Poems of the American Empire: The Lyric Form in the Long Twentieth Century 9781609386627, 1609386620

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Poems Including History
1. We Are All Pound Now: The Cantos and the Shape of the Economy
2. The All-Over Poem: William Carlos Williams's Egalitarian Aesthetics
3. Dido's Secret: The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Limitsof Lyric
4. The New Stone Age: Contemporary Poets on the Beginning of the American Empire
Coda. In Search of Lost Causes: Toward a Lyric Interpretation of History
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Poems of the American Empire

The New American Canon The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture Samuel Cohen, series editor

Poems of the American Empire the lyric form in the long twentieth century

Jen Hedler Phillis

University of Iowa Press / Iowa City

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2019 by the University of Iowa Press www.uipress.uiowa.edu Printed in the United States of America Design by Omega Clay No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. Printed on ­acid-­free paper Library of Congress ­Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Phillis, Jen Hedler, 1980– author. Title: Poems of the American empire : the lyric form in the long twentieth century / Jen Hedler Phillis. Description: Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, [2019] | Series: The new American canon : the Iowa series in contemporary literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. |  Identifiers: lccn 2019002001 (print) | lccn 2019018913 (ebook) | isbn 978-1-60938-662-7 (ebook) | isbn 978-1-60938-661-0 ­(paperback : ­alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: American poetry—20th ­century—­History and criticism. | Politics and literature—­United States—­History—20th century. Classification: lcc ps323.5 (ebook) | lcc ps323.5 .p54 2019 (print) | ddc 811/.040905—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002001

For Nanette, Avery, and Chris

contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction / Poems Including History  1 1  We Are All Pound Now / The Cantos and the Shape of the Economy  21 2  The ­All-­Over Poem / William Carlos Williams’s Egalitarian Aesthetics 53 3  Dido’s Secret / The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Limits of Lyric  86 4  The New Stone Age / Contemporary Poets on the Beginning of the American Empire  118 Coda. In Search of Lost Causes / Toward a Lyric Interpretation of History  148 Notes 161 Works Cited  183 Index 193

acknowledgments

To Nicholas Brown, Jennifer Ashton, Joshua Clover, Peter Coviello, and Walter Benn Michaels; to Sam Cohen, Ranjit Arab, and Meredith Stabel at the University of Iowa Press; and to my friends, family, colleagues, and comrades, Vin, Lisa, Whitman, and Everson Adiutori, Nicole Aschoff, Marc Baez, Dr. Guada Bastos, Brent Ryan Bellamy, Ryan Brooks, Karen Cralli, Angela Dancey, Currey Dorris, Ashleigh Evans, Julie Fiorelli, Kevin Floyd, Shawn Gude, Mary Hale, Tenney Hammond, all six Kidwells, Laura Krughoff, Lindsay Marshall, Megan McLeod, Matt Moraghan, ­Piper-­Lori Parker, Nanette Perez, Jon, Ursula, and Debbie Phillis, Chris Rhodes, Neri Sandoval, Emilio Sauri, Davis ­Smith-­Brecheisen, Josh and Shannon ­Stephany-­Hammond, Bhaskar Sunkara, and Micah Uetricht: thanks, and I’ll shut up about Pound now. And Richard, how could I do anything at a­ ll—­let alone anything this good—­without you?

Poems of the American Empire

Introduction poems including history

Within Joshua Clover’s 2014 collection Red Epic is a poem called “Spring Georgic.” That a poem named “Georgic” appears in a collection called Epic is something of a surprise. Epics, after all, narrate ­world-­historical events—­the fall of Troy, the founding of Rome, the revelation of God’s plan—­while georgics are more modestly devoted to disseminating the rules that govern agriculture and animal husbandry. Georgic opposes epic’s linear plot, moving through time cyclically, linking its lessons to the seasons that call for them. While epic describes historical change, georgic relays transhistorical truths. Both modes appear in this poem. “I have read a lot of thick books,” the poem’s speaker explains, and become convinced of only three things Do not send your army into Afghanistan the Hindu Kush will swallow them No matter the circumstance do not grant emergency powers to anyone (20)

These rules, taught perhaps more forcefully by the ­so-­called War on Terror than by any thick book, impart repeated historical mistakes. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia have all launched unsuccessful incursions into Afghanistan; the people of the United States, France, and Germany have all learned that emergency powers linger long after the emergency has passed. These truths, while demonstrated by specific events, have gained transhistorical status through repetition. The speaker saves the final lesson for the end of the poem:

2   introduction In March and in April and in May especially in late March seize the fucking banks

(22)

Here, a revolutionary action is presented as a yearly event, natural and recurring, like sowing the fields. The slow build of the georgic setup (“In March and in April and in May / especially in late March”) contrasts with the concise force of “seize the fucking banks,” mimicking the rupture that would be produced by such revolutionary action. The odd juxtaposition of georgic cyclicality and epic’s narrativity presents revolution as both appropriate and urgent. Earlier in the poem, the speaker reflects on temporal juxtapositions like these: To say it is a new era is to say it has discovered a new style of time we do not do this in language first but in terrain we have not chosen and do not yet understand language meets us there and must be cajoled into open air by dangling the old forms in their wrack and wreckage this is the poetic thought (21)

The speaker defines historical change as the arrival of a new temporality, a commonplace definition in certain Marxist accounts of not only revolution but historical development more generally.1 By using William Carlos Williams’s triadic line, Clover makes the argument that the new world order first registers in literature as the reappearance of outdated and damaged forms visible in the very structure of the poem. We shall return to Williams’s prosody in chapter 2, but it’s worth highlighting his initial description of his new poetic form: a variable system of measuring stress that “will be commensurate with the social, economic world in which we are living”

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(“Poem as a Field” 53). In “Spring Georgic,” as in Williams’s fi ­ ve-­volume Paterson (1946–1958), the new era appears in the structure of the poem before language can fully account for it. “The poetic thought,” then, becomes a formal recognition of temporal change: the shocks of social development play across the surface of the poem. Indeed the lyric form is specially suited to tracing temporal disruption, distortion, and change, giving its readers a new perspective on historical and economic development. This argument does not originate with me, nor with Clover or Williams, but with Virgil, the great poet of the Roman empire. His Aeneid (c. 29–19 bce) has traditionally been read as a celebration of Augustus Caesar’s victory in the Roman Civil War, which ended Rome’s republican experiment and renewed its imperial project. But, as David Quint argues in his seminal Epic and Empire (1993), the Aeneid’s relationship to the Roman empire can be described as, at best, ambivalent: Virgil carefully reconfigures Homeric tropes to weave an anticolonial message into the very fabric of the poem. Structurally, the Aeneid combines the episodic structure of the Odyssey and the more straightforward narrative of the Iliad (both eighth century bce). The first half of the poem follows Aeneas and the other Trojan survivors as they wander the Mediterranean until they land at Carthage and Aeneas begins his romance with Dido; the second half becomes a Roman Iliad, as Aeneas defeats the Italian tribes to secure his new empire. This structure follows the Trojan survivor’s transformation from loser to winner. Indeed, Quint highlights how Virgil uses Dido and Turnus to stand in for Aeneas, accepting the defeat that he will claim as victory. When Aeneas attempts to explain to Dido why he must abandon her, he insists that it’s the gods’ will that pushes him forward: the messenger of the gods—­I swear it, by your life and mine—­dispatched by Jove himself has brought me firm commands through the racing winds. With my own eyes I saw him, clear, in broad daylight, moving through your gates. With my own ears I drank his message in. . . . . . . I set sail for Italy— all against my will. (4.445–52)

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Dido doesn’t buy this “it’s not you, baby; it’s the gods” speech. She calls him a “traitor, liar,” and “shameless, ruthless” (4.457, 4.485). Aeneas, of course, cannot heed her: he is driven by duty now. Strongly as he longs to ease and allay her sorrow, speak to her, turn away her anguish with reassurance, still, moaning deeply, heart shattered by his great love, in spite of all he obeys the gods’ commands and back he goes to his ships. (4.495–500)

Dido won’t be “driven by duty.” At dawn the next day, seeing the Trojan ships at sea, she throws herself on a pyre of Aeneas’s belongings and stabs herself in the heart, acting as a grieving widow as her s­ till-­living husband sails north. Her death defies the gods: “she was dying a death not fated or deserved / . . . before her day” (4.866–67). In Italy, Aeneas encounters Turnus, who also refuses to accept Jupiter’s plans for the Trojans. Quint details how Virgil borrows directly from the Iliad to construct the final confrontation between these two characters. In Homer’s poem, Aeneas is nearly killed when Diomedes throws a massive stone—­one “no two men could carry”—that shatters the Trojan leader’s hip. He survives thanks only to divine intervention. In Book 12 of the Aeneid, Turnus lifts “a boundary stone” so large “a dozen picked men could barely shoulder it up” and prepares to hurl it at Aeneas (12.1043, 1044). Just as the gods saved Aeneas from Diomedes’s attack in Troy, they once again intervene, making Turnus too weak to heave the boulder. Aeneas throws his ­ ear-­fatal hip spear, hitting Turnus in the thigh, a slant rhyme on Aeneas’s n injury. Quint explains that these echoes allow Aeneas to turn a defeat into a victory: as “Turnus fails to become a new Diomedes, he succeeds in becoming a second Aeneas” (71). Both Dido and Turnus take Aeneas’s place and, in some sense, suffer deaths that should belong to him; Dido kills herself on what looks like Aeneas’s funeral pyre while Turnus dies the same way Aeneas almost died at Troy. Frederic Jameson takes up Epic and Empire in his Valences of the Dialectic (2011) to illustrate what he identifies as one of three Aristotelian plots: reversal.2 While the structure of reversal is most often understood to describe the trajectory of a single character—­Aeneas’s transformation from

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loser to winner, for example, or Oedipus’s inexorable fall—­Jameson argues that Quint shows how it can also describe the relationship between Virgil and the Roman empire: As long as the Aeneid is read as a success story, . . . it will remain as shallow as all ­self-­congratulatory stories of triumph are, and all ideologies of empire that celebrate the victor, or in other words ourselves. What Quint has done in his aforementioned book is to make the Aeneid available again by uncovering the vein of silver that runs through its imperial gold, and to reveal the story of failure and the experience of defeat that secretly accompany all its victories. (557)

The Aeneid makes it clear that Aeneas can shed his position as imperial loser only when he has pushed others into that role. Turnus’s and Dido’s “experience[s] of defeat . . . secretly accompany” Aeneas’s triumph. Once we understand this structure, we recognize Virgil’s resistance not only to the restoration of the Roman empire but also to the very structure of imperialism: every victory produces victims; their rarely told stories are necessary to the process of empire building. Hegel would call this structure dialectical—­ not because victor and victim occupy opposing positions but because their opposition defines them. No winners without losers, no empire without colonies, no center without periphery. When these two positions are taken together, the structure of the whole—­that is, its totality—­appears. The Aeneid is able to present this totality thanks to its shifting temporality. Like the Odyssey, the first half is episodic. As Jameson writes, “its organizational form . . . threatens to break down into discontinuous encounters and experiences, ­non-­narrative moments of the present which a different . . . system would no doubt want to identity as lyrical” (555). The second half, in contrast, is a straightforward narrative. For Quint, this structure “identifies epic teleology with narrative itself—­the winners’ story made possible by conquest—­and contrasts this story with the romance odyssey it supersedes: the losers’ aimless course, their lack of story, their falling out of history” (52). The shift in structures from the episodic romance to the narrative of war links each mode of storytelling to a specific position within the imperial project: the victors tell the story of their triumph, and their victims lose the linear structure of narrative; or, as Susan Howe puts it, “[I]f history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices” ­(Birth-­Mark 47).

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Both Virgil and Clover present two distinct temporalities that, when read together, produce a dialectic tension that allows readers to see the “vein of silver” that interrupts history’s “imperial gold.” Further, they both deploy this technique in the midst of translatio imperii, periods when imperial power is on the move: Virgil, when the Roman empire was reestablished after the nation’s experiment with republicanism; Clover, as the United States’ global superpower status seems to be on the wane. The poems that appear in the chapters that follow also belong to this dialectical genre, which, I argue, American poets have turned to throughout their nation’s imperial adventure. Although I will not make the case here, one entailment of this claim is that we could find examples of this genre at any moment when global power is in flux. These poets marshal this hybridity for a variety of political purposes, from Ezra Pound’s call for a revival of a ­Greco-­European empire to Douglas Kearney’s revelation of the sources of antiblack racism. All are united, however, by their integration of epic forms into the lyric poem. The period the book covers—­beginning with Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930 and ending with Hong’s Engine Empire in 2012—roughly matches the ascent and decline of the American empire. Just as Virgil’s Aeneid narrates the transfer of imperial power from one capital to another, these poets give the long twentieth century’s translatio imperii its formal expression. The modernist poems of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams attempt to square American culture and aesthetics with the United States’ new place at the center of the world economy while Amiri Baraka, M. NourbeSe Philip, dg nanouk okpik, Douglas Kearney, and Cathy Park Hong attempt to construct a total history of US power. These poems containing history produce a ­mirage-­like image of US hegemony that demonstrates how imperial practices produce specific forms of economic and social inequality.

History Confessing Itself to Itself The 2008 Great Recession marked our entry into a new era, and many critics are turning to the lyric form to make sense of this change. Besides recent landmark publications in the field, from Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins’s The Lyric Theory Reader (2014) to Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015), more and more critics are citing poetry as an aid to understanding

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the contours of our new world. For example, Andrew Hoberek reads the turn to the poetic form in Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets as evidence of “the breakdown in the novel’s historical capacity to translate fact into some sort of socially useful truth” (54). Ruth Jennison demonstrates the continuity between “the figural and the unseen” in poetry—“metaphors, similes, line breaks, vast and micro fields of white space, allusions”— and “a world financial system that is increasingly conducted in an invisible manner, through derivatives, currency trading, outsourcing, collateralized debt obligations, and so on” (39). Turning to poetry, she argues, will allow us to “tunnel . . . out of a critical sediment comprising a seemingly infinite history of revisions of one concept: narrative” (38). And, in “Retcon: Value and Temporality in Poetics” (2014), Joshua Clover announces that “while narrative fiction has been taken insistently as the relevant literary mode or genre for understanding the motion and particularly the temporality of finance, poetry finally provides a better heuristic for such an understanding” (13). We need a lyric theory that can capture this era’s new style of time. But our theories remain in the nineteenth century. Since the romantic period, the lyric form has largely been defined in terms of the poetic speaker’s individuality. From J. S. Mill’s definition of poetry as “feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude” in “What Is Poetry?” (1833) to the Language Poetry collective’s rejection of the canonization of “the lyric of fetishized personal ‘experience’” in 1988 (Silliman et al. 262), the lyric speaker has been at the center of two centuries’ worth of literary theory. This focus has narrowed our understanding of the lyric form, especially with regard to its politics. Indeed, much of the wrangling over the politics of the lyric in the twentieth century has focused on the lyric I, often ignoring the essential formal characteristics—­temporality among them—­that separate it from fiction.3 For example, both Theodor Adorno and Allen Grossman posit the lyric I as a powerful political actor. Adorno opens “On Lyric Poetry and Society” (1957) by highlighting his title’s apparent paradox: readers “experience lyric poetry as something opposed to society, something wholly individual,” but the reader’s expectation that lyric escape “from the weight of material existence [and] evoke the image of a life free from the coercion of reigning practices, of utility, of the relentless pressures of s­elf-­preservation .  .  . is itself social in nature” (39).4 The poet’s antisociality signals that something

8   introduction

in the world motivates her withdrawal from it.5 Adorno locates this flaw in the structure of capitalism, arguing that the poem “is a form of reaction to the reification of the world, to the domination of human beings by commodities” (“On Lyric” 40). The lyric resists this reification by deploying what Adorno calls language’s “double” character. He writes that language can assimilate “itself completely into subjective impulses,” so that it appears to be the invention of the speaker. At the same time, “language remains the medium of concepts” (43). Language’s objective quality—­in which it can communicate to a vast number of listeners or readers—­contrasts with its subjective malleability. This dialectical tension allows the lyric speaker to intervene in society while simultaneously withdrawing from it.6 Allen Grossman agrees that the lyric poem directly intervenes in social life, but he sees the poet’s political role as essentially unchanged over time. He models his understanding of poetic intervention on the Laocoön statuary, which depicts the Trojan priest and his two sons being devoured by Athena’s snakes after he warns his comrades to be wary of Greeks bearing gifts. One of his sons appears to be successfully freeing himself from the creatures that bind his family. As he slips out, he does not look up to heaven in supplication; he gazes at his father’s face. In the surviving son’s look, Grossman recognizes “the secret of the atrocity by which (always) the dominant discourse is known to have been founded” (113): the son recognizes that his father’s punishment shows that the gods have chosen to sacrifice one race (the Trojans) in order to elevate another (the Greeks). Grossman argues that this process recurs throughout human history. Conquest’s winners establish dominant discourses that retroactively justify their victories; Laocoön is one example, Dido another. In Grossman’s account, poetic language belongs to figures like Laocoön’s son—­those who were meant to be destroyed, survivors from an already concluded war and witnesses to that war’s atrocities. Poets, Grossman argues, engage in “the work of constructing the value of the person,” creating counterpoints to those barbaric documents (120). Even those who explicitly reject the conception of the lyric poem as individual expression do so on the grounds of subjectivity’s purported political engagement. For example, in “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto” (1988), Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten collectively argue that the

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focus on personal experience—­what they evocatively liken to “suburban landscape” painting—“is primarily responsible for the widespread contemporary reception of poetry as nice but irrelevant” (262, 264).7 In mainstream lyrics, they write, “[e]xperience is digested for its moral content and then dramatized and framed; at the same time, the transcendent moment dissolves back into the sentimental and banal, maintaining the purity of the poem by excluding explicit agendas” (264); that is, the poem’s connection to a highly individualized speaker prevents it from producing any significant political content. In contrast, the Language writers call on poets to expand the bounds of the lyric persona, so that it ceases to represent a particular speaker relating a specific event or revelation and becomes more open “to the implications of experience” (266). In her “The Rejection of Closure,” Lyn Hejinian argues for a poetic form that “invites participation,” further enlarging the scope of the lyric persona. She argues that this form “rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive” (43). A more collective lyric speaker then—­one that extends to include the audience—­has inherently more progressive politics than a singular voice. Although the Language writers privilege a collective speaker over an individual one, they share Adorno’s and Grossman’s belief that the position of speaker enables the poem to intervene in politics. But the lyric persona cannot sufficiently guarantee political engagement of any kind, let alone the kind of progressive interventions that these critics imagine poetry invites. Indeed, it’s hard to decide which version of subjectivity—­individual or collective—­is more capable of producing a politics. An individual subjectivity likely has a more coherent political position than a collective subject, but, at the same time, the elevation of the individual above the collective can be seen as the dominant ideology of capitalism. Put simply, a poem’s speaking subject can have any political content: the fascist Pound uses many of the same formal techniques as the feminist Susan Howe. Rather than focus on subjectivity and persona, I argue that we should attend to the lyric poem’s special relationship to time, which allows us to separate the lyric as a genre from the lyric poet or speaker as a political actor. Lyric’s nonnarrativity is a ­long-­standing generic marker. Georges Poulet’s classic “Timelessness and Romanticism” describes how some Romantic

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poets experience the “total exclusion of the past from the present, by a perfect absorption in the present” so that the idea of succession disappears completely (6). Contemporary definitions of lyric maintain this intense experience of presentness: Sharon Cameron writes that “the moment is to the lyric what sequence is to the story” (204), Culler that “if narrative is about what happens next, lyric is about what happens now” (“Why Lyric?” 202). But, as I shall demonstrate throughout, it’s not simply that lyric can isolate moments in time, turning something that feels like the present into a more eternal experience. Rather, lyric’s temporal structure allows it to move through time—­even to exist outside of time. When matched with epic’s forward motion, lyric time allows us to see the continuity—­and difference—­between ­often-­distant moments. In the chapters that follow, I will unpack how poets from the modernist period to the present use this hybrid genre in an attempt to intervene politically in contemporary life. In so doing, they make visible the totality of American imperial power. Neither an empty celebration of national exceptionalism nor a catalog of atrocities, what we begin to see is both: the triumphal parade must now share the streets with its ghostly double, the funeral march.

First as Tragedy, Then as Tragedy The Aeneid narrates the transfer of power between a fallen Troy and a burgeoning Rome, and this book will narrate the founding and the decline of the American empire. Like Quint and Jameson’s explication of the simultaneous revelation of winner and loser, the theory of imperial history that undergirds this text allows us to see, in the words of Giovanni Arrighi, “the fortunes of the conquering West and the misfortunes of the conquered ­non-­West as joint outcomes of a single historical process” (20). Further, by explicating the basic structure of the United States’ imperial strategy, we discover that, like all imperial projects, its failure was built into its very foundations. Arrighi explains that “the main thrust of US hegemony [is] ­anti-­imperialist,” a paradoxical claim that reveals the contradictory promise at the heart of the American empire (71). The closer the United States moved toward this purported goal, the more it eroded its own power, creating the conditions that would, over time, transform it from winner to loser. In his magisterial The Long Twentieth Century (1994), Arrighi places the

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American empire in the context of three prior cycles of capitalist accumulation. Although each differs considerably in its organizational logic and expansionary tactics, they all follow the same pattern: a period of incredible productive capacity, during which “money capital ‘sets in motion’ an increasing mass of commodities (including commoditized l­abor-­power and gifts of nature),” followed by a turn to finance, during which “an increasing mass of money capital ‘sets itself free’ from its commodity form, and accumulation proceeds through financial deals” (6).8 The transition to finance is presaged by a relative decline in domestic manufacturing profits, encouraging capitalists to invest in other projects, often in other parts of the world, in order to maintain their desired rate of return. As investments flow from the imperial center into new manufacturing hubs, they allow a new nation to become the world’s foremost commodity producer, eventually achieving its own period of productive expansion and taking its turn as a global leader. This book begins at the end of the United Kingdom’s cycle of accumulation, before the United States had amassed the financial and governmental capacity to lead the world system. As with American hegemony, the British empire’s fall can be attributed to its particular style of imperial management. Arrighi explains that the United Kingdom used physical expansion to fuel its economic dominance: No territorialist ruler had ever before incorporated within its domains so many, so populous, and so ­far-­flung territories as the United Kingdom did in the nineteenth century. Nor had any territorialist ruler ever before forcibly extracted in so short a time so much tribute—­in ­labor-­power, in natural resources, and in means of payments—­as the British state and its clients did in the Indian subcontinent in the course of the nineteenth century. Part of this tribute was used to buttress and expand the coercive apparatus through which more and more ­non-­Western subjects were added to the British territorial empire. But another, equally conspicuous part was siphoned off in one form or another to London, to be recycled in the circuits of wealth through which British power in the Western world was continually reproduced and expanded. (55)

The British did not conquer, settle, and annex more than half the world because they wanted to ensure that the sun would never set on their holdings. Rather, the fact that the sun never set on their colonies allowed them to ex-

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tract staggering wealth from those areas in an unprecedentedly short time. As Arrighi points out, this “tribute” fueled the city of London, turning it into the center of global finance. The British accomplished this not only thanks to their military superiority but also thanks to a new theory of political economy: a world market that superseded national power. “[E]ndowed with supernatural powers greater than anything pope and emperor had ever mastered,” the market’s free hand carried the British empire from its small, regularly besieged island to global hegemony. The United Kingdom, Arrighi argues, was able to marshal this market ideology because of its unilateral ­free-­trade policies ­ orld-­wide networks of dependence on, and allegiance to, that “created w the expansion of wealth and power of the United Kingdom” (Arrighi 56). Nations quickly fell under its orbit, from imperial territories like India and former holdings like the United States to countries that relied on British consumption to fuel their production. As Arrighi sums up, This extraordinary capacity was a manifestation of hegemony—­that is, of the capacity to claim with credibility that the expansion of UK power served not just UK national interest but a “universal” interest as well. Central to this hegemonic claim was a distinction between the power of rulers and the “wealth of nations” subtly drawn in the liberal ideology propagated by the British intelligentsia. In this ideology, the expansion of the power of British rulers relative to other rulers was presented as the motor force of a general expansion of the wealth of nations. Free trade might undermine the sovereignty of rulers, but it would at the same time expand the wealth of their subjects, or at least of their propertied subjects. (57)

Arrighi qualifies this final sentence with “at least of their propertied subjects” to remind us of the unequal distribution of the empire’s massive wealth. British ­working-­class subjects enjoyed access to increasingly inexpensive commodities from the world market, but they enjoyed substantially fewer of them than the ruling class and substantially more than the peripheral subjects, millions of whom died delivering cheap cotton to Liverpool. The United Kingdom’s global dominance put intense pressure on its continental competitors to maintain their own spheres of influence and to protect their national wealth. These rivalries exploded in World War I (1914–18), a conflict that lasted longer and cost more than anyone predicted.9 Witnesses—­

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like Ezra Pound, the subject of the first chapter—­tried to explain the war’s novel brutality. The answer Pound landed on would guide the rest of his poetic work. Soldiers went off to war, he wrote in 1923’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving came home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . home to old lies . . . ; usury ­age-­old and ­age-­thick (187)

Ten years later, he has a character in Canto 18 explain that world peace is impossible as long as “‘yew got tew billions ov money,’ / . . . ‘invested in the ­man-­u-­facture’ / ‘Of war machinery . . .’” (Cantos 81). Pound fully expresses his theory in 1944’s pamphlet “America, Roosevelt, and the Causes of the Present War,” where he writes, “Wars are provoked in succession, deliberately, by the great usurers, in order to create debts, to create scarcity, so that they can extort the interest on these debts, so that they can raise the price of money.” In large part, Pound’s quixotic antibank quest, which would slowly but inexorably transform into his a­ nti-­Semitic economics, was founded during World War I. Although Pound misrecognized the causes of this war, he correctly understood that it would radically transform the world. He had realized before the war began that British power was fading, a revelation that convinced him to move from the United Kingdom to France before he finally settled in Italy, where he believed a renewed G ­ reco-­European empire would be launched. He built A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930) around a productive tension between lyric and epic temporality, which allows him to articulate what he calls “luminous details”—artifacts that give us insight into a specific moment from the past—­alongside the long sweep of history (Selected Prose 24). Mussolini’s rise to power at once seemed to confirm Pound’s prediction and force him to revise it. In his World War II–era writings, Pound tried to square the developments of a changing world order with his theory of history, and he became fixated on the relationship between rulers and the money supply. In Cantos 52 through 71—the Chinese and Adams cantos (1940)—he presents monetary policy as a transhistorical problem with a universal solution. His narrow focus on an individual mechanism within

14   introduction

political economy reveals that he believes the structure of the economy is sound, a viewpoint that has come to be called technocratic. In fact, Pound’s economic ­anti-­Semitism represents this technocratic impulse taken to its most violent conclusion: it isn’t the economy that is unstable but a class of people within the economy who generate instability. A (slightly) less bigoted technocracy sits at the foundation of American imperialism. After World War II, the architects of West German reconstruction believed that empowering the market over the state would promote equality and avoid the perils of fascism. The primacy of a free market became an essential element of American ideology. As Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin explain in their essential history of the American empire, The Making of Global Capitalism (2012), “[t]he explicit l­ong-­term goal of the American state was to create the material and legal conditions for the free movement of capital throughout the world” (10). It did so by “trying to bring a common set of norms, and more ambitiously the ‘rule of law,’ to bear on international competition” (37). This built on the United Kingdom’s elevation of the world market but inserted the state—­in the form of “rule of law”—into the process.10 Rather than developing subordinate capitalist economies in conquered states, the United States would encourage independent economies to conform to the norms established in the imperial center and fully open their markets to global trade. To do so, they forged ties with capitalists all over world, “which actually reinforced the material foundation of American imperial hegemony. European capitalists no longer constituted ‘national bourgeoisies’ inclined towards a­ nti-­American sentiments, let alone towards reviving ­inter-­imperial rivalries” (115). Meanwhile, the US state used the rule of law to justify its military intervention. Woodrow Wilson asserted that the American entry into World War I represented “a global campaign for liberal democracy” (47). We needn’t dig very deep into the recent past to find other imperial adventures carried out under the same banner. The contradiction at the heart of the US empire here reveals itself: promoting democracy and equality globally would inevitably generate states that rejected American dominance over their economies. William Carlos Williams, the subject of the second chapter, recognized this conflict in the foundations of American history. He believed that the United States promised “abundance for all” but had repeatedly failed to live up to its founding

introduction   15

premise (Recognizable Image 218). Throughout In the American Grain (1925), he uses primary historical documents written during the European exploration of the New World, the British settlements, and the early years of the United States to show how the influence of regressive Puritan ideology slowly suppressed this original ideal of equality. His historical moment gave Williams’s argument urgency: as the United States was becoming the center of global power, he believed it had to return to its source and become, for the first time, a New World. The dissonance between what Williams believed the New World stood for and what it had become helps him discover the new measure and the triadic line, forms that allow him to build universal equality in the very form of Paterson. While this new prosody creates a poetic space in which none of the figures or formal elements is subordinated to any other, it can exist only within the aesthetic frame, once again revealing the distance between the ideals and the reality of United States as the center of accumulation and imperial power. In the postwar period, the nation did move closer to “abundance for all.” American economic superiority “mildly redistributed” wealth, creating a robust middle class and social safety net that did not endanger corporate profits (Stein xi). But, by the 1960s, the contradictions on which the US empire was built began to splinter this ­still-­uneven prosperity. The conflict between the US’s posture of a­ nti-­imperialist crusader and its real political and economic policies become apparent on three intimately connected registers: socially, economically, and geopolitically. For many US residents, the Civil Rights movement revealed the lie at the center of US culture. The boom years of the 1950s had been largely reserved for white people, as Jim Crow reigned in the South and redlining kept many black families from owning homes in northern cities. The violence activists met—­ from both vigilante lynch mobs and official arms of the state—­radicalized many. For Amiri Baraka, one of two poets who appear in chapter 3, the assassination of Malcolm X underlined the fundamental injustice of US society. Civil Rights and antiwar protesters believed that “the old order was built for a fearful era of scarcity, not this era of full employment and abundance” (Perlstein 220). Very few incidents better capture this changing world view than the meeting that divided the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). On February 23, 1968, this progressive wing of the Democratic Party voted to endorse antiwar presidential candidate Eugene

16   introduction

McCarthy over the incumbent president Lyndon Johnson. Representatives for three national labor unions quit the caucus on the spot (230). Gus Tyler complained that the vote signified a wholesale revision of the Democratic Party’s founding principles: they were moving “away from economics . . . to morality and culture” (218). The division between these two wings of the party became apparent at two chaotic national conventions: the bloody 1968 Chicago meeting and then in 1972 in Miami, where the rules handed down by the party’s reform commission first took effect. Designed to return power to r­ ank-­and-­file party members, the reforms radically reconfigured delegate elections. When television cameras swung over the crowd at the DNC in 1972, it looked very different than it had four years prior. The students, women, and minorities who had been beaten by police outside the Congress Hotel four years before now stood on the floor of the convention. The delegation was 36 percent women, 14 percent African American, and 23 percent people under thirty, up from 14 percent, 5 percent, and 2 percent, respectively, in Chicago. Labor leaders, used to running the ­ FL-­CIO, “sneered,” show, were horrified. George Meany, president of the A “What kind of delegation is this?” (Cowie 105). Al Barkan promised that labor wouldn’t “let these ­Harvard-­Berkeley Camelots take over our party” (Perlstein 514).11 But while these activists believed that the “fearful era of scarcity” had ended, American foreign policy had in fact steered the nation back toward economic crisis. For years, the United States had prioritized winning the Cold War over economic policy, creating favorable trade deals to shore up the American bloc against the Soviet Union. In 1945, when this doctrine was established, “U.S. economic superiority was so vast that onesided trade policies did not matter” (Stein xi). By the late 1960s, however, foreign competition had mostly eroded American supremacy—­so much so that in 1971, the United States faced its first trade deficit since 1893. In 1970, “60 percent [of Americans] were either poor or hovering between poverty and the very modest level of the ­[government-­recommended] intermediate budget” (14). While the Vietnam war gave the country a push toward full employment, those figures “underestimated the extent of joblessness. . . . [I]n 1969, a year of high employment, 20 percent of workers were unemployed for some period of time” (15). The boom had ended, even if no one realized it yet.

introduction   17

Meanwhile, the United States’ incomplete anticolonial strategy started to come undone. As Panitch and Gindin write, Above all, while its imperial role was rationalized in terms of bringing freedom and good government, the US ended up supporting local dictators and landed bourgeoisies, thereby fossilizing social structures, blocking economic development, and creating the conditions for continued political instability and revolts. (41)

The US state supported decolonization insofar as it opened new markets that would export raw materials and import finished American commodities. If a newly freed state, however, wanted to use its ­hard-­fought ­self-­determination to expel foreign corporations or nationalize major economic sectors, the United States installed regimes friendlier to its interests. Beginning in the 1960s, Third World nations increasingly refused to abide by this framework. They explicitly rejected the ­so-­called Hull rule, which held that “no government is entitled to expropriate private property, for whatever purpose without provision for prompt, adequate, and effective payment” (116). In fact, in 1974, the United Nations passed the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, which directly contradicted the Hull rule, stating “that each state has the right to ‘nationalize, expropriate, or transfer ownership of foreign property under the domestic law of the nationalizing State’” (144). These nations’ desire to control their own raw materials and markets follows logically from the process of decolonization, yet it works against the economic interests that had been claiming to support the principles of liberal democracy. According to Arrighi’s model, these years represent the signal crisis of the American empire: the “turning point” in imperial rise and decline. Having exhausted profits in domestic production, the United States “begins to switch its capital in increasing quantities from trade and production to financial intermediation and speculation.” Such a turn “has always been the preamble to a deepening of the crisis and to the eventual supersession of the still dominant regime of accumulation by a new one” (220–21). And, indeed, the United States soon turned to finance to make up for the competitive squeeze its imperial strategy produced. Panitch and Gindin explain that Bill Casey, Nixon’s last treasury secretary, recognized that making up

18   introduction

the trade deficit would require a massive change in American foreign economic policy, likely to alienate our allies. So, in direct contrast to the State Department’s traditional position for so much of the twentieth century, Casey presciently argued that “trade need no longer be the only source of major gains in our balance of payments.” . . . [T]he US could instead make “securities an export.” (148)

To do so, the United States would have to make radical changes to domestic banking operations and the relationship between the state and finance. Jefferson Cowie usefully illustrates this difference by describing the government’s response to two major 1970s recessions. Following the New Deal model, the federal government responded to the 1974–75 recession by choosing to “increase spending to reduce unemployment and boost demand.” In contrast, in the recession that followed the 1979 Iranian revolution, they lifted “a host of controls and regulations and .  .  . [launched] tax cuts to spur investments” (233). The state’s role in the economy had to keep up with this new focus. As Panitch and Gindin explain, the United States began “walking the tightrope of allowing volatile financial markets to flourish while at the same time managing and containing the inevitable financial crises that volatile financial markets spawned” (182). Arrighi demonstrates how the signal crises of all four cycles of accumulation introduce a period “of renewed wealth and power,” as the turn to finance offers a new source of profit for the nation and its capitalists. But, it “has never been the expression of a lasting resolution of the underlying systemic crisis” (221). Instead, the contradictions that produced the signal crisis recur as the terminal crisis, which marks the passing of imperial power to a new center. And, indeed, the 1973 oil crisis that marked the beginning of the US’s signal crisis finds its twin in the 2008 mortgage crisis: the inevitable—­and as we all learned, entirely predictable—­culmination of the era of financialization and deregulation. These two crises provide the backdrop for chapter 3, which examines the use of history in two plays by Amiri Baraka and in M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 poem Zong! In Slave Ship (1967) and The Motion of History (1976), which bookend the signal crisis, Baraka uses experimental staging techniques to fold time in hopes of making sense of the long history of white supremacy in the United States. The lyric

introduction   19

techniques Baraka deploys in both productions present key moments in US history as interchangeable, so that the horrors of the Middle Passage are revealed to be identical to the horrors of the resistance to the Civil Rights movement, and the forces that brought down Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) are shown to be the same as those inciting poor whites to racist violence in the 1960s. M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008) uses lyric and epic tropes to create an even longer historical continuity, one that reaches beyond US shores and back to the Roman empire. Philip reverses the l­yric-­epic structure laid out by Quint, granting the lyric voice to a sailor who narrates—­and attempts to absolve himself of—­a massacre that left 130 enslaved Africans dead, while reserving epic tropes for the victims. Zong! not only highlights the continuity of imperial structures from the Roman era to the present but also reveals the limits of the lyric form. As Philip’s poem demonstrates, the suffering endured by New World Africans from the eighteenth to the ­twenty-­first centuries is the form of appearance of a legal and economic system foundational to European society, one that has made the lyric form complicit in its violence. The final chapter turns to three contemporary poets—­dg nanouk okpik, Douglas Kearney, and Cathy Park Hong—­who use lyric’s complicity to capture American imperial history in its entirety. All three experiment with the poetic speaker, expanding it so it can better represent colonialism’s impact on both individual subjectivities and historical development. The split speaker who narrates a ­post-­petroleum future in okpik’s Corpse Whale (2012) explodes the traditional singular, ­first-­person speaker in order to measure how American imperialism has violently in- and excluded indigenous people. In The Black Automaton (2012), Kearney uses innovative lyric techniques to explore how forces external and hostile to black life have constructed and constrained black identity. Finally, Hong deploys a ­first-­person plural speaker in the first sequence of Engine Empire (2012) to highlight the nation’s complicity in genocide and to define the real political position of the lyric I. These poets use the lyric form, in all its “wrack and wreckage,” to construct total histories of the American empire. In the conclusion, I turn to the work of Susan Howe to offer an interpretative method that can reveal this total history. Howe’s integration of chance into her historical poems initially appears as a resistance to interpretation,

20   introduction

but her use of history and her handling of the tensions between form and content, between lyric and narrative, and between past and present articulate a structural account of aesthetics and politics that fully registers the tensions that created our contemporary crisis and model a temporality that can lead us out. The appearance of history in Poems of the American Empire gives us a new viewpoint on American global power. Howe’s poetic project underlines the stakes of this book as a whole: to read poetry is to see the structure of capitalist imperialism laid bare.

1

We Are All Pound Now the cantos and the shape of the economy

In Ezra Pound’s 1944 pamphlet “An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States,” he explains that he did not set out to write “an economic history of the U.S. or any other country.” Instead, he intended “to write an epic poem which begins ‘In the Dark Forest[,]’ crosses the Purgatory of human error, and ends in the light, and ‘fra i maestri di color che sanno.’” For this reason, he explains, he has “had to understand the NATURE of error” (Selected Prose 167).1 The phrasing implies that Pound is less interested in individual errors than in what constitutes an error—­that is, he wants to uncover the general structure of error, not catalog its specific articulations. And, indeed, “Economic Nature” identifies just one mistake, namely the US government’s adoption of a ­metallic-­backed currency instead of the fiat money commonly used by the colonies in the p ­ re-­Revolutionary period. This essay appeared on the heels of the Chinese and Adams cantos (Cantos 52–71, 1940), a section of the Cantos that deals extensively, if not exclusively, with economic history (of the United States as well as China and Italy). This pamphlet might therefore appear as a justification for the long digressions on banking and monetary theory at the center of the Cantos, explaining that they are designed to illustrate “the NATURE of error.” While this description does apply to Cantos 1–41, which use primary historical documents to examine repeated historical problems, it cannot account for the post-1937 cantos, where the problem of money completely overtakes the poem. Of course, Pound’s obsession with money is not unique in American discourse. The dominant economic question of the late nineteenth cen-

22   chapter one

tury was the problem of the gold standard, the consequences of free silver, and the potential of fiat money.2 There is little doubt that Pound, as a young man, was exposed to these debates. Hugh Kenner argues that Homer Pound’s work at the Philadelphia mint was foundational to young Ezra’s thinking about money: “as a small boy [he] watched his father . . . assaying gold with an incredibly delicate balance. . . . Gold was romance, was beauty: beauty to adorn Aphrodite, its meaning corrupted by a tangle of fiscal ideas” (Pound Era 412–13).3 As Pound grew up, money stayed at the center of economic debates. The interwar economic crisis motivated a number of new monetary theories, including C. H. Douglas’s social credit and Silvio Gessel’s stamp scrip, both of which Pound supported.4 So, while it’s not at all surprising that Pound was interested in money, what is surprising—­ and what this chapter aims to show—­is that his attention to money has the same basic structure as contemporary economic theory. The Cantos is not, as Pound intended, a history of human error; instead, it is the prehistory of the present. The chapter at hand cannot hope to encompass the Cantos as a whole. When any critic takes on this work, she not only must face the sheer size of it ­(seven-­hundred seventy pages, without any of the critical apparatus necessary to track down references, quotations, and translations) but must also account for the fact that it was composed over a ­forty-­year period, during which Pound’s ideas and life changed radically.5 When the ­“Ur-­Cantos” were published in Poetry in the summer of 1917, Pound still lived in London, reeling from the immense personal loss he suffered as a result of World War I. By the time Thrones (the last completed installment of the Cantos) came out in 1959, the poet had left England for Italy, where he joined the fascist party and publicly supported Mussolini (and condemned Franklin Roosevelt) on Italian radio. After being incarcerated in a Pisan concentration camp on treason charges, he was committed to St. Elizabeth’s hospital with a schizophrenia diagnosis—­a diagnosis, it is worth noting, that many critics believe was manufactured to help the poet avoid the death penalty—­and was finally released, returning to Italy to live out the last fourteen years of his life.6 Simply recounting the historical events Pound lived through—­let alone those he attempted to influence—­is lengthy work, which has, fortunately, been almost completed. I limit my discussion to the pre–Pisan Cantos because I believe that is where we can most clearly

we are all pound now   23

see how the Cantos devolves from “an epic . . . poem including history” to a monetarist screed (Prose 86).7 The first forty Cantos rely on a combination of lyric (in the guise of the luminous detail) and epic (in the guise of archival documents) that gave Pound a structure that could, indeed, include quite a bit of history as well as retain decisive differences between cultures. Until the Fifth Decad of Cantos, Pound used this form to identify repeated concepts that take on different valences depending not only on the historical moment in which they occur but also on the historic actors who undertake them. The poem juxtaposed works of art, ideas, and events that seemed to him synonymous, producing a historical record built around slant rhymes. In the Fifth Decad, however, his focus shifted, and Pound began finding these rhymes on the level of content: Mussolini’s agricultural policies suddenly look exactly like a program in t­ enth-­century China; Chinese emperor Kien Long takes the same approach to monetary policy as John Adams; Adams’s fight to secure fishing rights for the young United States is explained with the Chinese character chung. The material presented in the first installments of the Cantos attends to formal similarities across history; when we arrive at the Chinese and Adams cantos, however, Pound focuses on ideas that seem to repeat, verbatim, across time. This shift from form to content requires that the poet radically revise his theory of history: he begins to sever the luminous details from their historical contexts, presenting them instead as transhistorical ideas that appear unchanged at different moments. By the end of World War II, the poem that could once claim to include history includes only money. In the language of economics, we’d call Pound’s shift from the form of these rhymes to their content a transition from a structural critique to a technocratic one. As such, it mirrors one narrative of t­wentieth-­century economic thought, in which mainstream economics left behind Keynes’s structural interventions for neoliberal tinkering with tax rates and the money supply. As I will argue, this shift—­for both Pound and economics—­ is accompanied by, indeed entailed by, the disappearance of history. As we shall see, in Canto 48, Pound explicitly replaces his initial account of history as moving and dialectical with a cyclical understanding of the past. This turn to cyclical historiography renders the Chinese and Adams cantos ahistorical, which constrains the way Pound can think about the economy. Likewise, the neoliberal theories that emerged to replace fascist state eco-

24   chapter one

nomics (of which Pound’s theories are an example) also depend on this absence of the historical. Today, we see the persistence of Pound’s thought in the worrying rise of ­far-­right, xenophobic rhetoric closely linked to promises of economic revival, but I argue that the disappearance of history in economic thought also founds the most accepted contemporary economics.

All the Savants and Artists In his seminal The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner describes the shock modern artists felt at Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of the very walls of Troy. Suddenly, the Homeric epics transformed from poems to history. “[M]en had held in their hands the actual objects Homer’s sounding words name”: “reality retrieved from amid a din of words” (29, 43). As Kenner describes, Pound was enchanted with another trove of o ­ nce-­lost objects, a mass of papyrus fragments found in Egypt; “[t]here was virtue in scraps, mysterium in fragments, magical power in the tatter of a poem, sacred words biting on congruent actualities of sight and feeling and breath” (51). These twin discoveries—­the revelation of history within the epic form and “the tatter” of poetry—­fundamentally shaped the Cantos. We can, without losing too much nuance, map them onto the generic distinction between the lyric and the epic, a connection that Pound at least implicitly made. For Pound, the fragment became the luminous detail, a central element in the Cantos. In “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” (1911–1912), Pound explains that luminous details are “certain facts or points, . . . which governed knowledge as the switchboard [governed] the electric circuit” (Selected Prose 24). By examining just one luminous detail, observers can understand an era’s spirit. Pound uses an observation from Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt as an example of this kind of historical material: when in Burckhardt we come upon a passage: “In this year the Venetians refused to make war upon the Milanese because they held that any war between buyer and seller must prove profitable to neither,” we come upon a portent, the old order changes, one conception of war and of the State begins to decline. The Middle Ages imperceptibly give ground to the Renaissance. (Selected Prose 22)

we are all pound now   25

Burckhardt recognizes that Venetian pacifism condenses the shift from a politics of war to a politics of commerce, which perfectly captures a larger historical change from the medieval period to the Renaissance. The luminous detail—­an object that captures the world from which it emerged even after that world has disappeared—­largely matches my definition of lyric as narrative’s dialectical partner. More to the point, however, it corresponds to Pound’s ideas about what poetry does. In “A Few Don’ts” (1913), a belated manifesto for the Imagist movement, he defines the image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Literary Essays 4). Even readers largely unfamiliar with Pound will likely have encountered his famous “In a Station of the Metro,” which demonstrates how this poetic image works: “The apparition of these faces in the ­ audier-­Brzeska crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough” (Selected Poems 35). In G (1974), Pound describes the genesis of this famous couplet. While riding the metro in Paris, he saw “suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman.” He “could not find any words that seemed to [him] . . . worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion” (86–87). Over a year, he composed and cut a ­thirty-­line poem, until finally he came up with the two lines, which he wrote are “trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective” (89). Though relating to feeling rather than history, the goal is to find the language that can capture a transformation as it is taking place, just as Burckhardt’s example of Venetian pacifism condenses the transition from medieval to Renaissance Europe. Both encode a key moment, waiting for the right reader to uncover its meaning. Pound built his study of poetry on these foundations, naming it the ideogrammatic method. On the first page of 1934’s ABC of Reading, Pound describes this as “[t]he proper METHOD for studying poetry,” arguing that we should examine poetry using “the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful fi ­ rst-­hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one ‘slide’ or specimen with another” (17). Pound credits this methodology to Ernest Fenollosa’s philological interpretation of the Chinese language, which the latter called “the method of poetry” in his manuscripts (20). Pound contrasts Chinese and European modes of thought,

26   chapter one

arguing that European thought moves toward abstraction, while Chinese thought remains rooted in particular examples. As he explains, “if you ask [a European] what red is, he says it is a ‘colour.’ If you ask him what a colour is, he tells you it is a vibration or a refraction of light, or a division of the spectrum.” ­Follow-­up questions yield more and more abstract answers—­a vibration “is a mode of energy”—“until you arrive at a modality of being, or ­non-­being, or at any rate you get in beyond your depth” (19). In contrast, the Chinese written language uses specific examples to illustrate a complex thought: Chinese ideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound, or to be a written sign recalling a sound, but it is still the picture of a thing; of a thing in a given position or relation, or of a combination of things. It means the thing or the action or situation, or quality germane to the several things that it pictures. (21)

So, when you ask a Chinese person to define “red,” she will present you with an ideogram that combines the symbols for rose, cherry, iron rust, flamingo (22). The color red unites these four objects: specific instances of a general principle. This preference for the particular over the general—­or, more specifically, a particular that captures the general—­appears throughout Pound’s writing. In “The Teacher’s Mission” (1934), he writes, “Any teacher of biology would tell you that knowledge can NOT be transmitted by general statement without knowledge of particulars,” an idea carried forward in “Gold and Work,” the economic pamphlet he published in Italian in 1944 (Literary Essays 60). That essay begins with the author’s trip to Utopia, where “thought hinges on the definitions of words” (Selected Prose 336). In order to teach small children to observe particulars they practise a kind of game, in which a number of small objects, e.g., three grains of barley, a small coin, a blue button, a coffee bean, or, say, one grain of barley, three different kinds of buttons, etc., are concealed in the hand. The hand is opened for an instant, then quickly closed again, and the child is asked to say what it has seen. For older children the game is gradually made more elaborate, until finally they all know how their hats and shoes are made. I was also informed that by learning how to define words these people have succeeded in defining their economic terms, with the result that various iniquities of the stock mar-

we are all pound now   27

ket and financial world have entirely disappeared from their country, for no one allows himself to be fooled any longer. (Selected Prose 336)

Setting aside the leap from recognizing particulars to knowing “how their hats and shoes are made”—let alone how this produces clarity of thought regarding the financial sector—­this essay nevertheless documents Pound’s investment in the principle of linguistic precision.8 Of course, the Cantos does not consist entirely of images or ideograms, though the latter appear with more and more frequency beginning in the 1940s. We can certainly pull out a number of luminous details around which the long poem revolves—­the Tempio Malatestiano, which presents the relationship between the artist and the state in quattrocento Italy in condensed form; the Monte dei Paschi, which demonstrates how governments should control banks; the tenth-century “grain dividend” introduced in China, which proves Benito Mussolini’s fitness as a leader—­but they make up only a small part of the actual text. Most of the Cantos consists of something else entirely: archival evidence, often directly imported from primary sources. For Pound, these documents turn his lyric expression into epic: we can take his definition that “an epic is a poem including history” quite literally (Literary Essays 86). Following the revelation that Homer was as much historian as he was poet, Pound inserted history, via these primary historical documents, directly into the structure of his poem. The tension between these epic elements and the poem’s more lyrical images—­whether they be true luminous details like the Tempio or simply lyric digressions, like Cantos 16 and 36 or the opening of the Pisan cantos—­constitute the ideogrammatic method in action. Canto 5 begins with a cryptic summation of this structure: “Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus” (Cantos 17). Few readers would object to Pound’s description of the Cantos as a “great bulk”—by page seventeen, we’ve already encountered ancient Greece (via Andreas Divus’s s­ixteenth-­century Latin translation of the Odyssey), ­thirteenth-­century Italy and its troubadours (via the ­nineteenth-­century poet Robert Browning), Ovid’s ­first-­century Rome, and the poet’s own ­twentieth-­century Venice. Pound unites these expansive cultural allusions by presenting them as one might see entries in a thesaurus: they bear similar, albeit slightly different, meanings. The body of the canto then draws out these rhyming ideas. For example, he

28   chapter one

juxtaposes “Iamblichus’ light” with the image of souls ascending to heaven from Dante’s Paradiso, linking the ­fourth-­century Syrian Neoplatonist to the medieval Italian Catholic. Next, he connects three ancient lyric poets—­ Catullus, Sextus Propertius, and Sappho—­by combining their epithalamiums. The rest of the poem is devoted to bringing out rhymes between the Trojan mythos, the troubadour tradition, and s­ ixteenth-­century Florentine politics. Using the vidas of Gaubertz de Poicebot and Peire de Maensac, Pound connects Provençal poetry to the Iliad and Odyssey by highlighting themes of infidelity: Poicebot’s wife is seduced by another man, and Peire de Maensac steals Bernart de Tierci’s wife. Pound summarizes these stories: “Troy in Auvergnat.” He pushes this link further when he describes the death of Giovanni Borgia. Writing “John Borgia is bathed at last,” Pound creates a parallel between Borgia’s murder and Agamemnon’s death (18). While very few readers will draw out these connections on their own, the canto nevertheless suggests the repetition of certain patterns in history, which the specific details bring out in relief. Canto 5 offers this structure in abbreviated form, but Pound demonstrates its full possibilities in the Malatesta cantos, which are primarily concerned with the Malatesta family’s importance within the cultural tradition of the Italian quattrocento.9 The first readers of the Cantos would have known Sigismondo Malatesta for remodeling the church of San Francesco in Rimini, or, as it was more popularly known, the Tempio Malatestiano. The story of the Tempio, as told in late nineteenth- and early ­twentieth-­century guidebooks, held that Sigismondo dedicated it to his second wife, Isotta degli Atti, in defiance of and as an insult to his most formidable enemy: the Catholic Church. As such, it had become a monument to romance and the power of the individual against large bureaucracies.10 Pound does not comment on the controversy over the church. Instead, he uses Sigismondo’s Tempio and love for Isotta to connect the Malatestas to the troubadour tradition. For example, he includes in Canto 8 what he thought was a poem Sigismondo composed to honor Isotta: Ye spirits who of olde were in this land Each under Love, and shaken Go with your lutes, awaken The summer within her mind

we are all pound now   29 Who hath not Helen for peer Yseut nor Batsabe. (30)

It turns out this was written by Valturi, Sigismondo’s court poet (Rainey 185). Pound would not have had access to this information when he was writing, but it doesn’t really matter whether or not Sigismondo wrote it. What matters to Pound is that he is able to link the poem (and, by either direct or indirect association, Sigismondo) to the Provençal tradition.11 Such a connection justifies Pound’s interest in the Malatesta family, as this passage, which offers their history in radically condensed form, attests: And Poictiers, you know, Guillaume Poictiers had brought the song up out of Spain With the singers and viels. But here they wanted a setting, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And Mastin had come to Verucchio and the sword, Paolo il Bello’s, caught in the arras And, in Este’s house, Parisina Paid For this tribe paid always, and the house Called also Atreides’ . . . (32)

This section alludes to two centuries’ worth of Malatesta family history and almost three thousand years’ worth of literary history. “Mastin” refers to the Old Mastiff, the first of the Malatestas to rule Rimini. He provides the “setting” for Poictiers, another Provençal poet, to bring “the song up out of Spain.” Pound includes two other connections to the Western literary cannon: Paolo il Bello—­Sigismondo’s cousin, who appears in Canto 5 of Dante’s Inferno—­and Parisina—­another cousin and the main figure in a Byron poem. The whole house is “called also Atreides,” linking the Malatestas to Greek tragedy by way of Menelaus and Agamemnon. The Malatesta cantos therefore follow Canto 5’s pattern, drawing out rhyming ideas from the early Italian Renaissance, the Homeric tradition, and later English poetry. Within the context of the Cantos as a whole, however, these four poems also show how Pound will marshal the ideogrammatic method to make more political arguments.

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As many critics have noted, the Malatesta cantos begin with a contract: a letter from Sigismondo to “Giohanni of the Medici,” requesting a “Maestro di pentore.” What is notable about the offer is that the section of the Tempio that Sigismondo wants painted is not yet complete: “As the mortar is not yet dry / . . . it wd. be merely work chucked away” (28). So, he writes, But I want it to be quite clear, that until the chapels are ready I will arrange for him to paint something else So that both he and I shall Get as much enjoyment as possible from it. (29)

Despite the fact that the painter cannot work on what Sigismondo has hired him to paint, he should still come and “paint something else” that will give both the painter and Sigismondo “enjoyment.” This fair treatment of artists moves Pound to mention other leaders who had a similar respect for art. In Canto 13, Pound quotes Confucius: “When the prince has gathered about him / “All the savants and artists, his riches will be fully employed” (59); and, when Thomas Jefferson first appears, it is in the form of a letter requesting a “gardener / Who can play the french horn” because the “bounds of American fortune / Will not admit the indulgence of a domestic band . . .” (97).12 Here, the repeat in history appears as the economic position of artists, a structural aspect of the economy that is articulated differently in different places at different times. Sigismondo’s job offer, Confucius’s sage advice, and Jefferson’s respect for the puritanical customs of the United States all serve as luminous details that condense not only the artist’s position in society but also the broader economic structure: American propriety demands a multitasking musician, China’s imperial court system prospers under a wise leader, and artists in the quattrocentro had to find generous and enlightened patrons like Malatesta to support them.13 This sequence demonstrates how the combination of the repeat in history and the luminous detail can still account for change. By presenting three distinct eras in such close proximity, Pound underlines a repeated idea while preserving different responses to it over time. Although the problem is repeated, the solution varies. The capaciousness of the luminous detail–primary source relationship carries over into Pound’s political and economic writings. In Jefferson and/ or Mussolini (1935), Pound cites Mussolini’s 1934 speech in Milan to prove

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that the Italian leader is fulfilling the legacy of Thomas Jefferson. In the speech, Mussolini explains that the worldwide depression that began in 1929 marked “[n]ot only the ruins of a few or many individuals, but the end of a period of contemporary history, the end of a system which can be called the one of l­ iberal-­capitalist economy” (208). As a result, it represents “a transition from one historic phase to another. The economy, which concerned itself only with private gain, is being replaced by an economy which has as its principal object the safeguard of the interests of collectivity.” Mussolini lays out two possible responses to this crisis: central planning or the corporative system; and this is the solution of ­self-­discipline in production left to the producers. When I say producers I do not mean only the industrialists and the employers; I mean the workers too. Fascism proclaims the profound hierarchial equality of all individuals in labor and in concept of the Nation.14 (208)

It may seem surprising that Pound recognizes Thomas Jefferson in this speech. On the one hand, the emphasis on workers aligns with Jefferson’s dreams of a country of s­ elf-­sufficient farmers. On the other, if we had to pick an early American statesman who most believed in a kind of corporate organization, we would be more likely to look to the federalist Alexander Hamilton than the pastoral Jefferson. But Pound insists “[t]he heritage of Jefferson, Quincy Adams, old John Adams, Jackson, Van Buren is HERE, NOW in the Italian peninsula at the beginning of the fascist second decennio, not in Massachusetts or Delaware” because “the types of mind fitted to deal with either [the United States circa 1780 and Italy circa 1930] . . . are types which may have a very deep kinship which you may perceive if you can but sort out the likenesses underlying” (Jefferson 12, 75). It should come as no surprise that Pound thinks he has worked out these similarities. He enumerates them: agriculture, sense of the “root and the branch,” ready to scrap the lesser thing for the thing of major importance, indifference to mechanism as weighed against the main purpose, fitting of the means to that purpose without regard to abstract ideas, even if the idea was proclaimed the week before last. (64)

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We needn’t dig into any of these in detail nor catch ourselves up in the desire to either validate or disprove Pound’s theories about either man. For our purposes, the list describes beliefs that Jefferson and Mussolini share but articulate differently, as appropriate to each man’s time and locale. An underlying continuity connects them; Pound names it the “will toward order,” which he claims comes down from Confucius (99). Indeed, Pound insists on maintaining the differences between Jefferson and Mussolini: “if Mussolini had tried to fool himself into finding or into trying to find the identical solution for Italy 1922–1932 that Jefferson found for America 1776–1826, there would have been no fascist decennio” (11). Putting his arguments in the context of contemporary political developments, he points out that what works in one nation will not necessarily work in any other: “There will be no clear thinking until you understand that Italy is NOT Russia. Racially, geographically and with all the implications of both words Italy is not Russia, nor is America Italy, nor is Russia America, etc., and I do not ‘advocate’ America’s trying to be either Russia or Italy, und so weiter” (40).15 Pound puts this last point forcefully: Do the driving ideas of Jefferson, Quincy Adams, Van Buren, or whoever else there is in the creditable pages of our history, FUNCTION actually in the America of this decade to the extent that they function in Italy under the DUCE? The writer’s opinion is that they DON’T, and that nothing but vigorous realignment will make them, and that if, or when, they are made so to function, Mussolini will have acted as stimulus, will have entered into American history, as Lenin has entered into world history. That don’t, or don’t necessarily, mean an importation of the details of mechanisms and forms more adapted to Italy or to Russia than to the desert of Arizona or to the temperament of farms back of Baaaston. But it does definitely mean an orientation of will. (104–5)

Thus, while Mussolini has carried forward these ideas, he has carried them forward for Italy—­and all the difference that entails—­not for the United States. Even in Pound’s explicitly economic writings from this period, we find an insistence on preserving historical difference. The overall argument of ABC of Economics is that governments should intervene in the economy to ensure that all citizens have enough money to eat and clothe themselves.

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He writes that “the only economic problem needing emergency solution in our time is the problem of distribution. There are enough goods, there is superabundant capacity to produce goods in superabundance. Why should anyone starve?” (Selected Prose 234). This question leads him to his first lengthy analysis of money, which begins by defining precisely what money is and closes by proposing some solutions, including a major reduction in work hours, price controls, and the national dividend.16 In considering the true nature of money, he reminds his readers, There have been s­o-­called [economic] systems based .  .  . on nothing more than a temporary accident; as say the chance swapping of glass beads to the heathen, or the monopoly of a trade route, or the willingness of Indians to swap forty square miles of land for a rifle.17 Some of these systems have lasted for at least three hundred years. Nile tolls are at the beginning of history. Kublai understood paper currency. The Mantuans in the quatrocento [sic] considered a cloth pool on the lines of the Hoover government’s buying of wheat. There is probably no inventable scheme or measure that can’t be upholstered with historic background. (Selected Prose 248–49)

While we can find historic precedence for any contemporary economic scheme, that idea’s appearance in Egypt, Asia, or Italy does not guarantee its appropriateness for the present day. For example, when calling for a shorter working week, Pound cites Jefferson while claiming that “a man with a lot of spare time can get a great deal more out of life with a very little money, than an overworked man with a great deal. . . . Leisure is not gained by simply being out of work. Leisure is spare time free from anxiety.” But he nevertheless cautions readers, “You can throw in Confucius and Van Buren, but you must distinguish between 1820 and 1930, you must bring your Jefferson up to date” (243). More interestingly, Pound makes it clear that, at least at this moment, he believes that economics and politics are fundamentally separate realms: [T]he [political] problem of our time is to find the border between public and private affairs. In economics: to find a means whereby the ­common-­carrier [money] may be in such way kept in circulation that the individual’s demand, or at any rate

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his necessary requirement, shall not exceed the amount of ­common-­carrier in his pocket.18 (240)

Economics occupies a much narrower field than politics. As Pound explains, “ECONOMICS is concerned with determining WHAT financial measures, what methods or regulations of trade, etc., must be taken, or can most advantageously be taken,” but “[a]ll questions of how measures can be taken, how enforced, are questions of politics” (246). Pound’s interest in artists’ employment is also a question of distribution, and, in ABC of Economics, he suggests structural solutions like price and wage controls. However, as he digs deeper into these economic questions, Pound’s desire for precision comes into play. He becomes obsessed with defining money, often ignoring the mechanisms that distribute it. This commitment to the “right definition” fundamentally shifts Pound’s focus; he begins to prioritize the decisions about “WHAT financial measures” over the questions about “how measures can be taken.” This moves his economic theories away from structural problems to technocratic questions: that is, he begins to see the economy as an otherwise sound machine with one broken cog. This differs from structural change because it assumes that the economy would run smoothly were it not for this one failed element. This technocratic turn not only begins to dominate Pound’s prose work in the 1930s, but it also fundamentally alters the Cantos.

Nineteen Years on This Case We might consider The Fifth Decad of Cantos (1937) a transition point in the pre–World War II Cantos. On the level of form, it previews the documentary method that Pound will use to compose the Chinese and Adams cantos. While A Draft of XXX Cantos alternated between sections created out of primary historical documents (like the Malatesta cantos) and Pound’s original writing, the first dozen pages of The Fifth Decad consist almost entirely of reprints of the documents Pound consulted while writing these poems. These opening pages show that, for the most part, the style of the Malatesta cantos has taken over—­a transition that will be complete by 1940. On the level of content, The Fifth Decad presents Pound’s arguments against usury, which he blames not only for the wholesale slaughter of World War I but

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also for the economic crisis that wracked the globe between 1929 and the end of the World War II.19 In Canto 46, he laments, “. . . nineteen / Years on this case, CRIME / Ov two CENturies, 5 millions bein’ killed off / to 1919” and, later, FIVE million youths without jobs FOUR million adult illiterates 15 million ‘vocational misfits’, that is with small chance for jobs NINE million persons annual, injured in preventable industrial accidents One hundred thousand violent crimes. (231, 235)

The poems that constitute this installment will argue his case against banks, which he makes by highlighting a “damn good bank,” the Monte dei Paschi (209). His use of the Sienese institution shows how his understanding of the luminous detail has changed. Originally, the luminous details were used to present and preserve historical difference: while the way Sigismondo Malatesta treated the artists in his employ was admirable, it was only appropriate in the patronage system of the quattrocento. For that reason, Pound included references to other leaders who developed culturally appropriate relationships with artists. In contrast, Pound uses the Monte dei Paschi to derive a set of transhistorical rules about the proper relationship between a bank, the government, and the people. Thus, we should take Pound literally when he calls it “a species of bank,” indicating that he sees it as representative of a type (209). This phrasing denotes a new level of generality in the poem: the Monte appears as a luminous detail, but it also establishes a general model—­one that repeats across history—­against which Pound will judge other banks. We can discern three criteria for “damn good” banks in The Fifth Decad and in the economic writings from this period. First, they must have a proper foundation. In “Banks,” Pound explains, Cosimo, first duke of Tuscany . . . guaranteed the capital of the Monte, taking as security the one living property of Siena, and a certain amount of somewhat unhandy collateral. That is to say, Siena had grazing lands down toward Grosseto, and the grazing rights worth 10,000 ducats a year. On the basis of taking it for his main security, Cosimo underwrote a capital of 200,000 ducats, to pay 5 per cent to

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the shareholders, and to be lent at 5½ per cent. . . . That was in the first years of the seventeenth century, and that bank is open today. . . .20 And the lesson is the very basis of solid banking. The CREDIT rests in ultimate on the ABUNDANCE OF NATURE, on the growing grass that can nourish the living sheep.21 (Selected Prose 270)

This focus on the “natural” foundation of profit has old roots. The reason the Catholic Church banned usury was because it represented “unnatural” reproduction: making money from money, rather than from labor. This is why frauds and usurers appear in the same circle of hell as homosexuals in Dante’s Inferno: both homosexuality and finance represented reproduction that went against God’s law. Throughout the Cantos, Pound makes the same argument. The word “usurer” appears for the first time in Canto 12, when Jim X tells the story of the “honest sailor” to “[d]irectors, dealers through holding companies, / Deacons in churches, owning slum properties, / Alias usurers in excelsis” (55). The tale follows a sailor who is hospitalized because of his drinking. The doctors, hoping to scare him into sobriety, present the sailor with a son and tell him he gave birth to the child. Overcome by his new responsibilities, the sailor reforms his ways: And when he was well enough signed on with another ship And saved up his pay money, and kept on savin’ his pay money, And bought a share in the ship And finally had half shares, Then a ship and in time a whole line of steamers (56)

On his deathbed, the sailor apologizes to his son for not waiting to die until the boy was more prepared to take over the family business. When his son comforts him—“But, father,”—the father interrupts: “ ‘You called me father, and I ain’t. / . . . / I am not your fader but your moder,’ quod he, / ‘Your fader was a rich merchant in Stambouli’ ” (56–57). The point of the story comes with the punch line. Just as the sailor cannot possibly be his son’s mother, the company he built grew from an unproductive relationship. The sailor makes money by reproducing more of the same: a share

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in a ship turns into h ­ alf-­shares before transforming into a whole line of steamers. Rather than creating wealth through the abundance of nature or labor, the sailor has used money to create more money. Pound continues this theme by highlighting illegitimate births in The Fifth Decad. First, he cites Pietro de Medici’s bastard children, made legitimate through a financial trick (220). Then he includes a letter to Queen Victoria regarding the “pedigree of yr cairn puppy,” which turns out (scandalously) to have papers on only one side (241). Most important, however, are these lines, attributed to the architect of the Bank of England: “Said Paterson: / Hath benefit of interest on all / the moneys which it, the bank, creates out of nothing” (233).22 Another important distinction between the “damn good bank” and what Pound would come to call the “hell banks” is their purpose. The Paschi lent money not on a desire to make profit but to improve Siena. In Canto 42, Pound underlines the fact that lending decisions would be based on utility: . . . the Magistrate give his chief care that the specie be lent to whomso can best use it USE IT (id est, piú utilmente) (209–10)

Pound repeats “use it” three times, even providing it in the original Italian in case anyone disputes his translation. Further, the Monte would distribute its profit “every five years . . . / . . . to workers . . . holding in / reserve a prudent proportion as against unforeseen losses” (210). He includes archival records from the late seventeenth century that further show that the Paschi was a “damn good bank”: 1679 for two years no one gaoled for debts under 14 lire, those in for 30 or under cd. be released on order of the Buonuomini who shd/fix terms for arbitration Monte to lend 4736 scudi to the Tolomei foundation, and to take no interest on this sum spent for the college (221)

Toward the end of the sequence, he highlights Pietro Leopoldo’s accomplishments: he “wished state debt brought to an end” and “ended the gaol-

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ings for debt” (227).23 In contrast, the Bank of England was created simply to provide its shareholders profit. Pound includes another quotation that will appear throughout his writing from this period: ­ emi-­private inducement S Said Mr RothSchild, hell knows which ­Roth-­schild 1861, ’64 or there sometime, “Very few people “will understand this. Those who do will be occupied “getting profits. The general public will probably not “see it’s against their interest.” (233)

Thus, the only people who will understand that the bank works against the public good will be those smart enough to make money off the scam. The focus on Duke Leopold points to a major development in Pound’s thinking in this period. In ABC of Reading, written just four years before The Fifth Decad, he noted an overlap between politics and economics but maintained a strict distinction between the two realms. He closes Canto 44, however, with this line, “The foundation, Siena, has been to keep bridle on usury,” indicating that the nation’s relationship to the economy—­or, more specifically, to banking—­now founds the state. In Pound’s thinking at this time, the state exists only to mediate the relationship between the citizens and their financial institutions. Indeed, throughout these poems, he praises those leaders who opposed usury and condemns those who did not. He reminds readers that early American leaders rejected bank credit (“Mr. Jefferson met it: / No man hath natural right to exercise profession / of lender, save him who hath it lend. / . . . VanBuren [sic] met it” [234]) and criticizes the house of Medici for falling into its trap (“debt when the Medici took the throne was 5 million / and when they left was fourteen / and its interest ate up all the best income” [246]). This denotes a significant change in Pound’s thinking. We saw already that he is obsessed with precision: he not only uses it to judge other artists but insists on microscopically analyzing economic disorder to understand its root cause. But these careful demarcations begin to blur in the late 1930s. Pound argued in ABC of Economics that sound economic policy is but one aspect of politics; but, in “What Is Money For?” (1939), he argues that sound economic policy authorizes the very existence of the state:

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STATE AUTHORITY behind the printed note is the best means of establishing a JUST and HONEST currency. The Chinese grasped that over 1,000 years ago, as we can see from the Tang STATE (not Bank) NOTE. (Selected Prose 292)

This sequence shows that Pound’s theory of history and his understanding of state authority have changed radically. In ABC of Economics, he warned readers that “[t]here is probably no inventable scheme or measure that can’t be upholstered with historic background” (73); but in “What Is Money For?” he performs the same trick: combing the historical records for monetary systems that he believes should be imported into the present day.24 For example, in “A Visiting Card,” he radically condenses the Chinese and European history: From the day when the T’ang Emperors began to issue their state notes, . . . the use of gold in the manufacture of money was no longer necessary and became a matter of ignorance or a means of usury. These notes kept their original form from the year 656 down to 841–7, and the inscription is substantially the same as that . . . on an Italian ­ten-­lire note. (Selected Prose 316)

Further, Pound now believes that sound monetary policy is the basis for government. In contrast to the claim that government power can establish and maintain a stable monetary system, he writes that “SOVEREIGNTYinheres in the right to ISSUE money (tickets) and to determine the value thereof” (292). Under this definition, any group that issues money would be considered a sovereign, whether it be a government (“The U.S. Government has the right to say ‘a dollar is one w ­ heat-­bushel thick, it is one ­serge-­foot long, it is ten gallons of petrol wide’ ” [293]), a bank (“which it creates . . . out of nothing” [338]), or even corporations: No one, perhaps, has ever built a larger tract of railway, with nothing but his own credit and 5,000 dollars cash, than that laid down by my grandfather. The credit came from the lumbermen (and in face of the opposition of the big U.S. and foreign steel monopolists) by printing with his brother the paper money of the Union Lumbering Co. of Chippewa Falls, bearing the promise to “pay the bearer on demand. . . .” (325)

This shift is more significant than a revised understanding of the relationship between economics and politics. Rather, it demonstrates that econom-

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ics has taken a dominant position in Pound’s thinking, erasing the careful demarcations that Pound not only established but insisted on in his pre1937 writing. The great irony of this transition is that it turns Pound’s condemnation of usury back on the poet himself. In the famous Usura canto (45), Pound lists usury’s deleterious effects on art (“no picture is made to endure nor to live with / but it is made to sell and sell quickly” [229]) and life (“Usura slayeth the child in the womb / It stayeth the young man’s courting / It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth / between the young bride and her bridegroom / CONTRA NATURAM” [230]). At its center, however, sits a line that we could apply as easily to The Fifth Decad of Cantos: “with usura is no clear demarcation” (229). As economics takes center stage in Pound’s poetry and prose, he no longer distinguishes between the realms of art, politics, and economics: everything becomes an expression of economic order or disorder. Perhaps Pound means this ironically; perhaps he recognizes the blurring of lines, the failure of careful demarcation that these ten poems and myriad essays on economics represent. Perhaps he designed The Fifth Decad to index the spread of usury: it now muddies even Pound’s water, after nineteen years on the case. This is a sympathetic reading and one we might be willing to extend were it not for the cantos that followed.

Good Sovereign by Distribution By the late 1930s, Pound’s historical method had changed so significantly that he felt it necessary to begin the long poem again. Canto 1 opened with Pound’s translation of Divus’s Odyssey, picking up in media res, as one of the crew members narrates the journey to Hades. In Canto 47, Pound returns to an earlier moment in the story, when Circe tells Odysseus “to see Tiresias / Eyeless that was, a shade, that is in hell” (236). The description of the journey fades into images of “small lamps drift[ing] in the bay,” soon interrupted by calls for “Tamuz” and “Kai MOIRAI’ ADONIN.” Tamuz and Adonis have similar stories in Sumerian and Greek mythology: their yearly deaths and descents into hell mark the changing seasons. At first glance, we might add Tamuz and Adonis to the list of figures in the Cantos—­ Odysseus, yes, but also Dante and Pound—­who travel to the underworld. But these two new figures have radically different relationships with Hades.

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For Odysseus, Dante, and Pound, hell is an episode in a larger narrative; their experiences there prepare them for the next stage in a more or less linear plot. But Tamuz and Adonis descend to the underworld annually, leaving earth at the end of each summer and returning at the launch of each spring. This cyclical temporality belongs not to narrative—­nor properly to lyric as it is now understood—­but, as we saw in the introduction, to georgic. Pound underlines this shift by including lines from Hesiod’s georgic Works and Days on the very next page: “Begin thy plowing / When the Pleiades go down to their rest” (237). And, indeed, the Chinese cantos begin with this seasonal, cyclical time: Know then: Toward summer when the sun is in Hyades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . to this month are birds. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In this month no destruction no tree shall be cut at this time Wild beasts are driven from field in this month are simples gathered. (258)

The canto goes on like this, assigning certain activities to certain times of year: “Virgo in mid heaven at sunset / indigo must not be cut / No wood burnt into charcoal” (258); “This month is the reign of Autumn / Heaven is active in metals, now gather millet / and finish the ­flood-­walls” (260). The turn to cyclical history means the Cantos can no longer represent change. In the earlier installments, specific figures, works of art, buildings, events, and ideas from history appeared next to other historical artifacts, making their differences and similarities apparent. While the presentation of similarities creates the repeats in history around which much of the Cantos center, it is the preservation of difference that gives the particular people, objects, and ideas their power to illuminate. Pound initially described the luminous detail as something that “remain[s] unaltered,” which highlighted its ability to carry a trace of its historical moment forward in time (Selected Prose 23). Now, luminous details appear again and again, under different names and from different moments, shorn of their connection with historical and cultural particularity. While Malatesta’s, Confucius’s,

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and Jefferson’s relationships to artists offered insight into the structure of employment in their different milieus, economic policies, like agricultural dividends and paper money, appear in the Chinese and Adams cantos entirely “unaltered” over time: the grain dividend in Caï Fong in the tenth century bears the same name as ammassi, Mussolini’s policy of distributing agricultural products to citizens; Kien Long, emperor of China in 1736 has the same (correct, according to Pound) approach to currency as John Adams.25 This radical change in the structure of the poem has a clear political purpose: Pound deploys these hybrid luminous details–repeats in history to make the case for Mussolini. The Chinese and Adams cantos consist of two extended historical sequences that are almost entirely derived from two sources: Joseph de Moyriac de Mailla’s Histoire Général de la Chine (the basis for Cantos 52–62) and John Adams’s Collected Works (the basis for Cantos 62–71).26 Together, the twenty cantos cover almost five thousand years of history. As David Ten Eyck explains, even many of the most sympathetic readers . . . have been inclined to minimize the importance of these poems. The trajectory of Pound’s career in the late 1930s and 1940s is not uncommonly described in terms of failure and recovery. In this vision, the Adams Cantos represent a poetic ­dead-­end. (1)

Contrary to this view, Ten Eyck argues that the Adams and Chinese cantos represent the culmination of almost forty years of study that Pound began while at Penn in 1901 and 1902. We should, Ten Eyck avers, understand these poems as Pound did, as an important leap forward in his documentary method. Ten Eyck highlights how Pound excises much of the connective tissue that bound together the earlier cantos, like the Malatesta and Leopoldine sequences, showing that these poems fully articulate the historical method by which Pound structured his work. I argue, however, that they represent a definitive break on the level of both form and content, which ultimately changes the kind of political intervention the poem can make. The Chinese and Adams cantos offer a long meditation on the practice and development of good government in two very different cultures across time. In the opening canto, it becomes clear that Pound will bring this historical digression to bear on contemporary politics and economics:

we are all pound now   43 And I have told you of how things were under Duke Leopold in Siena And of the true base of credit, that is the abundance of nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . neschek is against this . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stinkschuld’s sin drawing vengeance, poor yitts paying for Stinkschuld paying for a few big jews’ vendetta on goyim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . remarked Johnnie Adams (the elder) IGNORANCE, sheer ignorance ov the natr ov money sheer ignorance of credit and circulation. Remarked Ben: better keep out the jews or yr/ grand children will curse you (257)

“Stinkschuld” originally read “Rothschild,” but Pound’s publishers made him take out the reference (Ten Eyck 6). It’s worth noting here that Pound’s ­anti-­Semitism has moved from subtext to text: in Canto 46, he capitalizes the “s” in Rothschild’s name to highlight the family’s ethnicity, but the Chinese and Adams cantos take direct aim at the “big jews” the poet blames for war, poverty, and most of the other ills of the world. We shall return to the importance of his racism shortly, but, for now, the essential element of this opening is that Pound frames his long excursus into Chinese history with the history of Siena and the United States. The canto then offers a definition of good governance: . . . . . . . Good sovereign by distribution Evil king is known by his imposts. Begin where you are said Lord Palmerston began draining swamps in Sligo Fought smoke nuisance in London. Dredged harbour in Sligo. (261)

The first two lines set up a way of measuring good and bad leaders, just as the Leopoldine cantos set up a measure for “damn good” and “hell” banks. A good sovereign distributes; a bad one taxes. Interestingly, however, these criteria are not immediately linked to China or the United States—­his purported subjects. Instead, he brings up Lord Palmerston, one of the few British leaders to appear in the Cantos in a positive light. Pound credits

44   chapter one

him with “draining swamps” and dredging the harbor at Sligo, the Irish port city where the Palmerston family was given peerage in the eighteenth century. No historical records indicate that Palmerston took on a drainage project. (He did, however, fight the “smoke nuisance in London,” introducing the Smoke Abatement Act in 1853.) Whether or not Pound made a genuine historical mistake or knowingly fabricated the reference to Sligo is beside the point: what matters is that this reference to Palmerston connects him to Mussolini, whose drainage of the Pontine marshes was heralded as evidence of his fitness to lead Italy.27 What is evident here is that while the subject matter of these cantos may be Chinese and US history, at least part of their purpose is to prove that Mussolini is a “good sovereign.” The references to Mussolini become more and more explicit as the Chinese cantos go on. For example, in Canto 56, Pound introduces the Honan city Caï Fong, which was the capital city from 907 to 960 CE. He explains that “in Caï Fong they made a grain dividend / and gave instruction in farming / ploughs, money, ammassi” (303). Pound refers to it again in Canto 61, this time with ­ ieu-­yu-­y, an ­eighteenth-­century bureaucrat whose handling of a regard to L famine brought him to the attention of the emperor.28 Lieu-­yu-­y, state examiner said . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . At moderate price we can sell in the spring to keep the market price decent And still bring in a small revenue which should be used for getting more next crop AMMASSI or sane collection, to have bigger provision next year, that is, augment our famine reserve and thus to keep the rice fresh in store house. IN time of common scarcity; to sell at the just price in extraordinary let it be lent to the people and in great calamities, give it free (335)

Throughout the Chinese cantos, then, Pound intends for us to connect the great emperors of China with Mussolini. One of the ways he does this is by transposing Mussolini’s programs into the historical record (crediting

we are all pound now   45

Palmerston with drainage programs, naming Chinese grain collection ammassi). These moves render economic history ahistorical and general. In the last of the Chinese cantos, Pound returns to John Adams: . . . Kien Long came to the throne in the 36th of that century— and as to the rise of the Adamses— . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Question of coin in these conquered towns is very important. I advise a few of YOUR mintage and to leave the old pieces current.’ (339)

Kien Long greatly expanded the Chinese empire in the early years of his ­sixty-­year-­long reign. What matters to Pound is not the military aspect of the emperor’s rule but his monetary policy. On Pound’s account, Kien Long succeeded because he handled the variety of currencies in his newly conquered lands correctly. This functions, then, as a corollary to “America, Roosevelt, and the Causes of the Present War,” where Pound argues that the real issue that split the American colonies away from Britain was the suppression of local currencies in Pennsylvania and other colonies: “[t]he cardinal fact of the American Revolution of 1776 was the suppression, in 1750, of the ­paper-­money issue” (“America”).29 The connection is reinforced by the enigmatic line “and as to the rise of the Adamses—,” which relies on the readers’ knowledge of Chinese and American history. Kien Long became emperor in 1736, one year after John Adams was born. With this tenuous connection established, Pound moves into the Adams cantos. A long section late in the Adams cantos makes explicit the connection between early American economic history, China, and fascist Italy. What seems to be at stake at first is whether or not the new United States will be sufficiently independent of Europe: France and England wd/ try to embroil us OBvious that all powers of Europe will be continually at manoeuvre to work us into their real or imaginary balances of power (377)

As the section continues, however, we see that the negotiations have more to do with the new government’s ability to conduct successful trade.

46   chapter one . . . FISHERIES our natural right . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . France wd/ never send that money (send any of it) to England whereas we getting money from Portugal must spend it in London, considered their attack on . . . the fisheries (377–78)

According to this canto, the independence being negotiated is economic. If Adams had been unable to secure the “natural right” to fish in the Atlantic, the money the United States borrowed from Portugal would simply be redirected to London. With fishing rights in place, money can circulate within the domestic economy, leaving the United States outside Europe’s “real or imaginary balances / of power.” Adams’s success ensures “that cash move amongst the people” (270); it also demonstrates that “the true base of credit . . . is / the abundance of nature” (257). The ­second-­to-­last canto in the Adams sections concludes with lines adapted from Adams’s memoir: After generous contest for liberty, Americans forgot what it consists of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . that there were Americans indifferent to fisheries and even some inclined to give them away . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I am for balance (412–13) 30

Next to the statement, “I am for balance,” Pound includes the Chinese character chung, which he elsewhere translates as “unwobbling pivot.” “I am for balance” calls back to Adams’s negotiations to keep the United States out of Europe’s “balance of power.” Its placement next to the chung character, however, provides final confirmation of the loss of historical specificity that marks these cantos. In another context, “I am for balance” and chung could function as luminous details: we could understand “I am for balance” as an aspect of John Adams’s political beliefs that illustrate the difference between American and British governance; chung might be an element of Chi-

we are all pound now   47

nese philosophy that has come down through the historical record whole; together, they might remind readers with good memories of his claim in “What Is Money For?” that “the money ticket . . . wobbles” (Selected Prose 290). Had Pound preserved the structure that placed luminous details in the context of historical repetitions, we might see these in the same way we understood the statements regarding the proper relationship between artists and their employers. But, here they are presented as interchangeable, functioning simultaneously as luminous details and repeats in history. Their specificity has been lost, taking history with it. The disappearance of history marks Pound’s true contribution to ­twentieth-­century economic thought. In his economic writings of the 1930s and 1940s, he calls for a number of more or less marginal economic solutions: government imposition of just price, as well as the adoption of C. H. Douglas’s national dividend and Silvio Gessel’s stamp scrip. Except in a few places, these proposals did not come to pass. Instead, what the Cantos helps us understand about the economy after World War I is its full transition into technocracy. Pound’s replacement of Odysseus with Adonis in Canto 48 gives up on both history and a structural critique of the economy. What remains, and what the Adams and Chinese cantos are devoted to, is locating the right mechanisms in economic history and replicating them in the present. Pound’s shift to technocracy tells the story of economic theory in the twentieth century. The interwar years ushered in a host of new theories that focused on the structural relationship between the state and the economy. John Maynard Keynes’s ideas about using the state to pump the economy during bust periods became dominant during the Great Depression and through the 1950s. Although most governments followed Keynesian orthodoxy, many economists found the state’s heavy hand in the economy troubling.31 Indeed, they suggested that what had looked like too little government intervention leading up to the 1929 crash was in fact evidence of too much. Rather than rely on the imperfect system of democratic control, we should allow the market to organically resolve its occasional instability. In 1966, Milton Friedman penned his famous, and often misattributed, letter to Time magazine that stated, “We are all Keynesians now.” That may have been true in the mid-1960s, but, today, we are all Pound.

48   chapter one

We Are All Pound The claim that Poundian and neoliberal economics share a foundational logic may sound absurd. After all, neoliberalism—­both the American form we are most familiar with and its German predecessor—­was designed to prevent the rise of future fascist states, the very states Pound praised. But the solutions offered by the a­ nti-­Semitic economics at the heart of midcentury fascism and by the f­ ree-­market theories of neoliberalism are both technocratic solutions, aimed at repairing broken, malfunctioning, or misused mechanisms within the economy. Indeed, economic a­nti-­Semitism takes this logic to its most absurd, most hateful extreme. These beliefs gained popularity in response to the financial crisis that plagued Europe, especially Germany, between the world wars—­a state of affairs that, it’s worth noting, John Maynard Keynes predicted in his 1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace.32 Lacking a structural account for the high inflation and high unemployment that plagued Germany as a result of the ­sky-­high reparations demanded by France, Germany needed a scapegoat, and, indeed, many economic thinkers, including C. H. Douglas and Pound, turned to ­anti-­Semitic beliefs in this period. The Cantos themselves are never as virulently a­ nti-­Semitic as Pound’s radio addresses, where he most clearly connects Jews to usury and calls for their expulsion from Europe.33 Some critics have tried to soften Pound’s ­anti-­Semitism, claiming that Pound began to use “Jew” as a synecdoche for the international finance system.34 But Pound’s own statements about this relationship point more to the ­anti-­Semitic reading than the antifinance reading. In a 1942 broadcast, he announces, “Your enemy is Das Leihkapital, international, wandering Loan Capital. . . . The big Jew is so bound up with this Leihkapital that no one is able to unscramble that omelet” (“Ezra” 59). If there ever was a distinction between the financiers and Jews, it is no longer possible to find it. Or, as Anthony Daniels explains, by the early 1940s Pound “came to believe that the class of parasitic exploiters was ­co-­terminous with the class of Jews” (34). No one is really able to unscramble the omelet that Pound himself made, where his ­anti-­Semitism becomes bound up in the Cantos, money pamphlets, and radio addresses. In “Elements of ­Anti-­Semitism,” Max Horkheimer and Theodor Ador-

we are all pound now   49

no offer a crucial explanation of the relationship between economics and racism: Bourgeois ­anti-­Semitism has a specific economic purpose: to conceal domination in production. If in earlier epochs the rulers were directly repressive, so that they not only left work exclusively to the lower orders but declared it [work] the ignominy it always was under domination, in the age of mercantilism the absolute monarch transformed himself into the supreme master of manufactories. . . . He called himself the producer, but he and everyone secretly knew the truth. The productive work of the capitalist .  .  . was the ideology which concealed the nature of the labor contract and the rapacity of the economic system in general. This is why people shout: “Stop thief!”—and point at the Jew. He is indeed the scapegoat, not only for individual maneuvers and machinations but in the wider sense that the economic injustice of the whole class is attributed to him. (142)

What Adorno and Horkheimer recognize is that economic a­ nti-­Semitism serves as useful cover for an economic system designed to reserve profits for the capitalist class. Blaming a class of people within the economy locates economic instability and injustice in a group that can be excluded, leaving the essential structure of the economy alone. Horkheimer and Adorno explain that this worldview is “a socially necessary illusion”: it provides an outlet for workers’ frustration at the economic structure that allows “the smallest magnate . . . a quantity of services and goods available to no ruler before him” and the worker only the “cultural minimum” (143, 142). Horkheimer and Adorno reveal that the economic hatred of Jews is a misrecognition of structural problems: because the Germans could not see the sphere of circulation, which was the cause of their misery, they hated its representatives. The founders of neoliberalism, the Freiburg School economists who were charged with rebuilding West Germany after World War II, believed that their new way of organizing the state’s relationship to the economy would prevent such confusion. As Michel Foucault explains in his 1978–1979 lectures, they believed that the Nazi state had practiced modes of economic intervention—­protectionism, state socialism, a planned economy, and fiscal

50   chapter one

stimulus packages—­that produced a “monstrosity” of an economy (Foucault 109). Moreover, these were all of a kind, all “economically linked,” so that “if you adopt one of [these elements] . . . you will not escape the other three” (110). Any element of state intervention in the economy leads us down the slippery slope to Nazism. As a result, the target of the Freiburg School’s attack was not the structures of the economy, but the structural relationship between the state and the economy. Foucault summarizes this position: [S]ince Nazism shows that the defects and destructive effects traditionally attributed to the market economy should instead be attributed to the state . . . [o]ur question should not be: Given a relatively free market economy, how should the state limit it so as to minimize its harmful effects? We should reason completely differently and say: Nothing proves that the market economy is intrinsically defective since everything attributed to it as a defect and as the effect of its defectiveness should really be attributed to the state. So, let’s do the opposite and demand even more from the market economy. (116)

Locating the site of irrationality in the state, as opposed to the economy, led the Freiburg School to the conclusion that the best possible relationship between the social and the economic is “a state under the supervision of the market” (116).35 While there are important distinctions between the Freiburg School of German neoliberalism and the Chicago School of American neoliberalism, they share this same belief in the market as the best supervisor of the social. In his Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman repeats many of the claims Foucault attributes to the Freiburg School. Perhaps the most striking is the way he demonstrates that, even for American neoliberals, the Nazi state functions as exemplary of the wrong relationship between the state and the economy. Regarding Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), a government task force charged with investigating claims of discrimination, he writes, FEPC legislation involves the acceptance of a principle that proponents would find abhorrent in almost every other application. If it is appropriate for the state to say that individuals may not discriminate in employment because of color or race or religion, then it is equally appropriate for the state, provided

we are all pound now   51

a majority can be found to vote that way, to say that individuals must discriminate in employment on the basis of color, race, or religion. The Hitler Nuremberg laws and the laws in the Southern states imposing special disabilities upon Negroes are both examples of laws similar in principle to FEPC. (113)

To summarize, any state activity that tells the market how to operate is “similar in principle” to Nazism. Further, we see here the way that irrationality is attributed to the state, rather than the market: to enact something like the Nuremberg laws or the FEPC, one must only find “a majority . . . to vote that way.”36 It is the social that introduces irrationality into the market, not the market that introduces irrationality into the social. So, what to do about those “laws in the Southern states”? The answer is familiar to everyone with a passing understanding of the Chicago School’s economic theories. A functioning and competitive market will eventually do away with discrimination. Friedman writes, “[D]iscrimination against groups of a particular color or religion is least in those areas where there is the greatest freedom of competition” (109). This is because a capitalist “who expresses preference in his [sic] business activities that are not related to productive efficiency is at a disadvantage compared to other individuals who do not” (109). In a deeper analysis of the same issue, Gary Becker demonstrates that “discrimination harms . . . capitalists” (13–14). If the state were to stay out of the market, the most appalling expressions of social irrationality in the twentieth century—­Nazism and Jim Crow—­would disappear. While these neoliberal theories seem very distinct from Pound’s economic beliefs, which, after all require the strong hand of a fascist leader, they in fact depend on the same disappearance of history. We saw already the way that the Chinese and Adams cantos discard historical particularity to demonstrate a continuum of good governance from 2700 BCE to 1940 CE. Likewise, Becker describes the economic model that demonstrates that “discrimination harms . . . capitalists” like this: “Government and monopolies are ignored for the present, as the analysis is confined to perfectly competitive societies” (11–12). One way of understanding this would be to say that for Becker to mathematically demonstrate the harmful effects of discrimination on capitalists, he must insulate the market from society. Imagining a perfectly competitive market is utopic thinking, one that can

52   chapter one

work only if the past—­in the form of Nazism or slavery—­is “ignored for the present.” It is perhaps unfair to hang too much on Becker’s choice of words here, but the past “ignored for the present” offers a handy summation of this chapter’s argument: t­ wentieth-­century economic thought not only ignores history but believes the almost complete absence of history is one of its virtues. While it isn’t surprising that Friedman and those who have followed him are thoroughgoing capitalists, what is likely surprising is that they are capitalists in precisely the same way as Ezra Pound. That is, both Pound and Friedman’s solutions to economic problems are technocratic, not structural. While Pound initially described the structure of capitalist labor relations through luminous details such as the Tempio Malatestiano, he eventually abandoned that structure and attended only to the more local problem of the creation and distribution of money. The problem with believing the faults in our economy are mechanical is that it means we no longer require political solutions to economic problems. Instead, we believe the solution can be found in mechanisms imminent to capitalism, whether they be fiscal or monetary solutions. It’s not, as Friedman suggested almost fifty years ago, that “we are all Keynesians now”: no, we are all Pound now.

2

The All-Over Poem william carlos williams’s egalitarian aesthetics

A strong archive of work on William Carlos Williams’s personal and professional relationships with visual artists already exists, and critics have drawn useful lines of influence between many of the major art movements of the early twentieth century and Williams’s poetry.1 But little work has appeared that connects Williams to the abstract expressionist movement.2 This is surprising because both Williams and the abstract expressionists hoped to establish a distinctly American idiom in an artistic field that had so far been dominated by Europeans. In fact, Williams himself understood this as a shared project, as he explained in a speech for the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1952 called “The American Spirit in Art”: “The obscurity of the modern poem as well as abstraction in the pictorial arts are . . . both the children . . . of that ­time-­drift which has brought our culture pattern, what we call America, to the fore” (Recognizable Image 211). The predominant properties of American poetry and visual art in 1952—“obscurity” and “abstraction”—are, on Williams’s account, the ­by-­products of the deeper “culture pattern” that is responsible for the United States’ ascent to global power. As the poet saw it, then, the formal properties of American art and the political nature of American empire have the same source. In the speech, Williams provides a long quote from Arnold Toynbee in which the historian speculates that the twentieth century will be remembered as “the first age . . . in which people dared to think it practicable to make the benefits of civilization available for the whole human race,” an idea Toynbee argues appeared with “the seventeenth century West Euro-

54   chapter two

pean settlements on the East Coast of North America that have grown into the United States” (Recognizable Image 214–15). In Toynbee, we hear echoes of the rhetoric Woodrow Wilson used to explain the United States’ entry into World War I; by directly engaging with the war in Europe, the United States would join “a global campaign for liberal democracy” (quoted in Panitch and Gindin 47). Williams replies, When the West European settlers arrived on the East Coast of North America to form their colonies—­that have grown into the United States—­they faced two things: a physical world of tremendous resources which they would learn to exploit to the astonishment of the world, and a new vision, far richer than anything the land itself offered, which has baffled them to the present day. (Recognizable Image 215)

Williams makes two important revisions to Toynbee’s claims. First, Williams alters Toynbee’s description of American exceptionalism’s source. Attracted to the historian’s p ­ ile-­up of directional adjectives, Williams repeats it almost word for word. But he changes “settlements” to “settlers” and inserts “to form their colonies.” The emphasis on the colonial history of the United States challenges Toynbee’s belief that the desire “to make the benefits of civilization available for the whole human race” was produced by these initial settlements. After all, the European colonial project was founded on the denial of those very benefits to those members of the human race already living in North America (and the enslaved African who would soon arrive). Williams asserts, instead, that the New World—­ its “tremendous resources” and baffling “new vision”—is the true source of American exceptionalism. Later in the essay, he identifies this “new vision” as the promise of “[a]bundance for all” (218). While its “political history” has been “varied,” it “has been the backbone of . . . all our art” (215). That is, while American politics have not always lived up the “new vision,” the arts have. For Williams, the artist who has done the most to “originate” American literature is Edgar Allan Poe. He intended In the American Grain (1925) to close with the Poe chapter, which argues “the New World, or to leave that for the better term, . . . a new locality. . . is in Poe assertive; it is America” (216). In fact, Williams explicitly rejects other American authors who are

the all-over poem   55

perhaps more obviously linked with the American locality. While James Fenimore Cooper wrote “of the Indians, the forests, the great natural beauty of the New World,” Poe embodied that spirit in the form of his writing: “he wanted a lean style, rapid as a hunter and with an aim as sure” (227). Nathaniel Hawthorne, Williams writes, was “doing what everyone else in France, England, Germany was doing for his own milieu . . . no more than copying their method with another setting.” As a result, he “does not ORIGINATE; has not a beginning literature at heart that must establish its own rules, own framework” (229). Poe’s “firm statements on the character of form,” which demand that American authors “borrow nothing from the scene, but . . . put all the weight of effort into the WRITING. . . . Method, punctuation, grammar” did “ORIGINATE,” did “establish [his] own rules, [his] own framework” (219, 227). Poe’s contribution to American literature was the creation of a new form—­an American form—­that would replace the forms handed down from those “West European settlers.” When Williams returns to Poe a decade later in a speech delivered to the Institute of Public Affairs, he underlines the fact that while art and politics may share a source, they are separate realms of expression. Poe is not to be made to write pro- or ­anti-­slavery doggerel. Society would lose largely were this so. His significance lies in his power to fix, recordize, reassert in cryptographic form (only vaguely sensed at the moment as greatness—­but full of accurate meaning for all that) to make a cryptogram of his time, in form and content—­with the passionate regenerative force of the artist underlying it. (Recognizable Image 106)

Or, as he puts it earlier in the same speech, “[y]ou can’t use great art as propaganda—­or any art. It will resist it” (103). The power of art is aesthetic, not political; the key to aesthetic innovation is form: its “[m]ethod, punctuation, grammar” and its power “to fix, recordize, and reassert” (In the American Grain 219, Recognizable Image 106). In his speech “The American Spirit in Art,” Williams restates this conviction: The basic idea which underlies our art must be, for better or worse, that which Toynbee has isolated for us: abundance, that is, permission, for all. And

56   chapter two

it is in the structure of our works that this must show. We must embody the principle of abundance. . . . [T]hrough cubism, Matisse, to Motherwell, the ultimate step is one gesture. And it is important because it says that you don’t paint a picture or write a poem about anything, you make a picture or a poem of anything. You see how that comes from Toynbee’s discovery. Abundance for all. (Recognizable Image 218)

For Williams, then, the structure of both poetry and painting must be equal to the American promise, so far politically incomplete, for “[a]bundance for all.” It is not the content of the work that matters, but its form. The notion of finding the truly American form animates both In the American Grain and Paterson. In the American Grain examines how the Spanish explorers and Puritan settlers distorted and deformed the American spirit. The settlers, Williams argues, “clung, one way or another, to the old, striving the while to pull off pieces to themselves from the fat of the new bounty” (136). Their relationship to the New World originated the “FORM ITSELF, .  .  . bred of brutality, inhumanity, cruel amputations,” that now founds the basis of contemporary Americans’ understanding of our history (111). American Grain uncovers the real source of the American “culture pattern,” which is the betrayal of the New World’s ability to provide “abundance for all ” (Recognizable Image 211, 218). American Grain reveals the history of this separation between the promise and reality of the New World, but Paterson is devoted to creating an aesthetic space in which it can be fulfilled. The climax of the ­five-­part poem comes when the city’s library is destroyed by the Beautiful Thing, a feminine force that stands in for the spirit of the New World, which European colonization has attempted to repress. The burning of the library allows Williams to replace its systems of valuation, which exclude figures like the Beautiful Thing. In its place, he will put his new measure, a system of (poetic) valuing that “will be commensurate with the social, economic world in which we are living as contrasted with the past.” Unlike “the measured quatrain, the staid concatenations of sounds in the usual stanza, the sonnet,” this new measure depends on a relative system of stress across the poetic form (“The Poem” 53).3 Rather than assigning stress to individual syllables across the line, each line is given the same weight. In a 1954 letter to Richard Eberhart, Williams provides this example:

the all-over poem   57 (1) Mother of God! Our Lady! (2) the heart (3) is an unruly master: (4) Forgive us our sins (5) as we (6) forgive (7) those who have sinned against.

Count a single beat to each numeral. You may not agree with my ear, but that is the way I count the line. Over the whole poem it gives a pattern to the meter that can be felt as a new measure. (327)

In this new system of poetic counting, “Mother of God! Our Lady!” has the same duration as “forgive.” Though most critics don’t recognize this form as fully developed until Pictures from Brueghel and Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, it makes its first appearance in the opening pages of Paterson 2.4 The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned Memory is a kind of accomplishment a sort of renewal even an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places inhabited by hordes heretofore unrealized of new kinds— since their movements are towards new objectives (even though formerly they were abandoned) No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—­since the world it opens is always a place formerly unsuspected. A world lost,

58   chapter two a world unsuspected beckons to new places and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory of whiteness . (78)

The tripartite structure suggests that the first and second lines will be reconciled in the third. But, as this section attests, Williams rarely closes a thought on the third line: the first set ends with “Memory is a kind,” requiring the reader to move to the second set to determine the meaning of “kind”; likewise, the fifth set ends with “unsuspecting. A,” again forcing the reader into the next set to resolve the line. Each set spills over into the next, moving readers quickly down the page and back to the left margin as they read. At the same time, the relative measuring of stress enforces a radical equality between the lines of the poem. As a result, “even” (the sixth line in the aforementioned passage) is given the same stress as every other line. Whether intentional or not, the choice of “even” as the first ­one-­word line of this new way of measuring functions as an explanation of the relationship among the three lines in each set. It also creates an uncanny resonance with the “abstract picture” Williams references in his 1952 speech.5 In Clement Greenberg’s 1955 essay, “­‘American-­Type’ Painting,” he draws out a number of traits of abstract expressionism, all of which are, on his account, meant to discard the “inherited convention” of painting, just as the new measure abandons the “staid concatenations” of traditional English prosody. One of the major innovations of the abstract expressionists, Greenberg argues, is their development of the “­‘all-­over’ design,” which produces a canvas covered “with an even, largely undifferentiated system of uniform motifs” (225). Like the radical equality among the lines of the poem produced in the new measure, these artists’ canvases produce a radical equality among all parts of the picture. Unlike traditional landscape, portrait, or historical paintings, which have a clear subject or ensemble of subjects on which the viewer is supposed to focus, the abstract expressionists do not favor one section of the canvas over any other. The elements of the canvas are therefore “undifferentiated,” its surface “uniform” or “even.”6 In not privileging any aspect of the painting, the a­ ll-­over technique becomes the pictorial equivalent of what Williams understood as the New World’s vision of “abundance for all.” The form Williams first deploys in the second

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installment of Paterson is designed to produce the same effect, transforming the poem into a space of pure equality. This radical revaluation of the lyric form allows the poem to intervene in and, in fact, replace the systems of value that European colonialization has created in the United States. But this replacement can take place only within the strict confines of the poem. Just as in the abstract paintings he so much admired, Williams’s egalitarian space can be maintained only within the aesthetic frame. Indeed, the equality of Paterson is founded on a key inequality: that between the aesthetic and the political realms.7

Decolonize or Die8 William Carlos Williams wrote most of In the American Grain during his trip to Europe in 1922. While he was traveling east, Europe’s money was traveling west, pouring into the United States from French, British, and German central banks. By then, the United States had become the banker and broker for German war reparations: collecting money from the defeated Germans, in the rare cases it was available, and lending money to both France and the United Kingdom when the German funds arrived late (or, as was often the case, not at all). Williams, like Pound, sensed this shift in global power. In the only chapter of In the American Grain set in Europe, “Père Sebastian Rasles,” Williams recounts a conversation with the French poet Valéry Larbaud, who, Williams is delighted to discover, is also a student of Puritan colonial history. Williams is “startled but thrilling with pleasure” when he learns Larbaud has read Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana; Larbaud is impressed when Williams references the ­anti-­Puritan texts written by persecuted Quakers in the late seventeenth century (109). Larbaud exclaims, “Why does one not hear Americans speak more often of these important things?” (113). Williams’s explanation is key for understanding both the construction of American Grain and how it will come to shape Paterson: It is an extraordinary phenomenon that Americans have lost the sense, being made up as we are, that what we are has its origin in what the nation in the past has been; that there is a source in AMERICA for everything we think or do; that morals affect the food and food the bone, and that, in fine, we have no

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conception at all of what is meant by moral, since we recognize no ground our own—­and that this rudeness rests all upon the unstudied character of our beginnings; and that if we will not pay heed to our own affairs, we are noth­ il-­hole for those, more able, who will ing but an unconscious porkyard and o fasten themselves upon us. And that we have no defense, lacking intelligent investigation of the changes worked upon the early comers here, to the New World, the books, the records, no defense save brute isolation, prohibitions, walls, ships, fortresses—­and all the asininities of ignorant fear that forbids us to protect a doubtful freedom by employing it. (Grain 109)

The long quotation is necessary to capture the logic of Williams’s claim. He derives three entailments from the particularly American aversion to its own history. Because Americans do not recognize that they descend from “what the nation in the past has been,” they “have no conception at all of what is meant by moral,” are destined to become “an unconscious porkyard and ­oil-­hole” for the rest of the world, and have “no defense save brute isolation.” The refusal to study American history not only makes Americans immoral but also subjects them to exploitation by other powers. As the rest of American Grain bears out, the exploitation described here has, in fact, played out on North American soil twice before. The first instance is the Spanish exploration of the New World. In the four chapters devoted to the Spanish, Williams presents the New World as a seductive and dangerous female force. This figure gets her name from an entry in Christopher Columbus’s journal, where he describes the New World as “the most beautiful thing which [he] had ever seen” (American Grain 26). In “De Soto and the New World” Williams demonstrates her power while emphasizing the difference between the Old and New Worlds. The chapter is presented as a dialogue: one voice belongs to “SHE,” the New World, the beautiful thing; the other belongs to one of De Soto’s soldiers, who narrates their journey from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. “SHE” opens the chapter: Courage is strength—­and you are vigilant, sagacious, firm besides. But I am beautiful. . . . I am beautiful. . . . Believe it. You will not dare to cease following me . . . turning from the sea, facing inland. And in the end you shall receive of me, nothing—­save one long caress as of a great river passing forever upon your sweet corse. (45)

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“She” believes that De Soto is being drawn further and further toward her—­toward her center, and all the eroticism entailed there—­by her beauty. But the second voice contradicts this. He explains that De Soto is not after the New World’s beauty, but her riches: he is driven by his desire “to find another treasure like that of Atabalipa” (47) and follows rumors of great wealth—“a country toward the rising sun, governed by a woman, where there was gold in quantity” (46); “a province called Chiaha, subject to a chief of Coca” (47).9 Because the chapter is narrated by two figures who interpret De Soto’s motivations, it is impossible to tell whether he is, as the New World believes, pursuing her or, as his soldier believes, pursuing the gold he wishes to return to Spain. This confusion comes to a head when De Soto refuses to meet with a Spanish emissary after a battle in which he lost the only treasure (a cache of pearls) he had so far acquired. The soldier believes De Soto skips the rendezvous because of the lost pearls: “he determined to send no news of himself until he should discover a rich country” (49). But the New World interprets it as evidence of his commitment to her: And for this your people begin to hate you. . . . Because you have found no gold, only increasing hardships; because of your obstinacy, unexplained, incredible to them—­you will be compared meanly with far lesser spirits. It is their revenge, making you solitary—­ready for my caresses. And if, to survive, you yourself in the end turned native, this victory is sweetest of all. . . . Let them talk, my Indian: I will console you. (50–51)

She has arranged these “increasing hardships” to prepare him for her, so that he turns native, becomes her “Indian.”10 And De Soto and his men do begin to adopt the ways of the New World upon arriving at the Mississippi: “[s]hawls, deer skins, lion and bear skins, and many cat skins were found. Numbers who had been a long time badly covered here clothed themselves. . . . They found shields of raw cowhide out of which armor was made for the horses” (53). Despite their relative comfort, De Soto wants to explore further. But the death of his translator, Juan Ortiz, forces him to reconsider; without a way to communicate with the tribes he encounters, De Soto spends months wandering in the wrong direction, often returning to the place he began. So he sends out an advance party “to learn if the sea was near” (55). The phrasing here is key: the New World began the chapter by

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promising that De Soto “would not dare to cease following me . . . turning from the sea, facing inland.” But after Ortiz’s death, the explorer seeks the ocean once again, turning away from the New World. He dies, and the promise of the New World is fulfilled. His body is weighed down and submerged in the Mississippi: he receives “nothing—­save one long caress as of a great river” (45). At stake in the chapter is the difference between the wealth sought by the Spanish colonial force and the wealth offered by the New World. The Spanish want gold, copper, pearls, riches, and raw materials to take back to Spain; she provides clothing, food, and weapons appropriate to their new locality. Williams summarizes this difference in the Daniel Boone chapter, now describing the relationship between Puritan settlers and the New World: [T]he problem of the New World was, as every new comer soon found out, an awkward one, on all sides the same: how to replace from the wild land that which, at home, they had scarcely known the Old World meant to them; through difficulty and even brutal hardship to find a ground to take the place of England. They could not do it. They clung, one way or another, to the old, striving the while to pull off pieces to themselves from the fat of the new bounty. (136)

The challenge the settlers faced, Williams argues, is that they tried to “replace” the Old World in a “wild land.” Rather than adapt themselves and their ways of life to a new environment, they attempted to recreate their lost homes in a new place. But “[t]hey could not do it.” They hoarded “pieces . . . from the fat of the new bounty” and blockaded themselves from the pieces they could not understand. This is the source of the “brute isolation” Williams described to Larbaud (109). Although the colonists seem most attracted to the New World’s vast resources, Williams insists that the difficulty faced by the colonists was “neither material nor political but .  .  . purely moral and aesthetic” (136). In the Boone chapter, the explorer solves this “moral and aesthetic” difficulty by attending to the New World’s wilderness. It is first aesthetic: Boone is “[f]illed with the wild beauty of the New World” and seeks “to grow close to it, to understand it and to be part of its mysterious movements” (137).11 This orientation enables his “complete possession” of the New World—

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a­ feat that had so far been impossible for the Spanish explorers and the Puritan colonists (137). What sets Boone apart from the others is that he understands that his “possession” of the New World depends on his complete possession by the New World: a reciprocal relationship in which he becomes “a natural expression of the place.” Boone describes this as a “new wedding,” but in the opening pages of Paterson, Williams will call the same concept an “interpenetration” (American Grain 138, Paterson 7). I cannot help but name it dialectical. The fact that Boone’s relationship to the New World is “moral and aesthetic” rather than “material [and] political” is not meant to imply that the two are disconnected. Rather, Williams argues that the Puritans used morality and aesthetics to obscure material and political realities: For the great task God had destined them to perform, they were clipped in mind, stripped to the physical necessities. They could not afford to allow their sense to wander any more than they could allow a member of their company to wander from the precinct of the church, even from Boston to Casco Bay, FOR WORLDLY PROFIT. This their formula condemned. For that Hannah Swanton was punished by captivity and TEMPTATION among the Catholics in Quebec.—I mean, that this form, this FORM ITSELF, such a religion upon our lips, though it have an economic, biologic basis in truth, nevertheless it is bred of brutality, inhumanity, cruel amputations and that THIS is the sum of its moral effect. (American Grain 111)

The Hannah Swanton story, which Williams references here as evidence of the “FORM ITSELF” of Puritanical thought, is a fairly typical captivity narrative that appeared originally in Cotton Mather’s Magnalia. Captured after the Abenaki tribe attacked Casco fort, Swanton witnessed her husband’s and eldest son’s murders. She describes months of starvation and subservience but credits her faith with giving her the strength to continue. Her ­first-­person narrative is bookended by Mather’s commentary; both argue that her family’s decision to move to Casco Bay to earn a better living condemned them to captivity and death. Had she remained in a Puritan settlement, their argument goes, she and her family would not have had to endure the Abenaki attack. Of course this argument ignores a host of material facts: from the privation that many Puritans faced in their communities to the radical misunderstanding of their relationship to the indigenous pop-

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ulations they wished to convert before supplanting. It hides material and political maneuvering behind a moral lesson: had Swanton’s family kept the right relationship to the church, they would not have left Massachusetts and therefore would have never had this experience. This scaffolding—“this FORM ITSELF”—Williams argues, remains on “our lips”: the moral and aesthetic forms inherited from the Puritans have completely covered the “new vision” offered to the original colonists (111). Or, as he puts it later, “[t]he primitive destiny of the land is obscure, but it has been obscured further by a field of unrelated culture stuccoed upon it” (212). The founders of the United States carried this material orientation with them into their statecraft. While their relationship to the New World is identical to that of Spanish and Puritan settlers, the characters have changed radically. In earlier chapters, Williams was able to clearly distinguish between representatives of the Old and New Worlds, but this distinction blurs in the chapters following Puritan colonization. The figures who appear here—­Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr—­were all born in the New World. Further, the land they encounter is not the New World Columbus or De Soto explored; Puritan colonization has already transformed it. This blurring of the two worlds leads Williams to present the Revolutionary War as an incomplete anticolonial movement. On one hand, the United States freed itself from the control of the Old World in the guise of the United Kingdom. On the other, the forms the new nation inherited from the Puritans continue to define and direct its relationship to the New World. For Williams, the Revolutionary War was a profound missed opportunity. He writes that England was “[a] dry skin to be cast off, an itch, that’s all. There was a deeper matter . . . an untracked force that might lead anywhere; it was springtime in a new world when all things were possible” (193). The early leaders, however, failed to embrace the possibilities the New World presented them. Although they were fully of the New World, they suppressed their nature, conforming to Old World—­that is, Puritan—­ways. Of Benjamin Franklin, Williams writes, “His mind was ALL out of the New World. . . . Strong and New World in innate strength.” But, “he is without beauty. The force of the New World is never in these men open; it is sly, covert, almost cringing” (154). Of George Washington, Williams wrote,

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“a man of stolid and untractable exterior,” who, on his surveying missions into the wilderness “breathed a more serious air which cannot but have penetrated to the deepest parts of his nature” (140) but who chose “home and quiet” (141). They are both, Williams explains, the “full development of . . . the timidity, the strength that denies itself ” (155). Because Franklin and Washington deny their New World heritage, they leave the path open for Alexander Hamilton, whose rapacious colonial spirit is a twin to that of the Spanish explorers. He sees North America as a source of raw materials to be transformed, refusing to be transformed himself. Hamilton will play an important role in Paterson, but he barely appears in In the American Grain: Williams relegates him to “The Virtue of History,” a chapter devoted to arguing that Aaron Burr is the true hero of the Revolutionary period. Williams explains that, with “the Revolution over[,] the New World instead of being freed slipped into a tyranny as bad as or worse than the one it left behind; that, of this tyranny, Hamilton was the agent” (195). Like the Spanish and Puritan explorers and settlers who came before, Hamilton wants to “pull off pieces . . . from the fat of the new bounty” (136). He planned to harness the whole, young, aspiring genius to a treadmill[.] Paterson he wished to make capital of the country because there was waterpower there which to his time and mind seemed colossal. And so he organized a company to hold the land thereabouts, with dams and sluices, the origin today of the vilest swillhole in christendom, the Passaic River; impossible to remove the nuisance so tight had he, Hamilton, sewed up his privileges unto kingdomcome, through his holding company, in the State legislature. His company. His United States: Hamiltonia—­the land of the company. (195)

The plan described here is the Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures, a private but ­state-­sponsored corporation Hamilton founded in 1791. Ostensibly created to increase the manufacturing capacity of the United States so that it could wean itself off expensive foreign imports, the S.U.M., as it was often abbreviated, proposed a system of mills in the region around the Passaic Falls ­(present-­day Paterson) that would become a national hub for manufacturing. But, on Williams’s account, it was a ploy that would allow Hamilton to further consolidate his power: only with a

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strong manufacturing base would the federal government be able to collect taxes. Williams uses “swillhole” to describe Paterson, resonating with the United States’ potential fate as “oilhole” for the world. We should read “The Virtue of History” as In the American Grain’s climax. What follows mostly repeats—­with the exception of the Poe chapter—­ themes that have come before. Sam Houston’s “Descent” replays Boone’s “Discovery of Kentucky”; Abraham Lincoln’s portrait reiterates the argument that the United States has repressed its feminine element. These repetitions underline Williams’s argument in “The Virtue of History”: the Revolutionary War should have been a turning point but instead entrenched the Puritans’ hold over the young nation. As a result, Williams believes that the United States is still under colonial rule: it’s just that the colonizers come from the same country they dominate. And this is where Paterson picks up the thread. The central figure of the poem is, of course, Paterson: both the city and the ­man-­giant who represents it, Dr. Paterson. A clear analogue for Williams, he shares his professions (doctor and poet) and his nickname (Noah Faitoute). And he owes his existence to Hamilton’s S.U.M.: . . . he breathes and the subtleties of his machinations drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river animate a thousand automatons. Who because they neither know their sources nor the sills of their disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly. . . . (Paterson 6)

Dr. Paterson is powered by the falls, which in turn “animate a thousand automatons.” The “automatons” refer not only to the mills that drew workers to Paterson but to the workers themselves. Elsewhere, Williams describes them as Dr. Paterson’s dreams (who “walk about the city where he persists / incognito” [6]) and his “thoughts” (“Inside the bus one sees / his thoughts sitting and standing. His / thoughts alight and scatter” [9]). They are separated from both Dr. Paterson and their true source, the Passaic Falls: they do not “know their sources” (6). In American Grain, the failure to know or recognize the source of American culture was posed as an urgent national problem: without recognizing our sources in the New World, we would continue to be subject to exploita-

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tion from outside groups. In Paterson, however, the problem takes linguistic form.12 The language is missing them they die also incommunicado. The language, the language fails them They do not know the words (11)

In Paterson 1, the failure of language turns fatal, revising the lines to read “they die . . . [because they are] / incommunicado.” For example, Sam Patch, famous for jumping off waterfalls across the United States, died because “[s]peech had failed him”: He appeared and made a short speech as he was wont to do. A speech! What could he say that he must leap so desperately to complete it? And plunged toward the stream below. But instead of descending with a p ­ lummet-­like fall his body wavered in the air—­Speech had failed him. He was confused. The word had been drained of its meaning. (16)

The speech is intimately connected to the leap: the jump completes what he’s just said, but, at the Genesee Falls, “[s]peech . . . failed him.” What he said was so incommensurate with the “desperate” act of leaping into the falls that the leap couldn’t work; instead, “his body wavered in the air.” His death implies that had the language been right, then the jump would not have been deadly; it imagines a deep connection between language and action that Sam Patch (as well as the incommunicado citizens of Paterson) cannot access. In the middle section of Paterson 2, the theme of failed language persists but takes on a new valence. As Dr. Paterson tours the park, he encounters three theories about the creation of wealth. First, he hears “a Protestant! protesting” (65): Klaus Ehrens delivers a fairly standard poverty sermon, in which he exhorts his listeners to throw “away [their money] with both hands” to receive “riches . . . / beyond all counting” (73). Woven throughout this, Williams includes details about how the Society for Useful Manufactures served Hamilton’s interests by establishing a strong central gov-

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ernment and creating a solid tax foundation. After Ehrens’s sermon ends, Williams turns to a Social Credit pamphlet that decries the Federal Reserve System as the “Legalized National Usury System,” for which “we, the people, representing the Government (in this instance at any rate) pay interest to the banks in the form of high taxes” (73).13 All three—­Ehrens, Hamilton, and the Federal Reserve—­function as examples of the creation of wealth or, as Ezra Pound would put it, “moneys which it . . . creates out of nothing” (Cantos 233). Ehrens creates wealth from piety; Hamilton and the Federal Reserve create wealth by taxing income. The fact that all three promise wealth from nothing but define “wealth” in radically different ways intensifies the call for a redeeming language. In this section, it becomes clear that the Passaic Falls represents this language. As the day progresses, Dr. Paterson and the citizens are surrounded by the “multiple and inarticulate” voices of the crowd. Against this confusion, they strain “to catch / the movement of one voice among the rest” (54). The voice’s source is revealed once Dr. Paterson reaches the top of Garrett Mountain: Stand at the rampart (use a metronome if your ear is deficient, one made in Hungary if you prefer) and look away north by east where the church spires still spend their wits against the sky . to the ­ball-­park in the hollow with its minute figures running —beyond the gap where the river plunges into the narrow gorge, unseen —and the imagination soars, as a voice beckons, a thundrous voice, endless —as sleep: the voice that has ineluctably called them— that unmoving roar! (55)

The voice Dr. Paterson and his citizens seek, knowingly or not, belongs to the Passaic Falls, their source. But, as Dr. Paterson confronts the falls, he finds them inadequate:

the all-over poem   69 Only the thought of the stream comforts him, its terrifying plunge, inviting marriage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From his eyes sparrows start and sing. His ears are toadstools, his fingers have begun to sprout leaves (his voice is drowned under the falls)

.

Poet, poet! sing your song, quickly! or not insects but pulpy weeds will blot out your kind. He all but falls . . (82–83)

The jump into the Passaic is proposed as a kind of marriage; Dr. Paterson will be united with the river. As he contemplates the leap, the unification begins: “His ears are toadstools, his fingers have / begun to sprout leaves.” But he is exhorted to “sing [his] song, quickly!” Without the song, “pulpy weeds will blot [him] out.” What would result from his leap isn’t a reunification between Paterson and his source but his destruction: he would become part of nature; the slow transformation of his body into “toadstools” and “leaves” would be complete, and all that would be left would be “pulpy weeds.” His rejection of the falls signals two things. First, it underlines the continuity and difference between Paterson and In the American Grain. In the earlier text, Boone describes a “new wedding” with the New World that would result in reciprocal possession. Here, the marriage—“a terrifying plunge”—does not appear as a reciprocal arrangement: Dr. Paterson would in fact lose himself, becoming wholly a part of nature—­not “himself in the New World,” as Boone did. Second, Williams reveals that the problem isn’t language but the structures from which language emerges: the abstract ideas language names. The Federal Reserve names the money it makes from nothing “wealth,” and Klaus Ehrens uses the same word to describe his poverty and religious devotion. If the language were correct—­if the Fed referred to its holdings as, say, “fictitious capital,” while Ehrens referred to his enlightenment as “piety”—the material situation would not change. The problem in Paterson may appear as “moral and aesthetic,” but any solution must also consider the “material and [the] political.”

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Flames, Too, Are a Form of Literacy14 The action of Paterson 2, ends when Dr. Paterson refuses to jump into the falls, but the book itself goes on for five pages that consist of a lengthy excerpt from one of fellow poet Marcia Nardi’s letters to Williams. Shorter excerpts have appeared throughout the book, all of which describe the creative block produced when Williams suddenly cut off their correspondence. Early in the book, she describes it as “exiling one’s self from one’s self,” which becomes a figure for the estrangement experienced by Dr. Paterson and the citizens in relation to their source (45). The long excerpt that closes Paterson 2, begins with an accusation: “My attitude[s] toward woman’s wretched position in society . . . were interesting to you, weren’t they, in so far as they made for literature?” This is proved, she goes, by his inclusion of one of her letters in Paterson 1, which could be put in the text only once it became “something disconnected from life” (87). Nardi rightly accuses Williams of believing that the appearance of found text and biographical details in the poem transforms them; they become “disconnected from life” by virtue of their appearance on the page. In other words, she accuses him of transforming something “material and political” into something simply aesthetic. While the very presence of this letter demonstrates that her accusation had no effect on Williams’s composition practices, the reintroduction of the Beautiful Thing in Paterson 3, offers an implicit response to Nardi’s criticisms. Appearing first as a battered young black woman whom Dr. Paterson treats, she soon transforms into a fire, flood, and tornado that almost destroy the city and, by extension, the poem. Her appearance first transforms the content of Paterson into the space of radical equality that he imagined truly American art could achieve, laying the groundwork for more obviously political material in Paterson 4. But it also allows Williams to reaffirm his commitment to the strict division between the aesthetic and political realms. Rather than reconnecting the poem to life, as Nardi called on him to do, he creates an “interpenetration” between art and life. Shaken from his encounter with the falls at the close of Paterson 2, Dr. Paterson seeks “a reverberation / not of the falls but of its rumor” (97). That is, he turns to material “disconnected from life.” This is explicit in Williams’s early notes for Paterson 3, where he writes that Dr. Paterson “seeks an interpretation of the Falls” at the library. But as he reads, these

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interpretations produce the same problem he confronted at the park (Notes on Paterson 3). Old newspaper files, to find—­a child burned in a field, no language. Tried, aflame to crawl under a fence to go home. So be it. Two others, boy and girl, clasped in each other’s arms (clasped also by the water) So be it. Drowned wordless in the canal. So be it. The Paterson Cricket Club, 1896. A woman lobbyist. So be it. Two local millionaires—­moved away. So be it. Another Indian rock shelter found—­a bone awl. So be it. The old Rogers Locomotive Works. So be it. Shield us from loneliness. So be it. The mind reels, starts back amazed from the reading . So be it. (Paterson 98)

The newspaper files present the tragic next to the mundane: dead children next to millionaires, the apparent novelty of “a woman lobbyist” next to an old factory, a Cricket Club and a bone awl. The failure of language that was central to Paterson 2 is replaced with language’s disappearance. Now there is “no language” with which to respond to “a child burned in a field.” The refrain “So be it,” which punctuates most of Paterson 3, is Dr. Paterson’s refusal to comment on the events in the files: he will not devote any more language to them. Soon Dr. Paterson’s “mind begins to drift” (100). He turns to the “Beautiful Thing,” a patient he treated in one of the city’s wealthy homes.15 The reason she needs a doctor is never given, but the passage implies that she was the victim of assault, kidnapping, and rape: “the guys from Paterson / beat up / the guys from Newark and told / them to stay the hell out / . . . then / socked [her] one / across the nose”; then “they maled / and femaled [her] jealously” for three days (127–28). Dr. Paterson treats her in her home, shown to her basement room by “the Lady of the House.” When he arrives in her room, he discovers that the Beautiful Thing sleeps “by the laundry tubs” (125). The implied wealth of “the Lady of the House” and

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the Beautiful Thing’s proximity to the laundry indicates that she is most likely a maid or servant.16 In her room, she has only a “damp bed” covered by a “dirty sheet.” The basement contains only two small “mud plashed” windows and is permeated by a “furnace odor” (125–26). She shows the doctor her legs, “scarred (as a child) / by the whip” (126). Dr. Paterson is moved by the Beautiful Thing, comparing her to the mythical Persephone and promising, “[i]t’s all for you” (126–27).17 Ann Mikkelsen reads the appearance of the Beautiful Thing as “surprising, potentially offensive, and yet reflective of Williams’s insistence upon disturbing settled aesthetic and social concepts of purity, value, and truth.” She aligns it with Williams’s desire to represent the United States by presenting those figures that exist at its margins, “people traditionally isolated by their gender, race, or sexual orientation” (68), a group of characters from the poem that would include the Beautiful Thing, Corydon, Sam Patch, Peter the Dwarf, Mrs. Cummings, Klaus Ehrens, and the dancing immigrant in the park. But the Beautiful Thing’s other form in the poem, as “a dark flame, / a wind, a flood” (Paterson 100), show that Williams is after more than inclusion.18 The progressive politics that seem to underlie Williams’s addition of these figures, however, is somewhat tainted by his presentation of female characters. The very metaphysics of Paterson, in which the female element is Garrett Mountain, “upon whose body Paterson instructs his thoughts,” renders the feminine inert, associating it with dumb nature that waits for the male presence to enliven it. Like the “female to the city,” the feminine principle of the New World is associated with nature, while the masculine principle represents civilization (Paterson 43).19 It would be incorrect, however, to dismiss the Beautiful Thing as simply another example of Williams’s outdated politics. I contend that her dual role as marginalized figure and destructive force implicitly critiques the representation of other female figures in both Paterson and In the American Grain. The long description of the fire’s path through downtown Paterson places the Beautiful Thing at the center of social life. She is the force of destruction—­one that the “poet” who watches the fire cannot control—­granting her much greater agency than he has given any other character in Paterson.20 At the same time, her centrality to social life and literature prefigures important contemporary critiques of capitalism from the perspective of both economics and identity.

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This dizzying sequence begins with a passage from a ­three-­volume history of Paterson describing how a “small blaze . . got suddenly out of control” so that “the whole city was doomed” (116). The first part of the sequence mirrors the earlier verses about the newspaper files. Papers (consumed) scattered to the winds. Black. The ink burned white, metal white. So be it. Come overall beauty. Come soon. So be it. A dust between the fingers. So be it. Come tatterdemalion futility. Win through. So be it. So be it. (117)

The “so be it” refrain takes on a new valence in this passage. Rather than indicating Dr. Paterson’s resignation in the face of history, here it seems to be part of a spell: “Come overall beauty”; “[c]ome tatterdemalion futility”; “[c]ome soon.” “So be it” no longer signifies acceptance of the past; it now signifies an attempt to bring about a specific kind of future. The “poet” continues to describe the fire, becoming very impressed with his rendering of “a bottle, mauled / by the flames, b ­ elly-­bent with laughter: / yellow, green” (118). He goes on, equating the lines about the bottle to a second fire: . . . The glass splotched with concentric rainbows of cold fire that the fire has bequeathed there as it cools, its flame defied—­the flame that wrapped the glass deflowered, reflowered there by the flame: a second flame, surpassing heat . (118–19)

The fire “deflowered” the bottle; the poet, by describing it, “reflower[s] it,” thereby defying and surpassing the flame. The poet taunts the fire: Hell’s fire. Fire. Sit your horny ass down. What’s your game? Beat you at your own game, Fire. Outlast you: Poet Beats Fire at Its Own Game! The bottle!

74   chapter two the bottle! the bottle! the bottle! I give you the bottle! What’s burning now, Fire?

The punch line is delivered after a stanza break: The Library? (119)

As the fire destroys the library, Dr. Paterson realizes that the blaze is another version of the redeeming language he has been seeking. He compares it to the Passaic Falls: “the waterfall of the / flames, a cataract reversed” because like the falls, it transcends language (121). How shall I find examples? Some boy who drove a ­bull-­dozer through the barrage at Iwo Jima and turned it and drove back making a path for the others— Voiceless, his action gracing a flame —but lost, lost because there is no way to link the syllables anew to imprison him (121)

The fire becomes a medium of representation for things that cannot otherwise be represented. The poet then calls for the destruction of the library so that we can “read: not the flames / but the ruin left / by the conflagration” (123). In calling for the destruction of the library, he explicitly evokes the Beautiful Thing as both the justification for and the cause of its destruction: . . . [T]he pathetic library (that contained, perhaps, not one volume of distinction) must go down also— Because it is silent. It is silent by defect of virtue in that it contains nothing of you That which should be rare, is trash; because it contains

the all-over poem   75 nothing of you. They spit on you, literally, but without you, nothing. The library is muffled and dead But you are the dream of dead men Beautiful Thing! (123)

The library must be destroyed because it is evidence that the Beautiful Thing has been excluded from social life, the suppression of the source which the Puritans initiated and which has been reinforced throughout American history. The justification for this destruction is that the library, without the presence of the Beautiful Thing, is silent: the volumes (“not one . . . of distinction”) are defective because they do not include her. Dr. Paterson sees and understands that without her, “nothing.” At stake in this sequence, I argue, is the question of value—­both social and literary. We saw already that Mikkelsen reads Williams’s inclusion of marginalized figures as “reflective of Williams’s insistence upon disturbing settled aesthetic and social concepts of purity, value, and truth” (68). If we follow Mikkelsen’s insight, then we see how the Library sequence accords with the Hamilton/Ehrens sequence from Paterson 2; both are concerned with the creation and maintenance of systems of value. In Paterson 2, the systems were monetary and religious, respectively, but here Williams takes on the production of social and aesthetic value. His insight in Paterson 3 is that social and aesthetic values are founded on the exclusion of a particular set of figures who are, in fact, essential to value’s production. Linda Kinnahan’s groundbreaking study of Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser, Poetics of the Feminine, points to a moment in American Grain where Williams makes this explicit. Contrary to most readings of Williams’s portrayal of women, Kinnahan reads the relative absence of female figures in Williams’s work as evidence of his interest in “the process through which ­male-­authored cultural texts define and regulate the feminine” (106–7). In American Grain, Kinnahan argues, the female presence functions as a disruptive element that challenges and, in some cases, undoes the patriarchal authority of the Puritans. She draws our attention to one disturbing image:

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Do you know that the old ­town-­records in Massachusetts show few men without two and many with as many as seven wives? Not at all uncommon to have had five. How? The first ones died shooting children against the wilderness like cannon balls. (American Grain 179)

Kinnahan explains, With his doctor’s eye, Williams reads woman’s experience into the New England records of marriages and deaths . . . and from this perspective he condemns the Puritan rationale for reproduction. Reduced to “shooting children against the wilderness like cannonballs” .  .  . the Puritan women find their sexuality defined by male need; their material capacity to create is valued by men primarily as a tool in conquering the wilderness. Their bodies become sites of weapons production. (112)

Kinnahan demonstrates that Williams recognizes a fundamental aspect of gender inequality: the reproductive labor of women goes radically undervalued. In this, we can productively link Williams with an important thread of Marxist feminist criticism that points to capitalism’s complicity in the creation and maintenance of the binary system of gender. Critiques of capitalism’s undervaluation of “women’s work” have been central to feminist interventions into Marxism for a long time. New work, most notably by Roswitha Scholz and the authors of Endnotes, demonstrates how capitalism has created and enforced the gender binary. For these authors, gender “is the anchoring of a certain group of individuals in a specific sphere of social activities” (Endnotes).21 Confining certain gendered individuals to an unpaid sphere of production—­that is, the sphere of social reproduction—­enables paid production to take place. Kinnahan’s apt, but nonetheless horrifying, metaphor of women’s bodies as “sites of weapons production” aligns with my reading of the Beautiful Thing. Women are integral to the reproduction of labor, actually producing and then maintaining the worker’s body. The subordination of “women’s work” to a sphere of unpaid labor produced, reinforced, and integrated gender and racial difference into the DNA of capitalism. It also performs a magic trick. The labor done by women—­whether the labor of childbearing, ­child-­rearing, or homemaking—­reproduces the commodity of labor power. From the perspective of the capitalist, who be-

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lieves reproductive labor to be fundamentally different from the productive labor he extracts from his workers, labor power is reproduced at little (or no) cost to him. From the perspective of the members of the sphere of reproductive labor, which would include the Beautiful Thing, this labor does have a cost, one that is taken out of their bodies. According to Kinnahan, Williams objects to this because it misunderstands a “maternal capacity to create” (Kinnahan 112). In contrast, I argue that Williams doesn’t object to the misapplication of creative power, but rather its ­mis-­valuation: without women, nothing. This, then, is why Williams calls the Beautiful Thing the dream of dead men: she represents the creation of value ex nihilo. To put the argument in Marxist terms, the Beautiful Thing’s domestic labor is the capitalist mystification of the labor process as a whole. In the first volume of Capital, Marx explains how a ­“would-­be capitalist,” new to the ­yarn-­spinning game, is shocked that, after buying ten pounds of raw cotton (ten shillings), employing a spinner to convert the cotton into yarn (three shillings), and analyzing his machinery’s depreciation (two shillings), the cost of producing yarn is identical to the cost of buying it prefabricated (291). He “stares in astonishment” and wonders if he would have been better off “playing ducks and drakes” than investing in manufacturing (297, 298). But suddenly, he has a revelation: the three shillings he paid his worker for six hours of labor required to produce ten pounds of yarn sustains the worker for a whole day. There is no reason not have the worker spin for eight or ten or twelve hours at the same cost. From the capitalist’s perspective, value appears ex nihilo. He is able to pay his spinner the same three shillings to spin twenty pounds of cotton, doubling his productive capacity and generating profit for the first time. The spinner’s labor and the capitalist’s calculations of it undergo incredible scrutiny in these pages. What Marx ignores—­just as the capitalist initially ignored the real source of profit—­is the labor that goes into the reproduction of the laborer. As Silvia Federici notes, this is a surprising gap in Marx’s work: “while he meticulously explored the dynamics of yarn production and capitalist valorization, he was succinct when tackling the question of reproductive work, reducing it to the workers’ consumption of the commodities their wages can buy and the work the production of these commodities requires” and thereby omitting the role domestic labor plays in the labor process (Revolution 93). Marx too participates in the dream of

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value ex nihilo—“the dream / of dead men”—in that he does not see the labor that sustains the laborer when he is not on the factory floor.22 This recourse to Marx also explains why Williams isn’t satisfied with mere inclusion. In the climax of Paterson 3, he instead calls for destruction: the library “must go down” (123). And it is the “Beautiful thing! aflame . / a defiance of authority” that brings it down (119). Williams doesn’t intend to expand the system of “social and aesthetic value” to include the Beautiful Thing but to destroy the system. Williams has now accomplished this destruction both on the level of form, with the invention of the new measure, and on the level of content. And, in Paterson 4, he continues this experimentation by introducing explicitly political material into the poem: the paean to Social Credit that dominates the second section of that book. This section has been largely ignored by the critical tradition around the long poem. Hugh Kenner, who reviewed the edition collecting the first four books of Paterson in the August 1952 issue of Poetry, completely effaces the Social Credit material, describing the middle section of Paterson 4 as “devoted to the heroism of the Curies” (“With the Bare Hands” 282). What attention it has received is almost always negative. Joseph Riddell explains that Paterson 4 has been subject to “the most consistent critical disapprobation” of all the sections of the poem (237). Joel Conarroe calls the sequence the “least successful poetic unit in the book” and compares it to “Pound at his most dispensable” (127, 117). Along the same lines, Louis Martz writes that the “highly Poundian diatribe” is “composed in something like Pound’s broken ­multi-­cultural style . . . all this ending with an overt echo of Pound’s unmistakable epistolary style” (83). Of course, since scholars have been able to study the manuscripts, we learned that much of this section isn’t an imitation of Pound but Ol’ Ez himself: Williams included multiple excerpts from his letters in the last three books of Paterson. Most critics who have taken up this section have justified its inclusion with recourse to Williams’s personal politics. Benjamin Sankey writes that the reader should take the Social Credit material “pretty seriously” because it corresponds to the “version of [Social Credit Williams took] as the basis for his critique of the present system” (189, 190). In similar terms, Conarroe argues that economics was “a subject about which Williams felt strongly, and since the sequence reveals the man and his world so thoroughly, containing evidences of his most passionately

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held convictions, it would be incomplete without this material” (Conarroe 130). But as we saw in “Revolutions (Re)valued,” Williams understands the political and poetic as separate realms. So, while it’s true that Williams supported the American version of Social Credit, the structure of Paterson 4 reveals that he remained committed to the strict separation of the aesthetic and political realms. Unpublished notes for this section indicate that Williams believed that the Social Credit material, when integrated in the poem, would become poetical. Both it and the radium material have “a literary meaning,” corresponding to “the splitting of the foot.”23 That is, this middle section of Paterson 4 is an exploration of a ­three-­part analogy: the discovery of radium, the political potential of Social Credit, and Williams’s development of the new measure. He makes the analogy between radium and credit explicitly: Money: Uranium (bound to be lead) throws out the fire . —the radium’s the credit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Money sequestered enriches avarice, makes poverty: the direct cause of disaster . while the leak drips Let out the fire, let the wind go! Release the Gamma rays that cure the cancer . the cancer, usury. Let credit out . out from between the bars before the bank windows (181–82)

The analogy depends on the formal identity between radium and credit, which is found in their method of discovery. Williams explains, “Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.” In the case of Curie, it is a “dissonance / in the valence of Uranium” that prompted her to “to dissect away / the block and leave / a separate metal” (175).24 For the Social Credit movement, the dissonance was in the price of a product when compared to its manufacturing costs. Sloganized as the A + B theorem, founder C. H. Douglas divided manufacturing costs into what he called real costs (A, which consists of raw material, plant, and labor) and bank costs (B,

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which consists of the interest payments, fees, and so on levied by the lending institution).25 According to Douglas, the portion of the price that goes to the A column is recirculated in the economy, while the portion of the price in the B column is left in the vault—­or, as Williams puts it, “[m]oney sequestered” behind “the bank windows” (Paterson 181–82). The seeming dissonance between the cost of manufacturing and cost for consumers led Douglas to the discovery of the A + B theorem. Likewise, Williams discovered the new measure thanks to his own investigation of dissonance: the dissonance between contemporary life and traditional poetic forms, which corresponds to the more foundational dissonance between the spirit of the New World and its articulation in American culture. Indeed, when we examine the final three pages of the ­radium-­credit section, we see that Williams presents the Social Credit material in such a way that he encourages readers to question the proposed reforms. For example, having compared credit to the Parthenon and money to “the gold entrusted to Phideas for the / statue of Pallas Athena, that he ‘put aside’ / for private purposes,” Williams concludes, “You can’t steal credit.” The next line, however, undoes the distinction between gold and credit: “let’s skip any reference, at this time, to the Elgin marbles” (183). Perhaps you can’t steal credit, but you can steal its products. Williams hedges, indicating that while Social Credit might cure some economic ills, it is by no means a c­ ure-­all. Further, the section has a number of examples of Williams’s familiar word play. In one multivalent passage, he writes: “Money : Joke / could be wiped out / at stroke / of pen / and was when / gold and pound were / devalued” (184). The historical reference here is to the financial shock, experienced in the United Kingdom, when the gold standard was reinstated in 1925, which devalued the pound sterling. “Pound” has a second meaning, though, referring also to the “devaluation” of Ezra Pound, which left him imprisoned in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for thirteen years. (Notes in the Yale archives indicate that Williams originally considered capitalizing “Pound” in these lines.) But this too is ambivalent: while Pound certainly had been “devalued” by the American government, he was highly valued in literary circles, having won the Bollingen Prize in 1949, just two years before Paterson 4 was published. The passage as a whole suggests that the work of wiping out money has already been done, slyly attributing it both to the devastating monetary policies in the United Kingdom during the interwar years and to

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Pound’s tireless (one is tempted to write “incessant”) efforts to inform his readers, Williams included, about monetary theory. Further, when Williams returns to the economic motif in Paterson 5, he seems to do so for the express purpose of clarifying its original appearance. A long excerpt from one of Pound’s letters begins, “Is there anything in Ac Bul 2 / vide enc that seems cloudy to you, or INComprehensible . . . ?” (Paterson 215). The letter goes on to discuss economics in the vein that readers of Pound will be familiar with: anyone who does not see the sense of his proposals is an idiot (“The hardest thing to discover is WHY someone else, apparently not an ape or a Roosevelt cannot understand something as simple as 2 plus 2 makes four”), a criminal (“Soddy got interested and started to study ‘economics’ and found out what they offered him wasn’t economics but banditry”), or a ­war-­monger (“Wars are made to make debt, and the late one started by the ambulating dunghill FDR . . . has been amply successful”) (216, spaced periods in original). There are two things—­beyond Pound’s economics—­ about the letter that are “incomprehensible.” The first is that, without the benefit of the full title of the enclosed text (“Ac Bul 2”), it isn’t possible for the reader to make any judgment about its clarity. The second is the letter’s placement: wedged between a translation of Sappho and a dedication to “a woman in our town,” Pound’s economic missive feels completely out of place (216). The fact that it is the only mention of economics in Paterson 5 and is presented in a letter set off from the rest of the text indicates that Williams felt readers did not sufficiently understand the purpose of its presence in Paterson 4. The Social Credit material does not serve a political purpose but is subordinated to the aesthetic material, serving as an elaboration of the potential of the new measure.

Coda: A Writer Need Not Write New Texts26 My recourse to Paterson 5 introduced a new problem. The reading of Paterson 1–4 I presented depends on the idea that Williams produces radical equality through the elimination of hierarchy. On the level of content, he does this most clearly through his destruction of the library, which is the symbol of a false system of values; on the level of form, he does this through the new measure, an “even” way of producing value in the poetic line. But the radical equality produced in Paterson 1–4 depends on Wil-

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liams’s transformation of elements of the world into elements of the poem. Such a transformation of material from antipoetic to poetic entails a radical inequality between the world and the poem. The Social Credit material is a perfect example of this: once it appears in Paterson 4, it ceases to be propaganda and instead becomes an explication of Williams’s aesthetic principles. Williams is able to maintain the strict separation between world and poem because Paterson 1–4 functions as a unified whole. Although his notes for each book do indicate some major restructuring as he wrote, the final form of the first four books closely follows the outline he provided in Paterson 1. There, on the page before the preface, he writes, “a local pride; spring, summer, fall and the sea” (2). And, indeed, the four books of Paterson match this description. All are, of course, about Paterson. When we leave New Jersey for Corydon’s Manhattan apartment in Paterson 4, the city arrives with us in the figure of Phyllis, the masseuse. Paterson 1, spring, begins with an image of birth: the city is “a nine months’ wonder” (4); Paterson 2, summer, takes place on a lazy Sunday in the park; Paterson 3 retreats indoors in preparation for winter; and Paterson 4 brings us to the sea. To further produce unity, Williams frames the book with images of the Passaic Falls. In Paterson 1, it serves as a metaphor for Dr. Paterson’s thoughts: Jostled as are the waters approaching the brink, his thoughts interlace, repel and cut under, rise ­rock-­thwarted and turn aside but forever strain forward—­or strike an eddy and whirl, marked by a leaf or curdy spume (7–8)

In Paterson 4, the eddying and whirling motion of the waterfall will signify our departure from Paterson, the forward motion of the waterfall replaced by its descent to the sea: This is the blast the eternal close the spiral the final somersault the end. (202)

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The opening and closing images of the waterfall create a formal unity among the four books, which is reiterated throughout. In Paterson 3 and 4, the books that perhaps deviate the most from exploring the “local pride” of New Jersey, Williams draws our attention back to the unity of the whole. In Paterson 3, Dr. Paterson’s immersion in the library books pulls him away from Paterson and toward the sea: O Thalassa, Thalassa! the lash and hiss of water The sea! How near it was to them! Soon! Too soon . (102)

The section foreshadows Paterson 4, and “Thalassa, Thalassa!” will become a refrain in the final section of the poem. But here, still in Paterson 3, it is “too soon” to go to the sea. When he turns to the scientific and economic material that makes up so much of Paterson 4, he chastises himself: “(What I miss, said your mother, is the poetry, the pure poem / of the first parts . )” and, in the opening lines of the final section, “Haven’t you forgot your virgin purpose, / the language?” (171, 186). Williams’s use of foreshadowing and commentary reinforces the notion that the poem is a unified piece. Seven years after Paterson 4 was published, however, Williams brought out Paterson 5. In the opening lines, he comments upon his return: In old age the mind casts off rebelliously an eagle from its crag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It is early . . . the song of the fox sparrow reawakening the world

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of Paterson —its rocks and streams frail tho it is from their long winter sleep (205)

Written in a variation of the ­then-­canonical triadic line, the opening lines both correspond to and disrupt the unity of the original four books. On one hand, the “long winter sleep” matches the original outline of the book. According to this structure, then, we are back at the beginning—­in spring, with the world “reawakening.” On the other, Williams describes this return as “rebellious,” indicating that the poet is defying some authority by revisiting the city and the poem. In a letter to his publisher New Directions regarding Paterson 5, Williams wrote that he was compelled to return to Paterson because he had “been forced to recognize that there can be no end to such a story.” He goes on that he “wanted to keep it whole” and “fondly” hopes for “a unity directly continuous with the Paterson of Pat. 1 to 4” (Paterson xv). The description offered in this letter produces a new aesthetic challenge for the long poem. His desire that the poem, when completed, will be “whole” and produce “a unity” contradicts his realization that “there can be no end.” One way to read Paterson 5 is as I have done so far, which is as an explication of the first four sections. The return to the economic motif is meant to clarify its position within the poem; and the ekphrases of The Unicorn Tapestries and The Adoration of the Magi can be read as an ekphrasis of the metrical innovation enacted in Paterson 1–4. But, by returning to Paterson to clarify Paterson’s aesthetic project, Williams breaks open the frame that kept the first four books separate from the world. If we understand Paterson 5 as a commentary on Paterson 1–4, we must understand that relationship as hierarchical. Paterson 5 surely shares the other books’ theory of a radical equality made possible within the aesthetic realm, but, because it is subordinated to the other four books by virtue of its explanatory intention, it introduces hierarchy into the poem. In his return to Paterson in 1958, Williams destroys the fragile separation between the world and the poem upon which the utopic expression of the poem depends. But in its failure, Paterson 5 is instructive. What is evident in reading it with and against the aesthetic unity of Paterson 1–5 is the fragility of the aes-

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thetic frame, which underlines the limited equality available in the world of the poem. Williams uses the new measure as a foundation on which to rebuild our systems of valuation. It is a “moral and aesthetic” response to the “material and political” effects of the establishment of the American empire. The United States’ Puritanical founders tried to blockade themselves from the spirit of the New World, the promise of abundance for all, and keep its riches for themselves. Recognizing that the United States was attaining unprecedented global power, Williams wanted the nation not only to live up to its promises but also to avoid repeating the same mistakes. But Paterson 5 reveals the fragility of this equality, which in Williams’s time—­as in our own—­is available only in the aesthetic realm. This recognition, then, is a final way in which the new measure is commensurate with the modern world: it is premised on equality but radically limited in its scope. It also begins to point to the limits of the lyric form; even a radical reinvention of its basic system of emphasis can reach only to the edges of the page and no further. Unlike Pound, who believed his “poem including history” would actually come to shape history, Williams recognized the limited influence of the lyric poem. While it allowed him to retell the history of the United States in a way that uncovered its foundational mistake, the lyric poem could not allow him to correct that mistake in the world. This challenge—­ how the aesthetic relates to the political and material world from which it is created—­will animate the rest of this text.

3 Dido’s Secret the atlantic slave trade and the limits of lyric

M. NourbeSe Philip constructed her 2008 poem Zong! out of the language of Gregson v. Gilbert, the Court of King’s Bench decision regarding a 1783 civil suit brought by the owners of a slave ship against their insurance company. Two years earlier, sailors aboard the Gregson family’s slave ship Zong threw 130 captive Africans into the sea. Following the massacre, the ­slave ­traders submitted a claim to their insurance company to cover the lost (human) cargo. Their insurers rejected the claim, as the insured property, which in this instance refers to more than a hundred men, women, and children, was intentionally destroyed. That is as far as the ­agreed-­upon facts of the case take us. A sick captain, a disgraced colonial governor, and a first mate unwilling to show his face in court all make it virtually impossible to know for sure what happened in the days leading up to the massacre. Fortunately for the justices, the court faced a much simpler question: must Gilbert pay for cargo that is intentionally jettisoned? This is an insurance case, after all, so it falls into the dry and dull corner of the law devoted to contracts. But insurance contracts, it turns out, are rather lyrical things. They assign value to objects before their sale can be valorized in the market. Like the lyric poem, insurance contracts act as if they can bend time. Months before the Zong was set to deliver its cargo to the slave block in Jamaica, the Gregson family predicted their returns: they would get at least thirty pounds for each person they sold. Valuing commodities before they were even in their possession, the Gregsons took future worth as present reality. But this folding of time is conditional: the thirty pounds per head

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that Gilbert agreed to cover would be paid out only if something prevented the sale of the captive Africans. Had the Zong delivered all its cargo to Jamaica, the Gregsons may well have earned an average of thirty pounds for each enslaved person sold. They might also have found a bull market and claimed up to f­ orty-­five pounds per person. A poor market might have left them in the red. (And, indeed, Gilbert’s lawyers argued that this calculation was the prime motive behind the massacre: the crew realized the owners would make more money from the insurance payout than the auction block.1) Insurance contracts protect current abundance against potential calamity, eliding the narrative cause and effect that would move the captured Africans across the Atlantic and to slavery in the New World. In the second section of Zong!, Philip draws out this strange temporality: underwriters of perils necessity & mortality of soon only & afterwards of was and not . . . (54)

The work of insurance—­protection against “perils / necessity / & / mortality”—appears paratactically next to a strange temporality—“soon / only & / afterwards.” While “soon” and “afterwards” make the future appear, “only” sets the limits of the contract. It can create value “only” “afterwards,” specifically after a certain set of events have occurred: “only” in the case of “perils / necessity / & / mortality.” Therefore, it is only after those perils that we are compelled to speak of the property as “was” and “not”: while the insurance contract is oriented to future value, its realization takes place only once the insured object ceases to be. In Ian Baucom’s essential Specters of the Atlantic, he argues that temporal distortions like these were central to the slave trade’s economic logic.

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Indeed, the financial instrument at the center of the triangular trade—­the bill of exchange—­depended on assuming future profit in the present. As he explains, when a s­lave-­trader’s agent arrived at market, he would “sell the captives (by auction, parcel, scramble, or other means) and then, after deducting his commission, ‘remit’ the proceeds of the sale in the form of ­interest-­bearing bill of exchange” (61). The bill functioned as a promise that the agent would return the proceeds of the sale plus interest to the ship’s owner in a given amount of time, usually between one and three years. Baucom explains the entailments of this arrangement: The Caribbean or American factor [sales agent] had thus not so much sold the slaves on behalf of their Liverpool “owners” as borrowed an amount equivalent to the sales proceeds from the Liverpool merchants and agreed to repay that amount with interest. The Liverpool businessmen invested in the trade had . . . transformed what looked like a simple trade in commodities to a trade in loans. . . . The slaves were thus treated not only as a type of commodity but as a type of ­interest-­bearing money.2 (61)

Thus, the Gregson family’s profits from the Zong’s voyage did not come just from the price the captives brought at market but also from the interest garnered through the bill of exchange they signed with their agent, Captain Luke Collingwood. This arrangement allowed the Liverpudlian capitalists to regularize their profits. Rather than waiting for intermittent payments that might be delayed by bad weather, a weak market, and the occasional massacre, merchant families like the Gregsons established a system whereby they could expect consistent returns on their investments. The bill of exchange and the insurance contract, Baucom explains, reverse “the protocols of value creation proper to commodity capital,” in which value is realized at the time of the sale. He goes on, Such value exists not because a purchase has been made and goods exchanged but because two or more parties have agreed to believe in it. Exchange, here, does not create value, it retrospectively confirms it, offers belated evidence to what already exists. . . . The value [of the Zong] existed the moment the insurance contract was signed. (17)

And this brings us to Baucom’s central point: in important ways, the financial logic that founded the slave trade remains central to the economy. The

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“reversal of the protocols of value creation” also describes the financial instruments central to the meltdown of the American housing market in the ­run-­up to the 2008 financial crisis, a fate foretold by the financial turn the US economy took in response to the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. This chapter offers snapshots of two moments of crisis in the US imperial project: first, in the midst of what Arrighi would call the signal crisis, the moment at which the imperial center shifts its focus from production to finance. At this time, the contradictions at the heart of the US project—­ the very ones Williams identified and for which he believed the triadic line could provide some kind of aesthetic solution—­were being expressed socially, politically, and economically. The gap between the state’s posture as the global protector of freedom and the facts at home, including the persistence of Jim Crow, the disastrous Vietnam War, and a nation with more than half its residents living in or hovering just above the poverty line, became suddenly visible. It was becoming clear that the center simply could not hold. The second snapshot comes just as the 2008 housing crash was unfolding, which, like the signal crisis, gets its shape from the contradiction on which the US empire was founded.3 The legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining practices had long denied black residents the benefits of home ownership. The development of sophisticated financial products that made these loans profitable fueled the market for subprime mortgages, which were made disproportionately to people and families of color.4 That the greatest social upheaval we’ve experienced in the t­wenty-­first century has been another wave of urban uprisings in response to the continued mistreatment of Americans of color at the (various) hands of the state should come as no surprise. Repetition structures the decline of imperial power, and there is little doubt that we are in midst of the United States’ terminal crisis. The two poets who appear in this chapter—­Amiri Baraka and M. NourbeSe Philip—­use the lyric form to uncover the structures of these twinned crises. In doing so, they reveal the limits of the form, a discovery befitting two moments in which the limits of American ideology are so clearly on display. The two Baraka plays span the signal crisis: written in 1967, Slave Ship identifies racism as the prime mover of both the slave trade and resistance to the Civil Rights movement; The Motion of History, written after the 1973 oil crisis and in the midst of the United States’ turn toward

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financialization, incorporates a critique of capitalism into its retelling of the history of American racism. Philip’s Zong! contains more history than either of Baraka’s sweeping pageants, connecting the Atlantic slave trade both to contemporary American racism and to the foundations of the Roman empire. She does so by upending the l­yric-­epic structure I have so far described. In Zong! the victims are denied the lyric voice but find refuge in epic tropes. While the atemporal, nonnarrative structure of lyric allowed Pound to make historical moments once again present in hopes of founding a new imperial order, that same power traps Baraka’s attempts to imagine the kind of revolution that could break the cycle. While Williams saw the space of lyric as a ground on which to construct the egalitarian society he believed the founding of the US had promised, Philip finds in it a form that already belongs to the voices of empire.

Badder Dan Nat Amiri Baraka promised the audiences who attended his “Revolutionary Theatre” “actual explosions and actual brutality” (“Revolutionary” 6). “[W]hen the final curtain goes down,” he wrote, “brains are splattered over the seats and the floor.” This violent aesthetic, Baraka argues, is nothing more than realism: it “must show what the facts are.” In contrast, bourgeois theatre “shows tired white lives, and the problems of eating white sugar, or else it herds bigcaboosed blondes onto huge stages in rhinestones and makes believe they are dancing or singing.” The falseness of bourgeois theatre corresponds to “the spiritual values of this unholy society, which sends young crackers all over the world blowing off colored people’s heads.” The Revolutionary Theatre is the theater of “World Spirit”; it opposes the values of bourgeois theatre and the society that produces it with “Force. Spirit. Feeling.” The theatrical project is, explicitly, political: Our theatre will show victims so that their brothers in the audience will be better able to understand that they are the brothers of victims, and that they themselves are victims. .  .  . [W]hat we show must cause the blood to rush, so that p ­ re-­revolutionary temperaments will be bathed in this blood, and it will cause their deepest souls to move, and they find themselves tensed and clenched, even ready to die, at what the soul has been taught. (2)

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Just as the events depicted onstage correspond to the “actual brutality” of the facts offstage, the performance’s events will correspond to a spiritual awakening among viewers that will motivate revolutionary action. “Revolutionary Theatre” specifically references three of Baraka’s plays—­ The Dutchman, The Toilet, and The Slave. But none of these culminate with “brains . . . splattered over the seats.” That is not to say that those plays are not violent: The Dutchman ends with a white woman murdering a black man on the subway and preparing to murder another; The Toilet closes with a brutal fistfight between two lovers; and The Slave’s domestic drama takes place against the background of a race war. But the violence in these plays remains onstage. It is not until Slave Ship: An Historical Pageant, first performed at the Spirit House Theatre (Newark) in 1967, that Baraka produces a play that ends with “actual brutality.” Slave Ship presents the history of black oppression in the United States in three interconnected sections, covering the Middle Passage, slavery, and the Civil Rights movement. The cast list names only two characters, the Old Tom Slave and New Tom (Preacher); both roles were performed by the same actor. The rest of the characters simply appear unnamed, as, for example, “1st Woman (Prayer)” or “2nd Man (Curser)” (131). For the most part, each actor performs in each section of the play, encouraging viewers to identify the violence that enslaved people endured in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the violence of the late 1960s. Ultimately, Slave Ship argues that all black Americans—­the characters, the performers, and the audience members—­remain subject to a specific form of racialized violence. Baraka’s stage directions call for the use of innovative design elements to bolster the audience’s identification with the events onstage. For example, the opening description sets the tone: Whole theater in darkness. Dark. For a long time. Just dark. Occasional sound, like ship groaning, squeaking, rocking. Sea smells. In the dark. Keep the people in the dark, and gradually the odors of the sea, and the sounds of the sea, and sounds of the ship, creep up. Burn incense, but make a significant, almost stifling, smell come up. Pee. Shit. Death. Life processes going on anyway. Eating. These smells and cries, the slash and tear of the lash, in a total atmosfeeling, gotten some way. (132)

Before the performance begins, Baraka fills the theater with an “atmosfeeling” designed to approximate the smells and sounds of a slave ship.

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Drums come in and then “the hideous screams,” all while the theater sits in complete darkness (132). The screams continue but begin to take a loosely narrative shape: women’s voices begin to call out names; one woman tries to calm her child, Moshake. A male voice quiets her. There is now “dim light” on the set, but no actors appear. The drums become “walls and floors being beaten”; the audience hears chains and whips; they get the “[f]eeling of people moving around, tumbling over each other” (134). The confusion continues—­more screams, more drums, more chains, more whips. The lights “flash on white men in sailor suits. . . . The white men begin to laugh and point, as if they were pointing at the filth, misery, and degradation of the Black People.” The lights go down again; the audience hears the captives “try to tear the chains out of the walls” (135). A woman is raped; a man tries to defend her. Another woman finds the child Moshake and her mother dead: “[s]he strangled herself with the chain. Choked the child” (136). The action rises until the theater is filled with “all mad sounds together,” soon replaced with the sound of the captives “trying to stay alive, and now, over it, the constant crazy laughter of the sailors” (137). This remarkable opening sequence attempts to reproduce the experience of the Middle Passage. Audience members, like the captives, are kept in the dark—­both literally and figuratively—­as they are prevented from seeing and comprehending the actions that take place in the theater. Slave Ship accomplishes this through its “atmosfeeling,” the combination of sound, smell, and occasional sight that is meant to produce the sensations, but not the narrative, of the Middle Passage. At the same time, Baraka presents a condensed version of the play’s larger argument: black oppression has been organized by racist whites, who take joy in the suffering they cause. Throughout Slave Ship, Baraka returns to these experimental techniques to drive home this point about the continuity of racial violence and suffering. In the middle section, Nat Turner’s revolution is put down after the Old Tom Slave trades information about the rebellion for an extra pork chop. Baraka returns to the experimental use of lighting and sound to dramatize the failed revolt: “Screams now, as soon as the lights go down . . . Gunshots, combination of slave ship and break up of the revolt. Voices of master and slaves in combat” (140). The “combination of slave ship and break up of the revolt” adds another piece to Baraka’s historical argument. White violence

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in Slave Ship is continuous: the slave ship’s brutality is the same as slavery’s brutality and, as we shall see in the next section, the same as the Civil Rights era’s brutality. The third and final section opens on the New Tom (Preacher), played by the same actor as Old Tom Slave in the middle section. He turns away from his congregation and addresses the disembodied voice of white power: Yasss, we understand . . . the problem. And, personally, I think some agreement can be reached. We will be nonviolenk. . . to the last . . . because we understand the dignity of Pruty McBonk and the Greasy Ghost. Of course diddy rip to bink, of vout juice. And penguins would do the same. I have a trauma that the gold sewers won’t integrate. (142, ellipses in original)

Despite the nonsense references to “Pruty McBonk,” “the Greasy Ghost,” and possibly sympathetic penguins, it’s clear that the preacher represents Civil Rights leaders who called for nonviolence in response to segregation. This monologue signals Baraka’s opinion of such moderate politics, but he deepens the critique in the next moment. A woman offstage starts screaming for Moshake: the same screams that came just before a mother murdered her child in the slave ship’s hold. After her screams have subsided, a man enters, carrying the corpse of a child. But the corpse does not belong to Moshake; it is “from a b ­ lown-­up church” (142). Baraka once again connects the violence of the Middle Passage with the violence of the 1960s. The appearance of the corpse—­which both is and is not the body of the child strangled during the Middle Passage, both is and is not the body of one of the children killed in Birmingham in 1963—is emblematic of the primary narrative technique Baraka uses to connect the three sections of the play. Rather than presenting slavery and the present as distinct, Baraka makes them interchangeable: the violence motivated by race hatred that destroys black lives in 1967 is the same violence that destroyed them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Stefan Brecht wrote in a review of a 1970 production of the play, Slave Ship argues that its black audiences are “still on that boat” (218). The body is placed at the preacher’s feet, but he refuses to acknowledge it. Instead, he “tries to push the baby’s body behind him [with his foot], grinning, and jeffing, all the time, showing teeth, and being ‘dignified.’ ”

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He starts speaking to the white voice again: “We Kneegrows are ready to integrate” (142). His betrayal sparks a revolution: the other black characters “merge on him and kill him daid” before hunting down the o ­ ff-­stage source of the voice of white power (145). The sequence argues that integration is possible only if both historical and contemporary violence are ignored. It thereby calls into question the claim that black suffering is produced solely by white hatred: the preacher proves that the white figures aren’t the only ones willing to see black people suffer. While the preacher does not share the sailors’ or overseers’ delight at the suffering of black people, he does grin and jeff while pushing the baby’s body behind him. Further, because the same actor portrays both the preacher and the slave who betrays Turner, Baraka tempts the audience to conflate their motivations. Admittedly, there is no difference for the victims whether their betrayer was motivated by ­race-­hatred, starvation, or anything else. But this does matter for the historical argument Baraka seemed to be making. If, up until this point, the explanation offered for the oppression of black subjects was pure hatred, the Tom character’s behavior in the second and third sections calls that into question, positing greed, hunger, or bad strategy as possible explanations for the betrayal. As such, the murder of the black preacher reveals that the end of Slave Ship isn’t race war; rather, it is a war against those—­white and black—­who would not assist in the liberation of black US citizens. Following the revolution, the audience is encouraged to participate in an emancipatory celebration. The stage directions read, “Lights come up abruptly, and people on stage begin to dance, same hip Boogalooyoruba, fingerpop, skate, monkey, dog . . . Enter audience; get members of audience to dance. To same music Rise up. Turns into an actual party” (145, ellipsis in original). The characters’ celebration becomes the audience’s celebration, bringing the happy resolution of Slave Ship off the stage and into the theatre. But this happiness ends abruptly: “When the party reaches some loose improvisation . . . audience relaxed, somebody throws the preacher’s head into center of floor, that is, after dancing starts for real. Then black” (145, ellipsis added). No production I’ve found record of or seen video of follows this stage direction. This is a shame, because, at least on my reading, the preacher’s decapitated head interrupting the “actual party” with “actual brutality” is the whole point of Slave Ship, if not the Revolutionary

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Theatre: without this, no “brains . . . splattered over seats.” And while the prop head may break the o ­ ne-­to-­one correspondence between the “facts” on- and offstage that Baraka hoped to produce, it nevertheless aims to show its audiences precisely what black liberation will look like. The violence of this play likely indexes Baraka’s own political position, which developed quickly in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the time of writing Slave Ship, Baraka had just left the Village for Harlem, where he became a leading figure in black nationalist arts. In “The Black Arts Movement: Its Meaning and Potential” (1994), Baraka reflects on this heady time, when he and a number of likeminded artists established the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School (BARTS) on 130th Street. There, he writes, “[w]e linked the common Eurocentric distortion of Black Arts as an evil magic, as a mystic pursuit. . . . We had long before understood the twisted racism of Europe and America when referring to Black. That everything Black was bad. But we was Bad; in fact, we was trying to get Badder dan Nat” (“Black Arts” 27). At BARTS, [t]here were cultural nationalists of all persuasions. Left Right & Centrist. Some as radicals, some as progressives, some as revolutionaries, some as political Black, some as m ­ ystical-­spiritual Black. Some as P ­ ick-­Up-­The-­Gun Blacks, most as ­Hate-­Whitey Blacks. We had the most unity on that, that being Black meant despising as openly as possible All White People, Groucho or Karl. (28)

Baraka attributes this intense feeling of hatred toward white people to most of the leaders’ petit bourgeois backgrounds. Many of the BARTS founders lived and worked in integrated spaces, separating them in some fundamental way from black culture. He relates his and his cofounders’ ideological intensity to Frantz Fanon’s theory of native intellectuals: [T]he native intellectuals . . . have become so integrated into the petty bourgeois superstructure and even the marginal social life of the oppressor nation that when we first receive that degree of ­self-­consciousness that makes us aware of how deeply we have joined with our own oppressors, even taking up the philosophies of our own inferiorization, we are deeply mortified. Fanon says such intellectuals next become blacker than Black, or Super Af-

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rican, to cover and dismiss their double consciousness. . . . I think there is very obviously some of this overcompensation in some of the interior and public manifestations of the Black Arts Movement. Fanon also said that if such intellectuals continue to struggle in the ­day-­to-­day practical revolutionary movement, then there is a chance that they might become authentic revolutionaries rather than compensating poseurs. (24–25)

The Motion of History seems to represent such a transition in Baraka’s thinking, from “blacker than Black” and “badder dan Nat” to what he believed was a more “authentic” position. In a 1978 interview, he explains how far he has moved from his cultural nationalist perspective, describing how he now views the arguments he made in 1963’s Blues People: The bourgeois nationalist poet would react against Greek mythology and praise Yoruba myth, for example, but if you analyze their economic bases you find they come out of the same thing: slave society and feudal society. What the bourgeois nationalist doesn’t understand is that African slave society is no better than European slave society. The masses are slaves in both. . . . The error I made [in Blues People] is trying to make African slavery seem more humanistic. Slavery is slavery. (Benston 313)

This change is obvious throughout The Motion of History. Rather than calling for a ­black-­led uprising against anyone, white or black, who would oppose liberation, the play ends with the formation of a multiracial “new Communist Party, guided by the science of revolution, M ­ arxism-­Leninism, Mao ­Tse-­tung Thought” (121). P ­ ro-­integration Civil Rights leaders—­most notably Martin Luther King, Jr.—appear not as obstacles to black liberations but as heroes to the new movement. While the historical subject of Slave Ship was the black population, the historical subject of The Motion of History is all oppressed people, regardless of race. Though these political perspectives are radically different, the later play still relies on the experimental techniques to collapse time, uses audience participation to spark political action, and closes with an ambivalent ending. The most experimental element of The Motion of History is Baraka’s integration of film into the production. The play opens with “[o]ne big rebellion film,” where images of “Third World struggling against imperialism, colonialism, ­neo-­colonialism, hegemonism” are played next to “work-

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ers battling police [in the west], the oppressed nationalities, black people prominently, getting smashed and bashed but fighting back” (21). After the film plays for a while, the two main characters—­initially identified only as “Black Dude” and “White Dude”—enter and stick their heads through holes in the projection screen. They “barely turn their heads” to look at the rebellion film (21). Until midway through the fourth and final act, these characters have very little of their own plot. As Black and White Dude watch, the first three acts of the play lay out Motion of History’s key argument: the architects of American capitalism have carefully worked to foment racism, especially among poor whites, in order to maintain their elite positions. One long sequence in Act 2 lays out this claim from the perspective of white Americans. Colin Leckett and Luke Trayvor, two ­middle-­class employees of the aptly named Man River Textiles, play cards with Curtis Rose and Wally Reese, two poor whites whose ancestors once worked as overseers on the Trayvor family plantation. Though ostensibly there to “have some cards, some ginnin, and some good talk” (32), Leckett quickly suggests that Rose and Reese might want to join his “movement to make this country finally a heaven for every white man” (34). The two poorer men are interested, but suspicious, and continue to highlight class rather than racial difference. When Leckett promises that all white men will “live in style,” Reese counters that Trayvor’s wealth “takes more than a buncha pennies. Luke, you got all this from your father before ye, and him from his father. You all had a thousand niggers humpin their ass off for all this” (33). Rose picks up the thread: From one father to the other father down to you, Luke. Yet my father was there with you all. Stride for stride under the same damn hot sun. In fact, we run the niggers for you. We helt the bastards down so they’d work steada running off or murderin you. Made em bring that goddamn cotton up out the ground, and strip the branches bare. (34)

Class difference comes out more subtly as well. When discussion moves to the Korean War, Reese says he “[a]lmost got [his] head blowed off a couple dozen times,” and Rose replies “Told ya the Navy was to see the world, not get buried under six feet of it.” When he asks where Leckett and Trayvor served, Trayvor explains he “had to stay back here an make certain the cotton kept rollin in off the farms,” and Leckett proudly shows off his reserves

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card (36). But Leckett and Trayvor steer the conversation away from the clear class difference between the two pairs and toward the possibility of black families getting ahead of poor whites. The scene abruptly cuts, and we turn to a brief interlude where Francis Lewis Cardoza, the first black person elected to statewide position in the US after he became secretary of state of South Carolina in 1868,5 opens a new public school. Cardoza begins the dedication: “[W]e know that this school will teach us how slavery died, why it died, and how a free people rose to claim their freedom” (38). But soon, it’s unclear whether this speech is taking place in the nineteenth or the twentieth century: “Douglass told us Lincoln gave us the sword to assist in saving the nation and Johnson had to give us the ballot if we were going to save ourselves” (38). When the action returns to the four white men, they now appear in silhouette, and it’s clear the play has moved back in time. Leckett opens the scene by explicating, “It’s seven years they been ruling here. The reconstruction of slaves as masters and masters as slaves. The North crushin us down under the niggers’ savage feet” (39). Rose objects more quickly this time: “We couldn’t vote before either, leastways not me and W.R. here. Didn’t have no school either till them niggers got to rootin around like they was somebody.” Leckett promises that “there’s enough for us to share. There enough for all white men.” “Like before the war,” Trayvor explains. Rose isn’t sold: “what the hell did we have before the war?” (40). Despite Rose and Reese’s initial resistance, Leckett and Trayvor eventually win them over with promises of “Arcadia, the land of nobility and tradition,” “redemption of the South,” and “power. New power” (42, 43). This sequence highlights the key argument of the first half of the play: the powerful, no matter when they hold power, elevate poor whites just enough to give them reason to oppress people of color. While Slave Ship had posited white racism as the driving motor of black suffering, The Motion of History posits this—­the division of the poor into races—­as the guiding force behind American history. These themes repeat throughout the play, as Baraka presents a litany of failed rebellions, each echoing the previous. Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) establishes two patterns that will mark each event: first, these are multiclass and multiracial alliances. Bacon wins the crowd over by appealing to its shared humanity: “like you I am a human being. . . . And I will not let this country become what England is, what Europe is” (48). Gabriel Prosser proclaims

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that his revolt “is open to all who hate slavery and injustice,” invoking the slogan of the French Revolution and promising to spare any Frenchman in Richmond (64). John Brown declares that his attack on Harper’s Ferry “will be the first blow against the hated slavery, the sign to all the peoples that love freedom that there is a sword which truth has” (73).6 And while each rebellion begins with the same noble promises, it falls apart for the same reason: one or more participants’ inability to see beyond the individual to the collective. In 1676, Admiral Thomas Grantham, who arrived to put down the rebellion at the behest of ­then-­governor William Berkeley, promised that all white people who had participated in the revolt “will be given review of their debts and no man amongst you will fear for perpetual servitude” (55). He likewise promises “no retribution” to the African slaves (55). A number of rebels—­the stage directions specify “mostly white, but some blacks”—accept his offer, and the rebellion folds. In Richmond, 1880, a slave betrays Gabriel Prosser’s rebellion because, he explains, “I want to save your life, because you’ve been kind to me” (64). A slave tells his master about Denmark Vesey’s uprising because he’s “got good sense” (67). These scenes present a bleak picture of revolution: though idealistically organized, people’s individualism will always win out over the collective. While this repetition plays and replays at the level of the people, Baraka also highlights the structure of the elite’s response to these uprisings. Following Bacon’s failed rebellion, Grantham realizes: If slavery is to be workable at all then no whites must be enslavable. . . . If we try to yoke black and white together they’ll rise together. . . . I say import more blacks, more black slaves, and relieve all the whites from debtor’s servitude. Then use the whites to enslave the blacks. Use the ­ex-­debtors, vagrants, the lower classes of Englishmen to be the overseers, the guards, the gendarmes for the blacks. . . .That way we have created a new place for the poor Englishmen here in the new world. A new world, a new place, we’ll make them the keepers of the blacks. They’ll be free, and, haha, white. And in place of this constant rebellion, we’ll have a social peace. (57–58) 7

By replacing class alliance with racial alliance, these architects of both Southern slavery and American racism create a permanent underclass of whites unlikely to rebel thanks to an even more permanent, and even more oppressed, class of black slaves.

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Act 4 returns to the present day. In initial productions, this final act was preceded by audience discussion, in which Baraka relied on plants to introduce socialist ideas into the conversation. One was meant to say, “[t]he future of America is in the hands of the people. But it’s more and more clear that the only change will come from violent revolution. To end Capitalism and build Socialism.” Another, “we keep seeing how the negative ­ruling-­class forces were always very clearly aware that they had to keep ­working-­class people divided along national and racial lines.” A footnote explains that this practice—­both interrupting the action of the play and relying on plants—­was abandoned after a few performances (75). It’s worth pausing to note how audience participation in Motion of History is different from the techniques used in Slave Ship. The earlier play aimed for identification: using unnamed archetypes, it worked to enroll the audience in the action of the play so that its members would join in loose celebration at the end. The audience discussion in Motion of History better suits this play, which Baraka called a “theater of ideas” (Benston 315).8 Act 4 is a rush of ideas, a fast tide of history. It depicts the dissolution of CPUSA (1944) and the sharecroppers’ union (1936), Rob Williams’s ejection from the NAACP for calling for black s­elf-­defense against the Klan (1959), the Birmingham Church bombing (1963), the assassination of Malcolm X (1965), followed quickly by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), the arrest of Rap Brown (1969), the murder of Fred Hampton by the Chicago Police (1968), and, finally, the October Revolution (1917). This unrelenting stream of violence and revolution finally pushes Black Dude and White Dude out of their roles as spectators. They decide to return to their homes, “go to the root!” as Black Dude says, then meet again a year later to tell each other what they’ve learned (105). At this stage, the play turns into a rather straightforward narrative: Black Dude, whose name is revealed as Lenny, forms a discussion group with other black people from his hometown. Their first selection is Dialectical and Historical Materialism by Joseph Stalin. White Dude (Richie) gets a job at an auto plant, where he convinces his coworkers to collectively confront the boss about a ­speed-­up on the factory line.9 In the final scene, the two men meet back up at a radical congress. They greet each other, assessing what the other has accomplished. Richie greets Lenny, “I know you’re in the Revo-

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lutionary Peoples Union, hear about you all in Gary, jamming U. S. Steel.”10 Lenny replies, “And I heard about you all in D.C. moving the workers to boo Humpty Dumpty Humphrey” (120). They break their discussion to hear Juanita Martinez launch the “new Communist Party, guided by the science of revolution, M ­ arxism-­Leninism-­Mao ­Tse-­tung Thought” (121). The play closes with her cries: “FORWARD TO THE PARTY!” “LONG LIVE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION” (122). Though incredibly stirring—­I can think of more than a few colleagues and comrades who would delight to sit through this ­four-­hour long production—­it’s hard not to read the end of the play ambivalently. Martinez highlights the party’s work leading up to its launch, explaining that they have “sunk deep roots among the masses of working people in the factories and communities” and “done practical work around the burning issues of our day” (121), but the play doesn’t make a strong case that this attempt at revolution will be any different from the previous, failed rebellions that the play has so far depicted. In this, The Motion of History reveals the limit of lyrical engagements with history. The more or less total rejection of narrative in favor of lyrical interludes that juxtapose a series of hopeful rebellions and crushing defeats makes it difficult to read the final moments as triumphant. Instead, the lyrical staging invites the audience to append their own endings to the play, in which these very radicals are separated by the same forces that broke up Bacon’s, Prosser’s, Turner’s, and Telemaque’s uprisings. And, unfortunately, that is precisely what has happened: the radical politics of black, Puerto Rican, feminist, and gay liberation that began to develop in the 1960s and 1970s were largely channeled into a moribund Democratic Party that has moved increasingly to the right. The poverty rate among black families in the US has fallen less since 1968 than it did between 1959 and 1968; it still doubles that of white families. Puerto Rico remains a colony, so mismanaged that three thousand people lost their lives to Hurricane Maria, thirty times more than the number of people who died in Hurricane Harvey. While most of the media attention around women’s rights has focused on the Supreme Court, especially recently during the highly contentious confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh, Roe v. Wade has more or less been overturned in many parts of the country, where draconian laws have closed clinics in all but the most urban and progressive areas. The radical demands

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of the Stonewall Riot, which was also a protest of police brutality, were sanitized into a battle for marriage equality. Though Baraka proclaimed a progressive view of history in 1978—“the motion of society and humanity is always onward and upward”—it’s hard to imagine that he would stage such a hopeful ending to his play in 2018 (Benston 309). The persistence of these trends makes it possible to discuss a poem about slavery published ­thirty-­plus years after The Motion of History without providing much historical detail to note the changing context. If part of the point of Slave Ship was to make audience members feel as though they were “still on that boat,” part of the point of this chapter is to remind readers that we are still waiting to move forward to the party.

The Me in Become; the Law in Os Zong! wrestles with a different set of lyrical limits. Less prescriptive than Baraka, Philip doesn’t try to present a solution to the legacy of slavery but rather to define its structure. To accomplish this, she situates slavery in a matrix of economic, legal, and social forces that not only describes the conditions of possibility for the Atlantic slave trade but also reveals the continuity between the foundations of European society and the present. She assigns the lyric voice to a sailor—­certainly guilty of murder but nevertheless trapped in the economic system that made employment on a slave ship his only option—­and reserves the epic voice for the victims, particularly Sade, whom the sailor renames Dido. This structure reveals the limits of the lyric form as a political tool, showing it to be, as Philip describes Gregson v. Gilbert itself, “already contaminated” (199). The contamination Philip identifies in the case comes from the limits of the law itself. In “Notanda,” the author’s note accompanying Zong!, Philip explains, The basic tool in the study of law is case analysis. This process requires a careful sifting of the reported case to find the kernel of the legal principle at the heart of the decision—­the ratio decidendi or simply the ratio. Having isolated that, all other opinion becomes obiter dicta, informally referred to as dicta. (199)

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The ratio in Gregson is whether or not killing the slaves was justified. The Gregson family held that their captain had authorized the murders to preserve the lives of crew and surviving captives, while Gilbert’s side argued that the massacre was a fraud designed to salvage thirty pounds a head against a bear market. The judges had to decide which version seemed more plausible. As three of the justices write, “[i]t has been decided, whether wisely or unwisely is not now the question, that a portion of our ­fellow-­creatures may become the subject of property. This, therefore, was a throwing overboard of goods” (211, emphasis added). The narrow ratio of Gregson v. Gilbert—­ the one “kernel” of law, which relates only to the jettisoning of cargo—­ cannot take the dicta, the 130 murdered people, into account. Thus, the only question on which the justices can render a decision is whether there was “sufficient necessity . . . [for] throwing the negroes overboard” (210). Philip situates her poem in the tension between the ratio and dicta. She uses the decision’s words as source material, eventually breaking the official vocabulary open to find Arabic, Fon, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, Shona, Twi, West Africa Patois, and Yoruba secreted within, presenting readers with a counterlanguage that hides in the center of the case, thereby uncovering an alternate history of the Atlantic slave trade that connects it to both the British and American empires. The language and history hidden within Gregson v. Gilbert provide a different vantage point from which to see not only the story of the Zong and the Atlantic slave trade but also the way that imperial power, up to our present moment, is founded on a murderous secret. Philip explains that she was limited to “a language already contaminated, possibly irrevocably and fatally” (199). An early poem, “Zong #9,” demonstrates the problem by taking up the visual style of an account ledger to reflect the actuarial logic by which murder is transformed into profit. But, as Erin Fehskens explains in “Accounts Unpaid, Accounts Untold: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and the Catalogue,” while the poem plays “with the form of exchange or equivalence,” “the content . . . refuses” (417). Contained in the two irreconcilable columns of “Zong #9” is the legal rationale underlying Gregson v. Gilbert and the formal method by which Philip will disrupt it.

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destroyed

slaves to the order in the circumstance in

fact subject creature underwriter negro in want in vessel in provisions die become (17–18)

the property in the subject in the loss in to the fellow in the sustenance the arrived the weight the suffered in the me in

Sections of “Zong #9” speak directly to the legal arguments of the case, repeating Lord Mansfield’s language. In the decision, he concluded, There is no evidence of the ship being foul and leaky, and that certainly was not the cause of the delay. There is weight, also, in the circumstance of the throwing overboard of the negroes after the rain (if the fact be so), for which, upon the evidence, there appears to have been no necessity. (211)

Already, we see how Philip will use Gregson v. Gilbert to produce her own history of the massacre. In “Zong #9,” “weight” is a measure, referring to how much water was onboard. But, in the decision, Mansfield uses “weight” to describe a preponderance of the evidence, specifically the fact that the

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massacre continued after the water stores were replenished. The “already contaminated” language also already has the potential to produce two different perspectives on the case. Other sections speak to larger questions about the massacre and the slave trade in general (“the arrived / in vessel,” “the subject in / creature,” “the fellow in / negro,” “the suffered in / die”), already expanding the world of the poem beyond the narrow ratio the justices considered. But the final couplet of the poem, in which Philip highlights “the me in / become” discloses the formal method of the other five sections, in which Philip will fully reconstruct the story out of the limited account offered by Gregson v. Gilbert, demonstrating that the case contains potential disruptions within it. As I shall argue, Zong! is interested in a very specific lyrical disruption into the historical record. The version proposed by “Zong #9” is personal and ethical: Philip finding “the me” in Gregson v. Gilbert means situating the present individual in the context of the past, but Philip largely rejects this account of her project.11 In “Notunda,” she describes being startled by a Ewe elder’s observation that “[n]one of [her] ancestors could have been among those thrown overboard. . . . If that were the case, he continues, [she] would not be there.” (Philip’s daughter reminds her that this isn’t precisely true: any one of the murdered captives might have had a surviving child or sibling on board.) Philip admits that, until that point, she had “never entertained the thought that [she] may have had a personal connection to the Zong,” revealing that she ultimately isn’t interested in appearing in the poem (202). Instead, the connection she has with the Zong case comes through language. A lawyer as well as a poet, Philip recognizes Gregson v. Gilbert’s poetics: she writes, “Law and poetry both share an inexorable concern with language—­the ‘right’ use of the ‘right’ words, phrases, or even marks of punctuation; precision of expression is the goal shared by both” (191). But, at the same time, she also writes, I deeply distrust this tool I work with—­language. It is a distrust rooted in certain historical events that are all of a piece with the events that took place on the Zong. The language in which those events took place promulgated the ­non-­being of African peoples, and I distrust its order, which hides disorder; its logic hiding the illogic and its rationality, which is simultaneously irrational. (197)

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Philip understands legal language’s orderliness as superficial, masking a more fundamental irrationality. This helps explain why Philip stops using Gregson v. Gilbert as a word bank and begins to split open the words to find a new language, as in this section: skim bodie s for

the sea the law

us os in

for in

ius in

in bone . . . (87)

The command to “skim the sea for / bodies,” which relates to Philip’s desire to bring back the bones of the dead for a proper memorial, turns into the imperative that we “skim the sea for / . . . the law.” Finding the law at work in the case is, however, opposed to finding the bodies: the question of what insurance moneys would be owed to the ship’s owners would not be an issue if it were a murder case. But, as she goes on, the poem will find “the law” in “ius,” “us,” and “os.” Unlike “the me in become,” none of the letters of “law” can be found in ius, us, and os. But ius is, of course, Latin for law, duty, or right; it’s where we get our word “justice.”12 Ius is then transformed into “us,” then “os,” Latin for bone. The linguistic transformations move from law to the bodies, implicating “us” in between. When Philip departs from the vocabulary of Gregson v. Gilbert and begins to use the letters, rather than the words, of the decision as the source material for the poem, the original constraint set by the word bank disappears. Gregson v. Gilbert includes all the letters of the alphabet, so Philip could have produced any number of works of art: Zong!, Baraka’s Slave Ship, and The Motion of History are all hidden in Gregson v. Gilbert. Likewise, Zong! contains material unrelated or opposed to it. We can find the complete Gossip Girl series as well as both versions of Birth of a Nation there as well. The raw materials for every text written in the Roman alphabet are available. So, as it turns out, no formal constraints govern the poem. There is, however, constraint on the level of content: Philip still uses Gregson v. Gilbert to produce a poem about the Zong massacre. This choice presents a different kind of poetic challenge than the one captured by finding “the me in become,” which describes a hunt for a personal connection between the decision, the massacre, and the present. Instead Zong! is after the structure that authorized the massacre and subsequent trial. To accomplish this, Phil-

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ip deploys recognizable lyric and epic tropes that reveal the Atlantic slave trade’s governing logic.

An Age of Lust In the introduction, I argued that epic poetry belongs to history’s winners, and the lyric form has become a refuge for their victims, those denied a place in stories of imperial triumph. Throughout Zong!, Philip plays on these associations, deploying both lyric and epic forms to depict the slave trade’s relationship to empire and to implicate both genres in this bloody history. She lends the lyric voice to an unnamed sailor, who relates the events on board to his fiancée, Ruth; her name often appears next to its source word from Gregson v. Gilbert: truth. Philip herself notes the irony of telling this story through the words of “someone who appears to be white, male, and European,” writing that it “presents [her] with a powerful example of how our language . . . is often . . . preselected for us” (204, 205). Indeed, despite lyric’s association with those who have fallen out of history, it has nevertheless been long dominated by “white, male, and European” speakers, radically narrowing our understanding of who can play the role of the lyric I.13 As such, even though the sailor has less power than the “captain pope & king” he blames for the massacre, he is not a victim: he’s the direct perpetrator of the violence of the slave trade (Zong! 90). As Philip takes up this normative lyric voice, she uses it to interrogate the connection between the lyric speaker and personhood. Throughout the poem, the sailor participates in a number of traditionally lyric tropes. The letters home to Ruth are ultimately apostrophes, what Jonathan Culler has called a “triangulated address—­address to the reader by means of address to something or someone else—­is . . . the ­root-­form of presentation for lyric” (Theory 186). In his letters, the sailor tells Ruth what their life will be like once he returns home: the e den of

our gar den you

and I ruth will have stag s

boar s &

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carp in the river doves there

will be dogs

fish

& grouse

owls & pigs . . . (103)

tit s pea hen s too no

As if borrowed straight from Marlowe, the sailor promises Ruth a life of natural abundance.14 The sailor’s pastoral fantasy and his use of apostrophe link him to the history of lyric, granting him a recognizable subject position. But Philip undermines the connection between the lyric persona and subjectivity by stripping the sailor of his individuality. The sailor appears interchangeable with many of his shipmates, as when he introduces himself: “my name is / ted is dave is jon is tim is / alf is piet is peter / ishansistomisjim / issamisroyisdonisned” (122). Nor do his letters home separate him from the other men aboard. All of them write to “the women who wait” (186): hans writes i ask piet

for your hand peter writes to miss clara

ted to miss tara

um

asif to

jon roy & ned tom tim (89)

Philip also uses letter writing to link the sailor to one of the massacre’s victims, Wale, who implores our narrator, “you / take / pen you / write / to / my sade” (89). But even this specificity, in which each man has a woman to write to, disappears when the sailor appears to be writing a letter to all these women: the

truth ru

th cl air ro se

ev ee

va

dido’s secret   109 cla

ra sa ra co

ra ma ry etc (95)

Previewing the fragmentation that will come to dominate the poem, this section reads “the truth ruth, clair, rose, eve, eva, clara, sara, cora, mary, etc.” Breaking the names up produces the occasional recognizable word—­ air, ma—­but mostly turns the names of these women who wait for their men to return from the sea into songlike syllables. The fragmentation undoes some of the personhood granted to these figures by naming them. Philip refuses to individuate the sailor from his comrades, turning his lyric voice into a structural position within the slave trade. Indeed, she makes a point of revealing the material conditions that led the men to join up with the Zong. Early in the poem, she explains how two of the men came on board: . . . a short a slave ship

stint on a ship was the lad s desire

just shy of seven tunes to lure

teen there were for a man from sane

to mad there and bile

he died . . .

were perils pus (116)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ned s story no more than eleven when he ran a way to sea not that far from the lisp of ma ma pa pa he too had heard of a seam of gold so broad & so wide in an age of lust what are we to do but lust (117)

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The stories are very similar, revealing that each man left home at a young age to seek “for / tunes,” a share of “a seam / of gold so / broad & so / wide.” Importantly, neither succeeds: the first finds only “perils pus and bile”; the second is trapped in “an age of lust” that is never satisfied. The similarities between the sailors that Philip highlights delinks the lyric form from personhood, instead positioning the dominant lyric voice as one part of the labor force necessary to keep the slave trade running. At key moments, the sailor uses his relatively underprivileged position to shift the blame for the massacre onto others. In one stunning section, he so muddles his narration of the events that it isn’t clear whether the sailors or the ocean killed the captives: . . . water carries

a ship yet drown s a man is not red

wine eats meat

yet turn s to

on bones turn s bone into sand (116)

The fragmentation in these lines produces two simultaneous readings that merge the ocean with “a man.” The subject of the first clause is clear: “water carries a ship yet drowns a man.” But the rest of this section could apply to “water” or “a man.” The clause “is not red yet” just as plausibly describes the sea before the massacre as it does “a man,” red either from drunkenness or sunburn. The clause after it doesn’t dispel our confusion, either. “[T]urns to wine” could refer to the sea or the man: the ­wine-­red sea, reminding us of Homer, or a man who “turns to wine” to ease his conscience. When we get to “eats meat on bone,” we might feel confident that “a man” has assumed the subject position. But even that isn’t entirely sure, as the sea—­full of the sharks that regularly followed slave ships—­could be said to have eaten “meat on bone.” The uncertainty regarding the subject of the sentence disperses the action. While we know the massacre is being described, it isn’t clear if it’s the man or the sea made red from it, whether the man is eating dinner or the captives are being consumed by the sea. The speaker refuses to claim the actions as his own. While this section carefully evades the question of responsibility, the next section shifts the blame to the state: “were we u / sed dupes all to king & state to pope” (116). Here, he holds the p ­ owers-­that-­be accountable, attempting to absolve himself of responsibility. We saw in Gregson v. Gilbert

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that some of the justices believed that the insurance agency was the victim of a dishonest shipping company. Here, the sailor tries to make the same move, aligning himself with the captives he drowned and occupying the position of victim. This is slyly captured in the fragmentation of the first line of the quote when, as if speaking to the captives, he writes “were we u.” These admonishments of the ruling class run throughout the poem. The sailor insists that “m lord / says the law / is never / wrong can never / sin” (88). He repeats to himself that “i am / gods agent here on earth our rule is / just” (117). Despite his attempts to appear sympathetic, as another victim aboard the Zong—­he explains, at one point, that “there be / no free on / board” (86)—the sailor fully understands the economic system he participates in, hoping eventually to become a ­slave ­trader (and ­slave ­owner) himself. For example, he adds two elements to the pastoral fantasy he describes to Ruth: “he / negroes &she / negroes,” indicating that the Eden he will retire to will be worked by slaves (103). Indeed, throughout the poem, he connects his future wealth to the slave trade: “i want a / hat of / fur for you / ruth shine the / negroes for sale” (86); “so we can li / ve in ease so you can li / ve in great ease figs and oranges hot bu / ns tea a secret race so a / lien to all we hold dear” (166). These sections present lyric poetry as deeply connected to, and in fact enabled by, the slave trade, illustrating Philip’s contention that the language she uses is “already contaminated” (199). The sailor also aligns himself with the ruling class he tries to blame for the massacre. In “Ventus,” the poem’s third movement, the sailor takes on the roles of king and pope in response to Wale’s request for a letter to Sade. Rather than fulfill Wale’s request, the sailor decides to “play a ruse on / him.” Just before Wale is introduced, the sailor refers to “a / queen / once now / my / whore to the crew / too” (88). Later, the sailor explains that he “won” her in a card game: “an / ace / of spades the deuce it was that / got me her forty days nights forty times forty” (107). The sailor realizes that the woman he has raped is married to Wale, so decides to stage a play in which he marries Sade: i say act scene my part is

set bring me my

cape my

112   chapter three mask my past clap clap i play

captain pope

&

king i

play god

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . do you take this negro to be y our slave . . . (90)

In this perversion of a wedding scene, the sailor plays two parts: on the one hand, he must become “captain / pope & / king” to enact the ruse for Wale’s benefit; on the other, the fake marriage aligns him with the victim of his trick, Sade’s husband. Philip’s presentation of the sailor throughout Zong! plays with lyric conventions to grant him a tenuous personhood: each time he speaks, he realizes that if he attempts to assert his individuality, he will take blame for the massacre, so he consistently rejects his agency in the events aboard the Zong. Meanwhile, the appearance of other sailors, often indistinguishable from the main speaker, further calls the subjectivity of the lyric I into question. Philip puts this into greater relief by reserving epic tropes for the captives, most explicitly Wale and Sade.

Snap the Spine of Time Playing off the notion that the captives become “mere footnotes” in Gregson v. Gilbert, Philip places a list of names under a thin line on each page of “Os.” Fehskens writes that this list of names attempts to correct the slave trade’s logic of deindividuation which “obscure[s] the singularity of each body,” making them available for “the endless substitutability to which they are consigned when valued at ‘30 pounds sterling’ ” (413). The names that appear in “Os,” she continues, “stand as singularities,” returning the captives’ individuality to them (415). She links this technique to the epic poem, arguing:

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We can think about this list of names as a diminished epic catalogue. The epic catalogue attends (in the sense of stretching from one point to another, from one time to another) by imagining its lost components geopolitically; ordering them makes them mean in relation to each other and stretching the audience’s world by attending the catalogue underscores their fundamental absence from the world of the . . . epic singer . . . and his audience. Here, Philip calls on us to attend names, locates them as the structuring underbelly to the skeleton (the “Os”) of her endeavor, and yet disallows us from locating them anywhere but in that Atlantic space. (415–16)

By providing a number of the victims of the massacre with names, Philip makes them present in their absence, forcefully reminding the audience of their position with regard to the case. Indeed, throughout the poem, Philip uses epic tropes not only to give the victims voice but also to uncover the structure of the violence they were subject to. The sailor repeatedly reminds Ruth that his is an “old tale,” and Zong! abounds with references to Homer and Virgil. The “poet of Troy” is evoked throughout the poem (87, 121, 166), and Circe not only appears as a character watching over the events on the ship but is also listed as one of the “women who wait” (186). The sailor renames Sade, calling her Dido, and promises her a life befitting her royal station: . . . sapphire ear rings for you my once my upon a time queen a lace ruff too . . . (112)

Initially, these references seem to offer a contrast between the sailor’s present and the epic past: the old kings and queens appear as foils to the “captain / pope & / king” that structure the sailor’s life. For example, the sailor tells one version of the massacre as a kind of play, inserting stage directions into the poem in italics: “exit the men the king reads then / dozes he holds / s a gold orb in his right /hand” (129); “enter the king he we / ars red robe with a g / old hasp” (130). In one scene, “t / he king makes a dec la / ration of w ar so too the p / ope il doge the laird t / he lord against wa / le and sade” (131–32). Thanks to the sailor’s denunciation of “king & state [and] pope,” this positions Wale and Sade as the protagonists of the story (116). This deepens as the story goes on, and the sailor becomes invested in his captives’ fate:

114   chapter three we cede the is

. . . if les to the kin g of spa in what have we w le and sade hid

here can wa e . . . (132)

The king’s justification for war—“if we cede the isles to the king of Spain, what have we?”—sits next to the nagging question about its effects on the poem’s characters: “where can wale and sade hide?” The recognition of these consequences seems to force the sailor to quickly move away from this line of thought, writing, “let / us have a new act a new s /cene.” He returns to the epic past, to Dido, the Carthaginian queen who fled Tyre and her murderous brother before offering Aeneas and the other Trojan survivors brief respite: . . . so here discove

is dido she red the save

in africa

finds a hid e found s a

city again st ro me . . . (133)

According to the Philippic Histories—­no relation to the author of Zong!— when Dido arrived in North Africa, she tricked a Berber king into giving her enough land to found Carthage. She asked for just as much area as an oxhide could cover; when the king agreed, she cleverly cut it into thin strips and encircled the large area where she would found her city.15 At this point, it seems that the sailor references Dido as a way of escaping thoughts of his king and pope, perhaps returning to a more heroic moment. But he soon explicitly links her to Wale and Sade: . . . wh

ere does di ee to a

do fl frica what do

e she fo y why do

es she ther unds a cit

es did ks a pla cre of ho

o flee she see ce to rest

an a pe in a hide

where is d one to g

ido g round in afri

dido’s secret   115 ca wa

le and sade u sed to li

ve in af

rica did o flees to afric

a seeks a

place to re st an a e in a hi

cre of hop de to f

round a c

ound and g ity . . . (142)

The references to Virgil’s Dido become difficult to separate from the references to Sade/Dido, creating a kind of temporal displacement. Dido is Rome’s opponent, even though she lived and died centuries before the city’s founding; Sade is Dido come again, even further removed from her place in history. By condensing time, so that Dido appears in three different historical periods, Philip argues that the same process that once forced Dido “against Rome” also structures the slave trade. Or, as she puts it, . . . in did

o afric a grafts r

ome to her a s

ecret so se cret . . . (149)

Put together, this highly fragmented section reads, “In Dido, Africa grafts Rome to her, a secret, so secret.” This once again brings David Quint’s Epic and Empire and Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic to the surface. As we saw in the introduction, Jameson reads the inclusion of the Dido romance in the Aeneid as a temporal disruption that produces the identity between the historic winner (Aeneas as founder of Rome) and the historic loser (Aeneas as survivor of Troy). Dido is the “vein of silver” that runs through “imperial gold,” which positions her, as representative of the periphery, in the center of the Roman imperial project, both an obstacle to the new empire and a melancholy reminder of the lost one (Jameson 557). Philip introduces Dido into Zong! to serve a similar purpose, except she reverses the figure’s agency. Rome does not conquer North Africa; Dido “grafts Rome to her,” highlighting how Europe gained dominance thanks to war and plunder in Africa (and Asia and the Americas). By linking the captives to the epic form, she places Wale and Sade at the heart of the British

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imperial project. In Zong!, epic no longer belongs to the victors. Now the victims can claim it, returning to their place at empire’s center. In “Notanda,” Philip extends this argument to include the experience of New World Africans in the twentieth and t­ wenty-­first centuries: The descendants of [the slave trade] appear creatures of the word, apparently brought into ontological being by fiat and by law. The law it was that said we were. Or were not. The fundamental resistance to this, whether or not it was being manifested in the many, many instances of insurrection, was the belief and knowledge that we—­the creatures of fiat and law—­always knew we existed outside of the law—­that law—­and that our b ­ e-­ing was prior in time to fiat, law, and word. Which converted us to property: “pig port field wood bull negroe.” It is a painful irony that today so many of us continue to live, albeit in an entirely different way, either outside of the law, or literally imprisoned within it. (206–7)

Philip here argues that enslaved people always recognized that the law could not simply make them property—­the equivalent of pig, port, field, and wood—­even if they were forced to live under its dictates. While Gregson v. Gilbert could not step beyond the law and recognize the Zong massacre for the murder case it actually represented, Philip connects this historical injustice with the present, in which New World Africans’ lives are still structured by laws that limit the range of people’s existence. It is this continuity, which reaches back to antiquity in order to reveal the structure of our present moment, that reveals the limits of the lyric form. In Zong!, the lyric persona becomes a structural position within a larger network of legal and economic relations, neither victim nor victor. This ambivalence reflects the complex history of the lyric form. While serving as a refuge for the victims of history, it nevertheless remained at the center of elite European cultural life for centuries. As Zong! uncovers lyric’s structural position within a larger network of legal and economic relations, it forces us to reconsider its relationship to narrative temporality. At three separate moments, the sailor claims that the events that took place aboard the Zong occurred “outside of time” or in “a gap in time” (119, 144; 120). These references align with the broad definitions of lyric time outlined in the introduction: the ability of lyric to disrupt, transcend, and escape

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from the forward motion of narrative allows victims’ voices to find refuge within its form. But Philip’s larger historical intervention, which begins in Carthage and runs up to the moment we read her poem, reveals that none of this took place “outside of time.” She documents, simply, history: one damn thing after another. When the sailor writes that he hopes his story will “ri / se up in time to sn / ap the spine of time,” he captures the bind that lyric finds itself in (141). On one hand, it aspires to “snap the spine of time,” replacing the murderous march of history with an atemporal form that can shelter victims from Dido’s time to the present. But to do so, it must “rise up in time,” underlining the lyric form’s close relationship with the cultural, political, and economic structures it nevertheless opposes. And it is this contradiction that the poets who appear in the next chapter must grapple with.

4 The New Stone Age contemporary poets on the beginning of the american empire

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1992) ranges over centuries and continents, bringing together a dozen protagonists whose stories document the colonization of North America. The individual plot threads merge when many of the main characters meet at the International Holistic Healers Convention in Tucson, Arizona. Angelita La Escapía has come as a proxy for Wacah and El Feo, the twin brothers who are leading a group of peaceful revolutionaries on a long march from the mountains of southern Mexico into the United States, where they will reclaim the land stolen by European colonists. But she’s really there to meet a different set of twins: ­weapons-­dealing sisters, Lecha and Zeta. La Escapía is supposed to tell the conference attendees “to be prepared for the changes, welcome the arrival of the people, and send any money they could” (710). While Wacah and El Feo promise that the donations will only go to food because an “the people were protected by the spirits and needed no weapons,” La Escapía disagrees (710). She knows that “[t]he unarmed people would most likely be shot down before they even reached the border” (711). “Angelita heard from spirits too,” the narrator explains, “only her spirits were furious” (712). La Escapía is a revolutionary communist, which has earned some distrust from the brothers and their followers: most of the other Marxists they’ve met—­like Bartolomeo, the Cuban who runs a Freedom School in Mexico City—­excoriate the indigenous people for “their ‘primitive animalistic tribalism,’ which was ‘the whore of nationalism and the dupe of capitalism’ ” (526). But La Escapía sees something different in the Marxist tradition.

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Initially she just “really liked the way Marx talked about Europeans” (313). He “was the first white man La Escapía had ever heard call his own people vampires and monsters” (312). But she also recognized that Marx had taken inspiration from “certain Native American communal societies”: everyone ate or everyone starved together, and no one being stood above another—­all stood side by side—­rock, insect, human being, river, or flower. . . . Marx understood what tribal people had always known: the maker of a thing pressed part of herself or himself into each object made. (519–20)1

For La Escapía, Marxism is at heart an indigenous tradition: the North American tribes recognized the benefits of egalitarian solidarity and the dangers of alienation centuries before the German materialist visited a single textile mill. But her reading of Marx is generous. Volume 1 of Capital’s treatment of primitive accumulation, the process by which the people are dispossessed of their communal land to push them into waged labor as the only means of survival, doesn’t mention the slow march of ­so-­called pioneers across North America. In fact, in his critique of E. G. Wakefield’s England and America (1833), Marx groups white settlers with the indigenous people whose land they’ve stolen. In a colonial situation, Marx explains, “the bulk of the soil is still public property. . . . This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their cancerous affliction—­their resistance to the establishment of capital” (934). Thus, the state must once again enclose the lands held by individual farmers, recreating Europe’s two classes: “the owners of capital and the owners of labour” (Wakefield 18, quoted in Marx 934). This description of the colonial process ignores how “the bulk of the soil” became European “public property” in the first place. Further, he presents state intervention as a renewal of the process of colonization, but it, in fact, represents the final stage in the long dynamic of imperialism.2 In The New Imperialism, David Harvey reminds us that “[d]isplacement of peasant populations and the formation of a landless proletariat has accelerated in countries such as Mexico and India in the last three decades” while “many formerly common property resources, such as water, have been privatized . . . and brought within the capitalist logic of accumulation” (145–46). We needn’t look further than Flint, Michigan, or Standing Rock, South Dakota, to find examples of this ongoing process.

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Perhaps La Escapía forgives Marx this omission because his understanding of history also aligns with indigenous thought, in its form if not its content. He recognizes that the era that began with Columbus’s arrival will end only once the land is returned to the people: For hundreds of years white men had been telling the people of the Americas to forget the past; but now the white man Marx came along and he was telling people to remember. The ­old-­time people had believed the same thing: they must reckon with the past because within it lay seeds of the present and future. (Silko 311)

Almanac in fact opens by establishing how “the ­old-­time people” have a different relationship to time than others, especially Europeans.3 They do not age the same as others: “[t]he ­old-­time people had not gotten old season by season. Suddenly, after ­eighty-­five years, they’d catch the flu later in the winter, and by spring their hair would be almost white” (19). Nor do they experience history in the same way. The Laguna tribe had its three stone idols stolen by an antiquities collector decades before the novel begins, but “seventy years was nothing—­a mere heartbeat” to his tribe’s elders (34). Just as the past stays close to the present, the ­old-­time people don’t worry about when the future will arrive: “Whatever was coming would not necessarily appear right away; it might not arrive for twenty or even a hundred years” (35). The revolutionary movement that is slowly moving north shares this understanding of history: What was coming could not be stopped; the people might join or not; the tribal people of North America could come to the aid of the twins and their followers or they could choose not to help. It made no difference because what was coming was relentless and inevitable; it might require five or ten years of great violence and conflict. It might require a hundred years of spirit voices and simple population growth, but the result would be the same: tribal people would retake the Americas. (711–12)

This description of El Feo and Wacah’s revolutionary movement echoes La Escapía’s explanation of Marxist history: No matter what you or anyone else did, Marx said, history would catch up with you; it was inevitable, it was relentless. The turning, the changing, were inevitable.

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The old people had stories that said much the same, that it was only a matter of time and things European would gradually fade from the American continents. History would catch up with the white man whether the Indians did anything or not. History was the sacred text. The most complete history was the most powerful force. (316)4

The time scale on which Silko presents her story allows readers to understand colonialism as a long process, one that continues into the present. It aims to produce something that approaches a complete history of US imperialism in North America. Such a document—­the actual Almanac of the Dead around which much of Silko’s novel circles—­would surely take a more narrative than lyrical form. The notion that “history would catch up” to the colonizers is, after all, a narrative thought: the gun in the ­long-­ago first act must go off in the story’s final moments. And, indeed, “the most complete history” would by necessity be narrative, in that it would have to transform the long list of “one damn thing after another” into a causal chain with all the connections—­necessary and contingent—­finally elucidated. But “complete” also entails the appearance of all voices, the victors and the victims of history’s various long marches. Throughout this book, I’ve traced the relationship between epic and lyric tropes, arguing that their dialectical arrangement in poems as different from each other as Pound’s Cantos and Philip’s Zong! help us see American imperialism from a new perspective, one that can include both the winners and losers of this historical process. But, as Zong! attests, the lyric space is not reserved for the voices of the dead and dispossessed; others, themselves warriors for or beneficiaries of the violence of empire, can take up the lyric I with as much ease as their victims—­if not more. A total history, then, has implications on the level of content as well as on the level of form. To imagine this kind of document, we have to consider how the form molds the content or, in some cases, allows itself to be molded by that content. In this final chapter, I turn to three contemporary poets, dg nanouk okpik, Douglas Kearney, and Cathy Park Hong, who stretch the lyric voice itself in order to contain history within the form of the poem. Their use of nontraditional poetic speakers—“she/I,” “[it],” and “we,” respectively—­ highlights the constructed nature of the lyric voice, uncovering the role American imperialism has played in its creation.

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As we saw in the introduction, the singular lyric speaker has been a central generic marker of the lyric poem since the Romantic period. But, as Virginia Jackson argues in Dickinson’s Misery, this definition of lyric is a relatively recent phenomenon. What we now think of as lyric—“feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude,” as J. S. Mill had it in 1833—became hegemonic, thanks to the rise of certain modes of circulation invented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Where lyric poems could once be found in “scrolls, manuscript books, song cycles, miscellanies, broadsides, hornbooks, libretti, quartos, chapbooks, recitation manuals, annuals, gift books, newspapers, anthologies,” Jackson writes, they migrated “from the popular press to the classroom” (7, 10). As a result, “the various modes of poetic circulation . . . tended to disappear behind an idealized scene of reading progressively identified with an idealized moment of expression,” culminating “by the middle of the twentieth century . . . in an idea of the lyric as temporally ­self-­present or unmediated” (7, 9). This “idealized moment” separates the lyric form from the context in which it was produced, which would evacuate it of historical content. The experimental lyric voices in this chapter return lyric to the scene of its own making, transforming it to contain a complete history.

Post-Glacial, Postcolonial The central formal feature of dg okpik’s 2012 collection Corpse Whale is her use of “she/I,” a dual first- and t­hird-­person voice that measures the lyric speaker’s distance from her Inuit heritage and Anglo upbringing. Though I do not read Corpse Whale as a confessional text, this persona does invite associations with okpik’s biography. The poet was adopted by an Anglo family in Anchorage, Alaska, as the result of a law that until 1984 required indigenous parents to give up any children they have after five (Jusinski). Throughout the collection, okpik uses the “she/I” form to document the estrangement the speaker feels as a result of this forced separation from her biological family. For example, in “Days of Next Yesterday,” she explains that “[w]hen she/I feel/s the weight of plastered walls, / brick doors closing heavy // windows slamming / she/I like/s to crawl into an igloo,” finding refuge from her Anglo surroundings in an imaginary return to a traditional home (31). But poems like “A Ricochet Harpoon Thrown through Time

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Space” reveal that the speaker has internalized the kind of racism that mandated her adoption. Speaking to her mother, the lyric she/I explains, “You gave her/me away to strangers,” so “she/I belong/s to them now” (89). The speaker says that she has been given away, a false accusation that reveals that she now believes the Anglo discourse that justifies such laws by claiming that indigenous—­and, indeed, black, Latinx, and poor—­families irresponsibly have more children than they can manage, which forces the state to step in “for the sake” of the children rather than for the sake of an ongoing process of assimilation. The speaker’s belief that her mother chose to give her up aligns with these justifications. Okpik’s use of she/I throughout Corpse Whale highlights the violence of these laws, which split the speaker in two, so that one half can no longer recognize the other as the self.5 Despite this pain, the split persona grants the speaker double—­sometimes triple—­vision, allowing her to see the world from multiple, simultaneous perspectives. Indeed, the book is structured around different ways of seeing and interpreting the world. Its twelve sections each bear the English and Inuit word for a month of the year. The familiar English words seem abstract when put next to the more descriptive Inuit phrases. For example, “Nippivik tatqiq,” which appears with November, is translated in the loose glossary as “frozen path to the moon,” and “Paniqsiqsiqsiivik” is glossed as “March moon hanging seals; bleaching caribou skin” (96). Of course, English month names have their own associations and etymologies, which have mostly been lost to speakers as a result of repetition and familiarity. By highlighting the cultural history behind the Inuit language that appears in Corpse Whale, okpik creates a strong contrast between the Anglo and indigenous ways of perceiving the world: the English names are conventional and abstract, while the Inuit names describe natural phenomena and the work of the community. The poems themselves deepen this contrast by strongly associating the English language with scientific dissection while linking the indigenous perspective to family and history. For example, in “Aqavirvik Tatqiq: August,” okpik writes, speckled eider, 82 to 87 percent carbon by weight 12 to 15 percent hydrogen, imagine a sandpiper of

124   chapter four paraffin (her/my mother says) as she/I drift/s away freely. (57)

The speaker’s description of a speckled eider—­more commonly known as a spectacled eider—­as its elemental components is interrupted by her mother’s instruction to “imagine a sandpiper of / paraffin.” The mother’s appearance links the imaginary bird with the speaker’s Inuit heritage, but it is already two degrees of separation away from her. Not only does it exist in the speaker’s imagination, but it’s not even the real thing; it’s a wax facsimile. The lines “82 to 87 / percent carbon by weight” and “of paraffin” both explain a bird’s composition, though the latter describes the object as a whole rather than its constitutive parts. This second bird and no doubt its association with her mother helps the speaker “drift . . . away / freely,” showing a clear preference for that mode of thought. But these different ways of viewing the world aren’t just about preference; in “Ukiuk: Winter” and “Stereoscope,” okpik demonstrates the consequences of the more scientific and deconstructive Anglo perspective. In these two poems, scientific discourses are directly linked to oil extraction and the displacement of indigenous people that was initiated soon after the discovery of these resources. The lyrics contrast Anglo ways of knowing with their material consequences, reversing the dissection and reuniting the parts with the whole as, for example, in “Ukiuk: Winter.” A high place for viewing; a root of a point 2 feet from the left, 71 degrees north, Gateway to the Arctic in the center of the earth a gingko tree is planted. . . .

The speaker names the same location three ways: with coordinates, a proper name, and its place in myth. The latitude points us to Barrow, Alaska—­the poet’s birthplace—­where oil companies have been pulling fuel out of the ground for over fifty years. The poem continues. . . . A hole drilled in rocks penetrates where the flesh is easily separated where her/my roots grow.

the new stone age   125 Her/my cadaver sings an old honor slow low. For she/I want/s confession with a full wafer and a drop of wine. (87)

These holes, the speaker explains, “separated” “the flesh” from “her/my roots,” killing her. While the final couplet’s Catholic imagery reinforces the themes of assimilation, it is hard not to read it also as the demand for those who committed this violence to confess their crimes. Similar imagery appears in “Stereoscope,” where curatorial practices of Anglo museums have the same physical effects on the speaker: How do you mention one by one our ­place-­names and dates of birth by labeling your glass boxes? How do you print on heavy flat paper the artifacts of Nuiqsut which makes me pull apart my cartilage? (34)

Here, the seemingly peaceful—­and from some perspectives restorative—­ act of collecting, naming, and displaying the artifacts of Inuit culture produces the same violence as oil extraction. Seeing “the artifacts of Nuiqsut” laid out “on heavy flat paper” prompts the speaker to pull herself apart. This poem reveals the continuity between the scientific approach to the world that makes the fossil fuel economy possible and the anthropological and historical discourses we find in museums. And, indeed, they are closely connected. Nuiqsut is a village in ­present-­day Alaska that was resettled in the 1970s after the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), which returned ­forty-­four million federally owned acres to Native hands. Rather than allowing the indigenous groups to determine their own form of organization, however, ANCSA imposed a corporate system, dividing Alaska into twelve regional corporations, in which native people could enroll as shareholders. (A thirteenth corporation was created for those no longer living in Alaska.) Indigenous people also enrolled in their ­village-­level corporations. Nuiqsut technically belongs to the Kuukpik corporation, which, according to its website, manages the Colville River Delta, an area “[a]bundant in petroleum and natural gas deposits,” now home to “the 429-­million-­barrel Alpine oil field, . . . the fifth largest oil discovery

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on the North Slope and the first on ­Native-­owned lands.” Shareholders are entitled to cuts of their region’s profits, often collected from oil leases and licenses. As the corporation explains, “[t]he settlement compensated the Natives for the collaborative use of their lands and opened the way for all Alaskans to profit from oil, essentially extinguishing Alaska Native claims to the land.” This phrase—“essentially extinguishing”—is a legal term denoting the successful resolution of land disputes. Despite its technical meaning, it’s hard not to read the phrase as a concise description of how the governments have used tactics like land trusts and corporations to “extinguish” indigenous protest and further subordinate communities to capitalist logics. This system may allow “all Alaskans to profit from oil,” but it does not allow Native people any control over how their land is used. As such, it aligns with Marx’s description of the laborer’s double freedom: “as a free individual he can dispose of his ­labour-­power as his own commodity,” but “he has no other commodity for sale,” leaving him reliant on his employer to meet his basic needs (272). Only once the US government has freed the Inuit and Inupiaq of their lands can they offer them this limited freedom to return. The ANCSA system is emblematic of the recent history of legal relations between indigenous communities and the federal governments of both the United States and Canada. In Red Skin, White Masks (2014), Glen Coulthard argues that such arrangements maintain the legal and economic structures of imperialism. As an example, he cites Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, a 1997 case in which two First Nations challenged Canada’s rights to almost sixty thousand acres of unceded territory. The court decided that First Nations claims “could be infringed upon” by the Canadian government so long as this action could be shown to further “a compelling and substantial legislative objective” that is “consistent with the special fiduciary relationship between the Crown and the [A]boriginal peoples.” What substantial objectives might justify infringement? According to the court, virtually any exploitative economic venture, including the “development of agriculture, forestry, mining, and hydroelectric power, the general economic development of the interior of British Columbia, protection of the environment or endangered species, and the building of infrastructure and the settlement of foreign populations to support those aims.” (41)

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Thus, even if indigenous people receive the right to ­self-­determination over the lands that belong to them, the s­ ettler-­colonial state could step in for any number of reasons, including “general economic development,” a phrase that could be used to justify the whole history of colonialism. As Coulthard writes in the conclusion, “efforts that seek to ameliorate [indigenous communities’] poverty and economic dependency through resource revenue sharing,” like the ANCSA system, keep these communities “dependent on a predatory economy that is entirely at odds with the deep reciprocity that forms the cultural core of many Indigenous peoples’ relationships with land.” In contrast, Coulthard argues for “a massive transformation in the political economy of contemporary ­settler-­colonialism” (171). It is precisely these transformations that okpik imagines in the climax of Corpse Whale. “Date: Post Glacial” takes place along the Chena River, now the site of a massive cleanup effort after the discovery of environmental contamination from petroleum processing. Although the Chena runs near Fairbanks, the poem takes place by the sea, indicating that we have moved into a future in which the Alaskan landscape has been radically transformed by climate change. A fern curls and drinks water next she/I engrave/s with drill bows layered polish

to the Chena River; the tattoos

on the backside of a gray whale, with cotton in circles to bring out the design.

Over the sea, ­black-­whales while ­four-­sided sabers

arch and span, guard the processing

barge—­a city atop the sea. (48)

The poem is full of surprising images. The speaker uses a “drill bow” to mark whale flesh even though drill bows are not typically used to make tattoos and tattoos are not typically applied to whales. The sea, full of whales, surrounds “a city” guarded with ­“four-­sided sabers,” evoking the ­off-­shore drilling platforms that now proliferate not only in the Arctic, but also from Newfoundland to the Gulf of Mexico. Likewise, in “Her/My Arctic” we encounter “a spotted human pelt” and “arms // of purple octopus grabbing the rearview mirrors” (65). These images describe a bizarre future in which the effects of colonization persist: indigenous life coexists uneasily with a

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mode of capitalism that must guard itself from disruption. As “Date: Post Glacial” goes on, the speaker describes how Inuit and Inupiat traditions have adapted to what she calls “the New Stone Age”: Invent a fan to blow The tall grass calls bent birch a tap dry of soot

the north wind

to cool the ivory bone etch.

snowshoes to make tracks. Do we run and sludge to forge roots?

How many drink wild tea, dip blubber in seal oil? From the horizon she/I watch/es fire opals come from molten rain,

the clay mass full grass baskets. (48–49)

returns to

The first line suggests that technology might help the old ways return: the speaker calls on her audience to “invent a fan” that can reverse the effects of global warming in order to create the “north wind to cool the ivory bone etch.” This will make the snow fall again, allowing “snowshoes to make tracks.” Okpik stretches this logical, if fantastical, connection to the breaking point in the final lines, when she marshals “soot and sludge” to create roots so that “clay mass returns to / full grass baskets.” “Oil is a People” explores this future in more detail, clearly situating the speaker in contrast to both the colonizers and the colonized. The title comes from the poem’s first line, which personifies oil and makes it an actor in the current stage of American imperialism, highlighting how fossil fuel extraction represents a continuation of the colonial domination that has already dispossessed the Inuit and Inupiat people from their land. But the poem actually deals with a much longer time frame than the period of European colonization. The events it describes unfold over “eleven thousand years,” mirroring the distance between our present and the Neolithic period—­literally “new stone age,” an era of incredible technological development among early humans. The poem follows the speaker as she “walk[s] with wrists sliced by burdock” toward the timberline, describing her adaptations to the new environmental realities: She/I wait/s late this summer to pick berries, east of the crossing where the slow fire burns

the new stone age   129 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . She/I smell/s the pungent lead, gray smoke from the shoreline of the old village. She/I hear/s cadaver ash whispering where your ceremonial house once held the winded songs Now

up in flames

of gypsy moths. blue oil burns

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . She/I see/s the pipeline cracking, the Haul road paved. Oil dripping on the tundra she/I fall/s asleep as you are dancing with the dead. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . She/I use/s her/my teeth to drill cold work metal tungsten steel into thick seaweed. . . . (62–63)

but maybe she/I can

Here, the “she/I” takes on a new valence. No longer measuring the speaker’s distance from her birth and adopted families, it begins to index her ability to survive in the New Stone Age. “You” remains in the past, “dancing with the dead,” as the speaker learns to survive. She “drill[s] cold,” reversing the effects of global warming, and imagines that she will be able to turn “metal tungsten steel / into thick seaweed,” restoring the damaged ocean. Like “Date: Post Glacial,” “Oil is a People” ends with an image of natural abundance emerging from environmental destruction. Okpik builds these images by situating Inuit and Inupiat art forms, hunting strategies, and survival techniques—­many of which have been lost as a result of colonization—­ within the ruins of petrocapitalism, calling for the very same return of unceded lands that Almanac’s people’s army promises. Importantly, however, okpik does not propose some romanticized return to traditional lifeways. Rather, she suggests that the “she/I” speaker must bring about this change. Okpik’s invention and use of the “she/I” form not only displays the psychological effects of ongoing colonialism on the speaker but also forces its audience to recognize what we’re reading as something created: we cannot mistake her poems for “feeling confessing itself.” The persona highlights the poem’s construction, reminding readers that their relationship with the

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text is always already mediated. In this case, it highlights how the “she/I” persona came into being as the result of imperial practices, reintegrating history into the poem.

Systemic Contraction and Explosion Douglas Kearney likewise examines the construction of the lyric speaker, uncovering how white supremacy shapes black subjectivity. His 2009 collection The Black Automaton includes both traditional lyrics—­clearly influenced by Amiri Baraka—­and more experimental poems that reveal the construction of the black lyric voice. While the more traditional poems end in impasse, The Black Automaton series demonstrates how black American identity has been externally imposed.6 The third section of The Black Automaton narrates the speaker’s experience on the first night of the LA Riots, exploring black identity in the midst of an urban revolt. The uprising began in earnest with the acquittal of four white officers videotaped beating Rodney King, but, as Mike Davis recounts, the jury’s decision threw a match onto dry kindling: The Rodney King explosion .  .  . was a series of separate but simultaneous detonations: kids against police in the wake of Operation Hammer, a more or less targeted attack on Korean businesses, and a postmodern food riot that expressed the acute economic distress of poor Latino neighborhoods.

The year before, Soon Ja Du had shot Latasha Harlins in the back of the head but, despite video evidence, received no prison time for the murder. Though Davis reminds us that the majority of detainees from the riots were nonblack residents arrested outside of South Central Los Angeles, the media largely portrayed the three days of unrest as a ­black-­led event. In an interview with Solstice, Kearney explains that he designed these poems to play on those associations. He describes noticing that “city” is often used as a synonym for black people and so built the poems in The Black Automaton to draw out the material effects of that euphemistic language: “If I could just keep saying city city city city until it becomes a synonym for black people and not a metaphor, not an allegory, not a metonym, but a synonym for the body, the city as a body, and a particular kind of body.” 7 In the “City with

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Fire” poems, Kearney hands the lyric voice to a ­mixed-­race speaker, whose activities on the first night of the uprising turn into a meditation on his identity. The speaker is moving across the city in the hopes of seeing his ­high-­school crush, “———— Carlson.” By redacting her first name, Kearney makes the poem feel more confessional: it’s very difficult not to associate the speaker of the “City with Fire” poems with the poet. These techniques encourage the audience to read the sequence as an example of the mainstream lyric form that Jackson described: an idealized speaker expressing feelings, separate from the historical and social context in which those feelings were experienced. But this idealized scene produces a less than ideal result: the speaker, who starts the poem hoping for a real connection with ———— Carlson, ends up all alone. When the speaker arrives at ———— Carlson’s house, her mother opens the door, “blue eyes / swollen / with News 5 and was she pale! you should / go home—” (42). The speaker quickly clarifies that Mrs. Carlson’s outburst wasn’t “like that! we got along.” Instead, she worries for his safety and won’t let her daughter leave the house. Disappointed, the speaker attends choir practice alone: . . . drove to the same white church where a blonde junior broke me into nigger when I was 8, remember her lips, her teeth white as church, white as ———— Carlson’s mother, white as fire’s starving heart. I wanted us to loot each other—­sweet yellow girl and I, no peace, just to haul down the gilt drywall from our frames . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . for neither of us black-­owned. (42–43)

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These lines stake out three racial positions—­the “blonde junior”; the speaker, subject to her racist abuse; and ———— Carlson, the “sweet yellow girl” with a white mother. The speaker’s fantasy of the encounter with ———— Carlson plays on these identities as well as on the politics of the riots that surround him. He imagines that they will tear down each other’s “gilt drywall,” an image that suggests they will get rid of each other’s “yellow,” shedding their ­mixed-­race identities. He insists that “neither” are “­ black-­owned,” which might make them vulnerable to the violence engulfing the neighborhood, but imagines that they will “loot” each other, locating them on both sides of the uprising. Indeed, the act of looting becomes a way of confirming his identity. In “Opening Duet,” he writes, someone else’s shit? I mean, ain’t but glass between theirs and mine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . who you are is what you got. I ask myself at the window “who will I be today?” (37)

At first, the poem seems to define identity through consumerism: the stolen goods allow the speaker to become someone else. These lines resonate with Amiri Baraka’s 1959 essay, “How You Sound??”8 There, Baraka claims that the lyric form gives him access to new identities: “MY POETRY is whatever I think I am. (Can I be light and weightless as a sail?? Heavy & clunking like 8 black boots.) I CAN BE ANYTHING I CAN” (645). Baraka uses typography to mimic these temporary selves—­the two question marks look like sails blown by the wind; the ampersand provides a visual “clunk” between the words—­highlighting poetry’s ability to move between “light and weightless” and “[h]eavy & clunking.” Kearney’s speaker, however, defines identity by “what you got,” so that breaking a window becomes a way of turning into someone else. But, in the context of US racialized rhetoric, it isn’t what’s behind the glass that would determine “who will I be today”; rather, it’s the act itself, as “looting” has become shorthand used to either discredit protesters (as in Baltimore) or criminalize people left for dead in the wake of natural disaster (as in New Orleans, Houston, Puerto Rico,

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Panama City, and on and on). Thus, it isn’t the objects that will determine the speaker’s identity but whether or not he participates in the revolt. The final installment, “City with Fire and a Piece of Silver,” continues to play on these themes, highlighting the speaker’s ambivalent racial identification and loyalty. He’s arrived at the church parking lot, where he notices that its surface looks like “white / lash marks on the newly laid blacktop” (46). After he sees the history of black American life physically reflected in the parking lot, he considers an imagined moral dilemma: night like a riot of black people crossing the church driveway, asking me, torches, street lamps street lamps like torches, the pitchfork trees, Hill Ave.’s traffic, —was it voices—­asking me over the starched choir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . are there white people inside? up high the moon, silver coin, flips—­heads, tails—­and again. (46)

The riots begin to transform the city: streetlamps turn into torches, trees into pitchforks, the moon into the blood money the speaker might receive for betraying his people. But who are his people? The white folks singing inside or the black people seeking them out? The silver coin transforms again: the speaker mentally flips it “heads, tails,” to decide what to do. It’s not simply that he can’t decide which side he belongs on; he also seems not to care very much, as he’s willing to leave the decision up to chance. The result is an intense feeling of isolation: how LA burned as the people split and dropped to either side of a camcorder,

134   chapter four liquor store, Desert Eagle, highway, siren. I found myself in the choir loft among white men and white women, sopranos, basses. Jesus leapt out nobody’s mouth and I sat to eat the fistful of songs I was given. (53)

While the city “split” on either side of him, the speaker remains in the impasse this divide has created. All that sustains him are the small measure of songs he is allowed to consume.9 The t­ hree-­poem sequence uses the LA Riots to explore ambivalent identities, but it also reveals the limits of the traditional, ­I-­centered lyric form. Because the speaker’s identity is largely constructed for him, he cannot define the “I” that narrates his poems. This links the lyric form not with personhood but with impasse: the characters who take up the lyric I throughout The Black Automaton remain stuck between two worlds. “Malik Considers the Winter Semester” is told from the perspective of a black college student, who feels that his academic life is “nothing like me.” It’s nearly impossible to read it without thinking of Baraka’s “Poem for HalfWhite College Students” (1969).10 The poem asks the students the question “How You Sound??” posed nine years earlier, but with a twist: “How do you sound, your words, are they / yours?” Unlike the essay, the poem suggests that there are limits to the identities people can inhabit. “How You Sound??” claimed that language allows the speaker to take on multiple identities, but “Poem for HalfWhite College Students” describes a narrower version of identity: . . . Check yourself, learn who it is speaking, when you make some ultrasophisticated point, check yourself, when you find yourself gesturing like Steve McQueen, check it out, ask in your black heart who it is you are, and is that image black or white, you might be surprised right out the window, whistling dixie on the way in. (151)

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The speaker asks the audience members to discover whether they see themselves as black or white. The speaker knows the answer (they are black because they have “black heart[s]”) but also knows that his audience wishes the answer were different (“whistling dixie”). The phrase “whistling Dixie” has another connotation, of course, which is that the audience longs for the antebellum South, which associates the halfwhite college students with slavery, implying that the students are betraying their ancestors by denying their blackness. In Baraka’s view, the halfwhite college students are betraying an essential part of themselves—­using external cues like language and gestures to appear white while being in fact black. His poem abides by a view of racial identity in which people’s race is as much a part of their existence as their internal organs. In contrast, Kearney recognizes that race is imposed from without. “Malik” begins with the speaker noting that the music on the radio is “nothing like me,” indicating a cultural distance between him and wherever he’s now living. He then applies the observation to his voicemail but explains that being “nothing like me” is the whole point: the message is “there to be what’s missing,” which is, of course, Malik, who cannot answer the phone (29). The graduation cards—“the we’re so proud / in kente. the figure, ­water-­colored brown / in cap and gown, to make me think / of me”—are “nothing like me” either. Even the free mug the university gave Malik is “nothing like me” (27). But the difference between these objects and the speaker actually explains why he’s at university: he’s “some starving, sweating pioneer” (29). Or, put another way, the difference between Malik and his college is the very reason he’s attending it in the first place: he’s become a “pioneer” for other black students. But even the environment is conspiring to erase him: first, the slush; a few dark, lingering grits; then everything white like an empty pad on a desk of books. I’ve wandered in and out of evenings, a radio between stations, whispering in night’s ear, winter fields wondering why I’m there.

136   chapter four I watched the black grits disappear. everything white. (28)

The natural metaphor here recalls the “white / lash marks on the newly laid blacktop” from “City with Fire and a Piece of Silver” (46). In both poems, the speaker’s environment seems to index his difference from the world he is trying to join. But importantly, this difference is externally applied: even the landscapes these characters inhabit confirm or deny the speakers’ identities and, indeed, their right to be in those spaces. In Kearney’s prose and more experimental poetry, he more directly argues that this internal split is externally constituted: black identity is imposed on his speakers, just as the “blonde junior” “broke” the speaker of the “City with Fire” poems into the word “nigger.” In “Some Terms for Black Study,” Kearney offers the following definitions for “Black” and “blackness.” “Black: indicates a preinscribed mark on a blanked surface”; “blackness”: “the condition of being the shit when it happens” (Mess 12, 13). These definitions point not to an essential “blackness” but rather to a specific subject position within society. This understanding of “blackness” of course has many resonances with critical race studies, but, perhaps most famously, it echoes a key moment in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952).11 Fanon explains that “the white man . . . had woven [the black race] out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” (Black Skin 84). He then recounts his own story from the streets of Paris to illustrate how he internalized this construction of race: “Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile. “Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me. “Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement. “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. . . . . . . I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by ­tom-­toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism [sic], racial defects, s­lave-­ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’.” (Black Skin 84–85)

In the story, the little girl’s recognition—“an external stimulus”—subjects Fanon to her—­in this case, literally the colonizer’s—­racist misrecognition,

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and he returns to a stereotypical mise en scène that supports the child’s fear: the ­“tom-­toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency.” The experience forces him to briefly consider himself as an object—­a terrifying object—­that a superior power must subordinate and control. Kearney’s essay “Yessuhrrealism” turns this externally imposed identity into an antebellum fable. The story follows a slave owner, who is instructing his enslaved blacksmith. After “Master asseverated [fire’s] chilliness,” he “demand[s] the slave put a hand in to prove Master correct” (Mess 36, 37). When the slave follows his owner’s instructions, “[n]ever had he felt such a hot chill” (37): At that instant, the red and orange ice was making its way up the arm attached to the slave, freezing the s­ hirt-­sleeves . . . into smoldering, crackling flurries. . . . The hypothermic nip scorched him so badly, he couldn’t manage even to shiver! . . . The slave recalled that he had recoiled from flame because he thought it had burned him. He came to recognize right then and there that if flames were actually frigid, he ought not to have withdrawn his hand: being hot, of course, is cured by cold. He thrust the hand . . . back in to the fire! Maybe at once, the pain ceased! Even Master stood agape, amazed at how quickly Master’s instruction “took.” (37–38)

This story serves as a morbid illustration of the definition of Yessuhrrealism: “a state in which someone other than ‘your’self (an elsewhere subjectivity) determines the nature of ‘your’ existence” (36). More abstractly, the story documents how slavery entailed a specific kind of epistemological training: the Master, wielding l­ife-­and-­death power over the enslaved person, teaches his property whatever he pleases. From the perspective of the blacksmith, in fact, it doesn’t matter much whether fire is the hottest or coldest thing he’s ever stuck his hand into: the adjective has no effect on his experience of incredible physical pain, which only ceases when the hand is so damaged the nerves stop sending signals to the brain. This painful lesson prompts the slave to think “back on all of the other lessons Master had given. ‘The day is night.’ ‘That wood is glass.’ ‘That’s a happy work song.’. . . After a hard day’s labor, the slave, in fact ‘wasn’t tired; just lazy’ ” (38). Upon realizing that Master’s instruction that “up was down” means that he could fly—­after all, “he only had to fall up.”

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The slave threw the body he boarded in down at the sky. And there he was toppling up at the big blue ground. And there, like a t­hick-­billed raven or ­broad-­footed mole, he went up downishly. Yes? And he might’ve fallen all the way over/under the Ohio River into freedom, except Master told him only last week that he “didn’t want to leave” Master’s household. (39)

The master’s contradictory knowledge gives the blacksmith a chance to become free, which he rejects because he continues to believe his owner’s teachings. Kearney explains why he would behave this way, writing, “if Master is Master, then Master must be Master; [the blacksmith] agreed in order to avoid abnigation” (37).12 Inserting “nig” into abnegation’s meaning of ­self-­denial, this neologism perfectly summarizes the story we’ve heard so far: to deny the master’s lessons, which would mean escaping, would also result in a ­self-­denial of the slave’s identity, which has been defined entirely by “Master.” He must accept that “Master is Master” because to do otherwise would call into question his own personhood. In his 2008 essay, “The Case of Blackness,” Fred Moten uncovers, in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), this very paradox. Fanon, Moten explains, classified both the acceptance of and resistance to the French imperial regime in Algeria as pathological. A contented Algerian is a “quintessentially pathological case,” but so are veterans of the liberation struggle. Indeed, Wretched of the Earth is devoted to describing the psychosomatic conditions that now afflict this population, like “[s]ystem contraction”: “Walking becomes contracted and turns into a shuffle. Passive bending of the lower limbs is practically impossible. No relaxation can be achieved” (Fanon 218, quoted in Moten 207). Fanon explains that the muscular “contraction, in fact, is quite simply . . . evidence in the colonized’s muscles of their rigidity, their reticence and refusal in the face of colonial authorities” (Fanon 217, quoted in Moten 207). The resistance the Algerian independence fighters had to demonstrate during their struggle has become an internal condition. Kearney’s “Notes toward Weaponizing Negrotesque Gestus,” a series of short essays in which the poet offers rhetorical and political readings of five stereotypically black performances—­the shake, the shimmy, the shuffle, the stagger, and the stutter—­offer a curious echo of Fanon’s “system contraction” (Mess 62­–75). Describing a segment of Chris Rock’s Bigger and Blacker as “a particularly

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tricky Shuffle” (Mess 69), Kearney argues that this “gestus” allows the black speaker to destabilize his white interlocutors, protecting himself from their wrath and even scoring political points. In the bit, Rock claims that older black men are “the most racist people in the world,” recounting a story about an old man muttering “­ Cracker-­ass cracker” behind the back of a white person whom he has just treated politely (69). The old man’s quick switch from “servile” to hateful is itself a shuffle: his performance of obsequiousness masks his deeply held antipathy. But, in Kearney’s reading, Rock himself is the Shuffler. He uses the opening criticism of the old man (“most racist [person] in the world”) to distract from his description of white racism: [T]he joke itself is a Shuffle [that] Rock performs, allowing him the opportunity to point out white racism (he remarks earlier in the bit that whites once used blacks as taxi cabs, jumping on their backs and spurring them to the white’s destination). The ground shifts: black racism (elaborated here as ­name-­calling and unheard threats) is more virulent than white racism (using blacks as horses)—a bold nonsense that allows Rock to make the joke ultimately at the white spectator’s expense. (70)

For Fanon, the shuffle was an effect of the anticolonial movement, physical evidence that the revolutionaries had internalized their resistance to the French so fully that it made it difficult for them to move. For Kearney, it marks a ­cold-­war continuation of that same struggle, a way of throwing the white interlocutor off guard while protecting the rebellious speaker.13 Whatever ambivalence the Shuffler feels is externalized. The split Moten discovers in Fanon—­between naming both obedient and disobedient subjects “pathological”—becomes, in “Notes toward Weaponizing Negrotesque Gestus,” two stages of the same performance. The Shuffler remains polite, even “servile,” as long as the white person is present, only to become disobedient as soon as he is alone. What went on inside Fanon’s patients— “a characteristic rigidity which inevitably suggests an attack on certain areas of the brain”—Kearney’s Shuffler externalizes (Fanon 218, quoted in Moten 207). The poems in The Black Automaton turn this ambivalence into form. These visually experimental poems use pairs of braces (“{ }”) to suggest multiple

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alternatives for understanding black identity, which Kearney presents as “[it]” throughout the series. As Jennifer Ashton explains in reference to “The Black Automaton in de Despair Ub Existence #2: Our New Day Begun,” the “it” that runs through these poems immediately poses a grammar problem: “We go looking for the referent of ‘it,’ and rather than finding it we get instead a concatenation of shifters and displacements” (44). The Black Automaton poems attempt to solve this problem by offering a conclusive definition of “it” but only find a proliferation of possible meanings. In an interview with Danielle Legros Georges, Kearney explains that “it” “is . . . there to censor. . . . It is like a bleep.” In a review of the collection for Tarpaulin Sky, Micah Ling writes that these poems have “the feel of a manual—­ some collection of diagrams and instructions—­for something precious and complicated.” Georges agrees, referring to the language that makes up these poems as “instructional.” For example, “The Black Automaton in Tag,” the poem that opens the collection, is an acrostic for the word “Negro.” In the poem’s heading, “Negro” appears with an asterisk next to each letter, pulling our eyes down to the rest of the poem. Kearney provides two possible meanings for each letter.14 “it guesses that G” is either “[G]-s up hoes down” or “[Je]-sus saves it,” presenting two stereotypes of black American culture: the misogynist gangsta rapper and the devout Christian. The entry for the letter “o” is particular telling: “it” either “oooohs” or “owes” (13). It is impossible not to read this entry in light of the 2007–2008 subprime crisis, which lowered black wealth in the United States by 40 percent (White). When Kearney sums up these dual definitions, he asks “. . . where [it] at? / in the middle” (Black Automaton 13). “Middle” once again branches off into a choice between a definitive exclamation point or a question mark. This opening poem doesn’t offer any clearer answers on identity than the one we’ve already encountered, but it does lay out a spectrum of stereotypes around which most of The Black Automaton poems will circle. “The Black Automaton in What It Is #1: Getting Off the Pot,” Kearney posits an absence at the center of “it’s” identity: it’s a problem of semanthematics: too many nothings. zero, zero, zero, o’ed up

the new stone age   141 it’s a dismemory on an operating table: awtopsy, auturvy (41)

The phrase “dismemory” recalls the “rememory” in Toni Morrison’s Beloved that allowed the lost child to resurface as a violent force, making the history of slavery present even after freedom was secured. But, in dissecting “dismemory,” the speaker discovers that there’s no there there: zero, zero, / zero, o’ed up.” The transformation of “zero” into “o’ed” invites a number of associations, from the subprime crisis mentioned to the “oh!” that marks so much lyric speech. As the poem goes on, this central absence points to the flimsiness of this constructed identity: “[it] ain’t no real representative / [it] ain’t official—[it] tentative.” Despite the “zero” at [its] center, the second installment of the “The Black Automaton in Tag” posits that “nigger” will always serve as [its] real name. The poem gives nigger the same treatment Negro received in the opening poem, but, in this case, the asterisks lead to a phonetic spelling that emphasizes the r­ -­sound at the end of the world: “*en*eye*double guh* errrrr” (54). This presentation clearly distinguishes “nigger” from “nigga,” which Kearney defines as “a term of endeerment / during buck seasons” (Mess 15). Despite the pronunciation guide, Kearney attaches a rhythmic little poem that serves as a kind of mnemonic device: it’s best not to err and er the a if one must air the n_ _ _ _ _. the er is a looming heir of that gloomy era where n_ _ _ _ _s were in the air in the best knots. it knows that to catch a n_ _ _ _ _ by the toe is a way to pick the very best one. when the n_ _ _ _ _ is to end up knotted in the air, it knows by your inheritance it is going to be it. the a may still be it, but it’s its it. (54)

Kearney fills the poem with words that blend the hard “ER” of nigger with the looser “A” of nigga: “heir,” “era,” “where,” “air.” This produces a haunt-

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ing image of lynchings, in which “the very best” “n_ _ _ _ _” appears “in the best knots.” Indeed, the “ER” becomes intrinsic to the Black Automaton’s identity because “your inheritance” always reduces “it” back to “nigger.” The question that seems to have launched the book—­what is the black automaton?—finally gets its answer: “since that’s its name / wear it out”: the black American will always be a nigger (54). Only when freed from the lyric space on the experimental pages of the Black Automaton poems can Kearney fully show how white supremacy has created and enforced the limits of black identity. Okpik and Kearney explode the lyric form ­ rst-­person speaker cannot fully express because the traditional singular fi the experiences of either indigenous or black Americans. Okpik does it by creating a speaking subject that captures both inclusion and displacement; Kearney does it by relegating the traditional lyric to expressions of impasse and ambivalence. As we shall see in this final section, Cathy Park Hong uses both lyric and epic forms to show how American imperialism creates these identities.

Imperial Ballad “Ballad of Our Jim,” the first sequence in Cathy Park Hong’s 2012 collection Engine Empire, unfolds primarily in fi ­ rst-­person plural. The use of “we” is first justified by the poems’ multiple speakers: a group of b ­ rother-­pioneers and the child they kidnap, who are fleeing the violence of the Civil War for the goldmines of California. The generic designation of ballad further authorizes the plural form, as, like epic, ballads were traditionally used to relate stories important to the cultural collective. To be sure, the brothers’ journey fits this criterion: it tells the story of primitive accumulation that must precede colonial settlement, relating it from the perspective of the violent pioneers whose labor will eventually be disowned. But the “we” form also implicates the audience in the bloody pathbreaking from Kansas to California. Though the brothers see themselves as outlaws, working against mainstream culture, they are in fact this mainstream’s vanguard: their murderous journey west clears the path for the more respectable settlers who will follow and eventually replace them. The use of “we” in “Ballad of Our Jim,” then, contains the totality of imperial teleology: first, the brutality of primitive accumulation, then, the disavowal of violence. By relating the sto-

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ry in ­first-­person plural, Hong forces the story of these brothers back into history, showing their necessary connection to the “civilization” that arose after them. But, as each brother is murdered, the “we” inexorably shrinks to an “I.” Our Jim, for whom the sequence is named, takes up this voice. Both a victim of and a warrior for US empire, his assumption of the role of lyric speaker underlines the complex politics of the lyric voice. The sequence is split into two halves: “Fort Ballads,” which follows the brothers west, and “Bowietown Ballads,” which describes their attempts to assimilate to the quickly changing frontier. The opening poem, “Ballad of the Range,” explains their motivation: The whole country is in a duel and we want no part of it. They see us ride, they say :all you men going the wrong d ­ i-­rection. :We’re getting to California. We ain’t got time to enlist. If some forts ready to be sawed to colt towns, others are abandoned since ­ricket-­limbed Southies couldn’t let their grudges aside and mauled each other to blood strops. All around us forts lie built and unbuilt, halfwalled towns as men yoke themselves to state, but we brothers are heading through fields of blue rye and plains scullground to silt sand, afar, the boomtowns of precious ore. (19)

These lines reveal as much as they hide. The brothers juxtapose the violence back East—­the “duel” between North and South—­with the “boomtowns of precious ore” out West, a contrast that implies that California does not suffer from the same brutality currently consuming the nation. But, the war has already spread west, as forts proliferate and “­ ricket-­limbed Southies / [who] couldn’t let their grudges aside” continue to fight. The brothers participate in this violence: in Nebraska, they flee “phantom harridans,” “earth crusted to their salt skin as if God didn’t finish / his making and we shot shot shot”; they murder any Miwok who crosses their paths (23). Even at the beginning of their journey, the group sees the pace at which the frontier is disappearing: ­half-­built outposts are already transforming into “towns,”

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where “men yoke themselves to state.” Just as they did with the Civil War’s violence, the brothers imagine that they can escape this force. As they near “the boomtowns of precious ore,” they “pass old travelers forever dying, their ­lamb-­milk eyes / astonished by years passing as one long noon” and reach “a legendary mining town drained of its ore” (25). Though the gold is gone, “still the isolated men settle to dig / and dig, furrowing wilder / into the earth. / We see the empire rising” (25). This stanza offers a different interpretation of the rise of the American empire in the nineteenth century than what we typically encounter. It was not the discovery of gold in California that fueled westward expansion, but the exhaustion of those resources, in the wake of which people still “dig / and dig.” These lines position meaningless, fruitless labor as the real source of imperial power.15 Further, the new empire seems to rise on its own, completely separate from anyone’s, including the brothers’, activities: Blood bursts from Earth’s throat in a mighty tornado and speckles itself across the soil, hardening to ruby poppies. A mighty empire arises. (25)

The “blood bursts from the Earth’s throat,” and the “mighty empire” appears as a “a mighty tornado.” These lines attribute the violence of Manifest Destiny to a natural phenomenon, revealing imperial propaganda’s historical amnesia: although the brothers, and many like them, cleared the way for the westward expansion of the United States, our history books tend only to record a certain kind of explorer and settler. Hong presents the imperial rise as a kind of natural force, only incidentally related to the brothers’ actions. But, put in the context of the necessary violence that allowed for Manifest Destiny, we see that, like the victims of empire, the people who originally clear the way for it will be disavowed, shunted to margins. “Bowietown Ballads” recount this process.16 We find the brothers playing cards and fighting with a cast of immigrants that “keep on coming”: “cowpokes and ­canvas-­wagoned / Easterners,” “Mexicans and ­deacon-­sized Chinamen / who find what we cain’t find,” and “henchmen French” (30, 31). The implants must travel “through graveyards / of footsore beeves” before arriving in Bowietown to “[s]hred the other folk” (30, 31). Soon, the brothers’ outlaw ways start to slowly destroy them. One brother taunts

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a funeral procession for “the last Chief,” eventually overturning the wagon that holds the corpse (32). In revenge, the dead man’s followers kill him. Another brother goes mad—“drowns of conscious”—so Our Jim “shoots him to a batter / of brain and dust” (33). Jim continues to practice the kind of violence that saw the brothers safely across the nation, attempting to kill every newcomer and preserve the wildness of the frontier: He slays them before they breed to corps. Still they come, an eternal train of settlers, chapels of ruby coppered hills flattened by the agate ants of strangers. (33)

But Jim can’t keep up, and the newcomers eventually replace the brothers and “henchmen French.” “Ballad in O” captures this inevitable transformation: O Boomtown’s got lots of sordor: odd horrors of throwdown bold cowboys lock horns, forlorn hobos plot to rob pots of gold, loco mobs drool for blood, howl or hoot for cottonwood blooms, throng to hood crooks to strong wood posts. So don’t confront hotbloods, don’t show off, go to blows or rows, don’t sob for gold lost to trollops, don’t drown sorrows on shots of grog. Work morn to moon. Know how to comb bottom pools, spot dots of gold to spoon pots of gold. Vow to do good. (26)

The “bold cowboys” and “forlorn hobos” are being replaced. Those who come in their place will work hard, expect less, and be better. Though the use of “we” is initially justified by the fact that the tale is told by a group of brothers, it now expands to include not only the virtuous settlers but the readers as well.

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But, as the brothers die off, the plural voice becomes singular, going not to the brother who narrated the events but to Our Jim. Early in the sequence, Jim is forced to sing for the brothers’ suppers, and the story he relates reveals his position between periphery and center. “[A]n Injun killing ranger” marries “his Comanche guide,” only to leave her for the ­“fair-­haired sheriff’s daughter.” The first wife gets her revenge “with a malarial dress”—a trick she surely learned from her ­ex-­husband—­then “strangles her own newborn, / and the other son flees” (21). The references to Medea are fitting, as it too is a story of imperialism: Medea comes from Colchis and her Greek husband eventually leaves her for a more suitable bride. Medea and Jim’s retelling of her story document the fate of colonized people even when they inhabit the imperial center: they will face the same fate as all others of their race. After the song is finished, the brothers recognize their captive in it: “it done occurs to us, looking at his dusky skin— // Our Jim’s a ­two-­bit ­half-­breed” (21). The song, then, both relates the singer’s life story and links it to the long history of imperialism. Both victim and victor of this imperial violence, Our Jim captures the complex relationship between the lyric form and imperialism. Finally, Jim goes too far, murdering “a high grass constable, / an old techy ranger hailed for bringing order to the land” (34). Learning of the bounty put on their captive’s head, the two surviving brothers try to murder Jim in his sleep. But he sang in his dreams, so raw he sucked us inside his fevered innards: a cloudburst of a horse rising to a stolen remuda as if all Mexico was raided: stallions, peg ponies, hogbacks— Git out he cried yet we were boiled inside him where we saw a ­cross-­dressing squaw in chaps, charging that mutant, mural herd through Bowietown, trampling down our tallowed kip tents, knocking down engine cars packed with forfeit ore—­Git out. (35)

Jim’s repeated demand—“git out”—is the squaw’s message as well. She and her “mutant” horses from Mexico destroy Bowietown, reclaiming the land,

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an echo of Silko’s people’s army and its armed vanguard, slowly making its way north from Mexico. From the perspective of the brothers, Jim’s behavior is incoherent: he helps them fight their way out West, then defend Bowietown from the law. But he ultimately kills two of them the first chance he gets. What Jim recognizes, and the brothers cannot see, is that they, the “henchman French,” the ­“canvas-­wagoned / Easterners,” and the “high grass constable” all belong to the same historical process. Jim becomes, across this sequence, the poetic speaker Allen Grossman describes in “The Passion of Laocoön”: Jim has watched as the white people around him have established artificial differences as a scaffold for law and order. This, after all, is the point of his retelling of Medea: he and his mother have been designated as others, excluded from the “mighty empire” that is growing around them. Unlike the brothers, who narrate the sequence, Jim recognizes this central injustice. As Bowietown becomes less violent, Jim begins to fully occupy his role as singer: Sing in this blinking twilight in this mining district filling with wild Irish striking it rich, spinning Christ, swigging spirits, rigging spits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jim sings: I’m tiring, I’m tiring. His grim instinct wilting. Dispiriting Jim, climbing hill’s hilt, drifting Jim, sighing in this lilting, sinking light. (36)

On one hand, these lines reaffirm the argument that launched this text: that poetry “shelters other voices” (Howe, B ­ irth-­Mark 47). But though Jim is undeniably othered, he also takes up a role in the center, as both recipient and enforcer of imperial violence. Jim has fought on both sides of the war, and this experience grants him a view of totality that is denied to both the brothers and the newcomers. Only Jim can become the lyric I, because only Jim’s song includes both the winners and losers of Manifest Destiny.

Coda

In Search of Lost Causes toward a lyric interpretation of history

This book has surveyed the poetry of the American empire in hopes of showing how lyric time—­separate from but nevertheless deeply interrelated to the linear narrativity of epic and history—­gives readers an alternate perspective from which to view the process that made and unmade the United States as the center of capitalist accumulation. What the lyric form does, in these poems, is uncover the totality of imperialism, allowing the victims to sound as clearly as the winners. But the poets who took up this form, especially after the contradictions at the heart of American ideology became obvious, have had to confront its limits. Not only are the political interventions made possible by the dialectic of lyric and epic confined to the page, but the lyric speaker itself has historically been occupied by voices complicit with and sympathetic to the violent processes of dispossession that the form was supposed to offer shelter from. The very limits of lyric have called forth stunning expansions and revisions of lyric possibility: Philip, okpik, Kearney, and Hong marshal it, in all its “wrack and wreckage,” to uncover the structure of its relationship with imperialism (Clover, Red Epic 21). The book was intended first to intervene in contemporary literary critical debates about the lyric form, which I believe have hardened into easy definitions that focus solely on the speaker of the poem. If anything, the final chapter should have shown these definitions to be too narrow to contain such a capacious form and the experimental poets who work within it. Second, it was intended to reintegrate lyric studies into Marxist literary criticism. This book is certainly not alone in making this case but offers

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another proof point to poetry’s ability to uncover the structures that found our economic and political regimes. Lastly, it hoped to offer a condensed, alternative history of the United States’ imperial rise and fall, linking the lyric back to the scenes of its making and complicating normative readings of poetry that isolate it from the context in which it is produced. But, here at the end, it is hard not to care more about the limits of this form, of literature, and of literary criticism than about their rather meager potentials. Arrighi tells us that history is a series of repetitions: what happened in the Italian city states, in the Netherlands, in the United Kingdom, and in the United States are all variations on the same violent theme. Within each regime of accumulation, too, there are repetitions: the signal crisis announces the form of terminal crisis, a devastating preview of what will finally loosen a power’s hold on the capitalist order. His cyclical model of capitalist accumulation produces the same dialectic that Virgil’s epic model of Roman history does: for every winner, there are losers; every winner will someday lose. But this offers little comfort, at least for me. That the political forces bent on greed, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia cannot possibly hold power in the long term does little for those suffering and dying in the present. Again, the conflict between present and future—­the very form of the financial model that will likely be the US’s terminal crisis—­rises. And indeed, the poets in this book have all taken retrospective positions. Their work excavating the past is certainly on behalf of a better future, but it remains firmly in the historical. They are, like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, oriented toward the rubble of the past, hoping to suspend time so that they can “awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed” (Benjamin 257). But progress is caught in all our wings, and we move toward the future, unable to see what will come. With this in mind, I want to close by laying out a model of literary engagement that synthesizes the discoveries of the previous chapters so that we can turn our heads just a degree and catch a glimpse of where we’re headed. I look for this aperture in a perhaps surprising place: the poetry of Susan Howe, particularly two of her most recent works, Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007) and Spontaneous Particulars (2014). With a bibliography full of primary historical documents salvaged from research libraries and archives, Howe is, of all the poets who appear in this book, likely most closely associated with the past. But as she

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clarifies the stakes of her relationship to history in these two books, it becomes clear that her poetic practice is designed to nurture the right perspective on—­and connection to—­the past so that we can understand, and possibly intervene, in the future.

Chance’s Order In the essay “Personal Narrative,” which opens Souls of the Labadie Tract, Howe describes her composition process as almost entirely dependent on chance. She explains that the experience of browsing through Yale’s Sterling Library in the 1970s “had a ­life-­giving effect on the process of [her] writing,” producing “the spiritual and solitary freedom of an inexorable order only chance creates” (14). Howe goes on, “Always remembering while roving through centuries that, apart from call number coincidence, there is no inherent reason a particular scant relic and curiosity should be in position to be accidentally grasped by a ­quick-­eyed reader” (15). The order Howe refers to here is, of course, the order imposed on books by library classification systems. While the Library of Congress Classification system means that she can find only a limited set of books placed together, there is nothing necessary about their placement, “no inherent reason” that Christian denominations are found in the section labeled BX and New England history is found in the section labeled F1–F105. Once, however, such an order is put in place, the classification of a book in the BX section and another in the F section becomes the only way those books can be ordered: “chance creates” “an inexorable order.” Chance plays a further role here, because, as the verb “roving” indicates, Howe’s discovery of certain historical texts is not systematic: A number of shelved volumes which are tougher have so compressed their congested neighbors that these thinner often spineless pamphlets and serial publications have come to resemble smaller extremities of smallest twigs. . . . Often a damaged edition’s ­semi-­decay is the soil in which I thrive. (15)

Howe finds herself drawn to certain kinds of books, “damaged” texts in a state of ­“semi-­decay.” There is “no inherent reason” these texts should have been placed next to “tougher” volumes that have, over the years, compressed them: it is a not only a matter of the adoption of a particular classi-

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fication system but also a matter of what books are in the library’s collection to begin with and what books might be checked out, lost, or stolen at any given moment. Further, there is “no inherent reason” Howe prefers them to their bulkier neighbors. Or, rather, the reason that Howe prefers these books to the others is a matter of chance; a different poet may be attracted only to larger volumes or to volumes on the highest or the lowest shelves. But this chance turns into order itself, as the scant relics and curiosities Howe has come across are put into order in her poetry. This order is, first, formal. The two methods Howe relies on most frequently—­the word square and the c­ ut-­up poem—­are designed to illustrate how certain figures disappear from the official historical record. The word square is composed of short sections, typically symmetrical both horizontally and vertically, centered on the page and surrounded, almost overwhelmed, by negative space. The beginnings and endings of the lines are fragmented: one line might begin with the second half of a word, or the connective tissue between two lines might be lost, as if it were covered over by the margins of the page. As Craig Douglas Dworkin explains, “the visual layout of centered columns of equally lengthed lines moving paratactically in fragmented units creates the appearance of larger, originally coherent texts read through a narrow window” (399). By cutting words off with the line break, Howe exploits a central feature of poetry to represent the ways in which absence impinges on history. The collage builds on the word square’s formal argument. These poems overlay textual fragments, often rendering them illegible. In a 1995 interview with Lynn Keller, Howe describes her intentions for the c­ ut-­up style in “The Nonconformist’s Memorial”: “I was trying to illustrate the process of her [Mary Magdalene’s] interruption and erasure” (Keller 11). But Howe finds another kind of order in the archives as well, one that is more pertinent to our purposes here: the chance discovery of these documents demands order be imposed upon them—­for example, in “Melville’s Marginalia,” an essay and poetic sequence that argues that James Clarence Mangan, an Irish poet, was the model for Melville’s Bartleby: One day while searching through Melville criticism at the Temple University Library I noticed two maroon ­dictionary-­size volumes, lying haphazardly, out of reach, almost out of sight on the topmost shelf. That’s how I found Mel-

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ville’s Marginalia or Melville’s Marginalia found me. (Nonconformist’s Memorial 89)

The lucky discovery of the two texts started her composition process: “pulling a phrase, sometimes just a word or a name, at random . . . and letting that lead [her] by free association to each separate poem in the series” (105). So far, the writing process is ­chance-­based: the books were discovered by accident; the raw materials of the poem were pulled “at random” from the source material. Having finished reading Melville’s Marginalia, which Howe describes as the “loving” work of “a dedicated ­sub-­sub-­graduate student in a time before librarians, scholars, and authors relied on computers or Xerox machines,” Howe turns to Houghton Library at Harvard to examine some of Melville’s books herself (90, 91). While reading his copy of Poems by James Clarence Mangan, she “saw the pencilled trace of Herman Melville’s passage through John Mitchel’s introduction and knew by shock of poetry telepathy the real James Clarence Mangan is the progenitor of fictional Bartleby” (106).1 Of course, this “pencilled trace” isn’t her only evidence. Mangan worked as a scrivener and died “probably from starvation” in 1849 (87). There is a striking similarity between the Irish poet and Melville’s model employee, but as Howe herself notes, “[t]he problem was chronology” (106). “Bartleby” was composed in 1853; Melville’s own inscription in the copy of Mangan’s poems, however, indicates that he did not discover the poet until 1862. She attempts to substantiate her claim—­ to turn what appears to be a fascinating set of coincidences into a causal, ­literary-­historical account of the composition of “Bartleby”—by pointing to the fact that “Mangan already had American readers during the 1850s,” so many that the United States Magazine and Literary Review published an issue devoted to Mangan in 1851, two years before “Bartleby” (107). These facts lead her to conclude, with uncharacteristic certainty, that “[b]y the time Melville acquired Mitchel’s edition of Mangan’s poems in 1862, he was already familiar with the poet’s life and work” (107). Whether or not we are convinced by Howe’s claims is beside the point. What is important about “Melville’s Marginalia” is that, despite the “problem. . . [of] chronology,” the resonances between Mangan and Bartleby are so great that it would be hard to imagine coming across the facts of the case and not devising the same account that Howe has. Although every-

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thing leading up to the composition of “Melville’s Marginalia” was random or coincidental—­from the fact that she was herself familiar with Mangan because of her Irish mother to the discovery of Melville’s Marginalia to which of Melville’s books were preserved at Harvard to the fact that Melville owned a book of poetry written by a man who was employed as a scrivener and starved to death in a hospital—­the case requires that some account be produced. The chance events that Howe emphasizes throughout the poem are ultimately transformed into necessity. At stake here is the difference between positing history as ultimately intelligible, even if we lack the information to produce its intelligibility, and believing that history is ultimately unintelligible. It is Howe’s belief in our ability to make the intelligible—“citable in all moments,” as Benjamin would put it, that contains the seeds of her utopic project, one that puts our understanding of history at the center of our politics (254).

A Theory of Retrospect Souls of the Labadie Tract is named for one of three lyric sequences contained within it. This particular set of poems presents Howe’s ongoing relationship to colonial American history in the form of a dialogue between her and the Labadists, a seventeenth-century Quietist sect that settled in Maryland.2 Like much of Howe’s poetry, it’s a difficult sequence, made more challenging by what at first appears to be a fluidity of identities: sections are spoken from both the singular and plural fi ­ rst-­person, all addressing “you.” When read in conjunction with “Personal Narrative,” the essay with which the collection opens, it becomes clear that “I” is Susan Howe and “we” are the Labadists and that the sequence dramatizes the relationship between Howe and the objects of her study. Sections spoken from the “I” position, such as “I’d have gone in for you as I // am out and you’re forever in,” “I have to see / you fresh,” and “I have lost your world,” all describe the process of archival research (35, 50, 60). In contrast, the plural speakers’ statements bind them to the archival materials and history from which they emerge: “we’re the past,” “[a]ren’t odd books full of us,” “[a]ren’t we the very same / as we long ago saw,” and, with gallows humor, “we’ve been dying to show you” (39, 50, 51, 63). Though these identities are clearly defined, both Howe

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and the Labadists are called “you” when they occupy the objective position in the sentence (as in “I’d have gone in for you” and “we’ve been dying to show you”). This repetition is also a matter of chance: in modern English, the words for the singular and plural s­ econd-­person pronouns are identical. William Montgomery describes the “surprisingly frequent” use of these pronouns as “a teasing and testing of lyric boundaries . . . [that] explodes and reaffirms the convention of lyric address,” a description that might also apply to the poets we encountered in the last chapter (163). Because the poem presents a conversation between Howe and the Labadists, both occupy the position of lyric subject and lyric object at different times in the poem. As such, Montgomery argues, it conforms to Elizabeth Willis’s claims about the “flexibility, ­self-­awareness, and multiplicity” of contemporary lyric (Montgomery 145). Howe further exploits this grammatical coincidence to insert a third subject position: . . . you . . . yes yes you with me here between us—­of our being together . . . (54)

Howe repeats and emphasizes “you,” placing it at the end of two consecutive lines, one of which ends a stanza. Based on the reading conventions so far established, we initially read the “you” as the Labadists, as the use of “me” suggests that the singular speaker (Howe) is the lyric subject. But the preposition “between” forces us to reconsider the relationship between the speakers. The Labadists (“you”) cannot be simultaneously “with me” and “between us.” The only way to make sense of these lines is to posit another figure, a third “you,” one who never assumes the position of lyric speaker. Of course, this third figure has always been present: the audience. So far, however, we have remained unacknowledged. At this moment, the entire perspective of the poem shifts, revealing that it is not simply a dramatization of Howe’s long engagement with history but an elaboration of how that engagement has become central to her aesthetic practice. In all her poems, Howe is “here between us” because she mediates the reader’s relationship to history. When the figures of the poem turn to and acknowledge the audience, Howe demonstrates that she is, indeed, playing with the lyric form

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and, importantly for our purposes, the relationship between the lyric poem and the audience. But unlike the Language Poets, with whom she is often connected, Howe’s acknowledgment of the audience does not invite our participation. By reserving the fi ­ rst-­person singular pronoun for the figure “between” the subject of the poem and its audience, Howe insists on the need for an author: the audience does not have direct access to the material; we can hear the Labadists only when Howe stands between us and them. This relationship entails a specific temporality. In the noted lyric, it becomes clear that “you” is not part of the dialogic exchange between Howe and the Labadists but, in fact, an apostrophe to the audience. While the audience was absent at the time of composition, they are present at the time of reading. As such, “Souls” depends on the existence of a future in which the poem will be read. Howe’s “testing and teasing” of traditional lyric address underline the temporal distance between author and reader, while also highlighting lyric’s ability to bring together distant temporal moments by staging a conversation between a ­twenty-­first-­century poet and an ­eighteenth-­century religious sect for the benefit of the audience that may (or may not) be just as temporally distant. For Howe, this temporal distance belongs both to the poem and the archive. In her description of her relationship to the archive in “Personal Narrative,” Howe writes, “The future seemed to lie in this forest of letters, theories, and forgotten actualities” (14). Here, past and future are condensed into the present moment. The past is available to Howe in the library, but it isn’t the past as such: it’s a wilderness, “a forest of letters.” Moreover, the past that’s there consists of “forgotten actualities.” That phrase speaks to the way in which the past functions as a given—­there’s no changing it—­and the way in which the conditions under which the past might be made legible on its own terms are lost. At the same time, however, it is in this wild and ­half-­forgotten place that Howe locates the future. In Spontaneous Particulars, Howe describes the “visionary spirit” of poetry, “a deposit from a future yet to come, [which] is gathered and guarded in the domain of research libraries and special collections” (17). In fact, the relationship between the past and future held by the archives sheds light in both directions. She writes, “I had a sense of the parallel

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between our always fragmentary knowledge and the continual progress toward perfect understanding that never withers away” (14). This is an asymptotic teleology in which the track of “our always fragmentary knowledge” approaches “perfect understanding” but never quite reaches it. The archive, in Howe’s work, is the place where such a “perfect understanding” can be reached for if not achieved. But it is also the place where “hunted, captured, guarded and preserved” objects and manuscripts are “shut carefully away, outside an economy of use” (Spontaneous Particulars 24).3 This speaks to a particular kind of accumulative violence that restricts the possibilities for fully understanding the past. Like Adorno, Howe finds these objects’ separation from the world key to their value. She writes, “this meanly magnificent ‘waste’ exists on a scale beyond actual use. It provides us with a literal and mythical sense of life hereafter” (25). In this instance, the existence of lost manuscripts implies a different kind of economy, one unrelated to utility and one that extends beyond the present and into the “life hereafter.” According to Howe, these materials wait for “an encounter with the mind of a curious read, a researcher, an antiquarian, a bibliomaniac, a sub sub librarian, a poet” (24), like the encounters staged in “Souls of the Labadie Tract” and “Melville’s Marginalia.” Such an encounter, in which the past is “­ re-­animated, ­re-­collected (recollected),” makes the voices silenced by history—­voices of women, people of color, and religious and political dissidents—­once again available (Spontaneous Particulars 24). In this sense, Howe’s project is cousin to Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism. In the rediscovery and recirculation of these lost objects, manuscripts, and ideas, the past is brought to us for reconsideration in its fullness: the archive, for Howe, is the only place where the past might become, in Benjamin’s terms, fully citable. Thus, the archive for Howe is a utopic site, in which the “forgotten actualities” are transformed into “a future yet to come” (Souls 14, Spontaneous Particulars 24). Although the future in which the past is fully citable, or, in her formulation, the future in which the track of our “always fragmentary knowledge” approaches “perfect understanding,” may never come, the archive represents the possibility of such a future, which depends on the possibility of making both past and future intelligible. The Labadists’ Maryland settlement becomes citable because

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it appears in the poem “Souls of the Labadie Tract.” A chance event has created an inexorable order: the order of the historical record. Indeed, the opening lyric of “Souls of the Labadie Tract” summarizes this argument: Indifferent truth and trust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . That we are come to that Between us here to know Things in the perfect way (27)

The second line of the second stanza—“between us here”—should remind us of the section in which Howe first acknowledges the audience. Here, the relationship “between us here” is the mechanism by which writer and audience might “know / Things in the perfect way.” That is, for Howe, the separation of author and audience is necessary for the production of “perfect knowledge” or, in the language of “Personal Narrative,” “perfect understanding.” This, then, is the force of describing truth as “indifferent” in the opening line: in Howe’s conception of the relationship “between us here,” the work of art is indifferent to its audience. The poem’s indifference to its audience does require the audience to act upon it, but as interpreters, not composers. The willful conversion of chance elements into necessity in the formal construction of the poem, unchanged by and indifferent to its interpreting audience, is the point at which the poem and politics touch. It provides a theory of the conversion of past events into history (perhaps even History), which is required for any political intervention. As Howe describes it, her poetry presents “singularities,” which refers to René Thom’s algebraic concept. In an interview with Edward Foster, reprinted in The B ­ irth-­Mark, she explains, In algebra a singularity is the point where plus becomes minus. On a line, if you start at x point, there is +1, +2, etc. But at the other side of the point is -1, -2, etc. The singularity (I think Thom is saying) is the point where there is a sudden change to something completely else. It’s a chaotic point. It’s the point chaos enters cosmos, the instant articulation. Then there is a leap into something else. (Birth-­Mark 173)

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Intentionally or not, Howe once again echoes Benjamin. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” he writes, The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution. (261)

Only once the revolutionary classes displace the ruling class can we make this “leap into the open air of history,” this “leap into something else,” ushering in a truly new style of time. Howe’s poetry, which returns to the past to make it fully citable in the present, won’t force us over the cliff and into the open sky of history. No poetry can. But, Howe’s poetry demands interpretation; it demands that we make an account. This book offers one way of making that account. Our present, whether this term refers to a time soon after this book’s publication or decades, even centuries later—­when a “­sub-­sub-­graduate student” has unearthed it from a ­tucked-­away shelf in a research library or the endless memory of the internet—­is determined by the past. While it is comforting to understand our contemporary crises as aberrations, swerves away from the progressive course of history, such thinking fails to address the structural contradictions at the heart of capitalist imperialism. At best, it simply reproduces the same conditions that have already victimized so many; at worst, by forestalling resolution, it allows these contradictions to become even more deadly. If this book has one central takeaway, it is that we can fully understand the present’s crises only by attending to history in its totality. The restoration of marginalized voices to the story of imperialism is not simply a matter of inclusion. Their appearance is what transforms history from a document of barbarism to a source of future freedom. The poems that appear in this book use the lyric form in hopes of creating such total histories, but they leave the work of interpreting—­and acting upon the knowledge contained therein—­up to their readers. It is our task to follow the path of imperfect knowledge toward a better future, and it is a task for which literary criticism—­particularly lyric criticism—­is specially suited.

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The ruling classes have determined this present, and they are fighting to make sure that they determine the future as well. For us to break into the open sky—­to take a leap into something else—­we must restore those voices of resistance and refusal that we have lost. These poems, these ­lyric-­epic hybrids, help us see history in its totality, making the past fully citable and putting the future under our control, perhaps for the first time.

notes

Introduction 1. Walter Benjamin reminds us that the French Revolution “introduced a new calendar.” “The revolutionary classes,” he writes, know “that they are about to make the continuum of history explode” (261). Likewise, E. P. Thompson draws out how the capitalist revolution radically reconstituted notions of time in his seminal “Time, ­Work-­Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967). 2. Jameson identifies peripeteia (reversal), anagnorisis (recognition), and pathos (suffering) as Aristotle’s three plots, but separating them departs both from Aristotle and from Jameson’s more immediate model, Paul Ricoeur. Peripeteia and anagnorisis are, in Aristotle, subcategories of the larger plot category metabolé?, which can be translated as “change.” Ricoeur designates metabolé? as “the central . . . tragic action” (43). Pathos does not denote action; in Jameson’s words, it is “the name for a specific moment of the theatrical spectacle and not for the structure of a narrative” such as “the suicide of Ajax, Medea surrounded by her dead children, Oedipus blinded, or, perhaps even more paradigmatic for the traditional understanding of pathos, the Laokoon statuary” (552, 583). That is, while peripeteia and anagnorisis are ways of describing the tragedy’s narrative structure, pathos indicates one (typically the last) moment of the play. That these categories really name plot elements rather than complete structures becomes obvious in Jameson’s reading of recognition. His example, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, serves as a corrective to Livy’s The Early History of Rome, which “has often been taken as the very prototype of class struggle,” describing it in terms of the oppression of the “commoners” by “the great and wealthy aristocratic families” that run the Roman Senate (565). Ste. Croix argues that Livy misunderstands Rome’s economic system. The commoners were not, in Jameson’s words, “the producers of surplus value in this social system”: the slaves were (566). As a result, the Spartacus revolt takes the place of the “political squabbles” central to Livy’s text as the

162   notes to page 7 real version of class conflict in the ancient world. Jameson summarizes Ste. Croix’s discovery: “[T]his emergence of some ultimate subject of history bearing the full weight of all of human production and value on its back surely constitutes the strong form of historical anagnorisis or recognition as such” (567). Not only does Ste. Croix recognize the slaves as the “ultimate subject of history,” but he reveals something further: the “commoners” are both the oppressed and the oppressors; they can identify with both the slaves and the senators. Thus, they hold a dual position in Roman society. Ste. Croix recognizes not only the true source of class conflict in Rome but also the fact that the commoners condense the totality of the Roman economic system. What Ste. Croix discovers has the same structure as the reversal that Quint’s Epic and Empire reveals. 3. We can blame this obsession with the lyric speaker on Hegel, whose definition of lyric poetry in his Aesthetics (1835) highlights the poet’s subjective perspective on the world. Like the Phenomenology and The Philosophy of History, the Aesthetics is a systemizing text. Hegel proceeds both historically and conceptually from architecture, through sculpture, music, and painting to arrive at poetry, which he understands as the aesthetic practice most capable of revealing spirit in a concrete and universal form. In the introduction to the Poetry section, Hegel reminds us that art’s goal is to make “itself independent of the mode of representation peculiar to one of the ­art-­forms” and stand “above the whole of these particular forms” (967); that is, every work of art tries to transcend its raw materials. This, he writes, is “the essence of poetry alone” because only in that transcendence can the “withdrawal of the spiritual content from sensuous material” be complete (967, 964). As he explains, the other arts are limited by the materials they use—“towering heavy masses, bronze, marble, wood, colours, and notes”; in poetry, however, “its results are to be made known to the spirit only by communication in language. But this,” he writes, “changes the whole relation to the material” (966). While architecture, sculpture, painting, and music depend on materials with specific limitations, poetry’s sensuous material is language, a capacious medium that can capture “the whole gamut of feeling,” freeing it from the “restricted range of presentations that completely [correspond] to particular real things existent in stone, colour, or sound” (1115). In the lyric form, the poet’s subjective spirit appears unencumbered by art’s otherwise heavy raw materials. 4. Jonathan Culler writes that this argument “exemplifies a dialectical thinking that is easy to mock,” comparing it to the kind of argumentative s­leight-­of-­hand that lies beneath claims that credit Louis XVI for the French Revolution (Theory 331). Culler’s comparison is itself another argumentative s­ leight-­of-­hand: there’s a major gulf between recognizing how the French king exacerbated inequalities sufficiently to provoke revolution and giving him credit for the event. While it’s true that some

notes to pages 8–9   163 dialectical thought appears as the substitution of a term for its opposite—­what appears to be antisocial is in fact social, the villain is in fact the hero—­what Adorno’s argument does is draw out the rather ­self-­evident truth that a work of art needs the existence of the social to present itself as antisocial. Not every pair of opposites produces dialectical tension; instead, dialectic pairs are terms that require their opposites for their meanings to make sense: no light without dark, no inside without outside, no antisociality with the social. 5. This constitutes what Adorno calls, in Aesthetic Theory (1998), art’s utopian longing. In that text, he claims that all works of art suffer longing caused by their relationship to the world. Because art is made from the same materials as everything else, it is just as much a part of the world (and a part of capitalism) as everything else: it cannot escape the totality of capitalism. But the point isn’t whether it can; the point is that it wants to—­it longs to have no relation to what is outside but to have relations only to its own parts. 6. Julia Kristeva makes a very similar argument in her Revolution in Poetic Language, albeit with an explicitly feminist twist. There, she separates language into the semiotic and the symbolic: the semiotic—­constituted by chora—­describes an individual’s personal relationship to language, which “precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality. Our discourse—­all discourse—­moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it” (26). The symbolic is, in contrast, what we think of as language (Kristeva includes “syntax and all linguistic categories” in the symbolic); it “is a social effect of the relation to the other, established through the objective constraints of biological . . . differences and concrete, historical family structures” (29). Poetry, Kristeva argues, records the subjective chora in its use of nonsignifying linguistic practice, which creates tension with the more universal symbolic realm. Although she points explicitly to rhythm in Revolution in Poetic Language, we can include other aspects of poetry: line and stanza breaks, rhyme, assonance, consonance—­any poetic technique that creates patterns of emphasis. To simplify Kristeva’s distinctions, then, we might say that the semiotic resides primarily in the formal aspects of the poem, while the symbolic resides in its content. 7. For example, they quote Rae Armantrout’s review of the 1985 Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, which characterizes the mainstream lyric speaker: “the ‘typical younger American poet’ is outdoors in an ‘abandoned’ location, doing physical labor with a sharp implement. Both isolation and sharp implements seem associated in the ‘typical’ American mind with a certain glamor. Perhaps that is what lends these poems their tones of authority and solemnity” (Armantrout, quoted in Silliman et al. 264).

164   notes to pages 11–14 8. As Arrighi notes, this cycle follows Marx’s general theory of capital (­ M-­C-­M'), which describes the investment of money (M) into production (C) so that the commodity can be realized for profit (M'). Arrighi writes, “Marx’s general formula of capital (MCM') can therefore be interpreted as depicting not just the logic of individual capitalist investments, but also a recurrent pattern of historical capitalism as world system” (6). The phases of material expansion correspond to the first half of Marx’s formula (MC), while the turn to finance is captured in the second half (CM'). For both a capitalist bringing her goods to market and the world system as a whole, the moment between C and M' is a moment of uncertainty. If the commodity goes unsold, the investment in it—­money, tools, and labor power—­is wasted. If the commodity sells for less than expected, the profit may not be large enough for another cycle to begin or for the capitalist to profit from the transaction. Things are a bit more dramatic on the world stage. The transition between C and M' has different actors: we are talking not just about a national power attempting to valorize its investments—­money, tools, and labor power, yes, as well as governments, armies, and laws—­but also about capital seeking a new center from which to launch a massive cycle of material expansion. The difference in scale matters—­more people die in moments of translatio imperii than they do in moments when commodities gather dust on shelves—­but the structures are identical. 9. In Lords of Finance, Liaquat Ahamed reports how the European powers all thought that the war would be a quick one, precisely because of the global banking system. He writes that, at the outset of the war, “every banker and finance minister seemed to be fixated not on military preparations or the movements of armies, but on the size and durability of his gold reserves” (73). According to Ahamed, a young John Maynard Keynes believed “‘that war could not last more than a year’ because by then the liquid wealth of Europe that could be utilized to finance the war would be ‘used up’” (74). 10. Arrighi, as well as Panitch and Gindin, emphasizes the interplay between the state and the economy. Arrighi points out that the four cycles of accumulation vary their emphasis between state- and ­market-­building. In fact, he proposes two additional general formulae to describe empires founded on territorial expansion (TMT') and those founded on economic expansion (MTM'). In the first, empires expand their territories to secure greater economic control, and in the second, “abstract economic command or money (M) is a means or intermediate link in a process aimed at the acquisition of additional territories (T')” (34). The British empire is an example of a territorial empire, whereas the United States used economic power to establish its hegemony. Similarly, Panitch and Gindin caution their readers not to ignore the role of the state in globalization. Contrary to the belief that, ­ y-­passing, or diminishing as a result of global capitalism, “markets were escaping, b

notes to pages 16–22   165 the state,” their account of American global supremacy draws out how the state played a central role in the development of worldwide capitalism (1). 11. A great irony of these labor leaders’ disdain for the 1972 delegations is that they had, on the whole, greater labor representation than the prior convention. As Jefferson Cowie explains, “there were more labor leaders and more delegates carrying union cards on the floor in Miami than there had been four years earlier in Chicago, but those labor delegates were not ­AFL-­CIO lieutenants but [were] acting independent of labor’s command and control” (105).

Chapter 1 1. I have preserved the idiosyncrasies of Pound’s spelling, capitalization, and grammar throughout. The phrase “fra i maestri di color che sanno” can be translated “among the masters of those who know”; it is a variation on “il maestro di color che sanno,” which appears in Canto 4 of the Inferno, when Dante and Virgil encounter the virtuous pagans. 2. For an extended reading of this phenomenon in late n ­ ineteenth-­century American literature, see Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. 3. Evidence for this claim can be found in Canto 14, one of the hell cantos, where Pound describes the “perverters of language” as those “who have set ­money-­lust / Before the pleasures of the senses” (61). 4. We shall hear a bit more about C. H. Douglas’s theories later in this chapter and in chapter 2. Briefly, he believed that the interwar economic crises were caused primarily by bank loans, which decreased the public’s purchasing power and thereby created both unemployment and overproduction. Gessel wasn’t worried about how much money people had; he worried about how quickly they could circulate it. In his proposed system, consumers would have to attach a stamp to each bill they carried for every day they kept it: the sticker would decrease the value of the money by some percentage each day, encouraging people to buy. Pound compares and contrasts these two plans in detail in “The Individual in His Milieu” (1935, Selected Prose 272–82). 5. James Longenbach writes that Pound wanted to produce a poem that “would not only include history but change history” (95). Stephen Sicari notes that the Cantos is, in this respect, “extraordinary.” Because the poem is so closely linked with contemporary politics, he argues, “the poem’s success or failure . . . [was] tied to the success or failure of a man whose political future [was] very much open to the fortune of events. Pound opened his poem to contemporary politics in an unprece-

166   notes to pages 22–30 dented way in an effort to make his poem capable of intervening in current events, attempting to mold and shape them” (125). 6. See Karen Leick and Matthew Feldman for more on Pound’s diagnosis. 7. Pound’s famous description of the epic as “a poem including history” first appears in the 1934 pamphlet “Date Line” (Literary Essays 74–87) but is repeated and varied throughout his prose of the 1930s and 1940s. 8. And, indeed, we find that Pound uses precision to judge other artists. In “The Serious Artist” (1913), he explains that “[t]he touchstone of an art is its precision” (Literary Essays 48). We then find precision favorably applied to Lionel Johnson, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce (and less favorably applied to Wordsworth): “The reality is that they [Johnson’s poems] are full of definite statement” (Literary 363); “Mr Hueffer’s [Ford’s] .  .  . insistence upon clarity and precision, upon the prose tradition; in brief, upon efficient writing—­even in verse” (376); “Mr Joyce does not flop about. He defines” (400); “Wordsworth was so busied about the ordinary word that he never found time to think about le mot juste,” that is, the right word (373). 9. Lawrence Rainey’s beautifully researched Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture demonstrates how Pound turned away from the specifically political and economic aspects of Sigismondo Malatesta’s life, focusing the final version of these cantos on his and his family’s contribution to Renaissance literature. 10. Rainey offers a detailed and compelling account of how the Tempio was marshaled in Italian political history. In fact, the Malatesta family was central to Italian social life and politics through World War II: Antonio Beltramelli, a key source for Pound, explicitly linked the Malatestas with Mussolini. 11. Rainey notes that Draft B of the Malatesta cantos has a more explicit link between Sigismondo and the Provençal troubadour Raimbaut (38–39). 12. Pound believed that Mussolini appreciated the arts because, upon reading A Draft of XXX Cantos, il Duce declared them “amusing.” This remark opens Canto 41: “‘Ma questo,’ / said the Boss, ‘è divertente’” (202) 13. When paired with this prose of the same period, the content of the Malatesta cantos attests to the fact that Pound’s primary economic interests remain structural. For example, in “The Renaissance” (1914), he suggests that the United States adopt “laws [that] . . . favor the creative author rather than the printer,” following France’s model, where artists “do not have to pay taxes save when convenient” (Literary Essays 226, 222). He also calls for a “subsidy of individual artists, writers, etc.” (225). In “Patria Mia,” he writes, “[I]f America has any desire to be a centre of artistic ac-

notes to pages 31–34   167 tivity she must learn her one lesson from the Ptolomies. Art was lifted into Alexandria by subsidy, and by no other means will be it established in the United States” (Selected Prose 128). He made these proposals official when, in a 1922 circular written for Le Bel Esprit, he suggested a rotating scholarship fund for poets who wished to concentrate on their art without concern for financial stability. These solutions, especially a ­government-­provided subsidy, would alter the structure of economy. 14. It is worth remembering in this context that Pound considers writers to be producers. In “The Renaissance” (1914), for example, Pound writes that “[t]he artist is one of the few producers. He, the farmer and the artisan create wealth; the rest shift and consume it” (Literary Essays 222). This understanding of artists as productive laborers was not only a common feeling among modernist authors, but it also corresponds to the economic question that dominates A Draft of XXX Cantos. 15. This runs throughout his earlier political writings as well. In “Patria Mia” (1913), he distinguishes England from the United States by explaining that, “[s]o far as I can make out, there is no morality in England which is not in one way or another a manifestation of the sense of property. A thing is right if it tends to conserve an estate, or to maintain a succession, no matter what servitude or oppression this inflict. Our [American] presumption is that those things are right which give the greatest freedom” (Selected Prose 118–19). Likewise, in “The Renaissance” (1914), Pound writes, “France recognizes the cash value of artists. .  .  . Literary but inartistic England moves with a slow paw pushing occasional chunks of meat towards the favoured” (Literary Essays 222). For a reading of Pound that positions this recognition of cultural difference not only within the Cantos but also within the discourse of imperialism, see Paul Stasi, “Cosmopolitan Kulchur: The Cantos as World Literature,” in Modernism, Imperialism, and the Historical Sense. 16. The national dividend belonged to C. H. Douglas’s theory of social credit. Essentially, he argued that much of today’s wealth exists in part thanks to the labor and inventiveness of past generations and so the government should distribute payments to people that account for this value. Pound summarizes the national dividend’s premise in “What Is Money For?” (1939), writing that “a lot of WORK has been ­ ell-­diggers, constructors of factory plant, etc.) done by men (mostly inventors, w now DEAD, and who therefore can NOT eat and wear clothes.” (Selected Prose 294). 17. It tells us something essential about Pound that he considers these examples “accidents” as opposed to transactions completed by force. 18. Pound isolates the question of public versus private affairs in Jefferson and/or Mussolini as well. He writes, “[T]he frontier between private and public affairs is ­ nglo-­Saxons had a NOT fixed, it varies from one state of society to another. The A

168   notes to pages 35–36 certain amount of common land, vide the name ‘Boston Common,’ which is still in Massachusetts. The English boob was done out of most of his common land some time or other, probably under whiggery and the earlier Georges.” In contrast to the ­Anglo-­Saxon position on property, “Russian Bolshevism is the outcome of centuries of historic determinism, Russian habit of having a town council or mir where all the moonheads used to go and jaw about it” (37). 19. As I described in the introduction, Pound argues throughout his poetry and prose that banks intentionally incite wars. He also singles out certain periods of American history as moments at which the banks’ dominance was challenged, claiming that both the American Revolution and the Civil War were fought over the issue of monetary control. The Revolutionary War, he argues, began when the British empire stopped the distribution of bank notes in Pennsylvania with the passage of the Currency Act of 1751. Even the Civil War, which Pound admits evoked the same “elements of ‘conscience’ and ‘idealism’” as World War II (although it is not clear whose conscience he refers to), was primarily about money: “[t]he aim of the Civil War was unmasked in an issue of the Hazard Circular in 1862: . . . It will not do to allow the greenback . . . to circulate” (“America”). (There is a bit of a historical mistake here—­the greenback did not exist before 1862, so while its circulation certainly was an issue after the war, it cannot be considered the cause of the war.) In an early radio address to both the United States and the United Kingdom, he announces, “I do NOT want my compatriots from the ages of 20 to 40 to go git slaughtered to keep up the Sassoon and other British Jew rackets” (Ezra 21). He also argues that “[t]he sixty Kikes who started this war” be exiled along with “some ­hyper-­kike, or ­non-­Jewish kikes,” an argument that, for some, indicates that Pound’s ­anti-­Semitism was directed at bankers, no matter their ethnicity or religion, rather than Jews as an identifiable race (115). 20. Had Pound lived long enough, even his one good bank would have disappointed him. From 2000 to 2006, following its debut on the Italian Stock Exchange, the Monte dei Paschi pursued an aggressive expansion strategy, buying up competing banks within Italy and the EU and opening new branches. To pay for the expansion, the bank hid two derivatives: Santorini and Allesandria. The Monte dei Paschi was, like most banks, hit hard by the 2008 financial crisis, posting losses of around two billion dollars. The real problem came, however, when the Santorini and Alessandria derivatives (which had relatively minor losses) were revealed to the public. As a result of the hidden transaction, bank stock fell 22 percent in three ­ ail-­out funds to days. The Bank of Italy provided more than five billion dollars in b keep the bank afloat. Pound would certainly have argued that the Monte dei Paschi’s decision to move away from the traditional basis of the bank—­natural credit and public works—­was the direct cause of its failure.

notes to pages 36–42   169 21. Cantos 42–44 go into excruciating detail regarding the amount of capital and the rate of return. For example, “to lend the fund against the Gd Duke’s / public entries to the sum of / 200,000 scudi / capital for fruit at 5% annual / which is 10,000 a year” (212); “Up to the quantity of 200,000 / on the whole people’s credit / for public and private utility” . . . “@ 100 scudi to give 5 scudi a year” (218); “1680 to debtors 4% and one third / to creditors be paid 2/3rds of 1% under that” (221). However, they mention the bank’s natural foundation only in passing, with one reference to “The Abundance” and two to the “office of grazing” (211, 212, 214). We might explain this rather surprising gap with reference to Pound’s historical method in these poems: because he’s quoting from primary sources, he finds himself constrained by what they include. The actual percentages clearly took up more space in those documents than the source of the collateral, which likely required no explanation to the Sienese government. 22. We shall return to this idea of money ex nihilo in the next chapter. 23. Indeed, Pound includes two descriptions of public celebrations in honor of the bank: the first in 1622 just after the Monte’s founding and the second in 1766 to celebrate Duke Leopold’s reforms. This sequence produced perhaps the best remark in Carroll Terrell’s careful work on Ezra Pound. In his glossary for Canto 44, he writes, “Pound loved a parade” (176n14). 24. In fact, this is precisely how Hugh Kenner defines the luminous detail. He writes, Again and again in the Cantos single details merely prove that something lies inside the domain of the possible. It is not necessary to prove that the possibility was ever widely actualized; only that it exists. What was done at Wörgl—­once, by one mayor, in one village—­proves that stamp scrip will work. What was done in San Zeno, once, on one column, proves the possibility of a craftsman’s pride in an unobtrusive structural member. And any thing that is possible can again be. The Cantos scan the past for possibilities, but their dynamic is turned toward the future. (325)

This seems to be a very useful description of how the function of the luminous detail changes over time, but it does not capture its original purpose, which was the historical corollary to the poetic image. 25. In referring to locations and characters from the Chinese cantos, I was forced to choose between Pound’s always idiosyncratic spelling and historically accurate spelling. I have sacrificed historical accuracy and used Pound’s spelling in the main text and will provide the accurate spelling in footnotes. Caï Fong refers to Kaifeng, and Kien Long is Qianlong.

170   notes to pages 43–48 26. Pound’s organization of these poems might explain why they were so poorly received. De Mailla’s history is chronological, and Pound follows that structure in the Chinese cantos. John Adams’s Works, however, is arranged by subject: biography, diary, autobiography, political writings, letters, and so on (see Ten Eyck 3 for a detailed table of contents). Pound again followed the structure of the original. As such, when it appears in the Cantos, it does not proceed through Adams’s life but skips around. This has been taken as evidence that Pound wrote these poems quickly, did not fully understand the material, and did not devote time to revision, but I would argue they further demonstrate Pound’s commitment to his documentary method. 27. Having drained off the muck by Vada From the marshes, by Circeo, where no one else wd. have drained it. Waited 2000 years, ate grain from the marshes; Water supply for ten million, another one million “vani ” that is rooms for people to live in. (202)

28. Liu ­Yü-­i. 29. He does mention the more accepted rationale for the Revolutionary War in Canto 63: “parliament / hath no authority / to impose internal taxes upon us” (356). 30. As we shall see in the next chapter, William Carlos Williams and Pound agree that the American Revolution did not achieve the freedom it sought. Pound, of course, attributes this to the government’s poor monetary policies; Williams will make a very different argument. 31. Although Keynes and Milton Friedman are often described as holding mutually exclusive views about the best way to manage an economy, the distinction between them is not so clear. Both believe in governmental intervention. A better way to understand the history of ­twentieth-­century economics is to understand, as Nicholas Wapshott does, Friedrich von Hayek as Keynes’s other. Friedman came, perhaps, too late—­after we were all already Keynesians—­to truly oppose the Keynesian system. 32. As recent US events have demonstrated, this may constitute another repeat in history. Many ­left-­wing narratives appeared in the immediate wake of the 2016 election claiming that, while bolstered by racism and xenophobia, Donald Trump was propelled to the White House by economic anxiety (see, for example, Mike Davis, “The Great God Trump and the White Working Class”). Research that emerged in 2017 and 2018, however, complicates this narrative. In one 2017 study, researchers found that “racial resentment and black influence animosity are significant predictors of Trump support among white respondents, independent of

notes to pages 48–50   171 partisanship, ideology, education levels, and the other factors” (McElwee and McDaniel). Another study found that “racial resentment is driving economic anxiety,” not the other way around (Fowler, Medenica, and Cohen). It is nearly impossible to separate these issues: is economic anxiety making US voters racist and xenophobic, or have threats of economic decline become cover for racism and xenophobia? Likewise, by the time Pound took to the Italian airwaves in support of the Axis Powers, it was impossible to separate his critique of banking from his a­ nti-­Semitism. 33. It’s worth pausing here to distinguish between Pound’s cultural a­ nti-­Semitism, which he would refer to as “stupid suburban prejudice” in an interview in 1967 with Allen Ginsberg, and his economic ­anti-­Semitism. There is much evidence of cultural ­anti-­Semitism in Pound’s poetry. While some Jewish figures are portrayed ambivalently—­including Baldy Bacon of Canto 12, who is (like Odysseus) “polutropon” and the “not totally unsympathetic caricature of Max Beerbohm” from “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (Casillo 4–5)—we might also say that what’s left out of the Cantos matters just as much as what appears. Certain groups of people and institutions are presented as hostile to the preservation of this tradition: in the Malatesta cantos, for example, it is the Catholic church; in the hell cantos, it is “politicians,” “profiteers,” “financiers,” and “betrayers of language” (61); and in Canto 16, which covers World War I, it is, at least partially, the Russian Revolutionaries. But the ­ omeric-­Provençal tradition must come at the expense of othpreservation of the H er traditions: not just the Judaic tradition but Catholic and Marxist traditions are excluded and criticized throughout the Cantos. 34. For example, he exempts poor Jewish people from his attacks, cautioning listeners not to “start a pogrom” unless one can be devised that starts “UP AT THE top” (Ezra 65). See note 19. 35. Foucault also argues in this chapter that the Freiburg School and the Frankfurt School share a common problem they are trying to solve. Both are investing in resolving the “irrational rationality of capitalist society” (105). There are two ways of approaching this problem. The first—­and this would be the force of the section title “Limits of Enlightenment” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment where Horkheimer and Adorno’s essay on a­ nti-­Semitism appears—­is, according to Foucault, to “determine what new social rationality could be defined and formed in such a way as to nullify economic irrationality” (106). Horkheimer and Adorno’s essay is concerned with understanding how an economic problem—­wages are insufficient—­turns into a social problem—­anti-­Semitism. The second approach, and the one the Freiburg School took, is “defining, or redefining, or rediscovering, the economic rationality that will make it possible to nullify the social irrationality of capitalism (106).

172   notes to pages 51–56 Thus, postwar German liberalism represents an attempt to find the economic system that will guarantee social stability. To summarize their differences in a way that oversimplifies both: the Frankfurt School located capitalist irrational rationality in the economy; the Freiburg School located it in society. 36. Earlier in the text, Friedman explains that while “action through political channels . . . tends to require or enforce substantial conformity . . . , the market . . . permits wide diversity. . . . Each man can vote, as it were, for the color of tie he wants and get it; he does not have to see what color the majority wants and then, if he is in the minority, submit” (15). Thus, whereas a nation can only have one president, its citizens can have unlimited consumer choices.

Chapter 2 1. In chronological order by visual art movement, the most important texts to consult are Christopher McGowan, William Carlos Williams’s Early Poetry: The Visual Arts Background; Bram Dijkstra, Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams; James E. B. Breslin, “William Carlos Williams and Charles Demuth: ­Cross-­Fertilization in the Arts”; Dickran Tashjian, William Carlos Williams and the American Scene, 1920–1940; Peter Schmidt, “Some Versions of Modernist Pastoral: Williams and the Precisionists”; and Mike Weaver, William Carlos Williams: The American Background. Peter Halter’s The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams traces how Williams’s investment in movements like Dada, Surrealism, and Precisionism index the poet’s negotiation between the work of art and the world. Terence Diggory’s William Carlos Williams and the Ethics of Painting marries two strains of Williams criticism: the visual arts background and the m ­ aterial-­transcendent dichotomy established by J. Hillis Miller in Poets of Reality: Six ­Twentieth-­Century Writers. 2. See, for example, Joan Burbick, “Grimaces of a New Age: The Postwar Poetry and Painting of William Carlos Williams and Jackson Pollock.” There, Burbick argues that “the first four books of Paterson and Pollock’s ‘classical’ drip paintings . . . produced the beginnings of a ­post-­modernist sensibility, caught in a rhetoric of ‘immanence’ rather than symbolism” (110). While Burbick and I both see important similarities in these two figures, Burbick attends to how their innovations usher in new movements; as we shall see, I’m more interested in how painters like Pollock help us understand the formal construction of Paterson. 3. There has been much debate about the new measure and triadic line in Williams criticism, often spurred by the contradictions between the practice of the new measure and how Williams described it in essays and letters. For a comprehensive review of the various positions taken with regard to the structure and composition

notes to pages 57–59   173 of the new measure, see Eleanor Berry, “William Carlos Williams’ T ­ riadic-­Line Verse: An Analysis of its Prosody.” 4. The books of Paterson were published separately between 1946 and 1958. In 1963 they were collected in one edition, just as all the various pieces of the Cantos are. In this chapter I will refer to the books of Paterson as Paterson 1, Paterson 2, and so on, which is how Williams himself referred to them. 5. Of course, “abstract picture” could refer to any number of art movements that Williams favored, including Dada and Cubism, which, as others have so eloquently drawn out, were central to his own aesthetic practices. But the speech is specifically about American art’s rise to prominence, and neither Dada nor Cubism can be accurately called American movements. Further, the artist Williams refers to most explicitly is Robert Motherwell, who named his group of painters that included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko the “New York School.” 6. In Paterson 5, Williams treats a number of classic works of art as if they were ­all-­over designs. For example, his description of the Unicorn Tapestries pays as much attention to the flowers that surround the unicorn, the hunters, and the virgin as to the narrative that unfolds across the seven panels. He writes, “Small flowers / seem crowding to be in on the act:” “to / fill in the detail / from frame to frame without perspective.” The field of flowers is “without perspective.” We cannot tell which flowers are closer or farther from the viewer, which means there is no distinguishing between the background and the foreground of the tapestry; we cannot tell which details are more important than the others. For some, the lack of perspective might be a defect, evidence of the relative primitivism of medieval art compared to the masters of later eras. But Williams writes that these flowers “fill in the detail” and “make up the picture” (232). He reads this technical aspect of medieval art as an analog for the a­ ll-­over paintings of the midcentury. It should go without saying that The Unicorn Tapestries is not an ­all-­over picture. Certain sections are treated as more important than the rest; the top and bottom, the left and right, the fore- and background of the frame are clearly distinguished. But Williams treats it as an ­all-­over work, as a space of radical equality. 7. In this claim I disagree with Lisa Siraganian, who argues in her influential Modernism’s Other Work that Williams was agnostic regarding the autonomy of the work of art. While authors like Gertrude Stein and Wyndham Lewis fiercely protected the division between the artwork and the world, Williams was attracted to artists like Duchamp, who toyed with breaking that barrier. She writes that the poet vacillated between Stein’s and Lewis’s orthodoxy and a view that “significantly anticipates the poetics of the post–World War II generation, filled with artists and writers who understand art’s role as eliminating the frame separating an audience

174   notes to pages 59–71 member from the art object” (81). As a result, Williams’s “extensive aesthetic, poetic, and political compromise . . . explores . . . before ultimately reimagining” the relationship between the work of art and the world (81). Siraganian maintains that this brings Williams’s aesthetic project in line with his political project: “Williams implies that .  .  . rewarding readers’ freedom to make meaning can best support social and aesthetic progress” (82). 8. Mongrel Coalition against Gringpo. 9. Atabalipa is the hispanicized spelling of “Atahualpa,” who was the emperor of the Inca before the Spanish conquest. The Chiaha people lived in east Tennessee. 10. Throughout In the American Grain, certain figures are given the opportunity to become “Indian” to succeed. De Soto is the first, followed by Daniel Boone, then Sam Houston. Williams describes Poe as “a new De Soto” (220). The idea of American citizens becoming “Indian” appeared in a number of texts from this period. For a reading of this figuration of ­“American-­ness,” see Walter Benn Michaels, Our America. 11. Readers of Kant may object that Boone’s possessive and indeed lustful relationship with the New World would disqualify it from the realm of the aesthetic. But it’s clear that Williams is using a more capacious definition of aesthetic, one designed to contrast Boone’s appreciation of Kentucky’s beauty with the Puritan’s desire to “pull off pieces . . . from the fat of the new bounty” (136). 12. This is of course the canonical reading of text, established first by Joel Conarroe in William Carlos Williams’ Paterson: Language and Landscape (1970). 13. The pamphlet was written by Alfredo and Clara Studer, with an assist from Ezra Pound. 14. Jasper Bernes, We Are Nothing and So Can You, 8. 15. Though not named until this moment in the third book, the Beautiful Thing has appeared in other guises already: as Paterson’s female consort in “The Delineaments of the Giants” (“The Park’s her head, carved, above the Falls, by the quiet / river,” “[p]earls at her ankles, her monstrous hair / spangled with a­ pple-­blossoms is scattered about into / the back country” [8, 9]); as the nine wives of “some African chief” “packed tight up / in a descending scale of freshness” on the pages of National Geographic (13); the young woman who, in “frank vulgarity,” seduces her beau in the park in Paterson 2 (51). But these figures are not named the Beautiful Thing, they only allude to her because of their connection to nature, to nonwhite culture, or to unrestrained feminine sexuality.

notes to page 72   175 16. Many critics understand the lady as the Beautiful Thing’s landlady, although Walter Scott Peterson suggests that she may be a madam and the Beautiful Thing a sex worker (157). 17. Persephone recurs in Williams’s writing, embodying renewal and return. Kora in Hell takes Persephone as its major figure, and she also appears, both explicitly and by allusion, in Spring and All and “The Descent of Winter.” Williams presents another female character to whom Dr. Paterson dedicates all his work in Paterson 5 (216–18). 18. This triple disaster— “a dark flame, / a wind, a flood”—refers to events in 1902, when a fire in February destroyed much of downtown Paterson. A month later, the Passaic flooded, and, that August, a tornado hit (Paterson 280). Most likely, the description of the dead children is pulled from news reports about these events. 19. Nonwhite characters get only slightly better treatment, as they appear as objects of fascination throughout his work. For example, in “Sub Terra,” the first poem of 1917’s Al Que Quiere!, Williams seeks out a “band” of likeminded people who would be willing “to come with [him] / poking into negro houses / with their gloom and smell” (“Sub Terra” 34–36). The anthropological interest Williams has in black culture persists in Paterson. In the section that directly precedes Dr. Paterson’s meeting with the Beautiful Thing, Williams includes part of a letter he found in his maid’s room. It closes, “Tell Raymond I said I bubetut hatche isus cashutute Just a new way of talking kid. It is called (Tut) maybe you heard of it” (125). Williams’s lifelong interest in and celebration of regional dialect (his poetry derives from “the mouths of Polish mothers”) certainly made this snippet appealing (Autobiography 311). But, as it appears just before the story of Dr. Paterson’s meeting with the “Beautiful Thing,” it functions as a further fetishization of nonwhite bodies and culture. Williams also relies on stereotypes about nonwhite sexuality in Paterson and In the American Grain. American Grain’s depiction of the New World depends on assumptions about the sexual liberation of the indigenous American people. This is carried over into Paterson 1, with the aforementioned National Geographic image, and Paterson 4, where he observes the President of Haiti escaping with his “blonde secretary” (13, 190). As such, Williams takes part in a modernist discourse on race that is no longer acceptable. While Williams celebrates these figures—­making him, on the whole, more progressive than many of his modernist cohort (see the previous chapter)—this celebration depends on racialized assumptions about the difference between white and nonwhite sexuality. 20. Some critics argue that Marcia Nardi is the most developed and most interesting female figure in the poem. For example, Joel Conarroe writes that she comes to represent the “thwarted feminine principle” (102). Theodora Graham argues that

176   notes to pages 76–79 “Williams had valued [her] potential more than he permits the reader of Paterson to suspect” (179). At the same time, Sandra Gilbert points to Williams’s editorial control over the letters, which allowed him to delete important details from Nardi’s life so that her statements appear out of the material context from which she was writing. As such, he turns the real author of the letters—­poet Marcia Nardi—“into a character and thus into a creature he could control” (8). 21. The articulation of the gender binary in familial structures has, of course, developed over time, moving from multigenerational family units in the nineteenth century to the nuclear family of high Fordism and into new arrangements, where all aspects of reproductive labor, from childbirth and care to housecleaning, cooking, and nursing are outsourced. Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch analyzed an early instance of this transition by revealing feminine resistance to the destruction of the commons and the imposition of a capitalist logic on domestic labor. The authors of Endnotes highlight the way in which our ideas of “femininity” and “masculinity” derive from the postwar era, when men and women took up the roles of, ­ other-­wife-­unpaid-­laborer in the respectively, ­father-­husband-­wage-­earner and m most individuated way. Roswitha Scholz captures an ongoing transition in this process, highlighting the “redistribution of . . . personal care and nursing within the female plane of existence,” so that “well situated women” hire “underpaid female immigrant laborers” to perform the reproductive activities they are no longer able to perform (137). For those poorly situated, much of this reproductive labor has been performed by the state in the form of public education, universalized health care, and ­old-­age insurance. Austerity measures in the United States and the Eurozone are cutting into the state’s role as provider of reproductive labor, replacing public with private services. As a result, only the well situated will be able to afford to outsource reproductive labor, and we will find people—­perhaps not women but those whose labor is the least valuable outside the home—­again confined to the unpaid and unvalued sphere of reproductive labor. While Silvia Federici finds great potential in this situation, as it would allow women to reorganize reproductive labor, there is much to be feared about a return to Fordist, or ­pre-­Fordist, gendered labor arrangements. 22. I am being quite a bit harder on Marx than Federici is. She excuses his oversight by reminding us that domestic labor was not “organized by capital for capital, according to the requirements of factory production” until the late nineteenth century, well after Marx so closely analyzed the workings of the yarn factory (94). 23. This is found in Williams’s notes for “Book 3,” held in the SUNY Buffalo archives. The passage is also cited in John Malcolm Brinnin, William Carlos Williams, and Albert Gelpi, A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910–1950.

notes to pages 79–89   177 24. For a clear explanation of the science behind the discovery of radium, see Walter Scott Peterson, An Approach to “Paterson,” 195–96. 25. See C. H. Douglas, Economic Democracy, chapter 5. 26. Kenneth Goldsmith, Facebook post on March 15, 2015, in response to “The Body of Michael Brown.” Quoted in Steinhauer.

Chapter 3 1. James Walvin provides more context for this claim, relying on notes taken by prominent abolitionist Granville Sharp during the trial. Walvin writes, The insurers’ ­counter-­argument was straightforward: the Zong found itself in dire straits because of human errors, notably the navigational error which sent the ship well beyond Jamaica. Then, faced with the prospect of a slow return leg to their destination, it had been decided to kill the Africans to reduce pressure on dwindling water supplies. It was ‘a Blunder, and Mistake the Ignorance of those with whom the Ship was entrusted but it is not a Peril within the Policy.’ These details hid, they claimed, the real intention: ‘to saddle a bad Market upon the Underwriters instead of the owners.’ The insurers believed that Luke Collingwood was afraid that this, his first command, ‘would make a bad voyage for the Owners.’ The insurers even claimed that, far from being ‘distressed,’ the Zong arrived in Jamaica ‘in perfect safety and with her Crew And the Rest of the Slaves in good health’—an assertion that seemed to be belied by the reports in the Jamaica press of the Zong’s state upon arrival. The insurers felt they were not liable ‘either within the Words or meaning of the aforesaid policies of insurance.’ The entire business was a murderous fraud.” (144–45)

2. Philip also notes the way the captives are treated as money by highlighting the coincidence between the “guinea” coin (named for where the gold was mined) and the “guinea men” sold at slave markets: “how many guineas for this gui / nea man” (138). 3. Many identify the subprime mortgage crisis as the US’s terminal crisis, but, to be perhaps too technical, these events are recognizable only in retrospect, as they mark the final transition from one regime of accumulation to another. Because it remains unclear what will take the US’s place as imperial center, any identification of the terminal crisis is speculative. 4. Black and Latino Americans were 2.4 times as likely to be offered a subprime loan than white Americans, a disparity that only increases with applicants’ wealth (Badger). The Great Recession also had a disproportionate impact of black Americans, who will, on average, be $100,000 poorer in 2031 than white Americans as a result of the crash (White).

178   notes to pages 98–105 5. Although Baraka refers to him as Cardoza, his last name was spelled Cardozo. 6. The exception is the Nat Turner sequence. There, Turner promises to “rouse the slaves our brothers and sisters throughout this land to fall on everything with the white skin” (62). 7. Barbara Fields makes a similar point in her classic “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America.” Noting that the ­three-­fifths clause in the US Constitution makes no racial distinction, instead separating “free” from “other” people, she highlights the original multiracial nature of US slavery. But, it eventually made sense to enslave only people of color, as they “had not taken part in the long history of negotiation and contest in which the English lower classes had worked out the relationship between themselves and their superiors” (104). This arrangement benefited ­slave owners in multiple ways: it helped them cultivate political support from poor whites and allowed them to capture people of African heritage who, although legally free, looked more like the slave population than the free population. 8. The only other instance of audience participation comes in Act 3, when Harriet Tubman collects people from the audience (71–72). It is not clear from the stage directions whether these are plants or spectators. 9. Though not explicit, this plot element may be based on the 174-day strike at the Lordstown (Ohio) GM plant, sparked by a ­speed-­up on the line. 10. This of course refers to the challenge to the Steelworkers’ top brass by a multiracial group of ­rank-­and-­file workers, led by Ed Sadlowski. 11. Jenny Sharpe understands the poem in precisely these terms, arguing that Zong! “is formed through a deep and personal connection with the drowned slaves,” “strong feelings of kinship” that allow Philip to access the “collective [memory] . . . formed through a transmission of stories and a way of being in the world indelibly marked by slavery and its legacy” (7, 5–6). She goes on to argue that Philip manifests her connection and kinship to the Zong massacre in her invention of ­ r-­ancestor,” who is credited as Setaey Adamu Boateng, the “fictitious Ghanaian u the coauthor of Zong! (7). On Sharpe’s account, Boateng takes the place of any of Philip’s ancestors who may or may not have been killed on the Zong; he is described on the back of the book as “the voice of the ancestors revealing the submerged stories of all who were on board the Zong,” a ghostly informant who provides Philip with the details of the voyage that have not been preserved in any official archive. But Sharpe’s reading transforms the vast architecture of law and finance that made the Zong massacre possible (and, indeed, that makes up most of the poem) into a personal relationship between the poet and history.

notes to pages 106–120   179 12. Interestingly, this definition is left out of the glossary that accompanies the poem. Even if unintentional, its omission is still an effective way of reminding the audience of the separation between the law and justice. 13. Both the debate over Kenneth Goldsmith’s “Michael Brown’s Body”—and Marjorie Perloff’s baffling defense of it—­and Rita Dove’s work on The Penguin Anthology of T ­ wentieth-­Century Poetry are helpful microcosms of this larger controversy (see Jen Hofer, “If You See Something, Say Something, Or If You’re Not at the Table You’re On the Menu” in Entropy Magazine; Fred Moten, “On Marjorie Perloff,” also in Entropy; and Evie Shockley, “Shifting the Re(Balance): Race and the Poetry Canon” in the Boston Review). Perhaps the best summation of the argument can be found in Cathy Park Hong’s devastating critique “Delusions of Whiteness in the ­Avant-­Garde” in Lana Turner, vol. 9. 14. The statement “no pigs” seems rather strange, but it might be the result of Renaissance structures of the pastoral genre. As Thomas Rosenmeyer summarizes in his study of the history of the genre, “goatherds, shepherds, and cowherds” were appropriate figures, while “herders of pigs or horses, hunters, fishermen, laborers, and sailors” were not, because “[p]igs are dirty; horses are not essential to the economy; hunters are never still enough; fisherman may not talk; and laborers and sailors work too hard” (7). 15. Of course, in Latin, the words for an animal’s hide and the act of hiding do not relate (cutis and abdo, respectively), but Philip recognizes their rhyme in translation.

Chapter 4 1. As Glen Coulthard writes in Red Skin, White Masks, a commitment to public property “deeply inform[s] and sustain[s] Indigenous modes of thought and behavior that harbor profound insights into the maintenance of relationships within and between human beings and the natural world built on principles of reciprocity, nonexploitation, and respectful coexistence” (12). 2. This aligns with William Carlos Williams’s understanding of the American revolution as a failed anticolonial uprising. It is also, incidentally, the heart of the HBO series Deadwood. See the excellent collection The Last Western: “Deadwood” and the End of the American Empire (Bloomsbury, 2013) and my review of it, “The Last Western’s Missing Piece,” Mediations 29, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 139–46. 3. In some instances, this is portrayed as a matter of isolation. The narrator explains that “the Depression . . . had made little or no impression on people at Laguna. Most, especially the ­old-­timers, had said they never even knew a depression was going on, because in those days people had no money in banks to lose. Indians had

180   notes to pages 121–132 never held legal title to any Indian reservation land, so there had never been property to mortgage. But winters those years had been mild and wet for the Southwest. Harvests had been plentiful, and the game had been fat for the winter. The Laguna people had heard something about ‘The Crash.’ But they remembered ‘The Crash’ as a year of bounty and plenty for the people” (Silko 40–41). 4. From one perspective, this view of history threatens to naturalize the revolutionary process, making it seem as if the oppressed need never act to see the restoration of their land, their rights, and their dignity. I think, however, that Silko means that colonization had been such a brutal process that an uprising is inevitable. Perhaps it would not come from the Indians; perhaps it would come from black Americans or from veterans, two groups who belong to El Feo and Wacah’s loose alliance. Thus while we cannot predict when a response will come or what shape it will take, we can predict that one will come: the violence experienced by indigenous Americans and Africans is simply too great to go unanswered; the Europeans “must reckon with the past because within it lay seeds of the present and future” (311). We shall return to the notion that the past largely determines the future in the conclusion. 5. This reading contradicts what seems to be the critical consensus around okpik’s use of “she/I.” In The Capilano Review, Eleni Sikelianos argues that this plural speaker represents “a multiplied self that is able to inhabit the contemporary . . . moment, while casting forward and back in its stories, straddling various worlds.” Similarly, Dorine Jennette describes Corpse Whale as a ­“multiple-­personality pastoral,” in which the “she/I” formation begins as a way of describing the m ­ other-­daughter relationship—­which I agree is a central dynamic to the book—­but expands to include the animal and spirit world as well. Jasmine Johnston picks up this transhuman angle in her review of Corpse Whale for Studies in American Indian Literatures. Okpik’s use of “I” when referring to the “Inuit in me,” however, supports my reading above these alternate views. 6. Colleen Abel finds the theme of identity construction in the text’s very foundations, arguing that Kearney’s reuse—­sampling—­of other poets and popular music “gesture[s] toward the very importance of historical attention in the project of understanding one’s own identity.” This process, she argues, makes “one’s larger historical context . . . as personal as one’s individual history.” 7. This creates a surprising connection with William Carlos Williams and, specifically, Paterson, which the poet described in a 1951 author’s note as “a long poem in four parts—­that a man himself is a city” (xiv). 8. In their reviews of The Black Automaton, both Micah Ling and Evan J. Peterson also note the similarities between Kearney’s book and Amiri Baraka’s poetry.

notes to pages 134–144   181 9. In “Mess Studies,” Kearney reflects on the repeated images of eating in his poetry. He writes, “to eat something does not absolutely negate it. You are taking it, sure, removing what you want and need from it, and only then voiding what you don’t absorb” (Mess 26). 10. This poem corresponds to Baraka’s most militant, black nationalist views, which he would soften throughout the 1970s. See chapter 3 for more. 11. Indeed, Glen Coulthard calls it “arguably the most famous passage” from that text, and he uses a summary of the same passage to point to the limits of a politics of recognition in Red Skin, White Masks (32). 12. “Abnigation” participates in the word play that appears throughout Mess and Mess and. For example, in “Din-,” Kearney provides a glossary of new words (“dincognito,” “dintelligible,” “dinvisible”). He explains that the new prefix is “rooted” equally in the “Latin prefix “‘in-’ meaning ‘not’” and “‘din,’ as in noise” and “a contraction of ‘dingy’ as in Old English notions of ‘dung.’” So “din-” denotes “‘black’ plus ‘noise’ plus ‘not a Latin prefix.’” (32). 13. Kearney’s description of the shuffle, of course, owes quite a bit to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s notion of “signifying,” in which the difference between a word’s denotative and connotative meanings allows a speaker to indirectly critique the people and structures of power that dominate her. Kearney pays this debt by referring to Rock as “Signifier” (69). 14. In the same interview with Georges, Kearney attributes his desire to offer two possible meanings as a resistance to presenting ideas as equivalent. “I have to juxtapose. I have to contrast. I still want to be able to present something that is not just going to be abstraction. I still have all these interests in musicality. I don’t want to just spiral down into this vortex of ­self-­reflexive word play. So I have to come up with other syntaxes, I have to come up with other larger formal ideas in order to write the thing, because all this other stuff to me feels wrong. This is not master’s tools.” This resonates with M. NourbeSe Philip’s recognition that the language she was using to make Zong! was already contaminated. 15. The theme of surplus labor appears in both the other sequences as well. In “Shangdu, My Artful Boomtown,” the Xiaos are “[u]nmarried migrant men who wander in from the rural provinces. . . . While others are active verbs who do,do,do, Xiaos are the true helping verbs. They sometimes sponge white over graffiti, pave potholed roads, or scrub the sauna’s drained tubs until there is enough dirt and dander in their pails to make another Xiao” (48). And in “The World Cloud,” the speaker explains that “the booming trade of information / exists without our paid labor” (74).

182   notes to pages 144–156 16. In her interview with Elsbeth Pancrazi, Hong describes an experience in Northern China that inspired some of the imagery in “Ballad of Our Jim.” “Years ago,” she recounts, I spent some time in China, in this Northern border city called Yanji, where I was a journalist writing about North Korean refugees illegally living there. It struck me as very Wild West: there was no regulation, it was lawless, cars were driving on the wrong side of the street, undercover North Korean agents lurked around dim hotel bars. It was hot and there was dust everywhere. My friend and interpreter got drunk one night at a foot massage parlor and lost his passport, and he was too drunk to remember which parlor it was. There were like 900 parlors in that city. His friend, who owned a hair salon, recruited his gang buddies and they fanned out and searched every parlor. One of the guys found it but he had to get into a big brawl with the parlor owner who wanted to keep it and sell it for a lot of money. Strange things like this happened everyday.

Coda 1. This imagery recurs, with some difference, in Spontaneous Particulars: “Often by chance, via ­out-­of-­the-­way card catalogues, or through previous web surfing, a particular ‘deep’ text, or a simple object (bobbin, sampler, scrap of lace) reveals itself here at the surface of the visible, by mystic documentary telepathy” (18). 2. See Will Montgomery’s Poetry of Susan Howe: History, Theology, Authority for a reading of how the theology of the Labadists, which he describes as a “processual collage,” relates to both Howe’s larger project and the two other key figures in the collection, Jonathan Edwards and Wallace Stevens (161). 3. This is the logic behind the “Salvage Art Institute,” a project founded by Elka Krajewska that houses damaged art works that insurance agencies have declared totaled. Ben Lerner writes about this institution in both his novel 10:04 and an article called “Damage Control.” In both texts, he describes the experience of being in the institute as utopic: I felt a fullness indistinguishable from being emptied as I held a work from which the exchange value had been extracted, an object that was otherwise unchanged. It was as if I could register in my hands a subtle but momentous transfer of weight: the ­twenty-­one grams of the market’s soul had fled; it was no longer a commodity fetish; it was art before or after capital. (10:04 133–34) Each work had been redeemed, both in the sense that the fetish had been converted back into cash, the claim paid out, but also in the more messianic sense of being saved from something, saved for something. For me these objects—­just as they were, but a little different—­were ­ready-­mades for or from a world to come, a future where there is some other system of value, in the art world and beyond, than the tyranny of price. (“Damage Control”)

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works cited   185 ———. “Why Lyric?” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 1, 2008, pp. 201–06. Daniels, Anthony. “Pound’s Depreciation.” New Criterion, vol. 25, 2007, pp. 31–35. Davis, Mike. “The Great God Trump and the White Working Class.” Jacobin, 7 February 2017, jacobinmag.com/2017/02­/the-­great-­god-­trump-­and-­the-­white -­working-­class/. Accessed 2 March 2019. ———. “1992 Remembered: A Tale of Two Riots.” Capital and Main, 5 April 2012, capitalandmain.com/1992-­remembered-­ike-­davis-­tale-­of-­two-­riots. Acessed 20 October 2017. Diggory, Terence. William Carlos Williams and the Ethics of Painting. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Dijkstra, Bram. Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. Douglas, Clifford Hugh. Economic Democracy. London: Cecil Palmer, 1920. Dworkin, Craig Douglas. “‘Waging Political Babble’: Susan Howe’s Visual Prosody and the Politics of Noise.” Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, vol. 12, no. 4, 1996, pp. 389–405. Endnotes. “The Logic of Gender,” Endnotes, vol. 3, 2013, endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/ en­/endnotes-­the-­logic-­of-­gender. Accessed 25 November 2017. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, London: Pluto Classics, 1981. ———. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2005. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004. ———. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2012. Fehskens, Erin M. “Accounts Unpaid, Accounts Untold: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and the Catalogue.” Callaloo, vol. 35, no. 2, 2012, pp. 407–24. Feldman, Matthew. “The ‘Pound Case’ in Historical Perspective: An Archival Overview.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 35, no. 2, 2012, pp. 83–97. Fields, Barbara Jeanne. “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America.” New Left Review, vol. 181, 1990, pp. 95–118. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79. Edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell, Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Fowler, Matthew, Vladimir E. Medenica, and Cathy J. Cohen. “Why 41 Percent of White Millennials Voted for Trump.” Washington Post, 15 December 2017, washingtonpost.com/news­/monkey-­cage/wp/2017/12/15/racial-­resentm ent-­is-­why-41-percent-­of-­white-­millennials-­voted-­for-­trump-­in-2016/?no redirect=on&utm_term=.ced19ef4cb48. Accessed 2 March 2019.

186   works cited Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of ­African-­American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gelpi, Alfred. A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910–1950. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Gilbert, Sandra. “Purloined Letters: William Carlos Williams and ‘Cress.’” William Carlos Williams Review, vol. 11, no. 2, 1985, pp. 5–15. Graham, Theodora R. “‘Her Heigh Compleynte’: The Cress Letters of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson.” Ezra Pound & William Carlos Williams: The University of Pennsylvania Conference Papers, edited by Daniel Hoffman, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983, pp. 164–93. Greenberg, Clement. “American-Type Painting.” Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, edited by John O’Brian, vol. 3, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Grossman, Allen. ­True-­Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Halter, Peter. The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts. Translated by Thomas Malcolm Knox, vol. 2, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Hejinian, Lyn. “The Rejection of Closure.” The Language of Inquiry, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, pp. 40–58. Hoberek, Andrew. “Adultery, Crisis, Contract.” Reading Capitalist Realism, edited by Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014, pp. 41–63. Hofer, Jen. “If You See Something Say Something, Or If You’re Not at the Table You’re on the Menu.” Entropy Magazine, 18 December 2015, entropymag .org­/if-­you-­hear-­something-­say-­something-­or-­if-­youre-­not-­at-­the-­table-­ youre-­on-­the-­menu. Accessed 5 January 2017. ­ vant-­Garde.” Lana Turner, Hong, Cathy Park. “Delusions of Whiteness in the A vol. 9, www.lanaturnerjournal.com/7­/delusions-­of-­whiteness-­in-­the-­avant -­garde. Accessed 16 December 2016. ———. Engine Empire. New York: Norton, 2012. ———. “Interview with Elsbeth Pancrazi.” Bomb Magazine, 9 May 2012, bombmaga zine.org/article/6569­/engine-­empire. Accessed 20 October 2017. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.

works cited   187 Howe, Susan. The B ­ irth-­Mark. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987. ———. The Nonconformist’s Memorial: Poems. New York: New Directions, 1993. ———. Souls of the Labadie Tract. New York: New Directions, 2007. ———. Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives. New York: New Directions, 2014. Jackson, Virginia. Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Jackson, Virginia, and Yopie Prins, editors. The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Jameson, Fredric. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 2011. Jennette, Dorine. “Multiple Personality Pastoral.” Terrain, no. 34, 18 October 2013, www.terrain.org/2013/issue-34­/multiple-­personality-­pastoral. Accessed 5 September 2017. Jennison, Ruth. “29 | 73 | 08: Poetry, Crisis, and a Hermeneutic of Limits.” Mediations, vol. 28, no. 2, 2015, pp. 37–46, www.mediationsjournal.org/articles­/ hermeneutic-­of-­limits. Accessed 20 April 2017. Johnston, Jasmine. “Corpse Whale by dg nanouk okpik.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 25, no. 4, 2013, pp. 111–14. Jusinski, Charlotte. “Native Tongues.” SF Reporter, 12 August 2009, www.sfreport er.com/news/coverstories/2009/08/12­/native-­tongues. Accessed 5 September 2017. Kearney, Douglas. The Black Automaton. Albany, NY: Fence Books, 2012. ———. “Interview with Douglas Kearney.” By Danielle Legros Georges, Solstice Magazine, Spring 2015, solsticelitmag.org/content­/interview-­with-­douglas -­kearney. Accessed 22 October 2017. ———. Mess and Mess and. Blacksburg, VA: Noemi Press, 2015. Keller, Lynn. “An Interview with Susan Howe.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 36, no. 1, 1995, pp. 1–34. Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. ———. “With the Bare Hands.” Poetry, vol. 80, no. 5, 1952, pp. 276–90. Kinnahan, Linda. Poetics of the Feminine: Authority and Literary Tradition in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Kuukpik Corporation. “About Us.” www.kuukpik.com­/about-­us/. Accessed 20 November 2017. Leick, Karen. “Madness, Paranoia, and Ezra Pound’s FBI File.” Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920–1950, edited by Claire A. Culleton and Karen Leick, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 105–26.

188   works cited Lerner, Ben. 10:04: A Novel. New York: Faber and Faber, 2014. ———. “Damage Control.” Harper’s Magazine, 2013, harpers.org/archive/2013/12­/ damage-­control. Accessed 10 November 2017. Ling, Micah. “Douglas Kearney’s The Black Automaton.” Tarpaulin Sky, 2010, tarpaulinsky.com/2010/04­/douglas-­kearneys-­the-­black-­automaton-­reviewed -­by-­micah-­ling. Accessed 20 November 2017. Longenbach, James. Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Martz, Louis. “The Unicorn in Paterson: William Carlos Williams.” William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by J. Hillis Miller, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: ­Prentice-­Hall, 1966, pp. 70–87. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes, vol. 1, London: Penguin, 1992. McElwee, Sean, and Jason McDaniel. “Economic Anxiety Didn’t Make People Vote Trump, Racism Did.” Nation, 8 May 2017, thenation.com/article ­/economic-­anxiety-­didnt-­make-­people-­vote-­trump-­racism-­did/. Accessed 2 March 2019. McGowan, Christopher J. William Carlos Williams’s Early Poetry: The Visual Arts Background. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. ———. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Mikkelsen, Ann Marie. “‘The Truth about Us’: Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Paterson.” American Literature, vol. 75, no. 3, 2003, pp. 601–27. Mill, John Stuart. “What is Poetry?” Monthly Repository, 1833, www.laits.utexas /diss-­ disc/poetry/poetry.html. Accessed 17 January .edu/poltheory/jsmill­ 2017. Miller, J. Hillis. Poets of Reality: Six ­Twentieth-­Century Writers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Mongrel Coalition against Gringpo. “The Mongrel Coalition Killed Conceptualism.” web.archive.org/web/20150217121158/http://gringpo.com/. Accessed 20 January 2017. Montgomery, Will. Poetry of Susan Howe: History, Theology, Authority. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage, 2004. Moten, Fred. “The Case of Blackness.” Criticism, vol. 50, no. 2, 2008, pp. 177–218. ———. “On Marjorie Perloff.” Entropy Magazine, 28 December 2015, entropymag. org­/on-­marjorie-­perloff. Accessed 20 January 2017.

works cited   189 Mussolini, Benito. “Speech to Workers of Milan.” Translated by Italian Consulate in New York, Vital Speeches of the Day, vol. 1, no. 7, 1935, pp. 208–9, ­the-­eye.eu/public/Books/Occult_Library/Misc/THE%20RICE%20FILES/ Misc.%20PDFs/Speech%20to%20Workers%20of %20Milan%20by%20Beni to%20Mussolini.pdf. Accessed 23 February 2019. Okpik, dg nanouk. Corpse Whale. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012. Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. London: Verso, 2012. Perlstein, Rick. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. New York: Scribner, 2009. Peterson, Evan J. “This Is More Than Poetry.” Rumpus, 19 May 2010, therumpus .net/2010/05­/this-­is-­more-­than-­poetry. Accessed 12 November 2017. Peterson, Walter Scott. An Approach to Paterson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967. Philip, M. NourbeSe. Zong! Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Phillis, Jen Hedler. “The Last Western’s Missing Piece.” Mediations, vol. 29, no. 1, Fall 2015, pp. 139–46. Poulet, Georges. “Timelessness and Romanticism.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 15, no. 1, 1954, pp. 3–22. Pound, Ezra. ABC of Economics. New York: New Directions, 1939. ———. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1934. ———. “America, Roosevelt, and the Causes of the Present War.” Translated by John Drummond, London: Peter Russell, 1951, archive.org/details/America RooseveltAndTheCausesOfThePresentWar. Accessed 2 July 2017. ———. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1976. ———. A Draft of XXX Cantos. Paris: Hours Press, 1930. ———. “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II. Edited by Leonard W. Doob, New York: Praeger, 1978. ———. ­Gaudier-­Brzeska: A Memoir. New York: New Directions, 1974. ———. “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.” Personae: The Shorter Poems, New York: Boni & Liveright, 1938. ———. Jefferson and/or Mussolini: Fascism as I Have Seen It. London: Stanley Nott, 1935, archive.org/details/JeffersonAndOrMussoliniPound1935. Accessed 2 November 2018. ———. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1968. ———. Selected Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1957. ———. Selected Prose, 1909–1965. Edited by William Cookson, New York: Faber and Faber, 1973. ———. “Social Credit: An Impact (1935).” London: Peter Russell, 1951, archive. org/details/SocialCreditAnImpact. Accessed 2 July 2017.

190   works cited Quint, David. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Rainey, Lawrence S. Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, vol. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Riddel, Joseph N. The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the Counterpoetics of William Carlos Williams. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974. Rosenmeyer, Thomas G. The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Sankey, Benjamin. A Companion to William Carlos Williams’s Paterson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Schmidt, Peter. “Some Versions of Modernist Pastoral: Williams and the Precisionists.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 21, no. 3, 1980, pp. 383–406. Scholz, Roswitha. “Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender without the Body.” Marxism and the Critique of Value, edited by Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown, MCM’, 2014, pp. 123–42. Sharpe, Jenny. “The Archive and Affective Memory in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!” Interventions, vol. 16, no. 4, 2014, pp. 1–18. Shockley, Evie. “Shifting the (Im)balance: Race and the Poetry Canon.” Boston Review. 6 June 2013, bostonreview.net/poetry­/shifting-­imbalance. Accessed 2 July 2017. Sicari, Stephen. Modernist Humanism and the Men of 1914: Joyce, Lewis, Pound, and Eliot. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011. Sikelianos, Eleni. “Eleni Sikelianos on dg nanouk okpik.” Capilano Review, Winter 2012, www.thecapilanoreview.ca­/eleni-­sikelianos-­on-­dg-­nanouk-­okpik. Accessed 12 November 2017. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Penguin, 1992. Silliman, Ron, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten. “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto.” Social Text nos. 19/20, 1988, pp. 261–75. Siraganian, Lisa. Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Stasi, Paul. Modernism, Imperialism, and the Historical Sense. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Stasi, Paul, and Jennifer Greiman. The Last Western: Deadwood and the End of American Empire. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Stein, Judith. Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.

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192   works cited ———. Paterson. Edited by Christopher MacGowan, New York: New Directions, 1992. ———. Pictures from Brueghel. New York: New Directions, 1967. ———. “The Poem as a Field of Action.” ­Twentieth-­Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry, edited by Dana Gioia, David Mason, and Meg Schoerke, New York: ­McGraw-­Hill, 2004, pp. 51–57. ———. A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists. New York: New Directions, 1978. ———. The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams. Edited by John C. Thirlwall, New York: New Directions, 1957. ———. Spring and All (Facsimile Edition). New York: New Directions, 2011. ———. “Sub Terra.” The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909– 1939. Edited by Christopher MacGowan, New York: New Directions, 1991.

index

Adorno, Theodor, 7–8, 48–49 Aeneid, The, 3–6, 113–15 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, 125–27 Almanac of the Dead, 118–21 anti-­Semitism, 13–14, 43, 48–50. See also Pound, Ezra Arrighi, Giovanni, 10–20, 89, 149

Corpse Whale, 122–30 Coulthard, Glen, 126–27 Culler, Jonathan, 6, 10

ballad form, 142 Bank of England, 37–38 Baraka, Amiri: on Black Arts Movement, 95–96; “How You Sound??” 132, 134; “Poem for HalfWhite College Students,” 134–35; “Revolutionary Theatre,” 90–91; theatrical techniques of, 91–92, 96–97, 98–100 Baucom, Ian, 87–89 Beautiful Thing, the: 60–62, 70–78. See also Paterson; Williams, William Carlos Becker, Gary, 51–52 Benjamin, Walter, 149, 156–60 Black Arts Repertory Theater/School (BARTS), 95–96

Engine Empire, 142–47 epic poetry, 3–6, 24, 27, 102, 112–16, 121

Cameron, Sharon, 10 Cantos: Adams Cantos, 46–47; Chinese Cantos, 42–45; historical structure of, 27–30, 41–42, 46–47, 51–52; Leopoldine Cantos, 34–40; Malatesta Cantos, 28–30 Civil Rights Movement, 15–17, 93–94 climate crisis, 127–29 Clover, Joshua, 1–3, 7 colonialism, 59–67, 118–21, 122–30

decolonization, 17, 59–67 Dido, 3–5, 8, 113–15 Douglas, C. H., 22, 47, 79–80

Fanon, Frantz, 95–96, 136–37, 138–39 Federici, Silvia, 77–78 financialization, 18, 88–90, 149; insurance, 86–89 Foucault, Michel, 49–50 Friedman, Milton, 50–51 generational wealth, 97–98 georgic poetry, 1–2, 41 Gindin, Sam, 14, 17 Greenberg, Clement, 58 Gregson v. Gilbert, 86–87, 103–05 Grossman, Allen, 7–8, 147 Hamilton, Alexander, 31, 64–66, 67–68 Hoberek, Andrew, 7 Hong, Cathy Park: on US imperialism, 142–47; use of tragedy, 146 Horkheimer, Max, 48–49 Howe, Susan: composition practices of, 150–51; and history, 149–53; at the library, 150–51, 155–56

194   index In the American Grain, 59–67, 75–76 Insurance. See financialization Jackson, Virginia, 6, 122 Jameson, Frederic, 4–6, 115 Jennison, Ruth, 7 Kearney, Douglas: on Chris Rock, 138–39; on identity, 131–34, 135–38; on the LA Riots, 130–34 Kenner, Hugh, 24, 78 Kinnahan, Linda, 75–76 labor, reproductive: 75–77; surplus, 144 Language Poetry, 7, 8–9, 167 lyric: integration of epic tropes, 6; opposed to narrative, 5–7, 25, 40–42, 121; politics of, 7–10, 84–85, 105, 116–17, 121–22, 146–47, 148–50, 157–60; speaker, 7–10, 19, 102, 107–10, 121–22, 129–30, 131, 142–47, 153–54; time, 9–10, 86–89, 101–02, 116–17, 148–50, 155 Marx, Karl, 77–78, 119–20, 126 Mill, John Stuart, 7, 122 money, theories of, 21–22, 33–34, 45, 67–69 Monte dei Paschi, 35–38 Moten, Fred, 138–39 Motion of History, The, 96–101 Nardi, Marcia, 70 neoliberalism, 48–52 oil economy, the, 124–29 okpik, dg: on petrofutures, 127–29; on scientific language, 123–25 Panitch, Leo, 14, 17 pastoral poetry, 108 Paterson, 66–85; and redeeming language, 67–71, 74; structure of, 81–85 Paterson, New Jersey, 65–66 Philip, M. NourbeSe: on language, 103–06; on law, 102–06, 116–17; on lyric, 107–10; use of epic tropes,112–17 Poulet, Georges, 9–10

Pound, Ezra: ­anti-­Semitism, 13–14, 43; on artists as workers, 30, 34; on banking, 35–37, 48; on Benito Mussolini, 30–32, 42, 44–45; economic theories of, 21–22, 32–34, 38–40, 48–52; on how shoes and hats are made, 25–26; “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” 13; ideograms, 25–27; luminous details, 13, 23–25, 30, 35, 47; in Paterson, 68, 78, 80–81; repeat in history, 28, 30; on usury, 13, 34–40 primitive accumulation, 119, 142–47 Prins, Yopie, 6 Quint, David, 3–5, 115 racism, 50–51. See also a­ nti-­Semitism: white supremacy Silko, Leslie Marmon, 118–21 Slave Ship, 91–94 slavery, 18–19, 86–90, 91–93, 97–100, 102–17, 137–38 Social Credit, 68, 78–81 Souls of the Labadie Tract, 153–56 Spontaneous Particulars, 156–57 technocracy, 13–14, 23, 34, 47–52 US empire: history of, 10–20, 54, 59–67, 143–47, 148–50; signal crisis of, 17–18, 19, 89; terminal crisis of, 18–19, 89 value: critique of, 56–59, 67–68, 156 Virgil, 3–6, 113–15, 149 white supremacy, 18–19, 92–95, 97–98, 139–42 Williams, William Carlos: on American art, 53–55; on politics of art, 55–59, 62–64, 70–72, 78–81; triadic line, 2–3, 15, 56–59; on US history, 14–15, 53–54, 56, 59–67; value critique of, 56–59, 67–68, 75–78; visual art, 53, 56, 58 World War I, 12–13, 34–35, 59 Zong!, 102–17

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