River fire and New York’s 1975 fiscal crisis. Prevailing responses to these events, such as reducing already austere budgets and taking on debt in the form of municipal bonds, made the social crisis theorists and planners diagnosed a decade earlier even worse (Hackworth 26–27). Even as conditions in some neighborhoods became unlivable, cities continued steering public funds to private ends. By the end of the 1970s, cities were increasingly administered as “growth machines” in which local government, business, and media elites who stood to benefit individually coalesced around the shared goal of promoting economic development (Molotch).9 The financial crises of the 1970s and 1980s set the stage for the emergence of neoliberal governance, the fourth and current form of American urban crisis. If in earlier decades cities were conceived as organisms that grew according to natural laws, constellations of resources to sustain individual and community

Introduction

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well-being, or complex environments shaped by competing interests, by the 1990s they were managed primarily as businesses. As Jason Hackworth explains, “Local governments are now not only expected to ally with business to improve [their] plight, they are also expected to behave as businesses as well” (26, italics in original). Grounded in the principle that markets produce just outcomes, neoliberal urbanism puts macro-level economic growth ahead of the claims of communities. Cities compete with one another for corporate investment. Those that provide the most attractive incentives—tax reductions, public–private partnerships, and outright privatization of public resources—are rewarded while those who fail to do so risk marginalization and decline. Global investment cycles push the immediate needs and interests of local communities to the margins.10 Hackworth identifies two main causes for the neoliberal turn: the globalization of trade and the devolution of responsibility for the provision of public services from the national to the local level. Both sets of changes, which intensified in the 1980s and remain vital forces today, made cities more vulnerable to shifts in the global economy and therefore more dependent on “hegemonic real estate interests and the pro-growth civic coalitions they are able to assemble” in order to remain financially solvent (Angotti 12). As a result of this increased vulnerability, cities increasingly choose to promote economic development at all costs, for example, by encouraging gentrification, offering tax and regulatory incentives for aggressive real estate development and downtown mega-projects, and eliminating public investment “that is not likely to lead to an immediate profit” (Hackworth 78). In order to further reduce costs and attract investment, cities are also establishing public–private partnerships and business improvement districts that allow them to outsource functions such as sidewalk maintenance and public safety protection to private entities. Many have also courted private investors to lease or purchase public resources such as parks, housing, and utility services. To attract residents back from the suburbs, cities are encouraging the redevelopment of waterfronts and others spaces abandoned by manufacturing as enclaves for “creative-class” professionals by easing restrictions on development and reducing the percentages of new housing that must be set aside for lowincome residents.11 Proponents of these strategies argue that the benefits of economic growth outweigh the disadvantages produced for particular communities at particular times. Edward Glaeser, for example, claims that since cities are incubators of innovation that “magnify humanity’s strengths,” promoting dense urban development is the best strategy for achieving economic and social justice for

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all (249; 224). Beyond recommending that “social services [should be] funded at the national rather than the local level,” however, Glaeser and other supporters of neoliberal urban policy rarely explain how accelerating corporate-sector growth will benefit the urban poor (90; 258). Indeed, an increasingly common outcome of pro-growth strategies is that inequalities between neighborhoods and across cities are intensifying, in many cases, along racial lines. Contrary to Glaeser’s urban boosterism, researchers are beginning to document the persistence of “neighborhood effects,” or the ways the social and physical conditions of neighborhoods affect residents’ financial and health outcomes over generations.12 Robert Sampson, in particular, suggests that while cities do have the potential to benefit large segments of the population, they are just as likely to reinforce existing economic and cultural disparities. The consequences for residents who are not in positions to benefit from neoliberal policies are “displacement, alienation, and exploitation” (Porter 530). For low-income residents, in particular, the rise of the neoliberal city has yielded “rapidly degrading qualities of urban life” and exposure to “predatory practices in urban housing markets, reductions in services, and above all the lack of viable employment opportunities, with some cities . . . utterly bereft of employment prospects” (Harvey, Rebel Cities 53). Neoliberal regimes dominate cities by redefining urban space as a limited resource. Defining the built environment as means for producing value, neoliberal approaches erase differences between individual places, subsuming all of urban space in the singular logic of exchange. Lefebvre describes the result, anticipating the effects of neoliberalism in his critique of the emerging cities of the late 1960s: “The city, or what remains of it, is built or is rearranged, in the likeness of a sum or combination of elements . . . [s]‌o that while one may rationally look for diversity, a feeling of monotony covers these diversities and prevails, whether housing, buildings, alleged urban centres, organized areas are concerned. The urban, not conceived as such but attacked face on and from the side, corroded and gnawed, has lost the features and characteristics of the oeuvre, of appropriation” (“The Right to the City” 127). What’s missing from the French cities Lefebvre critiques—and increasingly from ours—is an appreciation for the complex textures of everyday life. Instead of validating cultures and communities as they emerge, cities transform themselves into sites for investment in order to facilitate participation in global economic competition. Progressive planning’s interventions in neoliberal status quo have focused on the goal of promoting social and environmental justice. In order to achieve justice, planners are reimagining four aspects of their work:  its objectives,

Introduction

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processes, participants, and the types of knowledge that count in making decisions. In addition to replacing the objective of economic development with a focus on equity and justice, progress planners urge interventions in the processes used to generate, refine, and implement city plans. Patsy Healey, for example, has applied Jürgen Habermas’s “communicative action” model to argue that collaborative planning can bring communities together around previously unrecognized common interests (52–53). Radical or insurgent planners ally themselves more directly than their peers with “systematically disempowered” communities (Sandercock, Towards Cosmopolis 97). Planners who work in this vein understand planning as an “inherently political practice” (Angotti 24; Sandercock, Towards Cosmopolis 103). They insist that equity and justice are achievable only when community rather than expert knowledge structures plans and planning processes. Progressive work, in other words, requires effort on all fronts. As Leonie Sandercock explains, anticipating Peter Marcuse’s tactics of expose, propose, politicize, “if planning is to contribute to . . . social goals, then we need a broader and more politicized definition of planning’s domain and practices” (Towards Cosmopolis 204). At their best, progressive planners work with communities to nurture the emergence of a new “urban commons” that will make it possible for American cities to be “produced, protected, and used for social benefit” (Harvey, Rebel Cities, 86). But this is difficult, delicate work; the “neoliberal hegemony” persists (Fainstein, The Just City, 19). While progressive responses to crisis enable us to “distinguish between dynamics of social life that are intrinsically urban from those that are more properly seen as lying outside,” even progressively minded planners and theorists sometimes contribute to the prioritization of “economic efficiency [over] social wellbeing” (Scott and Storper 9–12). The line between disrupting the status quo and sustaining it through ameliorative action is narrow.

City poems and political action City Poems argues that poets enact progressive modes of city planning in the three ways:  (1) by exposing underlying urban realities in ways that shape our awareness of the diverse possibilities of the present moment, (2) by proposing alternative arrangements of resources and power, and (3)  by politicizing the need for action by communities of practice oriented toward the goals of justice and equity (Marcuse, “Whose Right(s)”). It demonstrates that poems function as theory-in-action, as “part of the [urban] world, not simply as a mirror of

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it” (Scully 4). Applying the techniques of urban theorists and city planners, my readings focus on the ways poets situate themselves, their speakers, and their readers in particular places in cities—for example, on streets and sidewalks, in buses and private cars, and at rest in apartments and shops—and explore what their strategies reveal about what cities are, who participates in their development, and how their existing social, economic, and political relations can be changed. Following poet-critics such as Juliana Spahr and James Scully, I argue that city poems constitute a form of social action that can have material effects. Following progressive planner Leonie Sandercock, I  suggest that city poems enact and produce “experiential, intuitive, and local knowledges; knowledges based on practices of talking, listening, seeing, contemplating, sharing; and knowledges expressed in visual and other symbolic, ritual, and artistic ways” that can supplement the “scientific and technical” knowledges that predominate in urban theory and city planning practice (Towards Cosmopolis 76). Further, I argue that careful engagement with city poems can expand our understandings of how urban power and resources might be rearranged to bring communities together across geographic and cultural differences despite the constraints imposed by overarching social, political, and economic orders. Recent studies of contemporary poetry have taken up similar lines of inquiry. Dale Smith, for example, argues that poetry contributes to the formation of spheres of discourse that shape our sense of “emergent social possibilities” (7). Contrasting the aesthetic experience of poetry with that of rational-critical debate, he suggests that poetry works as much at the level of affect, engaging our feelings and sympathies, as at the level of deliberative thought. Poetry “prepar[es] an audience for the possibilities that are latent in how circulations of discourse and other symbolic forms are valued,” in Smith’s view, by supplementing the “symbols, images, commonplaces, discourses, and performative acts” that constitute the Habermasian public sphere with “textures or ‘coloration’ ” that change how we think about our responsibilities to others (13–14). His argument for poetry’s capacity to “transpose private feeling into public affect” recalls Marcuse’s and Rancière’s discussions of aesthetic disruption and proposes an ethics-based supplement to their claims for its political effects (13). For example, Rancière might argue that a poem like Baudelaire’s “Les Sept Vieillards” might lead us to reconsider the part poor communities should have in decisions about investments in public housing; Smith, by contrast, would suggest that the poem “prepares” us to participate in policy debates in new ways by enabling us to “associate [our own] personal experiences with the lives of others” and reconsider our ethical responsibilities to people like the old man in the alley (15).

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The way poems engage our affects and emotions, in other words, matters more to Smith than the political insights it might occasion. Joel Nickels examines poetry’s political possibilities and the relationship between individual works and the social and political contexts from which they emerge. Focusing on modernist poetry and fiction, he argues that both poetic and political action run the risk of reinforcing exploitative practices. Nickels reads William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, for example, as a failed attempt to articulate a vision of a self-organizing “multitude,” the kind of collective political subject Paul Virno and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri propose as a successor to democracy. Linking moments of “spontaneous” political organization in the poem with dramatizations of “unseen structural estrangement,” Nickels concludes that Paterson exposes the violence that underlies existing political and economic structures (80; 74). Rather than engaging readers in enacting strategies of resistance to these structures, however, the poem’s disrupted process of composition and its structural and stylistic ambiguities simply mirror the “social forces” that prevent political action by “divid[ing] the multitude from itself ” (58). Nickels concludes, in a reading that recalls Benjamin’s use of Baudelaire, that Paterson functions as a symptom of broader social and political contradictions rather than a tool or medium for change. As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 1, the limits Nickels identifies Paterson are in some ways limits of his method of reading. Because he treats the poem as a reflection of its social and political context, he is unable to account for the aesthetic disruptions of Book V. While it is important not to disregard Nickels’s warning against investing poems with more radical potential than they can bear, it is also important not to foreclose the “aesthetic dimension” of a given poem’s disruptive possibilities. Like Nickels, Michael Clune and Christopher Nealon explore the relationships between twentieth-century poetry and its social and political context. Clune identifies the predominance of an “economic fiction” in the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Frank O’Hara, and others. The “economic fiction” is an aesthetic force of a particular kind. Similar to Marcuse’s aesthetic dimension, Clune’s fiction is a “material alternative to the social” that actively shapes readers’ abilities to perceive and understand the worlds they inhabit. Rather than exposing the hidden contradictions that structure everyday experience, however, Clune’s economic fiction “makes things disappear” and is thus more likely to produce exploitation than transformation (163). His reading of O’Hara’s city poems is instructive because it approaches poetry as a mode of critical urban analysis rather than as a symptom of a larger process. Clune compares the way O’Hara “dissolve[s]‌the individual in the flows and processes of the collective” to the

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way urban theorist Jane Jacobs subsumes individual residents in the “sidewalk ballet” of a safe and vibrant neighborhood (Clune 71; Jacobs 66). He notes that both O’Hara’s city poems and Jacobs’s urban theory run counter to the prevailing “economic fiction” of the early 1960s, the idea that individuals make rational choices in a “free market” that optimizes the distribution of material goods (55). In order to challenge this orthodoxy, he argues, O’Hara and Jacobs “fictionalize choosing” in their depictions of New York’s streets and emphasize that immersion in the collective can be more productive than insisting on private desires. This is especially the case when individual choices are framed in terms of environments like cities that are shared in common with others (Clune 59–63). Clune’s comparison of O’Hara and Jacobs shows that city poems make practical knowledge of urban experience legible to readers in the same way as other modes of critique. Further, it suggests that reading poetry as a mode of critical urban analysis opens up possibilities for collective action. Christopher Nealon takes a similar approach in The Matter of Capital. Observing that critics of twentieth-century poetry have “shunted to the side” its critique of capitalism, Nealon argues that poets have explored the “matter” of capitalist crisis in myriad textual forms across the century, in particular through resistance and refusal. He cites Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” as a specific example (35). Nealon’s reading of Ashbery recalls Adorno and Marcuse’s descriptions of the processes by which artists “sublimate” cultural materials into aesthetic form. He traces the ways the poet “pits” crises such as New York City’s 1975 bankruptcy and the escalation of the Vietnam War against the banal “dailiness” of life in the city and suggests that “Self-Portrait” ultimately functions as an aesthetic confrontation with a “violence that eludes naming” (86; 106). While Nealon’s reading is powerful, he leaves Ashbery where Benjamin left Baudelaire:  fully cognizant of the transformations underway but lacking the tools to muster a satisfactory political response.13 Like Clune, Nealon urges critics to pay closer attention to the aesthetic dimensions of contemporary city poetry and, in particular, to the social and political deformations poets register in their uses of language and poetic forms and the alternative modes of political engagement they propose. City Poems extends Smith, Nickels, Clune, and Nealon’s work both in terms of the poetry it addresses and in its conception of poetry as a social practice. Rather than focusing exclusively on avant-garde writing, for example, the book examines poetry from a range of traditions, including work by Wanda Coleman, Jayne Cortez, Brenda Coultas, and Lewis MacAdams that has been less frequently discussed in scholarly contexts. My purpose in reading these poets alongside

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canonical figures such as Williams, Olson, George Oppen, and Gwendolyn Brooks is to demonstrate a continuity of concern among a range of poets for the qualities of American urban life since the Second World War. Similarly, rather than reading for symptoms of broader social, political, or economic contradictions, I follow Clune in situating city poems in relation to contemporaneous debates in the fields of urban theory and city planning. This interdisciplinary approach enables City Poems to contribute to Joseph Harrington’s project of returning “poetry’s perceived abilities . . . to effect equilibrium and ordering, to preserve or transmit aesthetic and ethical values, and to (de)sacralize twentieth-century capitalist society” to the forefront of literary and cultural studies (167). Heeding Jed Rasula’s warning against reifying poetic schools, each chapter focuses on a particular city at a particular time:  New  York City in the 1960s, 1970s, and 2000s (Chapters 3, 4, and 6); Chicago in the 1950s and 2000s (Chapter 5); and Los Angeles in the 1960s, 1990s, and today (Chapters 2 and 6). In addition to these major cities, I  also discuss Paterson, NJ, and Gloucester, MA, the cities of Williams’s Paterson and Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, respectively (Chapter 1).

Scope and purpose But why does it matter if we read city poems as instances of critical urban analysis rather than as symptoms of broader social and political contradictions? Why does it matter if we approach city poetry as a mode of insurgent urban practice rather than as evidence to support other, broader theoretical arguments? One way to answer would be to apply Walt Whitman’s notion that “A great poem is no finish to a man or woman but rather a beginning” (Selected Poems 13). Poems are meaningful, according to this view, when they invite interpretation and use, when they spark action among readers to change the circumstances of their lives. The seventh poem of the 1861 Calamus sequence is a case in point. The poem opens in an atmosphere of disorientation triggered by “the terrible question of appearances” and builds through a series of personal reflections: “May-be the things I perceive / … / May-be they only seem to me what they are (as doubtless they indeed but seem), as from my present point of view–and might prove (as of course they would) naught of what they appear, or naught any how, from entirely changed points of view” (Selected Poems 231). Whitman worries that his understanding of the city is idiosyncratic rather than something he shares with fellow residents. The next several poems in the sequence persist in doubt:  “Is

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there even one other like me?” (Selected Poems 232); “Are you the person drawn toward me?” (Selected Poems 235); and “Who is now reading this?” (Selected Poems 237). The strongest response to these questions comes in Calamus 18 when Whitman turns exuberantly to the interactions the city makes possible: “City of my walks and joys! / City whom that I have lived and sung there will one day make you illustrious.” Whitman makes clear that it is not the built environment or the people in the streets that calm his anxieties about the reality of what he sees. Rather, he explains, it is the “frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love, / Offering me the response of my own” (Selected Poems 239). In other words, at least in this section of Calamus, it is visual recognition, the “flash of eyes,” the immanence of urban social relations, the city’s call and response, that turns the terrible doubt of appearances into a uniquely urban sensibility. Bruce Andrews issues a similar call to public action through his associative poetics. As Jed Rasula explains, “Andrews modulates and shuffles voices, attitudes, pronouncements, takes, come-ons, and styles of verbal display that have a vernacular range and precision poets rarely attempt. The reader is compelled to make sense of the text as if it were a fluid public scene” (Syncopations 111). Like Whitman, Andrews creates openings for readers in his poetry that encourage interpretive participation. As a result, the “public scene” his work produces is one of collective action rather than a static tableau. Andrews describes this effect in his important essay “Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis”: Explanation embeds itself in the writing itself—locating work in relation to its social materials: to what it handles, resists, characterizes. It reads the outside, it doesn’t just read itself . . . It is itself an interpretation. It is a response, a production that takes place within a larger context of reproduction. And this is the reflexivity which we should be on the look-out for—a social kind, that comes through method (of writing & of reading)—not (just) ‘content’. Method as Prescription—posing problems, eliciting reading. (24)

When we approach a poem as “itself an interpretation” rather than merely as a container for information or content, Andrews insists, we open ourselves up to being affected by its social and political relevance. We respond, in other words, to the “reading” the poem elicits. Andrews’s advice for readers is to be more responsive as we read, to “stop repressing the active construction, the making of meaning, the making of sense—social sense” available through poetry and to approach individual poems as beginnings, in Whitman’s sense, for collective action (24). Like Adorno and Rancière, Andrews argues that poetry makes “social processes visible” and, in so doing, enables us to imagine alternative ways

Introduction

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of imagining the “horizon” or “outer context” of everyday experience (29). By expanding our contextual horizons in this way, poetry enables us to experience new possibilities of meaning and social structure and to identify and grasp the levers by which we might reconfigure our world. “The Open,” a sequence of city poems in Ed Roberson’s 2006 collection City Eclogue, invites the kind of interpretive praxis Andrews and Whitman propose. Set in a “flattened sea of housing brick rubble” left behind by an urban renewal project, the sequence makes visible the social context of the lives the project has disrupted (70). Equally descriptive and critical, “The Open” examines the differences in lives lived on across the city and indicts the passivity and isolation of residents who have not been directly harmed by renewal. The title poem, for example, characterizes what outsiders are “[s]‌uddenly able to see” when a neighborhood is razed:                  People lived where it weren’t open, a people whose any beginning is disbursed     by a vagrant progress whose any settlement     is overturned for the better of a highway through to someone else’s    possibility. (64)

The “vagrant progress” of urban renewal displaces one set of residents in order to make room for infrastructure, in this case a highway, meant to benefit others. Roberson’s critique is clear:  when cities put economic growth ahead of other goals, such as nurturing existing neighborhoods, they make their residents vulnerable to displacement and worse. And the “people whose any beginning is disbursed” could be any group that finds itself in the way of another, more powerful group’s possibilities. But there is more going on in this poem and in “The Open,” as a whole, than an indictment of urban renewal. As Evie Shockley explains, “Roberson uses poetic techniques that frustrate oversimplified analysis of the operation of social and environmental systems, encouraging more nuanced understandings of our relationships with the world around us” (161). Indeed, the disjunctive syntax of the poem’s next seven lines creates space for critical engagement. Roberson sets the displaced community in a broader urban context, defining them as a “people within a people,” and then comments on the relationship between their

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suffering and the experiences of other residents. We are with the poet, here, in a neighborhood near the one that has been razed. The geography of the poem suggests Pittsburgh, where Roberson grew up and where more than 8,000 residents were displaced from the working-class Lower Hill District in the late 1950s to make way for a domed Civic Arena (Fitzpatrick).14 Looking out across the open space the neighborhood has become, we can see the city and our place in its geography differently than before: we are in a “valley we never knew / our ward flowed through” and closer to downtown than we thought. As the poem suggests, we lived in close proximity to another community until the  urban renewal project took its toll (64). Roberson describes them as a “people within a people yet whose link / we lived in a distant separation,” a social and perhaps economic distance we created despite physical proximity (64). The poet uses and repeats “we” in this section of the poem to implicate himself—and us—in what the displaced residents are experiencing. Roberson’s reflexivity, to use Andrews’s term, complicates the poem’s otherwise straightforward critique of urban renewal by inviting questions rather than enforcing judgments. Moving beyond the cliché of pitting heartless developers against helpless residents, “The Open” encourages us to consider the degree to which the physical and conceptual places we construct for ourselves within cities include and exclude other communities. Roberson links the aesthetic dimension of his poem to the physical dimensions of the city in a later section:                 Word is that walking     plots meaning from the chaos of point, in that,    movement is line    of body marking off the been    place’s journey into story (66)

These lines suggest that the ways we use the city—“walking” as individuals and in larger groups—infuse it with meaning and produce, over time, trajectories of “meaning” that transform urban chaos into “story.” The halting syncopation of the line breaks and extra spaces challenge us to reflect. What’s a “been place”: a place we’ve been? A place that once existed but now has been destroyed? Both of these things at once? And what responsibility do we have to the places and people we encounter as we move through the city “marking off ” the geographies that matter to us from those that don’t? While “The Open” responds to a specific instance of urban crisis and offers a focused critique, it also opens up these and

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other lines of inquiry. Reading the sequence as mode of analysis rather than as a symptom means being as attentive to the questions it raises—and in particular to the questions it raises for our own conceptions and practices—as to the specific scenes it describes. Rather than merely making the problems of the city or the effects of urban crisis visible, Roberson’s work engages us in a practice of critical reflection that enables us to imagine alternative futures for ourselves and our communities. Many poems and cities are, of course, missing from this study. Alice Notley’s feminist urban epic The Descent of Alette (1996), for example, would extend and complicate my analysis of Williams, Olson, and Ginsberg in Chapter 1, and a San Francisco nexus would enhance my account of Los Angeles poetics in Chapter  2.15 Similarly, Haniel Long’s Pittsburgh Memoranda (1935), Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), and Melvin Tolson’s Harlem Gallery (1965) belong with my discussion of neighborhood poetics in Chapters 4 and 5, as does more recent work such as Wendy Walter’s Troy, Michigan (2014) and Samuel Amadon’s The Hartford Book (2012). Finally, the practices of public dissent enacted in Leslie Scalapino’s that they were at the beach (1985) and way (1988) and David Buuck’s SITE CITE CITY (2015) would enhance my assessment of poetic and theoretical opposition to neoliberalism in Chapter 6. While City Poems undoubtedly suffers from these omissions, limiting its poetic scope has enabled me to include broader discussion of urban theory and city planning alongside my readings of individual poems. In particular, focusing on a small number of works has allowed me to examine the reading and writing of city poetry as a form of “planning” in itself that “reproduces in its experiment not just what it needs, life, but what it wants, life in difference, in the play of the general antagonism” (Moten and Harney 76). The political efficacy of city poems resides in their refusal of the existing social order and the space they make for readers to imagine alternative arrangements of power and resources. In a sense, Mel’s complaint that poetry “doesn’t really do much” is exactly right (Spahr and Buuck 87). No poem can change a city or the way it is governed. The readers a poem organizes, however, constitute an “army of lovers” joined together in the common project of reinterpreting urban circumstances in order to cultivate the “solidity” and momentum that sustains collective action and signifies it is already underway (Moten and Harney 78). In The Country and the City, his still-crucial study of representations of the city in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature, Raymond Williams asserts that “people have often said ‘the city’ when they meant capitalism or bureaucracy or centralized power” (291). His lesson for poets, readers, and critics

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is that “at every point we need to put these ideas to the historical realities:  at times to be confirmed, at times denied. But also, as we see the whole process, we need to put the historical realities to the ideas, for at times these express . . . human interests and purposes for which there is no other immediately available vocabulary” (291). City Poems follows Williams in exploring the relations between city poems, urban theory, and city planning. My aim throughout is to return “human interests and purposes” to the center of analysis of American cities and to articulate a progressive and practical vision that draws equally on the realities of experience and the insights of poetic imagination. Since cities function, as Williams observes, as ciphers for ideas and anxieties about the state of society at a particular moment in time, they also represent a field of experiment through which new arrangements of power and resources can be elaborated, critiqued, and put into practice. This is the challenge the poets I discuss in this book have taken up, and it is one I hope we will share in common going forward.

1

Writing around Williams: Paterson and Experimental Urban Poetics

          The poem is complex and the place made    in our lives      for the poem. William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

When William Carlos Williams finished Paterson Book IV in 1950, he had been working for more than three decades on a project he hoped would be “large enough to embody the whole knowable world” (Autobiography 391). When Book V was published in 1958, the poem had grown beyond and around even that ambition.1 Grounded in local scenes and vernacular languages, Paterson extends Williams’s career-long confrontation with the pessimistic erudition of T.  S. Eliot’s modernist poetics and his own  attempts to invent an American “measure” (Mariani 519).2 Williams describes the poetic vision underlying Paterson in “The Poem as a Field of Action,” an essay published in 1948: “The clearness we must have is first the clarity of knowing what we are doing—what we may do:  Make anew—a reexamination of the means—on a fresh—basis” (Selected Essays 285). True to this objective, the poem examines the consequences of urban development and chronicles residents’ efforts to “adapt the economic life of [their] human community to the nature of its place” (Berry 11). Williams struggled throughout the writing of the poem to “clarify / and compress” his materials, including archival research, community lore, direct observations, and personal correspondence, into a unified picture of contemporary American life (McKee 147; P 19). Christopher MacGowan cites a letter to the publisher James Laughlin describing these frustrations:  “That God damned and I mean God damned poem Paterson has me down . . . It’s all shaped up in outline and intent, the body of the thinking is finished, but the

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technique, the manner and the method are unresolvable to date. I flounder and flunk” (P xi). Though the poem fell short of Williams’s vision, it nonetheless models a mode of critical participation in everyday life that foregrounds the city’s ambiguities, disconnections, and contradictions (Axelrod and Axelrod 123–125).3 Williams was not alone in reckoning poetically with the dynamics of American cities in the decades after the Second World War. Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg also embarked on major city poems in the 1940s and 1950s. Even as they admired Paterson’s innovative poetics and used the poem as a model for their own experiments, they criticized Williams’s reliance on abstractions and his insistent attempts to create order from urban complexity. In Olson’s view, Paterson was too specific a record of one city and its history. As a result of its narrowness, the poem fell short of the critical rethinking of contemporary urban life it might have achieved. Olson sought to surpass Williams’s experiments in The Maximus Poems. Adapting Williams’s methods, he demonstrates in Maximus that rather than being comprehensible, a city’s meanings change continually as residents contest the use of its spaces and resources. For Ginsberg, Paterson strayed too far from everyday experience on River Street and elsewhere to adequately account for lives underway in its namesake city. He urged Williams to let go of abstraction and instead immerse himself in the messy chaos of urban life. He showed his mentor what this approach might yield in a series of poems about a “shrouded stranger” that culminate in “Howl.” The poems explore aspects of Paterson Williams ignored and link its streets to the vibrant subcultures of nearby New York City. Williams read their work with interest. He used a long section of Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” in his 1951 Autobiography and included excerpts from Ginsberg’s letters in Books IV and V of Paterson. He wrote introductions for Ginsberg’s first two books (Empty Mirror and Gates of Wrath) and reviewed Olson’s The Maximus Poems 11–20 for Evergreen Review. His engagement with Olson and Ginsberg’s critiques of Paterson and with the experimental poetics of Maximus and the “Shrouded Stranger” poems brought his own latent concerns about the methods of Books I–IV to the surface. In particular, their responses led him to abandon the broad analogies he had used to structure the work— man as city and city as marriage—as well as the comprehensive picture of the “knowable world” he hoped to achieve order to better attune his poem to the rhythms of daily life. The embodied mode of inquiry Williams uses in Book V brings readers out onto the streets of Paterson with the poet, inviting them to experience the city for themselves rather than engaging solely with the poem’s surface.



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Indeed, the five-part version of Paterson published in 1963 (and in revised form in 1992)  is a different work. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis explains, “by the addition of the fifth book, [Williams] acknowledges that the poem is about his involvement with his images and about how he exists in their midst. The poet’s life is defined in his created world; he alters it as he changes, creating himself and his consciousness in the process of creating the poem” (“The Endless Poem” 51). The transitions in Book V from abstraction and comprehensiveness to personal involvement and productive incompletion anticipate similar shifts in the fields of city planning and urban theory in the 1960s and after, including research and advocacy opposing the purposes and outcomes of rational-comprehensive urban renewal. While Williams, Olson, and Ginsberg’s city poems have received considerable critical attention, little has been written about the ways their experimental poetics relate to other forms of urban discourse.4 The extent of the three poets’ influence on each other’s city poems—in particular, the younger poets’ influence on Williams’s late work—has also been underanalyzed. Paterson, as a whole, is frequently described as a failure and regression from Williams’s early-career innovations (Daniel 118; Perloff, Poetics of Indeterminacy 154). Critical reception of Book V has been particularly inconsistent. Some readers argue it is integral to the poem as a whole for the way it “thickens” Williams’s portrayal of its title city and complicates his career-long engagement with visual art (Newmann 71; Schmidt 193–205). Many, however, view Book V as an outlier. Brian Austin Bremen and Julia Daniel, for example, exclude it from their analysis of Williams’s work, and Joel Nickels mentions it only once in his otherwise thorough study of Paterson’s political valences. Reading Paterson, especially Book V, alongside Olson and Ginsberg’s critical and poetic responses brings forward its critical analysis of prevailing conceptions of the city. Williams’s struggle to use the man as city and city as marriage analogies to structure Books I–IV draw attention to related gaps in rational-comprehensive planning’s primary assumptions. The openness he introduces in Book V points the way to more progressive forms of city planning practice and more politically vital modes of experimental urban poetics.

Rational-comprehensive planning The Regional Plan Association (RPA) published the Regional Plan for New York and Its Environs in 1929. It was the region’s first plan and the nation’s broadest planning document at the time. Using Daniel Burnham’s 1909 plan for Chicago

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as a model, the RPA applied the logic of physical determinism to propose the construction of “an elaborate network of highways, railroads, and parks, along with residential, commercial and industrial centers, as the foundation of the physical and social development of the region” (RPA; Hall 165–169). Modeled on Sir Patrick Geddes’s “civic survey” methodology, the Plan is grounded in comprehensive research into the region’s characteristics, including its geography, natural resources, infrastructure, industry and commerce, and population demographics, among others. Geddes insists that planning requires immersive involvement in research: “We cannot too fully survey and interpret the city for which we are to plan . . . its civic character, its collective soul, thus in some measure discerned and entered into, its activity daily life may be more fully touched, and its economic efficiency more vitally stimulated” (vi–vii). While Geddes encourages planners to consider both the “city and citizen, and the interrelation of these,” he also maintains that they remain neutral rather than orienting their work to the interests of one faction of the community or another (138). For Geddes as for the RPA, comprehensive research insulates the method and resulting plan from bias and irrationality. Geddes famously required students to spend substantial time recording observations from the vantage point of a high tower on the principle that looking out over the region from above allows the planner to better understand how its various aspects relate to one another (Hall 147–150). As the image of a planner alone in a tower suggests, the civic survey method prioritizes rational, comprehensive understanding of the city and region over finer-grained analysis of everyday life. The RPA’s 1929 Plan identifies Paterson, New Jersey, as a minor city that would benefit from being more fully integrated in the larger metropolitan region. Established as a manufacturing center in the early republic, the city had undergone a series of retoolings—from mill town to railroad supplier to silk producer—as the national economy developed over the next hundred years. Each shift in the manufacturing base required new uses of the area’s natural resources and, in particular, new ways of harnessing the water power of the Passaic River and the Great Falls around which the city was initially founded (Daniel 89–92). By the time the RPA launched its planning process in the late 1920s, Paterson’s economy was in decline. The silk industry was failing due to the introduction of synthetic materials and competition from other manufacturing hubs and there were no new enterprises on the horizon. Except for a short period during the Second World War, employment rates in the city continued to erode through next several decades. By 1980, Paterson had the fourth-highest poverty rate among American cities with more than 100,000 residents (Owusu 4–5).



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Williams knew Paterson’s evolving economic crisis firsthand and viewed its struggles as a microcosm of larger problems facing the country as a whole (Daniel 92). As Julia Daniel suggests, Williams interpreted the city’s “malaise [as a] lasting inheritance of extractive mill-town planning” (88). He began analyzing the city’s development and decline in poetry as early as 1914 in “The Wanderer: A Rococo Study,” which was published in The Egoist alongside an excerpt from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and an art review by Ezra Pound (CP1 27–36; 108–117).5 The poem describes the Passaic River’s progress from the untouched landscape above the Great Falls down through the polluted center of Paterson, past Rutherford, and out to the Atlantic Ocean. Williams dramatizes insights about the city in a personal narrative that progresses from innocent exploration of the urban landscape to a perverse baptism in the river itself: “Then the river began to enter my heart / . . . / Till I felt the utter depth of its filthiness, / The vile breath of its degradation, / And sank down knowing this was me now” (CP1 35). The city of Paterson serves in the poem as an object of curiosity and an initiatory portal to the corruption of the urban world. Williams returned to the city in his writing on occasion after “The Wanderer.” As MacGowan explains, he began to focus in earnest on the project that became Paterson in the late 1930s (P x). Whereas precursor poems such as “The Wanderer” provide mostly metaphorical versions of the city, Paterson itself proceeds through detailed research and analysis. Like the RPA’s 1929 Plan, the poem focuses on the “relationship[s]‌among urban habitat [and] local environment” (Daniel 14). As Daniel argues, Williams demonstrates in Paterson that something is wrong in the city (103). The poem enacts a process of inquiry into its state of crisis using methods that resemble Geddes’s civic survey and echo rational-comprehensive planning’s commitments to expert neutrality. Williams’s use of these methods limits the degree to which Paterson can fulfill his ambitions.

The rational-comprehensive limits of Paterson Books I–IV Book I establishes the terms of the poem’s urban inquiry. Williams poses a series of questions interspersed with descriptions of the city’s history and surrounding environment. The questions focus on how best to examine the city’s social and economic dynamics: “Who are these people (how complex / the mathematic) among who I see myself[?]‌” (P 9); “There is no direction. Whither? I / cannot say. I cannot say / more than how” (P 17); “Who? Who? Who? What?” (P 27); and “Who restricts knowledge?” (P 33). Like the RPA, Williams commits himself to

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finding answers “in the facts,” even if individual facts conflict with one another and introduce “divisions and imbalances / [in] his whole concept” (P 27). Despite a seeming willingness to follow where the inquiry leads, Williams organizes much of Book I and the poem, overall, in terms of two broad analogies: man as city and city as marriage. He explains the first analogy in a press release announcing publication of Book IV: “the thing was to use the multiple facets which a city presented as representatives for comparable facets of contemporary thought thus to be able to objectify the man himself as we know him and love him and hate him” (P xiii). The statement encourages readers to think of Paterson and its title city as models for human consciousness. He outlines the second analogy, city as marriage, in “Paterson: The Falls,” a précis of the longer work published in 1943. Likening the history of the city to the story of a consummated marriage, Williams describes the natural environment along the Passaic River as having been fertilized by male entrepreneurialism and commerce (CP2 57–58). The city of Paterson is the product of their flawed union. Tensions between open-ended inquiry and the structuring force of the man as city and city as marriage analogies come to the fore in Book II. Following a protocol that mirrors Geddes’s civic survey, Williams describes a character, “Dr.  Noah Faitoute Paterson,” making detailed observations as he walks the length and breadth of Paterson’s Garret Mountain Park. Dr. Paterson watches people as if to gather as much information as possible about the city’s social, physical, and economic conditions without directly involving himself in the scene. He pauses midway through the afternoon to look out over the city from the edge of the park, surveying the city from a distance to see how it fits in the larger region. As Williams explains in the poem, Alexander Hamilton made a similar survey of the area during the Revolutionary War and came away convinced that it could become a “great manufacturing center . . . to supply the needs of the country” (P 70). Unlike Hamilton, Dr. Paterson struggles to unify his observations into a comprehensive picture of the city’s social life. Critics have noted that the scene in the park seems “preplanned” to reinforce Williams’s analogies (Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy 151). Even so, they are insufficient to advance the poem’s larger objective of comprehending the city as a whole. Indeed, Williams describes Dr. Paterson straining during his walk “to catch the movement of one voice” among the “afternoon of complex / voices” (P 60). Even as his “imagination soars” as he looks out over the city, he concludes there is something about it that remains “(unheard) / moving under all” (P 55). Put simply, there is too much in the park to “clarify / and compress” into a unified picture (P 19).



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Perhaps acknowledging the difficulty of “decipher[ing]” the park’s underlying meanings (P 61), Williams supplements Dr. Paterson’s observations with other materials, including documentary evidence related to Paterson’s founding and extracts from letters he received from Marcia Nardi, a poet who approached him in person in 1942 and wrote to him periodically until 1956. Williams was sympathetic to Nardi’s inquiries at first, connecting her with a publisher and providing minor financial support, but he cut off contact in 1943. Nardi expresses her disappointment with his decision in the letters. She criticizes Williams’s detachment and accuses him of “ducking responsibility toward a better understanding of [his] fellow men except theoretically” (P 82). Noting continuities between Williams’s artistic practice and everyday life, Nardi challenges him to forgo abstractions such as the man as city and city as marriage analogies he uses to organize Paterson so that he can write more directly about the qualities of human experience: But in writing . . . one derives one’s unity of being and one’s freedom to be one’s self, from one’s relationship to those particular externals . . . over which one has complete control and the shaping of which lies entirely in one’s own power; whereas in living, one’s shaping of the externals involved there . . . is no longer entirely within one’s own power but requires the cooperation and the understanding and the humanity of others in order to bring out what is best and most real in one’s self. (P 87)

Poetry is not an analogy for life in Nardi’s view. Instead, it is a means for making a life, a proving ground where poets have “complete control” over their materials. Further, she argues, poetry requires the “cooperation and the understanding” of others. Building on these principles of engagement and collaboration, Nardi urges Williams to stop separating his subjective experiences from objective research and advises him to approach poetry and everyday life as “the very same” by bringing them into a “unity of being” in his future writing (P 87, italics in original). There has been sharp critical discussion of Williams’s use of Nardi’s letters in Paterson. Elizabeth O’Neil, for example, argues that the letters strike a “dissonant note that disturbs the harmony” of the poem overall (xxxi). For Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Williams’s inclusion of the letters shows he recognizes Nardi’s critique as a “complex diagnosis of his situation” that must be incorporated in the poem. Rather than disrupting an otherwise harmonic poetic structure, in DuPlessis’s view, Nardi’s letters provide Williams with a means for regaining “contact between his identity and his subject, the city” and create a “new center” for the

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poem (“The Endless Poem” 68–69). Williams explains his use of Nardi’s letters in a letter of his own to Srinivas Rayaprol, another poet who contacted him for advice: “The letter at the end of Book II is a real letter or a combination of two actual letters written to me several years ago by a woman I had attempt[ed] to help as best I  could . . . You might call her Mrs. Paterson. It is the woman striking back at the man, at all men” (O’Neil 84–85). Williams’s explanation establishes an insincere distance from Nardi by presenting her presence in the poem in terms of the broader city as marriage analogy. She is “Mrs. Paterson” fighting with “Mr. Paterson” rather than a fellow poet critiquing his ideas and approach. That Williams masks Nardi’s identity through a pseudonym, Cress, reinforces his detachment. His depiction of Nardi as “Mrs. Paterson” compresses the complexity of her engagement with his poetics. The city as marriage analogy imposes an interpretive frame on Nardi’s thought that the text of the excerpted letters calls into question. Critics have described similar contradictions in the overarching structure of Books I–IV. Perloff, for example, suggests that “for all its seeming openness” Paterson manifests a “symbolic superstructure” that undermines the “calculated indeterminacy” of Williams’s earlier, more innovative works (Poetics of Indeterminacy 148–154). Similarly, DuPlessis suggests that Williams’s detached analogies limit the poem’s “scope and address” by narrowing the “plenitude and mysterious fecundity” of its possibilities “into a figure, a theme, an idea” (The Pink Guitar 57, 62). Applying insights from Kevin Lynch’s 1960s research on urban “imageability,” Adam McKee argues that the stops and starts of Paterson, including the interruptions of Nardi’s letters and Dr. Paterson’s incomplete civic survey of the park, demonstrate an important characteristic of contemporary urban life: the “trouble of finding . . . a singular meaning in the modern city” (150). A city is “imageable,” for Lynch, if its physical characteristics allow residents to develop mental images they can use to get from place to place (Lynch 9–10). McKee argues that Paterson records Williams’s attempts to use his research on the city’s “history, language, and geography” to render its “seemingly chaotic form” in a usable and unified image (McKee 142). As such, the poem involves readers in a “continuous process of coming together and attempting to order the city” rather than presenting them with a finished urban portrait (154). McKee concludes that if Paterson ultimately exceeds Williams’s attempts to generate a usable image, it is a result of the city’s lack of imageability rather than the poet’s failing. He reads Paterson as documentary evidence of the negative ways the fragmented forms of cities in crises affect residents’ lives.



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DuPlessis, Perloff, and McKee’s readings draw attention to moments in Paterson when Williams’s methods of inquiry and analysis falter. The excerpts from Nardi’s letters represent one such moment. Another comes in the transition from Book II to Book III when Williams turns away from the “useless streets” of the city and, still in the persona of Dr. Paterson, renews his research in the city’s library (P 96). Like the survey of Garret Mountain Park, the library visit proves ineffective. In fact, Williams regrets his withdrawal from human involvement in the city almost immediately. The longer Dr. Paterson spends in the library, the more the poet worries his project is stalled: “Texts mount and complicate them/ selves, lead to further texts and those / to synopses, digests and emendations. So be it. Until the words break loose or—sadly / hold, unshaken” (P 130). By Book III’s conclusion, the pent-up urge to write—rather than merely read— about the city transforms into tornado and then a purifying fire. These disasters resemble the wrecking balls and bulldozers of urban renewal in their effects, a defensive response to the impossibility of achieving clarity of understanding. Williams acknowledges that “to write is a fire,” implying that any attempt to render Paterson in print will “destroy” the living city:  “a chance word, upon paper, may destroy the world” (P 113; 129). Once the destruction is underway, he resolves “to begin again / turning the inside out: to find one phrase that will / lie married beside another for delight” (P 140). As these lines suggest, despite earning insights about the limits of comprehensive research, Williams persists at the end of Book III in shaping his experience of the city through predetermined structures. He reverts to the city as marriage analogy even as the limits of this mode of analysis become clear. The dissonances in Williams’s account of Paterson continue to mount in Book IV. Acknowledging the failure of Dr.  Paterson’s library visit, the poet continues to press for a “discovery //  —to dissect away the block” (P 175). In the first part of the book, he describes a love triangle involving Corydon, a wealthy Manhattan socialite; Phyllis, a domestic servant who commutes to Corydon’s Upper East Side apartment from Paterson; and the poet himself in the persona of “Paterson” (P 149–169). Presented as a pastoral, the drama depicts the city as a site of discord rather than marital harmony. Williams condemns the character Paterson’s attempts to hide his dalliances behind the pretense of marriage: “Oh Paterson! Oh married man! / He is the city of cheap hotels and private / entrances” (P 154). As in Book II where he uses Nardi’s letters to interrupt Dr.  Paterson’s deficient civic survey, Williams fragments Corydon, Phillis, and Paterson’s drama with other materials, including long meditations on the scientist Marie Curie (P 171–178) and an excerpt from a

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letter from Ezra Pound (P 184–185). The Pound letter compares the “squalor of spreading slums” in contemporary America with the “splendour of renaissance cities” (P 185). The either-or contrast underscores the difficulties Williams faces in trying to interpret Paterson’s complexity. Lacking the centralized authority of the church or crown, American cities develop and spread in chaotic ways. The challenges of composing the city of Paterson lead William to acknowledge in Book IV that “[n]‌o one mind / can do it all” (P 190). He takes stock of the limits of his evolving project as the book nears its end by asking “ ‘What have I done?’ ” in the voice of a murderer executed in Paterson in 1850 (P 197–198). Far from renouncing his attempts to produce a unified image of the city at this moment, however, Williams reinvests in his methods. He retells the geologic and social history of the city at Book IV’s conclusion and describes his character Paterson resuming his search for its underlying meaning with “wax in [his] / ears” to blot out distraction (P 192–197; 200–202). If Williams is sensitive to the complexities of contemporary urban experience, as McKee suggests, he nonetheless persists through Book IV in his attempts to generate poetic order.

Paterson and Olson’s “Polis” Charles Olson pursues even more comprehensive methods of inquiry in The Maximus Poems. While his approach is similar to and builds from Williams’s, his city poem differs from Paterson in several respects. For example, Williams describes his project as an attempt to roll “up out of chaos, / a nine months’ wonder, the city / the man, an identity” (P 4). Olson, by contrast, envisions The Maximus Poems as a work “so open it hangs like the whole fucking universe itself ” (Selected Letters 259). Departing from Williams’s emphasis on discovering order, Olson presents Gloucester, Massachusetts—the city that serves as the object of his inquiry—as having been made and remade continuously over time. He calls on readers to engage critically with his depiction of the city as it develops. Indeed, as Lytle Shaw observes, the reader of The Maximus Poems has different work than the reader of Paterson. Whereas Williams’s poem locates us in a “luminous world of immersive specificity,” Olson’s presents a “world of independent clauses . . . imagined as a space of both conceptual and bodily liberation” (Shaw 6; 49). The Maximus Poems replaces Paterson’s narrow focus on the “substance historical of one city” with generative, open-ended inquiry (Mayan Letters 27–28).



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Olson frames his project as a response to the limitations of Paterson, Pound’s Cantos, and Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake in a series of letters to Robert Creeley written from Mexico in early 1951. Offering a “sweeping dismissal” of “inferior predecessors,” the letters describe the strengths and failings of modernist poetics and propose an alternative approach (Perloff, “Inferior Predecessors” 296–298). Olson identifies Williams’s “scrupulousness of attention” as a key achievement that helps orient readers to Paterson’s past, present, and future (Selected Letters 110–111). He acknowledges that Paterson presents an “emotional system which is capable of extensions & comprehensions,” but he concludes that the poem is compromised by Williams’s methods. Specifically, he argues that Paterson represents an attempt to “BEAT LIFE INTO FORM” and impose beauty on the “running street” of the city (Selected Letters 110). The poem fails, in other words, because it forces its terms rather than following insights about the relations between man and city and between poetic form and urban reality where they lead. Like Nardi in her critique of Williams’s detachment, Olson sees poetry and everyday experience as interdependent. He insists that human consciousness is “both the instrument of discovery and the instrument of definition” of the meanings of everyday life (Collected Prose 155). He applies this insight in The Maximus Poems by fusing Williams’s comprehensive research with direct descriptions of everyday life in Gloucester and reflections on the city’s embeddedness in global systems Olson’s overarching goals for The Maximus Poems are to “return politics to the concerns and experiences . . . of daily life, wherever and however it is lived” and to demonstrate the “relationship[s]‌between forms of writing, living, and larger social, spatial, and cosmic structures” (Alcalay 146). In keeping with these goals, he centers his poetic inquiry on the interconnections between residents’ experiences and the city’s broader historical and cultural contexts, proposing to bring the historical, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions of human experience into immediate relation. He describes what this entails in “Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]”:             An American is a complex of occasions themselves a geometry of spatial nature.     I have this sense, that I am one with my skin      Plus this—plus this:

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City Poems and American Urban Crisis that forever the geography which leans in on me I compell backwards I compell Gloucester to yield, to change     Polis is this (Maximus 185)

Olson’s identification of the city as a “skin” through which he encounters the world contrasts with Williams’s use of the city of Paterson as a representation of human consciousness. Rather than interpreting the city through analogies, Olson describes his own embodied experience. As Carla Billitteri explains, the city in The Maximus Poems is a “polis” rather than an analogy, “a disposition toward living” that emerges from a “fluid, utterly dynamic form of communal aggregation” (86). The polis represents a research method that approaches and interprets urban reality through a “global context” that includes “human migrations (some voluntary, others brutally coerced), transcontinental venues opened by mercantile trades, [and] the birth and exponential development of capitalism,” among other factors (Billitteri 87). Because Olson aggregates these contexts alongside personal reminiscences and other materials, The Maximus Poems train readers to think about experience in the world at its human and geologic scales simultaneously. To put it another way, Olson acts as a mapmaker who outlines possible routes for readers to follow in their encounter with the poem then leaves the journey up to them. He “register[s]‌features of the world paratactically, without imposing upon the world a subordinating humanistic order that is not there” (Buelens 263). In fact, as Mark Byers argues, because Olson brings events as distant in time as the retreat of the last Ice Age, the founding and development of Gloucester, and 1950s urban renewal projects into such “close relation through their coincidence on the page,” The Maximus Poems function as a “spatial” intervention in Western teleological thought (264). Interpreted as a process of inquiry, Olson’s polis mirrors Guy Debord’s psychogeographical theory of urban political action. Debord defines “psychogeography” as the “study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals” (“Introduction”). Responding to the numbing effects of planning projects designed to ensure the “smooth circulation” of people and goods through cities, he proposes tactics residents and activists can use to disrupt the patterns of their everyday lives (“Introduction”). For example, he describes



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a friend’s experiment of using a map of London to navigate a German city and encourages city residents to develop “renovated cartograph[ies]” of urban space by juxtaposing and overlaying maps of different kinds (“Introduction”). As another way to enact psychogeographical principles, Debord and other members of the Situationist International organized dérives or improvisational walks through Paris that made it possible for participants to reclaim “perceptual control” of their experiences of the city by detouring them from typical routes in accordance with predefined protocols (Elias 825). As Debord explains in The Society of the Spectacle, the disruptions introduced by dérives and other psychogeographical tactics help residents recognize that cities are organized in particular ways for particular purposes, in particular, the purposes of subsuming all aspects of everyday life in the logic of consumption (121). The disruptions also bring to light opportunities for resistance and transformation that are otherwise ignored by introducing alternatives to rationally ordered urban space (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle 126). Olson employs a psychogeographical poetics of the polis in The Maximus Poems to enact a belief that reality is “knowable,” or that, as he explains in a late poem: Truth [what can also be called, and is so often, to yield the suddenness, and completeness, and thereafter difference in the being (whether it is man or Earth—all the rest is self-declared, and simply will or can reveal itself by Earth & to Man if he chooses. (Maximus 564)

Poetic inquiry provides a means for accessing “truth,” in Olson’s view, by enabling readers to measure the relations between their conscious experiences and the geographic and cultural environments that surround them. Olson spent childhood summers in Gloucester and lived there more or less permanently from 1957 until shortly before his death in 1970. He worked for a time as a substitute letter carrier, and, in the words of landscape historian John Stilgoe, never forgot what working for the postal service taught him to do, namely, “to understand the urban landscape in terms not only of streets, but patterns of street addresses [and] the feel of the streets through his boot soles” (Polis Is This). An important center of the transatlantic fishing industry from its founding in 1623 through the nineteenth century, Gloucester declined in importance during the twentieth century. By 1957, as Olson observes in letters to the editor of the Gloucester

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Daily Times, it was becoming less a place of its own and more and more a part of Boston’s periphery. Olson was deeply troubled by renewal projects that were altering Gloucester’s geography in the late 1950s and early 1960s in order to accelerate its integration in the larger region. His strongest critique comes in a November 26, 1968, letter to the editor of the Gloucester Daily Times protesting the widening of Route 128. “MISTER URBAN RENEWAL / -PLEASE / DON’T CUT DOWN THE / CHISHOLMS the Printer’s / HOUSE,” he demands in all capitals, then P.S.:        Let not              Urban Renewal                touch anything Decent more               which is Left in the                City PS2    WHY NOT let CHISHOLM’s  literally block     the double-laned               or                     parkway HIGHWAY               literally like a Civil Rights     Demonstration—               FOREVER                  and but       SOLID               THE              BUILDING? when will FUNDS be     stopped?        why NOT        do this MONUMENTAL               THING (Maximus to Gloucester 143–144)

The letter asserts a progressive challenge to urban renewal at the level of both its form and content. Its jagged lineation mimics the disruption Olson anticipates the widened Route 128 will cause in Gloucester’s geography. As the letter suggests, his fundamental disagreement with the project is that the city is making local changes to serve regional goals. Rather than studying the city’s



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historical landscape, the developers are working at a broader scale, measuring Gloucester’s usefulness in relation to Boston and larger networks of exchange. He wants “CHISHOLM’s” to remain standing so that Gloucester will retain its idiosyncratic character rather than being absorbed. He objects to the highway widening for the same reasons he objects to Paterson’s analogies:  the project substitutes a means—widening the highway to speed up car travel to Boston or representing the city as a model for human consciousness—for an end— improving residents’ everyday lives or examining the cause and consequences of American urban crisis. Williams’s praises Olson’s poetry for the alternative maps it proposes. Reviewing The Maximus Poems 11–20 for Evergreen Review, he notes that the book “attracts the eye” and ear as a major work and suggests that when Olson’s poems work, they have the “brilliant, breathtaking” effect of transporting the reader through the streets of Gloucester and making words “walk about” through time and space (Something to Say 228; 231). Williams acknowledges in the review that some of the poems in the volume “defeated him,” but he emphasizes that others permitted him to “leap from one sense impression to another” and move out with the poet from Gloucester “over the whole world” (Something to Say 228–229). He applauds poems that allow him to explore the complex interactions of Gloucester’s personal, historical, poetic, and other elements on his own terms rather than imposing an interpretive structure. Though they were not yet written when Williams composed his review, the Dogtown poems in part VI of The Maximus Poems provide a powerful example of the open-ended method he celebrates. Olson describes the abandoned settlement’s historical and topological remnants in order to emphasize Dogtown’s ephemeral position in a longer trajectory of change: “Gravelly Hill says / leave me be, I am contingent, the end of the world / is the borders of my being / . . . it isn’t so decisive / how one thing does end / and another begin” (Maximus 331). As this plea from the landscape suggests, Olson recognizes the limits of trying to convey the results of his inquiry into Dogtown in a singular analogy or image. In place of this effort, he “animate[s]‌ the scene” through embodied exploration and resistance to closure (Collected Prose 252). The Dogtown poems lend credence to Creeley’s observation that “mapping in all its sense and applications is a primary act both for Olson and for those to whom he pays attention. One recognizes quickly that it is not simply a romantic enterprise he is drawn to, but the need to know by means of a determined process” (Collected Prose xii, italics in original). For Creeley as for Williams, Olson’s city poems encourage readers to follow the same process

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of inquiry he has, or, to use Billitteri’s terms, to adopt dispositions toward their encounters with his poems that involve measuring “one’s own bent plus what one can know” (Collected Prose 252). The Maximus Poems invite readers to apply psychogeographical reading practices that increase the likelihood they will make discoveries about themselves and their place in the world as they read. Olson portrays himself as a mapmaker in a November 12, 1961, poem placed near the beginning of section V of The Maximus Poems. Looking west from Tyre, the Phoenician city where the philosopher Maximus lived and worked, the poet asserts, “I am making a mappemunde. It is to include my being. / It is called here, at this point and point of time / Peloria” (Maximus 257). The poem describes a voyage across the Mediterranean to the shores of Cape Cod and “Settlement Cove” in Gloucester. The poem cites an earlier Maximus poem, On first looking out through Juan de la Cosa’s Eyes, and links three historical moments:  the life of Maximus in the second century AD, Viking voyages across the North Atlantic seven hundred years later, and the British settlement of Gloucester in the early 1600s. As Olson does throughout Maximus, he measures the historical dimensions of Gloucester through reference to his own lived experience, “my own being,” rather than imposing a rational-comprehensive structure on its “material (especially geographical) determinants” (Shaw 59). Mapping practices play an important role in a reading list Olson prepared for Ed Dorn, his student at Black Mountain College and an important poet in his own right. Olson cites Williams’s exploration of the local landscapes around Paterson as an example in the reading list and affirms that a central purpose of Dorn’s poetic research should be to “get that topographic sense in the mind as you have it in the feet” (Collected Prose 300). His advice to Dorn signals respect for Williams’s mapping of Paterson: “Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt that than is possible to any other man. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it. And then U KNOW everything else very fast:  one saturation job (it might take 14  years). And you’re in, forever!” (Collected Prose 300; 306–307, italics in original). The archaeological disposition Olson encourages here is not, as Alcalay observes, “happenstance.” Rather, it reflects an insistence that poets and researchers “allow the objects [of their inquiries] to determine the theory” rather than imposing rationalcomprehensive forms (Alcalay 85–86). Olson advises Dorn that if he wants to understand American history, he should immerse himself in a particular



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place and track the relations between that place and “everything else” that constitutes its landscape. This is, of course, the methodology of The Maximus Poems and Debord’s psychogeography. Digging into the archives of Gloucester’s geologic and commercial history as well as the archives of lived experience, Olson demonstrates that poetry can serve as a “fundamental basis for facts and how one absorbs knowledge about the world, how one responds to the world” (Alcalay 113–114). He documents Gloucester’s landscape in order to allow his reader to think through what those relations reveal about the past, present, and future dimensions of urban reality. He describes The Maximus Poems itself as a map in a late poem dated “April 14 / MDCCCCLXVI.” Looking out at the “light signals & mass points” of the night sky over Gloucester, Olson sees the “normal mappings of / inertia & every possible action / of aether and of / change.” The relations of the stars suggest a system for making sense of everyday experience. The system incorporates three scales, the galactic, the personal, and atomistic:       II to perambulate the bounds    a cosmos     closed in both respects    both laterally &             up & down bonded               up & down                     determined                       Eternal                    side on side (Maximus 516)

Recalling the poet’s attention to circumnavigation in On first looking out, the poem describes the “cosmos” contained in the “up & down” movements of quarks, the smallest of nuclear particles. In mapping “inertia” and “change” across time and space, the poem suggests an urban landscape constructed from the “complex of occasions” that grounds human experience across scales and dimensions. Olson “perambulate[s]‌the bounds” of this urban “cosmos” alongside readers rather than positioning them at an abstract distance. In so doing, he enacts his commitment to the idea that “no event // is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal / event” (Maximus 249). The promise of Maximus, as Olson explains in a letter to Ginsberg, is to provide an experience of how such an accumulation of material as he provides might hang together in the reader’s experience like the “universe itself ” while remaining “as open as, & be[ing] as firmly there” (Selected Letters 259).

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Paterson and Ginsberg’s “Shrouded Stranger” Ginsberg read Paterson earlier than Olson and knew much of the territory the poem covers from firsthand experience. Like Nardi and Olson, he criticizes Williams’s methods of inquiry for being too abstract to adequately measure the kinds of “actual living” underway in the city in the 1950s. Ginsberg reviewed Paterson Book I for the Passaic Valley Examiner, a local newspaper, in September 1946 while he was still an undergraduate at Columbia. Labeling the poem “somewhat hazy,” he defends Paterson as “urbane and civilized” and suggests that the poem signals a “stand-off ” between Williams, who “doesn’t like what he finds in Paterson,” and residents of city, who “won’t like what [they] find in Dr. Williams” (7). As the “sharply critical” tone of the review suggests, Paterson fired the younger poet’s imagination (Raskin 70). He refers to it frequently in his journals from 1949 to 1954, often in connection with a planned urban epic, “The Shrouded Stranger,” a project he never realized except in short poems and fragmentary journal entries.6 As a signal of its importance to his poetic development, Ginsberg places the project in a “chain of strong-breath’d poems” that includes “Howl,” “Sunflower Sutra,” “Kaddish,” and “Wichita Vortex Sutra” in his preface to his Collected Poems (xx). He worked on the proposed epic in two phases, first, from 1949 to 1950 before he met Williams and then, during 1951 and 1952, as the two poets worked together to revise Ginsberg’s first collection. The links between Paterson and the “shrouded stranger” project are particularly clear in a September 1950 journal entry titled “Notebook for the poem ‘Shroudy Stranger of the Night’ ” in which Ginsberg proposes to “restore a plot to long poetry” since “Stevens, Crane, Pound, Williams, Eliot, St. Perse, etc. have no human plot” (Martyrdom 335). Over the course of the project, Ginsberg transforms the symbolic abstractions of his early ambitions into direct personal narrative. He differentiates his city poems from Paterson by pointing out that they record his experience in the world as it stands rather than transforming it through abstractions. If Ginsberg succeeds in these ambitions in “Howl,” the “Shrouded Stranger” poems are the “poetic laboratory” in which the latter poem’s innovations are forged (Breslin 97; 93). The figure that becomes the “shrouded stranger” appears for the first time in Ginsberg’s journals soon after his arrest for burglary in April 1949.7 Written during the poet’s stay at the New York Psychiatric Hospital, the entry describes a “phantom who will appear at his own desire” (Martyrdom 325). Ginsberg



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portrays the figure as a stranger walking down Paterson’s River Street at night in an October 1949 prose poem: He wandered moodily along the hedged rural avenues of the outer night shadowed areas of Silk City passing one by one the familiar mansions of the mysterious order of the Masons, the secret Romanesque pile of the church, and among these many hoarily conceived relics of time, the gloomy funeral home with its shaded and curtained inner sanctum wherein no man knew what mortal fleshy rituals were enacted over the surrendered bodies of the dead, beyond shuddering mills where the patient silken labors of the ancient worm were manufactured further into the brocaded winding sheets to cover the dead and living, beyond the last block of River Avenue where the petalled lamplit radiance of the mist wove blooms [above] the Great Falls, and he did enter into the very hood of its whiteness, and stand meditating hidden like an ancestral traveler of the night come at last upon the end of his pilgrimage unto a palmy oasis of light, upon the barren firmamental plain of his eternity. (Martyrdom 327)

In a revised, lineated version of the poem, he identifies the figure as the “Shrouded Stranger.” The stranger revels in the mystical resonance of the architecture and geography of the “Silk City,” especially the “petalled lamplit radiance” of Paterson’s falls. Ginsberg confirms the city’s epic dimensions by describing the stranger’s walk as a “pilgrimage” to the “plain of his eternity” (Martyrdom 493– 494). Like Williams’s “Paterson,” who is seen “standing, shrouded there, in that din” above the falls in Book I, the stranger takes various forms as the project develops, becoming a predator “whoring into the night” and an “abhorred” figure consumed by shame in later versions (Collected Poems 26, 47; P 39). When Ginsberg shares a rhymed “shrouded stranger” poem with Williams in March 1950, he summarizes the poem as “the shroudy stranger speaking from the inside of the old wracked bum of a paterson or anywhere in america.” Williams uses excerpts from the letter in Paterson Book IV, including a section in which the younger poet argues that bringing such a “bum of Paterson” to voice in poetry makes him “one actual citizen of your community [who] has inherited your experience in his struggle to love and know his own world-city, through your work” (P 173–174). Ginsberg’s stranger is both a fictional stand-in for the poet and a device, like Olson’s polis, that the poet uses to explore the city at human scale. The stranger gives him a way to immerse himself in Paterson’s everyday realities rather than analyzing them from a distance. Indeed, the poem Ginsberg shares with Williams in 1950 relocates the personal drama of an earlier poem, “Ode to Decadence,” from New  York City to Paterson. In the “Ode,”

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Ginsberg describes a city of terrifying dimensions, a “fabulous, unfathomable city; / City of concrete images and mirrors; / City of spiritual magic and general sorrow” (Martyrdom 419). Recalling Baudelaire and Whitman, the “Ode” celebrates the gritty and surreal urban spectacle and culminates in a litany of mirrors symbolizing decay, vice, and the futility of attempting to discover the “gleaming core of fate” that underlies the urban scene (Martyrdom 420–426). Despite its ambition, the “Ode” falls short, in Ginsberg’s estimation, due to the same flaw Nardi identifies in Paterson: because it relies on symbols rather than “clear rational actualities.” Ginsberg resolves to integrate the experiential and the poetic in future work: “I shall try to set down in these notes (for a poem perhaps) the situation as it stands, admitting, for once, that I am weak and not strong. For all that I  have mythologized myself (both poetically and theologically) and elevated my weakness to dignity as perception of absolute divine world and contempt or lamblike weakness in real world others live in”(Martyrdom 335). Proposing to record his experience of the world “as it stands” rather than transforming it into poetry, Ginsberg outlines a writing practice that shapes the “Shrouded Stranger” project and comes to fruition in “Howl” and later city poems. As much as the discoveries recorded in the entry pertain to Ginsberg’s acceptance that his sufferings are not unique, they also represent a changed understanding of the dimensions of urban experience. The city of the “Ode” is primarily a city of dark alleys and secret rooms that offers refuge for urban subcultures. Just as Ginsberg recognizes he has “mythologized” himself in the poetry leading up to Empty Mirror, he sees that he has “mythologized” the city, as well. The “Shrouded Stranger” poems retain the “Ode’s” dark mood but they are set in real places in and around the city of Paterson. Ginsberg urges Williams to adopt a similar attitude toward the city in his poetry during the same period. He queries the older poet about his knowledge of the area around “the great Mill and River streets” in the June 1950 letter Williams excerpts in Paterson (P 193). He encourages him to visit the area’s bars and jazz clubs because they are “at the heart of what is to be known” about the city. As Terence Diggory explains, Ginsberg is inviting his mentor to join him in cultivating a “complex mood of urban pastoral” that allows him to see “beauty in the industrial landscape” while simultaneously resisting the “state of innocence” that would keep him from fully embracing its darker aspects (112; 115). Williams responds to the invitation two years later in a letter to Ginsberg’s father requesting a tour. Speculating that visiting River Street will change the shape of his city poem, Williams writes, “I don’t know what the joint [on River Street] is like or whether we’d be welcome there, but if it’s something to experience and to



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see I’d like to see it for I want to make it the central locale for a poem which I have in mind—a sort of extension of Paterson” (quoted in Mariani 702). Williams and the younger Ginsberg finally visit the area in the spring of 1952, but they come away dissatisfied with the experience. After the visit, Ginsberg recommends another bar to Williams in an unpublished letter: “Everything was actually rather dead on River Street when we went by. Try making a solitary trip in on a Saturday night and see it by yourself, the Bobaloo, I mean. I was there last night and had a good time. I think you really should if you can” (Ginsberg to Williams, 10 Aug. 1952). Though the younger poet fails in his first attempts to introduce Williams to real life in Paterson, he succeeds in shifting his mentor’s understanding of the dimensions of his poetic subject. River Street becomes a site of mutual influence. Ginsberg works closely with Williams during 1952 to revise the manuscript of Empty Mirrors. As he notes in his journal, Williams advocates cuts in many of the poems, promising “if you cut down everything no joking, no looseness, your book has a chance of making some kind of impression” (Martyrdom 383). Though the revisions make Ginsberg feel “twisted and deformed,” he accepts Williams’s advice (Martyrdom 382). He explains what he discovers through their interactions in his journal:  “Conversation with Williams— don’t know Eliot isn’t right? His suggestion—transfigured—(measure). As I  transfigure the shrouded stranger, I  transfigure the verse . . . Begin with symbols and end with things” (Martyrdom 342). This recognition prompts him to expand the rhymed “shrouded stranger” poem he shared in March 1950 into a longer, more concrete and specific version. Ginsberg publishes this version in Gates of Wrath. It transforms the symbolic lamentations of the earlier poem into a fragmentary narrative in four parts and anticipates an even longer version never to be written. Section 4 outlines the parameters of the expanded project: Fragmenta Monumenti It was to have a structure, it was going to tell a story; it was to be a mass of images moving on a page, with a hollow voice at the center it was to have told of Time and Eternity; to have begun in the rainfall’s hood and moon, and ended under the street light of the world’s bare physical

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City Poems and American Urban Crisis appearance; begun among vultures in the mountains of Mexico, traveled through all America and ended in garbage on River Street; its first line was to be “Be with me Shroud, now—” and the last “—naked on broken bottles between the brick walls,” being THE VISION OF THE SHROUDED STRANGER OF THE NIGHT (Collected Poems 48)

Merging the “stranger” into himself, the sketch represents “an attempt to objectify autobiography” (Breslin 94). It follows-up an ambition recorded in a November 1951 journal entry that “perhaps [the] form [of the project] should be life work of A.G entitled ‘Journal of the Shroudy Stanger’ telling my most secret ambitions and vagaries” (Martyrdom 344). Though the Gates of Wrath version of the poem is an unfinished fragment, it nonetheless asserts a broad geographic sweep, extending from the “mountains of Mexico / . . . through all of America” and back to “River Street,” and constitutes the first link in the “larger autobiographical chain that constitutes” Ginsberg’s later poetry (Perloff, Poetic License 200). The development of the “Shrouded Stranger” project shows how Ginsberg responded to Paterson’s experimental urban poetics. Rather than putting the city at the center of his poem in order to objectify the contents of his mind, as Williams had, Ginsberg puts himself at the center in order to discover and expose the contents of the larger culture. As he explains in a 1951 letter to Ezra Pound, though Williams “did everything he could to sacrifice longing for irrelevant metaphysics and imaginative splendor in language to get at truth, but that’s one phase, step, for him, and the local scene is covered. And he has no bounce, no beat (I’m not talking about iambic). Maybe I’m asking too much (not of him but next year’s poetry)” (Letters 73). He asserts a similar criticism in an unpublished 1955 letter to Williams explaining the long lines he uses in “Howl”: “Am reading Whitman through, note enclosed poem on same, saw your essay a few days ago, you do not go far enough, look what I  have done with the long line . . . With a long line comes a return, (caused by) expressive human feeling, it’s generally lacking in poetry now, which is inhuman. The release of emotion is one with rhythmical building of long line” (Ginsberg to Williams, December 9, 1955). Ginsberg cites the “spontaneity & expressiveness” of jazz; the “interior unchecked



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logical mental stream”; and the “elastic of the breath” as the governing principles of his long line. This connects his use of the “long line” in “Howl” to Williams’s career-long explorations of the “measure” of American language. At the same time, Ginsberg distinguishes his experiments with “expressive human feeling” from the “inhuman” order of Paterson (Ginsberg to Williams, December 9, 1955). The urban epic Ginsberg envisioned as he worked on his early “shrouded stranger” poems began in his responses to the limits of Paterson. The project matures in “Howl.” Ginsberg presents the poem as an act of witnessing—“I saw the best minds of my generation”—and purports to “recreate the syntax and measure of human prose” in the poem’s long lines instead of imposing an abstract or rational order (Collected Poems 126; 130). “Howl” documents the diversity of American urban life. The poem anticipates Gans and Jacobs’s research on communities under threat by expressing outrage at interference from outsiders and mirrors Debord’s contemporaneous theorization of psychogeography in prioritizing unauthorized uses of urban space. Rather than condemning behaviors such as “jump[ing] in the filthy Passaic River” then climbing out and “danc[ing] on wineglasses barefoot [to] smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz,” for example, Ginsberg indicts the structures and circumstances to which they are reactions (Collected Poems 129). His transcriptions of the realities of urban life prefigure later attempts by city planners to put “community knowledge” in priority over expert ideas (Sandercock 76). By focusing attention on what is happening in cities in the here and now, Ginsberg’s experimental urban poetics attests to progressive planner Leonie Sandercock’s notion that recognizing “memory, desire, and the spirit (or the sacred) as vital dimensions of healthy human settlements” is a necessary first step toward replacing rational-comprehensive modes of city planning with more just alternatives (214).

Williams’s search for “measure”: The late style of Book V American poetry was changing along with the broader society in the 1950s. As Donald Allen notes in his introduction to The New American Poetry, Williams’s late innovations were being ignored by all but a small coterie of innovative poets (xi). As an active reader of The Black Mountain Review, Origin, and Neon during the period, Williams knew that a select number of younger writers were heeding his calls for innovation (Mariani 691). He feared the younger generation might stop short of fully realizing the potential of their experiments and questioned

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their sense of urgency. As he explains in “On Measure,” an essay published in Origin in 1954, “Without measure we are lost. But we have lost even the ability to count. Actually we are not as bad as that. Instinctively we have continued to count as always but it has become not a conscious process and being unconscious has descended to a low level of the invention” (Selected Essays 340). Written after the poet’s seventieth birthday, “On Measure” reiterates Williams’s commitment, articulated previously in “Against the Weather” and repeated in The Wedge and “The Poem as a Field of Action,” to developing “a new measure by which may be ordered our poems as well as our lives” (Selected Essays 340). While it is unlikely that the assertions of “On Measure” pertain directly to the urban character of Olson and Ginsberg’s poems, the placement and timing of the essay are suggestive. Founded in 1951 by the poet Cid Corman, Origin published poetry by Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley, among others, as well as poems, letters, and essays by Williams. As Alan Golding explains, the magazine put “dominant, mainstream poetics” in dialogue with “emergent, marginal poetics” and functioned as a “metaphorical” community for writers who were geographically scattered (135; 122). Williams wrote “On Measure” in the period between composing Books IV and V of Paterson, a tumultuous five years during which he suffered a stroke and saw his appointment as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress rescinded out of suspicion of communist sympathies. It was also a period when he interacted directly with both Olson and Ginsberg and when all three poets were developing ambitious city poems: Olson published The Maximus Poems: 1–10 in 1953 and 11–20 in 1956, Ginsberg completed several versions of the ‘Shrouded Stranger’ project during the early 1950s and sent Williams a final draft of “Howl” in December 1955, and Williams began working on Paterson Book V in 1952 (the draft later became the long poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”) and published the completed book in 1958 (P 295). As the concerns articulated in “On Measure” suggest, Williams was restless with the pace of poetic innovation in the 1950s even among his self-identified successors. He was also cognizant of the limitations of his own city poem. He explains his concerns in a 1958 letter to New Directions enclosed with the manuscript of Book V: “I have been forced to recognize that there can be no end to such a story as I have envisioned with the terms which I had laid down for myself. I had to take the world of Paterson into a new dimension if I wanted to give it imaginative validity” (P xv). Williams’s experimentation with open-ended poetic structures and personal narrative in Book V suggests that he learned from Olson’s psychogeographical methodology and Ginsberg’s personal involvement in the city. Their city poems renewed his sense of himself as an avant-garde



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writer in the same way that Paterson spurred them to develop and expand their own city poems. Book V dispenses with the analogies and abstract rationality of Books I–IV and immerses readers, instead, in direct descriptions of Williams’s experiences along the Passaic River and further afield in New York City. The dynamics of Williams’s interactions with the younger poets follow the pattern of Edward Said’s “late style.” According to Said, artists who remain active late in long careers often reach a point at which they see themselves as out of step with tendencies in their fields. This is especially common among artists whose early-career innovations are taken up by subsequent generations within their lifetimes. Said’s analysis of the late work of composer Richard Strauss contains perhaps his clearest articulation of how this recognition of being out of step affects late-career artists. Like Williams, Strauss began his career in a period of modernist experiment. Said explains that while Strauss advocated for the use of melodic fragmentation and dissonant harmony in the 1880s, he changed course late in the 1930s and 1940s just as mainstream composers had begun to embrace those innovations. By contrast with the atonal complexity of many avant-garde compositions of the period, Strauss’s late works are “curiously abstract and ornamental” (Said 46). More important for Said, given Strauss’s reputation as an innovative composer, his late works are “defiant” in relation to their context: “the music seems to stand aside: it renounces claims to metaphysical statement of the sort embodied in comparably eminent composers of the time” (47). The poetics of Paterson Book V stands in a similar relation to Olson and Ginsberg’s city poems. Though Williams borrows Olson’s insight that cities are embedded in larger systems of geographic and ecological relations, Book V is “defiant” in relation to Olson’s open-ended poetic landscapes in relying on personal narrative. Similarly, though it immerses readers in everyday scenes, the book “defi[es]” Ginsberg’s confidence in the subversive possibilities of personal narrative by interweaving dense meditations on poetics and artistic precursors. Williams asserts his intention to innovate in Book V’s first six lines. Bending forward, the lines indicate an insistent posture:   In old age     the mind        casts off      rebelliously    an eagle from its crag (P 205)

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Perched on the “crag” of experimental American poetics, Williams surrounds himself in Book V with a community of poets, naming modernist peers Pound and cummings, as well as a successor generation, including Ginsberg and Olson, among others. He positions himself as a mentor to the younger cohort who is “trying / to get the young / to foreshorten / their errors in the use of words which / he had found so difficult, the errors / he had made in the use of / the poetic line” (P 227). Vigilant in acknowledging the limitations of his prior work, Williams reiterates in these lines the call he issues in his earlier essays for conscious experimentation with measure in order to explore the complexities of contemporary American experience. Williams experiments with a new form of urban poetics in “The Desert Music,” a poem composed in 1951 after he completed Paterson Book IV and began interacting with Olson and Ginsberg. In part a meditation on poetics, the poem describes a walking trip from El Paso, Texas, to Juarez, Mexico, with his wife and Robert McAlmon, a longtime friend and collaborator. The poem centers on two ambiguous figures, a “form / propped motionless” on a bridge across the Rio Bravo river and a dancer the group sees in a dingy Juarez bar. By contrast with the analogies at the center of Paterson Books I–IV, the figures are disturbingly real. The one on the bridge attracts Williams’s attention because it is “shapeless” and unclassifiable, “too small for a man. / A woman. Or a very shriveled old man. / Maybe dead” (CP2 275). Williams describes the dancer in similar terms:  while she is clearly a woman, she is also, like the figure on the bridge, out of place:  an American stripper in a Mexican club whose “worn-out” breasts are enticing only to the drunkest of patrons. What Williams finds most “refreshing” about the dancer is the music he hears in her movements, music that hits him “in the face” when he rejoins Floss and McAlmon outside the bar (CP2 279–281). Even as the dancer provokes a sexual response—or rather, even as Williams defines her through her compromised sexuality—she leads him to a deeper understanding of Juarez’s embeddedness in the surrounding landscape. By the end of the poem, in fact, the music of the dancer’s movements becomes a “protecting music” that surrounds the “shapeless” figure on the bridge, guarding it as if it were a “child in the womb” (CP2 284). Williams’s description of the scene echoes the confident anticipation of his “Preface” to Paterson where he proposes to roll “up out of the chaos, / a nine months’ wonder” (P 4). The moment carries Williams across the landscape and back to New Jersey and his identity as a poet. “I am a poet! I  / am. I  am. I  am a poet!,” he affirms, and then condenses his impressions of Juarez in a reflection on craft: “And I could not



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help thinking / of the wonders of the brain that / hears that music and of our / skill sometimes to record it” (CP2 284). Combining elements of music, painting and visual art, “The Desert Music” reverberates with “verbal and sonic diversity” (Middleton 176).8 The poem shows Williams engaging in an open-ended, psychogeographic exploration of Juarez rather than falling back on a search for rational order. Like Ginsberg, he tells the story of his experience rather than hiding his involvement behind a persona. Perhaps the most innovative aspect of Book V is Williams’s description of his visits to the Unicorn Tapestries at The Cloisters Museum in New York City. The tapestries depict a group of nobles hunting and capturing a unicorn with the help of a deceptive maiden. Scenes from the seven panels appear throughout Book V interwoven with reflections on visual art and everyday experience.9 Williams pays particular attention to the surviving fragments of the fifth tapestry. In one, a male courtier carries a staff and blows a horn as if to let the hunters know he has found the unicorn. In a second, the unicorn is attended by a woman in an elegant red dress who also seems to be signaling the hunters. Another figure, perhaps the maiden who betrays the unicorn in an earlier panel after it initially escapes, is barely visible at the right edge. Only her hand and arm can be seen. Williams questions the maiden’s complicity in the hunt—is she “lost in the woods (or hiding)”?—and calls for her to “come out of it if you call yourself a woman” (P 234). The maiden’s near absence from the scene—she is a fragment of a fragment of the tapestry—makes it impossible for Williams to definitively tell her story. Traditionally a symbol for the Virgin Mary, the maiden might function as an embodiment of the “Beautiful Thing” at the center of Paterson’s first four books. However, instead of wrenching her from her place in the tapestry into a rational analogy, Williams simply describes what it feels like to look for her and then relays an anecdote about his grandmother.10 Olson focuses on William’s descriptions of the tapestries in a review of Book V written for Evergreen Review. Declaring Book V an “uncanny triumph,” Olson marvels at the transformation the Cloisters visit signals in Williams’s poetics: When one walks the tapestry passage literally syllable to syllable, flower word to flower word, etc., the intention of the poet as well as his statement of the one thing life (or it is actually death) has taught him, is what one finds he has made you do. It is no longer a matter of a thing. It is only a track, a pi-meson movement (after the collision) which he has laid down—yield, like it or not, to the step of it, from nothing outside it, including yourself & himself, and take nothing from it but itself, away. (Collected Prose 289)

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Olson’s emphasis on movement recalls Williams’s praise for the way several of The Maximus Poems enabled him to “walk about” in Gloucester (Something to Say 228). Olson recognizes that Williams has replaced the analogies of Books I–IV with direct descriptions of the urban worlds he inhabits and, further, that he has merged the personas of Books I–IV into his own “unexampled subjectivity” (Collected Prose 289). Olson concludes that “in appearing to contradict all that Paterson was verse-wise before Book Five . . . Actually and solely, & quite exactly, & intact, the poem offers nothing but the path of itself ” (Collected Prose 289). Walking the “path” of the tapestries with Williams forces Olson to reconsider the dimensions of his mentor’s prior experiments. In the end, he explains, Williams’s use of the tapestries enables him to collapse the complex analogies of the preceding books onto a single plane, reducing the distances between poet and reader to “instantaneous presence” (Collected Prose 288). Book V stands in a different relation to urban experience than Paterson’s first four books. As Olson notes in his review, the book invites readers to travel with Williams on the bus to The Cloisters Museum and stand with him in front of the Unicorn Tapestries. Williams’s descriptions of the tapestries invite readers to experience their fragmentary nature as elements of a scene that demands exploration. Incorporating the open-ended disposition of Olson’s polis and the personal dimensions of Ginsberg’s “shrouded stranger” poems, then, Book V reframes Paterson’s urban landscape as a scene of discovery. As Ginsberg predicts, the integration of a personalized social vision allows Williams to explore his core concerns more directly. Book V signals a new opening in Williams’s critical urban poetics to the human scale of the city that anticipates Gans, Jacobs, Debord, and Sandercock’s critiques of rational-comprehensive planning. By exploring the specific reality of his experience of the Unicorn Tapestries rather than condensing an analogy from their layers of aesthetic complexity, Williams refreshes Paterson’s inaugurating intention:  “to make a start, / out of the particulars / and make them general / rolling up the sum” (P 3). Book V concludes with a final insistence on the importance of measure. Rather than anxiety about the trajectories of poetic innovation or urban development, however, the poem’s final lines suggest a lesson about using our powers of awareness and imagination to their fullest extent:  “The measure intervenes, to measure is all we know / a choice among the measures” (P 235). As this conclusion suggests, Book V invites us to experience the fragmentary nature of the tapestries and the surrounding landscape as occasions that demand active interpretation. Even as Williams acknowledges the limitations of Paterson’s analogies in Book V, he simultaneously asserts an enhanced social vision.



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Williams, Olson, and Ginsberg’s city poems reject the limitations of rationalcomprehensive modes of poetic inquiry. The trajectories their poems initiate within American urban poetics anticipate later critical work in the fields of urban theory and city planning. Williams’s emphasis in Paterson Book V on rooting poetic knowledge in personal experience, for example, echoes in progressive city planning practices that emerge in the 1990s and in the community-based poetics of Brenda Coultas’s “The Bowery Project” and Lewis MacAdams’s The River (Chapter 6). Olson’s use of archaeology as a form mapmaking coincides with critiques of “urban ideology” asserted by urban theorist Manuel Castells and poet George Oppen (Chapter  3). Similarly, Ginsberg’s insistence on individual experience follows a similar logic as Gwendolyn Brooks’s critiques of the racially and socially restrictive effects of rational-comprehensive planning in Chicago’s Bronzeville (Chapter 4). Finally, his complex engagement with the “shrouded stranger” as either an external figure or an internal myth recurs in the overlapping communities of Los Angeles poetry (Chapter 2) and in the political aesthetics of the Nuyorican poets on New York’s Lower East Side (Chapter 5). I explore these inheritances in more detail in the following chapters.

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Community and Crisis in Los Angeles Poetry

My life is so entwined with this city that I can’t talk about it without talking about myself—I can’t talk about myself without talking about it. This is my art. I know no other terrain—so intimately. Its violence is my violence. Wanda Coleman, Native in a Strange Land: Trials and Tremors Los Angeles sprawls across 469 square miles and is home to nearly 4  million people. An additional 9  million live in the surrounding metropolitan region. The city has the seventh most unequal income distribution among metropolitan areas in the United States as of 2016, with nonwhite residents earning lower incomes, having lower rates of home and vehicle ownership, and facing more limited access to credit (Berube and Holmes; De La Cruz-Viesca et al. 6). It has become a “patchwork metropolis” with small pockets of extreme wealth and influence surrounded by much larger swaths of neighborhoods with declining incomes and limited access to education and other public services (Florida, The New Urban Crisis 146). Gated communities, privatized security forces, and ubiquitous surveillance ensure residents of “fortress L.A.” rarely interact with those outside their circles of advantage (Davis 223). Portrayals of Los Angeles in popular culture reinforce these extremes. Films such as Blade Runner, Crash, and the Terminator series represent the city as a dystopia where communities clash and only the strong survive. By contrast, Keeping Up with the Kardashians and the 2016 film La La Land imply that Los Angeles is filled with opportunities for fame and success. While race- and class-based inequalities are certainly deepening in Los Angeles, conflicts over the city’s land and other resources are not new. In fact, exploitative speculation has shaped the city’s development since at least the late nineteenth century when Lewis Mulholland conceived the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a project that drained the agricultural communities of the nearby Owens Valley in order to promote metropolitan growth. Since then, the city has experienced cyclical growth and decline through the “anarchy of market

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forces.” As a result, as Mike Davis explains, it remains “fragmentary” despite efforts by city leaders to promote a unified identity (23). Indeed, rather than “revolving around a central nucleus” like Williams’s Paterson, Olson’s Gloucester or Ginsberg’s New York, Los Angeles functions as a set of “centerless, sprawled urban agglomerations inexorably enveloping everything in their path” (Judd 7). Since the 1980s, city planners and urban theorists working in Los Angeles have argued that the city’s geographic and social fragmentation represents the emergence of a new urban form. Analyzing changes globalization and technological advancement are bringing to cities, Los Angeles School theory predicts that economic polarization and conflict will continue to intensify without aggressive policy interventions (Judd 6–9). In contrast with the Chicago School’s ecological model, the theory posits that cities develop in unpredictable ways through the interaction of global forces and local responses. The global-local dynamic produces new challenges for planners and political leaders because it rewards decisions that serve larger economic interests ahead of residents’ everyday well-being. Edward Soja and Michael Dear are leading theorists and defenders of the Los Angeles School. For Soja, Los Angeles’s global ambitions represent a gleaming surface that masks “intensifying urban stress that cuts across class, race, and gender” (Postmodern Geographies 220). He suggests that even as these pressures increase economic exploitation, the resulting fragmentation of the city opens up spaces of small-scale “resistance, rejection and redirection” (Postmodern Geographies 235). For Dear, residents’ efforts to bridge Los Angeles’s “social heterogeneity and spatial extensiveness” prefigure a “new style of decentered politics” that could proliferate across the United States and bring excluded voices into city governance (14). Los Angeles is different, according to Soja, Dear, and their colleagues, because rather than organic growth and decline, complexity and competition are its underlying realities. Poets have responded to the city’s fractured landscapes in similar ways. As Doug Messerli explains, because Los Angeles is both an “architectural perplexity [and a] social conundrum . . . the only way anyone [can] comprehend the experience of living and surviving [there] is to create a narrative of sorts, to piece together the area, bit by bit, sharing small common experiences with friends” (Intersections 31–32). Writing in a similar vein, poet and anthologist Paul Vangelisti describes the city as an “unfinished world” where writers are “up against a dislocation so profound that absolute invention, of the self and its relationship to language, is indispensable to artistic survival” (13). Like Dear and Soja, Messerli and Vangelisti describe Los Angeles’s urban conditions as



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simultaneously inhibiting and enabling for poets. If the city’s freeways inhibit the informal gatherings typical of denser cities like New York, its “dislocation[s]‌” promote aesthetic innovation. The city’s physical form confronts poets with the challenge of creating communities to sustain their work. For a writer like Charles Bukowski, this challenge gives Los Angeles poets an aesthetic advantage: “The great facility of Los Angeles is that one can be alone if he wishes or he can be in a crowd if he wishes. No other city seems to allow this easy double choice as well. This is a fairly wonderful miracle, especially if one is a writer” (Bukowski, Cherry, and Vangelisti). Despite the city’s aesthetic opportunities, as poet and historian Bill Mohr explains, “the fact remains that the white poets do not know the same streets that the Black, Chicano and Asian poets know,” and “the absence of those streets” from readings, anthologies, and critical discussions of Los Angeles poetry “results in a poor map” (The Streets Inside). The streets missing from Mohr’s poetic map are the streets of neighborhoods like Compton and Watts where failed urban policies and persistent violence, including the major crises of the 1965 uprising and the 1992 riots, constrain residents’ everyday lives.1 These neighborhoods have been largely absent from discussions of Los Angeles poetry and of city poetry in general. Mohr, Daniel Widener, and Evie Shockley have examined the work of nonwhite Los Angeles poets, in particular in relation to the larger Black Arts Movement. Despite their work, important writers including Wanda Coleman, Jayne Cortez, and others continue to be read in isolation from their peers.2 Coleman and Cortez lived in Watts and made the neighborhood a central focus of their work in the 1960s. Their poetic visions are rooted in direct experiences of the city’s harshest conditions and myriad small acts of resistance. As Krista Comer explains, Coleman’s writing helps us see “what happens to Los Angeles when nondominant subjects’ relationships to space occupy the center of analysis” (373). Preceding Coleman by a decade, Cortez founded the Watts Repertory Theater Company in 1964 as an offshoot of the larger organization Studio Watts. The company “confronted audiences with an array of art possibilities” in order to provoke reflection on the need for social and political change (“In Her Own Words” 33). Given Los Angeles’s persistent and growing inequalities and its “paradigmatic” urban form, it is urgent to consider a fuller spectrum of poetic perspectives on its physical and social conditions (Judd 7; Nijman 135). Coleman and Cortez write in continuity with other Los Angeles poets. Their work builds on the efforts of other poets and artists to compose aesthetic communities and draws even greater attention to the geographic, social, and economic pressures shaping the city. More importantly, their insistence on the need for radical change draws

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attention to the progressive interventions of Los Angeles School urban theory and adds urgency to efforts by residents of Watts, Compton, and other neglected neighborhoods to claim their right to the city.

Claiming the “right to the city” in Los Angeles French urbanist Henri Lefebvre theorized the “right to the city” as an organizing principle for protests against urban exploitation in Paris in the late 1960s. As Lefebvre defines it, the right to the city is the right of all residents to use urban space and resources to pursue their individual needs and desires. Residents can be said to possess the right to the city, in Lefebvre’s terms, only when they possess the means to compose their own “social reality” regardless of external constraints such as location, infrastructure, and the relative condition of available housing (“The Right to the City” 103). Because it is existential as much as physical, claiming the right to the city involves more than merely gaining access to basic necessities or minimum standard living conditions. As Lefebvre explains, wealthy residents possess the right as a function of their grasp on resources: they can imprint their desires on the urban landscape by influencing policy decisions or by rebuilding the city or sectors of it in their image. For others, claiming the right requires persistent struggle. The “painful contradictions” of neighborhoods like Watts show that the challenges of claiming the right to the city multiply in communities left out of a city’s larger-order plans (“The Right to the City” 129). Crises of urban life such as the 1965 uprising in Watts and 1992 Los Angeles riots emerge when substandard economic and physical infrastructures interfere with the residents’ abilities to determine the shape of their lives. A basic sketch of Lefebvre’s theory of urban development and crisis might be as follows: Industrialization creates a need for an increased supply of labor power in direct proximity to sites of production. The population of a city grows as a result of this pressure as more and more workers aggregate at the same sites. This growth in population triggers a parallel process of urbanization involving the formation of denser and denser communities. As scales of production increase, firms act strategically to ensure the productivity of the labor force while minimizing costs. They build company housing and collaborate with city governments to construct transportation networks that serve their interests. As a result of these efforts, “The city, or what remains of it, is built or is rearranged [so that] a feeling of monotony covers [its] diversities and prevails, whether



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housing, buildings, alleged urban centres, organized areas are concerned” (“The Right to the City” 127). The social and physical conditions of cities become more and more homogenous as urbanization accelerates because firms and the urban systems in which they operate require ever more efficient reproduction of labor. The standardization of production processes and the resulting homogenization of urban space “corrode” the quality of residents’ experiences to the point that they lose the ability to “appropriate” city resources in order to accomplish their individual projects (“The Right to the City” 127). Social tensions mount as competition increases between communities for space and resources not already controlled by firms and their government allies. Cities turn to planners in moments of crisis in order to defuse unrest. As Lefebvre explains, the appeal to planning expertise is “more a symptom of change than of a continuously mounting rationality or of an internal harmony (although illusions on these points regularly reproduce themselves), as this thinking merges the philosophy of the city [with] the divisive schemes of urban space” (“The Right to the City” 108). Planners face a choice in whether to serve this ameliorative function or to advocate instead for communities harmed by the illusory processes of urban economic growth. The right to the city has become a rallying cry for progressive city planners because it puts residents’ everyday experiences rather than bureaucratic regulations at the center of planning practice. Peter Marcuse, for example, interprets the right as all-encompassing:  “it is multiple rights that are incorporated here: not just one, not just a right to public space, or a right to information and transparency in government, or a right to access to the center or a right to this service or that, but the right to a totality, a complexity, in which each of the parts is part of a single whole” (“From Critical Urban Theory” 192–193). Because the right to the city involves all aspect of urban experience, securing it requires planners to collaborate with communities to harness tactics and strategies they are already using to circumvent urban constraints. Lefebvre insists that communities “turn against . . . messages, orders and constraints coming from above . . . by foiling dominations, by diverting them from their goal, by deceit” every day, for example, by splicing television cables to serve multiple apartments or squatting in abandoned buildings (“The Right to the City” 117). Following a similar line of thought, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have argued more recently that these mundane practices constitute an improvisatory form of planning that has the potential, if cultivated and amplified, to override policies imposed from elsewhere (74–75). Like Lefebvre, Moten and Harney emphasize the ways individuals appropriate urban space

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and resources through “ongoing experiment[s]‌with the informal” that take place in “any kitchen, any improvised party, every night” (Moten and Harney 74). The persistence of local improvisation and experimentation within and across communities signals the presence of latent coalitions, or “fugitive publics,” linked in shared pursuits of alternative modes of urban life (Moten and Harney 64). Planners are well-positioned to amplify the claims of these fugitive publics because they are situated between communities and the urban power structure. Soja, Dear, and other Los Angeles School urban theorists claim that the city’s fragmentation makes it a potential incubator for these kinds of fugitive coalitions. Following Lefebvre, they argue that while the forces of production tend to dominate cities, their influence on urban environments is always incomplete. There are always “places of the possible” in the city where coordinated action might catalyze “radical metamorphosis” (Lefebvre, “The Right to the City” 155). Soja locates the possibility of community-driven urban change in “thirdspace,” a theoretical and actually existing space where conflicts between the processes of urbanization and resistance produce “lifeworlds that are radically open and openly radicalizable” (Thirdspace 70). Taking advantage of thirdspace requires physical labor, for example, converting a vacant lot into a community garden; social collaboration, or engaging in formal and informal conversations that build coalitions of volunteers to transform the lot; and aesthetic engagement, or cultivating acts of imagination that see rows of vegetables in place of rubble (Soja, Thirdspace 70–82).3 Like other modes of urban activism, thirdspaces are at once powerful and precarious. Since they emerge from the energies of communities under threat, they are always subject to dispersal and cooptation by outside interests (Lefebvre, “The Right to the City” 122–132). The aesthetic practices that characterize thirdspace and constitute fugitive publics are critical to sustaining progressive momentum. They create opportunities for social and physical engagement in the face of overwhelming pressure. As Lefebvre explains, “to put art at the service of the urban does not mean to prettify urban space with works of art. This parody of the possible is a caricature . . . Leaving aside representation, ornamentation and decoration, art can become praxis and poiesis on a social scale: the art of living in the city as work of art” (“The Right to the City” 173). Lefebvre and Soja propose an art that is the city rather than being merely of or for it. Like Moten and Harney, they assert that already existing practices, including self-consciously aesthetic efforts like writing poetry, as well as more mundane activities like cooking in bulk from limited supplies, enact this possibility.



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“The words we inhabit here”: Poetry and community in Los Angeles Los Angeles poets have used their work since the Second World War to nurture communities of resistance in the face of the city’s accelerating crises. Three distinct groups coalesced in the 1950s despite the city’s geographic and cultural fragmentation. Gathering in reading series, galleries, and collaborative journals, these groups built generative thirdspaces where aesthetic practices contributed to physical and social change. Their efforts laid a foundation for subsequent poetic engagements with the city including Cortez and Coleman’s poetic activism. The first group was organized by Thomas McGrath, a poet and professor who lost his job at Los Angeles State College after refusing to testify before Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. McGrath led a loosely affiliated group whose work appeared in The California Quarterly (1952–56) and Coastlines (1955–64), as well as the Poetry Los Angeles reading series and its 1958 anthology Poetry Los Angeles I.4 A second group coalesced in Venice Beach around Lawrence Lipton, author of the Beat classic The Holy Barbarians (1959). The Venice Beats, as they were called, transformed the neighborhood, a failed “early twentieth-century urban-bourgeois fantasy” real estate development, into a radically open center for written and visual art (Schrank 107).5 The third group was more geographically dispersed. “Stitched together” through Wallace Berman’s journal-in-fragments Semina (1955–64), the group drew inspiration from the formal aesthetic of McGrath’s circle and the radical practices of Lipton’s Venice Beats. Semina’s contributors and readers included West Coast poets Robert Duncan, Philip Lamantia, and Michael McClure, as well as visual artists Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Edward Kleinholz, and others further afield (Schrank 120).6 While McGrath, Lipton, and Berman’s communities were rarely in direct dialogue, they shared a commitment to using poetry to investigate the structures of everyday life and to propose and enact alternative practices and arrangements. Their work set the stage for broader coalitions of poets and artists that emerged in the 1960s to produce sharper critiques of the city’s growing inequities. The mission statement of McGrath’s The California Quarterly defines Los Angeles poetics first and foremost as a mode of inquiry: “The most enduring art is an imaginative re-creation of real life [reflecting] not only the complexity and contrariety of immediate experience, but also the simplicity underlying the turbulent history of men in whatever period, their unquenchable will to make a better life and their capacity to progress toward it” (quoted in Novak 12). The

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statement echoes Adorno’s argument that one function of aesthetic experience is to expose the contradictions of everyday life in order to produce new understandings. Reframing Adorno’s idea for use by a community, McGrath and his co-editors conceive of the poet as someone who “in company thinks alone and offers his experience as a poem” and define poetry as a means to interpret individual experiences for the benefit of a community (May, McGrath, and Yates). Their use of the verb “offers” in this statement, which appeared in the front matter of a collection of their work, implies an expectation that members of the community would engage in “contumacious, poignant dialogue” after sharing their work (Mohr, Hold-Outs 45). Listening “in company” as others read is a community-building act. While Los Angeles poets experience their lives and compose their poems “alone,” they rely on collaboration with one another and the sharing of clarified experiences through poetry to amplify their work. McGrath’s characterization of Los Angeles as a “vertical city shaped like an inverse hell” in his long poem Letter to an Imaginary Friend shows the difficulties of bringing this mode of collaborative aesthetic engagement to fruition. His analysis resembles Lefebvre’s critique of exploitative processes of industrialization and urbanization: Windless city built on decaying granite, loose ends Without end or beginning and nothing to tie to, city down hill From the high mania of our nineteenth century destiny—what’s loose Rolls here, what’s square slides, anything not tied down Flies in . . .      kind of petrified shitstorm.                 Retractable Swimming pools.        Cancer farms.              Whale dung At the bottom of the American night refugees tourists elastic Watches . . .       Vertical city shaped like an inverse hell (147)

The city appears here with many facets: the culmination of Westward Expansion, an idyllic tourist destination, a transient artificial environment, and a last haven of boosters and refugees. The city, in McGrath’s analysis, has three layers, each corresponding to a typical Marxian category. First, “at three feet above tide mark, at hunger line, are the lachrymose / Cities of the plain weeping in the sulphurous



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smog” (147). The hungry working classes suffer the “shitstorm” and smog that characterize Los Angeles, an inevitable byproduct of the manufacturing industry they labor to sustain. Further inland from the coast, a second layer is inhabited by “the petty B’s . . . The Johnny Come Earlies of the middling class” who shield themselves from reality with religion and material success (147). In “Cadillac country,” perched on the hills surrounding the city, an elite third group profits from unscrupulous labor practices, squeezing “blood from the bills” under cover of fantasies of a natural social order of “mental muscles” and “demi-virginity” produced by “Rand Corpse wise men,” architects of the region’s war machine (148).7 McGrath extends his description of Los Angeles’ economic geography later in the poem by returning from the elite enclaves on the hills to the smog at the coast: —They dream of a future founded on fire, on a planned coincidence Of time and sulphur . . .                  Heraclitian eschatology . . . And over it all, god’s face,               or perhaps a baboon’s ass In the shape of an IBM beams toward another war. One is to labor, two is to rob, three is to kill. Executive     legislative             judiciary .  .  .                           —muggery, buggery and thuggery All Los Angeles              America           is divided into three parts. (149)

In a description that anticipates Davis’s dystopic characterization in City of Quartz, smog becomes nuclear aftermath in this apocalyptic vision of an end of history centered in Los Angeles. The indentations McGrath uses throughout the poem hurry the reader’s eye to its right margins, up the slopes of the city’s “inverse hell,” while repeating sounds punctuate the poem’s condemnation of residents’ complicity in the status quo. Though its critique is overheated, the poem precipitates from an “immediate experience” of smog, factory labor, beach movies, and anti-communist hysteria and remains conscientiously engaged with

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society as it exists, exchanging the official names of branches of government for the charmingly cynical “muggery, buggery and thuggery.” McGrath overlays his sensory experiences of the city with references to it history, consumer culture, and military power. To apply Marcuse’s terms, Letter to an Imaginary Friend attempts to break through the “mystified (and petrified) social reality” and open a “horizon of change” by exposing both the “prevailing unfreedom” of existing social relations and the “rebelling forces” immanent in the city (xi). John Thomas was a reluctant participant in the Venice Beach scene beginning in 1959. Committed to innovative artistic practice, he left Los Angeles for San Francisco in October 1960 (Maynard 118). He returned to Los Angeles in 1965 and contributed actively to the city’s poetry  scene for decades until his death in 2002. He collaborated with Lipton on creating the Free University of California and the Free Press and had poems included in the Los Angeles-based anthologies edited by Bukowski, Vangelisti, and Mohr (Maynard 196–199; L.A. Exile 281). Thomas published four books of poetry in his lifetime, including Abandoned Latitudes (1983), a coproduction with Vangelisti and Robert Crosson. Wanda Coleman cites Thomas and his wife Philomene Long as mentors and friends. In a 2011 interview with Charles Joseph, she explains that Thomas introduced her to the work of Pound, Eliot, and Bukowski, his friend and fellow Venice writer (Joseph). Coleman and Thomas read together at Beyond Baroque, a literary community center in Venice Beach, beginning in the 1980s. Though less prolific than Bukowski, Thomas’s practice of using whatever material was at hand in his work links the strong critiques of McGrath’s circle to the community-mindedness of later generations of Los Angeles poets and, in particular, to Cortez and Coleman’s efforts to transform daily life in Watts. Thomas demonstrates his appropriative poetics clearly in “Apologia,” the final poem of Vangelisti’s anthology Specimen ’73. The poem is a meditation on writer’s block and the difficulties of breaking with traditional modes of thought and expression. In the poem’s first two sections, Thomas questions whether the cultural and material “detritus of California urban existence”— to use a term Stephen Fredman applies to the materials of Wallace Berman’s Semina assemblages—is sufficient to fulfill his aesthetic ambitions. He pleads with his Muse in the poem’s opening lines to “grant me a / poem” despite the disenchantment of Venice mornings. He hears birdsong as a “way of shrieking / about their hunger cramps” and seems to be struggling against himself:  “I think maybe today a poem I hope / after breakfast I start trying / pulling it out of my own gut / mostly by force” (Vangelisti, Specimen ’73). Writing is a morning



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constitutional in Thomas’s description, a process of resolving discomfort by forcing something out. Thomas confesses that he is usually unproductive in his efforts and then assigns his inability to write to a lack of material. “What is there to sing,” he asks, in “swimming / eating / sneering around” coffeehouses? Repeated day after day these activities offer little, in Thomas’s estimation, that might “charge my afternoons with metaphor” because “Venice California is a very murky universe for / man-alone and no god around” (Vangelisti, Specimen ’73). Even as he complains, of course, Thomas is writing a poem. He narrows in on the alienating urban conditions he feels are hindering him in “Apologia’s” third section: These desperations are not unique I don’t say that I only make affidavit of their solidity only testify to the reality of a certain kind of sullen rage that grows out of having only such trifles to work with . . . . . . & I tell you all that keeps me at it is that to form a living poem of such flimsy material to make it breathe & sing under these conditions is so preposterously difficult that it is an undertaking not unworthy of a man (Vangelisti, Specimen ’73)

Like Davis, Dear, and Soja, Thomas sees Los Angeles as the apotheosis of twentieth-century American urbanism and a logical endpoint of the trajectories of modernism. The city’s flat geography and mundane history are disorienting. As a result, the opportunities it offers for aesthetic experience are unstable. From sex to religion and from the natural world to human relationships, Thomas warns, there is a risk in Los Angeles that everyday experience might become merely a sequence of events devoid of meaning and feeling. Even so, he embraces

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everyday life in Los Angeles, taking its banality as a poetic provocation to make “true connections” between its component parts (Vangelisti, Specimen ’73). “Apologia” centers on a question: How can poetry be made out of the “words we inhabit here” in Los Angeles? While Thomas rages at the ways the city’s fractured geographies have stripped life of mystery and meaning, he nonetheless resolves to make “living poem[s]‌” from what he encounters in the city rather than retreating into sarcasm or defeat. Thomas’s poetics embodies Olson’s claim that the act of writing lends the poet’s voice “seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature” (Collected Prose 247). Indeed, writing gives his daily experiences “solidity” by integrating them into the larger whole of the poem. The fact that the task is “preposterously difficult” means it is worth attempting. As Vangelisti and Messerli suggest, living in Los Angeles exposes poets to isolation, instability, and disorientation they would not face in other cities. Responding to these risks by making use of the material at hand to craft alternative geographies is an urgent necessity. Los Angeles poets do not need “to be around other artists in order to reassure [themselves] all is well with the imagination,” as Mohr explains, because making a life and writing poetry in Los Angeles are mutually reinforcing activities (Poetry Loves Poetry iii). McGrath and Thomas’s poetics indicate that the “words [they] inhabit” as they make their way in the city are products of Lefebvrian appropriation.

Making personal geographies public Holly Prado and Kate Braverman wrote in the generation after McGrath, Thomas, Lipton, and Berman. They are among a small group of women whose work has been published in Los Angeles-focused anthologies, including Bukowski, Cherry, and Vangelisti’s Anthology of L.A. Poets (1972), Vangelisti’s Specimen ’73 (1973), Mohr’s The Streets Inside (1978), and Poetry Loves Poetry (1984). Frequent readers at Beyond Baroque, they claim elements of Los Angeles’s urban landscape in their work and use them to make personal geographies of the city public. Coleman cites both Prado and Braverman as “surrogate classmates,” fellow participants in the city’s poetry scene who contributed to her informal education (Joseph). Prado moved to Los Angeles in 1960 and has taken an active part in its literary communities as a teacher, poet, and publisher. She cofounded Cahuenga Press in 1985. Braverman is perhaps most widely known for her 2006 memoir Frantic Transmission to and from Los Angeles, a book in which she



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reflects on the city’s formative influence on her aesthetics. Resident in the city from 1971 to 1995, she was a founding member of the Venice Poetry Workshop (Block). In particular in the city poems “The Hill” and “Faircrest Avenue,” Prado and Braverman document “layers of pointillistic motion” that animate Los Angeles’s urban landscape (Mohr, Poetry Loves Poetry vi). Their work calls to mind the principles of Charles Olson’s experimental urban poetics in attempting to enact transfers of energy to readers. Presenting the city as they experience it, Prado and Braverman personalize earlier Los Angeles poets’ attempts to create and sustain communities across the city’s uneven environments. Olson insists that writing poetry “is a matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business . . . always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!” (Collected Prose 240, italics in original). His claim that managing “daily reality” and writing poetry are interdependent activities mirrors Thomas’s appropriations of the detritus of Venice Beach. At the same time, Olson’s projective poetics provide an alternative to Thomas’s isolation. Indeed, what matters for Olson is allowing perceptions and experiences to bloom into complexity on the page rather than wrenching them into predefined shapes through the “lyrical interference of the individual as ego” (Collected Prose 247). The urgency of Olson’s prose models the accumulating intensity of sensory and intellectual experience in projective verse. Moving “INSTANTER” from perception to perception decreases the distance between poet and reader. Like Olson, Prado and Braverman invite readers into their work by portraying the city as an aggregation of personally resonant sites and elements. Less protective of their identities than McGrath or Thomas, they use poetry to create intimate encounters with readers. Whether healthful or disturbing, these small moments of connection introduce the possibility of broader forms of solidarity that might extend across neighborhood borders. Prado’s “The Hill” narrates an Olsonian walk home “up and up / stone stairs” on a rainy night through a neighborhood overlooking Los Angeles. A branch has fallen on the stairs, obstructing Prado and her friend John Kelly’s path and leaving the pair to “crouch through” a section of the steps in order to reach their destination. The branch—and the way it changes the shape of their walk—gives rise to a reflection on the influence chance has on daily life. Through syntax that points in many directions at once, Prado explains a way of being in Los Angeles that is open to external forces and influences, susceptible to being shaped and changed from moment to moment. The poem begins:

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City Poems and American Urban Crisis one thing moves it changes the whole thing it shifts in the one thing today is rain he said “I like dangerous singers” dangerous and singers those odd words together they echo how can singing be other than lyrics but I know what he means (Poetry Loves Poetry 56)

Prado’s insight is that chance alters the course of thoughts, writings, lives, and history: “one thing moves it changes the whole thing it shifts.” The “one thing” takes many forms in the rest of the poem: a branch fallen on the stairs, the deck Kelly has built, the “design of notes” the singer improvises to move the melody forward, and the vulnerability the poet experiences when thunder crashes. Visible in the world or invisible in the poet’s experience, each of these things “changes the whole thing” and opens up new poetic possibilities. The syntax and its lack of punctuation make the experience of disorientation palpable to the reader. For example, the second and third lines of the poem bear little relation to one another, “one thing today is rain / he said ‘I like dangerous singers.’ ” If the second line invites contemplation of the environment, the third reports a snippet of an unrelated conversation. The shift from one kind of awareness, exploring internal thoughts, to another, listening for resonances in what a companion says, is mediated by a line break that puts the reader in a position to experience multiple levels of understanding in the same moment. Subsequent lines return attention to Prado’s private reflections: “I know what he means.” There are at least three levels of meaning at work in “The Hill”: the narrative of the walk up the hillside, Prado’s meditation on poetry’s role in the world, and the reader’s attempt to make meaning across line breaks. If the branch fallen across Prado and Kelly’s path makes their walk more dangerous, revealing the limits of human attempts to construct durable urban spaces in the process, it also surrounds the pair with a “tension of questions” that makes their experience together more meaningful. Prado revels in questions in the poem and worries how definitive answers might constrain her experience:  “if I  could answer what I ask every day / I would probably die we live in the tension of questions / it leads us it leads me it leads him” (Poetry Loves Poetry 57). The “tension” between questions and answers plays out differently in the worlds of poetry and construction. Kelly “tears down walls of houses [and] puts them up again,” asking and answering questions about shelter and permanence in his labor. Prado, as she confesses in the poem’s concluding phrase “cannot build anything with [her]



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hands.” The seeming ephemerality of her “ache of words,” however, is just as vital to their experience on “The Hill.” Her words introduce layers of meaning that would otherwise remain invisible. Indeed, rather than subordinating the aesthetic labor of poetry to the physical labor of building houses in “The Hill,” Prado ultimately asserts that the two kinds of urban making “collide they come together.” As the poem’s final line indicates, “it takes some singing”—some poetry—to bring people together in productive modes of awareness and action (Poetry Loves Poetry 57). “The Hill” takes place in an upper-class neighborhood overlooking the city, an upper circle of McGrath’s “inverse hell.” Braverman’s “Faircrest Avenue,” by contrast, is set in a middle-class development on the city’s west side. Like Prado, Braverman addresses the interpenetration of the city’s physical conditions and her own subjective experiences by acting as a reader of the neighborhood who analyzes the painful private meanings embedded in its buildings and streets. The poem begins with Braverman returning to “Faircrest Avenue” as an adult and remembering how abuse and alcoholism constrained her parents’ ambitions. Here is the path down to Faircrest Avenue. Faircrest. What did it sound like to her?      Collecting the down payment.      Promising them anything      after the Bronx childhood      of cold stoops and red bricks.      after the hospitals. Faircrest.      The curling of clear blue      mountain air in a kingdom      nestled between Pico and Olympic      where the past overlaps. And him? The master at last      with build in barbecue      rainbirds, leaves to sweep. A man of property in a land of second chances. (Mohr, The Streets Inside 173)

The family moves to Los Angeles to pursue their version of the American dream in a “kingdom / nestled between Pico and Olympic.” Faircrest Avenue, the

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street rather than the poem, represents a dream life and a second chance, the fulfillment of a promise the parents made to each other when they left the Bronx. Unfortunately, the family’s experiences on Faircrest contrast sharply with their hopes for domestic fulfillment. The father sits “fermenting near the wall” most days in an alcoholic stupor and abuses his wife so loudly that neighbors call the police twice (Mohr, The Streets Inside 170). From Braverman’s description, it is apparent that the family’s home was a mask they wore to conceal their problems: “Here is the house at dusk. / Innocuous, the shame covered, / with fresh pastel paint. / Here is the hate” (Mohr, The Streets Inside 172–173). Exterior calm and conformity conceals violence, hatred, shame, and abuse. This is a dark vision. Like Prado taking the fallen eucalyptus branch as a spur to meditation, however, Braverman reinhabits the contradictions of her childhood in order to assert control over the uncertainty they produce. The final stanza of the poem is a ride through the neighborhood that refutes its negative associations. But I am back, back with a bus. And everyone is coming.             My father. The newspaper boys.             My mother. The rabbi with his dog.             Yes, the dog is coming. The bus is taking everything.             The Christmas lights.             The summers.             The goddamn ivy. It’s all of Faircrest Avenue in the blue bus of my youth. And finally I am driving, taking them all down Pico Boulevard and not stopping.             Do you understand?             Not for popcorn or the highway.             Scream all you want. This bus is going out to sea. (Mohr, The Streets Inside 174)

Braverman’s staccato declarations—nearly every line ends with a period whether or not it is a sentence—recall a parent speaking to a child, but the relationship has been inverted. Pairing a narrative that begins at the left margin with indented



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secondary details, the poet defines her parents’ dysfunctions and the other meanings the street evokes for herself. The confidence of the stanza’s opening lines becomes aggression as details accumulate. Braverman locks everything she has experienced in “the blue bus of my youth” by the poem’s conclusion and drives the bus due west on Pico Boulevard to its terminus at the Pacific, completing the trajectory her parents began. Like Prado and Thomas, Braverman confronts with the buildings and objects she encounters for the ways they constrain her intentions. The city’s built environment is oppressive and banal in its perpetual summer and “goddman ivy.” Braverman separates objects and their meanings, past and present, so that rather than an idealized vision of a Hollywood future or a postmodern apocalypse, what comes through “Faircrest Avenue” is a set of possibilities for integrating the various elements at play “by bus / even when I walk / or drive my car,” depending on the moment (Mohr, The Streets Inside 169). Seeking resonances between their experiences and others’, Braverman, Prado, Thomas, and McGrath use poetry to negotiate the contradictions of Los Angeles at the ground level. Their work bears the influence of Olson’s projective urban poetics, especially its emphasis on setting aside conventions to follow the logic of the individual voice. The intimate scale of Prado and Braverman’s work, in particular, portrays Los Angeles as a site for community. Even so, the political dynamics of their poetry are limited by the fact of their socioeconomic positioning: they write from positions of relative privilege that many residents and fellow poets do not share. As Coleman explains, “L.A. kind of came between us in that way . . . You have this layer of illusion and people embracing the illusion layered on top of you. You have the usual things that may keep on[e]‌in a subculture, first the skin color, you know, your slave origin, you have those problems, then you have gender, then you have the fact that I’m, you know a working class poor worker, and then there’s this other thing about having to break through all of these layers, to use my intellect to get through all these layers” (Joseph). Coleman, Cortez, and other Watts poets transform Prado and Braverman’s intimate, appropriative urban poems into sites for collaborative encounters in order to assert an aesthetic right to the city. The continuities in their work suggest the possibility, and perhaps the insurgent potential, of collective poetic action.

Watts and the poetry of crisis From the 1930s through the end of the Second World War, Watts was a thriving working class neighborhood at a key intersection of Los Angeles’s intercity

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rail system. Manufacturing jobs attracted black migrants to the city from the American South during the later stages of the Great Migration. By 1940, many residents of the neighborhood worked in factories tied to the defense industry in the immediate vicinity (Horne 23–42). After the war, changes in the economic and spatial organization of Los Angeles disrupted the neighborhood’s “locational advantages—its proximity to industrial jobs and its convenient access to downtown” (Abu-Lughod 200). As factories moved to less expensive sites in the outer suburbs, the city replaced its deteriorating public transit system with limited-access freeways. Changes to the transportation network limited neighborhood residents’ access to jobs and services (Abu-Lughod 199–201; Davis 163–166). The Harbor freeway, for example, bisected Watts in the 1950s. As a further reaction to the city’s changing fortunes, voters approved Proposition 14 in 1964. The proposition repealed a locally enforced fair housing act, reinforcing de facto racial discrimination and trapping underemployed black families in neighborhoods with declining prospects (Davis 296; Horne 249). Alongside rampant police misconduct and increases in gang violence, these changes to the city’s transportation and housing infrastructure made Watts more and more dangerous during the 1960s. By 1964, as Coleman explains, the neighborhood was “synonymous with violence, death, drugs, gang warfare and the worst ‘culturally deprived’ colored/Negro stereotypes” (“Native in a Strange Land” 28).  These tensions produced a community-wide Uprising in August 1965. Despite the negative economic and social forces impinging on Watts, arts organizations flourished in the neighborhood in the 1960s, both before and after the 1965 uprising. Some, such as Studio Watts and the Watts Tower Arts Center, were founded by community members as sites for collaboration and collective action. Others, including the Watts Summer Festival and the Watts Writers Workshop, were launched by outsiders in the aftermath of the 1965 uprising as a way to channel violence toward productive ends. Community members “recognized the explosive potential of the Watts rebellion as a political force and developed a program and activities to organize black folks on the street” (Bloom and Martin 143). As historian Gerald Horne explains, “[t]‌here was a battle for the hearts and minds of many gang members and would-be gang members after August 1965” between cultural nationalists, who advocated for the community to rebuild itself; activists and militants in the orbit of the Black Panther Party, who called for direct action to overthrow oppressive policies; and city leaders and white philanthropists, who aimed to diffuse antagonism by implicating residents in the neighborhoods’ decline and providing small-scale improvements



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in housing and infrastructure (202; 226–227). California’s governor empaneled a committee of experts, the McCone Commission, to identify the underlying causes of the 1965 uprising and the neighborhood’s continuing unrest. Rather than identifying structural barriers to housing, employment, and education, the Commission’s report concluded that the community had been “caught up” in an “insensate rage of destruction” that rendered them incapable of acting in its own best interests. By ignoring the uprising’s political dimensions, the report “blamed the victims” for inciting violence rather than pursuing ameliorative action (Abu-Lughod 214). The controversial history of the Watts Writers Workshop provides a glimpse of these conflicts. Founded by Hollywood screenwriter Budd Schulberg, the Workshop was intended to provide a therapeutic space where residents of the community could be heard and respected and where their pent-up anger could be directed to productive ends. Schulberg describes this rationale in the introduction to From the Ashes, a 1967 anthology of participants’ work: “Think of finding these young men of mysterious depths, of talents neglected . . . His single candle may light a thousand thousand candles. And the light and warmth of these candles may help redeem and regenerate the core of the ghetto, that decomposed inner city, waiting either for a phoenix to rise from the ashes, or for bigger and more terrible fires” (23). As Daniel Widener observes, Schulberg’s workshop “offered a novel vision of local antipoverty politics,” in particular because it represented an attempt to integrate creative approaches to “social equality” with more radical activism (666). While the workshop promoted black cultural production as “part of the solution to rather than as a primary cause of urban poverty and social strife,” Widener concludes, Schulberg’s insistence on separating aesthetic and political activities alienated participants and inhibited authentic forms of solidarity and empowerment (680–682). The workshop’s ethos discouraged participants from incorporating political activism in their poetic mappings of the neighborhood’s social and economic realities and limited the extent to which it could serve as a thirdspace to cultivate broader attempts to create change. Thirteen members of the Watts Writers Workshop broke with Schulberg in 1967. Led by Quincy Troupe, they styled themselves the Watts 13 and published Watts Poets, a collection of their work, in 1968. The collection is dedicated to Thaddeus Morgan Brevard, a Watts resident who survived being shot by police in November 1967. The dedication, printed with irregular line breaks on the inside back cover, proposes an urgent line of inquiry into the neighborhood’s contradictions:

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City Poems and American Urban Crisis        What we want to know as recorders of                 these times, as poets and essayist, is why a man, when he is on his knees          has to be shot nine times?????????      “WATTS FATS” was on his knees, got shot        by those paid to PROTECT HIM!!!!              We as members of the Black           community ask WHY??? This book is also dedicated to all similar incidents. (Watts Poets)

Calling themselves “recorders of / these times,” the Watts 13 position themselves as witnesses and primary investigators of life in Watts. The repeated question marks of the dedication, nine to match the nine shots Brevard survived, signal their perspective on the troubled state of the Watts community in the period after the uprising. Where Schulberg organized his workshop as a way to change the course of individual lives in Watts, Troupe and the Watts 13 rally the community to action. Taken as a whole, Watts Poets enacts a poetics of crisis grounded in an urgent need for self-definition: only when residents demand control over their own daily lives can the work of rebuilding the community begin. The collection defines the 1965 uprising as an attempt by residents to claim their right to the city against the constraints of larger structures and challenges the McCone Commission’s conclusions by demonstrating how residents can work together to appropriate the neighborhood’s social and physical conditions to fulfill their everyday needs. For example, Eric Priestley documents the neighborhood’s physical conditions in “Can You Dig Where I’m Commin’ From.” Focusing on the ways the physical environment affects residents’ experiences, Priestley depicts Watts as “a jungle / of empty whiskey and wine bottles” populated by people “who had nothin’ to do all day, / but sit on old milk crates and beat up boxes.” The speaker of the poem is an unemployed young man who imagines other members of the community watching him struggle to create a life. Frustrated at the general lack of opportunity, he sees himself becoming one of the regulars sitting outside on crates. The title of the poem and its primary refrain, “Can you dig where I’m commin’ from,” is what he imagines the older generation thinks as they watch members of his generation walk the streets. The tone of poem is defiant. Amid the “flames and smoke” persisting in the community after the uprising, Priestley’s speaker turns away from the release he had found in drug use and addresses an unspecified “you” with this assertion:



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You can nolonger squeeze me out of your red and white tube. Put me in your little brown paper sack, and sniff me. Nolonger put me into a rubber balloon. Sell me, and shoot me through the dirty needle of some dumb ‘hype’. (Watts Poets)

The speaker admits drugs “were all merely ways I  used to run away, / cause I was ‘blue’ all through / . . . / . . . excuses I’d used in place of living” and turns the repeating question of the poem outward to his readers, challenging them to make sense of his origins, where he “believed / I was nobody, but mud,” and his future. The poem advances a structural critique of lived experience in the Watts community along the lines of Lefebvre’s conceptualization of spatial experience. Priestley’s perception is that Watts is a “jungle” outside the general order, a refuge for the “poor,” “wrinkled” and “tormented” that has been left out of the city’s economic redevelopment. Its empty lots are “burned clean” three years after the riots. Horne attests to this assessment: “the process of urban renewal, which often was packaged as a benevolent reform, devastated South LA in the wake of August 1965” (353). Rather than condemning the community for its response, Priestley opens a line of questioning, “can you dig where I’m commin’ from?” that looks back to explain how things have come to be the way they are and points forward to choices the community faces. Blossom Powe’s “It Was Here” extends Priestley’s analysis through specific consideration of the circumstances and effects of the 1965 uprising. The poem is intricately constructed, suspending ideas across many lines through enjambments that disrupt and extend syntax. Each stanza turns on “surrendered,” a word that accumulates meanings over the course of the poem. In the first stanza, Powe describes residents surrendering the “ties” that bind them to one another and locates the onset of the uprising’s violence in a cleaving of the community: This was where Scattered people went past Lured on the streets like rain, Giving up their human blood And ties surrendered When their aims were hot! (Watts Poets)

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Seeing Watts in relation to a larger world, Powe accuses external actors of “luring” people onto the streets and seducing them toward hot aims with “placating lies / From angry, twisted faces.” The lies are particularly pernicious because they dissolve bonds of family and community into atomized anger. Powe laments the destruction of the neighborhood in the poem’s second stanza. And then . . . The galling stenches of riot smelled real As they smothered the town! It was here Splattered brothers fell fast Nailed onto the streets like rain, Wasting all that precious blood In lives surrendered When the game was hot! And a truth, from old predictions, Was that steel-bullet eyes Long hid from human graces Devoured cold the nightwind’s Souls of black clay who drowned in currents Vilifying Cain In the hungry streets of Watts. (Watts Poets)

Rather than condemning the violence outright, Powe contrasts the brutality of the uprising with “humane graces” that are “hid” elsewhere in the community. If residents contributed to the neighborhood’s decline, the “steel-bullet eyes” of the police attest to the fact that racist antipathy pinned them in place. The analogy to Christ on the cross—“brothers . . . / Nailed onto the streets like rain”—suggests Powe interprets the uprising as a sacrifice through which the community reckons with evils done in the past and consecrates its commitment to constructing a better future. “It Was Here” points to a truth about Watts that the carnage of the uprising obscures: it is community knit together by individual hopes, fears, and capacities. Where Priestley interprets the lives lost in the uprising as harbingers of future violence, Powe explains them as so many “lives surrendered,” so that the larger community might benefit over the longer term. The poem’s final stanza describes the political impetus of the uprising as unextinguished. The neighborhood is a “weird battleground” where “eerie cries” still echo after three years on the “same / Tired, old, hungry streets of Watts.”



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Here and there Shattered window-pane glass Poured onto the streets like rain, Covering dried pools of blood From lives surrendered When the flames were hot! And a truth, stranger than fiction, Was that the eerie cries From tortured, dying faces Still echoed on nightwinds That blew debris in restless currents Up and down the same Tired, old, hungry streets of Watts. (Watts Poets)

Powe’s repetition of words and phrases across the poem’s three stanzas evokes the “contrariety of immediate experience” in Watts without forcing a particular understanding of the neighborhood on the reader (quoted in Novak 12). While a sense of loss persists in the cries Powe hears echoing in the streets of Watts, “It Was Here” portrays the neighborhood as a place where individuals with different viewpoints but similar aims might come together around a common purpose. The poem animates mysteries “stranger than fiction” through formal experiment. Combining the analytical force of McGrath and Thomas’s city poems with the personal resonances of Prado and Braverman’s poetics, it appropriates the devastation of the 1965 uprising in a moving call to action.

Claiming space for resistance: Music and solidarity in Jayne Cortez’s Pissstained Stairs Powe, Priestley, and other members of the Watts 13 called for continued collective action in the wake of the 1965 uprising. Their work invites readers to join together through acts of interpretation. Jayne Cortez positions her first collection, Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares, in much the same way. Written as part of a script for a performance of the Watts Repertory Theater Company, the collection renders the neighborhood’s conditions as a body in agony and examines how jazz performance and other aesthetic practices might serve as a means for collective action (Melhem 209). Like Powe and Priestley, Cortez writes vivid descriptions of the oppressive circumstances of everyday life

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in Watts. For example, she describes “an old woman at sixteen / slipping sliding / scrapping across the floor” of her apartment in “A Gathering of Fishes Dried with Salt Waiting to Wiggle in the Net of Life” and a community whose “cries / are forbidden / by / the artificial / manna sucking / plotters” in “Noir Martyree” (Pissstained Stairs). As Jennifer Ryan explains, Cortez’s poems do more than merely register oppression; they “force readers to confront these uncomfortable truths by presenting arguments for public policy revision” (94). While Ryan grounds her claim in later work that fuses surrealist improvisation and feminist politics, her readings focus attention on Cortez’s career-long orientation toward action. In Pissstained Stairs, for example, the speaker of the poem “Same Words / Same Song” prepares herself to change her orientation to her circumstances by posing critical questions: “Who robbed me of my savage scent / my rhythmic bone that shook with music inside my fine brown skinned thigh.” The poem dramatizes the unnamed woman’s struggle to claim her right to the city. Naming structures that have forced her to “play” her life in a “hell hole of fantasies,” she vows to speak out by “pissing down the throat of god” (Pissstained Stairs). The right she claims in the poem is the right to influence policies that will affect her life by speaking the truth of her experience. Laura Hinton argues that the bodies and bodily fluids in poems like “Same Words / Same Song” challenge readers to reconsider the ways they interpret visual metaphors. In particular when Cortez depicts bodies in action, she explains, her poems “overflow visual boundaries prescribed by perspectival and controlled spatial representations and, instead, inhabit an extended concept of ‘overflow’ itself ” (206). The bodily metaphors “overflow” what we expect to find and provoke questions about how and why we assume poetic bodies must not urinate, bleed, or pass gas. What seems to be excessive about Cortez’s poetic bodies is in fact grounded in bodily experiences we all share. Hinton suggests that lines like “pissing down the throat of god” disrupt the reading experience by reminding us of what bodies actually do: they move, change, and, in the end, overflow all our attempts to maintain control. What’s more, these processes are natural; they only seem excessive in relation to the conventions of poetry. Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega explores the relationship between Cortez’s depictions of bodies and urban space in New York City in an essay on “I Am New York City.” Like Hinton, Ortega recognizes that the bodies in Cortez’s poems “defy . . . social surveillance” by challenging distinctions between what is appropriate or obscene (257). In “I Am New York City,” she explains, Cortez disrupts the objectifying tendencies of the city in order to reinvest women’s bodies, in particular, with agency. The poem enacts Lefebvre’s urban theory by showing that even the most



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“debased,” objectified residents of a city play a part in shaping its structures (Ortega 262). Cortez examines the ways residents claim and repurpose urban spaces through their actions. In fact, as Ortega writes, “The speaker of ‘I Am New York City’ recognizes that the city’s image and definition are constantly in flux, that they are mapped by diverse voices often to contradictory effects” (262). Hinton and Ortega analyze the rhythms, repetitions, and improvisational sounds Cortez uses to explore the open-ended possibilities of poetic critique. Their readings underscore a point Elisabeth Frost and Cynthia Hogue make about Cortez’s “interarts poetics” in their Innovative Women Poets anthology: “Long before the explosion of hip-hop and the new performance poetry, Jayne Cortez was crossing the borders between improvisatory music making and traditional poetic text. With a focus few other women poets take to this task, Cortez stresses interarts poetics as itself a radical cultural politics” (69). Cortez’s formal integration of poetry, music, and performance enriches her ability to interleave critical descriptions of everyday life, radical reexaminations of embodied experience, and reflections on the political importance of black cultural production. “Payment in Advance,” a sonically rich poem from Pissstained Stairs, shows each of these elements in action. The poem gathers a crowd “From the fields / From the mines / From the cities” for a blues performance. Cortez names the audience as “Blood of my blood & our peoples blood” and “Tribes crying uniting without our soul souls time” and calls on them to:       Understand the dream unchanging       Understand the dream gesticulating       Understand the mainstream articulating third stream innovating time scheme of timeschemes time     Terrifying Identifying (Pissstained Stairs)

Like “Same Words / Same Song,” the poem is dense with the potential for action. Repetitions and rhymes on the present participle “-ing” in these lines and throughout the poem suggest an intensifying energy: the audience taking their seats, claiming drinks paid for in advance, anticipating what they will hear. Drawn together from different walks of life, they are creating community by informal means. When the performance starts, it is a “Blues blowing revolution” that turns on “The Goodness–all that is good / The Truth–all that is true / The Immediate–right now.” As in “I Am New York City,” Cortez insists on the need to transform the status quo, here figured as what the “mainstream” articulates. The performance serves the function embodied experience serves in other poems. It

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is at once the context through which the poem emerges and the common ground its participants share. Since the poem ends just as the music begins, readers join the audience in listening for its truth. Pissstained Stairs includes a number of poems like “Payment in Advance” that explore musical performance. Some celebrate specific musicians, including John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, Billie Holiday, and others. As Frost and Hogue explain, these poems provide a contrast to others in the collection and elsewhere that document the “violence and grief in black urban life” (70). D. J. Melhem takes the observation further, arguing that Cortez positions the musicians of Pissstained Stairs as political heroes for black readers who wish to confront exploitation in their own lives and suggests that the collection’s descriptions of jazz performance provide a release from the “collective rage of the disenfranchised, the dispossessed, and the victims of discrimination” expressed in other poems (181; 193). While the celebratory poems are tonally distinctive, reading them as heroic alternatives to the critiques of Watts in other poems limits their political resonance. Indeed, dichotomous readings like Melhem’s overwrite the collection’s “fugitive” nature, to use Moten and Harney’s term, or the unconventional ways it mixes suffering, hope, and playfulness (64). Seeing Pissstained Stairs in terms of either destructive rage or heroic transcendence limits the scope of the collection’s analysis and recalls the terms of the conflict that fractured the Watts Writers Workshop in 1967. As Hinton and Ortega show, the strength of Cortez’s poetics is her multifaceted confrontation with paternalistic, sexist, and racist practices. Her work reminds readers of the embodied experiences they share in common and creates spaces, physical and virtual, for collective action. The praise poems in Pissstained Stairs create space for action by encouraging open-ended participation from audiences. They name performers readers might know from other contexts and set out terms for debating their legacies. By inviting this dialogue, the poems call on readers to recognize and reconstitute the informal communities they may have experienced while listening to jazz. This is an especially relevant call to action in a text written as a script for performance. Moten and Harney argue that texts function as “social space[s]‌” when their form and content combine to produce surprises and contradictions (108). In “Payment in Advance, for example, Cortez accomplishes this” through rhythms and word play, infusing the word “scheme” with both nominal and verbal senses and proposing “future violence in our minds” without clarifying whether she is advocating for physical violence or addressing the conflicts plaguing her own and her readers’ minds. The praise poems set the scene for social interactions by situating readers in spaces characterized by these kinds of improvisatory



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ambiguities: jazz clubs, community theaters, and radio programs—or the living rooms or bars where they are listened to. Cortez notes in “How Long Has Trane Been Gone” that Black music was a central element of daily life in Watts in the 1950s and 60s. The “palpitating love notes” of Coltrane’s music linked audiences together as a “lost-found nation / within a nation” whether they realized it or not (Pissstained Stairs). Because audiences shared Coltrane’s music in common, both over the radio and in live performance, the music functioned as a meeting space and reference point. Like the blues performance that concludes “Payment in Advance,” listening to Coltrane brought the community together across differences. If Coltrane is a hero, Cortez suggests in the poem, he is an everyday hero, one who should be heard “throughout the projects.” Seen in light of Moten and Harney’s theory of the social functions of “fugitive” texts and Hinton and Ortega’s arguments for Cortez’s confrontational poetics, mundane actions like listening to Coltrane’s music or debating the merits of different recordings can become practices of solidarity with political implications. Cortez registers the potential of Black music to serve as a foundation for collective action in “How Long Has Trane Been Gone” through reference to institutional responses. She claims that music industry leaders disrupted the Watts community’s access to the full spectrum of Black music sometime in the 1960s by narrowing the range of styles broadcast over the radio: There was a time when KGFJ played all black music from Bird to Johnny Ace on show after show but what happened I’ll tell you what happened they divided black music doubled the money & left us split again is what happened (Pissstained Stairs)

One reason she chooses to celebrate Coltrane is that programming changes at Los Angeles’s KGFJ AM radio station mean fewer and fewer people recognize his music. When broadcasters and record executives “divided black music” into subgenres like jazz, soul, and R&B, Cortez claims, they effectively “split” the listening community. Moten and Harney characterize interventions like

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this as a “new form of expropriation” that commodifies informal practices by making them legible to powerful outsiders. These interventions have particularly insidious effects on under-resourced communities like Watts because they give the impression of serving the interests of residents even as they are “harvesting the means of social reproduction” (Moten and Harney 80). The insights of “How Long Has Trane Been Gone” follow a similar logic. Where the “warm arm” of Coltrane’s music once united residents in “resounding discovery” of common challenges and interests, with the bifurcation of Black music into subgenres it became a niche product. The social effects of the “split,” as Cortez calls it in the poem, are clear. Listeners who would have heard Coltrane’s jazz alongside blues, gospel, and other forms on KGFJ now lacked the opportunity. The community lost a potent shared experience in the process. Cortez dramatizes the costs of outsider interventions in Watts through praise poems for jazz luminaries like Coltrane she fears are fading from the collective consciousness. In the same way, she dramatizes the possibilities of renewed solidarity through performance poems like “Payment in Advance” and “Bright Brown Summer.” The poems are examples of Moten and Harney’s fugitive art because the performances they document function as spaces for exchanging ideas and recognizing common challenges and interests. “Bright Brown Summer” stages a jam session in which living and dead jazz musicians recruit listeners to join them “on the truth hunt.” As in “I Am New York City,” bodies and bodily fluids figure prominently. Trumpeter Clifford Brown’s “moist fleshy lips” set the scene of a “new day” with doo-wop rhythms: Kissing the foot of Oh Woo Wee Doo smacking Blackies heart in a flashy mass spittle of fire from the cookin nigguhs chops stompin pride from muted cries on the truth hunt (Pissstained Stairs)

Cortez writes Brown’s performance as mode of critical analysis. The “spittle” he clears from his instrument becomes “fire” as his playing challenges the



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audience to take pride in being part of a community. Other musicians join in as the performance continues: singer Freddy Cole, saxophonist Lester Young and Chet Baker, a white trumpeter, and vocalist. Their “black blazing lips” register the pain of oppression—“sore licking / on vasoline legs”—while their “bad tongue[s]‌” outline the radical possibilities of immersion in “tone blown love.” The poem’s mix of endstopped and enjambed lines and its dense repetitions of sounds reinforce the experience of hearing a live performance. Cortez describes her poetry as a kind of jam session in an interview with Melhem. Specifically, she claims that she uses sounds and rhythms as if they were the voices of musicians transforming melodies as they exchange solos in performance: I guess the poetry is like a festival. Everything can be transformed. The street becomes something else, the subway is something else, everything at a festival is disguised as something else. Everything changes: the look of the person changes, their intentions change, the attitudes are different, experiences become fiercer. Voices become other voices. So that’s what I  do in my poetry. I  keep making connections. (Melhem 205)

Like the provocative work of the Watts 13, Cortez’s poetry is grounded in shared experiences. She adds the possibility of transformative action to their critiques of oppression and self-sabotage in the neighborhood by staging performances and inviting readers to join in. “Everything can be transformed,” she insists, beginning with the community’s perceptions of itself. In order to “sink shame,” as Cortez proposes in “Forreal,” a poem from Pissstained Stairs that answers the call to action in “Same Words / Same Song,” residents need to condemn outsider interference in Watts and listen for new possibilities in what they share in common. If Coltrane’s music is no longer available over the radio, it is the community’s responsibility to find other opportunities to come together. Cortez’s poems suggest that jam sessions and neighborhood festivals can serve as stages for collective action. These kinds of events encourage participants to embrace change, both in their own lives and in the life of the community, by exposing truths about everyday experience that have been muted.

“I will factor-in feeling”: Wanda Coleman and the tactics of revolution Wanda Coleman was born in Watts in 1946. She witnessed the 1965 uprising and 1992 riots firsthand and was hailed as the “conscience of the L.A. literary

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scene” on her death in November 2013 (Ulin). Her writing affirms the power of Powe and Priestley’s articulations of Lefebvre’s right to the city and, like Cortez in Pissstained Stairs, identifies poets and artists as agents of change. Her work challenges readers to reconsider the “geographies that continue to support inequality” in Los Angeles and elsewhere (Ryan 128). Coleman explains the dynamics of her critical urban poetics in “Letter to Jamal,” an essay commissioned by High Performance magazine in the immediate aftermath of the 1992 riots: “I’m not a sociologist or an urban planner so I don’t have any grand rebuilding schemes to offer, [but] I  will do my part to keep reminding those who have forgotten the lessons of that past. I will teach those who want to learn. And while I may or may not do that from a podium, I will do it in my work as a poet. I will factor-in feeling. I will do my level best to clothe those bone-cold statistics in human flesh” (Native in a Strange Land 201). As a poet, she attests that “something significant has happened” in Watts by exposing the human consequences of economic decline, racialized violence, and official neglect (Mercurochrome 65). The feelings she “factor[s]‌-in” provide a common ground for readers, a thirdspace or fugitive public to use Soja and Moten and Harney’s terms, where they can develop and claim their right to the city. Whether we know Los Angeles or not, we recognize the joy, shame, anger, regret, disappointment, and hope Coleman describes. As Jennifer Ryan suggests, her intense focus on what she has seen, felt, and experienced engages readers in ongoing arguments about Watts and Los Angeles’s “social reputation[s]” and enlists their support for “political agenda[s]” to produce change (111). “Rapid Transit,” a short story published the 1987 collection Heavy Daughter Blues, provides a clear example of Coleman’s integration of flesh, feeling, and political engagement. The story narrates a black woman’s attempt to travel by bus across Watts for a job interview. Since Raylene does not have a car, she relies on city’s inefficient public transit system to get from one place to another. She needs to take two buses to reach her destination, but two unhelpful drivers leave her waiting on the sidewalk. The first, “not bad looking, in his late 20s with honeycolored skin and eyes,” does everything slowly, prompting Raylene to curse to herself “Why don’t the son-of-a-bitch drive faster?” (76). The second teases her, almost catching her foot as he snaps the door “viciously shut” and “in a sudden burst of speed” departs, “roar[ing] past . . . northward into the night,” leaving Raylene at the curb screaming “curses in its wake” (77). That both drivers are black compounds her frustration. As Raylene’s experience with the drivers suggests, Coleman’s Watts lacks a spirit of community. Rather than helping Raylene get where she needs to go, people attempt to take advantage of her vulnerability.



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For example, while waiting for the first bus, she is approached by a “tan-skinned wino [. . .] clad in a second-hand suit one size too small.” He makes a “calculated slide towards her end of the bench,” propositioning her and “spew[ing] forth a gust of stench and words.” She shrinks away, watching “in shame (that one of her people should be so disrespectful of hisself)” as he stumbles along “in a series of spasms” and then feeling repulsion dance “along her skin” before she escapes to the next bench (73). Almost immediately, another man pulls up in a “pitch black, silver chromed Cadillac El Dorado” to solicit sex. While Raylene thrills to the car’s “showroom-fresh beauty” and the “snazzily dressed, balding ebony man in his late 50s,” she declines his offer of a ride because she fears “what he wanted” in return. Through these encounters, she comes to fear the night and her surroundings, whether the “loud fierce barking” of what might be a rabid dog or the “raucous merry-making mingled with music flowing” from a club across the street from the bus stop (74). Coleman portrays Raylene as a black woman alone in a hostile, dangerous territory where residents are isolated from each other. When Raylene finally boards the bus, she chooses a seat that will allow her to watch “people’s faces as they got on” (75). Acting as a spectator detached from her community, she watches “three elderly chocolate-skinned washerwomen” sitting “numbly together”; a young black woman in an afro who listens to music and is “oblivious”; a mother-daughter pair sitting “mutely”; a “sweet-looking, olive-skinned old man [with] caucasian features”; and a pair of friends sharing a private story (75–76). There are no interactions or even acknowledgments among the numb, mute, oblivious company during the ride. As Raylene’s failed journey suggests, one difference between the streets of Watts and streets elsewhere in the city has to do with residents’ abilities to use the city to pursue their needs and desires. Another difference is that the pressures residents face make it difficult for them to build solidarity with one another. Coleman emphasizes the contrast between Watts and other Los Angeles Neighborhoods in “Down the Rabbit Hole.” The poem documents the parallel experiences of a black waitress and a white Hollywood starlet. The waitress “tail[s]‌” the actress “thru beverly hills” after she sees her in the diner: oh I tailed her thru beverly hills her ashen blonde locks my tar baby naps her pale silken face a full moon my red-brown face mars her intelligent gray crystals my fierce brown bricks her thin emotionless lips cloaked in a half smile my thick taut lips parted in battle’s cry her voguish figure and high-fashion boots my eternal diet and resoled wedgies she       climbed

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The actress’s world is expansive, ranging from a “penthouse suite” to “new york for the premiere” to “brazil to recuperate from her migraine.” Wherever she is, she is a focal point that “gathers the attention of the world.” By contrast, the waitress’s world is constrained to a “tore-down / coupe,” a waitressing job and an apartment she shares with her “mister.” Their lives impinge on one another when the narrative shifts from one to the other in the middle of a line. The oscillation suggests that the main action of the poem is a struggle for a territory. Rather than stewing in anger with Raylene or turning inward like Priestley, Coleman’s protagonist tracks the actress across the city, prying her world open with “resoled wedgies” in order to participate in her experience of free mobility. The distance between their lives is compressed by the lack of punctuation and the abrupt transitions it creates. Coleman’s waitress critiques the actress and the organization of space through which she operates by mimicking her reality. The poem challenges the reader to recognize that the opulence and poverty it portrays are mutually dependent rather than isolated:  “high-fashion boots” versus “wedgies” and a “chauffeurdriven limo” versus a “tore-down / coupe.” The conditions of Coleman’s Watts exist because other neighborhoods receive a greater share of the city’s resources. She makes the point directly in “L.A. Love Cry,” an essay first published in 1990 that echoes Soja and Dear’s descriptions of the city’s postmodern urban form: “Loving [Los Angeles] is to embrace the irrational and the disarranged. Is to welcome halfway house refugees and hospice hangers-on. Is to spread joy among the homeless lining corporate buildings with their possessions of castoffs, soaking up the sun remaining captured in the mortar” (21). Like Soja and Dear, Coleman points to the conceptual and physical gaps that emerge within



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homogenizing urban geographies. She suggests that exploiting these gaps and their potential as incubators of resistance requires viewing the city’s “refugees,” “hangers-on,” and “corporate buildings” as aspects of a single, conflicted reality rather than as features of separate geographies in need of reconciliation. As Coleman explains in the passage from “Violence, Art & Hustle” that serves as the epigraph to this chapter, she experiences Los Angeles’s irrational juxtapositions so intensely that she wears them in her body. As a result, she grounds the call to action she asserts in her work in lived experience rather than in abstract conceptions of urban reality. Coleman consolidates her observations about the persistent crisis of Los Angeles’s fragmented geography and the political possibilities of the Watts community in two poems from 2001’s Merchurochrome. In “They Will Not Be Poets,” she predicts: they will arrive by helicopter before noon the authorities will send them among us they will storm our neighborhoods and cordon off        connecting streets they will come in camouflage helmets and suits their tenderness protected by flakjackets hands raised to halt the suspicious & the innocent (Mercurochrome 79)

Crisis looms in Watts and across the city because “the authorities” insist on dispossessing communities of their abilities to use urban space and resources for their own purposes. At a remove of forty years from the 1965 uprising, Coleman concludes that “the superficial fires of controversy” are merely precursors to the “displacement & relocation” that will inevitably be visited on the community. Watts is a site of military struggle populated in residents’ minds with “helicopters,” “cordon[s]‌,” and “flakjackets.” While the community’s poets have no greater purchase on the community than anyone else, they have the capacity through their work to expose the forces that constrain residents’ lives and identify opportunities for resistance. Their greatest opportunities to provoke action lie in conveying what it feels like to be under threat to readers who have not experienced the feeling firsthand. The pessimism of “They Will Not Be Poets” recurs in “Paper Riot,” but in the latter poem Coleman articulates a Lefebvrian insistence that art can serve as a “source and model of appropriation of space and time” that returns control over the physical city to residents (“The Right to the City” 173). Like Priestely, Powe, and the Watts 13, Coleman condemns the exploitation of black neighborhoods by

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“cultural tourists,” including black intellectuals who advance themselves through association with places like Watts while at the same time “pen[ning] White lies for the press.” In contrast to these “lies,” Coleman portrays Watts as a terrain of conflict. Just as there is a problem with activists who offer assistance with their “dexter hands” while “cross[ing] the fingers / on their sinister hands,” there is a problem with descriptions of cities, she suggests, that focus on theoretical abstractions rather than lived experiences. She concludes that “posers” who offer such descriptions tend to win acclaim and attention because their perspectives are self-defeating, or, as Coleman explains in the poem: (since experiences other than electronic transfer       and networking are no longer of value particularly when not waxing inanely       and forever about the connections between man and nature as if cities       are not by-products of a dissatisfaction with precisely what’s found untamed/       precisely what bites, like sole-eating viruses (imparting new meaning to       loose shoes), as if something has been lost as opposed to overlooked or       deliberately omitted.) (Mercurochrome 121–122)

The convoluted syntax of this parenthetical—two “as if ’s” and a gerund phrase embedded within a larger dependent clause—is characteristic of the whole poem. It matches the complexity of the circumstances Coleman is trying to describe at the same time that it leads the reader to a concrete description of everyday reality: “cities are . . . by-products / of a dissatisfaction with precisely what’s found untamed.” Since cities themselves are products of conflict even at the broadest level of analysis, their conflicts should not be ignored or smoothed over. Instead, poets have an obligation to describe urban conflicts as directly and honestly as they can “until there are / enough looters present to make a respectable quorum” (122). The quorum Coleman envisions involves poets alongside residents, the Watts community alongside others from across the city. Like Cortez, her work disrupts official narratives of neighborhoods like Watts by prioritizing embodied knowledge and collective action and questioning “how identity and the nature of corporeality are formed, and how bodies can assert new information about



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their own identities through embodied movement” (Hinton 215). Extending the insights of other Los Angeles poets, Coleman and Cortez position their city poems as thirdspaces, sites, and catalysts for community action that provide a foundation for the work of claiming a right to the city. Their work demonstrates that addressing the contradictions of Watts requires more than mapping the city or provoking individual residents to cultivate practices of resistance. Like Priestley, Powe, and Lefebvre, Coleman and Cortez insist that communities can influence the social and physical circumstances that structure their lives if and only if they find ways to appropriate urban space and resources for their own purposes. Cortez’s musicians and Coleman’s quorum of poets claim their right to the city “by inventing, by sculpting space . . . by giving themselves rhythms” that break through external constraints (Lefebvre, “The Right to the City” 104– 105, italics in original). To use the terms of Peter Marcuse’s model of insurgent planning, their city poems expose ignored realities of everyday life in Watts, propose tactics and strategies individual residents and informal communities can use to appropriate space and resources, and politicize the need for collective action. By undertaking “praxis and poiesis on a social scale,” Coleman, Cortez, and other Los Angeles poets draw attention to ways poetry can contribute to the work of gathering communities together across geographic and social fragmentation (Lefebvre, “The Right to the City” 173).

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The “Curious” Languages of New York: George Oppen and Critical Urban Theory

Poetry rouses the appearance of the unreal and of dream in the face of the palpable and clamorous reality, in which we believe ourselves at home. And yet in just the reverse manner, what the poet says and undertakes to be is the real. Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” George Oppen stopped writing poetry in 1933, the same year he returned to New  York from the French countryside and became active as an organizer for the Communist Party in Brooklyn. His choice to stop writing was curious because his career as a poet was just beginning:  he had been included in the 1931 “Objectivist” issue of Poetry, edited by his friend Louis Zukofsky, and Ezra Pound had written an introduction for Discrete Series, his first book. When he started writing again twenty-five years later, he and his wife Mary were planning another return to New  York. The city and its persistent crises “had meaning to George for his writing” in Mary’s words because it gave him “roots from which to write again” (205). The problems that motivated the Oppens’ activist involvement in New York in the 1930s had deepened by the time they returned in 1960. As George explains in an interview, “We came back to New York. Things had changed, and the monuments of our life had gone, and I tell about the brick buildings, and I  walked down the terrible streets, Myrtle Avenue, and so on, and it was still terrible” (Swigg 164). If he “didn’t know enough” about the world to continue writing after publishing Discrete Series, by late 1965, as he worked through drafts of the long sequence “Of Being Numerous,” he had experienced so much that he found it difficult even “to speak of poetry” at all (Hatlen and Mandel 25). Indeed, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis explains in the introduction to Oppen’s Selected Letters, the effects of the Depression, the Second World War,

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and reactionary responses to transformative political action were among the “complex, overlapping reasons” for the twenty-five year gap in his work (xiii–xiv). Oppen transformed his experiences of these crises into three remarkable books after he returned to New  York fulltime in 1960:  The Materials (1962), This In Which (1965), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Of Being Numerous (1968). He depicts the city across his career as an important, if flawed, example of the humanity’s ability to shape the world according to its needs and desires. At the same time, he warns that the pace, density, and anonymity of urban life constrain our ability to recognize that we depend on one other for survival. Oppen shares the latter insight with critical urban theorist Manuel Castells. Influenced by Henri Lefebvre and the 1968 student protests in Paris, Castells argues in 1972’s The Urban Question that public discourse about urban crisis is an ideological technique that masks structural exploitation. He suggests that elites in business, city government, and the media promote an ideology of the urban in order to obscure the negative social effects of economic development: “In the parlance of the technocrats, the ‘city’ takes the place of explanation, through evidence of the cultural transformations that one fails to (or cannot) grasp and control” (The Urban Question 73). Discourse on the city and its crises stands in for genuine engagement with social problems in Castells’s view, flattening the dynamic, conflictual nature of urban experience onto a single plane of expert coordination and control. The languages used in these discourses distract from the city’s material and social conditions. Understanding Oppen’s changing engagement with the city from the 1930s to the 1960s is crucial to understanding his broader poetics. He recognized that American cities at the time were increasingly administered by small groups of elites who were detached from the lived realities of most residents and materially invested in using descriptions of crisis to authorize interventions in the built environment. By contrast with Castells, however, Oppen asserts in his work that urban ideologies can be disrupted through careful attention to relationships between language and experience. In his 1960s city poetry, in particular, he examines the curious relations among social, physical, and linguistic dimensions of urban experience in order to identify progressive alternatives. The primary insight of Discrete Series is that the city’s physical form is constructed rather than inevitable. Because of this, its shape and characteristics can be changed at any time—in fact, they are being continually transformed. Representations of the city in This In Which, The Materials, and Of Being Numerous extend this insight and assert a sharper critique of the discourses that obscure the contingent



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nature of urban reality. Like Castells, Oppen challenges the view that crisis is an unavoidable condition and shows that poetry can serve as a tool for intervention. He develops these principles by applying Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of language to the urban scene, in particular his assertion that poetry changes our conception of what’s possible in the world of everyday experience by “bring[ing] thinking to encounter its own limits, to experience its own ecstasis within the language it inhabits” (Smith, Sounding/Silence 147, italics in original). Oppen’s immersion in Heidegger’s work encouraged him to trust that the “difficult texture” of his poetry would “instigate a suitably complex” response in his readers (Nicholls 76). The poetic exchange plays a similar role in Oppen’s city poetry as critical analysis plays in Castells’s urban theory: it exposes inconsistencies in prevailing accounts of the city and proposes openings for transformation. Oppen’s careful poetic engagement with 1960s New York calls attention to the ways we experience the exploitative structures of urban life. Evoking how it feels “emotionally and morally and processually” to think and live together in cities, Oppen’s city poetry models a “readiness to experience the ruptures and possibilities of our place and time” and provides a common ground for radical efforts to remake our shared urban reality (DuPlessis, Blue Studios 195–196).

Urban questions The short, mostly untitled poems of Discrete Series document urban experience during the Great Depression. As Peter Nicholls explains, the collection enacts a materialist confrontation with urban capitalism (15). Several poems describe bourgeois urban scenes, for example, a man’s commute to and from work in the city center by train (NCP 25); a party on a yacht “a half mile / out—” to sea from the city harbor (NCP 15); an afternoon spent shopping (NCP 29); and an evening at the theater (NCP 17). In others, Oppen provides glimpses of workingclass lives, the types of lives he identifies elsewhere as “the roots” of the city (NCP 76). For example, a steam-shovel operator “in firm overalls” paves a city street in one poem (NCP 14), while in another a tugboat makes slow progress down the river at night (NCP 19). Throughout the collection, Oppen portrays streets and sidewalks as settings where residents from different classes have opportunities to interact. They are elements of the infrastructure that composes the larger urban scene. As such, they are places where the social effects of urban capitalism are particularly visible.

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Oppen focuses on the relation between streets and sidewalks in the collection’s seventh poem. He speculates about the isolating effects of automobile travel by emphasizing the fact that cars enclose their passengers and remove them from the possibility of interacting with pedestrians. As the poem suggests, alienation from the urban community might be the price of increasing automotive mobility: Closed car—closed in glass— At the curb, Unapplied and empty: A thing among others Over which clouds pass and the             alteration of lighting. An overstatement Hardly an exterior. Moving in traffic This thing is less strange— Tho the face, still within it, Between glasses—place, over which         time passes—a false light. (NCP 13)

From the pedestrian’s perspective, the car is “a thing among others,” somewhat strange as it sits beneath the passing clouds and the day’s changing light, but ultimately unremarkable. From the inside, however, the car is both strange and estranging. The key word in the poem is “closed,” as Oppen explains in a letter to David McAleavey: “The car at the curb was closed, and later the man closed in it” (Selected Letters 293). The fact of the car’s enclosure forces a terrifying separation. It reduces the passenger to a reflection in the “false light” of the window glass, estranging him from himself and numbing his senses to “ignorance” of the world around him, including the “joy” of the light of the afternoon. When the man chooses the efficiency of the “device” or “dark instrument” of the car, as Oppen terms it in other poems, he fails to realize the “strange” effects it will produce in his experience (NCP 8; 11). The difficulties cars introduce in human relationships figure prominently in eighth poem of the collection, as well. The poem’s “topography,” which includes a steam-shovel operator paving a street, invites us to “attend to the dynamics of urban experience that normally unfold just beneath the notice of consciousness, and to imagine our way toward an understanding of an emergent . . . order of existence” (Shoemaker 82).



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Who comes is occupied Toward the chest (in the crowd moving       opposite Grasp of me)           In firm overalls The middle-aged man sliding Levers in the steam-shovel cab,— Life (running cable) and swung, back Remotely respond to the gesture before last Of his arms fingers continually— Turning with the cab. But if I (how goes            it?)—              The asphalt edge Loose on the plateau, Horse’s classic height cartless See electric flash of streetcar, The fall is falling from electric burst (NCP 14)

Oppen captures the steam shovel in motion, just as it exposes the “loose” edge of the newly paved street. The poem links the steam shovel and its work to other moments in the history of urban transportation, from horse-drawn carts to electric streetcars to private automobiles, suggesting a continual remaking of the city over time. Perhaps to call attention  to the city’s constructed nature, Oppen inserts a pause—a temporary moment of confusion—between his initial description of the steam shovel and the lesson on transportation history: “But if I (how goes / it?)— / The asphalt edge / Loose on the plateau.” The appearance of the first-person pronoun is significant here because identifiable speaking voices are “carefully absent” from the majority of the poems in Discrete Series (Schimmel 295; 308). The “I” and the pause it announces stall the steam-shovel operator’s momentum and mark a moment of discovery that is further punctuated by the streetcar’s “electric burst.” The disruptions signal that rather than being an unremarkable evolution of urban form, the work of paving the street represents an intentional transformation of the city’s physical environment. Oppen explains the difference between these perspectives and how the poem addresses them in a 1968 interview. He notes that the poem invites readers to witness the urban scene as it is being made and to reflect on the choices and decisions that brought the steam shovel out into the street:

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There’s the asphalt but under it is really what was, or even is, just a prairie, just the raw land. There’s a double consciousness there where you see the road is a road and then begin to see just the raw land . . . It’s just land after all, even though they’ve paved this thing and created all this complication on it. (Swigg 24–25)

The poem focuses on a moment of transition when “raw land” is being converted into a constructed environment, when “what was, or even is, just a prairie” is obscured by the asphalt and the sparks from the streetcar. As Steve Shoemaker explains, the poem transforms the “giant machine of the city,” seemingly inevitable and all-encompassing, into a “thin shell that can be peeled back” to reveal a more fundamental reality (80). Nicholls attributes this portrayal of the city’s constructed nature to Oppen’s Marxist repudiation of the “habitual tendency of modern capitalism to conceal its own processes beneath extravagant surfaces” (15). He points to the “shiny fixed / alternatives” of another poem as a more direct application of this kind of critique. The poem describes the sleek design of modern appliances and the routines of lunch counters as evidence of the obfuscations “big-Business” visits on everyday life. The poem begins:       Thus Hides the Parts—the prudery Of Frigidaire, of Soda-jerking— (NCP 6–7)

Like “raw land” under the asphalt “complication” of the city street, the “parts” of the refrigerator are hidden from view. There is an insult in their being concealed, the poem suggests, because the “prudery” that transforms them into aesthetic objects limits our perceptions of how they work. In this sense, appliance manufacturers, soda jerks, and steam-shovel operators share in similar ideological work:  dissolving the processes of urban capitalism and obscuring the constructed nature of the urban scene into smooth surfaces that obscure alternatives. Forest Gander observes that Oppen’s syntax reinforces this effect:  “The syntax of an Oppen poem rivets our attention to both word and world in an enactment of intentional consciousness, the very act of perception and thought coming into being, of language and feeling arising as experience” (126). The pace of city life makes it difficult to maintain this kind of poetic attention. Michael Davidson offers a similar reading in his introduction to Oppen’s New Collected



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Poems. Focusing on the way language works and fails to work in Discrete Series, he suggests that Oppen refuses “the metaphysical lure of totality” implicit in urban capitalism’s “extravagant surfaces” (xxx). Davidson argues that Oppen uses the hesitations of everyday speech—for example, the two occurrences of “thus” in “Thus / Hides”—to draw attention to the ways language affects our experience of the world (xxxii–xxxiii). As he explains, “Oppen is less interested in what is discovered than he is in the condition or mood in which things can be apprehended, in which things constellate a world” (xxxi, italics in original). By presenting the parts of the city as parts rather than allowing them to remain combined in a cleanly unified scene, Oppen encourages us to adjust our typical modes of perception. Oppen describes his first impressions of New York in a 1970 radio interview. He and Mary sailed to the city from Detroit (Oppen, Meaning:  A Life 83). Comparing the city to San Francisco, where they had lived in close proximity to his wealthy family before relocating east, he notes that New  York seemed “artificial” and “abstract”: I had come to New York—we had come to New York—from San Francisco with the sense of the necessity of what one encountered, what one saw, the reality of the world… I mean, the mountains are extremely real to one in this place. One imagines New York City dwellers are really involved most of the time with artificial concepts, with the game, with the definitions of how you do things, and very little with material objects. (Swigg 42)

If the geography of San Francisco made the city seem “extremely real,” New York, by contrast, struck Oppen as a place where knowing the rules of “the game” was more important than trusting one’s own perceptions. Unsatisfied with the city’s aesthetic possibilities, the couple left New  York after a year to attempt to create a less materialistic “style of life for [them]selves” in France (Oppen, Meaning: A Life 121). The fissures between New York’s “artificial concepts” and “material objects” were even more apparent in 1933 when the Oppens returned to the city. The Depression, which struck while the couple was living in the French countryside, had changed “how you do things” so much that making a satisfying life had become nearly impossible for many residents. Mary describes the “overwhelming emergency” they found when they returned to New York in her autobiography: “The city had an air of disaster; the unemployed were the refugees who had exhausted their resources and did not know where to turn” (151). As a result, she explains, “people were frightened and helpless and in many parts of the country irregular ways of obtaining food seemed the only

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way to avoid starvation. The propaganda of fascism and the authoritarian state appealed to many who saw no other solution to the economic collapse of the United States” (147).1 For a time after their return, the Oppens worked as organizers for the Communist party, first in Brooklyn and then in Utica, New  York. Oppen recalls this work in “Blood from the Stone,” a four-part poem published in The Materials that was his first new poem since Discrete Series (Selected Letters 26). In the second part of the poem, he probes his perceptions of the urban scene for evidence of what it might conceal: The Thirties. And A spectre In every street, In all inexplicable crowds, what they did then Is still their lives. As thirty in a group— To Home Relief—the unemployed— Within the city’s intricacies Are these lives. Belief? What do we believe To live with? Answer. Not invent—just answer—all That verse attempts. That we can somehow add to each other? —Still our lives. (NCP 52)

The “city’s intricacies,” which Oppen explains here as the lives of individuals in a crowd, mirror the “complication[s]‌” of the steam shovel paving the street in his earlier poem “Who comes is occupied.” The poet struggles to distinguish “these lives” from the composite “spectre” of the urban scene. The questions he poses— “Belief? / What do we believe / To live with?”—and his tentative answer—“That we can somehow add to each other?”—recall the critical pauses of Discrete Series and prefigure the ethical commitments of “Of Being Numerous.” “Blood from the Stone” produces a “condition or mood in which things can be apprehended,” to use Davidson’s terms, rather than providing an objective description of city.2 It reinforces the claim Oppen asserts in Discrete Series that urban environments are constructed rather than inevitable and suggests that the extraordinary crisis of the Depression is a consequence of prior decisions. The poem centers on



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the degree to which the circumstances of the Depression constrain residents’ abilities to conceive the possibility of producing alternatives to the status quo through collective action. The difficulties of perception and action are central to “The Building of the Skyscraper,” as well. Unlike in “Blood from a Stone,” where the “spectre” of poverty inhibits the production of alternative modes of being, here the artificiality of the urban scene is disorienting in and of itself. O, the tree, growing from the sidewalk— It has a little life, sprouting Little green buds Into the culture of the streets. We look back Three hundred years and see bare land. And suffer vertigo. (NCP 149)

The “bare land” Oppen identifies under the “culture of the streets” recalls the “loose” edge the steam-shovel operator exposes in Discrete Series. It signals that the urban environment has been constructed in a certain way to serve particular interests. Much like the precursor poems “Who comes is occupied” and “Bolt / In the frame / Of the building,” the poem suggests that “look[ing] back” at the particular history of the city’s development rather than taking its present form for granted creates opportunities for intervention. Also like the earlier poems, “The Building of the Skyscraper” focuses on one element in the scene, a “steel worker on the girder” who has “learned not to look down.” Oppen reveals him on his perch in the poem’s first stanza: The steel worker on the girder Learned not to look down, and does his work And there are words we have learned Not to look at, Not to look for substance Below them. But we are on the verge Of vertigo. (NCP 149)

Isolated from the building under construction, the worker is a physical manifestation of the precariousness of immersion in the city. The girder he stands on provides further evidence of the constructed nature of the city and the

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work done to produce it, including the discursive work of learning which words to avoid when describing urban reality. The girder also alludes to a two-line poem by Charles Reznikoff that Oppen reflects on repeatedly in his daybooks, letters, and interviews.3 In Reznikoff ’s poem, the girder is a remnant of a building that has been demolished: “Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies / a girder, still itself among the rubbish” (The Poems 107). Oppen ascribes a “revelatory” power to Reznikoff ’s “girder”: I think that poetry which is of any value is always revelatory. Not that I think it reveals or could reveal Everything, but it must reveal something (I would like to say ‘Something’ and for the first time) . . . One can seldom describe the meaning—but sometimes one has stum-bled on the statement made in another way. As Parmenides’ “the Same is think and be” is Charles Reznikoff ’s “. . . the girder, still Itself among the rubble.” (Davidson, “An Adequate Vision” 14)

Oppen notes that Reznikoff presents the “girder” as identical with itself rather than as a sign for something else or as a component part of a larger entity. His rendering of the girder enables us to see it differently than we might if we visited the site in person. The poem enables us to recognize there is something uncanny about the girder that we typically gloss over. Like the steel worker in “The Building of the Skyscraper,” we are “propelled into a space on the edge” of our typical experience (DuPlessis, Blue Studios 197). Reznikoff ’s girder compels us to recognize that our perceptions of the city and the attention we pay to their constituent elements constrain the uses we make of urban resources. Oppen explains the “revelatory” effect of the girder as a function of syntactical inversion: SYNTAX; here a two line poem in which the syntax is arranged to control the order of disclosure upon which the poem depends (Rezi’s Girder). It is simply an inverted sentence. The inversion and the prosody place an emphasis on the word “girder” without which the poem would have no discernible meaning. (Davidson, “An Adequate Vision” 29)

The girder is surprising—in the poem and in the reality Reznikoff describes— because it is separated syntactically from the structures of which it is a constituent part. Seeing the girder as an entity in itself rather than integrating it, immediately, into the larger scene confirms what Oppen insists we have been trained not to acknowledge, namely that the city has been constructed and reconstructed over time to serve changing purposes. By calling attention to urban impermanence,



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Reznikoff ’s poem punctures habitual modes of perception and signals that the future form of the city is yet to be determined.

The questions of urban ideology: Oppen and Castells Manuel Castells pursues a related line of inquiry about the relations between perception and urban form in his 1972 book The Urban Question. Assessing American and European urban policy and planning from the 1930s to the 1960s, he writes, “If there has been an accelerated development of the urban thematic, this is due, very largely, to its imprecision, which makes it possible to group together under this heading a whole mass of questions felt, but not understood, whose identification (as ‘urban’) makes them less disturbing:  one can dismiss them as the natural misdeeds of the environment” (The Urban Question 73). Like Oppen and Reznikoff in their attention to the material realities hidden beneath the city’s smooth surfaces, Castells argues that the word “urban” has been used as a stand-in in public discourse for more complex, interrelated problems. This “urban ideology” fools us into dismissing the feelings of “vertigo” we experience in the city as outside our control. Rather than recognizing the circumstances that cause our discomfort as consequences of decisions about how to allocate power and resources, we experience them as “natural misdeeds of the environment.” Castells argues that focusing on the urban environment when discussing social problems conceals the exploitative nature of urban capitalism (The Urban Question 298–299). Robert Beauregard makes a similar point in applying Castells’s analysis to the American scene, noting that the discourse of “[u]‌rban decline” has provided “symbolic cover for more wide-ranging fears and anxieties [and] a spatial fix for our more generalized insecurities and complaints” (22). For Beauregard, the discourse of urban decline is particularly corrosive when it blocks the emergence of “more radical critique[s] of American society” (22). Castells makes a similar point, nothing that “[t]he social efficacity [sic] of this [urban] ideology derives from the fact that it describes the everyday problems experienced by people, while offering an interpretation of them in terms of natural evolution, from which the division into antagonistic classes is absent” (The Urban Question 85). The pervasiveness of false narratives about the causes of urban crisis ensures that residents who are most adversely affected by what the urban ideology conceals—Castells’s “antagonistic classes” and Oppen’s “inexplicable crowds”—come to accept their experiences as inevitable.

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Castells draws on Louis Althusser’s argument that ideologies structure not only our experiences but also our awareness of ourselves as subjects. Ideology is “material” to our self-awareness, in Althusser’s view, because we reproduce its effects through our participation in larger social systems. The net effect of this inscription is a double concealment: “what seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology [and] what really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it” (118). We think consciousness is prior to the practices and beliefs we encounter in society, but our confidence in this independence is false because our sense of ourselves arises from the fact of our being enmeshed in society. Building on Althusser’s insight, Castells argues that since “we are prisoners of . . . everyday language” in this way, locking ourselves into false consciousness even as we try to identity the structures that impede our lives, we need new critical tools: But let there be no misunderstanding. It is not a question of changing one term for another by bringing it closer to a language that is more familiar or more sympathetic (in terms of ideological affinity). It is a question of ensuring, in a parallel way, the development of certain concepts (and therefore not of ‘words,’ but of tools of theoretical work always referring back necessarily to a certain place in a certain theoretical field) and the intelligibility of these concepts in relation to everyday experience, by showing the community as a real object of reference between a particular concept and a particular ideological notion. (The Urban Question 441)

What matters for Castells is developing an approach that links theory to practice in order to subvert the urban ideology and preserve community as a “real object of reference.” Such an approach would recognize, for example, that the meanings we assign to cities emerge through “socialization of the consumption process through urban services [and] struggles over those services” (Castells, The City and the Grassroots 66). Further, it would expose the actions and decisions that constrain collective political action. Language is an inadequate tool for this work because its entanglement in the operations of ideology produces distortion rather than clarity. Oppen shares Castells’s suspicion of ideology and his understanding of the contradictory nature of urban capitalism. However, as Nicholls argues, he “associate[s]‌poetry with the acknowledgement of a certain indeterminacy and resistance that might save politics from ideology and mere ‘argument’ ” (53). While Oppen acknowledges that language is susceptible to corruption by



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ideology, his poetic practice points to the way that particular uses of language can prepare physical and intellectual space for collective action. He articulates his commitment to language’s disruptive potential by comparing the kinds of thinking poetry requires with the thinking involved in other modes of engagement with the world. In “Rationality” (This In Which), for example, he describes the “shock” of automated manufacturing through the eyes of a young workman. In the factories, and the young workman Elated among the men Is homesick In that instant Of the shock Of the press In which the manufactured part New in its oil On the steel bed is caught In the obstinate links Of cause, like the earth tilting To its famous Summers—that ‘part of consciousness’ . . . (NCP 136)

The poem trails off at “consciousness,” as if to signal the limits of rationality for grasping the “shock” of the instant in which the “manufactured part” comes into being. Dripping with the oil that lubricated its pressing, the part makes the workman “homesick.” The manufacturing process alienates him from his own skills and, in so doing, distances him from the “massive heart / Of the present.” The factory operates according to an “accumulation of knowledge” rather than through the craft and ingenuity of individual workers. Because the application of skill is no longer necessary on the factory floor, time is compressed into repeatable instants that arrest the “tilting” of the earth toward “its famous Summers” and numb the workman to the possibility of human emotion. The cold “steel bed” of rationality that dominates the factory robs the young workman of the excitement that brought him to the job. In “Debt,” a precursor poem, Oppen links the “part / of consciousness” that concludes “Rationality” with skilled handicraft. Published in The Materials,

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the poem charts a trajectory from the workbench to the factory and from the artisan to the engineer. “Consciousness” appears at the beginning of the poem rather than at the end and is connected directly with labor. As James Longenbach observes, “Debt” displays a greater attention to language and line than “Rationality.” The poem encourages us to “hear language at work” through lines that “emphasize rhythmical units rather than complete syntactical units” (40–45). The contradictory nature of the worker’s experience emerges in the oscillation of “perfect” and “imperfect” in the poem. Rather than carrying the residues of care and skill, the “manufactured part” holds only flaws, oily imperfections that are ignored so long as they remain within the tolerances that allow it to function properly as part of a larger machine. The manufactured part— New! And imperfect. Not as perfect As the die they made Which was imperfect. Checked To tolerance Among the pin ups, notices, conversion charts, And skills, so little said of it. (NCP 60)

Though they are “New!” the machine-produced parts are unremarkable because they lack the mark of human making. “Oppen’s notion of craftsmanship,” as Tim Woods explains, focuses on the “fingerprint of care in the handmade object, the endowment of an object in the world with personal and intimate knowledge” (459). The rationality of the factory replaces the skill and virtue of the craftsman’s bench, “ ‘that part / Of consciousness / That works,’ ” with the detritus of abstracted attention, “pin ups, notices, conversion charts.” The careful work of shaping raw materials into useful products is replaced with calculation and calibration, kinds of engagement that alienate the worker from the production process.4 The poems that follow “Debt” in The Materials cover similar ground. “Product,” for example, concerns boat building in New England. “Fresh from the dry tools / And the dry New England hands,” wooden fishing boats provide a fitting contrast to the manufactured parts of the modern factory. The poem describes the relationships between the shapes of the boats and the shapes of the lives to which they correspond. Oppen notes the “beauty” of the way the boats



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fit their environments, “find[ing]” and “accept[ing]” the waves, and recognizes that they are artifacts of attempts by New Englanders to make themselves at home in the world, to make their worlds “habitable” (NCP 61). In “Workman,” Oppen makes an explicit connection between the work of inhabiting the world and the work of creating and interpreting poetic language. The poem compares carpentry, which Oppen practiced as a profession while living in Mexico, with the activity of a hawk on the hunt. Leaving the house each dawn I see the hawk Flagrant over the driveway. In his claws That dot, that comma Is the broken animal: the dangling small beast knows The burden that he is: he has touched The hawk’s drab feathers. But the carpenter’s is a culture Of fitting, of firm dimensions, Of post and lintel. Quietly the roof lies That the carpenter has finished . . . (NCP 62)

Like the boats of New England, the finished roof exists “quietly” as part of the broader landscape: it is expertly made and structurally sound. The carpenter’s “culture / Of fitting, of firm dimensions” contrasts with the clutter and lazy “tolerance” of the automated factory portrayed in “Rationality” and “Debt.” What matters most about the roof is that it has been made by hand. The “post and lintel” that support the roof are parts of the larger whole. Their bond, the way they fit together, is mirrored in the relationship between the hawk and its prey. The prey “knows / The burden that he is” to the hawk: its death sustains the hawk just as the carpenter’s roof and the New Englander’s boats sustain their communities. In each case, the bond is forged by hand rather than by machine, by craft rather than abstract rationality. The “broken animal” the hawk carries in its claws is “that dot, that comma” that fits it into the syntax of the larger scene. As punctuation, the animal resembles the carpenter’s “post and lintel,” the structures he uses to fit the parts of the home he is building together. Lying “quietly” beneath the sky, the carpenter’s roof links the human act of building with more general processes of being in the world. The poem creates a conceptual space in which the activities of the carpenter and the hawk overlap. The overlap occurs in language. Oppen ascribes a similar function to the “meaning of words” in a late poem published in a special issue of Paideuma. “The Poem,” as it is titled, describes

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language as a “light” that reveals and constitutes the world at the same time, connecting the poet, through his use of language, to the universe as a whole. As both a material and a technology, words are elements of the world and tools the poet uses to make his way. A poetry of the meaning of words And a bond with the universe I think there is no light in the world but the world And I think there is light (NCP 309)

As in “Workman,” the work of developing a “bond with the universe” here is delicate. Using the “light” shed by poetic language requires the same precision as fitting post to lintel. As Oppen explains in “The Mind’s Own Place,” poetic language is more suited to this work than prose: “It is possible to say anything in abstract prose, but a great many things one believes or would like to believe or thinks he believes will not substantiate themselves in the concrete materials of a poem” (Selected Prose 32). By contrast with Castells’s distrust of language, then, Oppen enacts a commitment to the possibility that poetry can function as a tool for thinking and making. By exposing compromised logic, such as Castells’s urban ideology, and revealing faulty correspondences that have been established in other discourses between words and their meanings, poetry creates space for alternative practices. “Truth,” in other words, as Oppen observes in “Leviathan,” the final poem of The Materials, “also is the pursuit of it” (NCP 89, italics added). Whereas the city poems of Discrete Series center on poetry’s usefulness as a tool for pursuing the truth of experience, those of The Materials and This In Which suggest that making poems is equivalent to other forms of inhabiting the world.

The possibilities of poetic language: Oppen and Heidegger Oppen’s exploration of poetic language’s potential to disrupt ideology culminates in “Route” and “Of Being Numerous,” long serial poems published in 1968. “Route” conveys a pessimistic view. As Nicholls notes, the poem catalogues the deterioration of American cities after the Second World War with a “prescient grasp” of associated social fragmentation (98). Oppen writes, “We are at the beginning of a radical depopulation of the earth // Cataclysm . . . cataclysm of the plains, jungles, the cities” (NCP 201). Though we “try to understand” and “remain



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together,” we are increasingly isolated from one another (NCP 194). Oppen sees strengthening communities as a more urgent task than improving infrastructure or resolving political debates. Like Castells in his research methods, he aims for a “limited, limiting clarity” in his use of language in “Route” that allows the “subjects” of thought and discourse to be distinguished from ideological effects (NCP 193). He critiques the relationships between language and ideology by recounting a story he heard as a serviceman during the Second World war from Pierre Adam, a “journeyman mason” living near Alsace: During the occupation the Germans had declared Alsace a part of Greater Germany. Therefore they had drafted Alsatian men into the German army. Many men, learning in their own way that they were to be called, dug a hole. The word became a part of the language: faire une trou. Some men were in those holes as long as two and three years. It was necessary that someone should know where those holes were; in winter it was impossible for a man to come out of his hole without leaving footprints in the snow. While snow was actually falling, however, a friend could come to the hole with food and other help. Pierre, whom many people trusted, knew where some two dozen of those holes were. (NCP 195, italics in original)

Adam’s story reflects a world transformed by crisis. Home has been redefined as enemy territory. Living underground to avoid an oppressive regime, residents are deprived of the right to self-determination and the power to resist. The Alsatians found a way to survive by relying on one another rather than on an external infrastructure. Indeed, the tunnels only work as shelters from the regime because neighbors, including Adam, conspire with the builders and visit them regularly with “food and other help.” Without Adam and other collaborators, the men in the tunnels would be forced to “come out of [their] hole[s]‌,” exposing themselves and their families to Nazi aggression. Oppen’s use of the story suggests he sees building community as the only effective response to the coming crisis. As the story suggests, the phrase faire une trou carries multiple meanings.5 In a literal sense, the word “trou” means a hole, ditch, or trough, so the phrase describes the Alsatian’s act of digging tunnels in the ground. The phrase “faire son trou” also has a more general meaning of making one’s way in the world. In this sense, it echoes the idea Oppen introduces in The Materials and This In Which that activities like digging ditches, building houses, or making poems are ways of inhabiting, and thereby creating small segments of the world. The relation between the literal meaning and the colloquial phrase, which Oppen emphasizes by noting that the phrase had become “part of their language,” suggests that he views the tunnel-digging as an event of language, as well. He observes later in

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“Route” that Adam and his neighbors approached their situation “in the manner of poetry” rather than losing hope in the face of crisis: Imagine a man in the ditch, The wheels of the overturned wreck Still spinning— I don’t mean he despairs, I mean if he does not He sees in the manner of poetry. (NCP 198)

In these lines and throughout “Route,” Oppen makes a distinction between circumstances, “the overturned wreck” or the chaos of the Second World War, and ways of perceiving or approaching them. In “Route” as in The Materials and This In Which, he suggests that poetic language provides a means of managing difficult circumstances and converting them into opportunities for survival in community. Seeing “in the manner of poetry” provides an alternative to isolation and despair. The story of the Alsatian tunnels suggests that Oppen sees collective action as the most effective way to address human vulnerability. He extends this reflection in the final sections of “Route” through a direct assessment of city planning: Department of Plants and Structures—obsolete, the old name In this city, of the public works Tho we meant to entangle ourselves in the roots of the world An unexpected and forgotten spoor, all but indescribable shards To owe nothing to fortune, to chance, nor by the power of his heart Or her heart to have made these things sing But the benevolence of the real Tho there is no longer shelter in the earth, round helpless belly Or hope among the pipes and broken works ‘Substance itself which is the subject of all our planning’ And by this we are carried into the incalculable (NCP 201)

The urge to plan begins in an attempt to avoid the dangers of contingency and reflects a desire to live in such a way as “to owe nothing to fortune, to chance.” As in the earlier poem “Rationality,” where the logic of interchangeable parts



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alienates the young workman, “planning” isolates the individual from “his heart / Or her heart” and makes the “benevolence of the real” inaccessible. Indeed, planning and public works fail to protect us from vulnerability because the ideology on which they rely, the idea that vulnerability can be negated through rationally ordered actions, is false. For Steven Shoemaker, the critique of planning in “Route” demonstrates that cities are not “mathematical” models that can be understood at the level of abstract thought (65). The poem, and Oppen’s city poems more generally, invites readers to “attend to the dynamics of urban experience that normally unfold just beneath the notice of consciousness” (82). To return to the language of Discrete Series, “Route” describes the overlapping relations of the man-made and natural worlds, the asphalt and the “bare land” at its “loose” edge. It suggests that the city’s engineered surfaces are less reliable than the “roots of the world” as a foundation for well-being because they can be easily shattered into “indescribable shards” through neglect or the interference of external powers. Oppen identifies Heidegger as the source of his reflection on planning (Selected Letters 136; NCP 391).6 His examination of planning’s attempts to eliminate human vulnerability mirrors the philosopher’s discussions of acts of “building” and “dwelling.” Heidegger compares the two activities’ purposes and limitations in a 1951 lecture on the German housing shortage. He diagnoses the shortage as a failure of the German people to “commit themselves to something larger than their own mortal selves” and argues that it persists because German architects, planners, and politicians are approaching the problem as one of resources rather than as one of collective action (Harries 106). They are focusing building, the construction of housing infrastructure, in other words, when they should be focusing on dwelling, the act of making a life in relation to others. Dwelling gives purpose and meaning to building by orienting construction projects and other human activity to largerorder goals. As Heidegger explains, while we “attain to dwelling only by means of building, building is not merely a means and a way toward dwelling” (Poetry, Language, Thought 143–144). Dwelling requires considerations beyond material survival. Applying these definitions, Heidegger argues that Germany could address its housing shortage more effectively by defining it as a problem of making and inhabiting the country in common. Approaching the problem in this way would make it easier for city leaders to involve the German people in devising new ways to live in community with one another. The critical thrust of Heidegger’s lecture on the housing shortage is that the spaces of thought and imagination we create in order to dwell in common are as important to our survival as the physical spaces we inhabit. Like the carpenter’s

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joining of post and lintel in Oppen’s “Workman,” Heidegger’s practices of dwelling establish “firm dimensions” for human experience while at the same situating individuals in relation to one another and the larger world. Dwelling has relevance for my analysis of Oppen’s city poetry because it points to the ways linguistic frames contribute to the realities we experience. How we define the environments we inhabit—for example, whether we consider a skyscraper primarily as the culmination of human ingenuity or the product of laborers perched on girders—matters for how we experience and use them. Heidegger links practices of dwelling to poetic language in essays on the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin.7 While language is not so “transparent,” in his view, that it allows us to “straight away and definitively” engage with the world as it exists, neither is it so opaque or freighted with preexisting meanings that it traps us in false subjectivity (Poetry, Language, Thought 214). As Heidegger explains in “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” “Only where there is language, is there world … Language is not a tool at [humanity’s] disposal, rather it is that event which disposes of the supreme possibility of human existence” (Existence and Being 300). Language initiates the processes through which we become conscious of the world. As such, it has the capacity to reinforce our shared humanity and connect us to the environments where we dwell or, through distortion and concealment, to isolate us from one another and alienate us from the world. Poetry represents the quintessential use of language for purposes of dwelling because it is through poetry that we exercise our abilities to propose, measure, and explore the world and our relations to the things of the earth (Poetry, Language, Thought 226). As Heidegger writes elsewhere, “Poetry rouses the appearance of the unreal and of dream in the face of the palpable and clamorous reality, in which we believe ourselves at home. And yet in just the reverse manner, what the poet says and undertakes to be is the real” (Existence and Being 310). What seems unreal in poetry is an act of recalibration, of returning us to our embeddedness in the world and our interdependence with one another. More than bricks or concrete, then, language is the material we use to construct the environments we share in common. The “this in which” we exist, to use Oppen’s words, is an arrangement of places and things we have established together. Heidegger urges us to consider the possibility that, like the pedestrian at “loose” edge of the asphalt or the worker high up on the “girder” in Oppen’s poems, we have the capacity, in and through language, to make the world of our experience different than it is. The problems of distortion and concealment Castells and Althusser identify in ideology exist in Heidegger’s theory of poetic language, as well, but they matter



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in a different way. While poetic language is subject to misuse in Heidegger’s account, its limitations are not irredeemable. As he explains, “The pure and the ordinary are both equally something said. Hence the world as word never gives any direct guarantee as to whether it is an essential word or a counterfeit. On the contrary—an essential word often looks in its simplicity like an unessential one. And on the other hand that which is dressed up to look like the essential, is only something recited by heart or repeated” (Existence and Being 299). According to this definition, what Castells calls urban ideology is an instance of Heidegger’s “dressed up” words, false because it is false rather than because it is language. Because language is dynamic and changing, a process rather than an object, it permits us to create and recreate the worlds of our experience despite instances when the ordinary is made to masquerade as the pure. We retain agency in our uses of language because each time we exchange words with someone or articulate a thought, we bring the world into being in a particular way. The process is continual. While Heidegger would agree with Castells that what we say and write about cities often fails to correspond to what we experience in them, he would include poetic language alongside Castells’s critical research tools as a mode of engagement we can use to examine the “substance” beneath the surfaces of everyday life. When Oppen suggests in “Route” that “seeing in the manner of poetry” is different from seeing in the manner of architects, planners, and theorists, he merges Castells’s concern that the language of the city has been corrupted by ideology beyond “the limits of reason” with Heidegger’s insistence that poetic language provides a means for collective survival (NCP 202).

The “curious” languages of New York Oppen takes New York City as a field of inquiry in 1965’s “A Language of New York” and 1968’s “Of Being Numerous.” With forty sections compared to eight in “A Language of New  York,” “Of Being Numerous” expands from exploration of a single city to analysis of economics, politics, and language on a global scale. It reframes the urban questions of “A Language of New York” as questions about the “curious” properties of poetic language and how “seeing in the manner of poetry” might contribute to the enrichment of urban communities. Both poems take up the central claim of Heidegger’s theories of language and dwelling, the idea that we create and recreate the world we inhabit by describing it to ourselves and one another. If Castells’s critique of urban ideology and his argument that language is secondary to economic power represent one response to Heidegger’s claim

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as it applies to the urban scene, Oppen’s city poems represent another. Rather than merely exposing what language conceals through research into underlying structures, “A Language of New  York” and “Of Being Numerous” measure the extent to which poetic insights about the city might contribute to stronger communities. As Nicholls explains, the poems disclose the “texture of thinking as it takes shape,” documenting the material effects of urban crisis in order to suggest that urban form is collectively chosen rather than fixed or inevitable (72). Oppen engages readers in processes of inquiry that require a “readiness to experience the ruptures and possibilities of our place and time” (DuPlessis, Blue Studios 196). His city poems focus our attention on the “instant of meaning” in which “the truth of what is” emerges (Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought 72). Oppen explains his goals for “A Language of New  York” and “Of Being Numerous” in an October 4, 1965, letter to DuPlessis, then a graduate student at Columbia. Referring to all of his poetry as a single “project,” he summarizes the purpose of each of his books in a short phrase. He defines Discrete Series mathematically as “a series in which each term is empirically justified rather than derived from the preceding term.” The Materials is a “solid” restatement of themes. This In Which, the collection where “A Language of New York” first appears, represents a transformation of the project developed in the first two collections:  it “contains some private amusements in that it means also the achievement of form; that the materials in achieving solidity, form, appear in the light of the miraculous.” Oppen’s summary of This In Which suggests the book offers a different experience than his earlier work. Rather than confronting readers with ideas about the city, it leads them to perceptions and encounters that occur “in the light of the miraculous.” He identifies Of Being Numerous, then titled “Another language,” as an expansion of “A Language of New York”: “Another language—is imperfect. Has to be, tho I don’t mean it’s not my fault. But to being: a looser, a more commodious language, to make possible at least one more book—.” A  postscript adds clarity:  “There’s nothing very complex [in the book], nothing requiring tremendous aesthetic argument: we need courage, not ‘audacity’—Pound’s word—but plain courage. To say what it’s like out there . . . out here” (Selected Letters 122). What was “out here” for Oppen in New York in 1965 was a city once again in crisis. “Another language” and the finished poem “Of Being Numerous” document his attempts to describe what he sees and experiences in the city without aestheticizing or overcomplicating and to ground his observations in the city’s actual substance. Oppen describes the poetic procedure this inquiry requires in section 4 of “A Language of New York.” Proposing to capture words “one by one proceeding



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// Carefully” in order to restore them “to meaning / And to sense,” he tests the truth of his engagement with the city by examining the degree to which the words he uses obscure the “mineral fact” of what the poem describes (NCP 114; 164). While he recognizes the potential for distortion Castells identifies in his critique of urban ideology, he proposes to intervene by treating words as “enemies” that require skeptical interrogation (NCP 116). They are “Ghosts / Which have run mad / In the subways” in the poem, elements of the urban environment that evade stable signification (NCP 116). Oppen reflects on the degree to which poetry can serve as an effective means for treating words as “ghosts” and “enemies” in this sense in a daybook entry: I do not think that a poem can be filled with meaning by being filled, like a bag or a jug, with words. On the contrary is the poem, the structure of meaning which restores the words to clarity. The word is the burden, the words are the burden, of the line which it must bear lift up into meaning. (Selected Prose 68–69, underlining and strikethrough in original)

The “burden” of poetic language is the burden of making meaning from experience through a process of disclosure. Williams makes a similar point about poems as systems of meaning in notes for a prospective Book VI of his long city poem Paterson: “Words are the burden of poems, poems are made of [words]” (P 237). Poetry disciplines the mind to dwell in the possibilities of meanings that are just coming into being and liberates Oppen and Williams from relying on received knowledge or the implications of ideology. For Michael Heller, the procedures of careful writing and rewriting Oppen describes in “A Language of New  York” and enacts in the daybooks show his persistence in the face of crisis and despair. They show the poet willing himself into a posture of curiosity about the relationships between words and their meanings and exploring the transformative possibilities of taking an “open stance toward phenomena” (Heller 149). “Of Being Numerous” tests the limits of the poet’s curiosity about the city and, as Oren Izenberg suggests, questions “what forms of attention toward others might be adequate” for intervening in its cycles of crisis (85). Unlike the other seven parts of “A Language of New York,” which recur with only minor revisions in the expanded poem, section 4 is wholly transformed in “Of Being Numerous.” The revised version, now section 17, presents the work of restoring words to “meaning / And to sense” in precarious terms. Intensifying his earlier references to “enemies” and “ghosts,” Oppen describes the language of New York as a “ferocious mumbling, in public / Of rootless speech” (NCP 173). If section 4 of “A Language of New York” examines the correspondence between

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words and the urban reality they describe, section 17 of “Of Being Numerous” focuses instead on the difficulties language introduces in human relationships: The roots of words Dim in the subways 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 (NCP 173)

Words lose meaning as they circulate through the urban environment, and this contributes to a growing madness in the city itself. Oppen describes an unidentified speaker who “wants to say / His life is real” but fails in his efforts to communicate the value of his experience. The best he can muster is a nihilistic joke: “There is nobody here but us chickens.” As Nicholls observes, the “urban landscape [of “Of Being Numerous”] registers a disturbing loss of historical and linguistic depth” (84). Indeed, as Oppen’s revision of section 4 of “A Language of New  York” suggests, by the time he composed the expanded poem he was beginning to lose faith in the possibility that poetic language provides a means for intervening in the circumstances of urban crisis. His pessimism is perhaps most evident in section 26 of “Of Being Numerous,” the longest section in the series and one that does not appear in any form in “A Language of New York.” Seeking a purpose for poetry in view of catastrophic world events, Oppen compares American cities in the 1960s to the European cities he encountered during the Second World War, a strategy he also uses in “Route.” He describes what it feels like to be a poet in an atmosphere of crisis and concludes that “We stand on // That denial of death that paved the cities, / Paved the cities // Generation / For generation” (NCP 178). Urban experience is thoroughly alienating, according to this view, because it is founded on a refusal to accept human mortality. The “denial of death” Oppen witnesses in these lines shows that cities cannot provide assurance, in and of themselves, that humanity will be protected from harm. In fact, as the poem suggests, cities are merely places



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where lives are “paved” over generation after generation in fruitless ideological attempts to forestall the inevitable. The remainder of “Of Being Numerous” tests the extent to which poetic engagement with the city is doomed to replicate this perverse and debilitating cycle. For Marjorie Perloff, the meditation on poetics in sections 26 and 27 represent the climax of the poem. Noting that the first line of section 27, “It is difficult now to speak of poetry—,” signals a shift in Oppen’s perspective on the limitations of language, she suggests that Oppen’s pessimism about the distortions and madness of the city is balanced by his commitment to addressing the material effects of urban crisis through poetic inquiry. In Perloff ’s reading, Oppen’s renews his inquiry in section 27 by outlining a process that connects personal experiences to broader social and political dynamics. It begins in his description of poetry as a form of autobiography, “One would have to tell what happens in a life, what choices present themselves, what the world is for us,” and continues in terms that echo Heidegger’s dwelling: “I would want to talk 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” (NCP 180). Oppen follows-up his description of these dimensions of poetic language with a reflection on craft that recalls the writing practice he outlines in “A Language of New York”: 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 (NCP 180)

The recursive structure of section 27—modulating between poetry to prose and probing unanswered questions—mirrors the “fits and starts by means of which [Oppen’s] consciousness comes to terms with its new conditions” (Perloff, “The Shipwreck of the Singular” 197). The section and the poem as a whole document the “texture of [Oppen’s] thinking as it takes shape,” disclosing the personal dimensions of the city’s ongoing crises (Nicholls 72). Perloff concludes that “Of Being Numerous” is a “testimony to survival, to the ‘curious’ ability of the poet’s ‘numbers’ to interlock” rather than a thoroughgoing call for social transformation (“The Shipwreck of the Singular” 204). Indeed, she implies that the fact that section 27 descends into the confines of a rough-walled basement

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room suggests that Oppen’s attempts to “see the one thing” that can transform the city are ultimately ineffective. Like Perloff, Burton Hatlen identifies Oppen’s reflection on poetics in section 27 as a crucial moment in “Of Being Numerous.” Rather than pain or despair, however, he sees an affirmation of the power of poetry to bring isolated individuals together in its poetic engagement with the circumstances of urban crisis. The language of the section is “commodious” rather than constraining or pessimistic, in Hatlen’s view, because it initiates a process of inquiry that extends beyond the page. He reads the “marks of the forms, the old marks of wood in the concrete” Oppen sees in the basement room as “imprints” of the craftsman who built the room and argues that they show the room is less isolated from the community than its basement location suggests (Hatlen 279; NCP 180). Indeed, as Hatlen explains, “in the moment that [Oppen] looks at what the workman has made and acknowledges him as a brother, the poet  also implicitly passes beyond his solitude [and] achieves a measure of transcendence which makes possible a final affirmation of the poet’s singularity” (280). What Hatlen calls the poet’s singularity is the “one thing” Oppen discovers through the process of inquiry the poem documents. It is a perspective on the world that fuses the autobiographical and the documentary modes Oppen introduces in section 27. As Oppen explains late “Statement on Poetics”: “I am talking of experience, and THAT is to say, I am talking of emotion. Impossible to doubt the actualness of one’s own consciousness:  but therefore consciousness in itself, of itself, by itself carries the principle of ACTUALNESS for it, itself, is actual beyond doubt” (Selected Prose 49). Hatlen applies Oppen’s insight about the “actualness” of consciousness as it relates to external reality to “Of Being Numerous” as whole. He claims that by documenting the marks of our efforts to dwell together, the poem shows that cities are “permeated with our humanity” (287). Further, he argues that the poem shows how “language incarnates our humanity,” even in difficult circumstances, and thus affirms that careful, poetic engagement with the city can contribute to the enrichment of our collective existence (292; italics in original). “A Language of New York” and “Of Being Numerous” conclude with the same quotation from an April 19, 1864, letter from Walt Whitman to his mother. The quotation builds to the word “curious” set on a line by itself: The capital grows upon one in time, especially as they have got the great figure on top of it now, and you can see it very well. It is a great bronze figure, the Genius of Liberty I suppose. It looks wonderful toward sundown. I love to go



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and look at it. The sun when it is nearly down shines on the headpiece and it dazzles and glistens like a big star; it looks quite curious. . .’ (NCP 119; 188)

The quotation comes from a longer letter in which Whitman describes debates in Congress over expelling members who challenged Lincoln’s prosecution of the Civil War. Whitman expresses disappointment with the quality of the debate in lines Oppen does not use:  “I went down to the Capitol the nights of the debate on the expulsion of Mr Long last week . . . but the speaking & ability of the members is nearly always on a low scale, it is very curious & melancholy to see such a rate of talent there, such tremendous times as these” (Correspondence 211). Given the “tremendous times” and “magnificent hall,” Whitman expects thoughtful arguments about the future of the Union. He finds instead procedural maneuvering and rhetoric about the instability of language. Representative Fernando Wood, former mayor of New York City, for example, reads quotations from dozens of speeches and articles by Lincoln supporters into the record in an attempt to claim that the president and his party were attempting to “exterminate, destroy, rid of existence, extinguish the men, women, and children of the South” (2). Whitman finds it “curious & melancholy” that there is not greater alignment between the occasion and the words used to address it, or, indeed, between the words used and the “actualness,” to apply Oppen’s term, of the issues under debate. The word “curious” marks a discomfort about the correspondence between words and their meanings and a growing concern about the distorting effects of ideological uses of language. If “curious” carries a positive resonance in Whitman’s description of evening light glinting off the newly completed Capitol dome, in the context of the debates it suggests frustration and even sadness.8 Whitman uses the word “curious” again in his next letter home, this time as a way to describe Union soldiers marching through Washington in preparation for a new offensive. The letter gives a participant’s view of the proceedings: “Mother, it was a curious sight to see these ranks after ranks of our own dearest blood of men, mostly young, march by, worn & sunburnt & sweaty with well worn clothes & their bundles & knapsacks, tin cups & some with frying pans, strapt over their backs, all dirty & sweaty” (Correspondence 212). The scene is complex and spectacular, involving “a pretty strong force of artillery—& a middling force of cavalry, many New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, R[hode] I[sland], &c reg’ts,” as well as “five very full regiments of new black troops under Gen Ferrero” and a “reg’t of sharpshooters, partly composed of Indians” (Correspondence 212). The parade is “curious” for Whitman in both senses of the word. It embodies

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the possibilities of democratic unity he glimpses in the “curious” appearance of the Capitol dome. At the same time, it offers a material reminder of the perilous state of the Union he recognizes in the “curious” disappointment of the Congressional debate. Oppen explains his use of Whitman’s letter in a letter to John Crawford, poet and editor of West End, a literary magazine based in New York: There is an almost audible click in the brain to mark the transition between thought which is available because it has already been thought, and the thinking of the single man, the thinking of a man as if he were single . . . “Of Being Numerous” is constructed around that click, of course—and the poem ends with the word “curious.” I had set myself once before to say forthrightly “We want to be here,” and the long poem ends almost jokingly with “curious.” But it is not a joke entirely. If I were asked, Why do we want to be here—I would say: it is curious—the thing is curious— (NCP 387)

Rather than borrowing Whitman’s “curious” poetic vision directly, Oppen is more cautious. He rewrites Whitman’s letter for his own purposes, setting “curious” on a line by itself in order to create space for a “click,” or an “instant of meaning,” though which readers might rediscover a sense of themselves and their places in the world. Oppen’s restructuring of the letter is an example of the careful poetic practice he outlines in section 4 of “A Language of New York” and a culmination of the inquiry into the city he undertakes in “Of Being Numerous” into the possibility of restoring meaning and sense to the language of urban crisis. Oppen’s city poetry registers ideological distortion and concealment. The poems of Discrete Series, in particular, expose the alienating effects of urban capitalism by drawing attention to opportunities for intervention. As Perloff, Hatlen, Heller, and Izenberg suggest, the serial poems of This In Which and Of Being Numerous expand this poetics of exposure into a process of inquiry into the political valences of poetic language. Adapting Heidegger’s theory of dwelling to the urban scene, Oppen isolates words from their received meanings in “A Language of New York,” “Of Being Numerous,” and “Route” in order to show that language shapes experience. The poems demonstrate that maintaining curiosity about the words we use to describe cities in crisis can help us forge relationships despite barriers such as the enclosures of cars and basements rooms. These relationships, in turn, can contribute to collective political action by reminding us that questions about the forms our cities take involve deeper and more significant questions about the ways we inhabit the world together.

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Reading “Bronzeville”: Poetics of Neighborhood I

People protest in sprawling lightless ways Against their deceivers, they are never meek— Gwendolyn Brooks, Annie Allen Neighborhoods provide a local context for life in the city and offer small-scale opportunities for residents and policymakers to analyze and respond to largerscale urban problems. Typically defined as “subareas . . . whose physical or social characteristics distinguish them from one another,” they have long served as focal points for city planning (Rohe 210). In particular during the urban crisis of the 1950s and 1960s, planners and city leaders used neighborhoods as venues for addressing declining economic growth and associated social problems. The failures of many urban renewal projects led progressive city planners and critical urban theorists to reconsider how neighborhoods work. Documenting residents’ experiences before and after projects were implemented, researchers concluded that physical interventions in urban environments disrupt social and cultural dynamics in ways that outweigh their potential benefits. Jane Jacobs, for example, famously argued that building physical barriers such as super-block housing projects and high-speed highways produces negative outcomes for residents because they constrain a neighborhood’s “intricate and close-grained diversity of uses” (19). Similarly, Herbert Gans found that renewal projects in Boston’s West End failed as a result of their “negligen[ce] of residents’ needs” for social cohesion (Urban Villagers 324). These and other critical responses to rational-comprehensive urban renewal suggest that rather than giving spatial form to residents’ lives, neighborhoods influence everyday experiences though complex interactions of environmental, social, cultural, and other factors. As Gans explains, “Between the physical environment and empirically observable human behavior, there exist a social system and a set of cultural norms which

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define and evaluate portions of the physical environment relevant to the lives of people involved and structure the way people will use (and react to) this environment in their daily lives” (People and Plans 5). Gans and Jacobs’s arguments for the importance of residents’ relationships to their neighborhoods have been born out in more recent research. Robert Sampson, for example, demonstrates in Great American City (2012) that living in neighborhoods with limited resources and high crime rates affects residents’ lives negatively over generations while living in neighborhoods with high median incomes or dense networks of community organizations confers lasting benefits. Sampson grounds his claims in data on neighborhood life in Chicago from 1990 to 2012 that suggest that advantages and disadvantages “tend to come bundled together at the neighborhood level,” with positive health outcomes, high rates of educational attainment, and affluence clustering together in some neighborhoods while housing instability, higher than average incarceration rates, and poverty coincide in others (GAC 46). These “neighborhood effects,” as Sampson terms them, contribute, over time, to racially segregated distributions of poverty, crime, and other indicators, as well as to disproportionately negative outcomes for nonwhite city residents (GAC 112–116).1 Sampson acknowledges that identifying causal connections between neighborhood conditions and individual outcomes is complex. Even so, while residents live in certain neighborhoods for a variety of reasons, neighborhoods themselves rarely change places with each other in terms of relative advantage or disadvantage. Indeed, more than 80 percent of American neighborhoods in the bottom or top quintiles when ranked by median income in 1990 remained in the same quintile in 2000, and more than 75 percent remained in the same positions through 2010 (Sampson “Individual and Community Economic Mobility” 267). In addition, when residents move within a city, they tend to move to neighborhoods with the same advantages or disadvantages as where they started (GAC 326–328; Sampson, “Individual and Community Economic Mobility” 272). While not without its critics, Sampson’s research has drawn attention to two principles relevant to city planning: (1) variations among neighborhoods persist over time and (2)  neighborhood conditions continue to affect residents’ lives even after they relocate to neighborhoods with different conditions (GAC 302–304).2 Some communities and residents within communities find ways to overcome the negative effects associated with concentrated disadvantage despite constraints on individual and neighborhood mobility. According to Sampson, these successes emerge when communities find ways to nurture a shared sense of “collective efficacy” involving stronger “social cohesion” and greater “shared



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expectations for control” (GAC 152, italics in original). Collective efficacy exists in a neighborhood when residents “can perceive trust and infer shared expectations about public behavior” and when they believe their individual and collective actions will have an effect on their living conditions (GAC 153). Importantly, neighborhoods with high levels of collective efficacy produce positive effects in residents’ lives regardless of other characteristics such as income or educational attainment, while those with low levels of collective efficacy tend to produce negative effects even when they have other advantages (GAC 177–178). The relationships between collective efficacy and positive and negative neighborhood effects suggest that perceptions of neighborhoods matter more than is usually acknowledged. As Sampson explains, “We react to neighborhood difference and these reactions constitute social mechanisms and practices that in turn shape perceptions, relationships, and behaviors that reverberate both within and beyond traditional neighborhood borders” (GAC 21, italics in original). Like Gans, Sampson concludes that the ways residents perceive and define their neighborhoods and their roles within them influence their attachments to their communities and their willingness to participate in collective action. Residents avoid or embrace certain neighborhoods based on perceptions of their advantages and disadvantages. They come together in civic organizations and public events when they believe their participation will contribute to favorable change. A  neighborhood’s reputation in the public consciousness matters on a citywide scale, as well, because perceptions of neighborhoods and their trajectories of development play a role in policymaking and city planning. If individual perceptions influence where people live and how they engage in their communities, they also influence centralized decisions that feed back into cycles of advantage or disadvantage. Real estate developers seek to take advantage of these dynamics by promoting neighborhoods with invented names and acronyms. In New York City, for example, a dilapidated area of Brooklyn along an industrial canal was repackaged as Boerum Hill in the 1970s in order to attract new residents.3 Midtown Manhattan is being rebranded as MiMa in order to promote luxury apartment buildings along the recently extended number 7 subway line. As Christopher Mele explains, when the “images, symbols, and rhetorical forms” broadcast by developers and their allies get taken up by the media and circulated in formal and informal social networks, they “set broad parameters for the public’s awareness and understanding” of particular neighborhoods (17). City planners and activists are beginning to use similar tactics. Reasoning that progressive interventions are more likely to be successful if they are

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accompanied by “cultural changes,” they are undertaking planning processes that focus on consensus building as much as on technical solutions (GAC 308; Healey 65–68; 243–248). Lynne Manzo and Douglas Perkins contend that enhancing a community’s sense of collective efficacy can only be achieved by first deepening residents’ individual levels of attachment to the neighborhood and their neighbors. As they explain, “Place attachments, place identity, sense of community, and social capital are critical parts of person-environment transactions that foster the development of community in all of its physical, social, political, and economic aspects” (347). Manzo and Perkins’s research echoes Sampson’s in pointing to “place attachment” as a lever for creating progressive change. They urge planners to partner with community members to develop shared perceptions of existing resources and proposed interventions. Further, they suggest planners should also work across neighborhoods and within city government to address false perceptions that trap some neighborhoods in cycles of disinvestment. Douglas Madden extends Sampson and Manzo and Perkins’s lines of argument even further. Applying insights from critical urban theory, he urges city planners to reconceive neighborhoods as “spatial projects” that are continually produced through conflicts over their meanings and uses. Madden’s call to action puts questions about “who produces [neighborhoods], using what techniques, in what contexts, and toward what ends” at the center of planning work (481). Defining neighborhoods as dynamic and contested rather than as fixed and naturally occurring makes it easier to see what individual stakeholders stand to lose or gain. As Madden explains, “Some neighborhood formations, one could imagine, might have the effect of strengthening urban citizenship or bolstering particular kinds of political movements, while others might have the effect of dispossession” (491). The effects produced in and through particular neighborhood “spatial projects” depend on the relative power and cohesiveness of actors involved and the types of knowledge they deploy. Recognizing the tendency for politically and economically powerful actors to impose policy recommendations that serve their particular interests under guises of “neutral[ity]” and “disinterest,” Madden urges planners to “imagine alternative urban knowledges that might contribute to projects for more democratic, egalitarian neighborhoods instead” (492). Taken together, this research shows that neighborhoods influence residents’ lives at the micro-, meso-, and macroscales. Each in their own way Jacobs, Gans, Sampson, Manzo and Perkins, and Madden prioritize the experiences neighborhoods produce and describe progressive possibilities in terms of imaginative engagement. Just as the conditions of buildings in a neighborhood



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and the prevalence of racist practices and policies constrain or enable residential choices, the presence or absence of shared perspectives affects possibilities for social cohesion within and across communities. Similarly, just as memories of what a neighborhood has been and fears or hopes about what it might become inflect individual perceptions of safety and belonging, a neighborhood’s relative position in the collective urban imaginary identifies it as a place to visit, avoid, invest in, or renew. The research also suggests that planners must engage with multiple aspects of neighborhoods simultaneously in order to ensure that their work will contribute to progressive outcomes. City poems are uniquely situated to contribute to these kinds of multidimensional interventions. By asserting alternative forms of knowledge about neighborhood conditions and residents’ experiences, city poems expose flaws in the assumptions guiding other modes of urban research. In addition, by immersing readers in imaginative experiences, they disrupt existing perceptions of neighborhoods and propose new possibilities. Finally, by amplifying local efforts to claim the right to the city, they politicize changes in the “social mechanisms” that promote collective efficacy and produce neighborhood effects (GAC 152). In short, city poems change what we know about a neighborhood’s residents and possibilities. This is the poetics of neighborhood. It is not that poems can, in and of themselves, change existing conditions. Rather, it is that city poems can contribute to the formation of place attachments that prepare readers and residents alike to take part in collective action.

Reading poetry, reading neighborhoods Angus Fletcher argues that the experience of reading a poem can be as phenomenologically real as the experience of walking through a neighborhood if the poem invites complete immersion in a specific imaginative context. Using examples from the work of John Clare, Walt Whitman, and John Ashbery, Fletcher proposes that “environment-poems,” as he calls them, present “neighborhood[s]‌ of images and ideas” that animate the “adjacency of people, places, and things” rather than developing schemes of hierarchical or allegorical relations (156, italics in original). Environment-poems are not “about the environment,” he explains, but rather “share the same character, the same intrusion, the same coextension in our lives as the environment” (227, italics in original). By “break[ing] down the distinction between the poet’s interior life and the world outside,” environment-poems produce “an immersion in the quotidian” that points directly to the possibilities of political and social change (Simic).

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Fletcher offers Whitman’s “Sparkles from the Wheel” as a prototypical environment-poem. He argues that its repetitions and descriptive density provide readers a “sense of entering and remaining inside a continuing momentfilled flow” (Fletcher 248). The key moment in the poem is the first line of the second stanza, “The scene and all its belongings, how they seize and affect me,” a reflective pause that invites readers to experience the scene as if they were present with Whitman and other members of the crowd. The scene and all its belongings, how they seize and affect me, The sad, sharp-chinn’d old man with worn clothes and broad        shoulder-band of leather, Myself effusing and fluid, a phantom curiously floating,        now here absorb’d and arrested, The group, (an unminded point set in a vast surrounding,) The attentive, quiet children, the loud, proud, restive bass        of the streets, The low hoarse purr of the whirling stone, the light-press’d blade, Diffusing, dropping, sideways-darting, in tiny showers of gold, Sparkles from the wheel. (Whitman, Selected Poems 389–390)

Whitman’s “sideways-darting” description overflows its immediate context and encloses readers in an imaginative environment. The present participle endings of words like “whirling,” “diffusing,” and “dropping” transport us from one frame of understanding—that is, I  am reading a poem about a knife-sharpener and noticing how he is described—to another—that is, I am watching as part of the crowd as sparks fly from the knife-sharpener’s wheel. Fletcher acknowledges that readers cannot physically visit the nineteenth-century New  York City Whitman describes, but he argues that environment-poems nonetheless enable us to experience solidarity of the crowd and to participate in its absorption in the “vast surrounding” of the public life of the street. Fletcher’s theory matters for my analysis of city poems and urban crisis because it demands that we reimagine the work we do—and the experiences we have—as we read. Environment-poems privilege the experiences of reading over acts of reasoning and interpretation. As such, they encourage us to “practice a casual, unauthorized, but always intensely focused noticing” that enables us to compare the experiences we have as we read to other experiences we have had and to experiences portrayed in the poem (Fletcher 238). Prioritizing noticing enables us to consider multiple trajectories of meaning rather than imposing



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external frames of interpretation. We experience wonder with the crowd around Whitman’s knife-sharpener then return to our own cities with refined attention and a renewed appreciation for the life of the street. There is an ethical dimension to this kind of reading practice. At their best, as Fletcher argues, environmentpoems can help us to think in new ways about “who and what we are, and where and how we inhabit our space” (13). By stimulating our “awareness of varying conditions of life and living through,” they invite us to experience the environments we inhabit together as shared and provide a nexus for the “democratic gathering of energies” (136; 245). Environment-poems have the potential to disrupt readers’ perceptions of city neighborhoods and enlist their participation in confronting the negative effects of concentrated disadvantage. Like Fletcher, Juliana Spahr warns that we misunderstand contemporary poetry when we fail to account for the social and political dimensions of reading. In order to avoid misapprehension, she argues, we must “look at how [poems] mean and what sorts of readers they enable or construct” in addition to looking at “what [individual] works mean and what they say” (Everybody’s Autonomy 143). Spahr encourages scholars in particular to account for the “specific engagements” poets enact with readers through form and content, including the possibility that they are relying on divergent responses from different reading communities to animate and extend their work (155). Spahr’s claims for the communal nature of acts of reading remind us that a poem is a “social practice” that “exists in and through the historically specific world [it was] formed in concert with” and functions as a “site of an exchange” between the poet, her readers and their communities (Scully 133–134). Spahr’s broadened conception of poetry’s relevance to everyday life requires an approach to reading similar to Fletcher’s. Rather than narrowing in on the critique a poem offers or the strategies a poet employs to disrupt our perceptions, Spahr suggests that reading a poem means examining the dynamics of the “historically specific world[s]” from which it emerges and into which it enters. In the case of city poems, these worlds include both a city’s physical conditions and the social relations of its inhabitants. Ginsberg’s response to Book I of Williams’s Paterson shows how Spahr and Fletcher’s poetic theories of interpretation might play out at neighborhood scale. As I explain in Chapter 1, Ginsberg reviews Book I of the poem negatively in the Passaic Valley Examiner. He draws on his experiences as a resident of Paterson to claim that the poem misrepresents the city’s “actual conditions” by construing them as myth. Ginsberg writes, “It seems that Dr. Williams is unhappy . . . and so has decided to delight himself by making a myth, which tells, using generalities

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or well-known facts, about the author’s private life and his less well-known facts” (7). Williams’s projection of personal concerns onto the public world of the city worries Ginsberg because it constrains what readers might experience as they integrate their imaginative experience of the poem into their everyday lives and perceptions. Like Spahr, Ginsberg warns that different communities of readers will experience the poem in different ways, including potentially spurring some to retributive action. He identifies “the intelligentsia,” “Patersonians,” “similarly preoccupied local residents,” “the powers-that-be” and “the respectable ladies of Paterson” and faults Williams for tailoring his work to first group while ignoring the others (7–9). Whatever the limits of Ginsberg’s initial reading of Paterson, his response turns on the relationship between the city in the poem and the city he knows from experience. He objects to the poem because it shows him a Paterson he doesn’t recognize and challenges Williams to expand his vision of the city to account more fully for its varying neighborhoods. To use Fletcher and Spahr’s terms, Williams’s poem immerses Ginsberg in an environment that seems as real as  the city itself, but because the  poetic environment falls short of the “historically specific” city on which it is based, he attempts to intervene by inviting Williams to tour River Street, an area of Paterson he may not know. Their conflicting visions of Paterson reverberate in their later work:  Williams modifies his approach to Paterson after visiting River Street with Ginsberg, and Ginsberg begins his own major city poem after reading Williams’s. Paterson’s role in the two poets’ interactions indicates that poetry can function as a “social practice” when it immerses readers in critical reflection on their poetic experiences and the actual worlds from which those experiences emerge (Scully 133–134). In some cases, a reader like Ginsberg rejects the vision of a city a poem proposes and takes action to articulate alternatives. In others, a reader like Williams begins to see their city in a new light and imagines new possibilities for participating in its communities.

The poetics of neighborhood: Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Bronzeville” Bronzeville occupies 4 square miles of Chicago’s South Side bordered by Interstate 55 to the North, Washington Park to the South, Interstate 90 to the West, and Cottage Grove Avenue to the East and centers on the intersection of South 47th Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive (Drake and Cayton 379).4 Formed



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during the Great Migration, the neighborhood was home to roughly 200,000 in 1930. The population doubled by 1950, the year neighborhood resident Gwendolyn Brooks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen, and grew to nearly one million by 1969 (Drake and Cayton 8; 826). Known as the “foremost center of black entrepreneurialism” from the 1920s to 1940s, Bronzeville’s fortunes declined after the Second World War as its population grew despite the fact that manufacturing jobs were being relocated beyond its borders (Boyd 131; Drake and Cayton 517–519).5 Racist housing and employment practices trapped residents of Bronzeville during the late 1940s and 1950s in a cycle of declining economic security. Summarizing these conditions in 1945, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton describe the neighborhood as “the beach upon which broke the human flotsam [of] successive waves of migration from the South [and] the jetsam thrown off by lower-class families as they expanded within their restricted living quarters or disintegrated under the impact of economic crises” (577). Notwithstanding residents’ efforts to promote the neighborhood’s vibrant communities and rich culture, Bronzeville has remained among the most “hypersegregated” neighborhoods in the United States since the 1960s. Douglas Massey claims that its structural disadvantages are proof positive that “segregation is not a thing of the past, but a condition that continues to be generated and reinforced by ongoing social and economic processes that continue to operate within distinct segments of American society” (5–6). In Massey’s view, Bronzeville is a test case for the theory that the social and physical conditions of a neighborhood affect residents over the long term. Brooks experienced the neighborhood’s shifts in fortune firsthand. Born in 1917, she grew up in a small house at 4th Street and Champlain and raised her two children in a kitchenette apartment at 623 East 63rd Street (Report from Part One 59). Her family enjoyed the benefits of a rich community life. During the early 1940s in particular, Brooks and her husband Henry circulated among a rising class of artists and entrepreneurs: “There were always weekend parties to be attended where we merry Bronzevillians could find each other and earnestly philosophize sometimes on into the dawn, over martinis and Scotch and coffee, and an ample buffet. Great social decisions were reached. Great solutions, for great problems, were provided” (Report from Part One 68). As she explains in an interview republished in the first volume of her autobiography, the neighborhood “contributed to [her] writing progress” because “if you wanted a poem, you had only to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing” (Report from Part One 133; 65). As Evie Shockley explains, Brooks’s immersion in the specific circumstances

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of Bronzeville makes her exploration of its circumstances “socially grounded” (53). Like Williams’s Paterson and Ginsberg’s “Shrouded Stranger” poems, her Bronzeville poetry offers rich opportunities for readerly immersion and response. Beginning with A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and continuing through Annie Allen (1949), The Bean Eaters (1960), and the pivotal later works In the Mecca (1968) and Riot (1969), Brooks explores the neighborhood as both an everyday scene and a poetic environment. Bronzeville is a poem-in-action that offers material for poems and opportunities for critical analysis and reflection. Indeed, Brooks uses her poetry as a tool for translating Bronzeville’s social and physical conditions in terms that will allow residents, including residents of other neighborhoods, to engage imaginatively with its resources and challenges. Her work attempts to shift perceptions of the neighborhood in order to enhance residents’ shared sense of collective efficacy. As Brooks explains, “What affects society affects a poet. So I, starting out, usually in the grip of a high and private suffusion, may find by the time I have arrived at a last line that there is quite some public clamor in my product” (Report from Part One 138, italics in original). The “public clamor” of Brooks’s city poems echoes in the responses they elicit from readers and in the questions they pose about neighborhood conditions and what can be done to release residents from cycles of oppression. Brooks depicts Bronzeville as a familiar place in A Street in Bronzeville and Annie Allien. She portrays residents from a range of backgrounds pursuing varying and sometimes conflicting interests and commitments in a shared social environment. While some attempt to transcend the neighborhood’s constraining disadvantages, others seem contented to remain stuck in place. They are at once prototypical neighborhood residents and people with whom other Chicagoans might empathize. The young woman who sings “A Song in the Front Yard” in A Street in Bronzeville is an example of the latter type. Despite wanting to defy her mother’s rules against joining in the “wonderful fun” of the neighborhood’s “rough and untended” places, she repeatedly stops herself. Rather than taking action, exploring the “back yard now / And may be down the alley” in person, she talks back to her mother about the limits of her perspective and stays put (B 28). Other poems feature different kinds of characters with similarly limited horizons of opportunity, including returning veterans (“Gay Chaps at the Bar”), child molesters (“Matthew Cole”), and blues singers (“Queen of the Blues”). Brooks contrasts the attitudes of residents who accept or struggle against Bronzeville’s limits in “Sadie and Maud.” The poem follows two sisters from high school graduation to old age. Sadie stays in the neighborhood and proudly raises “two babies / Under her maiden name”; Maud goes away to college only to return



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as an adult, “a thin brown mouse / … living all alone / [i]‌n this old house” (B 32). Brooks leaves readers to determine which course of action produces better results, preferring neither in the poem itself and leaving open the possibility that neither sister has profited from her choice. The portraits of A Street in Bronzeville examine the community’s commitment to “gaining control of their own areas” (Drake and Cayton 198). The variety of perspectives represented in A Street in Bronzeville gives readers a way to test their own beliefs about the neighborhood and its residents. In her review of the collection for The Chicago Defender, a nationally prominent, black-owned newspaper published in Bronzeville, Marjorie Peters responds to the collection in just these terms. She claims that the book confronts “Chicago’s tragic housing situation for Negroes with [a]‌simple query as to the possibility of artistic dreams being engendered in ‘yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall’ ” (11). Perhaps to reinforce the idea that Brooks frames the neighborhood’s challenges as a citywide problem of squandered talent, Peters describes the poet herself as both a local informant—listing her home address and describing her kitchen—and a nationally known figure—citing poems published in Harper’s Magazine and favorable reviews by Carl Van Vechten, among others (11). Paul Engle, a poet and critic who championed Brooks before publication of A Street in Bronzeville, makes a similar claim about the possible resonances of the collection in his review for The Chicago Tribune. Describing its publication as “an exceptional event in the literary life of Chicago,” he observes that it “tak[es] you right inside the reality observed” (E11). Engle attempts to counteract prejudice among white readers against a black poet writing about a black community. He notes that “Miss Brooks goes thru Chicago with her eyes wide open and the poems are wide open too” as a way to indicate that her work has broad appeal (E11). As the Tribune and Defender reviews suggest, A Street in Bronzeville emerges from the specific, everyday reality of the neighborhood. Its immersion in local circumstances invites readers from across the city to reconsider their views of the community. Another Tribune writer, Roi Ottley, takes a different tack in presenting Brooks to readers beyond Bronzeville’s borders ten years later. Rather than universalizing her insights as Engle had, he argues instead that “her work reaches deeply into Negro life” and explains that “whatever the literary merit of her work . . . her reporting of Negro experience is significant because of its illumination of social realities of the south side” (17). Ottley directs readers to look to Brooks’s poetry for insight about their neighbors on the south side on the assumption they lack a clear sense of the struggles Bronzeville residents face.

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As if applying Sampson’s argument that a neighborhood’s reputation influences citywide policy toward it, he urges readers to take seriously the problems exposed by Brooks’s work. He humanizes her in his descriptions to prove she is a relatable and reliable witness: “Nowadays between her chores as a wife and mother she works on her poetry and fiction. This winter Harper Brothers will publish her book for children appropriately titled ‘Bronzeville Boys and Girls’ ” (17). Like Peters in her Defender review of A Street in Bronzeville, Ottley affirms the value of Brooks’s perspective by locating her in specific circumstances. His description of her “chores” is strategic: while she is an award-winning poet, she is also a wife and mother. Brooks’s evocation of the complex dynamics of Bronzeville’s community in Annie Allen is even richer. Providing a more comprehensive view of the neighborhood than A Street in Bronzeville, the book traces women’s experiences in the neighborhood from childhood (in the numbered lyrics of part one, “Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood”), to young adulthood (in the long poem that comprises part two, “The Anniad”), to maturity (in the complex sequence of part three, “The Womanhood”). A  sonnet sequence titled “the children of the poor” consolidates the collection’s range of perspectives at the beginning of its third and final part. The sequence outlines the unique vulnerabilities of Bronzeville’s children and describes their parents’ concomitant responsibilities and constraints. Brooks separates the neighborhood’s population into two categories in the first poem: “People who have no children” and thus “Need not pause in the fire, and in no sense / Hesitate in the hurricane to guard” and “we others” who do have children, and therefore experience the neighborhood’s storms as a “throttling dark” (B 115). She challenges readers to locate themselves in one group or the other and uses repeated sounds to reinforce the incommensurability of their perspectives:  a mother offers her children “little lifting helplessness,” listens to their “queer / Whimper-whine[s]‌,” and ponders her own “unridiculous / Lost softness” while the childless “Attain a mail of ice and insolence” (B 115). The sequence’s second and third poems question how mothers and the community as a whole might work together to ameliorate the compounding effects of concentrated disadvantage. Despite understanding that the neighborhood’s children are “quasi, contraband / Because unfinished, graven by a hand / Less than angelic, admirable or sure,” the poem maintains a state of patient readiness, “singularly calm / At forehead and at fingers rather wise” (B 116–117). Brooks’s description of the situation Bronzeville mothers face layers together social critique and affective response. Frequent pauses at punctuation and enjambments open space for readers to participate as witnesses



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and advocates: “I shall wait, if you wish: revise the psalm / If that should frighten you: sew up belief / If that should tear” (B 117). The “crooked little questionings” of the second and third poems culminate in a virtuoso call to action in the fourth (B 119): First fight. Then fiddle. Ply the slipping string With feathery sorcery; muzzle the note With hurting love; the music that they wrote Bewitch, bewilder. Qualify to sing Threadwise. Devise no salt, no hempen thing For the instrument to bear. Devote The bow to silks and honey. Be remote A while from malice and from murdering. But first to arms, to armor. Carry hate In front of you and harmony behind. Be deaf to music and to beauty blind. Win war. Rise bloody, maybe not too late For having first to civilize a space Wherein to play your violin with grace. (B 118)

Seemingly an instruction to a child to persist in practicing the violin, the poem sets one family’s apartment in relation to the public space of the neighborhood. Brooks pairs “fiddle” and “fight” and “harmony” and “hate” as if to diagram the dimensions of a growing conflict in Bronzeville between the “graven” forces acknowledged in the preceding poems and the children who are the fourth poem’s main subject and addressees. The poem modulates between moments of innocence in the opening octave—“feathery sorcery” and dreams of “silks and honey”—to moments of “deaf,” “blind,” and “bloody” horror in the concluding sestet. Its imperative mood, amplified by no fewer than sixteen separate commands, extends to readers, inviting us to take sides as allies in the children’s attempts to “civilize a space.” Brooks demands action repeatedly—“fight,” “ply,” “muzzle”—and calls for participation from readers—“devote,” “be,” “rise.” George Kent explains the effect of these commands as an “uncanny” transformation of private experience into public action (33). Rather than merely exposing or critiquing injustice, Brooks invests Annie Allen with the force of a “public act” that focuses attention on the “radical uncertainties at the base of black lives” without disguising them in “existentialism” (Kent 33–34). The doubled sounds and abrupt, imperative sentences of “the children of the poor” sequence bring the

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“deep ambiguities facing those who live in black ghettos” to readers’ attention in a “non-reductive” way (Grey 54). By presenting the neighborhood as it exists for mothers and their children, the sequence challenges readers to experience the conditions that affect residents’ lives and enlists our participation in emerging, community-based efforts to make improvements. Annie Allen concludes with an explicit plea for solidarity and collective action. Having catalogued the experiences of a range of Bronzeville women, the book’s final poem returns readers to the specific perspective of its title character. In “The Anniad,” the long poem at Annie Allen’s center, Brooks presents Annie as a woman who is unwilling to pattern her life on existing models. True to this commitment, she separates herself in the book’s final poem from “Men of careful turns, haters of forks in the road” and insists she possesses a uniquely powerful and productive form of urban knowledge (B 139). As Shockley explains, she reflects on how experiences in the city to “gather the tender and imaginative energy” that will “ease her confrontation with the constraints upon her life without blinding her to them” (Shockley 52). After “open[ing] her rooms” in order to make herself fully vulnerable, Annie implores readers to join  her in confronting private and public injustice: “Rise. / Let us combine. There are no magics or elves / Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must / Wizard a track through our own screaming weed” (B 140). This final exhortation is both the culmination of Annie’s maturation from girlhood to womanhood and the beginning of a larger “quest” in Brooks’s poetry of simultaneously constructing an “empowering [black, female, working-class] subjectivity” and a “social environment in which that subjectivity can be realized” (Shockley 44). To the degree that Annie Allen involves both the establishment of an identity and environment, it is a clear example of what I  am calling the poetics of neighborhood. Brooks identifies locally important people and places, provides first-hand descriptions of the Bronzeville’s physical and social characteristics, and organizes mothers and children into a comprehensible neighborhood context. She uses alliteration, repetition, and other verbal strategies to immerse readers in an emergent “spatial project,” to use Madden’s term, an attempt to define the community and its possibilities from within (481).

Looking outward: The Bean Eaters and “Two Dedications” Brooks’s third collection of poetry, The Bean Eaters (1960), centers on a range of Bronzeville characters whose lives and livelihoods take them across



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Chicago and as far south as Mississippi. Demonstrating that experiences in Bronzeville are “part of a larger, national Negro culture, its people being tied to thirteen million other Negros by innumerable bonds of kinship, associational and church membership and a common minority status,” the collection both documents continuing racial violence in Chicago and also engages national events, such as the murder of Emmett Till and school desegregation in Little Rock (Drake and Cayton 396). Amid portraits of residents like Rudolph Reed, whose family is attacked when they move to a white neighborhood, and the unnamed housekeeper in “Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat” who takes and loses a job with a racist white family, Brooks describes individuals on the verge of responding to the call to action Annie asserts in Annie Allen’s final poem. In “The Explorer,” for example, Brooks describes a lonely man wandering the halls of his apartment building looking for a “still spot in the noise.” Hearing only “spiraling, high human voices” and the “scream of nervous affairs” as he walks, he discovers there are “no bourns / . . . no quiet rooms.” Brooks subverts our pity for the man by suggesting, as the title of the poem implies, that there is more on his mind than solitude. Just at the moment when we learn he will not find his “still spot,” Brooks explains that rather than a lack of peace, what he fears “most of all” are the “choices, that cried to be taken” (B 327). The choices the man contemplates—linked as they are with the screaming voices that disturb the building’s quiet—are matters of both private and public concern. Public response to The Bean Eaters was mixed. For example, the Tribune’s reviewer suggested that while many of the poems “meet the measure set by earlier Bronzeville portraits . . . the book, as a whole, seems bitterly troubled in its inability to reach the stature it deserves” (Bock C12). The reviewer, Frederick Bock, objects, it seems, to the collection’s small-scale focus and the attention it draws to individual suffering. The review’s final words echo and invert Engle’s earlier suggestion that Brooks’s poetry transcends race:  “One lays [The Bean Eaters] down, finally, with the feeling that the tragedy of the Negro may be simply too vast, too deep, for words” (Bock C12). According to this reading, Brooks’s city poems dramatize the tragic dimensions of Bronzeville residents’ experiences without identifying viable opportunities for action. Bock criticizes “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon,” in particular, for its “complacent handling of racial themes” (C12). The poem describes the lynching of Emmett Till and the subsequent public outcry from the perspective of Carolyn Bryant, the young white woman whose accusations against Till precipitated his murder. While the language of the poem is matter-of-fact, it nonetheless offers a damning critique of Bryant and

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her husband’s actions. Framing the poem as a ballad, Brooks focuses attention on the imaginative realities Bryant and her husband acted on in pursuing their deception and the real-life consequences their false perceptions produced. Brooks contrasts the harshness of the Bryants’ racism by juxtaposing it with tender descriptions of Till. He is at once the “Dark Villain” of the ballad and a “blackish child / Of fourteen, with eyes still too young to be dirty, / And a mouth too young to have lost every reminder / Of its infant softness” (B 334). Perhaps to reinforce the contrast, Caroline questions the role her perceptions forced her to play midway through the poem, at a point in the narrative after her husband has been acquitted of the murder: “It occurred to her that there may have been something / Ridiculous in the picture of the Fine Prince / Rushing . . . / . . . / With his heavy companion to hack down (unhorsed) / That little foe” (B 335). The parenthetical and diminutive on either side of the line break suggest the horror of Till’s lynching might be more than Bryant can bear. The disruption it brings to her perception of herself as the heroine of the ballad is clear in the lines that follow: So much had happened, she could not remember now what that foe had done Against her, or if anything had been done. The one thing in the world that she did know and knew With terrifying clarity was that her composition Had disintegrated. That, although the pattern prevailed, The breaks were everywhere. That she could think Of no thread capable of the necessary Sew-work. (B 335)

The “composition” or story within which Bryant had been acting up to this moment in the poem “disintegrate[s]‌” as she reflects on the specific details of the lynching. The “clarity” she achieves is clarity regarding a shift in her role from damsel in distress to object of scorn. She worries her husband will see the “breaks” in his own perceptions of their “ballad” and recognize that she incited him to murder. Noting in the poem that the Bryants’ actions against Till fit the prevailing “pattern” of Mississippi racism, Brooks invites readers to recognize that the couple’s decision to act in accordance with the pattern leads to their own destruction. The poem’s vivid descriptions of their violence and its aftermath addresses black readers with a specific call to action:  Remember the horrors being visited on our community in Bronzeville, Mississippi, and elsewhere; Stand firm against the flawed, false perceptions that poison the minds of our attackers.



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Frank London Brown amplifies this message in his review of The Bean Eaters for the Defender. The review strikes an angry tone, accusing readers of abandoning Brooks in favor of easier pleasures. Where Bock sees complacency in The Bean Eaters and warns readers about the book’s fatalistic portrayal of black lives, Brown sees fire: “Go see Ray Charles, and Miles Davis, but remember that there is a woman who, with her colleagues, is putting down your sorrows and triumphs; a woman has given her life to the fire of poetry—your poetry, and song—your song, and rhythm—your rhythm” (A13). He links Brooks’s poetry to jazz and urges black readers, specifically, to pay more attention to her writing: “Gwendolyn Brooks has written a book of poetry. It is as if Monk had just put out another album, or Ornette Coleman had done a work for a fifty piece band which included Bird, Clifford Brown, and Fats Navarro, with Billie Holliday on vocals” (A13). Brown addresses readers who avoid poetry because they view it as uncool, white, or irrelevant to their lives. He blames their decisions about the cultural products they consume for the dearth of honest, well-rounded stories of black lives in popular film and television and argues that until black readers embrace black writers, their understandings of themselves and of their future possibilities will be artificially constrained. “People learn of themselves and others through the things their writers write about them. People learn dignity from tales of dignity and wars won. Writers tell those tales. People who don’t read their writers lose their writers” (Brown A13). Brown makes two arguments for why black readers should buy The Bean Eaters. First, the stories Brooks tells in her poems can help readers learn about themselves. Second, buying Brooks’s work will make it more likely she and other black writers will continue to be published. Writing as a black reader to other black readers, Brown responds to Brooks’s call to challenge the patterns through which black lives are typically interpreted. He encourages his readers—potential Brooks readers—to do the same. Brooks’s relationships to her different audiences organize the 1968 poem “Two Dedications.” Published alongside poems celebrating Medgar Evers and Malcolm X in In the Mecca, the poem responds to public artworks unveiled in Chicago in August of the previous year. Brooks read the poem’s first part, “The Chicago Picasso,” at a ceremony led by Mayor Richard Daley unveiling a controversial Picasso sculpture downtown. Debates over the sculpture’s meaning and purpose had simmered throughout the summer, with some officials breaking with the mayor to call for its removal and others predicting it would raise the city’s international profile. As the Tribune’s art editor, Edward Barry, explains in an article published on the eve of the unveiling: “For decades, possibly for

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generations, Chicagoans will dispute about this huge semi-abstract head of a woman—or is it something else?—which will be like a brooding presence in the center of the city. It will be derided, defended, laughed at, and—who knows?— maybe eventually loved” (E2). The simple language of Brooks’s poem contrasts with the heightened rhetoric of the moment: “Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms. / Art hurts. Art urges voyages— / and it is easier to stay at home, / the nice beer ready” (B 442). The poem’s opening lines anticipate the same range of responses to the sculpture as Barry’s article, but they speak more personally and directly to Chicagoans. Brooks encourages residents to visit the sculpture despite the discomfort they will experience and to accept the possibility that Picasso’s imprint on the city will be “as meaningful and as meaningless as any / other flower in the western field” (B 443). Written to the city as a whole, “The Chicago Picasso” confronts Chicago’s pretentions as much as it criticizes residents for their provinciality. The tone of the poem suggests the sculpture’s aesthetic test is an imposition rather than an opportunity, a sign that the city underestimates and misunderstands its residents at the same time. The second part of “Two Dedications” is written to a narrower audience. Titled “The Wall,” it celebrates the completion of a mural depicting black cultural figures at the intersection of 43rd Street and Langley in Bronzeville. In contrast to the first part of the poem, Brooks speaks with the crowd gathered for the dedication, the “hundreds of faces, red-brown, brown, black, ivory” gathered at “The Wall,” rather than to or about them (B 445). She affirms her position as a member of the audience by using an excerpt from an Ebony Magazine article about the ceremony as an epigraph. The article includes ten photographs of the mural, including one showing Brooks alongside James Baldwin and Malcolm X. Ebony identifies the subjects of the mural as “persons who had incurred both the plaudits and scorn of the world of whiteness, but who, in their relation to black people could by no account be considered other than images of dignity” (48). The description echoes the Defender’s review of The Bean Eaters: the mural addresses a local audience, “communicating black dignity,” regardless of outside judgments, and requires active engagement from Bronzeville residents to fulfill its purpose (B 444; Ebony 48). Brooks portrays the wall as a gathering place for the community. Rather than provoking aesthetic discomfort like the Chicago Picasso, it invites participation:  “It is the Hour of tribe and of vibration / the day-long Hour. It is the Hour / of ringing, rouse, of ferment-festival” (B 445). The poem reads like an incantation. Its rhythms and repeated sounds connect Brooks’s perspective on the wall to other aspects of the ceremony, including



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descriptions of what the audience was wearing, musical performances, and shouts of “fists out ‘Black Power!’ ” (B 444). “The Wall” is fully embedded in the moment it celebrates and the community it addresses. Portraying Bronzeville as a spatial-project-in-progress, its call to action foregrounds the possibility that residents can define the neighborhood for themselves rather than accepting false perceptions imposed from outside.

Neighborhood poetics as spatial project: “In the Mecca” and “The Sermons on the Warpland” The portraits and scenes of A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen, and The Bean Eaters provide an archive of information about everyday life in Bronzeville. They immerse readers in “locality knowledge” that is primarily “concerned with relatively small and specific acts done here and there” in the neighborhood (Jacobs 544). In the aggregate, this knowledge shows that Bronzeville, like all neighborhoods, is an “organized complexity . . . replete with unexamined, but obviously intricately interconnected, and surely understandable, relationships” rather than a place that can be defined through convenient labels like ghetto or slum (Jacobs 574). Indeed, the poetic environments we explore with Annie Allen, Sadie, Maud, and other residents invite us to confront our assumptions about the neighborhood and form new attachments to its possibilities. The vision Brooks animates in these collections establishes a foundation for the broader, more politically engaged poetics of neighborhood she asserts in In the Mecca (1968) and Riot (1969). As Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, and Juliana Spahr explain, the neighborhood that emerges in these books is undergoing radical change. Riot, in particular, proposes a “revisionary, and perhaps we might say even aspirational, history” of Bronzeville that frames violent protest as a form of collective action (Bernes, Clover, and Spahr). Brooks addresses In the Mecca, which was the last book she published with the mass-market publisher Harper & Row, and Riot, the first she published with the Detroit-based, community-owned Broadside Press, directly to residents of Bronzeville. Involving readers and residents alike in scenes of protest and action, the two books enlist our participation in the ongoing spatial project of cultivating the neighborhood’s collective efficacy and disrupting its cycle of negative neighborhood effects. The title poem of In the Mecca narrates a day in the life of a Bronzeville apartment building built in 1891 and demolished as part of an urban renewal

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project in 1952 (Clarke 136). Mrs. Sallie Smith, a single mother who lives in a fourth floor apartment with nine children, loses track of her youngest daughter, Pepita, and frantically searches the building. The search ends in tragedy when Pepita’s dead body is discovered hidden under a neighbor’s bed (B 433). While Pepita’s murder cloaks the poem in a dystopic mood, other aspects of the poem signal the possibility that neighborhood conditions can be improved through collective action. For example, Brooks introduces other residents of the building and explains their relationships with one another as she describes Mrs. Smith’s search. Her purpose, as she notes in Report from Part One, is to “capsulize the gist of black humanity in general” by presenting a “large variety of personalities against a mosaic of daily affairs, recognizing that the grimmest of these is likely to have a streak or two streaks of sun” (Report from Part One 189–190; Clarke 138). In order to understand the “poetics of neighborhood” Brooks deploys in the poem, it is important to note the verbal strategies she uses to depict the building’s community. Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega analyzes “In the Mecca” as an instance of flânerie that adapts a traditional poetic mode in order to generate insight about a misunderstood urban milieu. Observing that the poem is characterized by “burgeoning rhyme schemes [that] are restrained or cut off ” and a “syllabic rhythm [Brooks] periodically undermines with disruption,” Ortega argues that “In the Mecca” reflects and represents the “multivalent nature of urban life” in a way that confronts both the “hegemonic view of the American city presented by white, male poets” and the “fear of American cities expressed by black writers” (147; 153). Brooks’s verbal strategies, in Ortega’s reading, immerse readers in everyday life in the Mecca Apartments by disrupting their preconceptions about the building’s social and physical conditions. As an example of this process, Ortega points to Alfred, a young neighbor who aspires to be an architect and a poet, reads Leopold Senghor and possesses a “decent enough no-goodness” (B 409). Mrs. Sallie overhears Alfred reflecting on the meaning of Pepita’s death and the building’s frequent tragedies:      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,



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builds to a reportage and redemption.      A hot estrangement.      A material collapse that is Construction. (B 432–33)

As Ortega explains, Alfred’s words overlay Mrs. Smith’s fruitless search for Pepita with a more sanguine view of the future of Bronzeville. His accelerating cadences suggest he has a public audience in mind. His diction suggests he imagines himself preaching to an assembly of residents in the building’s courtyard. Brooks cuts off Alfred’s sermon at its climax, the identification of a “black and electric” future to come, with three short lines that set his redemptive vision in apposition to “estrangement,” “collapse,” and “construction.” Ortega links Alfred’s reflection to Brooks’s broader poetics: “Within the context of Brooks’s mythopoesis, the raising of a metaphoric Mecca could motivate the construction of a new city, one where the people of the Mecca have an urban history.” By restoring the “urban history” of the neighborhood in this way, Brooks ensures that the Mecca Apartments will remain part of her reader’s imaginative experience of the neighborhood “beyond the existence of its physical structure” (Ortega 152). While Pepita’s death haunts the poem, “In the Mecca” nonetheless signals the possibility of a poetics of neighborhood centered in the “multivalent nature of urban life” rather than on stereotypical depictions of the Bronzeville ghetto (Ortega 153). If Alfred’s naïve attempt to speak the “black and electric” future of Bronzeville into being is cut short, Brooks suggests other possibilities for how this vision might be achieved. Mrs. Smith’s family and the building as a whole need something to bring them together despite their differences and the factors that constrain their lives. Brooks signals this need for community by examining and rejecting classic genres of African American literature throughout the poem. As Cheryl Clarke observes, Brooks “critiques and pays homage” to several genres as she introduces residents of the building, including “the lyric, the ballad, the sermon, the slave narrative, the proverb, [and] the psalm” (139). Even as the building’s residents invoke these genres, however, their voices are overwritten by the “frantic pace, through the fragmented community” of Mrs. Smith’s search for Pepita (Clarke 145). It is as if no single genre or mode of address is sufficient as a response to the desperation of a mother searching for her murdered child. For Clarke, Brooks’s modulation among genres indicates a shift in her poetics toward “indeterminacy, ambiguity, fluidity, unpredictability, and liminality” and a search for alliances outside Bronzeville (138). The community of the Mecca

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is so compromised by the building’s social and physical conditions, the poem suggests, that residents are unable to join together in collective action to help Mrs. Smith find her daughter. Brooks notes the community’s passivity at the beginning of the search. She observes that Mrs. Smith and her children are “constrained” as they set out on their search because they know in advance that their neighbors will be unwilling to help: And they are 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. In twos! In threes! Knock-knocking down the martyred halls at doors behind whose yelling oak or pine      many flowers start, choke, reach up,      want help, get it, do not get it,      rally, bloom, or die on the wasting vine. (B 416–17)

The residents of the Mecca sit passively in their apartments because they know from experience that their individual fates are beyond their control. Rallying, blooming, or dying simply happen; they are not outcomes that can be cultivated through individual or collective effort. They lack that “joining thing,” as Alfred muses earlier in the poem, that would unite them around a common purpose (B 410). Brooks published “In the Mecca” during a period of transition. As Sheila Hassell Hughes explains, she had recently been exposed to the Black Arts Movement during a 1967 conference at Fisk University. Her encounters with Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka and others there led her to reconsider the relationship between her poetry and other social commitments.6 Citing the poet’s move to black-owned publishers in 1969, Hughes argues that Brooks drew “meaning and power” from the movement that reinforced her commitments to community empowerment and the liberation of predominantly black neighborhoods like Bronzeville (276). The complexity of “In the Mecca” bears witness to these deepening commitments. As Hughes explains, it “issues a prophetic call for radical reader-response and responsibility—even across the very lines of race and culture, time and place that Brooks delineates so powerfully” (258). For example, it is clear that Mrs. Smith continually earns greater empathy from readers than



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from her neighbors. While we cannot do anything to save the fictional girl, participating in the search brings us into close contact with the constraints and possibilities of Bronzeville. Hughes acknowledges that she cannot fully identify with Brooks’s characters or their situations. She explains the poem’s effect in this way: “I can only enter a necessary dance, in and out of the push-and-pull, to remain engaged, to keep moving, and to keep pressing toward the kind of action the poem might be calling for” (Hughes 273). The poetic knowledge of “In the Mecca” supplements the data Drake and Cayton and Sampson use to analyze Bronzeville’s physical, social, and economic orders. As Ortega, Clarke, and Hughes’s readings suggest, the poem initiates a “public clamor” through verbal strategies that engage readers as more than mere observers of the scene (Brooks, Report from Part One 138). By immersing readers in a specific environment, it engages more directly with the possibilities and consequences of collective action than any of Brooks’s earlier work. If “In the Mecca” stops short of issuing a direct call to action, the poem nonetheless invites us to explore the emerging contradictions of Bronzeville by considering how our imaginative experiences in the Mecca apartments relate to our prior conceptions of the neighborhood and others like it. Brooks published the first and second of three “Sermon[s]‌on the Warpland” alongside “In the Mecca.” The first sermon is a brief, obscure oration that proclaims the coming of a new social order. Brooks establishes the scene in a three-line introduction: “And several strengths from drowsiness campaigned / but spoke in Single Sermon on the warpland. // And went about the warpland saying No” (B 451). The “alternate geography” of the “warpland” invites several readings. As Lesley Wheeler observes, the word may refer to “the ‘warped land’ or even the ‘Waste Land’ of a racist and riot-torn America,” to the “ ‘war planned’ by black nationalists against white America,” or even to a “ ‘warplane,’ a carrier for this militant message” (231). Noting possible parallels with the “Sermon on the Mount” from the Book of Matthew, Wheeler argues that Brooks uses a conventional form of address in the sermon, the lyric apostrophe, to transform it into “a public forum” that might “sustain the marks of and even participate in political struggle” (227). Indeed, the speaker of the sermon, whose words are marked off by quotation marks, gathers her audience three times in twenty-one lines: “My people, black and black,” “Prepare to meet / (sisters, brothers),” and “Build now your church, my brothers, sisters” (B 451). These calls to assembly and Brooks’s use of second and third person plural pronouns throughout the poem embed the reader in the scene. We listen with the congregation to the speaker’s condemnation of the status quo and invest hope in her insistence on

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the better world to come. Like “In the Mecca,” the poem immerses readers in an alternate world in order to provoke critical involvement. If the first “Sermon on the Warpland” is a proclamation of a “luminously indiscreet; / complete, continuous” black future, the second is an exhortation to the Bronzeville community to persevere in the face of the “brash and terrible weather” of racist violence and civil unrest. Published in sequence with the first sermon in In the Mecca, the poem situates readers in Bronzeville through evocative descriptions of the neighborhood and community. Brooks interrupts our desire to impose meaning on the scenes she describes by withholding narrative. Like Whitman’s “Sparkles from the Wheel,” the second sermon surrounds us with possibilities of perception. Unlike in the first, the speaker’s message is not presented in quotation marks nor is it prefaced by an invocation of the scene. Presumably, we have already gathered to listen. The time cracks into furious flower. Lifts its face all unashamed. And sways in wicked grace. Whose half-black hands assemble oranges is tom-tom hearted (goes in bearing oranges and boom). And there are bells for orphans— and red and shriek and sheen. A garbageman is dignified as any diplomat. Big Bessie’s feet hurt like nobody’s business, but she stands—bigly—under the unruly scrutiny, stands in the wild weed. In the wild weed she is a citizen, and is a moment of highest quality; admirable. It is lonesome, yes. For we are the last of the loud. Nevertheless, live. Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind. (B 456)

Brooks’s speaker presents Bessie, the garbageman and the assembly-line worker as citizens of Bronzeville in the midst of their everyday lives. By insisting on their “dignity,” she converts their practices of endurance into a call to action. Rather than protest or other direct action, however, she counsels observation and self-awareness, precursors to the kind of organizing that might bring the



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community onto the common ground of collective efficacy. Brooks invites us to experience with Bessie what it feels like to stand, with aching feet, “under the unruly scrutiny” and encourages us to lift our faces “unashamed” in admiration of the future “crack[ing] into furious flower.” Raymond Malewitz observes that a defining characteristic of Brooks’s approach is the way she “positions herself . . . as an interpretive medium through which the internal divisions within the black community can be reconciled or at least negotiated” (542). Contrasting her work to other, more overtly political Black Nationalist poetry of the 1960s, Malewitz argues that Brooks invites readers to join together with her in devising strategies that will bring the future she prophecies into bloom: “This is the ultimate transference that Brooks asks her readers to imagine, to look upon her poetry as a signifier of the yet-to-be, and as a path from which to reach the halcyon future of a ‘medicated’ whirlwind or the ‘wild weed’—and not as a statement unto itself ” (537). Brooks’s sermons are rallying cries that situate readers in the here and now of social injustice, showing us “who and what we are, and where and how we inhabit our space.” They are environment-poems in this sense, acts of solidarity that incubate action at the neighborhood scale. As Fletcher explains, “Justice is not a forbidden subject for this [kind of] poetry; however, the poetry must first discover the living moment in which questions of social justice are embedded for actual human beings” (80, italics in original). By immersing us in the dangers and hopes of Bronzeville, Brooks’s “Sermons” disrupt our complacency about the human toll of concentrated disadvantage. Further, they signal that the community must develop a shared sense of social cohesion in order to redress the negative neighborhood effects that have accrued. Rather than simply telling us about these problems, however, the “Sermons” address us as participants in the spatial project of redefining Bronzeville as a community worth defending. The third “Sermon,” composed in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the ensuing Chicago riots, continues in this vein, assembling “obscure local references” and “disparate images” while at the same time withholding narrative synthesis (Debo 150). As Annette Debo observes, the poem “mirrors the chaotic form of a riot” and produces, for readers, an experience of confusion “akin to the country’s confusion in 1968 as it watched its urban centers explode” (150). Incorporating the voices of a “black philosopher” and a “white philosopher,” as well as several members of a community writing workshop, the poem is more than a commentary on the riot or an occasional description. Consider this excerpt:

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A clean riot is not one in which little rioters long-stomped, long-straddled, BEANLESS but knowing no Why go steal in hell a radio, sit to hear James Brown and Mingus, Young-Holt, Coleman, John,       on V.O.N. and sun themselves in Sin. However, what is going on is going on. (B 474)

Line breaks in this section and throughout the poem deform and reconstitute the reading experience. As James Scully contends, they are “areas of engagement, of interaction between work and reader” that involve readers as “joint producer[s]‌” of poems (129–130). Rather than being merely stylistic or aesthetic features, Scully explains, line breaks “ramify” across both the “structural economy of a poem” and the “layers of context” in which it is embedded by putting the reader’s experience of the poem and of everyday life in relation (129–130). Brooks makes more frequent use of line breaks as the poem moves toward its conclusion and then gathers readers from across political affiliations in a single word: “However.” As was the case with the lyric apostrophes of the first and second sermons, the “However” draws together the context of the riot from across recent and distant history and creates a pause readers can share. Having brought us into the “outside” of the sermon she has constructed for us “inside” the poem, Brooks poses a question, “what / is going on,” that further resolves into a statement of fact, “what / is going on / is going on.” The “what” she refers to is a complex matrix of racism, poverty, murder, playfulness, and political experiment. These lines present readers with a choice. We can side with the young men listening to Mingus; tremble in fear with the “motherwoman” who is murdered in a subsequent section; or harbor doubts about the efficacy of political action like a speaker on the poem’s last page who asks, “But WHY do These People offend themselves.” However we position ourselves, we are present with Brooks on the street, immersed in the poem’s environment. Her diction implores us to disrupt the “lies” and “legends” she assures us will arise once the dust settles by articulating, for ourselves and for the community, exactly “what / is going on” (B 476–478). If we are not physically present on the south side of late 1960s



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Chicago, we are imaginatively there, joining with the community in the spatial project of confronting the pernicious effects of concentrated disadvantage. Brooks’s poetics of neighborhood combines the critical analysis of other city poems with a complex address to readers that enlists participation rather than detachment. Recognizing the damage decades of neglect and isolation have brought to Bronzeville, she emphasizes local acts of resistance to the neighborhood’s status quo. Brooks depicts many residents failing in their attempts to overcome its cycles of poverty and violence. Like Wanda Coleman documenting the constraints of Watts, she brings their experience to life in order to show Bronzeville’s contradictions. As she insists in the second part of “Two Dedications” and in the challenging “Sermons on the Warpland,” the neighborhood has the power and resources to confront the limitations of its physical and economic infrastructures. Echoing Sampson, Brooks demonstrates that cultivating social cohesion and shared expectations for control offer greater opportunities for change than interventions organized from outside the community. Reading Brooks’s Bronzeville poetry locates us in overlapping environments simultaneously, including her poetic version of the neighborhood, portrayals of it in press coverage, social science research and the perceptions we carry with us from our own urban experiences in Chicago and elsewhere. Her work invites us to recognize and negotiate openings for action embedded in the relationships among these layers of meaning and, in so doing, to participate in the larger work of progressive transformation.

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Organizing “El Barrio” and the “Loisaida”: Poetics of Neighborhood II

To stay free is not theoretical. It is to take over your immediate environment. Miguel Algarín, “Nuyorican Language” Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri performed “Puerto Rican Obituary” for the first time at a rally marking the Young Lords’ occupation of East Harlem’s First Spanish Methodist Church in late December 1969 (Wanzer-Serrano 156). The People’s Church, as the Lords renamed it, provided free health screenings, meals, and other services to residents of the neighborhood for eleven days. It offered a local solution to problems the city government had neglected to address. The “Obituary” centers on five residents who had been negatively affected by the neighborhood’s circumstances. “Juan / Miguel / Milagros / Olga / [and] Manuel” struggle throughout the poem to cope with structural disadvantages and false perceptions that inhibit their ability to achieve social mobility (Pietri 3–12). The poem challenges members of the Nuyorican community to transform experiences of neglect and exploitation into collective action. Specifically, Pietri calls on residents to recognize the “geography of their complexion[s]‌,” so they can “sing / and dance and work together” to claim space and resources in their neighborhoods according to their needs and interests (11–12). Like Gwendolyn Brooks’s sermons on Chicago’s “Warpland,” the “Obituary” situates readers in an imaginatively enriched urban space, “El Barrio,” and proposes a “democratic gathering of energies” that might blossom into collective action (Fletcher 245). The poem frames its characters’ private experiences as emblems of the larger community’s precarious situation. Pietri made Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga, and Manuel’s experiences a matter of public concern by reading the “Obituary” at the People’s Church rally and other actions organized by the Young Lords. The call to action he asserts at the poem’s conclusion commands New  York’s Puerto Rican communities to join together to take control of their collective

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and individual futures rather than waiting for help to arrive from outside: “Aqui [here] the men and women admire desire / and never get tired of each other / Aqui Que Pasa Power is what’s happening” (Pietri 12). Pietri’s articulation of a locally defined, locally controlled poetics of neighborhood reinforced and amplified broader attempts by the Young Lords in the late 1960s and early 1970s to empower residents of New York’s Puerto Rican neighborhoods, including East Harlem, the Lower East Side, and the South Bronx, to enact their right to the city through direct action. As Darrel WanzerSerrano explains, the Lords oriented their rhetoric and organizing efforts to the goals of “symbolically restructuring El Barrio [by] imbuing [the community] with new attitudes toward politics and social life” (124). Like Pietri in “Puerto Rican Obituary,” the Lords challenged residents to reinterpret the oppressive status quo from alternative perspectives that would allow them  to see their neighborhoods as they might be rather than as they were. The organization was a “cultural phenomenon as well as an ideological one, with a highly developed instinct for visual self-projection” (Cotter). Posters, publications, and other ephemera gathered in a recent exhibition on the Young Lords’ legacy suggest that the organization relied on poetry and other modes of artistic expression to bring residents together and organize community action.1 Pietri’s reading at the People’s Church occupation shows that Nuyorican poetry played a central role in their attempts to organize community action. Indeed, even when not participating in protests or other actions, Pietri, Miguel Algarín, Sandra María Esteves, and other Nuyorican poets aligned their writing with the Lords’ broader efforts to reframe local conditions and possibilities and amplified the organization’s material demands. As such, Nuyorican poetry represents a powerful instance of the poetics of neighborhood. Its poetic visions of El Barrio and other Nuyorican neighborhoods create opportunities for imaginative affiliation within and across communities then and now. According to Urayoán Noel, Nuyorican poetry functions as a “social text” in this way because it addresses itself to a “community that is always evolving, always performing the terms of being and belonging, always in movement” (17). Noel’s definition echoes what critical urban theorist Douglas Madden defines as the “spatial project” theory of neighborhood formation and change (481).2 As Madden explains, conceiving of a neighborhood as a spatial project involves examining how “spatial projections of social power . . . produce space, in an ongoing, contingent, uneven manner” (480). Since residents, city leaders, and other actors pursue conflicting projects in the same spaces at the same



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time, conflict over the meanings and uses of neighborhoods are the norm rather than the exception. Noel and Madden’s theories suggest that reading or hearing Nuyorican poetry can trigger processes of interpretation that begin in engagement with a particular poem and emanate out into the real spaces of everyday life. “Puerto Rican Obituary” is a good example of this effect. Pietri’s dark humor challenges readers to imaginatively engage with his characters in order to determine the root causes of their troubles. Consider Pietri’s descriptions of the dreams they have of escaping El Barrio’s “nervous breakdown streets”: Juan died dreaming about a new car Miguel died dreaming about new anti-poverty programs Milagros died dreaming about a trip to Puerto Rico Olga died dreaming about real jewelry Manuel died dreaming about the irish sweepstakes (Pietri 7)

By highlighting Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga, and Manuel’s self-defeating visions, Pietri invites readers to consider the ways structural constraints limit their perspectives and also to imagine—with them, or on their behalf—how cultivating different understandings of El Barrio might produce different outcomes. The poem implies there is work to do. For example, how might Juan, Miguel, and the others take an active part in shaping the neighborhood’s conditions? How might they use their shared experiences as a foundation for solidarity? How might they partner with their neighbors to claim the right to use neighborhood resources to advance their individual and collective interests? Pietri makes clear in “Puerto Rican Obituary” and elsewhere that Nuyorican lives are limited by external factors. But he also directs residents to invest their energies “Aqui,” here, in the neighborhood and community of El Barrio, or they will continue to suffer. As an alternative to dreaming, Pietri encourages residents and audiences alike to “[keep] their eyes open” and “communicate” each other. More generally, he contends that staking a collective claim to El Barrio will enable residents to transform the “miserable weather conditions” of the present moment into a brighter, collective future (Pietri 12).

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Prelude to action: Abandonment and neglect in Nuyorican communities The neighborhoods Pietri and other Nuyorican poets describe in their work have been contested spaces throughout their histories. Unlike in Chicago’s Bronzeville, where official and unofficial actions enforced racial segregation throughout the twentieth century, the demographics of East Harlem, the Lower East Side, and the South Bronx have shifted over time. The Lower East Side, for example, was home to large numbers of European immigrants from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1920s. Perhaps because of the neighborhood’s dense immigrant population, it was identified in the RPA’s 1929 Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs as a prime location for residential redevelopment to support downtown Manhattan’s increasingly middle-class working population (Mele 90–92). Though many of the Plan’s development projects were left unrealized, planners and city leaders have continued to see the Lower East as a site for large-scale spatial intervention. As Christopher Mele explains, the neighborhood remained the “favored site for new public housing construction” in Manhattan south of 96th Street throughout the urban crisis of the 1950s and 1960s (108–113). East Harlem’s trajectory from immigrant enclave to redevelopment target is similar. After decades as a haven for workingclass immigrants, the neighborhood experienced “massive disinvestment” during the early 1950s that paved the way for the “selective redevelopment” of urban renewal in subsequent decades (Aponte-Parés 403). Like interventions in neighborhoods across the country, redevelopment projects in East Harlem and the Lower East Side reinforced separations among residents from different class, ethnic, and racial backgrounds (Aponte-Parés 404; Mele 132). The Puerto Rican communities in the two neighborhoods suffered, in particular, because residents had limited access to housing in the new developments built to replace buildings that had been torn down. According to Liz Ševčenko, public rhetoric about the supposed crises of East Harlem and the Lower East Side affected collective perceptions so negatively that by the 1960s they were effectively “erased” from the map of “palatable New  York” (296). Positioned in the official discourse as isolated ghettos, they were used as “symbolic reference[s]‌for the many social ills … associated with social disorganization” but rarely targeted for investment (Beauregard 140). Seeing the neighborhoods in these terms prompted landlords to “walk away from their buildings” in order to claim insurance payouts, leaving “uninhabitable and often burned-out shells that soon transformed the landscape into a haunting and



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scarred urban war zone” (Mele 181). Resentment over these practices and other facets of official neglect crested in East Harlem in three days of rioting during the summer of 1967. Sparked by police violence against young Puerto Rican men, the riots represented the community’s strongest response to date to “years of frustration and disenfranchisement” (Melendez 72). They were a clear statement to the city at large that Puerto Rican and other minority communities “were being denied the[ir] basic rights” to housing and public services (Melendez 72). Like similar uprisings around the country, while the riots raised awareness about problems in the neighborhood, they drew a limited response from city leaders. As in Watts, where the 1965 uprising produced community organizations and coalitions of artists, their effect on residents themselves was more pronounced. The rise of the Young Lords was one important outcome. Residents’ experiences of East Harlem, the Lower East Side, and other neighborhoods were not always identical with their public reputations. As in Brooks’s Bronzeville, Puerto Rican residents developed strong ties to El Barrio and Loisaida during the 1950s and 1960s at the same time that their well-being was in greatest peril. As Juan Flores explains, neighborhood-based organizations filled the “representational void” created by the Puerto Rican government’s policy at the time of cutting ties with migrants (178). Responding to cultural displacement, writers and artists in the community worked to ground their identities and artistic practices in a Nuyorican—as opposed to a purely Puerto Rican—identity. They viewed neighborhood-level attachments as particularly vital to this work. On the Lower East Side, for example, several vibrant artistic-poetic communities emerged during the neighborhood’s period of decline. As Daniel Kane explains, these groups organized themselves through informal gatherings at neighborhood bars and restaurants and, eventually, at official venues like the Poetry Project and the Nuyorican Poet’s Café. Nuyorican poets and artists “used their position[s]‌in a marginal neighborhood” to justify their experimentation with alternative modes of expression (Kane 2).3 In East Harlem, as well, artists partnered with students, activists, and residents to create community organizations during the same period. One group, Real Great Society (RGC), formed an Uptown Planning Studio (UPS) in partnership with professors and city planning students at Columbia University. The Studio advocated for improving the neighborhood through community-driven development. From 1968 to 1970, RGS’s Planning Studio launched or participated in a range of projects, including the development of parks, cooperative housing, and alternative schools (Aponte-Parés 411). Pietri and fellow Nuyorican poet Miguel Piñero participated in the group’s founding meeting (Aponte-Parés 406).

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Members of the Studio also partnered with the Young Lords to create summer programs for neighborhood youth and used members as sounding boards to ensure their actions served the community’s interests (Melendez 77). Though the partnership between the Lords and RGS/UPS ultimately dissolved, the organizations were united in their efforts to encourage residents of El Barrio to claim “Puerto Rican power and identity by appropriating the language of development, while searching for ways of articulating this identity and representing it in the urban landscape” (Aponte-Parés 420). As the effects of disinvestment mounted in 1970s, writers and artists were at the forefront of the Puerto Rican community’s response. Nuyorican artists “coupl[ed] music, poetry, painting, and even gardening with traditional tactics, such as rent strikes and demonstrations” in order to register dissent and confront the social effects of political neglect (Mele 200). For example, poets Bimbo Rivas and Chino Garcia renamed the Lower East Side as “Loisaida” in 1974 in service of this goal and, in combination with the broader community of artists and writers, “articulated both a physical and a discursive space for Puerto Ricans in the postindustrial city” through written, painted, and performed works (Ševčenko 298; 300). In parallel with these efforts, tenants in both neighborhoods organized to renovate and gain title to deteriorating buildings, forming community organizations such as RGS/UPS and Adopt-aBuilding and Rehabilitation in Action to Improve Neighborhoods (RAIN) and developing partnerships with national organizations such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) (Mele 204–208). Like the Nuyorican artists in their midst, neighborhood activists approached their work creatively, using place-framing strategies to “claim a geographical territory [and] endow this urban space with an identity and an ideology that would support its residents’ needs” (Ševčenko 296). In many cases, their efforts were successful. By encouraging residents to “roll up their sleeves and physically take over their environment,” the Nuyorican movement in El Barrio and Loisaida linked social, physical, and imaginative engagements in a holistic spatial project oriented toward collective action (Ševčenko 307).

Place-framing and collective efficacy: The Young Lords in New York City The Young Lords started as a political organization in Chicago in 1968, about 9 miles north of Brooks’s Bronzeville. Their first action was to protest the city’s



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decision to convert the neighborhood of Lincoln Park from a poor Puerto Rican enclave to a bedroom community for white-collar workers. As Jacqueline Lazú explains, the Chicago Young Lords organized residents in a “relentless struggle against what they called ‘urban removal,’ demystifying and deconstructing the agenda disguised as beautification and neighborhood improvement” (56). While the organization’s efforts in Lincoln Park were unsuccessful, its work catalyzed similar actions across the country. Within a few years, the Lords grew into a national network with chapters in New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. The founding members of the New  York Young Lords took inspiration from the Chicago organization. The group undertook major public actions in 1969 and 1970: a garbage offensive in East Harlem in summer 1969; a campaign to test residents for the effects of lead poisoning during the fall of the same year; the occupation of the People’s Church in late December; and the takeover of Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx in summer 1970. In each action, the organization’s immediate goals were to draw attention to unacknowledged problems in predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhoods and provide services to neglected communities. At the People’s Church occupation, for example, the Lords partnered with volunteers to offer free health screenings and day care services. During the garbage offensive, they worked with residents to clean East Harlem’s streets and protest the city’s neglect. As former Young Lord Mickey Melendez explains, the actions were “intended to show the people a path toward a high level of political consciousness, to understand the power that lies in the hands of the working people” (109). Equal parts direct action and public relations, the offensives gave Puerto Rican residents across the city new ways to understand themselves as collective agents of change. Darrel  Wanzer-Serrano argues that the Lords’ multivalent rhetoric was as influential in the community as their concrete actions. For example, during the garbage offensive, members of the organization and collaborators cleaned the streets of East Harlem and then piled and burned trash at intersections on Third Avenue. The resulting scene made the city’s neglect of sanitation services apparent in ways that other forms of protest or action could not. As Wanzer-Serrano explains, the sights, sounds, and smells of the garbage offensive “fundamentally altered the scene [and] transformed El Barrio into something Other—a re-tropicalized space resistant to modernity/coloniality . . . in a manner that activated political subjectivities and practices” (141). By engaging residents at a visceral level, the offensive reframed the East Harlem’s public sanitation needs as a public health emergency. In addition, the offensive called residents out into the street and showed them that they could take action to transform the neighborhood’s circumstances.

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Wanzer-Serrano’s term “re-tropicalization” highlights multiple dimensions of the Lords’ actions. In plain language, it refers to the organization’s attempts to convince residents to see their neighborhoods as extensions of the “tropical” island of Puerto Rico. At the level of rhetoric, “re-tropicalization” denotes a process by which tropes or labels are applied to people or places in order to give them particular meanings.4 The blockades of trash along Third Avenue transformed the ghetto of East Harlem into a battleground and made residents into active members of the resistance. The garbage offensive re-tropicalized El Barrio in both these senses, “represent[ing] a way of acting in the world and, in the process, serv[ing] to constitute that world by delineating a material place (East Harlem) and discursive space (political Nuyoricans in El Barrio) for this altered public consciousness” (Wanzer-Serrano 138). By re-tropicalizing the streets of East Harlem, in other words, the Young Lords engaged residents in redefining their neighborhoods as spaces for political action. In addition to disrupting prevailing perceptions of El Barrio, the garbage offensive and other direct actions introduced new models through which residents could imagine themselves as full participants in the life of the community and the city as a whole. For urban historian Thomas Bender, this kind of imaginative participation is a prerequisite for political engagement. Bender draws insights from community organizing strategies from cities around the world. He explains that imagination matters for urban citizenship because it enables residents to “affiliate,” or develop emotional ties with their neighborhoods and with one another. He argues that the “imagined city is as important as the experienced city” for the development of these kinds of affiliations because if “one cannot imagine oneself into the city, make oneself at home in the city, one may be in it but not of it” (Bender 268–269). Bender’s explanation of the importance of imaginative affiliation echoes Sampson’s research on the role perceptions play in determining a community’s sense of collective efficacy (Sampson 152–156). Like Sampson, he suggests that residents of a neighborhood are more likely to work together to improve its conditions when they believe their actions will produce change. Organizations like the Young Lords and progressive city planners who partner with them undertake imaginative work when they engage with residents to develop shared visions of “how the[ir] neighborhood ought to be” (Martin 733, italics in original). Imagining future possibilities rather than dwelling on current limitations makes it possible for residents to interpret what they already know about a neighborhood’s physical, social, and economic conditions in relation to the community’s overall well-being. As Deborah Martin explains, imaginative



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engagement also helps residents develop trust in planners and community organizations as co-participants in collectively chosen agendas for change. Martin describes “place-framing” rhetoric like the Young Lords’ use of the sights and smells of garbage as an organizing strategy that “legitimate[s]‌neighborhoodbased action and define[s] the neighborhood community organization as the best actor . . . to respond to neighborhood needs” (746). By defining El Barrio as a territory residents would defend from external neglect, the garbage offensive changed residents’ perceptions of themselves, and deepened their affiliations with the Young Lords. Martin notes that shifts in perspective are insufficient in themselves to advance spatial projects geared toward neighborhood improvement. Even so, she argues that place-framing provides a foundation for positioning residents as agents rather than as victims and empowering them to claim their right to the city through collective action. By changing how residents see and experience their neighborhoods, place-framing helps them recognize common interests and develop a greater sense of what Sampson calls social cohesion and shared expectations for control (GAC 152). As Martin suggests, convincing residents of neglected communities that change is possible is difficult work. Because the Young Lords recognized this difficulty, they addressed themselves simultaneously to residents’ concrete needs and to their individual and collective civic imaginations. When the Lords were successful in this work, as Wanzer-Serrano explains, they “crafted a ‘people’. . . who [were] marked first by their collectivism, from which they garner strength and through which they articulate links of equivalence to other Third World sisters and brothers in struggle” (163). While the Lords were only active in New York for a brief period from 1969 to 1971, they played an important role in boosting the collective efficacy of the city’s Puerto Rican communities. Their garbage, church, lead paint, and hospital offensives located “activism in place [by] defining a collective identity in terms of the common place that people—mostly neighborhood residents—share” (Martin 733). Through these actions and other community-centered work, the Lords challenged residents of El Barrio to work together to expose shared experiences of the neighborhood’s contradictions, propose alternatives arrangements of power and resources that would bypass official and systemic neglect, and politicize the possibility of transformation by involving the whole community in collective action (Marcuse, “Whose Right(s)” 37). Amplified by Nuyorican poetry and poetics, their activism enabled the community to imagine a place-based collective identity, “political Nuyoricans in El Barrio,” rather than continuing to experience themselves as a disconnected group of Puerto Ricans living in New York City (Wanzer-Serrano 138).

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Claiming space: The words and feelings of Nuyorican Poetry Published in 1975 and edited by poets Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero, Nuyorican Poetry consolidates the Young Lords’ place-framing and re-tropicalization strategies and extends their work beyond the organization’s dissolution in 1972. Combining sixty-three poems, five prose essays, and ten black and white photographs, the anthology includes contributions from no fewer than twenty-five poets and artists, including trombonist Willie Colón and theater director Joseph Papp. The book is organized in three sections— “Outlaw Poetry,” “Evolutionary Poetry” and “Dusmic Poetry”—that propose competing visions of El Barrio and Loisaida that align in different ways with the principles of the larger Nuyorican movement. Many of the poets featured in the anthology—Pedro Pietri and Chino García, most prominently—had been active members of the Young Lords and related organizations. Others, such as Sandra María Esteves and Bimbo Rivas, forged partnerships with artists and writers from ally communities, for example:  Taller Boricua, El Teatro Ambulante, and the Nuyorican Poets Café itself. The dynamic relations among the anthology’s visual and verbal texts, as well as its contributors’ participation in community organizations, model how imaginative affiliation can enable readers to become “joint producers” of their neighborhoods’ future possibilities (Scully 129–130). As an historical document, Nuyorican Poetry provides an important record of artistic and activist energies that coalesced among New York’s Puerto Rican communities in the early 1970s. In addition to preserving the communities’ histories of grassroots organizing and artistic self-determination, the anthology also functions, as Urayoán Noel suggests, as a “social text” in itself that “symbolically restructur[es] El Barrio by imbuing it with new attitudes toward politics and social life” (Noel 17; Wanzer-Serrano 124). For Noel, Nuyorican poetry produces this “social text” through its performative dimensions, including gestures, styles, spaces, and modes of address adapted from New  York City’s broader “poetic vanguard” (126). By incorporating aspects of performance in their written work—and by performing their work for each other and the larger community—Nuyorican poets during the 1970s animated the “relationship[s]‌ between art, community, and urban space . . . that shaped the spatial politics of Loisaida [and El Barrio]” for themselves and their readers alike (Noel 51). Indeed, Nuyorican poets developed “intersubjective identit[ies]” with their audiences during readings and performances that involved dynamic interactions among all participants (Noel 46–47). Noel explains the development of collective



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and activist identities through poetry in terms of reader-response: “While the emotional charge of the poems varies, certain heightened tones recur (humorous, irreverent, reflective, lyrical). The prevalence of these tones can be understood alongside their desired effects (laughter, shock, identification, contemplation), heightened states wherein a new relationship, an energy transfer between performer and audience akin to the kinetics of Olson’s ‘Projective Verse,’ becomes possible” (162). The spoken and unspoken interactions of poetry readings function as foundations for broader affiliation. Like the re-tropicalizing rhetoric of the Young Lords’ direct actions, Nuyorican poets’ techniques of performance provided audiences with a framework for imaginative participation in their neighborhoods and communities. As the anthology’s subtitle indicates, Nuyorican Poetry sets differing “Puerto Rican Words and Feelings” about neighborhood-based, collective identities in dynamic relation. Essays by Algarín and photographs by Gil Mendez are interspersed throughout the anthology. Functioning as paratexts that produce “thresholds of interpretation” that shape readers’ experiences and interpretations, they substitute for the multivalent gestures of live performance (Genette xi). Because they fit some poems more closely than others, the essays and photographs create conceptual spaces or place-frames through which readers can engage in dialogue with the anthology’s poetic texts. Algarín’s prose constitutes nearly 15  percent of Nuyorican Poetry overall. Appearing at the beginning, middle, and end of the volume and in introductions to each of the book’s three sections, the essays wholly surround the reading experience. They specify that the Nuyorican poet’s roots are in “the debris of the ghettos, the tar and concrete that covers the land, the dependence on manual labor that is merely brute force, the force feeding of the young in schools that kill their initiative rather than nourish it, and the loss of trust” (Algarín, “Nuyorican Literature” 90). Similarly, Mendez’s photographs call attention to familiar neighborhood contexts through which its poets depict the future they hope to create “by what [they] do that is cultural in the present” (Algarín, “Nuyorican Literature” 90).The dynamic relations between the essays, photographs, and poetry fulfill the mission Algarín sets out for Nuyorican poetry overall: to “write poems that describe our actual conditions without fearing that they might be too personal or too lost in the detail of the day and not metaphysical enough” (“Nuyorican Literature” 90). Their divergent visual and verbal languages make multiple trajectories of meaning and identification available and engage readers in actively mapping the linguistic, cultural, and spatial dimensions of everyday life in Nuyorican neighborhoods.

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Algarín identifies the anthology as an extension of direct action in his introductory essay “Nuyorican Language.” He describes failed efforts by neighborhood groups, including the Young Lords, the Renigades [sic] of Harlem, and the Dynamite Brothers of the Lower East Side to claim the community’s right to the city through interactions with the Municipal Housing Authority, the fire department, and the police. The essay suggests that Nuyorican poetry can reinvigorate their work. For example, Algarín explains that communications between community groups and entities of city government were “strained” in the early 1970s by mutual distrust and the lack of a common “language.” Even as the Young Lords and other groups shifted their energies from “organized street hustling” to “coordinated alternative street government,” they struggled to gain official recognition (NP 10, 16). Indeed, no matter how closely these groups aligned their activities with the long-term health of their communities, they seem destined to be pigeonholed as criminal and, therefore, subjected to harassment and control. For Algarín, this lack of recognition underscores the urgent need for Nuyorican communities to develop a “new language” responsive to the “raw life” from which their activism emerges. Such a language would serve multiple functions: “blaz[ing] a path of fire for the self ” (NP 10); “pierc[ing] the crowd with cataracts of clear, clean, precise, concrete words about the liquid, shifting latino [sic] reality around him” (NP 11); “verbaliz[ing] the stresses of street experience” (NP 19); and “document[ing] the conditions of survival” (NP 15). These functions are central components of the anthology’s broader place-framing rhetoric. Attempting in print what the Young Lords enacted in the garbage, church, and hospital offensives, Algarín and the poets represented in Nuyorican Poetry propose to engage readers and residents in the work of determining how their neighborhoods “ought to be” (Martin 733, italics in original). The anthology’s cover and the first two photographs reinforce Algarín’s call for a new language through which to articulate the community’s demands for access to power and resources. On the cover, four adults and a young girl stand at a littered curb. Five other adults walk by, but none of the nine makes eye contact with any of the others. They look guarded—arms crossed and faces firm—as if in frustrated dialogue with the abandoned building looming behind. In the next photograph, on page  45 in the middle of the “Outlaw Poetry” section, police restrain a young protester, perhaps a Young Lord, Renigade, or Dynamite Brother, while he points and shouts out of the frame. In the next photograph, also in the “Outlaw Poetry” section, a different young man marches with a placard featuring Pedro Albizu Campos and a rallying cry for Puerto



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Rican independence in English and Spanish, “IN ORDER TO DESTROY OUR NATION THEY WILL HAVE TO TAKE OUR LIVES” / “PARA QUITARNOS LA PATRIA TIENEN QUE QUITARNOS LA VIDA” (NP 61). The photographs capture the young men in the midst of acts of confrontation which contrast with the defensive postures of their neighbors on the cover. They model a different mode of response to the city’s neglect. Unapologetic and confident, these young men are analogs of Algarín’s outlaw poet, someone who “fights with words” and sees himself as “morally free to act, to aggress against authority” on behalf of “himself or for his friends or for his people” (NP 24; 27). Juxtaposed with these photographs, the poems in the section define geographical and imaginative terrains of conflict and action. Ranging from San Juan to Times Square, from 6th Street (“The Sounds of Sixth Street”) to 106th Street (“A day when clinkers . . .”) and through subway platforms (“Underground Poetry”), classrooms (“The Teacher of Life” and “Situation Heavy”), and infested apartments (“About Los Ratones”), they “tell the tale of the streets to the streets” (NP 11). The poems address residents of the neighborhood directly by challenging their complicity in oppressive myths about the neighborhood’s irreversible decline and enlisting their support in advocating for radical political change. Algarín singles out poets Martita Morales, Lucky CienFuegos, Chino Garcia, Jorge Lopez, and co-editor Miguel Piñero as exemplars of this mode of engagement, calling them “street fighters” who perform for the crowd and insist on “our right to make our words communicate our experience” (NP 23–24). Like the protests and marches featured in the section’s photographs, their poems invoke movement leaders, such as Lolita Lebrón, and call for “BORICUA REVOLUTION!!” (NP 59–60; 76–77). Piñero confronts city leaders for their neglect of Puerto Rican neighborhoods in the sardonic poem “The Book of Genesis According to Saint Miguelito.” The poem mimics the idiom of the King James Bible and inserts details from the street in the Christian creation story: In the beginning God created the ghettos & slums and God saw this was good. So God said, “Let there be more ghettos & slums” and there were more ghettos & slums. (NP 62)

The poem continues in a sequence of “begats” that demonstrates the scope and intensity of Piñero’s analysis:  the community’s fragile conditions are effects

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of individual and neighborhood-scale interactions as well as of confounding structures of national and international relations. The abstract, place-less operations of capitalism come in for particular critique: “capitalism / who begat racism / who begat exploitation / who begat male chauvinism,” and so on (NP 63). While residents are enmeshed in a cycle of negative neighborhood effects, Piñero insists they are not doomed. Instead, they face a choice about whether to remain “COOL” and accept the city’s insufficient responses to their calls for action or to raise their voices even louder: “WHY? WHY? que pasa babyyyyyy?” (NP 63–64). Portraying a similar choice, Pietri’s “before and after graduation day” shows the complexities of Nuyorican experience in a different way. The poem is set on a rooftop where two men are negotiating the terms of a suicide pact. As in Piñero’s “Genesis,” Pietri asserts his analysis of neighborhood circumstances in characteristically dark humor that contrasts the “Outlaw Poetry” section’s heroic photographs. The first speaker in the poem prods the second to “jump first” and gives reasons why: do not disappoint your friends they have been waiting down there . . . do not wait until it gets dark the lights do not work around this neighborhood of oldtime religion . . . hurry up before the reverend who showed you where the roof was at changes your mind with another bottle of gypsy rose & deports you back to night school (NP 33)

The man’s reasons invert the poetic responsibilities Algarín identifies in the section’s introduction. First, he says his friend must jump in order to fulfill the community’s expectations about his self-destructive behaviors; second, he must jump or the chaotic night will obscure and invalidate his attempt at calling attention to his struggle; third, he must jump or his intention to disrupt the status quo might dissolve in cheap liquor and another dead-end educational program. While the title of the poem signals the possibilities of emerging adulthood— possibilities which are also implicit in Mendez’s photographs of the protester



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and marcher—its narrative suggests idleness and incapacity, a mood that fits more closely with the visual language of the final photograph in the section. Featuring a balding older man looking down at his wrinkled hands in a mostly bare room, the photograph serves as a warning to the speakers on Pietri’s roof and participants in Piñero’s creation story: submitting to the status quo is not a viable option. Analyzing the structural causes of concentrated disadvantage— the chain of causation signaled in Piñero’s “Genesis”—can be a first step away from the roof edge. Juan Flores compares Algarín’s Nuyorican aesthetic to the realist fiction of Balzac. “What most impresses the young Puerto Rican writer,” he explains, is writing that “confronts social reality directly, as everyday lived experience and institutions, rather than as a mediation of what is conveyed in books and other means of representation” (185). Like Balzac, in Flores’s reading, Algarín positions desperate characters like the suicidal men of “before and after graduation day” alongside portraits of innocent residents and heroic protestors in order to assert that the “actual conditions” of life in Nuyorican communities involve the mundane and heroic in equal measure. Taken together, the contradictory resonances of Nuyorican Poetry’s “outlaw” figures suggest that book offers a composite poetics of neighborhood rather asserting a strictly unitary perspective on political action. Like the multivalent rhetoric of the Young Lords’ offensives, its combination of poetry, prose, and photographs enacts a place-framing process that involves multiple possibilities for imaginative affiliation with an emerging Nuyorican community. Even acknowledging the complexity of Nuyorican Poetry’s imaginative vision of El Barrio and Loisaida, however, the anthology is not without limitations. As Noel suggests, for example, Algarín’s model of “outlaw” activism privileges an “agonistic (and invariably male) street poet” and depends on a “tricky counterinstitutional politics” (41, italics in original). The constraining dynamics of Algarín’s “invariably male” perspective and his oppositional stance play out in his own “Inside Control: my tongue,” a poem included with Piñero’s “Genesis” and Pietri’s “before and after graduation day” in the “Outlaw Poetry” section: if the man owns the world oh white power hidden behind every word i speak if the man takes me into his caverns of meanings in sound if all my talk is borrowed from his tongue then i want hot boiling water to wash

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out my mouth i want lye to soothe my soiled lips for the english that i speak betrays my need to be a self made power (NP 58)

The poem makes a compelling claim:  the predominance of “english” in everyday life in the United States masks the operations of racist “white power” and their constraining effects on nonnative speakers. Echoing writers such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, Algarín vows to exchange the language of his oppressor for “self made power,” deploying subtly complex syntax to heighten the demonstration of his disgust. The suspended conditionals of the first seven lines produce a visceral effect at the triply enjambed conclusion: “then i want / hot boiling water to wash / out my mouth then i want lye / to soothe my soiled lips.” The trickiness of this stance, as Noel explains, is that Algarín’s assertion of “self made power” depends on the presence of its opposite, “white power.”5 Being “self made” is a function of resistance rather than one of self-determination. Noel cites further evidence of the limitations of Algarín’s “outlaw” model in Piñero’s “La Metadona Está Cabrona,” a poem that, like Pietri’s “before and after graduation day,” describes postures of abjection. The fourth stanza of the poem is representative: what’s the difference six days a week you nod out on the stoop the seventh you nod out on your therapy group they call you a slob cuz you nod out on the job and your wood won’t throb it just flops . . . flops . . . flops . . . . . . but you, you motherfuckin’ lame oye que lió te buscate mi pana, tu no sabes que la metadona está cabrona (NP 65–66)

Piñero shifts between registers of everyday English and Spanish vernaculars in the stanza, mocking both his dependence on heroin and methadone and the sexual and interpersonal impotence it causes. The flopping, flaccid penis he describes recalls the “mongo affair” Algarín identifies as characteristic of Puerto Rican masculinity in a long poem of the same name, also included in the “Outlaw” section. Not getting an erection means not being able forge an



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identity through active protest or even self-righteous complaint. “Can’t yell out ghettocide,” Piñero advises, because “who’s to blame / but you” (NP 66). “La Metadona’s” internal monologue mirrors the fatalistic advice of Pietri’s “before and after graduation day”: it doesn’t matter in the end what the speaker does, he is stuck on the margins, passed out on the stoop or peering over the roof ’s edge, frustrated in his attempts at self-improvement. On one hand, the men’s isolation within the neighborhood suggests a failure of Algarín’s Nuyorican project. On the other hand, however, Piñero’s and Pietri’s poems suggest that the community is more complex than Algarín’s essays indicate. In addition to the Renigades, Dynamite Brothers, and street poets he celebrates, the neighborhood also includes heroin addicts, alcoholics, and older people of all types. These figures are active participants in the development of the neighborhood’s identity and are as much members of the community as the virile activists marching through its streets. For Noel, their proliferation in the anthology excludes large numbers of readers (58). Perhaps as an acknowledgement of this limitation, Algarín and Piñero include work by four female poets in the anthology:  Martita Morales (two poems), Luz Rodriguez (two poems), Amina Muñoz (four poems), and Sandra María Esteves (four poems). Morales’s outlaw poem, “The Sounds of Sixth Street,” challenges masculine viewpoints in the voice of a 15-year-old girl who “never gives up” despite the limitations placed on her by her mother, teachers, and others in the neighborhood (NP 51). The poem enriches the anthology’s poetics of neighborhood by introducing an alternative perspective. Echoing Brooks’s sonnet sequence “the children of the poor,” “The Sounds of Sixth Street” engages readers’ empathy and sense of justice through descriptions of racialized conflict: “she fights and / she rebels / and for this / she gets expelled” (NP 51). Morales’s simple diction exposes the reader to the accumulation of wrongs that characterizes the girl’s life, while keeping her experience, through the persistent repetition of the pronoun “she,” always at the center. Maturing over the course of the poem from innocence, she plays at the beach “in a world of [her] own;” to emergent sexuality, “her parents will not let her have a boyfriend / with an afro;” to activism at a school assembly, the girl develops an increasingly complex identity over the course of the poem (NP 50). Outlaw words like “fight,” “rights,” “rebels,” and “expelled” organize the social context of the poem: a mixed-race neighborhood in which patriarchal authority figures punish deviation from norms. To escape from the restrictions these verbs indicate, Morales’s heroine seeks a community organized according to a shared sense of what, according to the poem’s final word, is “Right!”

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The poems and photographs of the “Evolutionary Poetry” and “Dusmic Poetry” sections of the anthology add similar complexities to its imaginative vision of El Barrio and Loisaida. Four smiling children look out from an apartment window in a photograph midway through the “Evolutionary Poetry” section on a page that sits between Morales’s “Teatro,” a poem that celebrates the community theater company Teatro Ambulante, and Carlos Conde’s “Así Era Yo,” one that reflects on the difficult relationships of Nuyorican men to their Puerto Rican fathers (NP 102–106). A young adult woman stands in the doorway of a shop in a photograph later in the section. She holds a cigarette and smiles for the camera on a quick break from work (NP 112). The poems immediately before and after the photograph explore the roles women play in advancing the community’s efforts to claim their right to the city. Amina Muñoz’s “a chant” describes a rooftop party at a building on East Harlem’s 116th Street. The party cannot start properly until the poem’s female speaker arrives: “a million african gods / bump their way up Madison ave. / to 116 st. / cause / it’s in my sneaker / a bag of reefer and / willie colon knows” (NP 111). Muñoz’s casual rhymes show that her speaker is integral to the social scene. Colón and the other “african gods” on their way to the party depend on her access to “reefer” to ensure the event’s success. Jesús Papoleto Meléndez’s “sister, / para nuestras hermanas” adds further details about women’s roles in the community. As if to confront a man who sees women as sexual partners and nothing more, the poem begins with a question: have you seen the revolutionary sister rappin’ to the masses of poor /        she talks about revolution / change        she talks about redistributing wealth        to all (NP 113)

Meléndez attests to the “revolutionary sister’s” expertise and commitment throughout the poem, noting that she’s read “Mao & Marx Che & Lenin”; “sleeps little / works hard”; and “loves her people,” including junkies and children (NP 113). While Meléndez cannot help but describe her “pretty / beautiful shape,” the “revolutionary sister’s” kindness contrasts the outlaw poet’s brash energy and shows that despite the anthology’s emphasis on male perspectives, the Nuyorican movement has a broad base of active support (NP 113). The “Dusmic Poetry” section is bookended by photographs of women at different stages of life. The first item in the section is a picture of a young girl



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striking a defiant pose on the sidewalk. Her white knee-socks and floral dress stand out against the dark background of the street, and her pursed lips and squinting eyes embody the “revolutionary” consciousness Meléndez describes (NP 132). Sandra María Esteve’s “for tito” appears on the facing page. Hailing Tito Puente, the East Harlem-born drummer who was the poet’s friend and contemporary, the poem describes the powers of rhythm and music to nurture transformative visions of Nuyorican neighborhoods. Esteves defines Puente’s drumming as a “unique language” that enables her to see possibilities in New York that the city’s neglect obscures:  “and when there are no more sunsets / and i become alone and lost / . . . / together / we reap mystical sugarcane in the ghetto” (NP 133). The poem overlays the limiting conditions of the New York City “ghetto” with a spirit of self-determination derived from “la isla,” Puerto Rico. It identifies Puente’s “macho paciencia,” a spirit that contrasts and sustains the impatient anger shown in the earlier poetic and visual depictions of outlaw protesters, as the element in his music that creates this effect (NP 133). The final photograph in the “Dusmic Poetry” section shows another version of “paciencia.” It captures an older woman at rest in a rocking chair (NP 174). Her floral housedress and intense facial expression echo the confident presence of the young girl posing on the sidewalk in the photograph at the section’s beginning. We look up and in at the woman from outside her room. Plain wood floors and walls and the blurred indication of a porch railing in the foreground give the impression that we are in Puerto Rico rather than New  York. If “for tito” and the photograph of the young girl show the possibilities of youthful Nuyorican activism, the woman in the rocking chair suggests the patience and persistence of an earlier generation. The combination of the two indicates that neither mode of engagement—public defiance or private perseverance—is sufficient by itself. Perhaps to reinforce the complex interdependence of different styles of Nuyorican activism, Esteves intones a call for unity and respect in “Blanket Weaver,” the second of three of her poems included in the “Dusmic Poetry” section. She calls out to a figure like the woman on the rocking chair in Mendez’s photograph in the poem’s opening lines:  “weaver / weave us a song of many threads / that will dance with the colors of our people / and cover us with the warmth of peace” (NP 135). Like Morales’s “Sixth Street,” Muñoz’s “a chant,” and her own “for tito,” “Blanket Weaver” addresses readers with compassion and seeks to establish a broad basis for collective action. Algarín describes the poem’s activist resonances in his introduction to the section: “A dusmic poem fortifies and centralizes the reader. It gives hope without deceptive illusions” (NP 130). Indeed, as Noel explains, Esteves’s poem “posits an organic poetics invested . . .

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in the recovering of discredited or marginalized African and Taíno forms, as well as in an exploration of the intersections between verbal and visual arts” (77). The blanket Esteves calls for in “Blanket Weaver” is a tactile representation of practices of solidarity which, in their domestic softness and repetitive patience, might be anathema to the anthology’s outlaws. As if to emphasize these qualities, Esteves starts each of the poem’s ten stanzas with the word “weave.” Her assertion of weaving as politically relevant work challenges the sexism embedded in Meléndez’s question and suggests an alternative trajectory for activism (NP 113). “Blanket Weaver” enhances Nuyorican Poetry’s imaginative vision of Puerto Rican neighborhoods by transposing “sweet plum,” “topaz canyons,” and “floral honey” onto New York’s crumbling infrastructure (NP 134). Re-tropicalizing El Barrio and Loisaida, the poem encourages readers to imagine the possibilities of imbuing city streets with the spirit of “la isla.” Despite the tranquil mood of Esteves’s transpositions and descriptions, “Blanket Weaver” does not lack for “fire” or depth. Perhaps the most powerful stanza is the third-to-last: weave us a rich round black that lives in the eyes of our warrior child and feeds our mouths with moon breezes with rhythms interflowing through all spaces of existence a black that holds the movement of eternity (NP 135)

The “black” Esteves invokes in these lines pairs the nurturing investments of motherhood with critical reflection on the spatial dynamics of everyday experience. Its “rhythms interflowing / through all spaces of experience” provides an apt characterization of the collaborative processes of community development. Paired with photographs of women, children, and the elderly, poems like Morales’s and Esteves’s make visible people, experiences, and perspectives on the margins of Algarín’s heroic countercultural avant-garde. Esteves’s feminist transformation of the outlaw model mirrors Wanda Coleman’s attempts to factor feeling into the poetry of Watts and Gwendolyn Brooks’s use of mothers to document the radical possibilities of collection action in Bronzeville. It anticipates the work of progressive planners such as Patsy Healey, Leonie Sandercock, and others to integrate lived and imaginative experiences alongside critical research and technical analysis as valid forms of engagement.



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Locating “la isla” in the “ghetto”: Expanding the Nuyorican poetics of neighborhood Esteves was born in the South Bronx in 1948. The author of two collections and six chapbooks, she has worked throughout her career across poetry, visual art, and jewelry design to cultivate an inclusive poetics of neighborhood.6 Her 1980 debut, Yerba Buena, in particular, asserts a direct challenge to Algarín and Piñero’s outlaw poetics by hailing female leaders and framing El Barrio and Loisaida as extensions of Puerto Rico. The collection pairs poems on political action, feminist movement leaders, and family heritage with line drawings of verdant island scenes and religious and mythological icons. As in Nuyorican Poetry, the dynamic relations between Yerba Buena’s visual and verbal texts frame the neighborhoods of El Barrio and Loisaida as sites for the emergence of collective efficacy. As an extension of this idea, Esteves advocates for the value and importance of Puerto Rican communities to the city’s overall well-being throughout the collection. Louis Reyes Rivera notes in the introduction to Yerba Buena that Esteves’s framing of Nuyorican neighborhoods as contested spaces engages readers in realizing “how accountable we are, how interconnected we are, each recording the actions to which we commit ourselves” (YB xv). If Algarín’s poetics of neighborhood asserts the necessity of imagining revolutionary possibilities, Yerba Buena proposes a more inclusive approach to collective action grounded in an “organic poetics of self-knowledge and political awakening” (Noel 76). Yerba Buena opens with a thick-lined drawing of a religious totem and a Spanish-language invocation to the reader to share in the “ambiente colectivo” or “shared environment” of El Barrio. Positioning herself as an oracle, Esteves commits to translating spiritual insight: “Oye me / que mi espiritu habla / . . . / Me dijo una cosa / y lo voy a decir a ti” (YB 2–3). The collection’s first poem equates the activities of speaking and listening with dancing, a performative form of interaction that, as Noel observes, is grounded in “improvisation” (78). Esteves pays homage to the guiding spirits of Frantz Fanon, Fidel Castro, Cristina Huyghue (her mother), and Louis Reyes Rivera (her friend and fellow poet) in the next several poems then turns to a critique of the masculinist assumptions of Nuyorican identity. “I look for peace great graveyard,” a poem included in an earlier form in Nuyorican Poetry, and “I am more than the night and day of things” depict New  York as a “rotting” hell of “constant struggle” and invest hope in a moment when the “dance of chinese windchimes [and]

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ancient pipe” will call a new neighborhood into being (YB 9). “I am the day and night of things” suggests that language provides a means for escaping the constraints of conventional femininity. The poem’s speaker describes herself as a “mixture of something unique / a verbal reflection all edged / to a center beyond sound” and points to a place “There! / there!” where she can become “all of which [she] once was afraid to be” (YB 10). The personal pronouns in the poem’s title and the final line and the speaker’s emphatic search for a place of her own suggest she experiences El Barrio as venue for personal exploration and development. Even as these possibilities excite her imagination, however, the neighborhood recedes from view; “it’s here, and there,” as if individual affiliation or attachment to place is insufficient to produce a new “center beyond sound.” A line drawing on the facing page accentuates the poem’s ambivalent mood. Calling to mind a forbidding jungle and exposed female genitalia, the drawing encourages a visceral response from readers by merging the exotic jungle and the everyday body. Like the Young Lords’ garbage offensive, the poem and drawing frame the speaker’s urban experience in complex, contradictory terms that highlight her potential involvement in place-based collective action. As Esteves observes in a later poem, the city is “[u]‌nconcerned for people who merely exist / to survive no more than greyness” (YB 13). Wanzer-Serrano notes in his study of the Young Lords that Esteves’s work was his first introduction to poetry’s capacity to transform consciousness: “[R]‌eading Sandra María Esteves’s ‘Here,’ I  got poetry for the first time . . . and I  wept. Her words spoke (and continue to speak) to me on a level that I  struggle to verbalize” (9). The words in Esteves’s poems give him a way to articulate aspects of his experience in the city he had been unable to express. “Here,” the poem Wanzer-Serrano reflects on, is one of a suite of six in Yerba Buena that describes how urban identities emerge through the interactions of language, memory, and space. The poems shift attention from the work of diagnosing or protesting against urban problems to the future-oriented project of identifying the parameters of collective action. Esteves notes in “Here” that she “speak[s] the alien tongue / in sweet boriqueño thoughts,” suggesting there are discrepancies between the English and Spanish-language influences on her experiences: I may never overcome the theft of my isla heritage dulce palmas de coco on Luquillo sway in windy recesses I can only imagine and remember how it was



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But that reality now a dream teaches me to see, and will bring me back to me. (YB 20)

Serving as the poem’s conclusion, these lines condense the frustrations Esteves articulates in other poems in the sequence in a complex reflection on the relationship between her “isla heritage” and the urban “reality” of cultural dispossession. Importantly for Wanzer-Serrano, Esteves holds these two visions of her spatial identity in dialectical tension. She predicts that dreaming the former while experiencing the latter will “bring me back to me.” Esteves’s central insight in “Here” is that it is possible to perceive aspects and dimensions of neighborhood environments that are typically suppressed. To put it another way, “Here” demonstrates Esteves’s claim that “la isla” exists in El Barrio. By narrating the moment when she recognizes the possibility of reimagining East Harlem in this way, Esteves makes the same kind of recognition available to Wanzer-Serrano and other readers. The poems surrounding “Here” frame the neighborhood in similar terms. In “Improvisando,” for example, Esteves writes in solidarity with the “Loisaida Poets and Writers Collective” about the “people dying in the streets / in houses suspended in cockroach nightmares.” Applying the Young Lords’ model of direct, collective action, she asks, “But where are the solutions? / Who knows the plan? // When will we stop the destruction / begin the creation / rebirth and rebuilding / of our people and our land?” (YB 16–17). “I am looking” links the decrepit condition of the “ghetto” of East Harlem with the imposition of colonial authority in “la isla” of Puerto Rico. As in “Here,” Esteves locates the possibility of a response to these physical constraints in a rejuvenating spatial imagination: my feet grab into the earth the earth receives the spaces form I become my own womb directing the voice I follow with simple pride stretching to assimilate into my one universe always a new way moving in constant touching all the atomic circumference (YB 24)

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Esteves uses her voice to “assimilate” the conflicting realities of East Harlem “into [the] one universe” of El Barrio. “I am looking” enacts the hope she invests in the disruptive power of language in the earlier poem “I am more than the night and day of things.” In both cases, poetry serves as a medium for inventing alternative grounds for identity and affiliation. The drawing that follows “I am looking” in the collection reinforces the place-framing Esteves attempts throughout Yerba Buena. Taking a water-level view of the New York City harbor, the drawing places fishing boats where we might otherwise expect container ships and suggests the gentle motion of a calm sea rather than the busy traffic of one of the world’s most densely inhabited islands. As if to emphasize “la isla” character of Manhattan island, Esteves includes the Statue of Liberty, a water tower, and two smokestacks floating in the far distance. In Martin’s terms, Esteves’s poems place-frame Nuyorican neighborhoods as sites of collective action that merge the sights and sounds of Puerto Rico with the most constraining characteristics of New York City. Yerba Buena creates a neighborhood “sphere of activism” by “cast[ing] the neighborhood as the most salient sphere of community” for readers and residents alike (Martin  744). Adapting Algarín’s outlaw model to accommodate a wider range of knowledge and experience, Esteves’s poetics of neighborhood enacts what Wanzer-Serrano calls “re-tropicalization” of Nuyorican neighborhoods. Her poetry and visual art invest El Barrio with the imaginative possibilities of locating “la isla” in the ghetto. Her layered renderings of the “grey world” of the city as a gentle, floating island invite residents to transform their experiences by infusing them with sights, smells, sounds, and practices derived from Puerto Rico (YB 13). As Miriam DeCosta-Willis observes, Esteves’s work suggests that Nuyorican “artistic creation is not confined to distinct media or discrete genres but [rather] that it is holistic, encompassing all forms of expressiveness” (6). Poems titled “Fill my world with music,” “Some people are about Jam,” and “Staring into eye of truth” provide explicit models for readers who would attempt to join Esteves in constructing this alternative space. Focusing on music, conversation, and love, the poems warn that change requires collective action and “is nourished by the rain / struggling every day” (YB 45). Esteves clarifies her vision of neighborhood-based collective action in an essay titled “Ambivalence or Activism from the Nuyorican Perspective in Poetry” originally delivered as a lecture at Rutgers University in 1983 and later published alongside Algarín’s “Nuyorican Aesthetics” in the edited collection of Nuyorican writing Images and Identities. Like the poems and drawings of Yerba Buena, the



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essay links the political valences of poetry with the spatial possibilities of Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Ambivalence is a constant political condition that goes beyond the boundaries of our Puerto Rican identity. We are always caught up in our choices for living, trying to survive somewhere between Yin and Yang, Heaven and hell, the Right and the Left, the New  York Puerto Rican and the Caribbean Puerto Rican, English and Spanish, poverty and technology, oppression and expression, the self and the soul. At every turn there is a new confrontation awaiting us. The challenge is to find the solution, to uncover, discover, recover, and recreate it. It is both a social and individual priority, and one of the many reasons why we are here. (Esteves, “Ambivalence” 168)

Placing equal emphasis on location and voice, Esteves’s assertion that the “political condition” of Nuyorican poetry is one of confrontation and survival mirrors the vision Algarín’s articulates in the prose sections of Nuyorican Poetry. Like Algarín, Esteves urges her audience to consider a wide range of affiliations with and attachments to the social and physical contexts of their lives. In a sense, the essay invites readers to use Esteves’s words as a poetic neighborhood in which to test out different approaches to collective action. Her insistence that readers partner with her and other Nuyorican artists to “find the solution, to uncover, discover, recover, and recreate it” recall a promise she makes in “All of you who come to dance with me,” a poem from the second half of Yerba Buena. With the title as the first line, the poem begins: All of you who come to dance with me to listen and breathe with me                  I will touch you              in ways you never thought of           walk with you                               thru misty lagoons                               and rainforests (YB 73)

The intimacy of Esteves’s “breath” and “touch” contrasts sharply with the activist thrust of Algarín and Piñero’s outlaw poetics, but the poem nonetheless conveys a similar commitment to the transformative power of performance and community. Esteves makes herself vulnerable in the poem so that her readers will do the same. Indeed, the drawing on the page that follows the poem depicts

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a venue like the Nuyorican Poets Café where poets and audiences might come together. Empty glasses trail along the floor between scattered instruments, a double bass, a trumpet, and a high hat. In the foreground two chairs face a microphone stand as if to register that a reading and performance has just taken place. Paired with the poem, the drawing activates what Noel calls the “social text” of Nuyorican poetry, its capacity to call into being a “community that is always evolving, always performing the terms of being and belonging, always in movement” (17). Esteves’s use of verbal and visual languages to reconstitute the dynamics of live performance suggests that the work of recreating Nuyorican neighborhoods as spaces for collective action begins in communal experiences of poetry. The final three poems of Yerba Buena continue in this vein, encouraging readers to share the kinds of vulnerability described in “All of you who come to dance with me” and to embrace the challenges and opportunities of imaginative engagement. “Do not be afraid to grab a thought,” for example, offers reassurance: “Do not be afraid to change / patterns of living that kill and corrupt”; “Do not be afraid to fly // or to reach out with love” and “Do not be afraid to give again and again // fulness [sic] is within” (YB 87). The poem’s repetitions recall the admonitions of Algarín’s “Inside Control:  my tongue” against accepting external models of perception and experience:  “if you want to feel very rich / look at your hands / that is where / the definition of magic / is located at” (NP 151). While Algarín emphasizes individual responsibility, Esteves contends that change comes from the community rather than from the individual. In “Do not be afraid” and throughout the collection, she reframes El Barrio as an emerging, evolving neighborhood where readers and residents can embrace the risks of collective action. Like the Young Lords recruiting collaborators in the garbage offensive or speaking with television crews outside the People’s church, Esteves insists through her poetry that imagining collective efficacy provides a foundation for social and political change. She reiterates this principle in Yerba Buena’s final two poems, “Whose war cry will be heard tomorrow?” and “A pile of wood.” Both are centered in the expectation that Nuyorican neighborhoods can remade through the community’s efforts. In “Whose war cry,” Esteves questions what will happen after existing structures of oppression are overturned. Focusing on the neighborhood context, she asks “[w]‌hose ideals will become realities” through the collective work of “destroying the prisons / eliminating disease / reforming the welfare of the people / developing the consciousness of new humanity” (YB 89). These questions lead to “A pile of wood,” a poem that, as its title suggests, is the most concrete and



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specific in the collection. Dedicated to the “Renegades of El Barrio,” a community organization that persisted after the Young Lords dissolved in 1972, the poem documents the work of rebuilding: “we take hammers in our hands / we build / a place called home / to stand tall / proud” (YB 90). As in other poems, Esteves describes identity in “A pile of wood” as a function of attachment to place. The fact that the Renegades take part in the physical labor of rebuilding the El Barrio enables them to “stand tall / [and] proud” in the neighborhood. Like Algarín, who describes an attempt by the “Dynamite Brothers” of Loisaida to secure access to a vacant lot for a community garden in the Introduction to Nuyorican Poetry, Esteves frames her poetics of neighborhood as complementary to the Renegades’ work (NP 16–18). Poetry incites and sustains their efforts to remake the neighborhood as a haven for collection action. Yerba Buena’s last page features a drawing of tropical foliage. Unlike the drawings in the preceding pages, it is a negative: white leaves and palm fronds emerge from a saturated black background. This reversal of color values mirrors Esteves’s attempts throughout Yerba Buena to infuse the ghettos of New York with the communal spirit of la isla of Puerto Rico. The drawing signals to readers that something has changed. As Esteves explains in “Ambivalence or Activism,” she sees her poetry as an “affirmation of political struggle . . . a statement of determination to dream, perhaps to hope, to determine, to give birth, to mold, to survive that confrontation victoriously” (168). This statement of purpose reinforces the place-framing rhetoric of Nuyorican outlaw poetics and Esteves’s own textual and visual depictions of collective efficacy. Faced with disinvestment and neglect, Esteves, Algarín, Piñero, Pietri, and other Nuyorican writers and artists deploy a multilayered poetics of neighborhood in order to organize residents into active political communities and assert actionable, if imperfect, visions of community-driven social change. By reinterpreting neighborhood conditions as beginning points for collective action, their work addresses audiences as contributors to the larger community’s collective efficacy. Their imaginative visions of El Barrio and Loisaida echo in Yerba Buena’s concluding lines, “Y la gente saben que somos la tierra / con fuegos y manos junto cambiamos” (YB 90). Like the Young Lords’ activism, Nuyorican poetry engages the city’s Puerto Rican residents in imagining and enacting the possibility of changing their world one neighborhood at a time.

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Poetry and Progressive Planning

A city is its people; their practices; and their political, social, cultural, and economic institutions as well as other things. The city planner must comprehend and deal with all these factors. Paul Davidoff, “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning” City planners work at the nexus of political power and community needs. As Manuel Castells, Tom Angotti, and others argue, they run the constant risk of having their work co-opted by exploitative urban growth regimes. While planners often serve at the pleasure of business and political leaders, their work creates profound effects in the lives of communities. Because of this positioning, they have a vital role to play in confronting urban inequality at the local and regional scales. For Libby Porter, planners face a choice between reinforcing elite interests or “articulat[ing] clear and genuine alternatives to this kind of practice–alternatives that imagine and practice forms of social and economic life that are not exploitative, commodifying, or alienating” (530). Indeed, for many planners and theorists, “the development of practical alternatives to the status quo” is the “primary task” of planning work regardless of the context in which it is pursued (Fainstein, The Just City 19). For example, New York City has used the planning tools of rezoning and eminent domain since the early 2000s to attract development interests to formerly public land at Hudson Yards in Manhattan and Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn (Angotti 206–222).1 By positioning neighborhoods near proposed developments as wasted space, planners participating in these projects effectively nullify existing uses. In New York, these uses included the daily lives of the dynamic communities of Hell’s Kitchen, Prospect Heights, and Fort Greene. The neoliberal rhetoric used to promote these and similar projects in other cities emphasizes the goal of generating revenue through higher and better uses of urban land over all other priorities.

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Leonie Sandercock argues that planners will not be able to engage effectively with communities in confronting projects like New York’s Hudson and Atlantic Yards projects until they begin to integrate community knowledge in their work. She notes that community knowledge differs from the information  typically considered in planning processes because it includes “experiential, intuitive, and local knowledges . . . based on practices of talking, listening, seeing, contemplating, sharing . . . and expressed in visual and other symbolic, ritual, and artistic ways” (76). In Sandercock’s view, community knowledge should be viewed as an alternative to the rational-comprehensive, scientific, and technical knowledges that planners have consistently brought to bear on city problems. She suggests that by expanding what counts as knowledge in planning processes planners can also expand the number and variety of community participants who feel personally invested in outcomes. In addition, changing what “counts” as valid knowledge would, in effect, reshape the terms of planning and policy debates. Sandercock elaborates a list of questions planners might use to access the range of knowledges communities possess: The questions at the heart of planning epistemology are: What do I know? How do I know that I know? What are my sources of knowledge? How is knowledge produced in planning? How and when do I know what I know? How secure am I in my knowledge? What level of uncertainty or ambiguity can I tolerate? What forms of knowledge offer me most security? How adequate is my knowledge for the purpose at hand? How can I improve the knowledge base of my (and others’) actions? What rights does my knowledge confer on me as a planner? What responsibilities do I assume for the application of what I claim to know? What is valid knowledge in planning? Who decides that? And who possesses knowledge that is relevant to planning? (58)

Perhaps more important than the answers such questions might yield, the planner following Sandercock’s advice would adopt a questioning mind-set, a practice of knowing oriented toward broadening the range of perspectives that matter for planning decisions. In so doing, she would be “creating space for other people” and amplifying their claims to use urban space and resources for their own purposes (Sandercock 157). Because the logics of neoliberal governance and urban economic development tend to flatten differences and exclude experiential forms of knowledge, planners must create “mechanisms for the effective recognition and representation of the distinct voices and perspectives of oppressed and disadvantaged groups” (Sandercock 197).



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Lucy Natarajan explains that planners sometimes balk at integrating community knowledge because it takes different forms than their own expert knowledge. For example, it is often conveyed through emotional or sensual descriptions and uses personal experience rather than impersonal data as evidence for claims about local conditions. Analyzing a recent collaborative planning project in a community outside London, Natarajan concludes that while community knowledge might appear “irrelevant to strategy . . . the amount of detail given by lay actors . . . produce[s]‌a much more rounded picture [and] provide[s] a ground-level layer of detail” inaccessible to other modes of inquiry (15). In addition to adding details left out by other modes of analysis, incorporating community knowledge also encourages residents to develop confidence that their lived experiences will be taken seriously no matter how they are expressed. As Peter Marcuse explains, affirming the value of community knowledge to planning processes allows planners to nurture relationships among different groups and help residents identify the “common roots” of individual problems and the “common nature” of their aspirations for the future (“Whose Right(s)” 39). By drawing attention in this way to common causes of injustice, planners can contribute to the formation of activist communities with shared commitments to social justice. Redefining planning processes as “nodes of social and political relations that occur in public places” rather than as “static things” provides a necessary first step toward achieving this political transformation (Angotti 24, italics in original). Sandercock, Natarajan, and Marcuse’s models of progressive planning turn on a “strategic conception of community” that approaches urban space as the product of conflictual social relations rather than as an independent commodity or object of analysis (Angotti 31; 229). According to this model, confronting injustice requires more than theorizing and articulating visions of a better urban future in isolation. Tom Angotti urges progressive city planners to integrate imaginative engagement with communities and the strategic use of political tools such as environmental regulations, zoning rules, community boards, and land trusts as a way to consolidate social and physical resources in an “urban commons” (231–234). The strategies Angotti enumerates combine community organizing and planning practice with an underlying “political recognition that the [urban] commons can be produced, protected, and used for social benefit” (Harvey, Rebel Cities 86). By transforming residents’ relationships to land in concrete ways, he suggests, planners can reinvigorate awareness of the “psychological, symbolic, cultural, and spiritual functions of land” that neoliberal urban policy obscures and thus contribute to emerging social movements (231).

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The urban commons Angotti proposes is both a spatial and conceptual entity. As David Harvey explains, producing and maintaining a transformative urban commons requires persistent collective political action: There is, in effect, a social practice of commoning. This practice produces or establishes a social relation with a common whose uses are either exclusive to a social group or partially or fully open to all and sundry. At the heart of the practice of commoning lies the principle that the relation between the social group and that aspect of the environment being treated as a commons shall be both collective and non-commodified—off-limits to the logic of market exchange and market valuations. (Rebel Cities 73, italics in original)

Harvey’s practice of commoning involves negotiating relationships between communities and their social and physical environments in the broader context of urban capitalism. Since “[i]‌ndividuals and social groups create the social world of the city,” they have the ability to “create something common as a framework within which all can dwell” (Rebel Cities 74). The link between Harvey’s theoretical analysis, Sandercock and Natarajan’s engagement with community knowledge, and Angotti’s progressive political strategies is a shared commitment to defining the “right to the city” as a “focused collective right” grounded in community knowledge (Harvey, Rebel Cities 137). Since “neoliberal social policy has had a fragmenting effect on progressive activism,” the formation of broad-based urban coalitions to advocate for political change is increasingly urgent (Hackworth 175). Progressive city planners must work with and through communities to claim “shaping power over the processes of urbanization, over the ways in which our cities are made and remade . . . in a fundamental and radical way” (Harvey, Rebel Cities 5). They must acknowledge and protect the conflicting uses communities make of urban space because the urban commons can only emerge through daily negotiations among them. City poems contribute to the labor of bringing the urban commons into being by articulating a “discursive right to claim that viable and progressive alternatives are possible” (Hackworth 207). By multiplying the community knowledge available to residents, activists, and planners alike, they disrupt our existing understandings of cities and forge communities of allies in individual neighborhoods and across geographic and social distance. City poems enact the principles of Peter Marcuse’s three-part strategy for progressive change: expose the underlying causes of material and cultural deprivation, propose alternatives grounded in locally determined objectives, and politicize the problems and



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solutions among allies in communities across the city and elsewhere (“Whose Right(s)” 37). Works like Paterson and The Maximus Poems, for example, expose the complexity of the urban scene. Locating the present moment in longer historical trajectories, they enable us to distinguish the root causes and consequences of existing conditions. The feelings and performances Jayne Cortez and Wanda Coleman bring to life in their Watts poetry underscore the potential of poetry to serve as a venue for constructing a transformative urban commons. Their writing challenges us to recognize what we share in common and make ourselves vulnerable to the disruptive possibilities of mutual understanding. George Oppen’s work proposes that the language we use to explain and understand cities can either aid or hinder the goals of equity and inclusion. Like Cortez and Coleman, Oppen insists that the city we know from everyday experience can influence the future we create together. He urges us to listen more attentively in order to ground our actions in underlying realities rather than in the city’s deceptive surfaces. Gwendolyn Brooks, Miguel Algarín, and Sandra María Esteves politicize Oppen’s commitments to poetic language in poetry that mirrors and supplements community activism. Their poetics of neighborhood involve readers alongside residents of Bronzeville, El Barrio, and Loisaida in redefining neighborhoods as sites for collective political action.

City poems, community knowledge, and progressive action Cooper Square sits at the western edge of New York City’s East Village about four blocks from the Algarín and Esteves’s Loisaida. Bisected by the Bowery, a street Whitman writes about in his most enthusiastic city poems, the neighborhoodwithin-a-neighborhood had become a slum in the eyes of many residents and city leaders by the 1950s. The city proposed to demolish most of its existing buildings in 1959 to make room for new development. As in many urban renewal projects of the period, the city’s plans made inadequate provisions for low-income residents and raised the likelihood that more than 2,400 would be displaced (Angotti 115). The Cooper Square community defeated the city’s efforts to renew the area by organizing to develop an alternative plan. The plan was issued by the community in 1961 and formally adopted by the city in 1970 after more than a decade of grassroots advocacy. Developed by a coalition of tenants and housing activists with the collaboration of progressive planner Walter Thabit, the community plan “set forth a bold strategy for building and preserving lowincome housing” (Angotti 113). The coalition succeeded in defeating the city’s

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plans by embedding the technical work of planning in broader, more imaginative practices of community organizing. As Angotti explains, the development of the Cooper Square alternative plan shows that progressive planning requires “perpetual organizing and protest, particularly when the organizing and protest are tied to broader social and political movements” (122). The poet Brenda Coultas moved to an apartment on the Bowery in 1994. A  native of Indiana, she took poetic action in 2000 when the Cooper Square Development Committee, the successor organization of the coalition that developed the 1961 alternative plan, agreed to allow the construction of luxury condominiums in the neighborhood. At the time, as Angotti explains, the agreement represented either a “weakening” of the community’s commitment to self-determination or an “acceptable compromise” for a neighborhood that had preserved more than 60 percent of its affordable housing stock over forty years (124). In either case, it reflected a shift in the politics of urban crisis from the centralized urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s to more diffuse neoliberal governance strategies of the 1980s and after. Concerned that the neighborhood’s history would be lost, Coultas resolved to document Cooper Square’s street life for several months. Through her observations, she created a series of prose poems titled “The Bowery Project” that were later published in 2003’s A Handmade Museum. As Coultas explains, “I lived a block from this section and traveled through it daily. My intent was not to romanticize the suffering or demonize the Bowery its residents, but rather to observe the changes the Bowery was currently undergoing and to write about my own dilemma and identification as a citizen one paycheck away from the street” (11). Identifying with and through the neighborhood, Coultas positions herself as a resident, advocate, and interpreter of community knowledge. True to this positioning, “The Bowery Project” focuses on people, things, and experiences that the luxury condominium project ignores, for example, homeless people, discarded furniture, and passersby. Coultas uses the knowledge embodied by these people and objects to produce an archive of urban community knowledge that is equal parts documentary and radical social practice. Coultas cites Jane Jacobs’s notion of “public characters” as an inspiration for the project’s methodology. For Jacobs, these “characters” are people who are “steadily stationed in public places” and make “frequent contact with a wide circle of people” in a neighborhood (89–90). They “spread the news” of the community’s daily life and take action when something seems out of the ordinary (Jacobs 92). In order to become a “public character” for purposes of “The Bowery Project,” Coultas established herself on a neighborhood sidewalk:



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I will sit in a chair in the Bowery at the same place and time for a season and participate and expedite street life. I’m going to dump it all in, everything that occurs to me or everything I see. That will be my data, my eyes upon the street; the firsthand observation of this last bum-claimed space, a small record before the wrecking ball arrives. I’m taking only pen and notepad. Everything I truly need will appear—I’m not an archaeologist, but am a studier of persons and documenter of travails. (Bowery & 1st St.) (15)2

As in much of “The Bowery Project,” Coultas locates this prose poem in a specific place—the intersection of Bowery and 1st Street—to affirm the validity of the knowledge it contains. In addition to recording what she sees from her sidewalk position, Coultas “expedite[s]‌street life” later in the project in several ways. She invites passersby to take a prerecorded tour of her apartment (33), collects “Bowery Wishes” anonymously in a box “mounted on street furniture or maybe wired to a chain link fence” (34–35), and sets up a sign near her chair that reads “Tell me a Bowery story” (47–51). Through these strategies and others, Coultas composes a “small record” of the community’s social and physical relations. She composes this record like a progressive city planner working in Sandercock and Natarajan’s mode to gather diverse community knowledges for use in transformative panning projects. One example of Coultas’s planning work is a description she provides of the social ecology of a dumpster in a poem titled “Gumball.” Renovations are underway in a nearby apartment, providing evidence of socioeconomic changes taking hold in the neighborhood. The poem asserts the “studied” local knowledge of a man Coultas observes picking through the contents of the dumpster against the destructive logic of gentrification. Aquamarine dumpster named Gumball, outside window, empty. Men from across the street filled it all day long. An eager man stood by taking what he could, he left an old model boat that was missing the sail. He took a small desk instead because he could sell it. He said they were cheapos, that the contractor and workers were destroying the furniture before it hit the street. He said if it were his job he’d put the furniture out, let people take it and then the dumpster would hold more. He had a great plan for how the dumpster should be filled, for he had studied on it. By day’s end, Gumball was brimming, overflowing, and surrounded by the homeless. (April 11, 2002, 75 E. 2nd St.) (45)

The man’s critique is subtle. Rather than protesting what the contractors are doing, he simply proposes a more community-friendly approach, one that would preserve rather than destroy existing resources while also yielding greater

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efficiencies. Alan Gilbert notes the “impressionistic, yet direct, depiction of people and discarded commodities” throughout “The Bowery Project” and commends Coultas’s “sympathetic, while never patronizing, tone” (222). He suggests that the net effect of a poem like “Gumball” is to “create confusions between the categories natural and unnatural, normal and abnormal” that invest the Bowery with “significance and value” beyond its status as property under law (218; 220). The man Coultas watches and overhears transforms the dumpster into a public resource shared in common by the contractor, workers, and neighborhood residents. Coultas describes this process of transformation in “Some Might Say That All I’ve Done Is Stack Up a Heap of Objects.” Her methodology turns on the possibility that readers might discover order amid the Bowery knowledge she is accumulating. Some will say it’s all been done before, and that others have done better but still I stack things up. I don’t think about it, I put blinders on but hope that through accumulation they’ll form a pattern out of chaos. I’ve stacked up twigs one by one, building a structure, weaving and shaping, forming a skeleton out of raw garbage transformed into beauty, maybe with something to say to any Bowery resident or reader of poetry. Please, I am intentionally writing this for you. (28)

Refusing, like Charles Olson in The Maximus Poems, to apply an abstract, external structure to her developing project, Coultas affirms her technique of considered observation. She doesn’t “think about” what she writes down because she trusts that a pattern will emerge from what she sees and experiences. In part, as Gilbert observes, the poem provides an “honest” accounting of the poet’s “struggles and frustrations with her project,” specifically, the struggle of playing a dual role as participant and observer (219). In part, however, Coultas is making an argument about the kinds of knowledge available in Cooper Square and offering a suggestion for how residents and planners might participate together in processes of knowledge construction. It is as if she were pausing over several of Sandercock’s questions: “What do I know? How do I know that I know? What are my sources of knowledge? . . . How and when do I know what I know?” (58). Jaime Robles sees political potential in Coultas’s method of leaving space for her readers’ imaginative involvement: “Her collecting allows for reshaping, which is an imaginative act that provides order in an inexplicable world . . . one that soothes pain and is generously shared.” What Coultas sees while watching



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Gumball is a dynamic neighborhood ecology: the workers fill the dumpster to make space for new development; the man and other Bowery residents react to the stimulus, first critiquing what’s happening and then making use of what they find; and their joint activity gives rise to the poet’s consideration of an emergent urban order. Coultas describes her own reuse of discarded material in several poems. For example, she writes in “Dumpster,” a poem published alongside “The Bowery Project” in A Handmade Museum: “My mission is to gather intelligence, so I went to the dumpster. There! Exactly what I was looking for. I washed it first before putting it on, it looks good on me. I’m not afraid of polyester. I’m not afraid of mixing prints. This is not a mere shirt. This is evidence” (92). Coultas contrasts her strategy of appropriation to the city’s determination to erase all evidence of low-income members of the community. For example, in “Bum Stash: Early 21st Century,” she documents the clearance and reuse of the same empty lot over a span of months. When the poem begins, the lot has been serving as a community garden. When Coultas returns to it in early May 2001, “the lot had been emptied by the police/city who put up a new fence and padlock, took down the trees and crops, and replaced the soil with gravel.” Later, “in secret,” she notices “a man with magenta hair, adding objects he found on the street” to a makeshift home he has constructed on the lot. The city clears the lot again three weeks later (Coultas 24–25). There is nothing magical or curative in a homeless man piling up discarded objects in an empty lot. The clearance of the lot, like the emptying of the dumpster in “Gumball,” protects the health and safety of the larger community. Nevertheless, “Bum Stash” and “The Bowery Project” as a whole preserve useful knowledge about everyday life on the Bowery and comprise an intriguing aesthetic and epistemological experiment. As it relates to the longer story of the neighborhood, however, “The Bowery Project” records the contradictions of neoliberal city planning and asserts the richness of neglected forms community knowledge. Echoing the 1961 alternative plan, Coultas’s poem testifies to the continued ability of the community to use the neighborhood according to their own interests. “The Bowery Project” was conceived as a response to a development project with a high percentage of luxury housing. By agreeing to the project, the Cooper Square Development Committee bowed to growing pressures to prioritize economic development ahead of all other objectives. This capitulation suggests that Coultas’s careful curation of knowledge from mundane objects and marginal people serves as documentation of changes in the neighborhood rather than contributing to broader political action.

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Poetic knowledge and critical urban analysis Published twenty years apart, Anne Winters’s The Key to the City (1986) and The Displaced of Capital (2004) assemble a different kind of knowledge. Like Coultas’s “Bowery Project,” the collections document the contradictory realities of contemporary New  York City:  social mobility for educated white professionals, globalized luxury for financial elites, and crushing poverty for immigrants, racial minorities, and poor people. Winters frames her insights about the city in narrowly observed lyrics that criticize the crushing effects of late twentieth-century urbanism and, at times, implicate the poet and her readers in its processes. Her critique is grounded in a conception of class conflict that draws on everyday experience for the terms of its analysis. By utilizing complex language to explore the urban consequences of uneven development, Winters’s poems open a “breech of idiomatic decorum” readers must reconcile in order to make sense of the persistence of injustice (Chiasson). Born on New  York’s Upper West Side, Winters studied at both New York University and Columbia before leaving the city for California and then Chicago in the 1980s. Her poetry pairs “complexly staged compassion” for residents constrained by concentrated disadvantages with “indignation … and a strong suspicion that art is one of the surpluses created by other people’s labor” (Chiasson). The contradictions of these parallel trajectories mirror the risks city planners take of contributing to exploitative growth regimes and underscore the limits of pursuing poetry without planning or planning without poetry. In “Two Derelicts,” for example, Winters contrasts the survival practices of homeless, including their “tacit / sense” of respect for one another and the city’s physical environment, with the “vertigo” of her own experience of privilege (The Key to the City 7). The poem combines two encounters, one when the poet is a student at NYU and the second after she has finished her doctorate and attained a professorship. In the earlier encounter, a passerby dressed in a “thin-striped, cheap green suit” confronts her as she steps over a man lying on a Bowery sidewalk:               The moment I mean my legs had just callipered a stale bundle with a face my eyes jerked away from, red porous mound in brown twiggery, two green ropes of snot. . . . But what set its seal on that step, that stockingless, sneakered step of mine, was the angry word a fat man spoke



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who suddenly appeared. Cheeks blotching, voice shaky—“How can you, just step over a man like that on your way to school?” (He must’ve seen my books.) (The Key to the City 5–6)

Attire distinguishes the three individuals’ positions in the urban hierarchy: Winters, in sneakers, is confidently mobile, or as she puts it earlier in the poem, “euphoric / with student poverty (the traveller’s / uncounscious I’ll only be here once)” (The Key to the City 5); the man who confronts her is stable but struggling, a wearer of cheap suits who draws his identity through rules of decorum; the man on the sidewalk is an almost inhuman object. Part of the appeal of the poem, and also a weakness, is the sense of guilt it induces. Most city people have walked past a homeless person without offering help. But the core of “Two Derelicts” is the analysis Winters lays over the narrative. Reflecting on the experience years later, she compares the emotional distance she kept from poor people on the Bowery to the insidious logic of neoliberalism. Addressing herself to the “apartment towers and awnings of Fifth Avenue,” Winters observes that the city’s built environment conceals injustice: As somebody said once, New York is everything that is the case: the rich up there, me here, these scavenging; you’re free to do—whatever you do do, in this city. Those buildings, for example: I used to wonder what jobs people had, who lived there, did anyone ask them? No. The point is, nobody stopped them. (The Key to the City 7)

Wealth insulates individuals from having to justify their behavior according to broader principles. But being free “to do—whatever you do do,” in other words, having individual autonomy, means different things for people with different access to resources. Holding aside the “derelicts” in the poem, the green-suited man bears the weight of this contradiction. He takes pride in working hard but recognizes in the moment he sees Winters stepping over the man on the sidewalk that his opportunities are more limited than hers. His rudeness, she concludes, shows a deep anger:                    The fat man the more I think, he must’ve worked down there. And wouldn’t he, carrying himself to work

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or home fat and tired past the red-ringed eyes, the weakly hugged pints of witch hazel, feel how day and night all roads lie open, hate them, hate the passersby too, at last lash out at barelegged me? (The Key to the City 7)

While the man cannot see the lie “all roads lie open” for what it is, he feels, viscerally, the conflict between his perception of himself and the visual cues of his neighborhood. His sense of justice arouses him to confront the poet but does not extend to the larger structures that constrain his life. Exploring diverging points of view in a single moment, Winters invites readers to consider their own complicity in the city’s exploitative conditions. “The Ruins” questions landlords’ decisions to abandon rather than maintain apartment buildings in the Bronx, East Harlem, and Lower East Side during the 1970s. Quotations identified as originating in the New  York Times set the scene: “Some streets might have ceased to be part / of the city. No police, fire protection; TB everywhere; heroin; in three blocks / studied by the Times the chance for a normal death / for anyone is one in twenty” (The Key to the City 21). A young black man explores the rubble of a newly collapsed building on one of these streets. Winters characterizes his expression as “furious, inward, fixed,” an attitude that recalls the postures of the Young Lords and other participants in the “Nuyorican” movement. “[I]‌nnerness and the street / begin to converge” in his confident defiance but also in the discarded furniture that litters the sidewalk in front of the site. While landlords are able to reap insurance benefits if buildings were made to “seem to fall from within,” their tenants are left exposed. While some tenants organized and were able to claim at least a partial right to the city, larger numbers were displaced. Winters draws attention to the interrelatedness of poverty and wealth in “The Ruins” by noting the proximity of the feral streets the young man travels to the luxuries of the Upper East Side. So Heaven and Earth have put their hands to the work that holds this boy, and holds him on this block. Not one light swerves of thousands outbound on the East Side Drive, or reflected in the shady vitrines of Madison, of Park; ten minutes on the A train from air-conditioning, residential towers still half I-beams, the endlessly pinwheeling brush-



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points of A Starry Night, and can not one of these banks of incandescence cast a lightline to these ruins? (The Key to the City 21–22)

The young man’s “fixed” position provides a counterpoint to the rest of the city’s constant motion. Since “capital itself (they say) has fled the city,” both at the level of individual decision-making and through the neoliberal disinvestment in public services, no “lightline” of intervention is forthcoming (The Key to the City 22). If the pressure point in “Two Derelicts” is the moment when Winters reconsiders her perception of the green-suited man’s indignant question, in “The Ruins,” a second description of the young man exploring the building collapse serves a similar purpose. Expression: obscure now, lid-glistening, as if you’d tried to seal yourself into something separate, and when this is denied a flatness comes into the human face. Yet it’s only the armor of outside, still inlaid with its useless and lovely uniqueness of inside. Almost you weep, taking arms, and one day one source of your street cool will be this tear spread without depth or relief over the whole eye. (The Key to the City 22)

Nothing has changed in the scene except the young man’s expression. What Winters characterizes as “furious, inward, fixed” early in the poem becomes externalized here, an “armor” of “street cool” that provides protection but also reinforces injustice. The young man is doubly affected by the neoliberal practice of neighborhood disinvestment. Deprived of a safe and secure place to live, he insulates himself from emotional involvement in the everyday. He is a surface on which the poet and readers alike project their distaste for the consequences of the urban crisis and their fears about the city’s future. It is an uncomfortable conclusion. Though the poem conveys a sophisticated critique of the spatial effects of neoliberalism and a prescient concern from the psychological condition of vulnerable populations, as in “Two Derelicts,” Winters invites readers to join her at a distance from the scene. We are near the ruined building, close enough to see tears forming in the young man’s eyes, but we are not members of his community nor are we participants in an allied social movement. Rather, we simply watch the scene play out and experience empathy or anger or sorrow through the poet’s pointed descriptions.3

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Like “The Ruins,” the fourteen poems of “A Sonnet Map of Manhattan” describe the physical and social conditions of the city in relation to abstractions such as money, housing codes, zoning laws, and electronic surveillance that constrain residents’ everyday lives. Ranging from Wall Street to the base of the George Washington Bridge, the sequence combines observations of injustice and Winters’s memories of growing up in a Village tenement to show how conditions of life in poor neighborhoods are changing as a result of neoliberal policy. “MacDougal Street: Old-Law Tenements” provides a baseline: We’re aware in every nerve end of our tenement’s hand-mortared Jersey brick, the plumbing’s dripping dew-points, the electric running Direct, and on each landing four hall-johns fitted to the specifics and minima of the 1879 Tenement Housing Act. We live in its clauses and parentheses, that drew up steep stairways and filled the brown airwells with eyebrowed windows. (The Displaced of Capital 45)

If life in the building is uncomfortable, it is also predictable and domestic. Tenants know each other and know what to expect when a radiator gives out in the winter or a roach falls from a crack in the ceiling. The “clauses / and parentheses” of the “1879 / Tenement Housing Act” protect them, modestly, from the dispossession the young man in “The Ruins” experiences. Winters reports in another sonnet how, when she was 14 and living in another neighborhood, the “city’s indifference drew me. / Curb-balancing on my sneaker arches, still and late / on Broadway, then strolling south for hours” (The Displaced of Capital 51). Her comfort in the city reflects its condition in the late 1940s and early 1950s, not yet in crisis and still committed to working-class neighborhoods. While memories of this period linger in the streets, conditions have changed by the 1970s when Winters describes the city as an adult. In “First Avenue: Drive-In Teller,” she contrasts the precariousness of making a utility payment at the last possible moment with the bizarre impersonality of the procedures of banking. “It’s one half hour till Bank Wednesday—last day / for my monthly payment paid, though not in a car, / in the line of this East Side drive-in” the poem begins, placing the poet on foot in the drive-through teller lane (The Displaced of Capital 48). The pneumatic tube she uses to submit her payment and the



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isolation she feels from the teller are disorienting. Added together with the “gray security / lens, angled towards license plates” over the poet’s shoulder, they make what is on the surface a routine experience into a “strange transaction” (The Displaced of Capital 48). Winters extends her exploration of the dehumanizing effects of the kinds of financial practices that take root in poor neighborhoods in a description of a check cashing window in another poem, “One-sixty-fifth Street: The Currency Exchange.” Here money takes on more palpable form, moist bills and coins counted out on linoleum sills. It’s July on Broadway, and the Exchange is a 12’ by 12’ storefront whose transom sports one outspread, sooted handprint. (The Displaced of Capital 52)

Passing money to the Exchange’s cashiers involves more human contact than sending it through a pneumatic tube, but the community’s presence in the space is ghostly, “one outspread, sooted handprint.” This is perhaps not surprising in view of the intrusive and patronizing form of surveillance Winters documents in the next three lines: “FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE AND SAFETY / YOUR TRANSACTION WILL BE PHOTOGRAPHED / by a bullet-headed, cyclopean rod” (The Displaced of Capital 52). Relinquishing a percentage of their incomes to the Exchange because they are otherwise “bankless,” customers, including Winters, are marked by the “warning-red / envelopes” they carry for “phone bills, electric; for these are those who pay, / always, on the final, disconnection day” (The Displaced of Capital 52). The mood of “One-sixty-fifth Street” is much bleaker than that of “First Avenue” or “MacDougal Street” and so is the social and physical condition of the neighborhood Winters describes. Fourteen miles from Wall Street, it is isolated from the engines of the city’s economy and the consciousness of its elite. Underserved by diminishing public services, community members are pulled into Harvey’s “economy of dispossession” to such a degree that they rely on predatory private entities to satisfy basic needs. The final poem of Winters’s “Sonnet Map,” “One-seventy-fifth Street:  The Scout,” associates global finance and neighborhood drug-dealing. Implicit in the poem, as in the sequence as a whole, is a conviction that Wall Street’s “spires and balustrades,” Lincoln Center’s “cantilevered mezzanine, underlit, // stipple-eyed in its stoles and fur tippets” and the “spike-fenced junior high” on 175th Street “in a neighborhood whose sewer is crumbling” are interlinked consequences of the same processes and practices (The Displaced of Capital 41; 49; 54). They exist

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in their current states as a function of citywide decisions about investment and disinvestment, public services and privatization, community development, and economic growth. The second half of the poem provides a concrete example: The beeper. Phone booths by the spike-fenced junior high in a neighborhood whose sewer is crumbling, where last week tuberculosis was diagnosed; the money flows from the bridge to the streets below. Our stoopfronts sprout silhouettes with baseball caps—the signifying angles, colors, the passwords. And on the stoop front, the watching profile and elliptic, archaic, smile of the ten-year-old scout. (The Displaced of Capital 54)

The presence of the “ten-year-old scout” on the stoop front is a direct consequence of the absence of the neighborhood from the city’s regular economic circuits. Since it has been bypassed by some markets, it has been integrated into others, with drug-dealing emerging in place of lawful exchange. Winters’s observations are pointed and her critique of what is happening across Manhattan has explanatory power. The intricate poems of “A Sonnet Map” interrupt readers’ expectations of aesthetic harshness to match the city’s social and physical conditions. The gap between Winters’s language and the subject matter of her poems, the “breech of idiomatic decorum” the poetry opens, underscores the seriousness of the injustices she exposes. As Marcuse and Sandercock urge, Winters consolidates the knowledge she accumulates about systematic inequalities into a focused critique of the neoliberal city. If the personal reminiscences in her poetry and backward-looking orientation suggest private experience rather than the coalescence of an activist “urban commons,” her rigorous attention to the city’s interconnectedness and her exposure of techniques of dispossession in poor and minority communities models a commitment to advocacy. Winters and Coultas address readers in more limited ways than Brooks and the Nuyoricans. They immerse us in poetic environments in order to expose us to racial and economic inequalities, but they do not enlist our participation in spatial projects. Nonetheless, their city poems consolidate the “dynamics of conflict, struggle, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity” in a focused critique of the status quo (Boykoff and Sand 17). Progressive planners share these practices and stand to benefit from using poetry as both a source of community knowledge and a form of critical urban analysis in itself. As Leonie Sandercock suggests, “If we want to achieve greater social justice, less



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polluted environments, and broader cross-cultural tolerance, and if planning is to contribute to those social goals, then we need a broader and more politicized definition of planning’s domain and practices” (204). What’s left is for poets and planners to join their work in a broad-based, community-oriented mode of insurgent urban politics.

“Not with my hands / but with my imagination”: Using poetry to cultivate the urban commons I started thinking about the project that became City Poems on a visit to the Brooklyn Promenade in the spring of 2010. Looking across the New  York harbor to the downtown skyline, I  saw major construction underway on the Brooklyn waterfront. Large mounds of earth appeared where I had remembered disused warehouses and industrial piers. Eight years later, Brooklyn Bridge Park is tremendous. It curls around the edge of Brooklyn from the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges at the north to the terminus of Atlantic Avenue at the south. Though still unfinished, the park already has more amenities than many public spaces in New York City: playgrounds, grassy areas, running and walking paths, boat launches, basketball courts, beach volleyball pits, and grass and stone amphitheaters, to name a few. While the park restores public access to the waterfront and is seemingly well-used, it is also expensive and exclusive. Developed through a public–private partnership, Brooklyn Bridge Park is a prime example of the contradictory processes and outcomes of neoliberal planning, including the privatization of decisions about the uses of public space, the promotion of physical solutions to urban problems, and the increasing primacy of the goals of economic growth. A  recent e-mail promotion for One Brooklyn Bridge Park, a luxury residential development located within the park’s boundaries, touts “an 85-acre backyard,” as if the park itself were a private amenity. With studio apartments priced at more than $600,000 and a five-bedroom apartment under contract at $6 million, it is clear that the park is attracting wealth. As a conclusion to my arguments for using city poems in service of progressive planning, I  compare the development of Brooklyn Bridge Park with the contemporaneous redevelopment of the Los Angeles River. While the former has been built according to the principles of neoliberalism, the latter is a prominent example of large-scale progressive city planning. Initiated by the poet Lewis MacAdams in the 1980s, the redevelopment of the Los Angeles River has

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proceeded in small stages over several decades through the efforts of a loosely affiliated coalition of community groups. MacAdams’s three-volume poem The River chronicles the varieties of activism that have driven the process. The poem has served since the project’s founding to “fortify us all against impatience and frustration and cynicism,” as MacAdams explains, while simultaneously insisting on a community-centered vision of the river’s future (“Restoring”). The benefits of MacAdams’s poetic commitment to the river are documented in the 2007 Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan. The Plan prioritizes the goals of enhancing neighborhood access to the river and engaging communities in future planning efforts ahead of other objectives (2–5). As I suggest above, the development of Brooklyn Bridge Park has followed a different process and has been without a poetic complement. Initially conceived as a public resource, the park is now controlled by a public–private partnership and its operating costs are funded by payments in lieu of taxes from private real estate located within its boundaries. The contrast between the neoliberal logic of Brooklyn Bridge Park and the community-based coalition politics of The River suggests that city poems serve as conceptual urban commons communities draw on in claiming their right to the city and enacting alternative visions of the urban future. Brooklyn Bridge Park’s chief designer Michael Van Valkenburgh claims that the park represents “a new kind of park-making—an act of transformation rather than preservation” that combines “park programming, innovative marine engineering adaptations, and shifts of scale—plus a bold design—to bring the [site] into a new balance with the colossal scale of the surrounding man-made” (quoted in American Society of Landscape Architects). A leading practitioner of ecological urbanism, Van Valkenburgh describes his primary goal for the park as transforming the abandoned waterfront into a place “where people feel embraced, welcomed and comfortable” (quoted in American Society of Landscape Architects). He compares the role of a visitor interacting with a park’s design with the role of a reader making meaning from poetry: As with poetry, a landscape requires the reader to want to be a participant, to add the important part of experience to the realization of the piece. That is a different kind of writing—and reading—than a novel . . . In a landscape often you don’t know where the boundaries or the edges are . . . and not knowing that is part of what you take advantage of if you are a good landscape architect. (Amidon 16–17)

Like Edward  Glaeser’s claims for the “triumph of the city,” however, Van Valkenburgh’s vision of a dynamic and engaging park elides important components



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of its design. In particular, it submerges the history of the site’s development and the decades-long conflict over whether it would be used as a public amenity or a tool for promoting economic growth. Further, Van Valkenburgh’s park design addresses a particular kind of visitor, one willing to experience its “colossal scale” while not knowing exactly “where the boundaries or edges are,” while ignoring others, for example, a family who wants to hold a barbeque on its sloping lawns. Beyond aesthetic restrictions on how the park can be used, the park also represents a transfer of a public resource into private control. Indeed, the park sits on land that New York’s Port Authority offered for sale in 1984 after the downtown Brooklyn waterfront had ceased to be an active port. With its unparalleled views of the Manhattan skyline and the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, the site was viewed at the time as a “remarkable piece of real estate” with vast potential to transform the economic future of the borough of Brooklyn and the city as a whole (Lyons R7). Developers proposed mixed-use projects for the site, emphasizing its attractiveness as a location for private residences, hotels, and a convention center that would draw visitors to the city from across the region and the country. In the context of the neoliberal turn in urban policy, the waterfront emerged through these development discussions as a tool for generating economic growth—something the city as a whole could use—rather than as a public resource—something individuals could use according to their own needs and interests. The Port Authority tentatively accepted a proposal from developer Larry Silverstein in 1989 to build offices, shops, restaurants, and a hotel and marina (Dunlap B4). Activists from Brooklyn Heights, a wealthy neighborhood adjacent to the site, opposed the sale on the grounds that Silverstein’s buildings would interrupt the neighborhood’s landmarked views and change the character of the area. Through their advocacy and the intervention of then-governor Mario Cuomo, the Port Authority cancelled the sale in 1992 and, after further negotiations, transferred control of the site to the state’s Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) (Tabor B3). As part of the transfer agreement, the ESDC invited groups opposed to private development at the waterfront to provide guidance as to what kind of development would be acceptable. The Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition, a community organization composed primarily of residents of Brooklyn Heights, published thirteen principles for development in late 1992. The list included a requirement that future plans for the site encourage “certain uses to produce revenues committed to the operation and maintenance of dedicated park and open space areas and contribute to project development costs” (FEIS

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1–23). This requirement effectively merged the project of building a public park with redevelopment for economic growth. In response to the Coalition’s recommendations, the ESDC established the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation (BBPDC) in 1998, a quasi-governmental organization with members appointed by the mayor and governor, to steer development of the site. In the same year the ESDC became involved in plans for the downtown Brooklyn waterfront, the New  York City Planning Commission published its first Comprehensive Waterfront Plan. The Plan identifies a conflict between the priorities of “commerce and recreation” along the City’s waterfronts and proposes to “balance competing interests” by interspersing growth and publicspace-oriented development (2). The Comprehensive Plan classifies the city’s waterfronts in four categories:  the “natural” waterfront, including “beaches, wetlands, wildlife habitats, sensitive ecosystems and the water itself ”; the “public” waterfront, including “parks, esplanades, piers, street ends, vistas and waterways that offer public open spaces and waterfront views”; the “working” waterfront, “where water-dependent, maritime and industrial uses cluster or where various transportation and municipal facilities are dispersed”; and the “redeveloping” waterfront, “where vacant and underutilized properties suggest potential for beneficial change” (3). Echoing the Coalition’s recommendation to encourage private development as a way to fund public amenities, the Comprehensive Plan links public benefits and private development by suggesting that “expanded public access to and along the waterfront will result from the conversion of manufacturing-zoned land to residential and mixed uses” (63). Prepared as an addendum to the Comprehensive Plan, the 1994 Plan for the Brooklyn Waterfront proposes an alternate vision of the site, envisioning “public access in a parklike setting with enlivening activities” (70). Recommending a “phased, adaptive reuse strategy,” the Brooklyn Plan emphasizes that the site is a publicly owned resource and insists that it offers an unparalleled opportunity for the creation of a “public waterfront of regional significance.” Further, it proposes that “transforming the area primarily for public use and activity would create a gateway to the waterfront and provide a focal point for waterfront public access and recreation for much of Brooklyn – especially the northern part of the borough which has relatively little parkland.” (82–83) Despite the Brooklyn Plan and considerable opposition from community groups to “elements that don’t belong in a public park,” the BBPDC’s 2005 Master Plan provided for private development within park boundaries as the most efficient means for generating revenue to sustain its operations (Ravitch C11). A New York Times editorial titled “Selling Brooklyn Bridge Park” reflects



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on the conflict: “The goal here [should be] for Brooklyn’s waterfront to become a real public treasure, not a private development with a few token patches of public space” (S13). Angotti explains the dynamics surrounding the development of the park as a function of the kind of “developer-driven planning” characteristic of neoliberal governance. When a project like Brooklyn Bridge Park begins from developers’ proposals, he argues, “community organizations are diverted away from pursuing plans that will meet their needs and instead toward negotiating over a developer’s plan” (222). When the Port Authority offered the land for sale to private developers in the 1980s, to apply Angotti’s analysis, it positioned the downtown Brooklyn waterfront as a blank slate for redevelopment. As a result, public debate over what would be built at the site has centered since then on how to spur economic growth rather than on how to enhance public benefit. Architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff describes the park’s completed sections as an intellectual and aesthetic achievement. “What gives the park a truly contemporary sensibility,” he reports, “is the way Mr. Van Valkenburgh connects his design to the surrounding city and its infrastructure” embracing “the grittier elements of the city” and celebrating “the underpinnings that support them” (C23). In Ouroussoff ’s view, the park is meaningful and important because it echoes and engages city’s physical environment, in particular, the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges and Manhattan skyline. A reviewer for the New York Daily News agrees that the view makes the park a treasure: “as a visitor’s perspective shifts, the view of the city changes with it” (Sheftell 1). While tourists might share the press’s enthusiasm, views of the Manhattan skyline seem an unlikely attraction for local families. Setha Low, Dana Taplin, and Suzanne Scheld caution cities to design parks to welcome a wide range of “vernacular uses.” While these uses are rarely noted in official park descriptions, they explain, they play a crucial role in sustaining “the social and cultural life of parks” and contribute “an unexpected vitality that energizes formally designed parks” (35; 199). Low and her colleagues argue that surface aesthetics and directive programming, such as the manicured paths and historic views Ouroussoff champions in his review of Brooklyn Bridge Park, restrict “vernacular uses” such as “outings, get-togethers, picnics, [and] sports and games” as well as “excessive drinking, exuberant park play . . . and loud, rowdy behavior” (21; 35; 53). The use of “polite, upper-class idiom[s]‌” in park design sends a message to prospective local users that “the landscape [is] exclusive—something for others” but not for them (199). While the BBPDC’s Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) indicates that the park is intended to “welcome all New Yorkers and serve a diverse population,” the language it uses to describe the park’s potential socioeconomic effects indicates

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that wealthy users from nearby neighborhoods are the park’s target audience (1–5).4 The park is a good fit for the neighborhood, as the FEIS suggests, because the neighborhoods surrounding the park were already experiencing increasing incomes, housing values, and rental rates and “a trend towards development of market-rate and luxury housing” before construction began. Because of this, the report concludes, “The housing that would be introduced by the proposed action would represent a continuation of an existing trend rather than the introduction of a new one” (3–13). Unlike the construction of Brooklyn Bridge Park, the redevelopment of the Los Angeles River began in work undertaken by communities. Familiar in popular culture from the drag-race in Grease and the apocalyptic battle scenes in Terminator 2, the river was paved in the 1930s to reduce flood risks. While it has protected Los Angeles since then as the “world’s largest storm drain,” it had also “disappeared from public consciousness” for decades until a poet began to advocate for its restoration in 1986 (FoLAR). Lewis MacAdams and the Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR), an organization he founded, have raised the river’s profile through thirty years of clean-up projects, art installations, and public relations events.5 Los Angeles’s current Revitalization Master Plan for the river pays tribute to FoLAR’s efforts to “sponsor and implement revitalization projects, including pocket parks, landscape improvements, and water quality treatment areas” (1–6).6 While the Plan is not innocent of neoliberalism’s influence, it is notable for defining the river as a public resource and emphasizing the roles local communities will play in its future restoration.7 MacAdams’s three-volume poem, The River, has  catalyzed and sustained FoLAR’s activities since the beginning. An “ongoing performance” and “fortyyear art project,” the poem is powerful example of progressive city planning for two reasons (MacAdams, “Restoring”). First, as social ecologist Anne Taufen Wessells explains, The River demonstrates the viability of “place-based, visceral” alternatives to neoliberal planning techniques (550). MacAdams documents the everyday realities of the river in his poetry rather than rendering it as an abstraction or relying on impossibly utopian visions. In so doing, he invites readers, in Wessells’s reading, to “physically, personally experience” the river’s possibilities, in other words, to inhabit in the present a future version of Los Angeles that includes the river as a constituent part (549). Second, the poem consolidates perceptions, experiences, and community-based interventions in an activist critique that is equal parts analysis and action. It records strategies and turning points of FoLAR’s struggle to convince city leaders to take seriously the needs and desires of communities on the river’s edges and charts



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MacAdams’s personal investments in the river’s future. By drawing on a variety of knowledges about the river, the poem implements Marcuse’s critical planning model, integrating critique, politics, and action in order to expose the limitations of existing practices and perceptions, propose alternative arrangements of power and resources, and politicize the possibility of progressive change. It shows that communities can reinvent urban places despite neoliberalism’s hegemonic force and that city poems can bridge the gaps between theory and practice by organizing diverse knowledges and constituents into the kind of politicized urban commons Harvey, Angotti, and others argue are a necessary foundation for successful community action. MacAdams questions popular representations of the river in “To Artesia,” a poem from Book II. Acknowledging that the river has historically exerted a powerful draw on the city’s imagination, he presents it as a contested site. The poem’s overlaying of contradictory views suggests the possibility of new characterizations of the river’s place in the larger geography of the city and region. I think of the river the way it reads in the Sam Shepard story, Cruising Paradise— a “huge concrete serpent,” a “dumping ground for murder victims.” I think of the river beside a freeway off-ramp as roller-bladers, bent into it, spandexed buttocks rotating, roll downstream. I think of William Mulholland’s “gentle, limpid stream” coursing from a Pharaoh’s forehead or from the brow of a Rhine-maiden, green-eyed and coffee-colored, a bracelet of drowned children wrapped around her wrist, descending from the mountains east of Irwindale into the jardin des rocas. (II. 29)

Three visions of the river are at odds here: Shepard’s noir nightmare, Mulholland’s early 1900’s boosterism, and MacAdams’s banal, sexualized rollerbladers.

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Equally vivid, each vision proceeds from a different set of interests and speaks to different audiences. Shepard, as Mike Davis explains in City of Quartz, is a playwright and screenwriter whose main subject is the persistence of crime at the city’s margins. Focusing on neglected sites, he exposes the consequences of Los Angeles’s fascination with the Hollywood fantasy world through descriptions of physical and moral decay (92). Mulholland was chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power from 1886 to 1928 and promoted Los Angeles in this role as a desirable destination in order to garner federal support for infrastructure projects such as the Hoover Dam (Dear 104–105).8 MacAdams cuts across Shepherd’s and Mulholland’s visions with his own view of the river from behind the steering wheel of his car. His offhand comparison of the river with a “freeway off-ramp,” and, by extension, with Los Angeles’s notorious traffic, suggests their utopic and dystopic visions are equally exaggerated. MacAdams further counters Mulholland’s and Shepherd’s limiting visions of the river in a poem from Book III where he notes the river’s relevance to all residents of the city:  “We all worship / the river in our own ways, some with stale tortillas / from the Salvation Army, others / with degrees in landscape architecture / from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo” (III.14). As Sandercock would insist, these lines level the differences between experiential and technical knowledge. MacAdams’s intervention works in both directions. The poem suggests that while impromptu picnics and landscape architecture represent valid uses of the river, both uses also involve some measure of irrational “worship” of its possibilities. As founder of FoLAR and the initial “Voice of the River,” MacAdams embodies the power of imagination and activism, vision and action, in concert, to change the shape of urban space. The River and the community activism it documents represent the fulfillment of a promise MacAdams made in 1986 when he visited the river for the first time with three friends and fellow activists. Cutting “through the fence beside the / 1st Street Bridge” to reach the river’s bed, they stood in its dry center, imagining deer, herons, and steelhead trout where they saw merely pavement. As MacAdams explains in “The Founding of Friends of the Los Angeles River,” “This must have been / one of the most beautiful places // around here, once—” but “Now there are railroad tracks / on both banks of the river, three freeway / bridges—the 10, the 110, and the 5—cross it” (I.16). The presence of maintenance workers repaving the riverbed gives MacAdams’s poetic retelling of this first visit a particular urgency. Since cement is just inverted riverbed, they have to re-pave it. Today there’s thirty guys with jackhammers, leveling



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the river ahead of an airport runway paving machine. It makes an unholy clatter, so we address ourselves to the river. We ask if we can speak on its behalf in the human realm. We can’t hear the river saying no so we set to work. (I.16)

MacAdams’s activism begins from the same place as his poetry, in dreams, drama, and imagination. Like Coultas and Winters, he watches and listens for the deeper resonances of his experiences in the city and develops a critical poetics from his encounters there. Proposing a river where others saw only the “world’s largest storm drain” is a political act: the creation of a conceptual urban commons. Like the progressive approaches to urban planning advocated by Angotti, Marcuse, Sandercock, and others, The River couples an audacious goal, improving a city’s quality of life by remaking its social and physical geography, with a radical technique, challenging and transforming a community’s conception of its possibilities. Joining poetry and progressive action, MacAdams and other advocates for the Los Angeles River have maintained community control over its banks through a combination of imaginative and practical activism. The River concludes with an encomium to the various community knowledges the FoLAR and its partners produced through their efforts. As he does throughout the poem, MacAdams listens for the variety of sounds and uses the river welcomes in order to fully account for the roles it plays in resident’s lives. He hears “golf balls clanking in the / power towers” and kids “laughing when they spot the mud people / moving along the sand bars / in silent meditation” (III. 40). Alongside these playful sounds, he also hears the River’s voice “through the passing railroad cars” and in “the endless meetings, / always one or two more” that progressive planning requires (III. 40). Like Sandercock’s radical planner, MacAdams listens for all of these voices in order to make his own hearing “more acute” and so he can hear the natural harmonies of birds underneath harsh industrial sounds and the relentless acronyms of city politics:  “the laptops clicking, the TMDL’s, / the BMP’s, the RFP’s, the SSO’s, and / the UAA’s” (III. 40). He merges these sounds together in his rendering of

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the river’s voice because he has witnessed their contributions to its restoration. Indeed, the river he describes in this final poem signals that the commons he envisions allows space for all uses the community might attempt, in particular those that run against the grain of neoliberalism’s “deep voice of command” (III. 40). As the poem suggests, residents produce new visions of the river’s commons every day as they struggle with and resolve the conflicts between their uses. FoLAR has achieved considerable progress since 1986 toward the goals of restoring the river’s natural habitat and increasing public accessibility. In part, the work has progressed through the forging of alliances with other individuals and groups, such as the editors of High Performance magazine (I. 18), the Urban Creeks Council (II. 5) and the members of the American Rivers conference (II. 18). As Wessells argues, the success of the movement FoLAR initiated is as much a credit to MacAdams’s and other activist’s pursuit of imaginative reconstruction as it is to their organizing skills. Their work, she explains, represents an intervention in urban watershed management that is “less an exercise in nearterm structural governance reform than a long-term call to social-ecological creativity for the watershed’s artist-citizens” (550). In recognition of this dimension of the community’s engagement with the river, the Revitalization Master Plan articulates a goal of “enhanc[ing] the use of art along the river” as way to encourage residents to “understand, celebrate, and participate in honoring the [river] and its significance” (5–36). MacAdams identifies a similar principle at work in himself when, looking back on twenty years of activism in “RIVERBOY: ‘THE MASK,’ ” he writes, “I built this river— / not with my hands, / but with my imagination” (III. 37). An integral part of MacAdams’s activism, The River created an aesthetic disruption in Los Angeles residents’ conceptions of the city’s physical geography. The poem proposed a “dream of a world in which things would be different,” the dream of river once again flush with herons and steelhead trout in place of one that was merely pavement (Adorno 40–41). Even more than asserting the possibility of a restored physical environment, MacAdams’s work challenged the neoliberal status quo in the city’s planning practice by enabling the formation of a coalition of community organizations that took matters into their own hands. In addition to FoLAR, the redevelopment process has involved a number of other groups that have worked together to “raise public and private awareness of the River’s potential, and to sponsor and implement revitalization projects, including pocket parks, landscape improvements, and water quality treatment areas” (City of Los Angeles 1–6). MacAdams’s coalition and its ongoing work constitute an extension of the aesthetic experience of his poem, The River. To



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use Rancière’s words, the poem produces a redistribution of the “sensible” along the river’s banks, expanding the population that “ha[d]‌a share in” decisions about its future and providing a conceptual urban commons through which residents could take charge of “what is common to the community” (The Politics of Aesthetics 7–8). The River expands on the kinds of critical urban analysis in Coultas and Winters’s work by combining exposure and politicization of urban contradictions with total reliance on the community knowledge produced in residents’ everyday lives. Placing this knowledge in the foreground, MacAdams’s poem enacts an insurgent mode of planning critical to producing a more just and equitable urban future.

Notes Introduction: City Poems and American Urban Crisis 1 Herbert Gans articulates an early version of this claim in his 1968 book People and Plans. The essays in the 2012 collection Cities for People, Not for Profit, edited by Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse, and Margit Meyer, frame it in contemporary terms. 2 Marshall Berman applies a similar approach to Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen in All That Is Solid Melts into Air. For example, he reads the lover’s quarrel over the proper attitude to take toward the poor in “The Eyes of the Poor” as evidence of the contradictions inherent in Haussman’s modernization of the city’s streets. At the same time that the boulevards encourage the bourgeois spectacles of street cafés, for example, they render poor craftsmen and beggars invisible (148–155). 3 Marcuse cites his son, progressive city planner Peter Marcuse, as an important influence on his understanding of aesthetic action in the acknowledgments of The Aesthetic Dimension (vii). I discuss Peter Marcuse’s work in Chapter 6. 4 Tom Angotti describes contemporary debates over locally unwanted land uses or “LULUs” in New York for Sale (30–31; 132–135). 5 Poets, of course, come under strict scrutiny in the Platonic city because their representations of reality can so be easily mistaken by citizens for philosophic truths (see The Republic, Book III). 6 Angotti discusses the strategies city governments use to promote the development of “higher and better uses” in New York for Sale. 7 Ashley Foard and Hilbert Fefferman describe the legislative history of urban renewal policy in “Federal Urban Renewal Legislation” in the edited collection Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy. 8 A January 2016 report from the Brookings Institution shows that income inequality increased in a majority of the 100 largest American cities between 2007 and 2014. The report cites declining incomes and housing affordability as contributing factors (Berube and Holmes). An August 2015 report from the Century Foundation indicates that racialized segregation and poverty have increased since 2000. Black and Hispanic residents of medium-sized cities have been most affected by deepening inequality (Jargowsky). 9 Molotch explains that businesses and civic organizations draw nonelite residents into the “growth machine” through advertisements and other messages that advance a spirit of growth (314).

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10 Saskia Sassen documents the effects of global economic competition in The Global City. Specifically, she argues that the growth and colocation of the financial services industry has produced a “global hierarchy of cities” in which a small number of major urban centers organize an emerging “transterritorial marketplace” (327). 11 Richard Florida famously argues that attracting creative-class professionals in industries such as advertising, the arts, and technology is the best way for cities to compete for corporate investment in the global economy in The Rise of the Creative Class. Michael Sorkin describes redevelopment programs centered on the economic benefits of entertainment and tourism in Variations on a Theme Park. 12 Robert Sampson documents “neighborhood effects” in Chicago in Great American City. I discuss his research in relation to Gwendolyn Brooks’s neighborhood poetry in Chapter 4. 13 In subsequent chapters, Nealon documents the differences between Ashbery’s poetics and more politically oriented projects by Jack Spicer, Ron Silliman, Claudia Rankine, and Kevin Davies. Nealon suggests that what he calls “late late capitalism” demands even more complex and associative “textual environments” to be brought to account (140; 152). 14 Roberson describes looking out over Pittsburgh from the hills above the Lower Hill District in a 2011 interview with Lynn Keller and Steel Wagstaff (403–404). 15 The urban contours of Robert Duncan’s Heavenly City Earthly City seem particularly ripe for exploration.

1  Writing around Williams: Paterson and Experimental Urban Poetics 1 Fragments of a sixth book were published together with Books I–V after Williams’s death in 1963 (P ix). 2 Williams explains what he means by “measure” in talks and essay starting in the late 1930s and continuing through the early 1950s. His clearest discussions of the term appear in “Against the Weather” (1939), his author’s introduction to The Wedge (1944), “The Poem as a Field of Action” (1948), and “On Measure” (1954), each of which is reprinted in the Selected Essays. 3 Comparing Paterson to Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, Axelrod and Axelrod further suggest that Williams’s poem presents “a compound of atomized counter-publics, sedimented together over time in a shared space, unable either to disperse or to melt into one” and a “site of neither dystopic despair nor utopic redemption but rather a decaying regional city notable only for its ordinariness” (128). 4 Joel Nickels’s The Poetry of the Possible, Lytle Shaw’s Fieldworks, and Julia Daniel’s Building Natures are exceptions. Nickels interprets Paterson and other postwar

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American poetry as political rhetoric. Shaw reads Williams and Olson’s work in comparison with later work in the fields of geography and landscape art. Daniel reads Books I and II of Paterson as a critique of city planning practices centered on industrial development. She focuses on Williams’s engagement with the city’s early history rather than on planning approaches current at the time the poem was composed. Digitized copies of The Egoist and other small modernist magazines are available at The Modernist Journals Project, www.modjourn.org/index.html. “The Wanderer” was published in the March 16, 1914, issue. Published “shrouded stranger” material includes an unpublished prose poem (Martyrdom 326–327); journal entries from 1949–1954 (Martyrdom 325; 334–335; 342; Early Fifties 85–86); letters to Williams describing the project, including one excerpted in Paterson Book IV (P 173–174); a poem in quatrains published in Empty Mirror (Collected Poems 26); and a poem in four parts published in Gates of Wrath (Collected Poems 47–48). Ginsberg describes the circumstances of the arrest in a long reflection titled “The Fall.” He had been allowing Herbert Huncke to use his apartment as a place to store stolen goods. When it becomes clear Huncke’s activities are attracting police attention, they determine to move the stolen goods to a safer location on Long Island. On the day of the move, Jack Melody, another associate, loses control of the car they are using after making a wrong turn in Queens. Ginsberg escapes the accident unhurt and returns home. He is arrested at his apartment later the same afternoon. Through the efforts of his father and professors at Columbia, he is confined for eight months to the inpatient unit at the New York Psychiatric Hospital rather than being jailed (Martyrdom 307–313; Raskin 82–89). Middleton applies Said’s rubric in his discussion of “The Desert Music” (169–171). Where he argues that Williams’s use of irony represents an internally focused effort to renew his craft, however, I argue that his “late style” constitutes a response to Olson and Ginsberg’s experiments and a reassertion of his own preeminence as an avant-garde poet. MacGowan identifies some of the references in notes to his edition of Paterson: “The Unicorn Is Found” (P 213), “The Unicorn Is Attacked” (P 206), “The Unicorn Defends Itself ” (P 207), “The Mystic Capture of the Unicorn” (P 213; 233–234), “The Unicorn Is Killed and Brought to the Castle” (P 231–233), and “The Unicorn in Captivity” (P 209; 229; 296; 306). There is no direct allusion to the first tapestry, “The Hunters Enter the Woods,” in the poem. Images of the tapestries and a description of the narrative are available at www.metmuseum.org/content/ interactives/Unicorn/unicorn_inside.htm. Williams marks the transition between the two women with crow shrieks that mirror similar shrieks in Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” (P 234; Collected Poems 227).

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Williams would not have read “Kaddish” until after Book V was published, so the shrieks represent, if anything, a borrowing back by the younger poet.

2  Community and Crisis in Los Angeles Poetry 1 As Janet Abu-Lughod explains, the terms we use to describe these events signal the overarching understanding of them we bring to bear (252). I use the term “uprising” for the events of August 1965 because, following historian Gerald Horne, I understand the violence as both an expression of “decades—if not centuries—of pent-up rage” and as a strategic, if not planned or coordinated, confrontation with oppressive structures of power (Horne 302). I use the term “riot” for the events of April–May 1992 because the causes and circumstances of the events are more complex than the terms “uprising” or “rebellion” suggest (Abu-Lughod 237–248). 2 Mohr’s Hold-Outs outlines a history of community arts organizations in Los Angeles from the 1950s to 1990s and emphasizes multiracial and cross-cultural coalitions formed during the 1970s and 1980s. Widener’s Black Arts West situates the poetry of Watts in relation to black cultural production in the greater Los Angeles region. Working on a national scale, Shockley’s Renegade Poetics challenges conventional understandings of black poetics by reading experimental writing alongside traditional lyric verse. Neither Widener nor Shockley discusses the poetry of the nonwhite writers in relation to work by white contemporaries. 3 I have condensed Soja’s theoretical exposition of the “trialectics of spatiality” into the example of a community garden. Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s film The Garden documents the creation of a community garden in South Central Los Angeles in the wake of the 1992 riots. The film highlights the visionary, social, and physical practices that characterized the community’s work. 4 Ellen Gershgoren Novak describes McGrath as the “center of the community of poets in Los Angeles in the 1950s and of the community of poets that continued after his departure into the early 1970s” in the introduction to her anthology of the California Quarterly and Coastlines writers, Poets of the NonExistent City (18). 5 John Arthur Maynard documents Lipton’s circle in Venice West: The Beat Generation in Southern California. He emphasizes the studied informality of their work. 6 The exhibition catalogue Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle reprints all issues of the journal and examines the relationships Berman forged between written, visual, and participatory art. Richard Cándida Smith details Berman’s life and career in Utopia and Dissent (212–298). Smith’s discussion of Berman is particularly instructive because it relates his perspective on the relationship between visual art and politics to Robert Duncan’s more developed poetic critique of the radical left.

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7 Los Angeles benefited substantially from investments in weapons and other military manufacturing for the Pacific Theater of the Second World War (Soja, Postmodern Geographies 200–208). The availability of manufacturing jobs attracted large numbers of black migrants from the American South. Changes in the industry after the war and the city’s limited housing stock and racist housing policies isolated these migrants and their families in Watts (Davis 163; Horne 50–51).

3  The “Curious” Languages of New York: George Oppen and Critical Urban Theory 1 Mary Oppen reports that the couple’s intuitions about the Depression and President Roosevelt’s early responses to it had been significant factors in their decision to return to the United States (138). 2 For Nicholls, this effort relates to Oppen’s broader attempt to separate experience from political argument: “This way of situating the subject emphasize[s]‌the irreducibility of experience to knowledge” and makes poetry the source of a “generative opacity within political thinking” associated with “indeterminacy and resistance” (53). Like Davidson, Nicholls focuses on Oppen’s acts of observation and perception rather than the political content of the scene he describes. 3 The daybooks are bundles of undated, hand-bound papers. Six of the daybooks are reprinted in Stephen Cope’s invaluable Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers. Further selections are reprinted in Davidson’s “An Adequate Vision.” In regards to the quotation from Reznikoff, Davidson explains that Oppen substitutes the word “rubble” for Reznikoff ’s “rubbish” here and in several letters that refer to the poem (xxxiv). “Rubble” suggests a resonance with the bombed European cities Oppen saw during his service in the Second World War. 4 Consciousness is entirely absent from an even earlier version of the poem, “The Manufactured Part,” published in the San Francisco Review. The poem turns on the idea that “the planet / Isn’t habitable but by labor” (NCP 366–367). 5 Oppen uses the feminine article “une” in “Route” despite the fact that “trou” is a masculine noun. This could be an error. It could also indicate he has conflated “faire son trou” with another colloquial phrase, “faire une trouvaille,” which translates roughly to having unexpected good luck. Given the circumstances the poem describes, an intentional reference to the latter phrase is unlikely. The definitions of the two phrases are listed in Larousse Dictionnaire Française under “trou” and “trouvaille,” respectively. 6 Nicholls claims Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics is the probable source, but he too is unable to identify an exact quotation (81). He establishes that Oppen was reading an English translation of Existence and Being as he wrote the poems collected in This In Which (76–81).

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7 The essays are collected in Existence and Being and Poetry, Language, Thought. Oppen knew the former volume. Though written in the 1950s, Poetry, Language, Thought was not published in English until 1971. 8 Izenberg explains the symbolic importance of the Capitol to Whitman in his study of Oppen, Being Numerous (95–98). As Jennifer Weber explains, the debates over expelling Representative Long took place at a tenuous moment for the Union. The Copperhead movement, a faction that opposed Lincoln’s efforts to keep the country, was gaining strength at the time and support for the Union was declining as casualties mounted. Some politicians were predicting that Lincoln’s defeat in the upcoming presidential election was inevitable (Weber 47).

4  Reading “Bronzeville”: Poetics of Neighborhood I 1 Peterson and Krivo reach a similar conclusion. They argue that the tendency of nonwhite neighborhoods to have higher crime rates than predominantly white neighborhoods is an outgrowth of a “racialized order in which groups of all colors reside” rather than an effect of individual resident’s choices or actions (Peterson and Krivo 11). 2 Tom Slater, for example, uses insights from critical urban theory to argue that research on neighborhood effects minimizes the influence of structural factors that constrain choices residents have about where to live. He suggests that this oversight leads policymakers to advocate for interventions such as housing stipends that move the problems associated with poverty from one neighborhood to another rather than interventions that would address “what is causing class inequality in cities” in the first place (Slater 383). 3 Jonathan Lethem describes the beginning stages of gentrification in Boerum Hill in his autobiographical novel The Fortress of Solitude. 4 These interstates were constructed in the late 1950s and early 1960s along the routes of railway lines that had previously served as Bronzeville’s de facto borders. 5 Richard Wright fictionalizes conflicts within the neighborhood and between black residents and the city’s white communities during this period in a trio of novels: Lawd Today!, Native Son, and The Outsider. 6 Aldon Lynn Nielsen describes an encounter between the two poets at a 1964 conference at the University of California on “The Negro Writer in the United States” in the introduction to the edited collection Reading Race in American Poetry: An Area of Act. According to Nielsen, after reading together at the conference, Brooks and Jones/Baraka challenged audience members’ attempts to pit their aesthetics against each other (5–7). Brooks points to the later 1967 Fisk University conference as a turning point in her conceptualization of herself as a Black poet (Report from Part One 83–86).

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5  Organizing “El Barrio” and the “Loisaida”: Poetics of Neighborhood II 1 Titled “¡Presente!,” the exhibition was cosponsored by El Museo del Barrio, the Bronx Museum, and Loisaida, Inc., and was on view from July 2 to December 12, 2015. Details are available at www.bronxmuseum.org/exhibitions/presente-theyoung-lords-in-new-york and www.elmuseo.org/the-young-lords-in-new-york/. 2 I discuss Madden’s theory and its relationship to what I’m calling the poetics of neighborhood in more detail in Chapter 4. 3 Like Kane, Mele notes that inexpensive rents drew artists and writers to the Lower East Side in the 1960s. He situates their presence there in relation to longer histories of change. Mele demonstrates, for example, that developers used the neighborhood’s countercultural reputation as an asset when they rebranded its northern section as the East Village in the 1970s. The rebranding contributed to the gentrification of both the East Village and Lower East Side in subsequent decades (173–179). 4 Frances Arpacio and Susana Chávez-Silverman introduce the term “tropicalization” as a way to identify colonizing discourses used to portray Latinx communities in English-language art and literature in Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad. Wanzer-Serrano builds on their work by arguing that the Young Lords reclaimed the discourse of “tropicalization” through their public actions in order to organize and empower New York City’s Puerto Rican communities. 5 Algarín’s multilingual narrative poems, “A Mongo Affair” and “Tangiers,” seem less susceptible to this critique. As Wanzer Serrano suggests about the Young Lords’ activism, these poems “articulate links of equivalence” between Nuyorican experiences and those of “other Third World sisters and brothers in struggle” (163). 6 Esteves’s collections are Yerba Buena (Greenfield Review, 1980) and Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo (Arte Publico, 1990). Her visual art and jewelry designs are shown alongside new and selected poems at www.sandraesteves.com/. The site includes a digital version of the now out-of-print Yerba Buena.

6  Poetry and Progressive Planning 1 The Hudson Yards project was ultimately scaled back when New York City’s bid for the 2012 Olympic Games was unsuccessful. Largely implemented, the Atlantic Yards project continues to be controversial. The documentary The Battle for Brooklyn chronicles the community’s resistance to the project and tactics developers and the city used in pursuing it. 2 Coultas’s claim that she is “not an archaeologist” distinguishes her project from Charles Olson’s encyclopedic Maximus poems. Olson famously defined himself as an “archaeologist of morning” (Collected Prose 206).

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3 The narrative of Winters’s remarkable long poem “An Immigrant Woman” follows a similar trajectory (The Displaced of Capital 13–29). At the beginning, the speaker of the poem, a student at NYU, and Pilar, its title character, join together to protest an infrastructure project they fear will damage the tenement building where they both live and others nearby. They become friends through their shared commitment to opposing the project. When an accident caused by the project kills Pilar’s daughter in her apartment, the two become estranged. Pilar retreats into her work as a housekeeper at a Manhattan hotel and the speaker relocates, at the invitation of a fellow student, to an apartment in the Village. The poem concludes with a reunion, but their failure to empathize across class positions during a crisis seems to be its main subject. 4 The FEIS describes Van Valkenburgh’s complete vision for the park. It is numbered by section and page, so the citation “1–5” signifies section 1, page 5. Additional documentation of the park’s development, including the most recent version of the General Project Plan, is available at www.brooklynbridgepark.org/pages/ project-approvals-and-presentations. 5 MacAdams chronicles “The First Los Angeles River Art Walk” in poem I.18 and describes the “Gran Limpieza” clean-up efforts in poems II.5 and III.38. Since The River is not paginated, I cite book and poem numbers, so the citation “I.18” signifies Book I, poem 18. 6 The Revitalization Master Plan is paginated by section and page, so the citation “1–6” signifies section 1, page 6. 7 The city’s 2016 decision to engage Frank Gehry to develop a new master plan for the river’s redevelopment suggests MacAdams and the communities he has worked with will face challenges in maintaining access to the improvements they have made (Hawthorne). 8 For a sympathetic history of Mulholland’s influence, see his granddaughter Catherine Mulholland’s William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles.

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227

Index activism 1, 13 Brooks, Gwendolyn 139–43 Coleman, Wanda 90–1 collective action 3–4 Cortez, Jayne 79, 82–5 Esteves, Sandra María 169–75 neighborhood-based 123–5 Nuyorican Poetry 156–7 Oppen, George 104–5, 110–11 Watts 20, 22–3, 25, 74–5, 79, 90–1 Adorno, Theodor 8–9, 11, 20, 22, 64, 202 aesthetic theory 6–12 Alcalay, Ammiel 37, 42–3 Allen, Donald 49 Algarín, Miguel 3, 149 “A Mongo Affair” 164, 211 n.5 “Dusmic Poetry” 167 “Inside Control: my tongue” 163–4, 174 “Nuyorican Aesthetics” 172–3 “Nuyorican Language” 149, 160–1 “Nuyorican Literature” 159 Nuyorican Poetry 158–9 “Tangiers” 211 n.5 Althusser, Louis 104, 112–13 Andrews, Bruce 22–4 Angotti, Thomas 12, 15, 17, 177, 179–80, 181–2, 197, 205 n.4 anthologies 59, 66, 63, 68 Nuyorican Poetry 158–68 Aponte-Parés, Luis 152–4 apostrophe 143, 146 Ashbery, John 20, 125, 206 n.13 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones) 142, 210 n.6 Baudelaire, Charles 3, 6–8, 11–12, 18–20, 46, 205 n.2 Beauregard, Robert 13, 103 Bender, Thomas 156 Benjamin, Walter 3, 6–9, 11, 19, 20 Berman, Marshall 205 n.2 Berman, Wallace 63, 66, 208 n.6 Billitteri, Carla 38, 42

Black Arts Movement 142, 145, 210 n.6 Black Panther Party 13, 74 Boston, Mass. 40–1, 121–2 Braverman, Kate 68–9, 79 “Faircrest Avenue” 71–3 Bronzeville (Chicago, Ill.) 128–9 Brooklyn Bridge Park 193–8 public-private partnership 195–6 Brooks, Gwendolyn 3, 21, 55, 168, 181 Annie Allen 121, 132–4 “The Bean Eaters” 134–7 “In the Mecca” 139–43 Report from Part One 129–30, 140, 143 reception 131–2, 135, 137 Riot 139 “Sermons on the Warpland” 143–7 A Street in Bronzeville 129–32 “Two Dedications” 137–9 Bukowski, Charles 59, 66, 68 buses (see public transportation) Buuck, David 4–6, 25 Castells, Manuel 14, 55, 94–5, 103–4, 108–9, 112–13, 177 Cayton, Horace 128–31, 135, 143 Chicago 3, 13, 122–3 Bronzeville neighborhood 14, 128–9 Burnham Plan 29–30 1968 riots 145 Picasso sculpture 137–8 Young Lords 168–9 Chicago School 12, 58 civic survey (Sir Patrick Geddes) 30–1 Clarke, Cheryl 140–1, 143 Clune, Michael 19–21 Coleman, Wanda 3, 20, 57, 59–60, 147, 168, 181 “Down the Rabbit Hole” 87–8 friendships 66, 68 “Paper Riot” 89–91 perspective on Los Angeles 73–4, 85, 88–9

230 “Rapid Transit” 86–7 “They Will Not Be Poets” 89 collective efficacy (Robert Sampson) 122–4, 156–7, 174–5 Coltrane, John 82–5 community knowledge (Leonie Sandercock) 17, 49, 139, 178–9 Cortez, Jayne 3, 20, 59, 66, 181 “I Am New York City” 80–1 Pissstained Stairs 79–85 Coultas, Brenda 55, 182–5, 192, 201, 211 n.2 creative class (Richard Florida) 2, 15, 206 n.11 Creeley, Robert 37, 41–2, 50 Daniel, Julia 29–31, 206 n.4 Davidoff, Paul 13–14, 177 Davidson, Michael 98–100, 209 n.2 Davis, Mike 57–8, 65, 200, 206 n.3 Dear, Michael (see also Los Angeles School) 59, 62, 88–9 Debord, Guy 6, 38–9, 43, 49, 54 Depression, The 93, 95, 99–101, 209 n.1 disinvestment 1, 12, 124, 152–4, 175, 188–9, 192 displacement 13, 16, 23–4, 89, 153, 181–5 Dorn, Ed 42 Drake, St. Clair 128–31, 135, 143 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau 29, 33–5, 93–5, 102, 114

Index Florida Richard 1–2, 57, 206 n.11 Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) 198, 201–2 fugitive publics (Fred Moten and Stefano Harney) 6, 62, 82–4, 86 Gans, Herbert 13, 49, 121–3, 205 n.1 Geddes, Sir Patrick 30–2 gentrification 15, 183, 210 n.3, 211 n.3 Ginsberg, Allen 3, 28, 44–9, 207 n.7 Gates of Wrath 47–8 Empty Mirrors 28, 47 “Howl” 46, 48–9, 50 journals 44, 46, 47, 48 “Kaddish” 208 n.10 letters to William Carlos Williams 45–7, 48 “Ode to Decadence” 45–6 review of Paterson 44, 127–8 shrouded stranger poems 28, 44–50, 54–5, 130, 207 n.6 Glaeser, Edward 1–2, 15–16, 194–5 Gloucester, Mass. 36–9, 42–3 Dogtown 41 urban renewal 39–41

economic development 1–2, 94, 124 Chicago School 12–13 growth regimes 177, 186, 205 n.9 neoliberalism 14–17, 185, 193–6 progressive planning 18–19, 61, 177–8 environment-poem (Angus Fletcher) 125–7, 145–7 Eliot, T. S. 27, 44, 47, 66 Esteves, Sandra María 3, 150, 158, 165 “Ambivalence or Activism” 172–3 “Blanket Weaver” 167–8 drawings 169, 172, 174–5 “for tito” 167 Yerba Buena 169–75, 175, 211 n.6 Evergreen Review, The 28, 41, 53

Hackworth, Jason 14–15, 180 Harney, Stefano 6, 25, 61–2, 82–4, 86 Harvey, David 1, 14, 16–17, 179–80, 191, 199 Heidegger, Martin 93, 95, 111–14, 117, 120, 209 n.6, 210 n.7 highway construction 10, 23, 30, 40–1, 121 Hinton, Laura 80–3, 90–1 homelessness 88, 182–5, 186–7 Horne, Gerald 74–5, 208 n.1 housing 60–1, 121 Brooklyn Bridge Park 198 Bowery/Cooper Square (New York City) 181–2, 185 Chicago 129–31 Germany 111–12 Lower East Side (New York City) 152–3 Watts (Los Angeles) 74–5 Housing Act 13, 74, 190

Fletcher, Angus 125–7, 145, 149 Flores, Juan 153, 163

inequality 2, 16, 57, 86, 177, 205 n.8 Izenberg, Oren 115, 210 n.8

Index

231

Jacobs, Jane 10, 13, 20, 49, 54, 121–2, 139, 182 jazz (see also music) 46, 48–9 Brooks, Gwendolyn 137 Cortez, Jayne 79–85 Ginsberg, Allen 46–7

music (see also jazz) Brooks, Gwendolyn 138–9 Cortez, Jayne 79–85 Esteves, Sandra María 167–72 Nuyorican Poetry 154 Williams, William Carlos 52–3

Lamar, Kendrick 3 Lefebvre, Henri 14, 16, 60–2, 77, 89–91 line breaks 24–5, 70, 75, 77–9, 84–5, 90, 136, 146–7 Lipton, Lawrence 63, 66 Los Angeles 3, 13–14, 62, 64–8 arts organizations 208 n.2 history 57–60, 200, 209 n.7 Los Angeles River 193–4, 198 Los Angeles School 58, 60, 62 Lynch, Kevin 13, 34

Nardi, Marcia 33–6, 37, 44, 46 Natarajan, Lucy 179–80 Nealon, Christopher 19–20, 206 n.13 neighborhoods 10, 76–9, 121–2, 210 n.5 Bronzeville (Chicago) 128–31 Bowery/Cooper Square (New York City) 181–2, 185 El Barrio (East Harlem, New York City) 149–50, 152–4 environment-poems 125–7, 145–7 Loisaida (Lower East Side, New York City) 152–4 Los Angeles 57, 59–60, 69–72, 87–90, 193–4 spatial projects 124–5, 139, 150–1 urban renewal 12–14, 23–4, 177 Venice Beach 63 Watts (Los Angeles) 73–5 neighborhood effects (Robert Sampson) 16, 122–3, 139–40, 162, 206 n.12, 210 n.3 neoliberalism 1, 14–17, 177–80, 182, 185, 189–90, 193–5, 197–9, 202 New York City 10, 14, 35, 99 Bowery/Cooper Square 186–8 Brooklyn Bridge Park 193–8 Cortez, Jayne 80–1 development 123, 177–8, 181–5 East Harlem 152–4 fiscal crisis 20 Lower East Side 152–4 Oppen, George 93–5, 113–8 Upper East Side 188–9 Young Lords 155–7 Nicholls, Peter 95, 98, 104–5, 108, 114, 116–17, 209 n.2, 209 n.6 Nickels, Joel 19–20, 29, 206 n.4 Nielson, Aldon Lynn 210 n.6 Noel, Urayoán 150–1, 158–9, 163–5, 167–9, 174 Nuyorican poetics 3, 55, 149–51, 152–4, 159–60, 172–3, 175, 211 n.5 anthology 158–68 sexism in 163–5, 169–70

McAdams, Lewis 3, 5, 193–4 The River 198–203, 212 n.5 MacGowan, Christopher 27, 31, 207 n.9 McGrath, Thomas 63–4, 68, 73 “Letter to an Imaginary Friend” 64–6, 208 n.4 McKee, Adam 27, 34–5 Madden, Douglas 124–5, 150–1 Malewitz, Raymond 145 Manzo, Lynne 124 mapping 6, 38–43, 55, 59, 75, 91, 159, 190–2 Marcuse, Herbert 8–9, 11–12, 19–20, 205 n.3 Marcuse, Peter 2–4, 17, 61, 91, 125, 157, 179–80, 199, 205 n.3 Martin, Deborah 156–7, 172 Mele, Christopher 123, 152–4, 211 n.3 Melendez, Mickey 153–5 Melhem, D. J. 82, 85 Messerli, Douglas 58, 68 modernism 19, 27, 37, 51–2 Mohr, Bill 59, 64, 66, 68, 208 n.2 Molotch, Harvey 205 n.9 Morales, Martita 161, 165–8 Moses, Robert 10 Moten, Fred 6, 25, 61–2, 82–4, 86 Mulholland, William 57, 199–200, 212 n.8 Muñoz, Amina 165–6 murals 137–9

232

Index

O’Hara, Frank 19–20 Olson, Charles 3, 28, 39, 211 n.2 letter to Ginsberg 43 mapping 42–3 Maximus Poems 37–43, 50, 181, 184, 207 n.4 “Maximus to Gloucester” 40 polis 37–9, 45, 54–5 “Projective Verse” 28, 69, 73, 159 response to Paterson 36–7, 53–4 O’Neil, Elizabeth 33–4 Oppen, George 3, 55, 93–5, 100, 181 “A Language of New York” 113–16 “Blood from a Stone” 100–1 “Debt” 106 Discrete Series 95–9, 111 “Of Being Numerous” 113–18, 119 “Rationality” 105–6 “Route” 108–11 “Statement on Poetics” 118 “The Building of a Skyscraper” 101–2 “The Mind’s Own Place” 108 “The Poem” 107–8 “Workmen” 107–8 Oppen, Mary 93–4, 99–100, 209 n.1 Ortega, Kirsten Bartholomew 80–3, 140–1, 143 Ouroussoff, Nicolai 197 Paris 7, 9, 11, 39, 60, 94 parks 4–6, 32–3, 35, 193–5, 196–8, 212 n.4 Passaic River 30–2, 49, 51 performance (see also music) 181 Brooks, Gwendolyn 139 Cortez, Jayne 79–81 jazz 82–5 Nuyorican poetics 158–9, 174 spoken word 3 Perkins, Douglas 124 Perloff, Marjorie 29, 32, 34–5, 37, 48, 117–18 photographs 159, 167 Pietri, Pedro 3, 153, 158, 175 “before and after graduation day” 162–3 “Puerto Rican Obituary” 149–51 Piñero, Miguel 153–4, 175 “La Metadona Está Cabrona” 164–5 Nuyorican Poetry 158

“The Book of Genesis According to Saint Miguelito” 161–3 place-framing 124–5, 156–7, 158–60, 163, 172, 175 Porter, Libby 177 Pound, Ezra 31, 35–6, 37, 44, 48, 52, 66, 93, 114 Powe, Blossom 77–9, 91 Prado, Holly 68–71, 72–3, 79 Priestley, Eric 76–7, 78–9, 91 progressive planning 2–4, 13–14, 61–2, 121, 123–5 overview 16–17, 178–82 urban commons 192–3, 198–9, 201 protest (see also riots) 1, 5, 12, 60, 94, 139, 154–5, 160–2, 167, 182 public-private partnerships 15, 193–4 public transportation buses 54, 72–3, 86–7 sidewalks 19–20, 95–6, 167, 182–3, 186–9 subways 85, 115–15, 123, 161 Puerto Rico 156, 167, 169, 171–2, 175 Rancière, Jacques 6, 9–12, 18, 203 Rankine, Claudia 3, 206 n.13 Rasula, Jed 21, 22 rational-comprehensive planning 12–14, 29–31, 49, 54–5, 121, 178 reading 8–9, 21–2, 25, 69, 132–4, 158–60, 172–4 community 63, 127–8 immersion 36–9, 51, 86, 113–14, 125–7, 139–40, 142–5 performance 138–9, 149–50, 158–9 politics 5–6, 79–80, 130–1, 146–7 Regional Plan Association (RPA) 29–31, 152 Republic, The (Plato) 10–12, 205 n.5 Reznikoff, Charles 102–3, 209 n.3 right to the city 73, 76, 86, 157, 160, 180 definition 60–1 Los Angeles School 61–2 through poetry 89–91, 150, 166, 194 riots (see also Watts Uprising) 59–60, 77–8, 85–6, 208 n.1, 208 n.3 Chicago 145–6 East Harlem 153

Index Roberson, Ed 23–5, 206 n.14 Robles, Jaime 184–5 Ryan, Jennifer 80, 86 Said, Edward 51, 207 n.8 Sampson, Robert 16, 122–5, 132, 156–7, 206 n.12 Sandercock, Leonie 17–18, 49, 168, 178–9, 183–4, 192–3, 200–1 San Francisco 4–5, 13, 25, 66, 99 Schulberg, Budd 75–6 Scully, James 146–7 Second World War 1, 12, 21, 28, 30, 63, 73, 93–4, 108–10, 116, 129, 209 n.7 segregation 1, 12, 74, 122, 129, 152, 205 n.9 Sevçenko, Liz 152–4 Shaw, Lytle 36, 42, 206 n.4 Shockley, Evie 23, 59, 129–30, 134, 208 n.2 Shoemaker, Steve 98 sidewalks (see public transportation) Smith, Dale 18–19 Soja, Edward (see also Los Angeles School) 58, 62, 86, 88, 208 n.3 Sommer, Doris 5 spatial projects 124–5, 134, 139, 145, 150–1, 154, 157, 192 Spahr, Juliana 18, 139 An Army of Lovers 4–6 Everybody’s Autonomy 127–8 Thomas, John 66–8, 69, 73, 79 tropicalization 155–6, 158–9, 168, 172, 211 n.4 Troupe, Quincy 75–6 Unicorn Tapestries 53–5, 207 n.9 urban commons 17, 179–81, 192, 193–4, 199, 201–3 urban ideology (see also Castells, Manuel) 55, 94, 103–4, 108, 113, 115 urban renewal 12–14, 121, 205 n.7 Chicago 139–40, 210 n.4 Gloucester, Mass. 38–41 Los Angeles 74–5, 77 New York City 152, 181–2 Paterson, N. J. 29, 35 Pittsburgh 23–5

233

Vangelisti, Paul 58–9, 66, 68 Van Valkenburgh, Michael 194–5, 197, 212 n.4 Venice Beats (see also Thomas, John) 63, 66, 69 walking Baudelaire, Charles 7–9 Brooks, Gwendolyn 129 dérive 39 environment-poem 125 Ginsberg, Allen 45 Prado, Holly 69–70 Priestley, Eric 76–7 Roberson, Ed 24–5 Whitman, Walt 21–2 Williams, William Carlos 32, 41, 52–3, 53–4 Wanzer-Serrano, Darrel 150, 155–7, 170–2, 211 n.4 waterfront development 15, 193–8 Watts 59, 73–5 Coleman, Wanda 86–91, 147 Cortez, Jayne 83–5 Writers Workshop 74–5 Watts Uprising (see also riots) 13, 59–60, 75–9, 153, 208 n.3, 209 n.7 Wessells, Anne Taufen 198, 202 Whitman, Walt 21–3, 46, 48, 144, 181, 210 n.8 correspondence in Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” 118–20, 210 n.8 “Sparkles from the Wheel” 125–7, 144 Widener, Daniel 75, 208 n.2 Williams, Raymond 25–6 Williams, William Carlos “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower” 27, 50 Autobiography 27 interactions with Allen Ginsberg 46–9 “On Measure” 49–50, 206 n.2 Paterson 3, 19, 27–9, 31, 36–7, 44, 45 Paterson Book V 50–5, 115, 127–8, 181, 206 n.1, 207 n.10 response to Charles Olson 41 “The Desert Music” 52–3, 207 n.8 “The Poem as a Field of Action” 27, 50, 206 n.2 “The Wanderer” 31, 207 n.5

234 Winters, Anne 186, 201 “An Immigrant Woman” 212 n.3 “A Sonnet Map of Manhattan” 190–3 “The Ruins” 188–9 “Two Derelicts” 186–8

Index Young Lords 13, 149–50, 154–5, 155–7, 160, 163, 170–1, 174–5, 211 n.1, 211 n.4 zoning 177, 179, 190, 196 Zukofsky, Louis 5, 93