The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry: Local Tongues in Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics) 3031078888, 9783031078880

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction. Local Tongues: Twentieth-Century English-Language Poetry and the Politics of Speech
Four Poets, Local Speech, and a New Formalism
Earlier Twentieth-Century Colloquial Poetic Tongues (and Before)
Transnational Local Tongues: Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton
Chapter 2: Troubled Tongues: Seamus Heaney and the Political Poetics of Speech
Good Poem as Good Politics, or the Sex Appeal of Violence
Local Speech as Poetic Strategy
Local Speech in Heaney’s Early Poems
Local Speech in Heaney’s Poems About the Troubles
The Redress of Local Speech
Chapter 3: The Gwendolynian Tongue: Gwendolyn Brooks’s Individualized Local Speech
Brooks’s Staple Local-Speech Poem
The Gwendolynian Tongue
Brooks’s Sunday Speech
Brooks’s Thaumaturgic Tongue
Chapter 4: Tongue-Tied Fighting: Tony Harrison’s Linguistic Divisions
Harrison’s Eloquence
Harrison’s Colloquial Loiners, Miltons, and Satyrs
Harrison v. Harrison
Chapter 5: Mortal Tongues: Lucille Clifton’s Local-Speech Admonitions
Clifton’s Black Speech
Clifton’s Admonitions
Clifton’s Local-Speech Testaments
Clifton’s Oracular Vernacular
Lucifer’s Local Speech in Lucille’s Eden
Clifton’s “Messages”
Chapter 6: Coda. Lashing Tongues: Twenty-First-Century Local-Speech Poems
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY POETRY AND POETICS

The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry Local Tongues in Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton William Fogarty

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Series Editor

Ann Vickery Deakin University Burwood, Australia

Founded by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, continued by David Herd, and now headed by Ann Vickery, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in the burgeoning field of 20th and 21st century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes: social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. Since its inception, the series has been distinguished by its tilt toward experimental work  – intellectually, politically, aesthetically. It has consistently published work on Anglophone poetry in the broadest sense and has featured critical work studying literatures of the UK, of the US, of Canada, and Australia, as well as eclectic mixes of work from other social and poetic communities. As poetry and poetics form a crucial response to contemporary social and political conditions, under David Herd’s editorship the series will continue to broaden understanding of the field and its significance. Editorial Board Members: Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University Vincent Broqua, Université Paris 8 Olivier Brossard, Université Paris-Est Steve Collis, Simon Fraser University Jacob Edmond, University of Otago Stephen Fredman, Notre Dame University Fiona Green, University of Cambridge Abigail Lang, Université Paris Diderot Will Montgomery, Royal Holloway University of London Miriam Nichols, University of the Fraser Valley Redell Olsen, Royal Holloway University of London Sandeep Parmar, University of Liverpool Adam Piette, University of Sheffield Nisha Ramaya, Queen Mary University of London Brian Reed, University of Washington Carol Watts, University of Sussex

William Fogarty

The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-­ Century Poetry Local Tongues in Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton

William Fogarty University of Central Florida Orlando, FL, USA

ISSN 2634-6052     ISSN 2634-6060 (electronic) Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics ISBN 978-3-031-07888-0    ISBN 978-3-031-07889-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07889-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: beastfromeast / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

I dedicate this book to Eric Bo Perry, a constant source of care and support. I also dedicate this to my mother, Kathy Fogarty, and to the memory of my father, Jerry Fogarty (1942–2007). They worked tirelessly to send my siblings—Jean, Tom, and John––and me to schools and universities, and they always supported us without question or reservation in our professional and personal pursuits. Special thanks to Jean for being a sounding board while finalizing this book. Many people helped me over the years as I completed the reading, researching, and writing for this book. First and foremost is Karen Jackson Ford, professor of English and dean of faculty for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon, who guided me through all aspects of this project at every step, from inception to completion, and who taught me how to read poetry and how to write about it. Lizzy LeRud, now at Minot State University, read many drafts of these chapters and offered vitally important suggestions, discussions, and insights. I am grateful for other faculty at the University of Oregon who also read drafts, gave feedback, and provided professional support, including Carolyn Bergquist, Louise Bishop, Miriam Gershow, Paul Peppis, Forest Pyle, Mark Quigley, and Ben Saunders. I offer special thanks to my colleagues at the University of Central Florida who have read drafts of this manuscript and provided invaluable commenting, advice, and support as I prepared the work for publication, especially James Campbell, Stephen Hopkins, Rochelle Hurt, Anna Maria Jones, Louise Kane, Lisa Logan, Carmen Faye Mathes (now at the v

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University of Regina), Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, Trey Philpotts, Tison Pugh, Anastasia Salter, and Mel Stanfill. Thanks also to those who talked to me about my work and about their own as I researched, wrote, and taught at the University of Oregon, at Emory University, and beyond: Kiera Allison, Amanda Bartenstein, Rachel Bash, Paul Bellew, Cheryl Boyce Taylor, Meghan Brown, Anna Carroll, Sumita Chakraborty, Liz Curry, Hannah Godwin, Matt Hannah, Angelina Lynch, Kate Myers, Jenny Noyce, Rosalie O’Brien Kivlehan, Jeni Rinner, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Eleanor Wakefield, Christopher Willoughby, and many others. I am grateful for an Exploratory Research Award from the University of Central Florida’s Seed Funding program that provided resources to research both the Gwendolyn Brooks and the Seamus Heaney archival holdings at the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley. Much research conducted for this book was done when I was the N. E. H. Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetics at the Fox Center for Humanities at Emory University. The fellowship provided time and space to write as well as access to the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book library that holds Lucille Clifton’s and Seamus Heaney’s unpublished archival material. The Fox fellowship also provided travel funding to research Seamus Heaney’s papers at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin and the Tony Harrison Archive at the University of Leeds. I would also like to thank the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for access to their Gwendolyn Brooks collection. I thank the journals that facilitated peer reviews and published earlier versions of some of the work that appears in this book. Twentieth-Century Literature published a large portion of this book’s fourth chapter. That material is republished by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. The Comparatist, published by the University of North Carolina Press, published material included in the chapter on Seamus Heaney. Finally, I acknowledge the estate and copyright holders who granted permission to quote from the poets studied in this book: Gwendolyn Brooks’s poems are reprinted by consent of Brooks Permissions. “the astrologer predicts at mary’s birth” copyright © 1980 by Lucille Clifton. Originally published by The University of Massachusetts Press. Currently published in Two-Headed Woman. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

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Lucille Clifton, excerpts from “brothers” from The Book of Light. Copyright 1993 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org. Lucille Clifton, excerpts from “moses,” “cain,” “john,” “those boys that ran together,” “admonitions,” “some jesus,” “eve’s version,” “lucifer speaks in his own voice,” “tyrone (1),” “tyrone (2),” “willie b (2),” “tyrone (4),” “willie b (4),” and “the message from The Ones (received in the late 70s)” from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton. Copyright 1969, 1974, 1987, 1991, 2000 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org. “Spirit Writing.” Copyright © 1977 by Lucille Clifton. “Spirit Writing”—unpublished Lucille Clifton archival material, Emory University, Rose Library. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Tony Harrison’s published and unpublished material are reprinted with approval from Harrison’s agents via Faber. Danez Smith, excerpts from “summer, somewhere” from Don’t Call Us Dead. Copyright © 2017 by Danez Smith. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, graywolfpress.org. Tracy K.  Smith, excerpts from “Brief Touristic Account” from The Body’s Question. Copyright © 2003 by Tracy K. Smith. “I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It” from Such Color: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2021 by Tracy K. Smith. Both reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, graywolfpress.org. Yeats, “Politics,” reprinted by permission of United Agents LLP.

Contents

1 Introduction.  Local Tongues: Twentieth-Century English-Language Poetry and the Politics of Speech  1 2 Troubled  Tongues: Seamus Heaney and the Political Poetics of Speech 27 3 The  Gwendolynian Tongue: Gwendolyn Brooks’s Individualized Local Speech 69 4 Tongue-Tied  Fighting: Tony Harrison’s Linguistic Divisions111 5 Mortal  Tongues: Lucille Clifton’s Local-­Speech Admonitions155 6 Coda.  Lashing Tongues: Twenty-First-Century Local-Speech Poems201 Works Cited223 Index239

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Tony Harrison’s Notebooks in the Tony Harrison Archive (1953–2009), University of Leeds Spirit Writing in the Lucille Clifton Papers at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library of Emory University Spirit Writing in the Lucille Clifton Papers at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library of Emory University

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction. Local Tongues: Twentieth-­ Century English-Language Poetry and the Politics of Speech

The poem usually cited as William Butler Yeats’s last is a short lyric titled “Politics.”1 It provides a fitting epilogue to Yeats’s oeuvre in that it capsulizes the poet’s long preoccupation with the relationship between art and sociopolitical reality, concerns that are central to this book. In fact, “Politics” is precisely the kind of poem that The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry will scrutinize. Here it is in its entirety: How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics, Yet here’s a travelled man that knows What he talks about, And there’s a politician That has both read and thought, And maybe what they say is true Of war and war’s alarms, But O that I were young again And held her in my arms. (348)

The poem weighs a certain pressure to “talk” politics during the time leading up to World War II against another poetic impulse: to ruminate on personal feelings and emotional experiences. Both inclinations are the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. Fogarty, The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07889-7_1

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provenance of poetry and in a kind of perpetual conflict that the brief lyric draws out. Is poetry, to borrow Edward Said’s terms, a “quasi-religious wonder,” necessarily private and intimate, that evades or even transcends the material, political matters of the real world, or is a poem “a human sign to be understood in secular and social terms”? To turn to the poem’s epigraph by Thomas Mann, is it certain that human “destiny” in the modern era “presents its meanings in political terms,” or are there alternatives for that presentation?2 Yeats’s “Politics” suggests poetry’s capacity for both.3 The poem doesn’t determine whether it should reflect on personal memories of young love or sound “war’s alarms.” True, it ends with the poet’s memory of his arms wrapped around his beloved, but the title is, quite bluntly, “Politics.” Rather than coming out on one side or the other, the poem folds both instincts in a conversational language that allows it to strike its two notes at once, dissolving the potentially propagandistic rhetorical postures of political statement and the elevated, willfully contrived pitches of conventional personal reverie in the cadences of a casual, uncomplicated colloquiality. “Politics” isn’t primarily about politics or, for that matter, love. Rather, it is a soliloquy spoken in a local tongue that interrogates a crossed predilection for politics and personal remembrance. That informal local language might be described as colloquial standard English, but with Yeats’s Irish inflection—an Irish English—implied by his reputation as a definitively Irish poet and perhaps even detectable in, at least to those familiar with the cadences and syntax of English as it is spoken in different parts of Ireland, the demonstrative and inverted phrasing of “How can I, that girl standing there/My attention fix,” “here’s a travelled man/That knows what he talks about,” and “there’s a politician/That has both read and thought.”4 The contractions—the “here’s” and “there’s”—and the pronoun “that” instead of “who” make for an informal-sounding articulation. Moreover, the use of “there” and “here” to emphasize a subject echoes certain linguistic patterns in Irish English. For example, in an analysis of the “responsive system” of the language, the way its speakers answer simple yes or no questions, Gili Diamant observes that “there” is often placed in the subject position—“there is” or “there isn’t” instead of yes or no (253).5 At any rate, the mere mention of politics by the Anglo-Irish author of “Easter 1916,” “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” “A Meditation in Time of War,” and “On a Political Prisoner,” some of the most famous English-language political poems about Ireland, conjures the

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volatile terrain of Irish independence, despite the fact that Ireland goes unmentioned in “Politics.” And yet for all these particularizing local aspects and allusions, the language’s ordinariness renders it general, too. The poem observes only “that girl” (we know not from the poem’s content but from literary history that the usual object of Yeats’s infatuation is the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne). It leaps from Roman to Russian to Spanish politics with no elaboration—and, as with Ireland, no mention of Germany, even as Europe stood at the precipice of Nazi domination at the time of the poem’s composition. It refers casually to “a travelled man,” “a politician,” and “they,” rather loose authorities on some indeterminate sense of “war and war’s alarms.” In other words, the poem’s speech renders it at once specific in its local facets and general in its commonplaceness. The girl is “standing there,” located nearby and yet, standing where? The travelled man is characterized as one who “knows/What he talks about,” lending him a bit of distinction although what it is he talks about is not disclosed. Even if we take the speaker to be Yeats himself, we could conclude it is only an approximate portrayal of him in an undefined state of speculation: “Maybe what they say is true,” he wonders with an idiomatic flatness uncharacteristic of Yeats, revealing neither who “they” are nor what it is they say. Further, the repetition of “on” between the looming, broad national designations that do get named—on Roman, on Russian, and on Spanish—has the effect of making the poem sound like the extemporaneous speech pattern of an individual, perhaps any individual. In lieu of resolving its ambiguities, the poem proceeds like a discrete and yet abstracted mind in conversation with itself, tightening rhythmically to its closing cri de coeur, “O that I were young again/And held her in my arms.” Such lyrical thinking-in-­ progress is punctuated by the poem’s two rhymes that emphasize the terms of the argument: “How can I,” the poem asks rhetorically, “fix” on “politics” when there exists the possibility of warding off “war’s alarms,” however urgent, with the enveloping “arms” of lovers—or the memory of them? Those rhymes produce sonic connections rather than stamp definitive conclusions. Indeed, its last lines conjure the anonymous “Western Wind” lyrics of a sixteenth-century song that has come to represent the musical, intimate, first-person aspects of lyrical poetry.6 The poem’s rhythmic colloquial tone produced by its local-speech cadences, its conversational generalities, and its patterned lineation portray a human being questioning, talking, thinking, remembering, and loving through “war

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and war’s alarms.” The poem is the tension between those human activities on the one hand and the all too human social and political catastrophes that sound war’s alarms on the other. “Politics” doesn’t answer the question it raises because it is itself the raising of that question. It rehearses a quandary, rather than provides an answer, one that reflects something of the dilemma about politics and poetry that engrosses the four English-language poets from the latter half of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic who are the subjects of this study: Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and Lucille Clifton. Theirs is a dilemma captured in another famous twentieth-­ century English-language poem, this one with Yeats as subject rather than author, W.  H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.  B. Yeats.” That poem—and these representative twentieth-century poets in Northern Ireland, the United States, and England who wrote in the decades after it—asks if poetry can be effectual in any social sense. Can it make things happen in the world (Auden 88)? Indeed, Auden’s elegy to Yeats is appealed to time and again whenever the question of poetry’s relation to politics is broached. In fact, it has become practically obligatory to invoke the poem’s equivocation-­masked-as-assertion that “Poetry makes nothing happen” whenever poetry’s social utility or futility is under inspection (an invocation this very introduction has also just made), and it is often deployed to concede the political limitations of poetry (a concession this book resists).7 What is consistently overlooked is that Auden’s elegy refers to poetry just a few lines after its most famous one as “A way of happening, a mouth” that “survives.” That is, if Auden’s poem argues that poetry is not a rhetorical tool to catalyze action, it claims in equal measure that it is an action, a “happening,” a “mouth” that continues speaking even after its creator has been elegized. The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry takes poetry quite literally as “a mouth” that produces local speech and identifies that speech as a  dynamic, transnational poetic resource with the capacity for reconciling what is often thought to be an incompatibility between poetic and sociopolitical realities. Jahan Ramazani has observed that poetry “may seem an improbable genre to consider within transnational contexts”: The global mobility of other cultural forms, such as digital media and cinema, is more immediately visible, and most commentary on literary cosmopolitanism has been on prose fiction, one scholar theorizing cosmopolitan

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fellow feeling as the ‘narrative imagination.’ Poetry is more often seen as local, regional, or ‘stubbornly national,’ in T.  S. Eliot’s phrase, ‘the most provincial of the arts,’ in W. H. Auden’s. (Transnational 3)

Nevertheless, Ramazani identifies poetry, especially in the twentieth century, as profoundly transnational, claiming that certain “cross-cultural dynamics are arguably among the engines of modern and contemporary poetic development and innovation” (3). Ramazani is referring here to poems by English-language poets all over the globe and throughout the twentieth century such as Derek Walcott, Claude McKay, Paul Muldoon, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Wole Soyinka, Agha Shahid Ali, Lorna Goodison,  and many others including Eliot, poems that “switch codes between dialect and standard, cross between the oral and the literary, interanimate foreign and indigenous genres, span distances among far-­ flung locales, frame discourses within one another, and indigenize borrowed forms to serve antithetical ends” (4). Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton don’t generally employ multilingualism or pyrotechnical experimentation, for theirs is a more nuanced interplay between nonstandard and standard speech registers, but they all in one way or another make poems from the kinds of crossings Ramazani describes. I claim as well, to trade on Eliot’s remark above about poetry’s obstinate ties to the nations it is reared in, that local attachments are not necessarily stubborn but may be flexible and malleable, and that it is often precisely the multifarious employments of local speech in later twentieth-century English-­ language poetry to examine and critique local conditions, circumstances, and encumbrances that account for poetry’s transnational valences, what Ramazani calls in his most recent book, poetry’s “multinational heterogenous array of traces” (Global Age 2). For while the language transformed into poetry by Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton that is under examination here is local, the transformation itself into rhythms, patterns, sound effects, harmonization, discordance, coherences, and incoherencies extends across locales and nations. In other words, when read together, local-speech poems derived from a variety of local and national concerns instantiate the translocal character of poetry, its boundary-penetrating resources, methods, and principles. A poem’s associations alone with, say, received overarching structures like the sonnet or a classical rhetorical strategy such as apostrophe reach across time and place and into many times and places along that reach: “Even when you localize, nationalize, and historicize poems, poetry’s deep memory of literary form and antecedent and its linguistic and aesthetic sedimentation transport you

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wily-nily across national and historical boundaries” (Ramazani, Global Age 9). At the same time, local speech is a grounding instrument. These concurrent locational and translocational proclivities, I argue, are the reasons local speech rose to prominence in English-language poetry in the second part of the twentieth century.

Four Poets, Local Speech, and a New Formalism In its examination of local speech in poems written in Northern Ireland, the US, and England during the decades after Yeats and Auden, The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry posits a key observation about the poetry of the four major poets from that era and those locales that this book focuses on. Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton all respond to societal crises across their prolific careers by arranging, reproducing, and reconceiving their particular versions of local speech in poetic forms. Each of these well-known and influential poets has attained a prominent place in the world of mainstream English-language poetry while coming from an outlier community whose original colloquial speech is a local vernacular that diverges from the institutionalized standard English they also master as poets. They make poems from those languages. That each is a major twentieth-century English-language poet working within or very close to the global centers of the English-speaking world but from varying positions of alterity affirms the prevalence of local speech in the English-language poetic tradition. At the same time, it reaffirms that nonstandard English is not an anomaly in modern and contemporary English-language poetry, predominant, say, only in global Anglophone literatures at postcolonial peripheries where English is often an ancillary linguistic element among many others. Nor is it only one of many felicitous linguistic features predisposed for avant-garde experimentation. Rather, local speech became one of the central modes across an aggregate of styles of English-language poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. Further, Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton all agonize at crucial points in their abundant careers about writing poems whose social concerns won’t undermine their art. Not only do they express these anxieties about writing poems in response to social encumbrances in interviews, essays, and letters, and in the jottings, notes, annotations, and revisions found in their archives, they construct poems out of that very anxiety, appealing in the process to the speech they spoke in their childhood homes, schools, farms, and streets. Each asks in different ways, how

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can poetry respond to atrocities, deprivations, divisions, and disturbances without aestheticizing them, without becoming programmatic or propagandistic, and without reinforcing false preconceptions about the kinds of language suitable for poetry? They answer that question with the speech of their local worlds, and they identify in their versions of local language, a “medium,” to borrow James Longenbach’s term, for facilitating an exchange between reality, represented here by speech, and art, represented by verse form (“Medium”). That local speech is, broadly considered, the everyday languages of the various marginalized communities they were each born and raised in— nonstandard languages typically exchanged among families, neighbors, friends, acquaintances, and other members of the same or similar locales. They are languages connected by everydayness, colloquiality, and distinction from blanket norms and standards. They are also individuated, multifarious, and plural. Indeed, a single geographical location can include an array of divergent, and interpenetrating, styles of speaking. For, as James Higginbotham explains, language is always social, even at its most discrete, developing from all kinds of other linguistic forms circulating among the persons of a specific area: “a language belongs to a population because of the intertwining, and mutually agreeing and reinforcing, mental states and dispositions of its members” (142). Speech is, in other words, an eminently social and always changing phenomenon in all its iterations. Local speech is a variable daily occurrence across all the varieties of everyday life.8 The relationship between the social forms of local speech and the aesthetic forms of poetry is likewise multidimensional. Angela Leighton summarizes the varieties of ways that “form” as a conception has been construed critically in literary studies since at least the turn of the twenty-­ first century, the word itself signifying everything from “the specifics of technique to the workings of creativity, from language parts to interrelations of interpretation, from artistic integrity to the nature of knowledge” (27). Leighton references, among others, Denis Donoghue’s conception of form as a “force” that amounts to “the distinguishing characteristic of art” (121) and Susan Wolfson’s articulation of form as a “charge” (230) to point up the definitiveness, energy, pliability, and movability of form, dimensions that contain their own “ideological and social functions” rather than standing apart from such phenomena (Leighton 24). Speech is also a changing, unstable, ideological, and social form, and this book pays attention to what happens when the force of local speech and the force of poetic form come together. In other words, what charges do such

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interpenetrations produce? Jonathan Culler deduces that while it may be impossible to determine poetry’s social effects, it is possible to comprehend its “sensuous factors,” the effects of its formal elements, as working against the “homogenized experience” that informs political arrangements (304–05). I argue that when what Culler calls “language processes” in poetry include nonstandard local speech registers, when the forms of poetry are created by the forms of such speech, they can create a linguistic corollary that enacts and resists debilitating sociopolitical encumbrances. When such speech is patterned in poetic forms, it can sound the emotional, highly individual tonal reverberations that have come to define poetry while critiquing social constraints and proscriptions by, say, staging resistance to comparable linguistic precepts or refashioning and reinvigorating a standard poetic formal attribute with a nonstandard or unsanctioned version of language. This interfusion of the social forms of local speech and the aesthetic forms of poetry has the capacity to foreground individuality without severing individuality from communality and can inject marginalized presences with social and aesthetic authority. Indeed, poetic form is as much a social form as speech is in that it also constructs a response if not always exactly to the world, always at least in it, an aspect of aesthetic form that has become increasingly prominent in literary studies. Although Marjorie Levinson, in her survey of formalist criticism in the first decade of the twenty-first century, identified a “perception of the embattled situation of formalist interests in today’s critical arena,” she also perceived an emerging tendency to examine “the conception, role, and importance of form in new historicism … cultural studies; contextual critique; ideology critique; Foucauldian analysis; political, intersectional, and special-interest criticism; suspicion hermeneutics, and theory” (141). Caroline Levine outlined in 2015 a new formalist method that does not separate aesthetic or literary form from sociopolitical experience, and that also doesn’t just “read literary form in relation to social structures” either, a “commonplace practice in literary studies” by 2015 (3). Levine observes that “politics involves activities of ordering, patterning, and shaping” just as literature does and that formalism should “bring together the field’s dispersed insights into social and aesthetic form” to advance a “new theory of form,” one that comprehends political and social reality as, like art, forms themselves that are “containing, plural, overlapping, portable, and situated” (3). Timothy Yu observes that twenty-first-century poetry scholarship has vociferously refused to divide

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poetic form from its social and historical contexts, noting that it has even gone back to “late twentieth-century claims on behalf of the ‘politics of poetic form’” to reexamine its generalizations against the particular “social locations that shape the politics and form of poetry” in every time period (6). This book attends not just to the ways aesthetic and social forms “overlap and collide” but also to how they collaborate within their locations. Each can transform and deform the other, but they can animate and enliven each other, too. The overarching argument here is that local tongues in poetry have the capacity to bridge aesthetic and sociopolitical realms because nonstandard local speech is, like any language, amenable to arrangement and rearrangement. But unlike standard versions of speech, nonstandard languages can also declare their distinction from the status quo and bind people who have been subordinated by hierarchical social conditions. In other words, harnessing nonstandard local speech into poetic structures can actively counter the very hierarchies that would degrade those languages. The diverse local tongues of the four poets under examination here, the colloquial speech of their specific familial and communal origins marshaled into the forms of poetry, situate them in those hierarchies, as well as in geographical locales and in literary tradition, intersections that produce what Adrienne Rich called “the location of the poet,” a writer’s position within society predicated on such determinants as race, religion, gender, sexuality, and class, a location vulnerable to “the facts of blood and bread, the social and political forces of … time and place” (171). Rich describes having learned as an undergraduate from the highly contentious and often reactionary “dialogue between art and politics” in Yeats’s poetry that poetry “can, may have to account for itself politically, consciously situate itself amid political conditions, without sacrificing intensity of language”—and for either progressive or, as is often the case with Yeats, regressive political purposes (174). Local speech for Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton serves as a resource for meeting the political imperatives and securing the linguistic vigor Rich refers to. If poems are, as Yeats famously asserted, made from “the quarrel with ourselves” as opposed to the “quarrel with others” that is rhetoric, then we might surmise that the local-speech poem is that “quarrel with ourselves” when the self simultaneously identifies as part of some “other” (Yeats, “Amica” 285). They are poems that admit some aspects of that outwardly quarreling rhetoric without sacrificing themselves to it.

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Earlier Twentieth-Century Colloquial Poetic Tongues (and Before) Yeats evinces alongside other twentieth-century poets that colloquial versions of standard English became in that century a common mode for English-language poetry in Britain, Ireland, and the US. His contemporaries and successors in these nations such as Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, T.  S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, W.  H. Auden, Patrick Kavanagh, Hugh MacDiarmid, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and many others, reinvented and reinvigorated twentieth-century English-language poetry with an array of colloquial styles, from the general (Frost’s and Williams’s broad-brush American speech) to the highly distinct (Hughes’s and MacDiarmid’s local dialects). Indeed, David Perkins long ago established that in England, Ireland, and America in earlier decades of the twentieth century, colloquial diction was becoming predominant in poetry: the “prevailing mode of the period,” Perkins says, is “provisionally characterized as a quietly reflective, colloquial poetry of actual life,” citing Thomas Hardy’s “Afterwards,” Frost’s “After Apple-Picking,” and Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole” to exemplify his point (1890s to the High Modernist Mode 136). Further, informal, everyday speech was an alternative to conventionally poetic diction for early twentieth-century poets who wanted to modernize: in the renovations of modernism, “meter, rhyme, stanza, archaic or otherwise ‘poetic’ diction, ‘beauty’ of sound and imagery, formal closure, and the figure of the poet as apart from ordinary life gave way to free verse, colloquial diction, images of everyday experience, open form, and, in one famous example, the figure of the poet as New Jersey doctor” (Perkins, Modernism and After 336). That New Jersey doctor, William Carlos Williams, identified in what he called “live” American speech the potential for a distinctly American verse form: “Trying to conceive a new prosody, [Williams] urged that there must be a ‘measure’ …, ‘some sort of discipline to free from the vagaries of mere chance.’ The measure must be ‘new’ and ‘intrinsic’ to actual American speech. ‘Speech is the fountain of the line,’ and ‘it is in the newness of a live speech that the new line exists’” (qtd. in Perkins 269; Williams 134, 336). For Williams, such generalized American colloquial speech was both a resource to thwart vagary and an invigorating element. Alan Golding, in his survey of “Experimental Modernisms,” points out that the “colloquial voicing” in Williams is one of the features of his work that answers Ezra Pound’s famous dictate that modern poets must “make it new” (45). Golding says the same about

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Mina Loy, who mixes into various styles of language the “bluntly colloquial” (44), and Pound himself, whose Cantos are marked by “shifts into and out of colloquial diction and syntax” (40). Robert Frost also famously identified colloquial American speech—in his work, a rural New England parlance—as an energizing principle of poetry, calling the play between natural speech and iambic pentameter “the sound of sense.” The enigmatic phrase refers to the tone of voice— the sense—produced by setting what Frost called in 1913 the “irregular” rhythms of his particular version of that everyday New England speech to the “regular” pattern of meter (CPPP 665). The idea seems fairly straightforward: the inflections with which a phrase or sentence is delivered indicate its purport. And yet the sound of sense is not simply a matter of delivery or intonation but results from the arrangement in writing of natural-­sounding speech into the fixed patterns of traditional metrical form. Frost describes the sound of sense as a dynamic, uneasy collaboration of the two elements: the sound of sense is made when poems “drag and break the intonation [of everyday speech] across the metre as waves first comb and then break stumbling on the shingle” (680). His poems put forms of natural speech (the variable waves) and verse form (the stationary shingles the waves spill over) into what he calls “strained relation.”9 Williams and Frost both suggest that various versions of local American speech have the capacity to distinguish modern American poetry sharply from English poetry. But poetry in England was in the first half of the twentieth century becoming more colloquial, too, albeit in less pronounced ways. During the 1930s, England’s poetry was adapting its own conversational tones even as it sought to remain connected to its lofty tradition: “English poetry [in the 1930s] returned for inspiration to its native traditions. Not that these poets, or most of them, could be thought traditional in the sense of ‘like the past.’ They were too colloquial, elliptical, rhythmically irregular and seriously parodic for that” (Perkins, Modernism and After 128–29).10 Perkins points to Auden’s “Spain 1937” as an early instance of this predominant style in England, which he calls “intellectual talk,” emphasizing its conversational qualities: “the mode of address could range from the oratorical to the intimate, but for the most part this poetry of intellectual speech was conversational. More exactly, it was a poetic imitation of conversation, more heightened, metaphoric, and formally patterned than ordinary conversation, but more like talk than was common in English poetry” (127). In other parts of the British Isles such as Scotland and Ireland, local speech was being put to more experimental purposes

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than in England. In Scotland during the 1930s, Hugh MacDiarmid invented what he called “synthetic Scots,” his own poetic version of his Scots dialect, “a literary language [that] recreates the Scots poetic tradition via the contingencies of the dictionary, mixing contemporary idioms with obsolete and rare specimens from various regions of Scotland” (Matthew Hart 10). In Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s, Patrick Kavanagh published poems such as “The Great Hunger” and “Epic” in what John McAuliffe identifies as a mixture of “neighbourly speech” and “more metropolitan and authoritative language,” a combination of “local speech and dictionary learning” that yielded a local poetry reflective of what Kavanagh called a “parochial mentality” as opposed to a “provincial” one (197). This binary clarified for Kavanagh a principle of local artistic sovereignty: “Parochialism and provincialism are opposites. The provincial has no mind of his own; he does not trust what his eyes see until he has heard what the metropolis—towards which his eyes are turned—has to say on any subject. This runs through all activities. The parochial mentality on the other hand is never in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish. All great civilizations are based on parochialism—Greek, Israelite, English” (204–05). Such civilizations are also, at their roots and in their speech, local. Heaney draws a transnational line from Kavanagh to Frost, describing Frost’s work with the very terms Kavanagh used to distinguish poetry that does not require validation from cosmopolitan sources: Heaney remarks, “the word ‘parochial’ is one that I would apply to Frost positively within the redefinition of the word ‘parochial’ offered by Eire’s poet Patrick Kavanagh.… The parochial imagination, [Kavanagh] says, is never in any doubt about the artistic validity of its parish as the subject for art; whereas the provincial imagination is always looking over its shoulder to the metropolis to see if it’s getting approval” (qtd. in Poirier 103). That Heaney describes Frost with this affirmation of the local by the Irish poet who perhaps most influenced Heaney’s own poetic portrayals of rural life is just one indication of the transnational reach of local-speech poetics. And yet for all the progressive, modernizing, and affirming potential of local speech in poetry, it could be distorted into potentially regressive forms, too. For African American poets in the early twentieth century, literary Black dialect was expected by poetry’s mostly white and middle-­ class readers as an inevitability in Black poetry, an assumption fueled by demeaning racist stereotypes. For example, Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first African American poet with a broad readership, felt forced to compose in Black dialect “in order to gain a hearing from white readers,

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expecting that they would then be interested in his nondialect poetry,” which they weren’t (Ford, “Fight and Fiddle” 373). Despite James Weldon Johnson’s own experiments with “the forms, tropes, diction, and rhythms of black vernacular music, particularly the spirituals and, to some degree, ragtime and the blues as a bases for a new black poetry,” he was also cautious of Black writers being pigeonholed into those vernacular modes of expression (Smethurst 83). In 1922, sixteen years after Dunbar’s death, Johnson observed that African American poets were “trying to break away from, not Negro dialect itself, but the limitations on Negro dialect imposed by the fixing effects of long convention” (41). That long convention of literary Black dialect derived from racist minstrel and plantation traditions, and Johnson thus urged African American poets “to find a form that will express the racial spirit” and communicate the complexity of modern Black experience other than that mode: contrived Black speech guided by conventions rooted in stereotypes, Johnson said, “is not capable of giving expression to the varied conditions of Negro life in America, and much less is it capable of giving the fullest interpretation of Negro character and psychology. This is no indictment against the dialect as dialect, but against the mold of convention in which Negro dialect in the United States has been set” (42). So while everyday speech in poetry could be a means for progression and reinvented to uphold the local as authoritative aesthetic material, African American poets understood the “quaint and musical folk-speech” of a conventionalized literary Black dialect as vulnerable to racist simplification, “an instrument,” Johnson declared, “with but two full-stops, humor and pathos” (40–41). Johnson wanted a form for African American poetry that expressed “the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought” of Black individuals that was “freer and larger than dialect” manifested in staged versions of speech (41). He wanted “live speech” instead of manufactured speech. If live speech and formal expertise and innovation are the salient characteristics of a distinctly American poetry, African American poetry epitomizes American poetry: it has a history of employing local language as its raw material in a way that rejects “the mold of convention” that was literary Black dialect, and it has “from the start,” as Karen Jackson Ford explains, “both mastered and altered the dominant Anglo-European literary tradition it encountered in the United States” (373). Langston Hughes, for example, invented a whole new African American vernacular poetry by mining formal lyric modes for their potential for innovation: he “was fascinated by the sonnet and the other song-based forms of Western European lyric poetry that

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formed the backbone of the English lyric verse tradition, [and] created a genre or sub-genre of African American lyric poetry based on popular and folk song forms identified with African Americans, most notably the blues” (Smethurst 85). Brooks and Clifton, we shall see, continue in the tradition of Johnson and Hughes: they invent their own poetic languages that employ and strategically subsume their versions of authentic Black speech. Colloquial language, of course, appeared in poetry long before the advent of modernism or the creation of modern African American poetry, but it was generally not emphasized in poetry until at least the Romantic period. As Barry McCrea points out, the “conviction that one’s mother tongue, one’s national language, the language one employs in intimate relationships, and the language of poetry ought to be the same is a relatively new one …, ultimately traceable, perhaps, to the Romantic idea that poetry was the expression of an individual soul through which also spoke the soul of an identifiable collective—often national—community” (14). In the classic preface to William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads in 1802, Wordsworth famously described that collection’s linguistic mode as “the language really spoken by men” (452). He characterizes the diction of Lyrical Ballads as rigorously devised to “look steadily at my subject” and to avoid “falsehood of description”: “There will … be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction; as much pains has been taken to avoid it as is ordinarily taken to produce it; this has been done … to bring my language near to the language of men; and further, because the pleasure which I have proposed to myself to impart is of a kind very different from which is supposed by many persons to be the proper object of poetry” (450). Wordsworth and Coleridge here are not just introducing their new style of poetry but revising the very meaning of “poetic diction” and the “proper object of poetry,” moving the language of poetry closer to colloquial speech in order to move poetry forward. Decades before his Romantic contemporaries, Robert Burns had been demonstrating that a less common “language of men,” Scots dialect, was also a “proper object” for English-language poetry. Scots, as we have seen, is a variant of English, and Burns spoke and wrote in both standard English and Scots. But it is the poems in Burns’s “vernacular, his cherished, native tongue” that have lasted because of their departures from the standard (Miller 272). Standard English may have been “of great importance” to Burns, as Robert Crawford remarks (Scotland’s Books 338), but, as Karl Miller notes, “literary criticism has preferred with reason his poems in Scots to those in English,” that reason being, Miller suggests, that the

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nonstandard version of the same speech is already imbedded with a subversive political force that also retains the poem’s “artistic worth” (282). This isn’t to suggest that vernacular-inflected writing was an entirely new enterprise for the Romantic poets, either, for dialectal speech was always at least subtly in circulation in English-language poetry. Indeed, such writing goes back to the very beginning of English-language literature. Larry Benson cites two specific lines in The Reeve’s Tale in which a pair of clerks greet each other as evidence that Chaucer “clearly wished the language of the two clerks to sound Northern,” distinguishing the instance as “apparently the first case of this kind of joking imitation of a dialect recorded in English literature” (850n4022). Jon Cook mentions that idiomatic speech was in use as an aesthetic tool in poetry during the Renaissance, too: “John Donne wanted to roughen up the smooth textures of Petrarchan love poetry with vernacular idioms and rhythms” (1). Sir Thomas Wyatt, about a century before Donne, did the same. For Tom Paulin in 1990, when he edited The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse, it is the nineteenth century when everyday speech comes to full fruition in poetry after the vernacular innovations of Burns and William Barnett, who wrote in Dorset dialect from England’s West Country in the eighteenth century, as Burns did in Scots. Paulin places Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman, and Christina Rossetti in a “common family of vernacular writers” who are “linked by the way in which they employ language as speech process in their poems, not necessarily by their use of dialect words or regional accents” but for what he calls their “savage vernacular energies” (xi–xii) and their poetic renderings of “spoken sound” (xiv).11 Still, for Paulin, it is John Clare’s explicit local-speech poems from the early 1800s that best represent vernacular poetry because they accrue political force from their East Midlands regional English and their resistance to standard English grammar: “With their lack of punctuation, freedom from standard spelling and charged demotic ripples, [Clare’s poems] become a form of Nation Language that rejects the polished urbanity of Official Standard. They are communal speech—the speech of the Northamptonshire peasantry—vulnerable before the all-powerful language of aristocratic politicians and the printed language of parliamentary statutes” (xix). Tony Harrison, to borrow Paulin’s phrasing about Clare, also “dramatizes his experience of the [British] class system,” not just by rejecting standard spelling, punctuation, or polish but by stacking his working-class northern English vernacular against a variety of other forms of speech to create fields of verbal turbulence that enact the divisions that

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classism creates. Finally, it nearly goes without saying that the vernacular in poetry is not only an English-language phenomenon. Perhaps the most famous non-English example in the West is Dante’s Divine Comedy, written in Florentine Italian instead of Latin. We will see in the next chapter (Chap. 2) that Heaney was inspired to model one of his major poetic sequences on Dante’s epic in part because of the links Dante makes between the vernacular and local politics. Heaney adapts the Italian poet’s terza rima local-speech form with his own local Northern Irish speech for similar aesthetic and political purchase. One of the points this transhistorical gloss seeks to make is that this book is not concerned with generalized, colloquial, everyday speech per se. It can’t be; for to isolate such speech in modern and contemporary poetry would be to encompass most of that poetry while to deem any particular speech as definitively “everyday” is to ignore the manifold variances encapsulated in that term. Whose daily lives are we talking about? Rather, this book is concerned with the nonsingular versions of local everyday speech that proliferated and diversified in poetry during the latter half of the twentieth century and that has its roots in the local-speech poetry that came before it, most firmly in the poetry from the first half of the twentieth century but before that as well. As Terry Eagleton has observed, the very term “diction”—the words and phrases arranged to produce a poem—is laced with questions of so-called suitability, a concept that poets have always regarded with suspicion and that poets in the twentieth century finally detonated: “Diction means the kind of vocabulary conventionally considered suitable for poetry; and the point about modern poetry is that there isn’t one” (Eagleton, How to Read 144). The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is careful to separate the term “poetic diction” from the “diction of poetry” in reference to the modern period because the “20th century steadily [removed] virtually every restriction in diction” while “The 21st bars no word whatever from the diction of poetry” (359).12 In fact, individual poets do not typically work within their own productions in a single species of diction. They more often set various strands of diction against each other, eliciting the resulting tensions. The terms “everyday speech” or “ordinary language,” then, are by themselves too capacious for the purposes of this study; they risk conflating the demotic language of one person or community with that of another. Everyday speech, for instance, on Heaney’s Northern Irish childhood farm is nothing like that on Brooks’s street in Bronzeville, her South

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Side Chicago neighborhood. Nor is the working-class Leeds dialect of Harrison’s family anything like Clifton’s family’s Black vernacular in working-class Upstate New York. Brooks and Clifton sometimes produce similar local speech, but they also both invent their own languages that only suggest Black vernacular and that are entirely different from each other: the language Brooks creates for her local characters is elaborate, polysyllabic, and highly adorned while Clifton’s is pared down, minimalist, and highly nuanced. The everyday language of the poets studied here is more precisely called local speech, the language of their particular geographical locales and communities that is unusual and extraordinary as often as it is usual and ordinary. They employ their local tongues to speak from their social spheres, setting their languages in a host of traditional and free-verse forms to be “A way of happening, a mouth” that can speak with vocal authenticity about local social realities (88). The “two roads” of these poets’ tongues, to borrow a figure Clifton devises to describe the language she invents for multiple existential realms, “converge into a single/certitude” (CP 469). We can perceive these “two roads” as artistic and historical reality or geographical and social location or politics and prosody or sound and sense or standard and nonstandard, all converging in the single certitude of poetry that joins artistic and social spheres by situating the poet in many spaces at once.

Transnational Local Tongues: Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton In the chapters that follow, historically situated close readings focus on the different kinds of diction these twentieth-century poets enlist to create their poetic forms. Each chapter probes the poetic operations of such diction in poems across these poets’ long careers that are both concerned with specific social matters and culled from nonstandard English typically spoken during intimate, communal socializing. At key points, the book inspects archival material such as marked-up versions of poems, personal letters and notations, and writing that preceded or led to poetic output to discover aesthetic strategies and to explore what these poets think about how poems work and what political concerns they want (and don’t want) to express in their poems. Those concerns are sometimes general and even abstract but also often specific and concrete, as varied as the different versions of local speech each poet employs. For example, Heaney

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writes about the Northern Irish sectarian war known as the Troubles that began the year before his second book was published; Brooks examines and resists local deprivations caused by the inequities of racism in the US in the years directly preceding the civil rights movements of the 1960s; Harrison contemplates the miners’ strike in working-class northern England that occurred in 1984; and Clifton creates monologues for children set during riots in Buffalo, New York, the year before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. It bears repeating that there are as many assortments of local speech as there are locations, including variances within locations, and the chapters investigate the ways those variations take shape in each poets’ poetic responses to local crises: for instance, Heaney often ruminates on or thematizes local speech while disposing it into a poem’s form; Brooks invents an idiolect—a distinct individualized language use—in part from African American dialect; Harrison juxtaposes local speech with more so-called elevated versions of speech, drawing out the tensions between them; and Clifton revises and expands distinct vernacular modes that move between particularized and generalized speakers and even between material and nonmaterial realms. Their poems corroborate Crawford’s observation in his classic Devolving English Literature (2000, 1992) that literature is necessarily local in origin and context and that to ignore these dimensions is to circumvent an integral aspect of literary expression, and to reinforce the kinds of hierarchies that so much literature writes against: If, deliberately or not, we totalize all the constituents of English Literature, and if, as both traditional literary history and poststructuralist criticism have done all too often, we ignore matters of local origin, then we perform an act of naïve cultural imperialism, acting as if books grew not out of particular conditions in Nottingham, Dublin, St Lucia, or Salem, Massachusetts, but out of the bland uniformity of airport departure lounges. The act of inscription is not a simple entry into the delocalized, pure medium of language; it is constantly, often deliberately, an act which speaks of its local origins, of points of departure never fully left behind. (7)

Each poet studied here has a point of departure in distinct versions of local speech, and they use them to write about specific social catastrophes, such speech providing a resource for making poems from real-world injustices that doesn’t risk inventiveness or originality; for that real-world language has the capacity for enacting linguistic experiences that can serve as

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corollaries of lived experience rather than just issuing portentous commentary. At the same time, the arrangements, shapes, alignments, and patterns of local speech are, to turn again to Ramazani, “polytemporal” and “polyspatial,” constituting an “extranational frame” (Global Age 1–2). Still, Ramazani reminds us that even if we acknowledge that the “complex temporality and spatiality of poetry are better suited to a translocal and polytemporal poetics” (7), we should be careful not to let “the local or the global … become mystified abstractions” and should pay careful attention to the ways a translocal production also situates itself in the local (10). Each chapter provides a case study of a poet inventing from local speech a poetic language in response to social reality. The first is Seamus Heaney, who felt both compelled and unduly pressured to address the rapid social breakdown of his local world when Northern Ireland erupted into sectarian war just a few years after the publication of his first book, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966. Local speech presented Heaney with both a way to write about that catastrophe and a way to express in poems the anxieties he felt about doing so. The chapter establishes that arranging local speech in verse form allowed Heaney in his early years as a poet to convey the exigencies and restorative aspects of rural life while maintaining his commitment to his art. It then illustrates how such speech in poems written at the beginning of the Troubles resulted in allegories of political unification that bring together various linguistic strains from different aspects of Northern Irish identity. For example, lines like “long rigs/ending in broad docken/and a canopied pad” from “Broagh” contain locutions from Gaelic (“Broagh” is an Anglicization of the Irish word “Bruach”), Ulster Scots (“docken”), Anglo-Saxon (“rigs”), and Northern Irish argot (“pad”) (Wintering Out 17). Heaney later turns to local speech to confront the Troubles in poems that depict the machinations of such speech in a deteriorating society where people are forced to patrol their words in order to conceal allegiances, an environment “Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks” (North 54). Heaney sets that “coiled” local language in patterns, rhythms, and rhymes, drawing out simultaneously its deceptions and authenticities, its discordances and harmonies, and its cryptic and coherent qualities. Finally, when murdered victims of political violence speak in his poems, their colloquial monologues give the impression of being transparent and unmediated, thereby confronting the risk of aestheticizing the social atrocities they consider. Such local-speech monologues are “Not masked in any way” but “barefaced as they would be in

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the day,” matching linguistically the bald reality of sectarian violence (77–80). Gwendolyn Brooks’s poems exemplify some of Heaney’s claims in his book The Redress of Poetry (1995) that socially minded poetry should contain “coordinates” of the actual worlds they are about so as to create balance when they envision a “glimpsed alternative” to those worlds: “As long as the coordinates of the imagined thing correspond to those of the world that we live in and endure, poetry is fulfilling its counterweighting function” (4, 8). For Heaney, those coordinates are open to experimentation. Poets who conceive realities that counter historical reality, Heaney argues, rely on their abilities to innovate language; they “answer” social conditions in poetic languages they invent, not in the language imposed upon them: their answer, he says, is “given in its own language rather than in the language of the world that provokes it” (191). Chapter 3, “The Gwendolynian Tongue,” argues that Brooks provides her own language that is also a coordinate of the world she lives in, offering a nuanced way of understanding local-speech poems: they aren’t necessarily made exclusively from vernacular but rather can infuse subtle elements of it and other forms of speech to create a linguistic intermixing that amounts to a whole new poetic language. Despite an academic persistence in labeling Brooks as a vernacular poet, the definitive element of Brooks’s poetry has always been its emphatically noncolloquial language that draws only in part from the local parlance of her Southside Chicago neighborhood. For example, “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith,” an early poem in iambic pentameter, raises expectations that this portrait of a poor Black man who dons zoot suits on Sundays will be cast in Black vernacular. Yet, though his sobriquet is the idiomatic “Satin-Legs,” and he is initially described as a “cat” who is “fat/and fine,” evoking the vernacular “fat cat,” the only thing colloquial about him is his nickname  (Blacks 42–47). For even as the poem suggests colloquial language throughout, the diction is anything but. The poem’s extravagant language set in stately, randomly rhymed metrical lines, what Brooks calls her “Gwendolynian” tongue, corresponds to Satin-Legs’s own stylistic flair and defies the deprivations caused at the intersections of racism and classism. The Gwendolynian tongue suggests the colloquial but in diction and syntax that is decidedly noncolloquial; it is a mode driven by a double inclination toward everyday experience and away from everyday language, a crossing with sociopolitical valences. In such poems, Brooks invents for her local characters an idiolect from dialect that challenges the status granted to diverse varieties of speech as well as

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assumptions about what constitutes poetic language. Her Gwendolynian idiolect in traditional verse forms contends with the deleterious forces of inequality and oppression. Across the Atlantic and a couple of decades later, Tony Harrison would also invent a poetic language out of dialect and wield that invention in traditional verse as a form for contention. Chapter 4 studies Harrison’s arrangements of the speech he spoke in his working-class northern English home into traditional verse forms that depict class struggle and critique classist hierarchies. Marshaling his own nonstandard vernacular into standard patterns of poetry, Harrison interrogates classist notions about speech and its relation to that tradition while reproducing linguistically the disturbances produced by class separation. He presents forms of speech as allegories of division rather than, in Heaney’s case, allegories of integration. For example, in “Them and [uz],” speech registers are bluntly set against each other to create a turbulent linguistic environment (133–34). There, the speaker recalls being ridiculed by his school teachers for reading Keats and Shakespeare in his Leeds accent; as a boy, he pronounced the word “us,” represented phonetically in Daniel Jones’s 1917 English Pronouncing Dictionary by the symbol [as], as “uz.” The poem brings together several forms of speech in rhyming iambic pentameter: a single stanza includes Greek words from a tragic chorus (αίαΐ); that same utterance refashioned as the colloquial “ay, ay”; an arcane reference to an ancient Greek orator with a speech impediment; English idioms like “gob” and “done to death”; digits as opposed to spelled-out numbers; a phrase from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” rewritten phonetically to indicate the Leeds accent; and a patronizing English teacher’s quoted speech. Such combinations are disorienting: they generate division by their jarring, cacophonous, and abstruse elements. But, for all their chaotic speech, these poems are delivered in remarkably orderly and rhythmic forms. Where poetry scholarship in general and Harrison scholarship in particular often place demotic registers in opposition to traditional verse forms, this chapter argues that it is precisely the working relationship Harrison finds between verse forms and speech forms that upends hierarchies in his poetry, making new music out of local parlance. Whereas the Leeds dialect in Harrison’s poems operates alongside other versions of speech in order to forge ruptures that correspond to unequal social organization, Lucille Clifton’s poems make sudden movements across linguistic registers that are smooth and continuous. Chapter 5 examines how Clifton’s subtly disparate linguistic registers relate

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individual experience in domestic settings to common experience in broader social contexts. Her fusions of nonstandard and standard constructions in free-verse forms speak at times from particular local communities and at other times from transhistorical and even otherworldly perspectives. Her complex poetic inventions redress social constructs by fusing colloquial and prophetic modes. Early poems often made from Black dialect and emphatically oratorical phrasing locate Clifton in African American contexts and historical moments. Many of the poems in the latter part of her career depict speakers enduring troubling spiritual experiences in an enigmatic demotic language that is not always as specifically locatable as African American dialect but that is in its colloquial texture local nonetheless. Such poems embody a less-situated dimension of her nonetheless adamantly specific cultural experience. The chapter identifies what I call Clifton’s vernacular for the oracular, chiefly in a late sequence of poems titled “the message from The Ones (received in the late 70s)” and compares the sequence to her unpublished “Spirit Writing.” “The Ones” is indeed the name Clifton gave to voices she began hearing and transcribing in the late 1970s. The transcriptions resulted in an immense body of automatic writing that doesn’t look or sound much like the poetic forms Clifton would eventually craft out of them. The poem “the message from The Ones” is the reconstruction of this raw material into those poetic forms published two decades after she heard it. The Ones finally speak in her poems when Clifton’s oracular vernacular transfigures everyday language as the language of prophecy. Indeed, the Ones speak through Clifton’s local, human, and poetic tongue because they require all these to issue their admonitions about a world gone dangerously awry. The concluding chapter (Chap. 6) moves into the twenty-first century, surveying the continuing legacy of local tongues in English-language poetry and connecting specific poems by twenty-first-century poets to the local-speech poetics of Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton. Tracy K. Smith, once a student of Heaney’s at Harvard, has made political poetry with an approach similar to Heaney’s method of creating poems in the speech of real-life victims of political violence. I consider a sequence in her 2018 book Wade in the Water titled “I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It” that culls its content from the missives of African Americans during the Civil War. In a similar though less official vein, Terrance Hayes has positioned himself as something of a student of Brooks. His poem from 2010 called “The Golden Shovel” takes its title from Brooks’s “We Real Cool” and builds itself from that earlier poem’s

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diction: the last word of each line in Hayes’s “Golden Shovel” recreates Brooks’s entire poem. Hayes’s poem inspired a whole anthology of similar poems based on Brooks by several hundred contemporary poets, underscoring the persistence and potency of both Brooks’s work and the innovations of local speech in later poetry that this book traces. In contemporary Scotland, Don Paterson has emerged as Harrison’s heir apparent. Like Harrison, Paterson has a commitment to traditional poetic form, to experimentation, and to his own local speech. For example, his book 40 Sonnets (2015) includes both traditional and highly nontraditional sonnets that achieve their most innovative renderings and their most trenchant social critiques when they are built from Scots dialect. Finally, Danez Smith’s “summer, somewhere” is a sequence of twenty poems responding to anti-­ Black police violence from Smith’s second full-length book, Don’t Call Us Dead (2017), that both alludes directly to Clifton’s famous “celebrate with me” poem and adapts her poetic method of inventing local tongues for realms at once extracted from day-to-day reality and profoundly linked to it. Smith’s “somewhere” is an imaginary “local” haven from racism and, as with Clifton’s non-earthly locales, it has its very own local language. These twenty-first-century English-language poets insist that local speech continues to be a major poetic resource for putting poetry to the task of examining and interrogating society. Their local tongues position them in distinct social territories, and their engagements with poetic form locate the languages of those territories in a vast tradition of English-language poetry. They corroborate this book’s claim that local speech is a principal poetic in modern and contemporary English-language poetry with profound social and political ramifications.

Notes 1. The first existing draft of “Politics” is dated May 24, 1938. Yeats died seven months later. Yeats himself, David A. Ross explains, chose “Politics” as the last poem for Last Poems and Two Plays, published in 1939 (203). “Politics” is also last in the “Last Poems” section of Richard J. Finneran’s Collected Poems. For an overview of some disputes around the ordering of Yeats’s poems in various editions, see Bazargan 201n4 and Bradford. For a history of the poem and an analysis of it, see Robinson 71–82. 2. The epigraph from Mann is “In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms.”

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3. This persistent debate in poetry studies asks, can a poem have social and political efficacy? It’s a question that has been put to poetry from the time Plato declared that poets should be removed from the republic because of their irrationality to a recent New York Times article by the 2018 US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (discussed briefly in this book’s Coda) in which Smith revealed that a golden rule in 1990s graduate poetry-writing programs was to avoid political material because it usually resulted in “didacticism and slackened craft.” When James Merrill was asked in 1968 about poetry and “political realities,” he briskly dismissed the notion that poetry is an effective form for examining political matters: “Oh dear, these immensely real concerns do not produce poetry” (38). Over forty years later, David Orr sums up the same line of thinking: poetry is thought to be “passive, swoony, and generally not in the business of ‘doing things’” while “politics is active” and “gritty” (38). Jonathan Culler devotes a chapter of Theory of the Lyric (2015) to “Lyric and Society” and opens it by noting that the “lyric is often characterized as language cut off from worldly purpose—so framed by its form and its conventions” (296). 4. Jennifer Keating-Miller provides an overview of the emergence of a broadly conceived Irish English in Ireland from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Keating describes Irish English as a “contact language” produced by British imperialism that supplanted the Irish language, a version of “Enlightenment English” inflected by the “grammatical structures” of Irish (2). Barry McCrea argues that the Irish language and other rural European vernaculars are animating presences haunting modernist texts composed in “metropolitan standards like English and French,” invoked to convey longing and loss (10–11). 5. According to Matthew Campbell, Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” exemplifies the “Irish Mode” of English-language poetry as defined by the Irish revolutionary and poet Thomas MacDonagh because it “shows an English-Irish speech through its metrical effects” (31). This “main example of the Irish mode” in poetry uses the word “there” four times across its twelve lines and is cast in a register that’s somewhat less conversational than “Politics.” 6. The lyrics from the song Yeats adapts are  O western wind when wilt though blow That the small rain down can rain:— Christ, that my love were in my arms And I in my bed again. I quote these lines from the 1938 essay by Archibald MacLeish titled “Private Speech and Public Speech in Poetry” that provoked Yeats into writing “Politics” (540). There, MacLeish also quotes Mann’s observation

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about modernity, destiny, and political terms (545–46). According to MacLeish, the “Western Wind” lyrics gain their permanence from their “use of living tongues” (537). He prizes poetry when it is presented as public speech rather than private speech because private-speech poetry is “special, formalized, and poetized …, suitable only to private communication” while public-speech poetry is “human, living, natural, and unformalized …, capable of the public communication of common experience” (537–38). The intimate lyrics of “Western Wind” sound private, but in MacLeish’s estimation they attain the distinction of public speech because they constitute “living speech.” 7. For instance, in his 2007 book on twenty-first-century political poetry, Michael Dowdy employs Auden’s line to typify the commonplace perception that “a poem is … an ineffective social act” (2). 8. Several recent books examine through multifarious lenses the concept of the everyday in poetry. For example, Andrew Epstein’s Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry (2016) demonstrates that contemporary poetry is profoundly and definitively captivated with daily life. According to Epstein, “a thirst for everyday life explodes in the post-1945 period” as a “reaction to the rapid and dislocating cultural, political, and social transformations that characterize this epoch” (3). Chad Bennett’s Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry (2018) links the everyday language of gossip and lyric poems via their shared paradoxical attributes as simultaneously private and public phenomena. Rachael Gilmour’s Bad English (2020) takes up multilingualism in literature in Britain since the turn of the twenty-first century, demonstrating that everyday experience for many Britons is a polyglot experience with imbedded political ramifications. Lucy Alford’s Forms of Poetic Attention (2020) explores how poetic languages in mostly North American twentieth- and twenty-first-century poems both generate and demand forms of cognitive attention entirely different from the daily forms of attention required by the digital age. 9. Frost’s terminology makes it easy to confuse his conception with Alexander Pope’s classic dictum in his poem “An Essay on Criticism” that a poem’s “sound must seem an echo to the sense”  (29). Pope means that sound devices like alliteration can mimic the sound of, say, a “Zephyr” in lines about wind. Frost, on the other hand, means the tones of voice that everyday speech produces when patterned into verse form. The casual, understated everydayness of the kind of speech Frost is talking about tends to have a quieting effect on elements such as assonance and consonance. 10. The poets of the 1930s that Perkins is referring to include, along with Auden, Dylan Thomas, William Empson, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis. This generation is commonly referred to as

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“the thirties poets” or “the Auden group.” They’re not all English: MacNeice was born and raised in Northern Ireland, and his parents were from the west of Ireland. 11. Paulin’s is the only general anthology of modern and contemporary poems composed in dialect and, more generally, in colloquial language. The poets represented are mostly British and, to a lesser extent, Irish. Paulin does include a poem by Heaney (“Broagh,” which I discuss in Chap. 2) and Harrison (“v.,” which I discuss in Chap. 4). Brooks and Clifton are not represented. In fact, few American poets are included (Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop are) and no African Americans except the blues singer Lucille Bogan, not known as a poet in any conventional sense, who recorded under the pseudonym Bessie Jackson. Only a handful of Black and brown poets appear in the book at all: Louise Bennett from Jamaica, Derek Walcott from Trinidad, the Indian poets Eunice de Souza and Nissim Ezekiel. The absence of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) poets in an anthology of poems made from regional speech is a glaring omission: local language is often a crucial element in the work of poets of color as they examine rigorously the intersections of race, class, gender, language, and tradition. 12. Two classic studies of diction in poetry are Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction (1928) and Donald Davie’s Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952). Emerson R.  Marks’s Taming the Chaos (1998) covers “four centuries of commentary by writers in English on the nature of poetic language,” and its introduction provides a broad overview of that commentary (11). Other analyses of diction in English-language poetry are Michael North’s The Dialect of Modernism (1994) and Rob Jackaman’s Broken English/Breaking English (2003).

CHAPTER 2

Troubled Tongues: Seamus Heaney and the Political Poetics of Speech

The Northern Irish Troubles began in the late 1960s when a student-led civil rights campaign protesting widespread, institutionalized discrimination against Catholics escalated into violent rioting and clashes between Catholic and Protestant civilians and between Catholics and the mostly Protestant police forces in Belfast and Derry.1 Seamus Heaney, in a 1968 front-page essay published in The Listener, listed the general “grievances of the Catholic majority” that led to the student movement, particularly in Derry, where Heaney had attended St. Columb’s College, a Catholic boarding school, as an adolescent: “unemployment, lack of housing, discrimination in jobs, and gerrymandering in electoral affairs.”2 Heaney summarized the basic demands of Derry’s Catholic community: “They were asking to be accepted as citizens of Derry …; they wanted at least the right, too long the prerogative of the [Protestant] minority, to demonstrate and express themselves in public” (522). Heaney then forebodingly describes the official response by the Northern Irish government to a recent civil rights march meant to air those grievances and assert those demands: “Mr. [William] Craig, the Minister of Home Affairs, … considered that a demonstration on behalf of the rights of the majority was a danger to public law and order, though opinion in Derry did not agree with him then or since. He placed the police. He alerted a reserve force. The rest was violence.” The rest was violence indeed, and then some. For those early stand-offs marked the beginning of a thirty-year period in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. Fogarty, The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07889-7_2

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Northern Ireland of mass arrest, internment without trial, military deployment, increased segregation, paramilitarism, assassinations, bombings, and reprisals. It was also a period that cast crucial demands on Northern Irish poets to adapt what Heaney has called “the representative function,” an amplification of their poetic voices to “speak for [their] own crowd” in, for example, condemnation of the state-sponsored systemic oppression that spurred the violence or the violence itself engendered by that system (“Calling the Tune” 5). Those Northern Irish poetic voices would as a result of the Troubles acquire an unprecedented broadcast. As Heaney’s fellow Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon commented in 1970 about that new prominence, “it is sufficiently remarkable” that there “has been some talk in recent years of a new Northern Irish group of poets” because “until two years ago, not many were aware of a place called Northern Ireland, let alone that it might produce poets” (“Poetry in Northern Ireland” 89). Heaney himself would become the most widely heard of these voices, dubbed “Famous Seamus” across Ireland shortly after the Troubles began. In a state crudely bifurcated, largely by the media, into bluntly opposed sides—loyalist versus nationalist, Catholic versus Protestant, Falls Road versus Shankill Road, Green Ireland versus Orange Ulster—the new global awareness about Northern Ireland subjected its poets to variable pressures that posed to them difficult questions: Is creating poetry out of sectarian violence exploitative? Does not writing about immediate political conditions render a poet inconsequential? How will poets serve the subtle, ambiguous instincts that come with being artists while responding to obtusely defined, abhorrent sociopolitical conditions they’ve inherited and are expected— by their communities, by local and international journalists, by their fellow artists, by themselves—to address? To put it most broadly, are the supposed moral and civic incompatibilities of, as Heaney remarks, “indulging the pleasures of poetry in the face of all that is wrong with the world” ever reconcilable (Heaney to “Ramon”)?3 Those poetic pleasures were never for Heaney simple pleasures, especially as they related to social encumbrances. His well-known formulation of “the redress of poetry” describes one kind of effective socially minded poem as rendering navigable the “labyrinths” of reality when those labyrinths are blocked by, in the case of Northern Ireland, discrimination, dispossession, and disenfranchisement: “if our given experience is a labyrinth, its impassability can still be countered by the poet’s imagining some equivalent of the labyrinth and presenting himself and us with a vivid

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experience of it” (Redress 2). The poet’s reimagining and vivification of such circumstances constitute acts of redress when they reconceive prevailing social deprivations: the “redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances” (4). Fran Brearton also employs the term “labyrinth” to describe social reality, in her case even more specifically pointing up the manifold ambivalences of the politics of Northern Ireland: its “barricades, literal and psychological, form something of a labyrinth; its two sides are never clear cut. If the conflict began with the civil rights protests of 1968–9, whether it mutated into a religious conflict, a class war, a civil war, a war against external forces, or a combination of all of these remains a controversial question” (“Poetry and the ‘Troubles’” 223). Northern Ireland is, in other words, a complex of entanglements insufficiently characterized by simplifying binaries; a poet’s response to them must be accordingly non-simplifying: as Peter Lennon wrote in 1985, well over a decade into the Troubles, “poetry, … contemplative and fastidious, has special problems in this kind of climate. The poets of Northern Ireland face expectations from their readers—to ‘bear witness,’ even to be ‘war poets’—which do not normally confront a poet” (8). What does normally confront a poet is an unyielding impulse, the poet’s own expectation, to invent poetic languages, whether contemplative, fastidious, bearing witness, conveying the horrors of war, or otherwise. This chapter examines Heaney’s poetic language in relation to the cultural and sociopolitical climate of his time and place, demonstrating that Heaney enlists his particular local speech and other versions of Northern Ireland’s local languages as poetic resources to speak from his “own crowd” and to write about political matters in a way that isn’t programmatic, propagandistic, or narrow. As Frank Sewell has explained, Irish literature in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland has sometimes been oversimplified as “dual,” written in the “majority and minority languages, English and Irish” (149). However, “a polyphony of voices” comprises linguistic expression on the island that may include enlaced strands of, say, English, Irish, Irish English, Northern Irish English, Southern Irish English, Ulster Scots, and “whatever international sources” a particular Irish writer might be in engagement with. In his study of the effects of sectarianism on language in Northern Ireland, Kevin McCafferty underscores the specific polyvocality of language in the North, marked as it is by “the varieties [of English] spoken to the north of the major dialect boundary in Ireland that runs approximately from Donegal Bay on the west coast

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to Carlingford Lough in the east. NIE [Northern Ireland English] therefore includes Ulster-Scots, Mid-Ulster English and South Ulster English varieties” (5n1). And yet despite the deep social divisions in Northern Ireland, local languages have been consistent across those divides: “What we get in Northern Ireland sociolinguistics is an ‘alternative Ulster,’ where language is presented as a common denominator in an otherwise split culture” (37). Little wonder, then, that Heaney turned to local speech, with all its regional particularity and cultural interlacing, as both an individuating and unifying resource. I begin this chapter by considering the pressures Heaney felt to address the Troubles just a few years after the publication of his first book, and his identification of writing in  local speech as an authenticating method for authoritatively making art in response to local catastrophe. By the time of the Troubles, Heaney had already been arranging the local speech he spoke as a child in rural Northern Ireland into the traditional forms of poetry to capture the emotional vicissitudes of Northern Irish rural life while asserting the artistic reality of poetic form. Once the Troubles got underway, he would intertwine other versions of local Northern Irish speech that represent different sides of the conflict to make lingual allegories of political unification and employ local Belfast vernacular to enact the linguistic manipulations required for people to reveal or conceal allegiances for self-protection. Finally, Heaney’s monologues by murdered victims of sectarian violence in colloquial Northern Irish English create an apparently transparent, unmediated, realistic relay of events that refuse both the aestheticization and propagandization of the violence they recount and critique.

Good Poem as Good Politics, or the Sex Appeal of Violence Heaney and his Northern Irish peers have repudiated external insistences about their poetry’s political allegiances in essays, letters, and interviews and, most compellingly, in their poems. They have also at times acknowledged an undeniable attractiveness in sociopolitical crisis for a poet: “we cannot be unaware,” says Heaney in 1989, “of the link between the political glamour of the place (Ulster), the sex-appeal of violence, and the prominence accorded to the poets” (“Calling” 5). Michael Longley described in 2017 the split sensibility he harbored as a Northern Irish poet when the Troubles began five decades earlier, articulating the dual nature

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of political calamity for artists, one part repudiation and one part potential: “Part of me felt like an appalled outsider, another part—anti-­Unionist, anti-establishment—felt exhilarated” (“Songs”). Indeed, turmoil can make way for productive “tension between imaginative freedom and social obligation, between the public and private voice,” between, as Heaney admits about his homeland, the sociopolitical volatility that conditioned Northern Ireland and the prestige that responding to those conditions in poetry could award (Brearton, “Between” 134). As Mahon observes in a 1985 interview, a creative outcome of the Troubles has been that “the poet from the North had a new thing to say, a new kind of sound to make, a new texture to create. Looking back on it, there’s a sort of inevitability that the new energy should have come from the North” (Interview with Mahon 12–13). In Heaney’s estimation of the Northern Irish poet’s relationship to politics during conversations he had with Dennis O’Driscoll for the 2008 book Stepping Stones, he repeats Mahon’s often-quoted comment from a 1970 essay that “a good poem is a paradigm of good politics”—paradigmatic when, Mahon explained in those early years of the Troubles, the poem presents “people talking to each other, with honest subtlety, at a profound level” (Mahon, “Poetry in Northern Ireland” 93). Heaney appeals to Mahon over three decades later to assert his belief that poems can be expressly political even when they don’t “deal directly with political issues”: “all of us probably had some notion that a good poem was ‘a paradigm of good politics,’ a site of energy and tension and possibility, a truth-telling arena but not a killing field” (Stepping Stones 123). He then relates the Northern Irish peace process that began in 1994 and culminated with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 explicitly to his poetry and that of his Northern Irish contemporaries such as Mahon and Longley, assigning to poetry a concrete social function: “I believe what was envisaged and almost set up by the Good Friday Agreement was prefigured in what I called [in an earlier essay titled ‘Place and Displacement’] our subtleties and tolerances” (123).4 Heaney generated throughout his career his own new energies, tensions, and subtleties out of the cultural and sociopolitical realities of Northern Ireland by arranging and patterning different forms of local Northern Irish speech in both poetry’s received and free-verse forms to enact the experiences of living through some of those realities, rather than simply denouncing or lamenting them. And yet despite Heaney’s substantial confidence in poetry’s social efficacy, he spent his career worrying about the discordances between poetry

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and politics. Throughout his interviews, correspondences, and essays, he is typically at once decisively sure of poetry’s sociopolitical competencies and deeply tentative about them. For example, in a conversation with Henri Cole in 1997, Heaney assigns the power to spark practical, active progress to poetry’s linguistic and metaphoric inventions rather than to polemics: “Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. … In Northern Ireland, … a new metaphor for the way we are positioned, a new language would create new possibility. I’m convinced of that” (144). And yet Heaney insists elsewhere that when a poem’s concerns are political, only a willful disengagement from practical politics will preserve that poem’s essential aesthetic aspect. There must be, in other words, a carefully extended distance maintained between politics and poetry, especially when poets are writing in a language foisted upon them historically by domination: anywhere where the English language and an imposed anglicized culture have radically altered the original social and linguistic conditions, there is likely to be a literary task … of subversion and redefinition. For the writers in these situations this will involve … not just a simple program of cultural nationalism but something more detached and vigilant. The writer’s task will ultimately be visionary rather than social; the human rather than the national dream is his or her responsibility, a care for the logic and possibility of the medium rather than its utility and applicability; and it will be a personal task not in the sense that its import will be private but in the sense that it will begin in a deeply felt inner need not to be appeased in any way other than by the achievement of a right form of expression. (“Regional Forecast” 19)

What poetic strategies can maintain such a distance? Ultimately for Heaney, it is to the creation of languages that poets are primarily beholden, for they must “persist in an effort to invent an idiom that will expose us to what exactly it was we experienced” (12). Heaney thus devises his own idiom in part from local idiomatic versions of that dominating language as he persists in both reconceiving the inimical experiences of the Troubles and reconciling the dilemma about writing political poetry that doesn’t risk inventiveness or originality. A way to cross-examine this dilemma about poetry and politics is to ask what poets want to avoid when writing about political circumstances. How, for example, do Northern Irish poets during the Troubles respond to that crisis without becoming what Longley calls “versifying journalists”

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(qtd. in Lennon 8)?5 The answer, broadly speaking, is that they devise aesthetic procedures for addressing such conditions that push against the very pressure to address them in the first place. Heaney and his contemporaries don’t issue statements but arrange their own invented languages in unexpected and often indirect ways, refusing to appease political importunities on their work but also taking up political material in their arrangements. Complicating these rejected impositions for poets like Heaney, Mahon, and Longley is another, contradictory directive. As Nathan Suhr-­ Sytsma explains, Northern Irish poets were concomitantly subjected to a cultural precept to refrain from speaking for the public: “In the Irish and British circles in which Northern poets moved, the critical orthodoxy was that a poet should not speak for the political interests of a specific community, that poetry should distinguish itself from discourses stressing ethnic or religious identity” (168). What, then, to make of Heaney, who explained his artistic advancement after his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), precisely in terms of reaching for a communal register? After that book, he declared that he would “move from I to we—open it out somehow” (Heaney, Conversation with Karl Miller 19). He wanted in his next artistic phase to get “out of the autobiographical data, and into a subject which was … public” (19). And yet in a letter to Longley, Heaney claims that in his second book, Door into the Dark (1968), he had been “slipping towards” what he calls “secret rather than public poems” (Longley, Letter from Heaney). Perhaps “secret” here does not signify for Heaney an antithesis to “public” but an alternative, a way of writing about public matters that is not obviously political in a “public” sense, that “deeply felt inner need” to find the right form of expression. One can, after all, address public issues in a strategic or “secret” manner, for example, creating, as Heaney does, a poetic idiom for local concerns from local speech to portray or enact linguistically the experience of political crisis. Indeed, Heaney’s body of work doesn’t assume to speak for his community in a typically representative, essayistic, or journalistic fashion: rather he speaks most often as a historical, embodied individual in the first person, as his autobiographical self, or as dramatic personae in the forms of, for example, prehistoric cadavers preserved in the bogs of Northern Europe (the bog poems in North), murdered victims of the Troubles whom Heaney knew personally (“Casualty,” “The Strand at Lough Beg,” the seventh and eighth sections of “Station Island”), or the watchman in the Agamemnon myth (“Mycenae Lookout”). Even in first-person plural poems from that second book such as “Requiem for the Croppies,”

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spoken by a member of the United Irishmen who were defeated during a 1798 rebellion against the British, or “Bogland,” which reflects on the preservative quality of Ireland’s bogs, the speakers are not so much explicit representatives of Heaney’s community than individuals using “we” to talk about a shared cultural experience (in these cases, the experience of being a member of a group of insurgents or a person who lives in a rural area on the island of Ireland). He didn’t, then, even in these “we” poems about Irish history and geography “open it out” by speaking representatively for his community but by inventing a poetic language that is, if not in these cases pointedly idiomatic, characterized by an overall colloquial texture that attains at once distance from what Jahan Ramazani would call “platform politics” and immediacy in its colloquiality (“Poetry and Postcolonialism” 939); the conversational, direct, intimate tone of such poems reproduces first-hand experience rather than just amplifying a spokesperson’s voice.

Local Speech as Poetic Strategy Local speech in all its multiplicity and diversity is one resource among others that Heaney appealed to when writing about the Troubles. Another is an autobiographical language of guilt relating to his own role in his country’s social and political crisis. Often, he weaves these together, responding in local speech to that guilt. In fact, despite his claims about eschewing the autobiographical in his move from I to we, Heaney did not ever jettison autobiography; rather, he moved from (in some autobiographical poems) simply making poems from the “data” of his personal past and toward an autobiographical voice firmly situated in and conflicted by the catastrophic present moment. The poetic speaker in some of Heaney’s most political poems is Heaney himself as a poet expressing agonistic remorse about whether or not he has, in his work, aestheticized violence, holed up in poetic composition instead of taking action, feigned indifference and timidity, evaded the facts of political barbarity. These instances should not be mistaken simply as Heaney threading into his poems his real-world trepidations about the political culpability of his aesthetic creations; the lines he writes that register his guilt about writing poetry during political calamity do not constitute meta-commentaries on the poems—they are the poems. Heaney transforms his worries about poetry’s engagement with local political realities into their own poetic resource, instantiating (and paraphrasing) Yeats’s famous pronouncement that

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“Poetry is out of the quarrel with ourselves and the quarrel with others is rhetoric” (Preoccupations 34).6 In a letter about a group of such inculpatory poems in Field Work (1979), Heaney identifies for a potential translator the substratal “haunting” and “animating” forces operating in the poems: “there are a few poems which go together insofar as they are haunted by the problem (problem?) of art in the context of deprivation/ violence/suffering[;] basically, they are animated by a sense of guilt” (Heaney to “Ramon”).7 The problem-with-a-question-mark of art and politics (Heaney appears to be unsure if the word “problem” adequately describes the relation between the two categories) and the artist’s guilt about responding to the latter with the former are precisely what makes the poetry. What also often makes the poetry is local speech: Heaney merges in key poems his animating autobiographical language of guilt and the local language he invents for his dramatic personae based on the speech of their particular locales, staging discourses in the form of ordinary conversation between speaker and personae about the relationship between poetry and politics, essentially weighing poetic strategies against each other, local language acting at times as a riposte to the poet’s guilt about making poetry from the Troubles. Despite these complex linguistic poetic methods, few have taken up in any extended way, as Jason David Hall has noted, the relations between the poems’ operations and their cultural and political concerns: “Though Heaney’s poetry has certainly been assessed from both old-style formalist and cultural-studies perspectives, it has not had much … cultural neoformalism brought to bear on it” (21).8 To this absence identified by Hall, I add local speech: Heaney certainly has been acknowledged as a poet of local concerns and speech, but the procedures of that speech in relation to those concerns have not been wholly analyzed. The general critical consensus on his aesthetic strategies is that his is a poetics of plumbing the depths, excavating the earth to uncover symbols of identity, mining the land for communal sources with a specialized diction drawn from agricultural and archeological terms. His poems are typically deemed grounded and earthy, “loud with the slap of the spade and sour with the stink of turned earth,” as Douglas Dunn remarked in a review of Heaney’s second book, Door into the Dark (1969), a comment repeatedly cited in essays about Heaney because it describes many Heaney poems at various points across his long career (“Fear” 770). Indeed, the title of the first poem in Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first book, is “Digging,” famous now for announcing at the outset Heaney’s ambition to “dig” with his pen just as

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his father and grandfathers dug with their spades. His ensuing work undoubtedly bears out a steadfast commitment to this agricultural and archeological initiative. No wonder his expansive selected poems is titled Opened Ground (1998), a phrase taken from “Act of Union” from North (1975), a poem that personifies Ireland as a body ravaged by English colonialism in “pain” and “raw” like “opened ground” (44), and from the second of the ten “Glanmore Sonnets” in Field Work (1979) that equates writing lines of verse with “ploughing” verbs in the “opened ground” of the blank page (33).9 When read together in the two poems, the phrase connects what I have been framing as the definitive and conflicting elements of Heaney’s oeuvre: the aesthetic potentialities that lay in the ground, the sociopolitical atrocities that occur on the ground, and the moral and civic ramifications of connecting those phenomena in poems. Another phenomenon of Heaney’s work from the very beginning of his career is its use of various forms of local language spoken on the ground in Heaney’s locales, a colloquial register distinct from his acclaimed agricultural and archeological lexicon. He employed such language early on to convey life on his Northern Irish farm and to draw out multivalent facets of identity that colonialism threatens to elide. Several crucial political poems reveal that local language also became for him a poetic strategy to write about the Troubles without being propagandistic: for example, in one of his best-known poems, “Whatever You Say Say Nothing,” he adapts various forms of everyday speech in Belfast—from news sources to conversations to graffiti—to reproduce linguistically the corrosive effects of sectarianism. A later poem about the Troubles in Station Island (1984), the seventh of the title sequence, employs a Northern Irish colloquial vernacular to speak with verity and immediacy about political atrocities without writing verse journalism. These poems demonstrate that local speech could itself be a poetic resource for writing about political concerns that won’t undermine aesthetics.

Local Speech in Heaney’s Early Poems Heaney’s early poems almost always set the words, idioms, and phrases of his rural Northern Irish community in traditional verse forms to articulate his community’s sensibilities and vicissitudes. For example, colloquial language in two of his best-known poems from Death of a Naturalist, “Mid-­ Term Break” and “The Early Purges,” portrays his rural community’s reticence in the face of death. “Mid-Term Break” recounts in mostly iambic pentameter tercets the wake of Heaney’s young brother by

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foregrounding demotic tones against background sounds typically associated with domestic routine, conveying both the assimilation of extraordinary tragedy into the ordinary and the pressure of suppressed emotion. As the speaker moves tentatively through his brother’s wake, he detects among nervous whispers and awkward salutations the everyday sound of a “baby” who “cooed and laughed and rocked the pram” (Naturalist 15). Meanwhile, the poem’s colloquialisms—the crying father who normally takes “funerals in his stride,” the loss summarized as “a hard blow,” the old men “sorry for [his] trouble”—convey in clipped local expressions the community’s restraint and grief. Contrasted with the descriptions of the infant, they also depict a going through the motions: the speaker awkwardly shakes hands with adults who address him with these idiomatic phrases, but he fixates on the cooing, laughter, and rocking that he hears beyond their words. When he finds himself holding the hand of his mother who “coughed out angry tearless sighs,” grief and suppression collide in what Helen Vendler describes as “the conflict between ‘angry’ and ‘sighs,’ and the violently suppressed tears stifled under ‘tearless’” (Heaney 31). By the end, the poem’s loose iambic rhythms give way to the stricter iambic pentameter of the last two lines: “No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.//A four-foot box, a foot for every year.” The steady rhythm and the exact rhyme of “clear” and “year” mirror the directness and clarity of the speaker’s frank confrontation with and acceptance of his brother’s death. Similarly, “The Early Purges” recalls also in colloquial tercets the fright and sadness of two young boys when they first witness kittens being drowned in the interest of running a farm well (Naturalist 11). The poem sets “false sentiments” about death against the boys’ humorous idiomatic description of the kittens: “the scraggy wee shits,” one calls them. A few lines later, one friend tries to convince the other that the kittens’ death is for the best, asking “Sure isn’t it better for them now?” Unaffected regional expressions like “wee” and “Sure” communicate both reluctance and consent as the boys learn the hard lesson that, on a farm, death is a fundamental part of the work. Such instances of local speech punctuate all of Heaney’s books. It is, in fact, one of his definitive modes. In fact, “Digging,” his inaugural declaration that he will write poems to excavate a communal history, is also an announcement of a poetic career that will rely on such speech. The poem begins with a rather stately syntactical arrangement—prepositional phrase first—that suggests with its metrical stresses a formal pronouncement: “Between my finger and my thumb/the squat pen rests; snug as a gun”

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(1–2). But, too, a subtle shift occurs across the poem to a less self-­ consciously declarative colloquial idiom that expresses the poem’s climactic intimacy: “By God, the old man could handle a spade./Just like his old man.” The lines stand out visually in the center of the poem with blank space above and below. A similarly amplified demotic note is struck again at the poem’s end: The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.

The enjambed, slant-rhymed lines in the first stanza above generate a lilting, rapid iambic rhythm moderated by that stanza’s last idiomatic line. The leveling out of that contoured rhythm in that final line contains the poem’s revelation: the speaker admits, “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them,” a fact he both relishes and laments, speaking in his father’s and grandfather’s, and indeed his uncomplicated parlance as the poem imparts at once connections (the speaker is the older men’s progeny) and disconnections (he has different tools). Further, such localisms have the effect of transforming the rhetorical pitch of the concluding stanza, an almost verbatim repetition of the poem’s opening declamatory lines. The grand assertion at the beginning attains a new, low-keyed, more assured inflection when it is reiterated at the end, the stresses having shifted from “finger” and “thumb” in stanza one to “my” and “my” in the last stanza: “Between my finger and my thumb/the squat pen rests./I’ll dig with it.”10 This is one of the central operations of the poem: it modulates poetic form and colloquial speech to enact a sonic shift in emphasis from “finger” and “thumb” to “my.” Indeed, Heaney’s poems from the very beginning were marked by plainspoken tones of voice sounded by colloquial language. His second book, for instance, Door into the Dark (1969), contains lines of local speech that operate similarly to the three examples referred to above from his first book in that they characterize the rural community of his childhood: “Go by.//Get up on that gate,” commands the “curt” bull-breeder “old Kelly” in “The Outlaw” (4–5); “It’s threshing better than I thought,

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and mind/It’s good clean seed. Away over there and look,” the overbearing husband directs his wife in “The Wife’s Tale” (15–16); “All I know is a door into the dark,” announces the first line of “The Forge” (7); “We’ll be the quicker going down,” assure the skilled fishermen in “A Lough Neagh Sequence” (26–33). But Heaney would not just enlist local language to capture rural sensibilities; he also scrutinized local words early in his career for political purposes, mining etymologies for their sociolinguistic indications: “the language I spoke while growing up in mid-Ulster … [was] a language where trace elements of Elizabethan English and Lowland Scots are still to be heard and to be reckoned with as a matter of pronunciation and even, indeed, of politics” (Finders Keepers 379). Words such as place names, then, from his youth are not merely data from the personal past but sociohistorical sites. “Mossbawn,” for example, was the name of Heaney’s childhood farm. The very word became to him a metaphor for the different cultures of Northern Ireland: “Our farm was called Mossbawn. Moss, a Scots word probably carried to Ulster by the Planters, and bawn, the name the English colonists gave to their fortified farmhouses. Mossbawn, the planter’s house on the bog” (Preoccupations 35). To this Scottish and English hybridization Heaney adds a local Irish strain that subordinates the semantic meaning of bawn to how the word sounds when spoken by Heaney and his family and neighbors: “we pronounced it Moss bann, and bán is the Gaelic word for white. So might not the thing mean the white moss, the moss of bog cotton? In the syllables of my home I see a metaphor of the split culture of Ulster” (35). Heaney situates himself not in the moss or the bawn but “in between the marks of English influence and the lure of the native experience” (35). For Heaney, local language in poems could interweave threads of identity—whether they be national, political, or historical—that sectarianism threatens to divide. Heaney joins such threads in a series of place-name poems from the first part of his third book, Wintering Out (1972), that demonstrates how the sounds of local words can at once embed and translate local experience and culture.11 These modern English-language poems harken to the Irish dinnseanchas, early Irish narratives that produce “toponymic lore” to explain the origins of Irish-language place names, a form practiced by medieval Irish poets. In such texts, “[p]lace-names are explained by reference to legends which are linked to them by means of pseudo-­etymological techniques, where sometimes fictitious stories are adduced to explain the existing names” (“Dinnshenchas”).12 They also display a writer’s “knowledge of the meaning of place” and reveal “a major preoccupation in Irish literary

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culture: a deep-rooted concern with origins” (Welch 9–10). The tradition links local language to the concept of origins, and Heaney brings it into his contemporary Northern Irish poetry to make the same connection. Rachel Buxton and Andrew Murphy argue that it presents problems for Heaney because the esoteric names and their derivations exclude readers even though his aims are to communicate beyond his locale. They each cite his poem “Broagh” to exhibit their concerns. Buxton contends that “Heaney has at times been unsure about exactly what language he should be using. He is torn between, on the one hand, the desire to be faithful to his origins, and, on the other, the recognition that he must communicate effectively to a wider audience who may find his use of Irishisms—such as deibidhe rhyme, the dinnseanchas genre, and local duality—a barrier to comprehension, as he highlights in … ‘Broagh’” (49).13 Similarly, Murphy points out that the “linguistic and cultural map” that the dinnseanchas provides wouldn’t be readily navigable to anyone unfamiliar with the locales represented: “in ‘Broagh,’ a common language of place, intelligible to planter and native alike, [is] unavailable to outsiders, ‘Broagh’ itself being a kind of signifier shared only by the locals, because of ‘that last/gh the strangers found/difficult to manage’” (143). Indeed, “Broagh” ruminates upon the pronunciation of a place name that is especially difficult to all but the local community, and Heaney himself has described the poem in terms of exclusiveness: “I felt that I had made Broagh exclusive, made the English language work to tell my story” (“Among” 10). But the poem just as equally instrumentalizes both common diction and an image that conveys the very sound of that Irish place name as it is spoken locally in a way that could include outsiders. In other words, the poem is not necessarily restrictive; rather, its careful manipulation of English emphasizes the Irish place name’s local particularity while elucidating that localness for those unfamiliar with it. The poem, then, is inclusive, too: it clarifies a word’s obscurity for those who can’t pronounce it, thereby including the “strangers” referred to at the end of the poem who can’t make the Irish “gh” sound. “Broagh” follows the dinnseanchas tradition while suggesting that Irish place names need not exclude those unfamiliar with them. The poem presents the name of the local village as distinctively Irish by providing that word’s derivation. “Broagh” is the name of a village that part of Heaney’s Mossbawn farm crossed into. It is also an Anglicization of the Irish word Bruach, which means the bank of the river and gives the poem its first word, “Riverbank” (Hart 65). The stanza proceeds with terms that merge Irish, English, and Ulster Scots as it describes a path to a river: “rigs,”

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“docken,” and “pad” (Wintering Out 17). Heaney provides elsewhere an explication of these local words: “the Broagh riverbank was covered with docken, and docken was an old English plural. … And our riverbank field was called ‘the long rigs,’ and rigs is a Scottish word, probably brought over by the planters in the seventeenth century” (“Among” 9). Further, “pad” is a Northern Irish colloquialism that signifies a path (“pad”). The first stanza, then, charts a linguistic history as it progresses from the name of the village to the riverbank that the name derives from and then on to wild dock plants and a tree-covered path that leads to the ford at the end of the riverbank. The poem also mixes more broadly ordinary English with such local referents. The local terms of the poem’s title and first stanza—“Broagh,” “rigs,” “docken,” “pad”—give way to more common language, connoting a physical location that is at once singular and accessible. After the first stanza brings us through a “rig” that includes a host of diverse linguistic influences from the “Riverbank” to the “ford,” the next stanzas describe ground with general words. In the second stanza, the ground is referred to as “garden mould,” a Northern Irish word that would be familiar to locals as “organically-rich soil” (“mould”). That the soil is in a “garden” imbues the lines with general familiarity, too. Further, the terrain is described in simple, everyday diction that has a gentle, vulnerable aspect, making this “garden” feel shared: its ground “bruise[s] easily” and the rain that soaks it is a soft “shower.” When the ground becomes wet, the “heelmark” that forms from walking upon it isn’t definitively a local’s or, for that matter, the poet’s, but is “your heelmark,” an imprint the poem compares to “the black O//in Broagh,” whose       low tattoo among the windy boortrees and rhubarb-blades ended almost suddenly, like that last gh the strangers found difficult to manage.

These final images concretize the local accent with an action that describes sound: “your heel” creates a “low tattoo” in the ground and fills suddenly with rain; “almost” as suddenly, the water is then absorbed back into the ground, and the impression disappears. The gh sound in the word

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“Broagh,” Heaney imagines, would sound like the “almost” sudden absorption of water into the ground and the fading of the heelmark if such an action were audible.14 These commonplace words, and the poem’s ultimate attempt to articulate the sound the word “Broagh” makes in local speech, which would be at best difficult for those who haven’t been brought up hearing and saying it, invite the nonlocal auditor into the poem. “Broagh,” then, mitigates difficulty as much as enacts it; it extols a locale’s linguistic distinction while clarifying the qualities that make that language distinct. This isn’t to dilute the political context of “Broagh” or to suggest that its aural properties somehow evade or transcend politics. Heaney contradicts his avowal that the place-name poems “are phonetic rather than political” when he explains that with “Broagh” he “was trying to coax a few lyric shoots out of the political compost heap of Northern Ireland” (Finders Keepers 382). In fact, the poem’s phonetic concerns are political: “its purpose was to bring … Irish, Elizabethan English and Ulster Scots … into some kind of creative intercourse and alignment and thereby to intimate the possibility of some new intercourse and alignment among the cultural and political heritages which these three languages represent in Northern Ireland” (382). He is, in other words, employing local speech in poetry to make a paradigm of good politics. The poem doesn’t merely separate those who can comprehend the word “Broagh” from those who can’t but works to join the diverse linguistic inheritances of a language while simultaneously underscoring the discreteness of that language. Poets may “broach the dictionary hoard, and get great energy and exhibition from doing so,” but local language also provides that energy: “I’ve always confined myself to words I myself could have heard spoken, words I’d be able to use with familiarity in certain companies” (Stepping Stones 129). That local language, represented by the word “Broagh,” is a distinct, exclusive, difficult language used in the poem to individualize an array of identifications. The multifarious linguistic inheritances in “Broagh” assert local Northern Irish identity in a way that is not narrow but expansive and inclusive: Heaney remarks, “the poem, although very short, tried to do justice to all the elements of heritage in my natural speech, although it could not have come into being without the excited, vindicated right of the Irish to have its equal say” (“Among” 9). These diverse elements allowed Heaney to “fuse” what he describes as “the resentful nationalism of [his] Catholic minority experience” and “a concept of identity that was

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enlarging and releasing and would eventually help me to relate my literary education with the heritage of the home ground” (9). For Richard Russell, fusing these varied strains of linguistic influence in an English-language poem make a paradox: “Heaney’s recognition of his various dialectical heritages in the poem paradoxically enabled him to claim his Irishness and convey that part of his identity through the English language, a perfect illustration of how he draws upon and unifies seemingly opposed spheres of influence” (Poetry and Peace 205). But, too, Heaney’s apprehension of his own multilayered speech traditions and his use of the English language to “claim his Irishness” is comprehensive, and his employment of English is natural: English is, after all, Heaney’s language, the language he was brought up speaking, and the language he mastered. An earlier handwritten draft of the poem ended not with “strangers” unable to manage the “gh” sound, but with “the English” unable to do so (“that last GH the English find/hard to manage,” the draft says), a revision that indicates Heaney’s hesitation to separate himself entirely from all strata of “Englishness” (“Broagh,” draft). What they, the “strangers” who include “English” visitors, can’t master is not actually an Irish word (the word “Bruach” has no “gh” and no “O”) but an Anglicization, an English-­ language adaptation of an Irish word. That Heaney generalized that last reference to “strangers” suggests that he wanted this phonetic, political poem to be an inclusive one: “strangers” refers to the unfamiliar but in its generality is more companionable than “the English.”

Local Speech in Heaney’s Poems About the Troubles Heaney would learn during the Troubles, which had begun a few years before “Broagh” was published, that Northern Irish poetry cannot be only a site for linguistic unification. He had always been acutely aware of his own community’s secondary status in Northern Ireland’s social structure. For example, he described with caustic irony in pre-Troubles 1966 a dominant unionist mentality that pitted itself oppressively against the region’s beleaguered Catholic community: that mentality is “loyal to the Crown, concerned to maintain the Ulster border as a bulwark against the tyranny of Rome and rebels”; it is the mentality of “one who is grateful for the North’s refusal of Home Rule, … who recognises that gerrymandering is a necessary evil in order to maintain a loyalist government” (Heaney, “From the Archive”). And yet even as he knew before the Troubles of the bulwarks, refusals, and so-called necessary evils when one community

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relies “for their identity on their adopted political allegiance rather than their geographical position” (“Archive”), it was not until the Troubles were well underway that Heaney changed the shape of his poetry, when, as he says, “the problems of poetry moved from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament” (Preoccupations 56). Heaney would eventually find compelling images and symbols in the remains of prehistoric tribal murder victims buried in the bogs of Northern Europe, figures he gave voice to briefly in Wintering Out (1972) and then more lengthily in the famous sequence of bog poems in North (1975). The poems originated mostly from photos of preserved corpses of ancient Scandinavian and Germanic victims of ritualistic murder dug up from bog land that he came across in P. V. Glob’s 1965 book The Bog People. Heaney perceived a correspondence between the tribal violence in prehistoric Jutland, Irish history, and contemporary Northern Ireland: “the unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with photographs of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles” (58).15 That correspondence between the primeval and the political would prove itself to be for Heaney a troubled one. Indeed, if Heaney found adequate images and symbols in the bog, he also found that the bog’s resources were finite. The bog poems are pared down, comprising mostly quatrains with two- and three-beat lines, their long, narrow shapes suggesting a downward movement as if into the ground. They rely mostly on visceral description that connects the physical images of the bog cadavers to contemporary images of Northern Ireland and to the poet’s personal, conflicted disposition toward his place in a sectarian society—an autobiographical language of guilt. For example, in “Punishment,” the poet-speaker observes the ancient corpse of a young woman probably executed for adultery in blazon-like detail; he “can feel the tug/of the halter” at her neck and a breeze “on her naked front,” as well as “see her drowned/body in the bog” and “her shaved head/like a stubble of black corn” (North 30–31).16 He envisions what the woman looked like when she was alive, before her punishment, addressing her as if she were his beloved: “Little adulteress,” he calls her, “you were flaxen-­ haired,/undernourished, and your/tar-black face was beautiful.” But the poem would ultimately be more than descriptive; by its end, the poet implicates himself as one of her exploiters, “the artful voyeur” of the corpse’s brain, muscles, and bones. Early drafts of the poem end with those observations, but the poem’s final version continues, linking the

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strangled prehistoric “adulteress” and contemporary young Catholic women in Northern Ireland who are tarred and feathered when accused of indiscretions with British soldiers while the poet “stood dumb,” conniving “civilized outrage” while also understanding the “tribal, intimate revenge” of the ghastly punishment. The poem self-reflexively ponders the ethical responsibility of rendering brutality in poetry while the poet himself can’t outwardly respond to such savagery in life. His observations are “artful,” but he is also “dumb”: the volatile political situation requires him to “connive,” to strategize about how and when to speak. He exaggerates his outrage in public while privately justifying the “tribal” comeuppance he outwardly repudiates. All the while, the poem itself is also strategic: it blazons a victim of barbarous punishment; it suggests a physical and emotional attraction to her corpse; it presents the speaker as implicating himself; it links the corpse to present-day circumstances; it even claims at the end to “understand” the punishment. Description here leads to a revelation that the horrors of the past are the horrors of the present and that our supposed present-day “civilized outrage” at such horrors is checked by an inherent understanding of them. It may after all reduce Heaney to an “artful voyeur” of deplorable violence. In fact, the bog poems forced Heaney into a long debate with himself about creating poetic language in response to political violence and about his two-fold responsibility to his art and to his community. The bog poems demonstrated for Heaney that “description is revelation,” a lesson Heaney explains learning in “Fosterage,” the fifth section of the “Singing School” sequence in North that immediately follows the bog poems and that details different facets of the speaker’s education—his Yeatsian “Singing School”  (the title comes from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”)—from adolescence as a student through adulthood as a poet (North 66). But poems like “Punishment,” whose revelations are also indictments of description, suggest at least that Heaney sensed he would have to move beyond that particular poetic activity. In the many drafts of “Fosterage,” where Heaney describes learning from his teacher Michael McLaverty that “description is revelation” (the phrase is from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Description Without Place”), we find Heaney struggling to connect his education as a poet to his education as a subjugated minority in a hostile society; we find, in other words, the tension between poetry and politics. The published version of “Fosterage” is a sixteen-line free-­ verse poem with nothing overtly political in it—the only apolitical section of the “Singing School” sequence—a poem that, along with description,

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recommends for good writing individuality, minute detail, understatement, and patience. But the history of “Fosterage” is not apolitical: in the draft revisions, we see Heaney wrestling with ways to correlate the lessons he learned as a student to the political realities he witnesses in his city and country. Indeed, rather than uphold his descriptive method as revelation, Heaney’s painstaking work on “Fosterage” suggests, like “Punishment” does, that he is dragging that very method into question. The first handwritten draft includes political references that never make it into the final poem. That version refers to being “schooled upon your father’s pillow” with “A loaded revolver underneath,” and proceeds to describe this schooling, the poet recalling how he “toed the stylist’s line” while witnessing violence erupt in his homeland, political violence signified by “gunfire in Ballymurphy,” “buses burning,” and crossed-out references to “that ministry of fear” and “the Falls” (“Fosterage,” drafts).17 “Toeing the line” implies a certain social pressure on Heaney, not simply advice. The “Falls” refers to the Falls Road, the center of Irish Republicanism and a site of sectarian violence in Belfast. “Ministry of Fear” is the title of the sequence’s first poem where Heaney recalls as an adolescent in an elite school his South Derry accent setting him apart from the other students and distinguishing his early attempts to write poetry. In that poem, the poet recalls how he “innovated a South Derry rhyme/With hushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled” and that such a rhyme amounted to his “hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain/ … walking, by God, all over the fine Lawns of elocution” (North 58). A couple of versions after the first draft of “Fosterage,” the title changes to “Stylist,” and the poem  becomes a version of a Petrarchan sonnet whose octave remains almost intact in the final printed version. But the sestet in the draft, where the poem had turned from the teacher’s advice to ruminations on politics and style, is not included in the final published version. In that sestet, the political references to gunfire and burning busses that were earlier struck are back in, along with “bonfires” and “soldiers” who “wrecked” a “kitchen house,” images reminiscent of the early days of the partition of Ireland in the 1920s. The next draft is considerably longer than the sonnet or the final sixteen-line poem: here it’s three sonnets, the title an explicit dedication (“To Michael McLaverty”). The first sonnet contemplates the axiom that “Description is revelation” by contrasting the quotidian and out-of-the ordinary political violence, again questioning how to “toe the line” with style. The next envisions walking through various rural locales

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and equates the ridgeline of the mountain “Cave Hill” to his first bog poem, “The Tollund Man” (not from the bog poems of North but from Wintering Out). The final sonnet draft is rife with Catholic imagery: “Rosary Beads,” “Our Lady of Perpetual Succour,” “Sacred Heart of Jesus.” In a typed draft that includes this new handwritten material, Heaney handwrites brackets around most of the political content, brackets and strikes the Catholic references, and strikes the references to “Cave Hill” and “The Tollund Man.” Finally, the last draft has a new title, “Friendship’s Garland,” and is set in numbered, eight-line sections with all political content moved to the third section. Some Catholic references are reintroduced while some are struck again. The reference to “The Tollund Man” at the end is reinserted and then struck once more. Marginal notes advise that he end the poem with Katherine Mansfield and Gerard Manley Hopkins. By the final printed version, all political content has been excised. These drafts show that Heaney was unsure even of the methods he was trying to uphold. Description may have been revelation in the bog poems—connecting a distant, symbolic past to the Troubles—but he seemed to struggle employing a descriptive method in the present for the contemporaneous world. And yet the advice was a form of “Fosterage,” an important part of the development of his thinking about art’s possibilities and limitations. That he changed the title from “Stylist” to “Fosterage” connects the two concepts, after all. Finally, it seems he was able to shave the poem down to just the advice and the reference to Hopkins because the other poems in the section addressed less problematically his anxieties about poetry and politics. To try to reconcile these anxieties, Heaney would encounter more directly the actualities of the Troubles, testing different methods to avoid the voyeurism that description might encourage, trying to find a way to “toe the line” with style. Local speech would once again become part of his strategy. For example, “Whatever You Say Say Nothing,” a poem that directly succeeds the bog poems and precedes “Singing School” in North, marshals Northern Irish Belfast vernacular in traditional verse form to depict sectarianism’s cultural erosions. The poem is set in the real world of contemporary Belfast where social disintegration has reduced language to journalistic cant and cagey colloquialisms. The poem exemplifies, as Suhr-­ Sytsma demonstrates, the need for Northern Irish poets to distinguish themselves from journalists who are often thought to be exploitative in their instantaneous reportage of events (162–63). Indeed, in one of the drafts of “Fosterage,” Heaney recounts another piece of advice from his

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teacher: “Reading the newspapers will spoil your style.” And yet “Whatever You Say Say Nothing” is critical not just of the language of the dailies; it critiques and evaluates a range of vernacular usages. The poem’s language itself—“a common and particular Belfast English” (Keating-Miller 64)—is not divided along sectarian lines, for the poem’s local idioms, words, and phrases would be “used by both communities, and where there is any distinction in usage it is between working and middle-class speakers or older and younger speakers, rather than along religious lines” (Henry 8). The poem presents that common Belfast English as a tool for evasion, concealment, and expression. “Whatever You Say Say Nothing” enacts linguistically the deteriorations caused by sectarianism. To read the poem is to enter into a welter of journalistic phrases, empty idioms, cryptic clichés, a dissembling environment where words are strategically designed to “say nothing.” The poem contemplates life in a world where people must hold their tongues even when speaking (or writing poetry). It begins with Heaney being asked by “an English journalist” for “views/On the Irish thing.” Indeed, an early draft was titled “Views” even as it proceeds emphatically not to articulate views but rather to orchestrate speech machinations into verse form (“Whatever You Say” drafts). In fact, the poem amplifies those machinations as strategies designed to obscure views, to “say nothing” even in one’s saying. The patterns and rhythms of rhymed pentameter quatrains contrast starkly with the rote phrasing of journalists when reporting on the Troubles and the calculated idioms used by civilians to hide allegiances. Eamonn Hughes describes the poem as made “from the criticism of the conventional language of the Troubles” (111) while Rosie Lavan says the sections “are poised—staged, even, and the performative verb is apt” (40). As Lavan explains, the poem originated as a series of unpublished verse letters Heaney wrote when he returned to Belfast after living and teaching for a year in California, an experience that effected Heaney’s poetic style: “His new disposition towards Belfast after the return from Berkeley was further registered in a change in his poetic diction, and this in itself was an outward turn: the new relationship with language was played out in a series of verse letters Heaney wrote to friends in the months immediately following his return from America” (59).18 For example, one draft entitled “Backlash Blues” includes the lines, “‘I’ve written five verse letters this weekend/For there’s great sport in letting it hang out,” that last phrase, “letting it hang out,” indicative to Lavan of an American idiom making its way into Heaney’s verse (qtd. in Lavan 59; “Whatever You Say” drafts).

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It also indicates how idiomatic, colloquial, local speech could be a way to let it all hang out without letting it all hang out. For this poem on “views” strapped by an unspoken rule to say nothing is both an analysis of the language of the Troubles and constituted of that very language: the journalistic banalities and the linguistic subterfuge are, in part, what create the poem. Heaney, in other words, lets it all hang out while also saying nothing. In other words, a collocation of local speech registers patterned into rhyming iambic pentameter provides the poet with a way not to issue views but to “sing” amid empty political rhetoric and sensationalizing journalists whose sound bites of opportunistic journalism reduce Northern Ireland’s conflict to stock phrases, journalists who     proved upon their pulses ‘escalate’, ‘Backlash’ and ‘crack down’, ‘the provisional wing’, ‘Polarization’ and ‘long-standing hate’. (51–55)

But the quatrain concludes with the poet’s insistence on his poetic language—he says, twice, “I live here too” and describes himself as singing this declaration. It is an assertion that generates a new tone in the next stanza where the poet’s song is “Expertly civil-tongued” when talking to his neighbors as he balances on “the high wires” of the news of the day, “Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours/Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts.” The iambic rhythms and the rhymes are as expertly managed as the old, idiomatic “retorts” and the banal “reports” of journalists, but whereas the retorts and reports are designed to evade, simplify, and sensationalize, the poem creates harmony out of those contrived languages. The rhythm, assonance, consonance, and alliteration of “high wires of first wireless reports” and “Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours,” for example, produce an intricate, even dulcet music despite the references to anxious manipulation (“civil-tongued” while on a “high wire”) and palpable bitterness (“fake taste” and “stony flavors”). And yet when the language of the poet’s “civil neighbors” quickly shifts back to a litany of “sanctioned” demotic responses, the musicality recedes as circumspect local speech takes over in a litany of hackneyed phrases—“it’s disgraceful,” “Where’s it going to end?,” “They’re murderers,”—that cause even the poet’s “voice of sanity” to become “hoarse” from repeating the same overused, vacuous phrases. This hoarseness leaves Heaney unconvinced that traditional poetic form is enough to contravene the restrictive dialectal conditions in his “land of

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password, handgrip, wink and nod,” a land “Where tongues lie coiled” and “Where half of us” are “cabin’d and confined” like the Greeks in the Trojan horse, “Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.” How can verse form unlock this “confined” linguistic “cabin” when the only allowable language is a “whispering morse”? The poem’s metered quatrains are composed largely of cryptic jargon, but rhyme and rhythm do not just emphasize the underhandedness of such vernacular; Heaney also defends the purposeful ambiguity and evasion in the speech of his Catholic compatriots: they are a “flock suspect” who must conform to their tribe lest they be cast as “heretic[s]” who have “come at last to heel and to the stake.” Heaney employs clichés not just to critique his community’s speech as he did the journalist’s sensationalizing jargon but to speak in their evasive “fork-tongued” language because it is his language as well: “We … want no truck,” “We’re on the make,” “Long sucking the hind tit,/Cold as a witch’s.” Even the tolerance of the “liberal papist note” “sounds hollow,” deteriorating into superficialities in the context of civil war. Heaney then holds his own poet’s tongue when he turns his attention to the composition of the poem itself in a parenthetical aside that questions poetry’s ability to offer anything like a solution and to scorn its “open-minded” proclivity to refrain from taking sides: (It’s tempting here to rhyme on ‘labour pangs’ And diagnose a rebirth in our plight But that would be to ignore other symptoms. Last night you didn’t need a stethoscope To hear the eructation of Orange drums Allergic equally to Pearse and Pope.)19

Heaney worries that the beating of his pentameter lines is about as audible as a heartbeat next to the sound of actual detonations. Can poetry “draw the line through bigotry and sham” in an environment “Where to be saved you only must save face/And whatever you say, you say nothing”? The poet despairs that he cannot write about a place where “hold[ing] your tongue” is at once a weapon against your enemies and a strategy both to align yourself with and protect yourself against your own community: “for all this art and sedentary trade/I am incapable.” And yet the poet is capable, for even as he appears to capitulate to the conditions that stultify language in the “wee six” counties of the North, his impulse to sing persists: “Of the ‘wee six’ I sing.” The poem ends with a line of graffiti,

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another form of local language, that equates living in a world of such violence to not living at all: “Is there a life before death?,” the scrawl reads expressing in its terseness and directness the “Competence with pain” that the poem indicates it has been searching for. Indeed, the poem arranges the hollow cant and loaded colloquialisms it examines in cadenced lines to “say something” quite specific: that a life in which everyday language becomes a means of evasion, concealment, and self-protection is no life at all. He may not be able to “diagnose a rebirth” in the “miseries” of the Troubles, but he makes them “Coherent” by arranging local speech— whether journalistic reportage or “Northern reticence, the tight gag of place” or a defacement on a public wall—in traditional patterns that underscore their social functions: to inform or sensationalize, to evade and conceal, to express and sing.

The Redress of Local Speech Two discrete methods from each of the two sections of North that Heaney merges to make sense of the Troubles are giving voice to the prehistoric dead (the bog poems in the book’s first section) and instrumentalizing local speech (“Whatever You Say Say Nothing” in section two). In “The Strand at Lough Beg” from his next book, Field Work (1975), Heaney shifts his focus from the bog corpses and the fraught language of sectarianism to an actual victim of the Troubles, one who is connected personally to the poet. It is as if moving from the distanced, symbolic figures of the past and the dialectal degradations of the present to more immediate figures might offer Heaney a way to bear witness without voyeurism or evasion. And yet “The Strand at Lough Beg” does not resolve the dilemma for Heaney but exacerbates it. The poem elegizes Colum McCartney, a second cousin of Heaney who was murdered by paramilitaries, in randomly rhymed verse that attempts to strike a balance between a brutal murder and a ritualistic burial intended to provide alleviation. The poem envisions the moments leading up to McCartney’s execution at the hands of a loyalist gang while traveling through the Irish countryside. A hazardous presence haunts the stark setting with its “white glow of filling stations” and “lonely streetlamps” lined along fields and hills “beneath the stars” as the poet imagines his cousin’s entrapment by assassins. He envisions hooded, armed men flagging his cousin’s car down with a “faked road block” or by

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flashing headlights in his rearview mirror while his cousin drives through unfamiliar territory, far from the waters and trees of his hometown: Where you weren’t known and far from what you knew: The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg, Church Island’s spire, its soft treeline of yew. (17–18)

The quiet backdrop, the lush and emphatically lyrical presentation of his cousin’s home at Lough Beg, and the impending violence on the desolate road are not the only disparate elements in the poem. The measured pentameter counters the suddenness of the ambush while the poem’s random rhymes both reflect and offset the arbitrariness of sectarian vengeance: the violence is unexpected and yet anxiously anticipated just as the rhymes occur sporadically but distinctly; they accumulate in some parts and then disappear in others. In fact, “Lough Beg” tends to describe landscape in rhymed lines, but the poem either stops rhyming or employs slant rhymes when its attention shifts to the violent act that occurs on the land. In the final stanza, the poet sees himself with his cousin back on his cousin’s “strand” where                   the cattle graze Up to their bellies in an early mist And now they turn their unbewildered gaze To where we work our way through squeaking sedge Drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge Honed bright, Lough Beg half shines under the haze. I turn because the sweeping of your feet Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes.

The series of exact rhymes—“graze,” “gaze,” and “haze,”; “sedge” and “edge”—communicates the unified composition of the tranquil dawn landscape: the cattle, the two men, and the lake are all immersed in the same dewy mist. But that composure subsides as the rhymed lines quickly give way to unrhymed and slant-rhymed lines (“feet,” “knees,” “eyes”). The poem orchestrates harmony and disharmony concurrently. Heaney claims that the “hard information” at the beginning of the poem balances the “healing landscape passage” that ends the poem (Stepping Stones 221), implying that his vision of preparing his cousin’s body required a matter-of-fact note to counter its potential contrivance

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and sentimentality. The end of the poem describes Heaney ceremoniously washing his cousin with “handfuls of the dew,” laying his cousin’s body out, adorning his “shroud” with “Green Scapulars.” It is an allusion to the first Canto of Dante’s Purgatorio where Cato the Younger, who committed suicide in ancient Utica rather than capitulate to Julius Caesar’s tyranny, instructs Virgil on how to prepare Dante’s body to enter Purgatory. But Heaney ultimately assesses in the remarks referred to above that the concrete details at the beginning of the poem that juxtapose landscape and ambush temper the potential bathos in the closing lines’ reenactment of Dante. Still, the counterpoise of the first and last parts of the poem and between the actual events and the verse lines in which those events are envisioned is apparently not enough to keep him from redressing the poem itself in his next book, Station Island (1985), a critique that plays itself out in local speech, suggesting that the colloquial and the local can act as rejoinders to the problems of couching crisis in self-consciously poetic language. Indeed, in the title poem of that book, a sequence of twelve poems depicting ghostly encounters, Heaney criticizes the methods of “The Strand at Lough Beg.”20 He worries that the earlier poem doesn’t correlate to what he would call in his book about poetry’s social aptitudes, The Redress of Poetry (1995), a poem’s “projections and inventions” and “complex reality” (8). “The Strand at Lough Beg” presents the realworld images of sectarian violence and contrasts them with images of the countryside: roadblocks, guns, and blood are set against trees, a lake, cattle, and marigolds. The poem’s final scene, however, isn’t built on contrasts nor does it provide a complex realistic scene. Rather, it is a Dantesque vision. When the poem shifts from realism to the imagined burial rites, does it slide into melodrama? In the “Station Island” sequence, Heaney examines explicitly poetry’s capacity to respond to reality as well as its susceptibility to sentimentalizing it. What’s more, he identifies in local speech a stay against this risk. Heaney notes that obsolete uses of the term “redress” are “to set (a person or thing) upright again; to raise again to an erect position” and “to bring back to the proper course” (Redress 15). For Heaney, that setting upright, raising, and bringing back to course is linguistic. The seventh and eighth sections of “Station Island” sets the contemporary dead upright and has them speak in their own speech, as opposed to inventing a material language for symbolic figures of the prehistoric past or contrasting a sectarian assassination, a serene rural landscape, and an allusion to an especially ceremonious

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scene in Dante, thereby making the resulting burial self-consciously literary and ritualistic. In the eighth “Station Island” poem, the ghost of the elegized subject of “The Strand at Lough Beg” rebukes Heaney for not attending his wake and for the methods of the elegy itself. That an early version of just this section appeared in a 1979 memorial concert program with the title “Encounter on Station Island”—five years before Station Island the book was released—suggests the prominence of both poems in Heaney’s mind and the persistence of his inclination to question his poetic approaches to the Troubles (“Encounter”). Heaney tries in this “Station Island” encounter to explain to McCartney that he foregrounded the murder in “Lough Beg” against the dewy landscape because he connected the gloominess of the beach there to his own sense of desolation upon hearing the news. He pleads with his cousin’s ghost that “he kept seeing a grey stretch of Lough Beg” and the “strand empty at daybreak” and that it made him feel “like the bottom of a dried-up lake” (81–83). But McCartney’s ghost will have none of it. He charges Heaney with mistaking political circumventions for aesthetic strategies. Heaney redresses himself by “redressing” McCartney’s corpse, again, in the obsolete sense of setting a person upright again. Heaney supplies McCartney with a voice to admonish the kind of voyeurism that he worried about in “Punishment” and to investigate the culpability of poetic language in the face of political violence, accusing Heaney of favoring beauty over truth, images over “the fact”: You confused evasion and artistic tact. The Protestant who shot me through the head I accuse directly, but indirectly, you who now atone perhaps upon this bed for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio and saccharined my death with morning dew.

The poetic elements of rhyme and meter in “Lough Beg” cannot be what is causing Heaney to worry about “evasion,” nor do they “whitewash” or “saccharine” death; for McCartney speaks here in lines formally similar to the randomly rhymed pentameters of that earlier poem. What McCartney’s ghost objects to is the mannered diction at the end of “Lough Beg.” The “cold handfuls of the dew” that Heaney gathers to “wash you, cousin” in

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the earlier poem are repudiated in the later poem because instead of washing the corpse, they only “whitewashed ugliness.” It is the kind of descriptive language that characterizes the excerpt from Dante’s Purgatorio that Heaney uses as the epigraph for “Lough Beg”: “All round this little island, on the strand/Far down below there, where the breakers strive,/Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand.” Dante’s striving breakers, tall rushes, and oozy sand are “lovely blinds” indeed, but in the volatile context of civil war would they also be examples of evasive language that can have the effect of sugarcoating the hard facts? Despite this interrogation of Dantesque lyricism, the Divine Comedy, particularly the Purgatorio, is an even more central source for “Station Island” than it was for “The Strand at Lough Beg.” Indeed, the entire “Station Island” sequence is modeled on Dante’s epic. As Neil Corcoran explains, “in ‘Station Island,’ the imaginary pilgrimage to the island becomes a series of meetings with ghosts of the type Dante meets in the Purgatorio: friendly, sad, self-defining, exemplary, admonitory, rebuking” (115–16). Heaney is able to redress “the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio” in a poem that is modeled on the Purgatorio because much of “Station Island,” and especially the section immediately preceding section “VIII,” employs another kind of Dantesque diction that allows him to exercise “artistic tact” without evading facts: local speech. Section VII of “Station Island” relays in local speech both a married couple’s bedroom conversation in the moments before the husband is murdered by sectarian paramilitaries and a conversation between the husband and the poet himself.21 Heaney innovates the poem’s terza rima verse form with an exceptionally transparent rendering of the everyday speech of his region.22 Heaney, Russell explains, “turned to a variation on Dante’s terza rima … because of his conviction that that form was inherently vernacular, regional, and attentive … to local politics, geography, and culture” (Regions 248).23 Despite Heaney’s own adeptness with writing in his vernacular and his attraction to the vernacular aspect of the Divine Comedy (Dante famously wrote in Florentine Italian instead of Latin), he recalls struggling with this very aspect when he first attempted to translate the poem: “I couldn’t establish a measure that combined plain speaking with fluent movement. I just couldn’t catch the shapes that the bright container of the terza rima contained” (Stepping Stones 425–26). To catch the form’s shapes with plain speaking, Heaney felt he needed to embody it, to personalize it in some way: “For a big job like that, you need a note that pays you back, … you need to be making a music that doesn’t

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just match the original but verifies something in yourself’” (426). He couldn’t find that measure and movement when he was translating Dante literally, but he found exactly that when in poem “VII” he adapted Dante’s form with his own local speech. Such speech fulfilled for Heaney other commitments as well: he has described the seventh section of “Station Island” as an effort to “say what happened,” suggesting that the potential for specific local intonations to create the impression of unmitigated immediacy could help him achieve that aim (Stepping Stones 248).24 The fundamental influence of Dante on the poem, the sequence, and the book Station Island, as well as other Heaney poems, has been carefully delineated by many of Heaney’s readers, and by Heaney himself.25 Those readers almost all point to section “VII” as the apotheosis of that influence—but most do not provide in-­depth analysis of its poetic operations, how it just says what happened.26 O’Donoghue calls it “the most fully Dantesque piece Heaney has every written” (Cambridge 8) while Floyd Collins says that the poem “comes nearest to capturing Dante’s easy vernacular style” (145). Michael Cavanagh regards the poem as “Heaney’s supreme performance in Dante’s mode” (145), but he also keeps the resounding Dantean influence in check, observing that the poem “draws deeply from the Commedia’s themes and style while at the same time remaining very characteristic of Heaney” (164). The element that is most characteristic of Heaney in “VII” is the emphatically plainspoken colloquial diction he applies to modify Dante’s form: as Cavanagh says, Heaney “tones Dante down; he makes him rather plain” (159). That plain-making and toning down is attained by Heaney’s use of clear-cut local speech to “say what happened” as directly and clearly as possible. In fact, when Heaney distinguishes the “Station Island” sequence from Dante, the aspect he draws attention to in order to underscore that distinction is its diction’s plainness, for making his own poem with speech even plainer than Dante’s ensured for Heaney that “Station Island” would not just constitute another version of the Divine Comedy: “I was worried, of course, by the pastiche element, writing a poem so obviously an echo of The Divine Comedy, so one antidote to that was to make it very plain in its diction, and entirely matter-of-fact in its narrative” (Heaney, Conversation with Karl Miller 34–35). The poem is a supreme performance in Dante’s mode, but it is also a poem that creates that mode with Heaney’s own specific local intonations, intonations that Heaney again emphasizes when discussing the poem: “What I enjoy is the muted rhyming, the slightly Dantesque formality of the verse, being combined

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with the speech rhythms of South Derry” (25). Those Derry speech rhythms are not divided “along ethnic lines of demarcation between Protestant and Catholic; [for] there is no such thing as ‘Catholic English’ or ‘Protestant English’” (McCafferty 1). Rather, local Derry speech in the poem is a nonsectarian speech amplified against sectarian violence. The poem’s combination of forms of local speech and verse form communicates the hard facts of sectarian murder while drifting between easy familiarity, anxiety, terror, grief, and friendly humor. Although Heaney begins the seventh section of “Station Island” with the poet gazing languidly into a body of water, alluding to Narcissus peering into his own reflection, Heaney’s “looking” and “idling” do not degenerate into poetic posturing or navel-gazing (77–80). The poet is not as he imagined himself in the final image of Death of a Naturalist (in the poem “Personal Helicon”) two decades earlier: “big-eyed Narcissus” peering and shouting into wells to “see myself, to set the darkness echoing” (44). Rather, Heaney has realized from the volatile situation in Northern Ireland that, as we saw earlier, he “must move from I to we—open it up somehow” (Heaney, Conversation with Karl Miller 19). One of his ways to open it up is to let the victims of the Troubles speak in his poems in their own language. Thus, in “VII,” he reproduces a local language for the ghost of a shopkeeper whom Heaney knew when they were both young men and who was executed by sectarian vigilantes after being called down from his apartment in the early morning hours. The poet is “reluctant … to meet his [old friend’s] face” but not at all reluctant to hand, metaphorically, the poem over to him. After describing the ghost—his forehead is busted and he’s covered in dried blood27—Heaney lets the shopkeeper tell his own story in their shared local speech. The shopkeeper first downplays his “raw” appearance and then launches into the tale of his murder:                 What time it was when I was wakened up I still don’t know but I heard this knocking, knocking, and it scared me, like the phone in the small hours, so I had the sense not to put on the light. (77)

The shopkeeper pulls “the curtain” back and sees a pair of men below and a parked vehicle with its doors ajar knowing what the set-up foretells:          so I let the curtain drop, but they must have been waiting for it to move for they shouted to come down into the shop. (78)

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The poem presents the victim speaking about his own murder in his uncomplicated and forthright living language, creating a relaxed, conversational tone that has the effect of augmenting the narrative’s menacing imminence by contrast. Half-rhymes and loose iambs practically conceal the terza rima form as the poem’s pentameter lines tighten and then ease throughout. For example, in the lines above, the strict iambic pattern of “what time it was/when I was wakened up I still don’t know” gives way to the irregular pattern of “but I heard this knocking, knocking, and it/ scared me.” In this intermittent arrangement, the repetition of “knocking, knocking” and its stressed first syllables reverberate with a sense of anticipatory urgency while the slight pause at the speaker’s enjambed admission of his fear accentuates that dread, as if the speaker is both remembering the details and reliving them in his lucid, colloquial recounting. Similarly, the half-rhymes that temper the terza rima form a bit—raw/know, it/ light, curtain/open—build to the exact, one-syllable rhyme of “drop” and “shop,” generating a definitive sound that matches the inescapability of what’s to come.28 Further, the rhyme at “shop” resonates a few lines later when the speaker tells the poet, “All the time they were shouting, ‘Shop!// Shop!,’” the repeated exclamation distinguished by a whole stanza break evoking the sound of gunshots. Meanwhile, in the next stanzas, the dialogue between the shopkeeper and his wife conveys the private tragedy of political violence, portraying the couple apprehending the terrible fact that one of them is about to be taken from the other. The wife senses the danger and cries out while the shopkeeper dismisses her anguish, not because he thinks she’s overreacting but because he knows she’s not. The wife’s fear, his admonishment of her protestations, and his struggle to keep his “senses” culminate in a single gesture that doesn’t “saccharine” or “whitewash” violence; instead, the poem reports the gesture as a matter of fact. When the wife asks who the men are, the shopkeeper says he knows them but adds, ­“something/ made me reach and squeeze her hand across the bed” before going downstairs to answer the door. That squeeze of the hand is not sentimentalized, obscured, embellished, or expounded upon; it is a hard fact of the narrative, the last time the man will touch his wife, and it is relayed in blunt colloquial speech. Instead of setting sectarian violence against a moody landscape, enacting a ritualistic preparation of a victim’s body, or describing a prehistoric corpse with metaphorical language in compressed lines, the poet presents a victim speaking to him in his own local speech, a language that prevents the terza rima poem from sounding contrived.

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The speaker-poet lets the shopkeeper have his say, but he doesn’t disappear from the poem because he is not relinquishing responsibility as a poet; he is assessing the language he creates to address the Troubles: “My conscious concern was the killings in the North and the adequacy or inadequacy of my response to them in the poetry I was writing,” Heaney says about the poem (Heaney,  Conversation  with Karl Miller 25). After the speaker hears the shopkeeper’s tale, he talks directly to the murdered man, single quotes indicating that the conversation occurs in the present between the poet and the ghost rather than within the ghost’s narrative about his murder: ‘Did they say nothing?’ ‘Nothing. What would they say?’ ‘Were they in uniform? Not masked in any way?’ ‘They were barefaced as they would be in the day, shites thinking they were the be-all and the end-all.’ (79)

The diction itself here is also not masked in any way, matching the blunt reality of sectarian assassination: the local language corresponds to the local world it responds to. The downplaying of the extraordinary incident with everyday language like “shites” and “the be-all and the end-all” has the effect of underscoring by contrast its exceptional horror. When the poet resumes speaking, he retains in his own speech the shopkeeper’s plainspoken manner: except for the ravaged forehead and the blood, he was still that same rangy midfielder in a blue jersey and starched pants, the one stylist on the team, the perfect, clean, unthinkable victim. (79–80)

The poem’s own clean style individualizes its unthinkable victim, one of thousands of innocent people killed during the Troubles. The shopkeeper is representative of these victims, but the poem’s idiomatic diction also renders him a particular man in a particular place: he gets annoyed with his wife; he struggles to keep his senses when he’s afraid; he feigns impatience with his assassins, yelling down to them to be quiet. He even needles the poet with wily humor, observing that his interlocutor has “put on weight.” Finally, when the poet asks the shopkeeper to “Forgive the way I have

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lived indifferent—/forgive my timid circumspect involvement,” the shopkeeper refuses such headiness and won’t gainsay his forthright, idiomatic manner: “Forgive/my eye,” he responds, “all that’s above my head” (80). The ghost doesn’t have a language for debates about poetry and politics or divided commitments or appropriate poetic languages. Rather, he has living, authentic, direct speech. As Bernard O’Donoghue explains, it is such speech that epitomizes the example of Dante emboldening Heaney to write in vernacular: What Heaney is doing again is to suggest that the language of the exchange is not rhetorically recast in the poem, but occurs unprocessed. The interlocutory ghost here, William Strathearn, goes on to reject more elevated language, about forgiveness and circumspection, by saying: ‘All that’s above my head.’ … The characters in Inferno act with passion, but they speak without it; in accordance with God’s will, they answer Dante’s requests for information in a clear, informative narrative. Heaney abides by a similar convention. (Language 93–94)

Heaney, like the ghosts in his poems, rejects “whitewashed” language for local speech because it risks evading the hard facts of sectarianism while the colloquial can present the facts—the situational and emotional actualities—head on. Heaney has attributed the success of the poem to its combination of local speech and traditional form: “It’s one that holds up. It’s almost twenty years since I wrote it, but I still occasionally include it at poetry readings. I suppose it comes across because it’s a story, and because of the colloquial aspect” (Heaney,  Conversation  with Karl Miller 25). Indeed, that local speech became for him a device for scrutinizing artistic tact amid complex social reality. Heaney’s remarks about Patrick Kavanagh’s “Lough Derg” poem, written four decades before Heaney’s, could be said about his own Lough Derg poem, Station Island, and about many of the poems across his career: “there’s a lot of old blather in it but at least you’re in the company of flesh and blood” (Stepping Stones 238). The interaction between that “old blather” and poetic form was what supplied Heaney with a method to locate what he called the “frontier of writing,” a nonsectarian space in a violently divided country, while allowing him to remain loyal to his own local community and to his artistic commitments (Redress 186). In the guise of Colum McCartney’s ghost, Heaney had chastised himself in Section VIII of “Station Island” for remaining at a poetry event instead of attending his cousin’s wake: “You were with the poets” he observes, “and stayed … with them,” while McCartney’s corpse was moved to his hometown of Bellaghy.29 The

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“blather” that Heaney hears in Kavanagh, the multifarious versions of his homeland’s local speech, allows Heaney to align himself both “with the poets” and with the people of Derry and Mossbawn and Broagh and Belfast and Bellaghy, all of them his “flesh and blood.”

Notes 1. The partition of Ireland occurred after the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) and the signing of the Anglo-Irish treaty in 1922 when twenty-six counties of the island gained independence from Britain as the Irish Free State (eventually becoming what we know today as the Republic of Ireland), and the six remaining counties in the north of the island remained under British rule (creating a separate political entity, “Northern Ireland”). The partition caused a year-long civil war in Ireland between those who supported the Treaty that led to the creation of Northern Ireland and those who did not. The majority of citizens in the six counties were Protestants (with variances; for instance, in Derry the majority was Catholic) who identified as British and wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom. However, almost as many people in Northern Ireland were Catholics who identified as Irish. Northern Ireland thus became a deeply divided and dangerously contentious place. One of the effects of such division was institutionalized discrimination in employment and housing against Irish Catholics. What we know today as “the Troubles” began in the late 1960s when student-­led demonstrations demanding civil rights for Northern Irish Catholics were met with violence by loyalists and the police force and, eventually, the British army that was originally called in to protect the Catholic community. Heaney succinctly relates the sectarian crisis that began a few years after the publication of his first book (Death of a Naturalist in 1966) to the 1922 partition: “partition created crisis. It kept the Protestant majority out of Ireland’s Ireland every bit as effectively as it kept the Catholic minority within Britain’s” (Redress 198). The Troubles have lasted for over thirty years, with the worst violence occurring in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1998, the “Good Friday Agreement … put in place wide-ranging strategies of accommodation between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and between Ireland and Britain. In 1999 a devolved assembly was formed in Stormont, only to be revoked in 2000 when agreement could not be reached on the decommissioning of weapons. In 2007 a new devolved assembly was established involving power-sharing between Sinn Fein and Dr. Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party” (“Northern Ireland”). 2. The Listener was a weekly magazine established by the British Broadcasting Corporation that covered literature and politics. It ran from 1929 to 1991.

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3. Longley lays out some of the reasons why he and his contemporaries were especially tentative about writing poems in response to the Troubles:  We believed that poetry, the opposite of propaganda, should encourage people to think and feel for themselves: it should appeal to their “generous instinct,” as [Louis] MacNeice said in the violent 1930s. We hated what we came to call “Troubles trash.” We believed that, even when generated by the best of intentions, bad poetry about the sufferings of fellow citizens would be an impertinence; as part of an agenda it would be a blasphemy. We disliked the notion that civic unrest might be good for poetry, and poetry a solace for the broken-hearted. We were none of us in the front line (“Songs”). 4. The Peace Process began with the Good Friday Agreement, ratified in May 1998. It ended the war in the mid-1990s via power-sharing between the two communities. It did not, as Peter Geoghegan explains, end the “structural sectarianism of that society” (xi). 5. Longley has often contrasted the poet’s impulse to write about the Troubles to the sometimes opportunistic and reductive intentions of journalism: “From the beginning my poet-friends and I resisted the temptation to hitch a ride on yesterday’s headlines, to write the poem of the latest atrocity” (“Songs”). For an analysis of the poet-journalist divide in the context of Northern Irish poetry about the Troubles, see Suhr-Sytsma’s chapter, “Publishing the Troubles” (162–95). Suhr-Sytsma notes, “University-­educated poets in the postwar years imagined journalism as the opposite of literature” (163). 6. The Yeats quote is “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry” (285). It is from his essay “Anima Hominis” published in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918). 7. These are the poems: “Oysters,” “The Singer’s House,” the ninth “Glanmore Sonnet,” “An Afterwards,” “Song.” The letter—in the Heaney archive at Emory University’s Rose Library—is addressed only to “Ramon.” 8. Helen Vendler’s 1995 monograph on Heaney has sections titled “Archaeologies” and “Anthropologies.” Heaney’s fifty-year body of work has been thoroughly studied by scholars ever since Blake Morrison in 1982 issued the first Heaney monograph. Other works of Heaney criticism that examine Heaney’s language in relation to culture and history include two classic studies, Bernard O’Donoghue’s Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1994) and Neil Corcoran’s The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (1989). In 2009, Bernard O’Donoghue summarized the extensiveness of the scholarly output: “By now the number of specializing books on Heaney is too large to itemize because it is likely to be out of date as soon as it is published. For example there are at least sixteen books whose title is simply Seamus Heaney” (Cambridge 2). According to O’Donoghue, such

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critical attention on a single contemporary poet is unparalleled: “no other current poet [has been] nearly as much written about as Heaney.” Since 2009, there have been book-length studies on Heaney’s prosody (Hall), on his prose about other poets (Cavanagh), on his readings of and relations to Eastern European poets (Kay), on his poetic conceptions of local, political, and spiritual “regions” (Russell), on his persistent consideration of the socially “adequate” poem in his own critical writings on poetics (Dennison), on the European-inflected “aesthetic thinking” of his prose (O’Brien), on the function of memory in his later work (Piavanini), on the ways Heaney’s work in education, journalism, and broadcasting informed his poetry, as well as the ways his poetry was made available in newspapers, on recorded programs, and in annotated drafts at major archival libraries (Lavan), and on his relation to American poetry (Laverty). 9. Quotations from Heaney’s poems are from his individual volumes. I indicate the volume and inclusive page numbers the first time a poem is quoted and then proceed without page citations for short poems and with page citations for longer poems. 10. A televised BBC Northern Ireland special on Heaney shows a montage of Heaney reading “Digging” in the way I describe. 11. The place-name poems from Wintering Out include “Anahorish,” “Gifts of Rain,” “Toome,” and “Broagh.” Lavan reveals that “Anahorish,” “Toome,” and “Broagh” were initially presented as a sequence: “Heaney gathered three poems, ‘Anahorish,’ ‘Toome,’ and ‘Broagh,’ all subsequently published independently in Wintering Out, under the title ‘Watermarks’ for inclusion in the journal Stand in July 1972, and manuscript drafts suggest that he may also have considered the title ‘Folk Musics’ for this sequence of place-name poems” (42). 12. Heaney spells the form “dinnseanchas” (see his essay “The Sense of Place” in Preoccupations 131–49). The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, whose definition I cite,  spells it “dinnshenchas.” Robert Welch, ­editor of that Companion, uses the spelling “dindshenchas” in his recent study of Irish literary history, The Cold of May Day Monday (2014). 13. Deibidhe is an Irish-language poetic “form which rhymes monosyllables with the unstressed syllable of a two-syllabled word” (O’Donoghue, Language 18). Rob Jackaman explains that it is an especially difficult form to bring into English because its seven-syllable structures “are generally unfamiliar in English prosody” (162). Heaney uses the form, for example, in the sixth section of Sweeney Astray, his version of the medieval Irish poem Buile Suibhne (McCarthy 20). 14. The last three stanzas of “Broagh” constitute one rhythmic sentence that makes use of assonance, consonance, and alliteration, countering the blunt sound of the last two lines. Richard Russell points out the prevalence of

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assonantal o sounds, both long and short, throughout the poem: we hear “broad,” “ford,” “mould,” “O,” “Broagh,” “boortrees,” and “tattoo,” as well as “docken,” “canopied,” “down,” “shower” and “found” (Poetry and Peace  205). Such instances of assonance occur amid the alliteration and consonance of “docken” and “down,” “canopied” and “pad,” and “black,” “Broagh,” “boortrees” and “rhubarb-blades.” Russell hears the poem rendering the uncommon gh sound in the wind that “ended almost suddenly”: “the ‘low tattoo’ of the uttered ‘Broagh’ that sings in the ‘boortrees’ in stanza 3 abruptly stops in stanza 4” (205). For him, that sonorous, sudden stopping of wind gives way to the last line’s “fricative ‘difficult’ and the harsh ‘a’ sounds of ‘manage’” (205).” Russell thus concludes that the poem reproduces the difficulty that strangers experience when trying to say the word “Broagh”: “The effect on the reader is jarring, and he is forced to literally reshape the sounds issuing from his mouth, echoing the difficulty of the ‘strangers’ (presumably English) in uttering ‘Broagh’” (205). 15. Not all of the bog poems come from Glob’s images. For instance, “Bog Queen” is not based on a photo, nor was this “Queen” a Scandinavian or Germanic victim of tribal violence: “There’s no photo of the ‘bog queen,’ only a quotation about a body being found on Lord Moira’s estate in the late eighteenth century” (Stepping Stones 158). The speaker is, however, a victim of violent natural processes—“the seeps of winter/digested me”— and daily life in rural Ireland: “I was barbered/and stripped/by a turfcutter’s spade.” In her essay “Bog Queens,” Patricia Coughlan argues that Heaney is unable to construct autonomous, empowered feminine figures; they are always subordinated to his male ego, or rather, to his spade/pen: “such representations of feminine power ultimately arise from a masculine psychological difficulty in acknowledging woman’s subjectivity as a force in itself, and not merely as a relation to man’s” (186). 16. Vendler has pointed out that “Bog Queen” is indebted both to English and Irish traditions: the poem is a blazon, but it is also a “renovation of the aisling poem (a poem envisaging the nation as a maiden appearing to the poet)” (Heaney 46–47). 17. All drafts of “Fosterage” are from the Seamus Heaney Collection at the Stuart A.  Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library of Emory University. There are ten pages of drafts in one folder. I cite this first instance of quoted material then proceed without in-text citations. For a comprehensive description and analysis of the drafts, see Allison. 18. “Whatever You Say Say Nothing” was first published in a different version under the headline, “Seamus Heaney gives his views on the Irish thing” in the October 14, 1971 edition of The Listener. In Chapter Four of his book, Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature (2017), Suhr-­

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Sytsma reads this poem that begins by referring to journalistic references to the Troubles in relation to the poem’s appearance in the pages of a journalistic periodical distributed to a public much larger than that usually afforded for poetry. This earlier version identified the location of the graffiti in the last section as appearing “on a wall down town,” a line later changed to “in Ballymurphy” for the poem’s final version published in North. Lavan notes that the former phrasing is “self-consciously American English, part of the linguistic legacy of his year away at Berkeley. ‘Ballymurphy’ signals with precision the return to Belfast” (40). Indeed, Heaney was a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley during the 1970–71 academic year. Lavan provides an overview of the unpublished drafts of the poem, examining how Heaney’s diction in early versions of the poem reflects a “Californian colloquialism” (59). 19. These lines in which Heaney employs the very colloquialisms he critiques and in which he ponders rhyming “pangs” and “bangs” are from the poem’s second section. Though “Whatever You Say Say Nothing” is one of his most famous poems, Heaney apparently felt compelled to hold his tongue while making editorial decisions for Opened Ground, his large selected poems. The second section is not included in that book, nor is it included in his earlier Selected Poems. 20. “Station Island” is a twelve-poem sequence modeled on Dante’s Divine Comedy that depicts a pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg. Corcoran explains that the “three-day pilgrimage (which Seamus Heaney himself made three times in his youth) involves a self-punitive routine of prayer, fasting and barefoot walking around stone circles or ‘beds,’ thought to be the remains of ancient monastic cells” (159). Along the way, the narrator encounters a number of ghosts of “the type Dante meets in the Purgatorio,” including an Irish traveler, the Irish novelist William Carleton, Patrick Cavanagh, a young priest, a Northern Irish hunger striker, and James Joyce. The sequence comprises the second part of the book Station Island. 21. The poem tells the story of William Strathearn, whom Heaney knew as a young man. Strathearn was “a Catholic murdered in his general store in Ahoghill, County Antrim, on April 19, 1977 by two loyalist paramilitary members, supported by two members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the latter two later being convicted of the killing” (Russell, Introduction 117). 22. Terza rima is “an Italian stanzaic form, used most notably by Dante Alighieri in Commedia (The Divine Comedy), consisting of tercets with interwoven rhymes (ABA BCB DED EFE, and so on). A concluding couplet rhymes with the penultimate line of the last tercet” (“Terza Rima,” Poetry Foundation). The form formally establishes “interconnectedness”

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with its interlocking rhymes that “provide a reassuring structure of woven continuity” (“Terza Rima,” Princeton 1423). 23. Russell explains that terza rima “replaced Heaney’s formerly favored quatrain as the poet’s dominant form from the mid-1980s onward, even though he wrote occasionally in tercets after the early 1960s” (Regions 241). Russell provides an overview of Heaney’s different uses of the form throughout his career (248–56). 24. Heaney’s reference to trying to “say what happened” recalls Robert Lowell’s famous phrase in his poem “Epilogue,” where Lowell ponders whether his poems should be entirely imagined, foregoing autobiographical detail, especially when “All’s misalliance.” He comes out on the side of reality when he asks, rhetorically, “Yet why not say what happened?” (836). 25. Cavanagh, Fumagalli, Heininger, O’Brien, Ross, and Russell have examined extensively the influence of Dante on Heaney. Cavanagh hails section “VII” as “one of Heaney’s greatest poetic accomplishments” (164). He identifies characteristics that set it apart from Dante. Fumagalli provides a close examination of the relation between Dante and Heaney (and Derek Walcott) but only refers to section “VII” briefly in a summary of the “Station Island” sequence. Russell examines the poem’s technical modulation of the terza rima form (Regions 263–65).  In his essay “Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet,” Heaney discusses Dante’s importance to modern poetry in general and the very nature of literary influence: “when poets turn to the great masters, they turn to an image of their own creation, one which is likely to be a reflection of their own imaginative needs, their own artistic inclinations and procedures” (5). Heaney proceeds here to critique T. S. Eliot’s rendering of Dante in the second section of “Little Gidding” because Eliot divests Dante’s language of its “parochial element”: “when he makes Dante’s confident and classically ratified language bear an almost allegorical force, he does less than justice to the untamed and thoroughly parochial elements which it possesses. To listen to Eliot, one would almost be led to forget that Dante’s great literary contribution was to write in the vernacular and thereby to give the usual language its head” (12). 26. Neil Corcoran and Bernard O’Donoghue have opposing views of the language of section “VII”: Corcoran calls it “heavy handed” and “stilted,” in part because of Heaney’s use of contractions like “you have” and “it is” rather than “you’ve” and “it’s” (124), while O’Donoghue says “the language of the exchange is not rhetorically recast in the poem, but occurs unprocessed” (Language 93). Russell says the poem combines formal and informal cadences: there are, he points out, elided colloquial constructions apropos of dialogue but also contractions that indicate a kind of anxious unnaturalness due to the intense and malevolent circumstances (Regions 264).

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27. Cavanagh identifies connections between details in Heaney’s narrative and Dante’s: “Strathearn is deliberately modeled on Inferno III’s Manfredi, the excommunicated Ghibelline hero killed fighting the papacy three years before Dante was born. Dante describes Manfredi as ‘fair haired and beautiful and of noble appearance, but one of his eyebrows had been severed by a blow’” (164). 28. Russell distinguishes Heaney’s use of the form’s rhyme scheme from both Dante’s and T. S. Eliot’s in the second section of “Little Gidding,” observing that “Heaney maintains, by use of some pararhyme, a chiming of the first and third lines in each tercet throughout, although he does not use the rhyme of his initial second line to begin the rhyme of his second stanza as normal terza rima would do. … Therefore, Heaney establishes a new alternating rhyme scheme in each successive tercet in this particular section that departs from the hurtling rhyme scheme of true Dantean terza rima but certainly is far from Eliot’s general lack of any rhyme in that famous section of ‘Little Gidding’” (Regions 265). 29. Heaney’s professional obligations as a poet caused him to miss his cousin’s wake. He was attending Kilkenny Arts Week at Jerpoint Abbey to introduce Robert Lowell when the murder happened. Because he did not know his cousin well (McCartney was a son of Heaney’s father’s cousin, so he would have been a rather distant relative), and because he would have been represented by family who were in Bellaghy, Heaney didn’t feel compelled to abandon his duties in order to attend the funeral. Still, he felt considerable compunction about that decision: “the circumstances of his death were so brutal you couldn’t not feel that your presence was called for, in protest as much as in sympathy” (Stepping Stones 220).

CHAPTER 3

The Gwendolynian Tongue: Gwendolyn Brooks’s Individualized Local Speech

Gwendolyn Brooks offered time and again a definition of poetry both pithy and sweeping: “poetry,” she insisted throughout her career, “is life distilled.” The compressed definition itself captures her position that poetry condenses real-world experience and extracts from the busyness, disjointedness, mundanity, and chaos of day-to-day reality some essential signification, transforming, as it does, life’s raw material into verbal arrangements that produce sensory affects and reveal otherwise obscured meanings. Brooks always couched the phrase in contexts of individuality. For example, in her Young Poets Primer, she explains, “tell the truth as you know it. Tell your truth. Don’t try to sugar it up. Don’t force your poem to be nice or proper or normal or happy if it does not want to be. Remember that poetry is life distilled and that life is not always nice or proper or normal or happy or smooth or even-edged” (7).1 “Life” in Brooks’s formulation is singular, specific, and distinct, and the distillation that makes poetry out of life is unconventional, innovative, and even defiant. Brooks’s own poetry often challenged the very notion of what was “proper” or “normal” for a poem in the years after modernism when she began her career with her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, in 1945, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for her second book, Annie Allen (1949). The markedly elaborate innovations of diction and syntax she invented for everyday African American characters, settings, and contexts in those books and the books she published in subsequent decades such as The © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. Fogarty, The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07889-7_3

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Bean Eaters (1960) and In the Mecca (1968) often reproduce the colloquial language of Black vernacular while suggesting with emphatically noncolloquial words and constructions the rarified and elevated aspects of so-called poetic diction, insisting at once that Black vernacular is a language for poetry and that Black vernacular is only one species of the multifarious languages of Black poetry. In fact, Brooks’s poetry is only adequately characterized as “vernacular” on the one hand and “elevated” on the other when those attributes are explicitly linked both to each other and to the highly idiosyncratic language she invents for her poems, a language that is neither purely vernacular nor elevated in any conventional sense. Indeed, Brooks’s distillations of life do not typically just extract the colloquial from the everyday or condense the everyday into the lyrical; rather, they all at once embellish, adorn, and expand upon their colloquial extractions and formal compressions, producing a distinct poetic language for her locales that recreates and innovates local speech, drawing out often all at once the individual, communal, ordinary, and extraordinary valences of Black life in mid-twentieth-century urban America. This fusion of the vernacular, the elevated, and the embellished in an extensive array of traditional and free poetic forms proclaims Black American individuality. At the same time, Brooks’s portraits of individuality are, in equal measure, communal in nature, for they also portray the Black American locales her characters exist in. The life Brooks distills comes directly from the streets, churches, restaurants, bars, pool halls, and homes of her “Bronzeville” neighborhood in Chicago’s South Side—the “hypersegregated center of Chicago’s Black Belt” (Morgan 2017). As she told Paul Angle in 1967 about what she calls her “better-known” earlier books, “I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street. I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner [of 63rd Street in Bronzeville], and I could look first on one side and then on the other. There was my material” (Conversations 15). That material was in part local dialect, and Brooks’s transformations—her distillations—of that dialect resulted in an idiolect—an especially distinct, emphatically individualized language. As James Higginbotham explains, an idiolect is by definition a language unique to a particular human being, but it does not develop separately from other versions of language a person may be fluent in, such as, say, a dialect (a language of a particular region) or a sociolect (a language of a specific social class); rather, it is contingent upon their intersections: “the social conception of language does not deny the existence of idiolects; rather, idiolects would be construed as idiolects of a common language”

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(142). Brooks’s poetry operates in part on shifting, collapsing, and accentuating the social and individual properties of language: she makes a Black American local poetic language that is entirely her own. Brook’s idiolectic inventions demonstrate that what we might call a local-speech poem isn’t necessarily a reiteration of vernacular but can emerge from a range of linguistic elements resulting in an entirely new— and entirely individual—poetic language. Brooks’s idiolect, what she tellingly referred to as her “Gwendolynian” style, is devised only in part from the colloquial dialect spoken outside her window (Conversations 68). In fact, her narrators and local characters often speak in ways and in settings that suggest the colloquial but in adamantly noncolloquial words and configurations. Her poems are often driven toward everyday experience but away from everyday language, a crossing whose resulting uncommon language foregrounds multifaceted Black individuality and superimposes it on destructive US social realities such as segregation that reinforce poverty in places like Chicago’s South Side.2 Her poems pit this elaborate, local-­ speech idiolect against the intersecting forces of racism, sexism, and classicism while challenging the status granted to different kinds of speech and regressive mid-twentieth-century ideas about what does or doesn’t qualify as poetic language. Brooks’s idiolectic local tongue amounts to a politically conscious aesthetic that Brooks employed from the very beginning of her career, and it marks a consistency across her work that provides further evidence that her poetry was always political in nature, even when she wrote in traditional verse forms. Much has been made of Brooks’s radicalization in 1967 at a Fisk University writers conference when she first encountered the free-­ verse, Black vernacular poetry of the young Black Arts Movement (BAM) poets who advanced an aesthetic of collective militancy to bolster Black nationalism. Black Arts poetry was designed to “expose the enemy, praise the people, and support the revolution” in free verse and Black vernacular—a repudiation of the Anglo-European literary conventions that earlier African American poets such as Brooks made use of (Karenga 33–34). Black Arts poets persuaded Brooks that traditional forms were white forms that she should do away with: “The word went down: we must chase out Western measures, rules, models” (Capsule 5).3 After encountering such poetry at Fisk, Brooks began herself to write mostly free verse in an effort to be more immediately accessible to her Black community than she thought her earlier work had been. She underwent a profound transformation at Fisk that, Karen Jackson Ford explains, “was felt in all aspects of

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her life—personal, public, and poetic—as she made new friendships and professional alliances, began publishing with black presses, and worked indefatigably to encourage and support young black writers” (“Sonnets” 346). This transformation notwithstanding, the typical line of thinking has been that Brooks went from white integrationist formal writing to Black free forms and that her work before 1967 was apolitical. It is also a line of thinking that has been thoroughly challenged by Brooks’s scholars.4 This chapter deepens their work by demonstrating that not just the poetic forms but the very words of Brooks’s poetry articulate a lifelong mission: the Gwendolynian tongue that Brooks employed well before 1967 and in her most formally traditional poems was always directed toward social and political critique. What Brooks attempted post-Fisk was to write poetry that would immediately reach all Black people from “the taverns” to “the consulate” without imitating other BAM poets and without sacrificing what she calls her “G. B. voice” (183). That “G. B. voice” is made from the Gwendolynian tongue, a highly wrought poetic language for the distinct local worlds she always depicted, from the beginning of her career to the end. A draft of remarks Brooks composed for a graduation speech offers something of a model for comprehending the Gwendolynian tongue. The commencement address refers to Paul Laurence Dunbar, the African American author of both Black dialect and standard English poems, who was a formidable influence on Brooks. She explains in her comments that she inherited her love of Dunbar from her father, who passed down a volume of Dunbar’s work to her, a book containing a telling detail about her father that suggests another bequest: “I inherited this book from my parents. My father’s name is written at the top of Page 3, on the other side of which is a gentle picture of poet Dunbar at the age of 24. ‘David A. Brooks,’ the signature reads, with a mischievously elegant flourish on the A” (“Originals,” Folder 7). Brooks notes as well that her father had flagged one of the more “standard” poems (as opposed to one of Dunbar’s famous dialect poems) in the volume’s table of contents, stating, “I always put quotes around the ‘standard’ of the phrase ‘standard English.’” This admixture of dialect, suspicion of a so-called standard English, and characterization of an “elegant flourish” as mischievous describes Brooks’s own idiolect. It is the “mischievously elegant flourish” of the defiantly individual and local Gwendolynian tongue that constitutes the most definitive element of Brooks’s work, and it is the subject of this chapter.

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Brooks’s Staple Local-Speech Poem “We Real Cool,” Brooks’s perennial anthology and classroom chestnut, exemplifies the linguistic and aesthetic procedures described above that characterize her work. The poem summarizes the lives of seven adolescents in four monosyllabic couplets that transform colloquial language into a series of coinciding sounds, framed by the unambiguous declarations “We real cool” and “left school” in the first couplet and the blunt observation of inevitable death in the last line. Irrespective of these colloquial assertions bookending the poem, “We Real Cool” is not an entirely colloquial text, although it is a definitively local one. For the poem marshals different registers of language into its form, devising an individualized local speech marked by modulations that press back against the destructive social realities the poem implies. Its layered rhetorical movements epitomize how poetry can employ verbal patterns not just for the private expression typically associated with lyric but to advance a criticism of the conditions in which such a lyric is uttered.5 “We Real Cool” foregrounds the fact that it is a speech and that it is happening in a pool hall; its subtitle announces its speakers and its setting—“The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel”—and its line-­ endings create a column of the first-person plural pronoun “We,” perhaps seven in a row for each player. It brings equal attention to the reverberating phrases that constitute its speech. When critics have paid attention to those phrases, they almost always characterize them as Black vernacular, as if the poem reproduces precisely and solely the realistic dialect of its historical and local context.6 The poem is certainly grounded in Black speech—it states, after all, that we are hearing seven young Black characters set in a South Side pool hall speaking either in unison or in sequence. Howard Rambsy and Briana Whiteside explain that the vernacular opening is unequivocally African American: “the speakers … adhere to the AAL [African American Language] practice by omitting the copula ‘are’ between ‘we’ and ‘real cool’ …, thus indicating the timelessness of their style. … The speakers are not merely ‘like’ someone cool or ‘as’ cool as someone else; instead, they are the very embodiment of coolness. The exclusion of like and as in Brooks’s famous phrasing ‘we real cool’ corresponds directly to popular Black syntax” (709). Rambsy and Whiteside also describe more generally some of the multiple valences of Black vernacular in Black poetry:

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In efforts to convincingly present AAL practices on the page, poets enact several different approaches. They adopt the persona of notable historical figures, project militant tones and rhetoric, and display Black pride. Their poems approximate AAL patterns, and they routinely signify and utilize metaphors that might resonate with African Americans. In addition, Black poets incorporate street speech in their works as a way of highlighting connections to urban or vernacular Black folks. Accordingly, a considerable amount of Black poetry resembles or showcases African American speech and speaking patterns. (707)

In other words, poems don’t have to be written in dialect solely or categorically for those registers to resound in them. Further, Black poetry that does employ Black vernacular can do so with vast scope and with intricate nuance. As Fahamisha Patricia Brown says, “Urban argot and rural dialect are not the only registers of Blackness” (4), for Black vernacular itself is inherently heterogeneous: African American vernacular English is not merely colloquial, slang, or vulgar. It is fluid, adaptable language with its own rhythms and intonations, figures, and metaphors, as well as a variety of class and regional variants. Language is also one of the ways through which individuals express their personalities. African American language acts, events, or situations provide for displays of linguistic virtuosity. At the same time, there are markers of a particular mode of cultural expressivity. (8)

It is precisely the linguistic virtuosity of “We Real Cool” that both expresses its speakers’ personalities and critiques racist and classist realities. Even as the poem begins in the colloquial language of Black vernacular, it gives way immediately to an intricate series of assertions that aren’t exactly colloquial but designed to convey sonically something of the essence of young Black boys talking in a pool hall: the pool players announce that they “Lurk late,” “Strike straight,” “Sing sin,” “Thin gin,” and “Jazz June,” instead of going to school. The language is too uniform to be exactly everyday speech. Rather than realistic idioms, the expressions are Brooks’s inventions, carefully calibrated to elicit via the formal properties of poetry the energy of teenagers. The poem mobilizes at least two speech registers at once: a musical, figurative, even obscure language emerges from an unambiguous idiomatic voice before settling back into the plainspoken, matter-of-fact final line. A poetic language results from the poem’s shift back and forth from dialect to idiolect. The aural effects are rhythmic

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and lilting in the way one might imagine the teens’ speech to be, the sound effects exceptionally layered: the repetition of “We” throughout the poem, the pronounced exact rhymes that punctuate each couplet, and the web of alliteration and consonance in the l, k, s, r, and n sounds that thread word to word, line to line, and couplet to couplet. The poem is an aggregate of connecting notes. In fact, all but one of the poem’s twenty-four words affix to other words in the poem through sound, an exception that punctuates the poem’s commentary. “Die” doesn’t relate to any other words by way of rhyme, alliteration, or consonance. And while all the other verbs in the poem are linked to their modifiers by sound, “Die” doesn’t associate formally with “soon.” The highly ornate and enigmatic poetic language Brooks has devised enacts the brio of youth—and then the jolt of such vitality abruptly cut off. The poem’s language is at once certain, natural, and lyrical, but it also pronounces that the boys’ striking, singing, drinking, and jazzing may be fatal. The pool players are demonstrative, determined, even recalcitrant, and yet their teenage exuberance is countered by an acute awareness of early death. Indeed, the seven line-endings of “We” march down the page finally to blank space in the last line. The tragedy of the poem is that the adolescent experience of these boys includes all the verve we might expect from young people and it conveys that liveliness in a verbal gusto that is quickly halted by an abrupt statement of impending doom. When George Stavros asked Brooks in 1969 if the form of “We Real Cool” had been “determined by the colloquial rhythm [she was] trying to catch,” Brooks minimized that element: “No,” she replied, “determined by my feeling about these boys, these young men” (Conversations 44). Earlier in their discussion, Brooks describes the pronoun “We” throughout the poem as underscoring the speakers’ tentativeness: “The ‘We’— you’re supposed to stop after the ‘We’ and think about their validity, and of course there’s no way for you to tell whether it should be said softly or not, I suppose, but I say it rather softly because I want to represent their basic uncertainty, which they don’t bother to question every day, of course.” She is suggesting here that the placement of “We” at the end of all but the last line is the poem’s most crucial formal aspect rather than its other sound effects. And yet her later comments about the poem downplay the connection between the poem’s formal features and its speakers’ self-doubts. By 1988 she comes to hear the “We” as a much louder assertion of the speakers’ identity against a society that overlooks them:

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when I first wrote the poem, oh, so many years ago, I said, ‘We real cool/ we left school/we learned late.’ But then it occurred to me that these are youngsters, that’s why I wrote the poem really. These are youngsters who don’t have much attention. They would like some attention. They’d like to be looked at with some respect and affection by their society. So I decided to put the ‘we’ at the end so that you would have to pause just a split second and give them just a split second’s worth of attention. (134)

Two years before this, she was even more insistent about the young pool players’ self-determination, singling out the phrase “Jazz June” as an example of the poem’s linguistic response to threatening social forces, indicating that the phrase is an idiolectic invention rooted in dialect rather than an unmediated presentation of dialect: I wrote it because I was passing by a pool hall in my neighborhood in Chicago one afternoon and I saw, well as I said in the poem, seven boys shooting pool and I wondered how they felt about themselves. And I decided that they felt they were not quite valid and that they certainly were insecure. They were not quite cherished by the society. Therefore they would feel that they should spit in the face of the establishment. I use the month of June as an establishment symbol. Whereas the rest of us love and respect June and wait for it to come so we can enjoy it, they jazz June as I said before, derange in it and scratch it and do anything that would annoy the establishment. (130)

Over the years, “We Real Cool” came to demonstrate for Brooks the capacity of specific wording like “jazz June” to annoy the establishment by asserting individuality and communality against the forces that would eradicate it.

The Gwendolynian Tongue The Gwendolynian tongue is the poetic language Brooks created for her first book in 1945 and employed through her last in 2003, an elaborate idiolect made in part from expressly noncolloquial locutions, elaborately formalized syntactical arrangements, and the local parlance of her Southside Chicago neighborhood.7 It is a style marked by an intricate blend of dialectal and idiolectal linguistic constructions that magnify and amplify Black American experience in Black American locales. It often correlates to lavish personal style and determined imaginative capacities

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designed to resist deprivations caused by racism, sexism, and classism. It is a mode that instantiates Evie Shockley’s expansive definition of a “‘black aesthetics,’ plural,” the aesthetic strategies devised by Black poets that assert “the subjectivity of the African American writer—that is, the subjectivity produced by the experience of identifying or being interpolated as ‘black’ in the U.S.—actively working out a poetics in the context of a racist society” (9).8 Brooks actively worked out a local-speech poetics built on diverse linguistic registers that acclaim Black individuality, defy prescriptions and expectations about language and poetry, and critique racist social realities.9 Despite her exceptional range, Brooks is still often characterized as only a vernacular, populist poet rather than the recondite, eccentric poet she most characteristically is. David Orr, for instance, has suggested that her poem “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock” in The Bean Eaters is decisively colloquial: her “diction [in that poem] is simple and approachable,” he says; she “stays within her audience’s range of reference” (55). Orr criticizes the poem for not “engaging in ingenious formal maneuvers”—even though the poem is an assemblage of monosyllabic and polysyllabic exact and half rhymes, iambic and trochaic meters, end-stops and enjambments, and line lengths that range from two to sixteen syllables. He also detects a demotic quality that manages to situate the poem politically: it “has the potential to function as local, specific political speech … it approaches the reader as one citizen addressing another.” The poem set in 1957 presents a “reporter’s” observations that the people in Little Rock are “like people everywhere,” even though the white people there—adult men, the reporter observes—are spitting and throwing rocks, “Garbage and fruit” at “brownish girls,” the “Little Rock Nine” who enrolled at Central High School after Brown V.  Board of Education declared segregation unconstitutional (346–48). The report issued by the “Man” sent by the paper to Little Rock is all Gwendolynian, set in diction and phrasing that is entirely enigmatic: “multiferns,” “Little Rock will. … /. … weave,/From laugh and tinsel,” “Barcarolle,” “implacable,” “semi-­ discomfitures,” “Half-havings have they,” “many-faceted fuzziness,” “harryings,” “lariat lynch-wish,” “loveliest lynchee was our Lord.” The context is local (Little Rock in the 1950s), but the ornate language is emphatically noncolloquial. At the same time, the poem hints at colloquiality: it’s spoken by a character (a journalist for the African American newspaper The Chicago Defender); it has at least one suggestively idiomatic phrase (people at church sing “hymns like anything”); and it presents

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everyday images of an ordinary Sunday afternoon (“wheat toast,” “Lorna Doones,” an “Open Air Concert,” “the telephone,” “Garbage”). The poem intimates the colloquial in a lexical environment that is anything but. In fact, there is evidence that Brooks didn’t consider the colloquial language of Black speech in and of itself to be one of her essential languages. In a note  in her archive, Brooks writes that “Black English”— which, she observes, has been called “twisted,” “contorted,” “adjusted,” “mauled,” “beaten,” “bruised,” “assaulted,” and “rearranged” English— “is not my speech.” In fact, to consider such speech as only “Black” and to consider “Black English” as only one kind of language is, for Brooks, “insulting to my people” (Black Glossy Folder, Folder 25). Nevertheless, she indicates that Black speech is useful for her aesthetically: “Out of it you can draw a word or a bunch of words that will accommodate your inner thunder or lightening” (Folder 25). Black speech was for her a source of energy, a language to depict individuality and to connect individuals to each other and to a location. She would draw from it to create her own Gwendolynian local speech, especially when creating portraits of people in her local Chicago world. In another note, Brooks claims, “It seems to me I have always been a ‘PEOPLE POET.’ And I have loved creating portraits,” dividing those portraits into the “little” and the “large scale” (Black Glossy Folder, Folder 23). In what follows, I will examine two large-scale poetic “people” portraits—“The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith” from A Street in Bronzeville and “The Anniad” from Annie Allen, paying special attention to the extraordinary local speech she creates for them. Both portray so-called ordinary characters in impoverished social contexts with lavish, ostentatious languages. These major mid-century poems illustrate the operations of Brooks’s highly idiosyncratic poetics. They are large-scale portraits constructed from Brooks’s local Gwendolynian idiolect that depict their everyday characters in everyday contexts expressing “inner thunder and lightning” against and despite social conditions that threaten to destroy them.

Brooks’s Sunday Speech Relatively few of Brooks’s poems are written entirely in what could be considered everyday language. Even her poems depicting everyday characters more often employ an idiolect rather than a dialect, an individualized and uncommon language constructed in part from the communal speech of dialect. For instance, “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith” portrays its

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title character and his neighborhood in an extravagant diction arranged in randomly rhymed iambic pentameter that is emphatically not everyday (Blacks 42–47). “Satin-Legs Smith” is a Black man who dons zoot suits on Sundays to compensate for workweek deprivations. Smith fends off the constraints of poverty by dressing in flashy suits, going to the movies, and taking different women out on dates. The poem’s baroque words and phrases and their stately formal arrangements match Smith’s luxurious style, a “Sunday” idiolect rather than an everyday dialect, that contrasts to Smith’s weekdays. Here is Brooks’s summary of the poem: “It is Sunday for Satin-Legs, it is a Sunday like every one of his Sundays. He is about 23. He has a demeaning job. He has a go-nowhere job. He is not interested in his job. He is interested in his Sundays. He thinks he can control those” (Black Glossy Folder, Folder 6). The poem never mentions Smith’s job; rather, it implies that his weekdays are demeaning and ineffectual by contrast to what the poem is made of: elaborate descriptions of Smith’s lavish Sunday dress and punctilious routine. In a similar fashion, the embellished language in the poem that relays that dress and routine suggests everyday speech throughout but never actually presents it. We never hear Smith talk even as the poem repeatedly refers to speech. At the same time, the poem is not only a portrait of ostentation in the face of deprivation, for it ruminates on the appropriate diction with which “to proceed” and “inspect” Smith’s Sunday endeavors. It is as if the poem strategically resists Smith’s speech—or expectations of what that speech would sound like—in its consideration of the available forms of poetic language. That Brooks wrote the poem in response to Richard Wright’s suggestion that she include in A Street in Bronzeville “one really long fine poem around which shorter ones are added or grouped” that would strike “a personal note and carr[y] a good burden of personal feeling” suggests that the poem epitomized for Brooks something of her own “personal” poetics (qtd. in Kent 63). The fact that Brooks doesn’t present Smith’s speech overtly seems expressly tactical because the poem subtly gestures toward that colloquial register it refuses to feature. The first few stanzas encapsulate the poem’s overall pitch: they comprise especially ornamental language that conveys the ceremonial grandness of Smith’s Sunday ritual. It is a language that represents Smith with marked extravagance: Inamoratas, with an approbation, Bestowed his title. Blessed his inclination.

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He wakes, unwinds, elaborately: a cat Tawny, reluctant, royal. He is fat And fine this morning. Definite. Reimbursed. He waits a moment, he designs his reign, That no performance may be plain or vain. Then rises in a clear delirium. He sheds, with his pajamas, shabby days. And his desertedness, his intricate fear, the Postponed resentments and the prim precautions. (42)

The poem “unwinds, elaborately” as it recounts the advent of Smith’s sobriquet, “Satin-Legs,” with eccentric words in a highly formal and formalized presentation: Smith’s lovers are “Inamoratas” who have “bestowed” upon him the “title” Satin-Legs Smith in “approbation” of his stylistic “inclination.” It is, in other words, not at all plain or shabby, like Smith’s weekdays, but luxurious. Smith himself is described in similarly idiosyncratic diction: he is “Tawny,” “reluctant,” and, finally, “royal,” “Definite,” and “Reimbursed.” Indeed, he plans his Sunday “reign” with the patience and meticulousness of a king. His regal grandness is not “plain or vain,” for his performance and the language used to describe it “Reimburse” him by offsetting the “desertedness,” “fear,” “resentments,” and “precautions” of his laborious daily life: the diction is exuberant not deserted, audacious instead of fearful, and innovative rather than cautious. As he approaches his bath, Smith—“fat/And fine”—seems not just to have delayed his resentments but eradicated them. Rhythm is as elaborate here as the words themselves: a single-syllable rhyme (“cat”/“fat”) follows a four-syllable one (“approbation”/“inclination”) while consonance and alliteration produce an intricate aural pattern. The words form a complex of b, w, t, r, and f sounds: “approbation,” “Bestowed,” “Blessed,” “elaborately,” “Reimbursed”; “wakes,” “unwinds”; “cat,” “Tawny,” “reluctant,” “fat,” “Definite”; “reluctant,” “royal,” “Reimbursed”; “fat,” “fine,” “Definite.” But while the poem is cast in these noncolloquial elaborations, it also hints at colloquial language. For instance, the second stanza suggests the phrase “fat cat” without actually employing it. Instead, it describes Smith as waking like “a cat” and then as “fat/And fine this morning” (Blacks 42). Brooks intimates a local-speech phrase Smith might use to describe himself or one of his Bronzeville acquaintances, instrumentalizing it to create a local idiolectic language. She breaks the expression

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apart, reverses its order, and arranges it to produce an exact rhyme, separating its parts—“fat” and “cat”—to put them to nondemotic use: Smith is compared to a cat stretching after waking and then described as physically large. The phrase, in other words, is carefully stylized to match Smith’s primping. The colloquialisms (“fat cat,” “Satin-Legs”) and embellished, polysyllabic diction (“Inamoratas,” “approbation,” “Reimbursed,” “delirium”) are combined and reworked to make an extravagant music that foregrounds Smith’s exuberant style against the reality of his workweek. “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith” suggests colloquialisms but doesn’t explicitly utilize them to characterize Smith because the poem is not concerned with reproducing natural speech per se but with inventing an idiolectic poetic language that corresponds to Smith’s elaborate Sunday style. In other words, it is interested in the capacity of artifice and embellishment to resist dismal social conditions. The language that describes Smith’s dress is as grand as the clothes themselves, establishing linguistic flamboyance as the poem’s guiding aesthetic principle and the defining quality of its idiolect. Smith’s closet                is a vault Whose glory is not diamonds, not pearls, Not silver plate with just enough dull shine. But wonder-suits in yellow and in wine, Sarcastic green and zebra-striped cobalt. All drapes. With shoulder padding that is wide And cocky and determined as his pride; Ballooning pants that taper off to ends Scheduled to choke precisely. (43–44)

The iambic pentameter, perfect rhymes (“shine”/“wine,” “wide”/ “pride”), and alliterations (“wonder,” “wine,” “With,” “wide”; “pearls,” “plate,” “padding,” “pride,” “pants,” “precisely”) are as “precisely” “Scheduled” as Smith’s “Ballooning pants that taper off to ends.” The description of his “wonder-suits” as “Sarcastic green” emphasizes their unusual brightness and, like “cat” and “fat,” connects his sartorial grandiosity directly to speech. That the two instances of enjambment here occur when the poem describes the end of Smith’s shoulder line (the shoulder pads are “wide/And cocky”) and the ends of his pant legs (they “taper off to ends/Scheduled to choke”) stresses the correspondence between

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Smith’s extravagant dress and the poem’s rhetorical extravagance: the written lines are as tailored as the lines of his suit. Smith’s dress, it appears, is a kind of poetry. And yet Satin-Legs Smith is not an uncomplicated, definitive figure for the poet, even as his Sunday style and rituals are presented as creative, adroit gestures whose designs ward off the deprivations of his weekdays, and even as those extravagances correlate to Brooks’s own Gwendolynian style. In fact, the poem maintains a rigorous critique of Satin-Legs Smith, specifically his inability to tune into his locale.10 For while Smith’s Sunday customs are determined and vivacious, he is also considerably oblivious to and detached from his local world. That Brooks, on the one hand, employs Smith’s style to render his local world and, on the other hand, portrays him as not entirely perceiving that world points up the poem’s argument that the uses of personal style should also be public, that an individual aesthetic inclination, to borrow from the poem’s lexicon, has origins in and responsibilities to the local. For example, the destitute men in Smith’s community contrast with his extravagance, making him seem self-­ indulgent, while the poem honors those men with a solemn delivery of their circumstances. The “estranged” men’s “foodlessness” puts them far “From music and from wonder and from joy” while Smith wears wonder-­ suits, goes to the movies, and takes his date to “Joe’s Eats” where he can enjoy “fish or chicken on meat platters./With coleslaw, macaroni, candied sweets,/Coffee and apple pie” (45, 47).11 Further, just as he doesn’t speak in the poem, he doesn’t entirely hear and see what’s going on in the environment around him either. The poem, meanwhile, logs the neighborhood’s happenings in an especially reverent version of its “Sunday” speech. When Smith goes out, “Sounds about him smear,/Become a unit” as he        hears and does not hear The alarm clock meddling in somebody’s sleep; Children’s governed Sunday happiness; The dry tone of a plane; a woman’s oath; Consumption’s spiritless expectoration; An indignant robin’s resolute donation Pinching a track through apathy and din; Restaurant vendors weeping; and the L That comes on like a slightly horrible thought. (45)

Smith doesn’t entirely hear life happening in his neighborhood, and yet the poem gives outline to the very details Smith misses in the same

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intricate and embellished language used to describe Smith’s suits. The rolling verse is made of distinctive diction—an alarm clock is “meddling,” overheard talk declares an “oath,” coughing produces the onomatopoeic “spiritless expectoration,” an “indignant,” “resolute” “robin” is “pinching a track through apathy and din.” The “L” refers to Chicago’s elevated rapid transit system; the l sound of that colloquialism itself “comes on” in its repetition across the stanza’s last line. The elaborateness here is not just a counterpart to Smith’s showy style: it renders precisely the local world that Smith himself only barely registers, indicating that style isn’t all for portraiture, that it can be extended beyond the individual to larger, communal purviews, an extension Smith doesn’t make but the poem does. Brooks describes those aspects of the neighborhood that Smith “sees and does not see” and “hears and does not hear” with the same kind of uncommon diction that she employed to describe his waking, his bath, and his suits—and expands it into its own kind of local language. It is an idiolectic local language that complements Smith’s style, depicts that style’s capacity to “Reimburse” Smith’s “shabby days,” and distinguishes aural and visual details of the street—the raw local material—that Smith overlooks.12 All at once, the language is, like Smith, entirely individual and, unlike Smith, entirely aware of life in Smith’s local world. In other words, the quality of the poem’s speech is not just individual but also profoundly local. The details that Smith doesn’t perceive reveal the deprivation of his surroundings, and the language the poem invents to represent Smith and, increasingly, his local world opposes those deprivations. He doesn’t entirely hear and see his neighborhood or its people and happenings, but Brooks’s Satin-Legs-like poetic language relays all at once the dilapidation of Smith’s neighborhood, its people dressed in their Sunday bests, and the neighborhood’s various Sunday customs and occurrences. The poem pits its own linguistic opulence and stateliness against those deprivations, adorning them with a local idiolect that produces from its elaborateness a dignified, reverential tone. Smith doesn’t see but the poem does see              broken windows Hiding their shame with newsprint; little girl With ribbons decking wornness, little boy Wearing the trousers with the decentest patch, To honor Sunday; women on their way From “service,” temperate holiness arranged Ably on asking faces; men estranged From music and from wonder and from joy

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But far familiar with the guiding awe Of foodlessness. (45)

The dressed-up language counters the “broken windows” it describes. Like the girl’s “ribbons” and the boy’s “patch,” the stanza’s august verse form, proliferating alliterations (“windows,” “with,” “wornness,” “wearing,” “women,” “way,” “wonder”; “Sunday” and “service”; “from,” “far,” “familiar,” “foodlessness”), exact and slant rhymes (“arranged”/“estranged”; “joy”/“awe”), and repetitions (“From music and from wonder and from joy”) deck the wornness of urban blight. The broken windows may be “Hiding their shame” with newsprint, but the little girl’s frayed appearance is festooned with ribbons, the little boy’s patch mends a hole on his trousers, and hunger produces in the “estranged” men a “guiding awe.” The people of Smith’s locale are distinguished: the girl doesn’t hide but decorates her dress; the boy finds trousers with “the decentest patch,/To honor Sunday”; and the men contend in subdued consternation with the overwhelming forces of indigence. The idiolectic language that accentuated Smith’s individuality is adapted here to do the same for people outside of Smith’s parlor, people Smith doesn’t acknowledge. If, as the poem says, “People are so in need, in need of help,” the poem’s Gwendolynian style provides something of that help. It bears repeating that while Smith “hears and does not hear” and “sees and does not see,” he also speaks and does not speak because he is not only unmindful of his external surroundings but also of his ancestry and history, other foundational aspects of local life and language. As we have seen, the poem’s ornamental, magniloquent “Sunday” speech depicts and matches Smith’s distinctiveness, and yet the fact that he himself never speaks in the poem renders that distinctiveness tentative. He expresses himself with his embellished style of dress, but we never hear his particular words and phrases. His silence underscores his obstructed relationship to both the social world he doesn’t fully see or hear and his own history. At the same time, the poem scrutinizes these obstructions with its “Satin-­ Legs” language, indicating that style alone may not be enough to distinguish him. It takes up the same approach when it turns its attention to Smith’s specific past, which he is not just indifferent to but perturbed by: The pasts of his ancestors lean against Him. Crowd him. Fog out his identity. Hundreds of hungers mingle with his own,

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Hundreds of voices advise so dexterously He quite considers his reactions his, Judges he walks most powerfully alone, That everything is—simply what it is. (46)

Smith wants to believe the illusion that his stylistic “inclination” sets him apart from history, that his “reactions” are entirely individualistic, and that “he walks most powerfully alone.” The reality is that he shares his “hungers” with “Hundreds.” Local speech is once again hinted at: “everything is—simply what it is” sounds like the colloquial phrase “it is what it is,” an instance where, we might say, Smith speaks but doesn’t speak. By modifying the idiom with the word “simply,” Brooks emphasizes the phrase’s propensity to abbreviate or even evade complexity. Even though the “ancestors” of the past “advise so dexterously,” Smith’s estimation of that past, and the social world around him that he doesn’t completely see or hear, is, tepidly, just that it is what it is. The poem, however, doesn’t simplify but adapts Smith’s ostentatious style to convey the complex reality of his world and his own history that Smith can’t register. He would like to regard himself as an island, but the twelve alliterating h sounds across the stanza’s seven lines communicate connectedness to his locale and to his ancestry, each referring either to Smith, to his community, or to his past: “his,” “Him,” “him,” “his,” “Hundreds,” “hungers,” “his,” “Hundreds,” “He,” “his,” “his,” “he.” Whether Smith senses it or not, everything is not simply what it is: alliteration depicts his identity mingling with his ancestors and his community. The poem’s idiolectic local language conveys Smith’s individuality, and then turns that language onto Smith himself to examine his fraught relationship with his individuality, both checking it and establishing it. For all its critique of Smith, the poem employs its idiolectic speech to empathize with him, too. When Smith does come closest to speaking, he can merely utter sounds rather than articulate coherent verbal responses to racism: his “yelp” on the front steps of the hotel he’s staying at is “secret,” and his reaction to the prohibited images of white movie stars when he goes to the cinema is just to “boo”: “time to boo/The hero’s kiss, and boo the heroine/Whose ivory and yellow it is sin/For his eye to eat of” (46). Yelping and booing seem rather indistinct ripostes for such a meticulous person. And yet utter he does, for the “sin” that racism imposes on Black men provokes at least unformed defiance. Similarly, the embellished dress of the different women he “Squires” tends to “Fog out” their individuality, but they insist on it nonetheless:

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His lady alters as to leg and eye, Thickness and height, such minor points as these, From Sunday to Sunday. (46)

The elaborately made-up women Smith courts are indistinguishable from each other. And yet, in their “Queen-lace stockings,” they are as “positively” royal as Smith:                      no matter what Her name or body positively she’s In Queen Lace stockings with ambitious heels That strain to kiss the calves, and vivid shoes Frontless and backless, Chinese fingernails, Earrings, three layers of lipstick, intense hat Dripping with the most voluble of veils. Her affable extremes are like sweet bombs About him, whom no middle grace or good Could gratify. (46–47)

Each woman looks like the next, but each opposes “middle” ordinariness on her Sunday date with ambition, vividness, intensity, and extremity. That Smith’s date’s hat is “Dripping with the most voluble of veils” once again associates dress with verbal expression and underscores the fact that we never hear her actual volubility either. Increasingly, the poem has been weighing down on the fact that speech is a marker of identity, employing its own idiolectic local speech to distinguish individuality and communality while also implying that the absence of speech threatens both. Smith and his dates push against this absence, but they can only get so far. The poem once again provides the help they need to go further. That the poem describes so scrupulously the local environment and ancestry that Smith overlooks stresses his shortsightedness, but those descriptions in Smith’s very style indicate that the poem doesn’t completely admonish him. In fact, the poem has another figure to contend with, and its idiolectic tongue more strictly reprimands the “you” addressed in the fifth stanza: Now, at his bath, would you deny him lavender Or take away the power of his pine? What smelly substitute, heady as wine, Would you provide? life must be aromatic.

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There must be scent, somehow there must be some. Would you have flowers in his life? suggest Asters? a Really Good geranium? (42)

This direct address is typically understood as Brooks apostrophizing her middle-class readers, both white and Black, and calling out judgmental expectations about the kind of language a poem should employ.13 The poem considers in this exchange between narrator and reader the very language it gathers into its form, implying in its interrogation that some readers would not consider a working-class Black man’s weekend exploits as the appropriate material for poetry. It is as if the narrator overhears preconceptions unsaid in the poem about what is or isn’t appropriately “poetic.” Why, we might ask, would “lavender” and “pine” require “substitutes”? Narrow conventions, the poem surmises, demand “headier” images, not a poor Black man’s inexpensive oils and colognes. At the same time, the poem throughout disavows such racist and classist insistences. Smith’s “wonder-suits” are, in fact, “in yellow and in wine,” not because “wine” is heady but because “wine” is the color of some of Smith’s suits. Brooks slyly rebukes any inclination to devise substitutes because substitutions would “deny” and “take away” Smith’s “power.” When she asks what kind of flowers would be suitable to envision in Smith’s room, the conversational “Really Good geranium” is derisive, the capitalization of that empty descriptor emphasizing the vacuity of including an image simply because it is a flower—the g sounds in “Good” and “geranium” don’t even alliterate. The poem asserts that poetry and life must correspond— “There must be scent, somehow there must be some,” it insists—and that correspondence must be attained with images and language from the life that the poem depicts. If “life must be aromatic,” poems must be as well, but they must include the aromas of the world they respond to; therefore, “you might as well/Leave him his lotion, lavender and oil” because those are the actual materials of Smith’s world (43). The poem makes this point not just by including Smith’s “lotion, lavender and oil” but by creating a multilayered, ornamented, and highly ordered lexical and metrical environment, turning the implied expectation that Satin-Legs Smith’s Sundays aren’t right for poetry squarely on its head. Brooks not only refers to images from Smith’s world but places them in opposition to images not from that world, images that would presumably meet the kinds of expectations the narrator scrutinizes—images it then flatly refuses as inauthentic. At the thought of including a geranium, carnation, poinsettia, or rose, she exclaims,

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No! He has not a flower to his name. Except a feather one, for his lapel. Apart from that, if he should think of flowers It is in terms of dandelions or death. Ah, there is little hope. You might as well— Unless you care to set the world a-boil And do a lot of equalizing things, Remove a little ermine, say, from kings, Shake hands with paupers and appoint them men, For instance—certainly you might as well Leave him his lotion, lavender and oil. (43)

There may be “little hope,” but there is hope nonetheless. Indeed, the poem itself does “a lot of equalizing things”: it refuses to substitute Smith’s “lotion, lavender and oil,” his “feather” flower (unlike “Good” and “geranium,” “feather” and “flower” alliterates), his “heritage of cabbage and pigtails,” his “intimacy with alleys, garbage pails” with more ostensibly decorous images and instead employs those realistic figures to compose intricately patterned verse. In other words, the poem presents Smith’s Sunday style as an alternative to bleak reality in poetic language that renders Smith’s dress and past as alternatives themselves. Another way of saying this is that Brooks adds “a little ermine” to Smith by matching his extravagant style with an equally extravagant poetic language, a language that obtains its extravagance from the real images of Smith’s world—after all, the poem opens by comparing Smith to a king. Brooks bears witness to her local world from that plane, envisioning an alternative that could “set the [larger] world a-boil” by “appointing” Smith and Smith’s neighborhood as the local raw material for an especially opulent poetry. The Gwendolynian language Brooks crafted for Smith in the mid-­1940s, then, defies racist and classist assumptions about aesthetic language. It also refuses expectations it subtly raises about the way its main character would speak when the poem implies vernacular in the title (“Satin-Legs Smith”) and refers to speaking in various instances throughout the poem without ever presenting her protagonist’s speech (or that of any other characters): “cat” and “fat,” “Sarcastic green,” “Hundreds of voices advis[ing],” “everything is—simply what it is,” “the most voluble of veils.” The poem refers to colloquial language in a noncolloquial linguistic context as it invents its own version of local speech from both the colloquial and from Brooks’s own idiolect. The result is neither the everyday language of Black vernacular nor a particularly formal or standard version of English, either,

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as some critics have suggested.14 In what context would words and phrases like “inamoratas,” “clear delirium,” “blithest,” “gold impulse,” “expectoration,” “pinching a track,” “estranged from music,” “piquant,” “sweet bombs” (and a host of others) be considered standard? It is a local language with a host of constitutive elements. Even when the poem names the titles of blues songs—“The Lonesome Blues, the Long-lost Blues, I Want A/Big Fat Mama”—it does so to contrast those colloquial titles with the names of “standard” European classical composers: both sets of referents make up the language of the poem. But the poem prizes the blues songs as representative of the kind of local speech it is interested in producing as a form for comprehensive expression and formidable resistance. Despite the “piquant” elusiveness of Grieg, “Tschaikovsky’s wayward eloquence,” and “the shapely tender drift of Brahms,” theirs is not the most fitting music for the “sore avenues” of Smith’s locale (45–46). Instead, blues is a more appropriate local aesthetic language because it would more accurately convey Smith’s childhood experiences, his “forgotten hate,” his father’s lost dream, the memory of his sister turning to prostitution, the general malaise and monotony of poverty—and it has the capacity to connect Smith to the other people in his neighborhood, and to their pasts and his own past. The blues is also a suitable figure for Black aesthetic expression because it depicts Black individuals contending with oppressive social conditions and challenging those conditions: “The music is distinguished thematically and philosophically by its posture of direct confrontation with the melancholy psychological state also called blues that is produced by unfortunate circumstances of lost love or unjust circumstances of racism and poverty” (“Blues” 151). Further, the blues extends individual psychology out to the community, just as “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith” moves from portraying Smith’s elaborateness to portraying his local world and the children, women, and men who live there: “the blues fosters the creation of a distinctive [African American] communal culture as a bulwark against social oppression and existential angst” (151). These fortifying aspects of the blues are attributes of Brooks’s iambic pentameter idiolectic “Sundays” poem. Its suggestion of vernacular in an emphatically uncommon linguistic production stages a rigorous, multidimensional examination of the politics of aesthetic style and invention, and demonstrates that individuality and communality bolster and depend on each other. The poem’s Gwendolynian local tongue differentiates Smith from his everyday life while linking him inextricably to his locale.

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Brooks’s Thaumaturgic Tongue Many of the poems in Brooks’s second book, Annie Allen (1950), are even more elaborate than “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith.” Here, the formal and linguistic elaborations resist deprivation at every turn. The book is cast entirely in a highly individualized idiosyncratic language for its title character that is also a speech for its mid-twentieth-century African American locale. Annie Allen is a young girl with a soaring romantic imagination whose ideals define and guide her as she grows up and marries a man known as “tan man.” The ideals also threaten to dissolve as she confronts both her own dreams and the deleterious social forces that transform many of those dreams into illusions. Annie’s exaggeratedly unordinary speech in the book’s opening “Childhood and Girlhood” poems characterizes her as a precocious child: “How pinchy is my room!,” she complains, where she says she can’t breathe, doesn’t feel like anything special, and hasn’t “anything, or anything to do!” (Blacks, “birth in a narrow room” 83). She is a sophisticated thinker. She senses large meanings in everyday life and discerns the limitations of convention even if she can’t yet articulate them; for example, in “Maxie Allen,” she tries to school her mother, Maxie, in the untellable mysterious of existence, a “somewhat of something other” she senses and tries to articulate that very well may be of “veils and God” or of “whistling ghosts,” but also might not be (84). In another poem, “‘do not be afraid of no,’” Annie examines abstractly the implications of resistance and capitulation: she is uncomfortable with saying “no” but also feels as if saying yes too often could amount to self-­ sacrifice (92–93). And yet she neither condones nor endorses refusal or acquiescence. Instead, she suggests something of Keats’s “negative capability,” the famous idea that literary achievement is attainable when the writer “is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (261). Young Annie, it would seem, shares Keats’s instincts about the value of uncertainty for a daring imagination: for Annie, being “involved” in the “unresolved” is “brave,” a state to be “not fearful” of. When big questions don’t yield easy answers, when such answers take “no airships” but have to walk “awhile,” Annie doesn’t recoil but smiles. The language employed throughout in these poems reflects the intellectual boldness of them. Rather than responding to life in a straightforward local idiom, Annie presses back against her reality, not with outward style like Satin-Legs Smith, but with an ornate and dexterous internal imagination.15 That imagination is conveyed in a correspondingly oblique and grandiloquent idiolect.

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Language in Annie Allen is at its most extraordinary in “The Anniad,” the middle section of the book that separates the eleven “Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood” poems and the fifteen poems that comprise “The Womanhood” (Blacks 99–109). The poem is a linguistic portrait of a vivid imagination’s endurance in a social reality made increasingly desolate by racism, sexism, and classism. Like Annie does literally at a relative’s wake in the fifth “Notes” poem (“old relative” 88), Brooks in “The Anniad” figuratively sticks out her “Gwendolynian” tongue to portray Annie’s mind, life, and locale. In forty-three tetrameter septets, each with three variously patterned, mostly exact rhymes, “The Anniad” intricately depicts Annie’s encounters with the constraining realities of war, betrayal, sickness, death, parenthood, and solitude. As D. H. Melhem has observed, the stanzas are set in a variation of rhyme royal, traditionally seven pentameter lines rhyming ababbcc (63).16 Brooks alters the form with shorter four-beat lines, a different rhyme scheme (though still with only three rhymes per stanza), and a mostly trochaic pattern with each line beginning and ending with a stressed syllable. The first stanza establishes the poem’s propulsive cadence as it begins by asking us both to “think” of the sweets, chocolates, and featherbeds of a fanciful childhood and to weigh a series of oppositions: /

x

/

x

/

x

/

Think of | sweet and | choco|late /

x

/ x

/ x

/

B

Left to | folly | or to | fate, /

x

/

x

/

x

/

Whom the | higher | gods for|got, /

x

/

x

/

x

/

Whom the | lower | gods be|rate; / x

/

x

/

x

/

x

/

x

/

x

/

Fanc|ying | on the | feather| bed /

x

/ x

/

x

A B C

Physi|cal and | under| fed /

A

/

What was | never | and is | not. (99)

C A

The short lines framed by heavy stresses generate an insistent rhythm while the rhyming end-stops, both exact and slant, create a resounding,

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persistent pattern. It is a tempo the poem never diverts from as it proceeds to narrate the folly, fate, forgetting, and berating that the “higher” and “lower gods” of Annie’s life will dole out to her. Indeed, “The Anniad” presents from beginning to end Annie and her imagination as indivisible: Annie’s quoted speech, the language that describes her and the poem’s other characters, the language that describes her local world, and the language that describes her imaginings are all of the same register throughout the entire poem. The poem’s diction, phrasing, syntax, and formal patterns represent Annie’s intellectual and creative capacities for navigating her emotions, her relationships, and her locale. For example, despite her poor surroundings, Annie mitigates feelings of anger early in the poem by dreaming of romance and by applying make-up and styling her hair: Watching for the paladin Which no woman ever had, Paradisaical and sad With a dimple in his chin And the mountains in the mind; Ruralist and rather bad, Cosmopolitan and kind. Think of thaumaturgic lass Looking in her looking-glass At the unembroidered brown; Printing bastard roses there; Then emotionally aware Of the black and boisterous hair, Taming all that anger down. (99–100)

The diction that describes the “unembroidered” Annie is as embroidered and “boisterous” as that used to describe the mate Annie dreams up: she imagines, after all, a “paladin” who is “Paradisaical,” “Ruralist,” and “Cosmopolitan,” while she is described as “Physical and underfed” but also “Fancying” about “Western clouds and quarter-stars,/Fairy-­sweet of old guitars” with “All her harvest buttoned in/All her ornaments untried,” “Printing bastard roses” with rouge on her cheeks. Indeed, Annie’s imagination is “thaumaturgic.” Not only is the term polysyllabic and highly unusual, it denotes that which “works, or has the power of working, miracles or marvels; wonder-working” (“thaumaturgic”). This uncommon

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word, emblematic of the poem’s idiosyncratic lexicon, correlates to SatinLegs Smith’s extravagant “wonder-suits” and the corresponding language that Brooks devises in that poem to match Smith’s style. But Annie is depicted intellectually. Her thaumaturgic mind creates a dynamic “paladin” who can be at once “Paradisiacal and sad,” who has a childlike “dimple in his chin” and yet “mountains” in his mind, who is “Ruralist” on the one hand and urbane on the other; and who is both alluringly “bad” and “kind.” The figure Annie thinks up is not real, and yet the imagination that conceives that figure is real: both are represented in the same diction. “What was never and is not” refers to the idealized “paladin”: he is, after all, a lover “Which no woman ever had.” “What is ever and is not” in the next line and stanza is Annie’s abundant, romantic imagination that is capable of dreaming up a heroic figure even as “the higher gods” have forgotten her and “the lower gods berate” her. Critical discussions about the poem’s Gwendolynian language have revolved around the allusiveness of the poem’s title and its evocation of epic poetry. When Brooks’s readers consider the extravagant diction of “The Anniad,” a reference to Homer’s The Iliad and Virgil’s The Aeneid, they often classify it as especially formal: it is “erudite” (Tate 149), “archaic” (Goodman 166), “exalted” (Jimoh 178).17 Such diction is often then deemed to satirize Annie in the tradition of a mock-epic, either by ironically employing lofty words to describe poor Black people during a time of institutionalized racial segregation or by amplifying a young Black girl’s futile romantic illusions with a language emphatically detached from day-to-day reality.18 For example, Claudia Tate argues that “The Anniad” “relies on mock-heroic conventions in order to underscore the gravity of [Brooks’s] criticism of Annie’s adult life” and that the poem adapts its conventional verse form in order to criticize Annie: “Brooks seems to be ridiculing aspects of Annie’s life” with “conventional, formal, satirical techniques for expressing her attitude toward her subject” (142). Evie Shockley points out that readers tend to hear irony in an African American poem when they don’t hear “ordinary speech”: this is “manifest in readings of the poem as a mock-epic that explicitly or implicitly turn on the claim that Brooks’s language is too ‘deliberately distanced from [the] ordinary speech’ of most African Americans to be anything but satirical as a vehicle for an ‘ordinary’ young African American woman’s story” (39).19 For Shockley, the poem’s self-conscious distance from ordinary life is the key to understanding it. She reads the poem as a “legitimate epic” rather than a mock-epic because its essential Black aesthetic is its very adaptation

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of that grand genre to tell a narrative about an everyday, working-class African American girl.20 She locates this aesthetic in the fact that it portrays a poor Black girl’s plight as a heroic quest a decade before the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s.21 Another way of understanding “The Anniad” is to consider the poem’s language as Gwendolynian local speech, an idiolectic language the poem creates and sustains to portray a young Black woman’s imagination, the local world she lives in, and that imagination’s capacity to endure against the intersecting social forces that would thwart her. In other words, the poem produces a local language for Annie’s physical, social, psychological, emotional, and intellectual realms. Rather than erudite, “The Anniad”’s language is recondite—an innovative combination of polysyllabic words that would be unusual in any context (“paladin,” “Paradisiacal,” “thaumaturgic,” “theopathy,” “Doomer,” “hecatombs,” “bijouterie,” “Appoggiatura,” “Hyacinthine”), equally idiosyncratic made-up words and constructions (“rompabout,” “demi-gloom,” “Oilily,” “children-­ dear,” “magics,” “ribbonize,” “satinly”), everyday words in unusual syntax that refer to Annie’s commonplace world (“Now she folds his rust and cough/in the pity old and staunch”; “Telephone hoists her stomach to the air”; “Who is starch or who is stone/Washes coffee-cups and hair/Sweeps, determines what to wear”), and peculiar phrasing that renders ordinary actions extraordinary (Annie “Printing bastard roses” is Annie applying blush; “Hieroglyphics of her eyes” conveys Annie’s anxiety for her conscripted husband; “a green/Moist sweet breath for mezzanine” indicates that tan man is in the hospital with a respiratory infection; the “Meteors” that “encircle her” are Annie’s potential lovers). Even the instance of archaic language (“Take such rubies as ye list”) and the references to literature (Shakespearean “Pucks and cupids,” a catalog of classical figures from Plato to Dionysius) communicate not the pursuit of formal learning but a romantic mind searching English and Greek classics for “solace” and for “kisses pressed in books.” This is not standard diction employed to mock Annie, nor is it diction that flamboyantly accentuates the absurdity of Annie’s romantic illusions. Rather, this is a complex idiolect in intricate septets that depicts Annie’s local world and matches Annie’s romantic, precocious imagination and its perseverance in that world. To read the poem only as either flamboyantly accentuating the absurdity of Annie’s romantic illusions or as depicting Annie as the tragic hero of an epic risks disregarding the other traditional forms the poem employs

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and suggesting that the poem necessarily depicts Annie’s ultimate demise. In fact, “The Anniad” alludes to a host of poetic traditions but in a language whose consistency corresponds to its hero’s durable mental capacities. For example, the poem has features of a ballad: it sustains a distinct rhythmic pattern, its stanzas are repeated, its characters are representative (“thaumaturgic lass,” “tan man,” “bacchanalian lass.”), and it tells the story of a person who faces tragedies but withstands those tragedies.22 And yet the diction is never culled from the overtly colloquial registers common to ballads. Rather, the poem’s language stays adamantly noncolloquial even when its ballad-like features conjure the notion of everyday language. If the elaborate diction of “The Anniad” is meant to convey Annie’s romantic imagination as it is defeated by an increasingly bleak social reality, couldn’t we expect some change in that diction as her imminent defeat nears? Further, if the diction represents Annie’s romantic impulses and the destruction of “tan man,” war, tan man’s mistresses, death, and loneliness, might we not also anticipate that the language meant to convey Annie’s romantic conceptions and that used to refer to those deleterious forces would be set at different registers? “The Anniad” presents a wholly consistent poetic language to describe Annie, her locale, her early fantasies, her speech, tan man, the war, tan man’s girlfriends, and Annie’s crisis and endurance. The language of the poem is all of a piece— in diction, meter, tone, stanza length, number of rhymes per stanza— throughout its 301 lines, regardless of what those lines are describing. That this includes Annie’s early imaginings and her quoted speech signifies that even though the poem is a third-person narrative, the language throughout represents Annie’s mind. It is, in other words, her idiolect. That Annie’s quoted speech is as idiosyncratic as the words used by the narrator to tell Annie’s story indicates that this idiolect also represents Annie’s local speech. For example, when tan man is drafted, just as she has become comfortable in their new apartment, Annie responds to his loss in the poem’s characteristic language: Vaunting hands are now devoid. Hieroglyphics of her eyes Blink upon a paradise Paralyzed and paranoid. But idea and body too Clamor “Skirmishes can do. Then he will come back to you.” (102)

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Annie is “devoid,” “Paralyzed,” and made “paranoid” by the anxiety of seeing her husband off to war. And yet the language is not devoid or paralyzed but rather as elaborate and enlivened as the rest of the poem. The consonance of “Vaunting” and “devoid,” the three first-syllable rhymes of the alliterating “paradise/Paralyzed and paranoid,” and the stanza’s three rhymes (“devoid”/“paranoid,” “eyes”/“paradise,” “too”/“do”/“you”) convey Annie’s “Vaunting” imaginative capacities, which are intact here and remain so throughout the poem. What’s more, Annie’s eyes are figured as “Hieroglyphics” because of the shapes they make as she stares and blinks, but the metaphor also suggests that they signify, like a written mark, more than just their physical characteristics. Annie is, like a hieroglyphic, a bit hard to read: she is worried about tan man, but she also envisions “a paradise” that they may return to when he eventually comes home. She thinks to herself in language that is set off from the narrator’s language by quotation marks, but her description of war is just as idiosyncratic as the narrator’s description of, say, Annie’s desire for her husband as “a hot theopathy.” Annie conceives of the war as “Skirmishes” that will end soon and not necessarily tragically. Marshaling eccentric language to minimize the war, she counters her paralysis and ruminates upon what life will be like when he returns. Her imaginative ability to reduce the war is a way to bear it. Downplaying the war as “Skirmishes” that “can do” before tan man returns is not Annie’s only method of survival. For example, she idealistically puts tan man in a “heaven,” describing the cap of his military uniform as a “godhead” that “glitters now/Cavalierly on his brow.” When tan man moves Annie into an apartment that is even shabbier than the “dusted demi-gloom” of her parent’s home, her imagination is not hampered by disappointment but persists against it. She adjusts her perception of their new home: Which she makes a chapel of. Where she genuflects to love. All the prayerbooks in her eyes Open soft as sacrifice Or the dolour of a dove. Tender candles ray by ray Warm and gratify the gray. (101)

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Tan man’s “pocket chooses” a “lowly room” because it is all he can afford, but this description counters that lowliness: Annie has turned the room into a chapel. The couple may lack dollars, but Annie offsets their grim financial situation with the spiritual “dolour of a dove,” a traditional Christian figure for the Holy Spirit. Annie’s elaborate imagination turns a gray, bleak kitchenette into an austere, solemn, candlelit sanctum just as she filled her head with “Western clouds and quarter-stars” and the “Fairy-­ sweet of old guitars” as she lay on the featherbed of her “underfed” childhood. The poem’s idiolect pits Annie’s imagination directly against social reality, gilding that reality (Annie’s shyness is a “gilt humility”), bejeweling it (tan man’s cap is a “bejeweled diadem”), and warming it (the candles she lights in her new apartment “Warm and gratify the gray”). Her imagination is, ultimately, what survives in this nearly tragic poem. Even though the war threatens to destroy Annie’s world and her imaginative impulses, it doesn’t disrupt the language that corresponds to those impulses. In fact, the war is introduced in language that is altogether consistent with the rest of the poem, and which figures war as its own form of speech: Doomer, though, crescendo-comes Prophesying hecatombs. Surrealist and cynical. Garrulous and guttural. Spits upon the silver leaves. Denigrates the dainty eves Dear dexterity achieves. Names him. Tames him. Takes him off, Throws to columns row on row. Where he makes the rifles cough, Stutter. Where the reveille Is staccato majesty. Then to marches. Then to know The hunched hells across the sea. (101–02)

War is worse than doom (“Doomer)” and arrives in a powerful “crescendo”; its destructive might is mysterious (“prophesying”), sacrificial (“hecatombs”), and bizarre (“Surrealist”). Its speech is noisy, ineloquent, nasty, and spiteful. Along with conveying Annie’s thaumaturgic imagination (her “gilt humility,” “hot theopathy,” “dusted demi-gloom”), “The

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Anniad”‘s Gwendolynian tongue voices Annie’s sense of the crudity of war: war “spits” upon the “dainty eves” of Annie’s dexterous imagination. In other words, Annie, on the one hand, comprehends the disturbing force of war as a “crescendo. … Prophesying hecatombs,” a “great public sacrifice (properly a hundred oxen) among the Greeks and Romans” (“hecatomb”); but, on the other hand, she recognizes war as a brutal language itself that is “Garrulous and Guttural,” a “cough,” a “stutter.” Even the “majesty” of war’s “reveille” is a “staccato,” repetitive drone. War denigrates everything Annie strives to create—the “silver leaves” that “Dear dexterity achieves”—and yet, in turn, Annie articulates war as a cacophonous and inarticulate language. The poem juxtaposes the war’s spitting, coughing, and stuttering with the language used to convey Annie’s sophistication: she communicates in “crimson ruses,” her eyes contain “prayerbooks,” she “believes/Incorruptibly.” The War may name and “tame” tan man, but Annie’s “Dear dexterity,” rendered in the poem’s Gwendolynian language, names and tames the War. The idiolectic language of “The Anniad,” then, does not communicate Annie’s demise but her persistence. This is not to say that the poem depicts Annie as immutable. In fact, social reality changes Annie and nearly extinguishes her imaginative capabilities. By the time tan man returns from the war’s “eerie stutter” to seek “recompense” in extramarital affairs, Annie is all but stripped of her romantic illusions: Think of sweet and chocolate Minus passing-magistrate, Minus passing-lofty light, Minus passing-stars for night, Sirocco wafts and tra la la, Minus symbol, cinema Mirages, all things suave and bright. (104)

Annie’s fantasies about magistrates, lofty light, stars, exotic places, music, and movies—“all things suave and bright”—have been subtracted from her imagination. The first line of this stanza—“Think of sweet and chocolate”—repeats the first line of the poem, asking us to consider just how much experience has changed her. Even though Annie spends an entire year seeking, and at least temporarily finding, “solaces” in the seasons— the crunching of snow “Chills her nicely,” the spring air produces “a fine/ Fume of fondness and sunshine,” the “hypnotist intent” of summer

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picnics distracts her from her dismal home life (105)—we must not take Annie’s resilience as evidence that her experiences haven’t affected her negatively. Not only is Annie “Minus” her “suave and bright” illusions, but when we are asked yet again to “Think of” Annie after her year of searching, the terms of the poem’s first line are repeated but with the order reversed, indicating that Annie has changed; the reality of being an African American woman bearing dismal circumstances in a racist and sexist society has outstripped her naïve youthfulness: “Think of chocolate and sweet/Wanting richly not to care/That summer hoots at solitaire” (105). Annie, still equipped with elaborative imaginative capacities, has come to find that even though she may want “not to care,” her imagination can no longer evade reality.23 She is too familiar now with heartbreak and loneliness to be wholly and permanently comforted by snow, sunshine, and picnics. She knows that in “her true town” everything is “falling falling down” (105). Indeed, Annie’s experiences threaten to destroy her, but her local tongue persists. True, after looking to nature, community service (“I am bedecked with love!” Annie proclaims, “I am philanthropist!”), art and literature, and eventually a love affair of her own (she “Tests forbidden taffeta”), Annie appears to have surrendered, for the “culprit magics” have faded and      no music plays at all In the inner, hasty hall Which compulsion cut from shade.— Frees her lover. Drops her hands. Shorn and taciturn she stands. (107)

And yet Annie refuses to be “taciturn,” a word that denotes Annie’s near speechlessness. For in the next stanza, she announces, in quotations, her recourse to another potentially compensatory realm, motherhood: Petals at her breast and knee …. “Then incline to children-dear! Pull the halt magnificence near, Sniff the perfumes, ribbonize Gay bouquet most satinly; Hoard it, for a planned surprise When the desert terrifies.”

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Once again, Annie’s quoted speech is entirely Gwendolynian. Just as the young girl’s ribbons adorned urban blight in “The Sundays of Satin-­Legs Smith,” Annie’s elaborate imagination, however “shorn and taciturn,” is still able to “ribbonize” “most satinly” her difficult reality. She reminds herself that her capacity to imagine alternatives to reality can make the unbearable bearable and that she can put this ability to use time and again: “Hoard it, for a planned surprise/When the desert terrifies.” Social reality changes Annie but only almost extinguishes her imaginative capabilities. The end of the poem surveys the damage done to her: “Think of tweaked and twenty-four”; “Think of almost thoroughly/ Derelict and dim and done.” Still, against the nearly obliterating odds, Annie is, however “faint” and “old,” surviving: Stroking swallows from the sweat. Fingering faint violet. Hugging old and Sunday sun. Kissing in her kitchenette The minuets of memory. (109)

Annie continues “Stroking swallows from” her “sweat” even after tan man’s repeated betrayals, his constant rejection of her, and his death. From the poem’s first line to its last, Annie endures despite being almost destroyed by one tragedy after the next. Just short of destroyed, she is still “Stroking,” “Fingering,” “Hugging” and “Kissing.” No longer genuflecting to immature romantic illusions, Annie kisses “minuets” of the memories of her life experiences that are not illusions. The Gwendolynian tongue is Brooks’s political aesthetic; it voices in “The Anniad” a distinctive African American idiolect pressing back against the racist, classist, and sexist forces that would eradicate it. And yet Brooks was ambivalent about “The Anniad” even as it is a poem in which her Gwendolynian style is in full display. She assessed the poem in 1967 as “not a wild success; some of it just doesn’t come off” (Conversations 47). Still, in the same interview, Brooks associates the poem’s diction and form with mystery and pleasure: “I was fascinated by what words might do there in [“The Anniad”]. You can tell that it’s labored, a poem that’s very interested in the mysteries and magic of technique” (46). She relates the poem’s meticulous diction to potency and coherence: “I was just very conscious of every word; I wanted every phrase to be beautiful, and yet to contribute sanely to the whole, to the whole effect” (46–47). Brooks was

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equivocal about “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith,” too: “I try to picture in [that poem] a young man who didn’t even know he was a tool for the establishment, who didn’t know his life was being run for him from birth straight to death, and even before birth. As I say in that poem: ‘Here are hats/Like bright umbrellas; and hysterical ties/Like narrow banners for some gathering war’”24 (Conversations 106). Brooks regards Smith’s “hysterical ties” as a figure for political resistance, but she insinuates that Smith’s penchant for baths, lotion, lavender, zoot suits, and women in equally ostentatious dress reveals him to be a mere “tool.” Over a decade earlier, she had asserted without equivocation that elaborate style such as Smith’s could provide a shield against racism: “I called it hats ‘like bright umbrellas,’ which implies that he is protecting himself under that fancy wideness” (Conversations 43). If Smith is a “tool for the establishment,” he nevertheless demonstrates that bright, wide, ballooning style could serve as armor against that same establishment. Indeed, since the beginning of her career, Brooks was setting her style against established forms of oppression. As late as 1983, she was still debunking the notion that her early poems in traditional forms were less political than her free-verse poems. When Tate suggests in that year that A Street in Bronzeville and Annie Allen “don’t seem to focus directly on heightened political awareness,” Brooks replies, “Well, let me just run down the table of contents of A Street in Bronzeville ‘of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery,’ ‘The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith.’ … Many of the poems, in my new and old books, are ‘politically aware’: I suggest you reread them” (106). Tate then asked Brooks about “the black aesthetic,” and Brooks responded impatiently, “But we have been talking about this all along. An announcement that we are going to deal with ‘the black aesthetic’ seems to me to be a waste of time. I’ve been talking about blackness and black people all along” (108). In 1994, when Sheldon Hackney brought up to Brooks the “notion that [her] poetry before 1967 is descriptive of the black experience but not alert to the injustice, whereas afterwards it is committed, more activist,” Brooks replies, “that is absolutely not true” (Conversations 162). Brooks is defensive about whether her early poems are political and testy with questions about a post-BAM Black aesthetic because all of her work was socially minded Black poetry. Her idiosyncratic combination of colloquial and noncolloquial diction set in traditional verse forms and located squarely in African American contexts defies the deprivations of racism, sexism, and classism. Her employment of received forms and diction, then, is not ironic—to apprehend it as

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such is to overlook the collaboration of linguistic registers in her poems to counter deprivation and depict Black people as individuals: “It is my privilege to state ‘Negroes’ not as curios but as people,” she told Paul Angle in 1967 (Conversations 25). She uses that word again over two decades later in a conversation with Haki Madhubuti: “our people have been looked upon as curios, something to look at and be amazed by—something other than ordinarily human. And of course I can’t accept that. I happen to know myself and I know that inside myself I am not a curio” (qtd. in Joyce 247). The idiolect Brooks invents affirms her community’s individuality not by presenting ordinariness but by depicting style and imagination in the interaction between forms of speech and poetic form, positioning that collaboration in opposition to the deprivations people face when they are subject to forms of oppression.

Notes 1. Brooks also used gossip as a metaphor to explain to young writers that poetry should be convincing and realistic and that formal techniques could help the “wordage” of poems achieve that: “You must make your reader believe that what you say could be true. Think of your efforts to be convincing and entertaining when you are gossiping. You use gesture, touch, tone-­ variation, facial expression. Try persuading your wordage— SOMEHOW!—to do all the things your body does when forwarding a piece of gossip” (Capsule 11). 2. In her study of Chicago’s South Side in relation to American segregation and institutionalized racism, Natalie Y.  Moore explains the practice of redlining, just one example of systemic racism in American cities: By 1930, blacks were spatially isolated to a high degree in American cities, with Chicago leading the way. The Home Owner’s Loan Corporation was formed in 1933 as part of the New Deal and provided funds for refinancing urban mortgages in danger of default. But the Depression-­era government program institutionalized redlining, a practice that excluded blacks by color coding black neighborhoods based on loan risk. The lowest color was red, where blacks lived. Redlining influenced lending practices of the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration of the 1940s with regard to blacks. (42) 3. Brooks also contradicts her eschewals of received verse forms. For instance, in 1969 she told George Stavros that “there are things colloquial and contemporary that can be done with the sonnet form,” and as late as 1977 she

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regarded the ballad form as appropriate for a new, immediate, and accessible poetry that she was still trying to write and define (Conversations 45, 88). 4. See Ford’s and Shockley’s work on Brooks that refutes the bifurcation of Brooks’s poetry as apolitical before 1967 and political after that year. Ford’s essay on Brooks’s sonnets demonstrates that her poetry is throughout her whole career consistently engaged with questions about poetic form and its relationship to political and social reality, a unifying rather than divisive aspect of her work. Similarly, Shockley argues that Brooks wrote in traditional poetic form before 1967 in part to showcase her technical abilities before a dismissive white literary establishment and to advance “a black aesthetic highly attuned to the interplay between race, gender, and class” (31). Shockley associates this Black aesthetic with what she calls Brooks’s “polyvocality,” her combination and innovation of traditional genre, stanzaic form, and poetic diction to address at once a crosssection of potential readers—white and Black literary critics, middle-class and wealthy white readers, working-class and middle-class African Americans, feminists—thereby ­questioning assumptions about race and gender that cause these groups to hear the poem differently (30–31). 5. The prevailing “general sense [is] that the lyric is the genre of personal expression,” Jackson and Prins (2). 6. In his introduction to the golden shovel form on the Poetry Foundation website, Don Share identifies the qualities that he believes have made the poem last: “the pool players—‘Seven at the Golden Shovel’—are larger than life, facing mortality and bigotry with defiant, memorable verve. These young men will ‘die soon,’ perhaps; but in poetry, they are, like the poem itself and Brooks’s legacy, immortal.” Earlier readers have been less receptive to that verve and immortality. For example, while Barbara B. Sims finds the sonority of the poem’s language connotative of a “certain pride” in its speakers, she ultimately hears them as delusional: “their defiant and complacent attitudes seem quite pathetic, and the reader wonders whom the cool people are trying to kid about the desirability of their disordered lives” (58). Similarly, Helen Vendler dismisses the poem based on her sense of its “prudishness,” referring to it as a “judgmental monologue, which though it is ostensibly spoken by adolescents, barely conceals its adult reproach of their behavior” (“Rita Dove”  384). Alternatively, Hortense J. Spillers has argued that the poem does not evaluate the choices of its young speakers but presents their own thoughts about themselves in their own language: “Deliberately subverting the romance of sociological pathos, Brooks presents the pool players—‘seven [at] the golden shovel’— in their own words and time. They make no excuse for themselves and apparently invite no one else to do so. The poem is their situation as they

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see it … they could well drink to this poem, making it a drinking/revelry song” (120). Stephanie Burt also hears youthfulness in the poem, observing that it “famously reflects” the pool players’ “swagger” in its “lines’ syncopation,” but Burt concludes that the poem struggles to “acknowledge” that swagger as it prefigures its characters’ imminent deaths (109). Even Brooks herself referred to her seven boys at the Golden Shovel, at least in one unpublished talk ostensibly planned for a group of students probably about the same age as her speakers, as “dumb”: she warns the audience not to be “mush-minded” like the characters in her poem: “Don’t allow the stupid among your associates to lead you into any of the wells waiting for them right here on earth. That’s the destiny of those seven dumb young folks in a poem of mine: WE REAL COOL” (“Speeches,” Folder 3). These readings concentrate on the poem’s speakers, interpreting their mood from the tone of their pronouncements, and weighing those interpretations against the boys’ approaching demise. 7. Brooks’s last book, In Montgomery, and Other Poems (2003) was published three years after her death. 8. Shockley’s emphasis on the “plural” distinguishes her definition of Black aesthetics from the more delimited, singular “Black Aesthetic” defined by the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in the 1960s that limited it to “a set of characteristics said to be derived organically from African and African diasporic cultures and yet, paradoxically, must often be imposed upon African American poets, who would appear to be dangerously close to assimilation into European American culture” (2–3). 9. Timo Müller connects Brooks to Robert Hayden and Melvin B. Tolson by their dual absorption of both Black vernacular poetry and the experiments of modernism: “When … Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Melvin Tolson took up the Afromodernist project from the 1940s onward, they did not have a unified tradition to extend or reject. They drew on a variety of sources and traditions, particularly high-modernist formal experimentation and black vernacular speech, which they brought together into an idiom that Matthew Hart calls a ‘synthetic vernacular’” (7–9; Hart 7). Müller delineates Brooks’s mix of the idiosyncratic and the everyday as a “self-consciously artificial” combination of “high modernist formal experimentation and black vernacular speech,” a pairing designed, he says, to negotiate “racial concerns in a modernist poetic framework” (253). Müller borrows Matthew Hart’s concept of “synthetic vernacular writing” to argue that Brooks sets Black speech in received Anglo verse forms to disrupt the Anglo-European literary tradition: she “jeopardize[s]” the “organic unity” created by inherited poetic forms by “exposing it to the black idiom” (256). Müller suggests that adhering to these dual (and, for him, conflicting) impulses led Brooks to question the very notion of

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authenticity in relation to Black speech: her poems “draw on the authenticity of the vernacular but inevitably falsify that authenticity by adapting it to the requirements of a predetermined formal framework” (256). An earlier essay by Maria K. Mootry argues that Tolson’s and Brooks’s early sonnets demonstrate their efforts to produce “new poetic modes” as demanding as those devised by modernist innovation and that also reflected “Black values, hopes and dreams” (69). 10. See Ford for an overview of various critical perceptions of Satin-Legs and perceptions of the speaker’s disposition toward him (“Sonnets” 350n8; 351n9). She explains that critics tend to read the poem’s last stanza—an italicized sestet written in plainspoken, simple diction that contrasts with the poem’s prevailing style—as an indication that the poem is critical of Smith’s flamboyance because “underneath all his artifice he’s a natural man and … he succeeds when he accepts this about himself” (351n9). However, Ford points out that this last stanza is not necessarily the poem’s definitive ending; for “The Sundays” presents two other registers in the stanzas just before it: a “zoot-suit” language that catalogues the offerings at “Joe’s Eats” (and which has been the poem’s register throughout), and a tetrameter, eye-­rhyming couplet that sounds especially lofty and romantic (“And even and intrepid come/The tender boots of night to home”) (350–51). Ford argues that this presentation of three endings “challenges certainty,” and thus “the poem refuses either to indict or exonerate Satin-Legs; rather … this poem is more interested in how to represent ambiguity than in how to resolve it” (349; 351n9). 11. Brooks’s readers don’t always register this ambivalence and often view the poem as casting Smith in an entirely negative or entirely positive light. For example, Danielle Chapman argues that Brooks, “in her pure delight in Satin[−]Legs, … enables the character to come alive and exist independently of her own interests, her pathos, herself” (57). In contrast, for Joanne V.  Gabbin, Smith is “in perverse oblivion of his oppression, … merely the walking dead” (255). 12. Ford calls the poem’s elaborateness its “zoot-suit aesthetic” (“Sonnets” 349). 13. The direct address is typically understood as Brooks apostrophizing her white readers and calling out their judgmental expectations. Mullen suggest that the “you” is not necessarily only the liberal white poetry reader but middle-class Black bourgeoisie who “desire for participation in and resistance to American democratic capitalism” (151). Bryant argues that the “you” includes white liberals and Black middle-class readers (like those who would have subscribed to Ebony magazine); the poem for her critiques the expectations of both demographics: “Brooks interrogates both her middle-­class black readers’ notions of respectability and her liberal white

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readers’ fascination with black urban life, resisting their respective tendencies to view Smith as either a bad example or a representative figure” (89). 14. Scholars sometimes perceive the ostentatious diction of “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith” as ironic in the same way that “The Anniad”’s diction has been perceived. For instance, Mullen refers to the former poem’s opening diction as “mock chivalric jargon” that operates as a kind of “fronting” strategy that “separates the ‘respectable’ and ‘riffraff’ in Bronzeville” (162). Similarly, Henry Taylor comprehends the “elegant language” he hears in the poem as “mock-heroic” because Satin-Legs is too ordinary for heightened words such as “Inamoratas,” “approbation,” “bestowed”: “The ironic contrasts begin with the title; the protagonist’s name yokes the exotic and the ordinary. The polysyllabic opening introduces a narrator whose self-­consciously elegant language is mock-heroic” (257). I argue that Brooks’s diction is not ironic but is instead a key element of her Gwendolynian aesthetic, and I hope to demonstrate that this is nowhere truer than in “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith” and “The Anniad.” 15. The idea of the imagination pressing back against reality comes from Wallace Stevens’s famous essay, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words”: “It [the nature of poetry] is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals” (27). Stevens complicates his idea about this interdependence by merging these concepts with each other and with “society”: “Reality is life and life is society and the imagination and reality, that is to say, the imagination and society are inseparable” (28). The context here is Stevens’s argument that a poet does not have intrinsic social obligations. The implication, however, is that poetry’s combination of imagination and reality, and its enactment of the imagination resisting “the pressure of reality,” inevitably relates poetry to society: for Stevens, the imagination and society are, after all, “inseparable.” 16. Rhyme royal dates back to the Middle Ages. It has been called the Troilus stanza because Chaucer used it in Troilus and Criseyde. 17. Melhem explains the significance of the -ad suffix and connects it to what she hears as its celebratory (though tentatively so) tone: “the suffix -ad is a Greek form, denoting a descent from a period of time (in Annie’s case, an updated Medieval); a group (the poems); an epic in celebration. Here Brooks continues to celebrate the common life with its potential grandeur, in a way both critical and compassionate” (61–62). Spillers calls the title a “pun on The Aeniad or The Iliad” that “prepares us for a mock-heroic journey of a particular female soul as she attempts to gain self-knowledge against an unresponsive social backdrop” (121). Melhem’s view and the fact that Spillers finds the poem to be “funny … a comedy [that] proceeds from ­self-­recognition” demonstrates that even readers who view Annie in

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a positive light tend to perceive the relationship between the poem’s subject matter and its formal structure as ironic. 18. For a comprehensive summary of scholarship that grapples with the question of whether or not “The Anniad” should be regarded as an epic or a mock-epic, see Shockley’s endnote to her chapter on the poem (206n18). Shockley charts conflicting critical opinions regarding the matter that spans twenty years: Tate (1987), Melhem (1987), Spillers (1987), Stanford (1995), Jimoh (1998), Walters (2001), and Leonard (2006). Shockley (2011) argues that writing an epic allowed Brooks to appeal to two impulses: it legitimized her technical skill to a white literary establishment, and it granted her a “polyvocality” with which to advance a “black aesthetic highly attuned to the interplay between race, gender, and class” (28–29). 19. Some scholars do, in fact, hear Black vernacular in “The Anniad.” For instance, Houston A. Baker considers the poem (and “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith”) to be a Frostian mixture of colloquial speech patterns and psychology: “while Brooks employs polysyllabics and forces words into striking combinations, she preserves colloquial rhythms. Repeatedly one is confronted by a realistic voice—not unlike that in Robert Frost’s poetry— that carries one along the dim corridors of the human psyche or down the rancid halls of a decaying tenement. Brooks’s colloquial narrative voice, however, is more prone to complex juxtapositions than Frost’s” (25–26). Hortense J. Spillers reads the phrase “bad honey” in “The Anniad” that describes Annie’s husband’s mistresses as an example of the poem’s specific use of colloquial language. For Spillers, the other noncolloquial terms that also describe tan man’s girlfriends emphasize that colloquialism by contrast: “‘Bad’ honey is the best kind in colloquial parlance, ‘bad’ having appropriated its antonym, and in the midst of ‘vinaigrettes” and ‘bacchanalian lasses,’ it is a sharp surprise” (124). 20. Shockley identifies certain problems in conventional “epic” speech for an African American poet working out of a Black aesthetic. As Tracy Walters tells us, epic poetry is traditionally written in “a style which is deliberately distanced from ordinary speech and proportioned to the grandeur and formality of the heroic subject” (354). Shockley surmises that this grand style coupled with epic’s communal objectives presented a distinct challenge for Brooks as an African American poet: “While these two expectations for the epic [that the diction should be far from ordinary speech and that it should voice a community’s heritage] are not inherently in conflict, they might be seen as incompatible—as creating a problem of language, in other words—for an African American poet, if ‘the voice of [her] community’s heritage’ is understood to be, by definition, a black vernacular voice” (38). In other words, if epic expresses a “community’s heritage” and also

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utilizes a diction far removed from living speech, how can an African American poet effectively put that genre to communal work when the assumption in 1949 was that the language of the Black community was Black vernacular? Shockley answers this question not by analyzing the diction of “The Anniad” but by considering the time period (the late 1940s) and the critical context of the poem. She explains that Brooks would have been writing under the auspices of the New Negro Renaissance, which presented Black poets as capable of the highest level of literary achievement—capable, in other words, of writing epics and rhyme royal stanzas in lofty, erudite language. 21. Shockley explains that critics mistake the diction of “The Anniad” as satirical because they view the poem through a Black Arts lens even though that movement would not coalesce for many years. The Black Arts Movement prescribed free verse and Black vernacular as essential qualities of Black poetry, so a poem like “The Anniad” would sound by BAM standards like it was ironically mocking Annie or, as Haki R. Madhubuti (formerly Don L. Lee) put it in 1972, like it was “written for whites” because it “requires unusual concentrated study” (Report 17). Shockley here is defining Brooks’s pre-Black Arts Black aesthetic as the utilization of an especially elevated literary genre—one traditionally employed to represent an entire people’s history, nation, or culture—to narrate the story of a Black woman. Brooks refused, in other words, to accept in 1949 that certain literary forms were inappropriate for African Americans and for women and so wrote “The Anniad” to challenge assumptions about the appropriate subjects for traditional poetic forms (32). Stephen Henderson includes elaborate diction in his list of BAM poetics and argues against the notion that Black poetry must be written in Black vernacular. Ironically, the example he chooses to elucidate diction as a Black aesthetic is Madhubuti, who took issue with the language of “The Anniad” and heard that language as white: “Don Lee [Madhubuti], for example, can use the word ‘neoteric’ without batting an eye and send us scurrying to our dictionaries. The word is not ‘Black’ but the casual, virtuoso way that he drops it on us–like ‘Deal with that’–is an elegant Black linguistic gesture” (33). Madhubuti’s gesture with the word “neoteric” is a Gwendolynian move. 22. Other critics have suggested that “The Anniad” is ballad-like: Melhem points out that “the singular form of this forty-three-stanza poem, whose septets have been classified as a version of rhyme royal, bears a resemblance to the tetrameter of the long-meter hymn stanza” (62); Harold Bloom calls the poem “a problematic but poetically interesting ballad” (vii). Ford explains that the ballad form was important to Brooks because it “had a distinguished lineage in African American culture” and because it proved “useful for writing about ordinary black folk” (“Ballads” 373–74). Ford

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helps us to understand that Brooks didn’t necessarily write explicitly in a form when she wanted to utilize that form to examine the relationship between art and life. For example, the last poem of “Appendix to the Anniad,” “the sonnet-ballad,” is clearly a sonnet, but its ballad features are not so easily discernable. Ford identifies those features and argues that the two forms work together to draw out the transformation of Annie’s “romantic illusions” as they “give way to recognition of adult responsibilities” (376). That this last poem ends the book’s middle section, which is titled “The Anniad,” corroborates my argument that Brooks was alluding to a number of different traditions in that section’s title poem rather than writing in any one tradition. 23. Shockley reads the “Minuses” as especially positive: “Though cast in terms of lack, this letting-go represents progress on her journey” (48). 24. For Mullen, too, Smith is a tool for the establishment. He argues that Smith’s penchant for “flashiness” is “an ironic metaphor for both the traumatic markings of black social class formation and the dismal potentiality of protest ideologies” in a commodity culture (163). In Mullen’s reading, “The Sundays” depicts “the ‘choice’ of race rebellion” as it is undermined by “consumer preference” (164). In other words, rather than rebelling, Smith is consuming products and advertising them.

CHAPTER 4

Tongue-Tied Fighting: Tony Harrison’s Linguistic Divisions

Seamus Heaney opens his book The Redress of Poetry (1995) by pitting Tony Harrison against Wallace Stevens, placing Harrison and Stevens on opposite sides of a question that remains a fault line in poetry studies and is central to this book: what are a poem’s capacities for responding to sociopolitical realities? For Heaney, where Harrison represents poetry that bluntly condemns existing social injustice, Stevens stands for poetry that reimagines, rather than reproaches, real-world experience. Stevens redresses the social world with imagined “alternative worlds” designed from aesthetic principles while Harrison’s poems “derive from the politics of subversion” (1–2), not from a transcendent or “metaphysical” poetics. Heaney ranks Stevens above Harrison on this basis, though he imagines a scene where Harrison commands the attention of an audience, the subversive shouting down Stevens’s sublime: “[Stevens] is anxious to insist that his own words are intended to be more than merely sonorous, and his anxiety is understandable. It is as if he were imagining and responding to the outcry of some disaffected heckler in the crowd of those whom Tony Harrison calls ‘the rhubarbarians,’ one crying out against the mystification of art and its appropriation by the grandees of aesthetics” (1). Heaney refers here to Harrison’s poem “The Rhubarbarians,” and the “disaffected heckler” is Harrison himself: in that poem, Harrison expressly aligns himself with his north England working-class community—the “rhubarbarians” of the title—and its history of resistance and capitulation to industrial © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. Fogarty, The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07889-7_4

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and class exploitation. Characteristically, the poem is made from the working-class north English dialect that Harrison grew up speaking in Leeds. At first Heaney seems to admire Harrison’s distrust of mystery and grandness, the conviction that poetry can provide alternatives, and then some, writing that Harrison “want[s] poetry to be more than an imagined response to conditions in the world” (2). But what initially sounds like praise for Harrison’s social and political integrity is revealed as critical skepticism about explicitly political poetry. For politically charged poems such as Harrison’s, Heaney suggests, represent an “applied art,” “an exercise of leverage on behalf of their point of view” (6). They risk acquiescing to a general “desire” for “simplification” rather than repudiating such desire with “complication” (3). This kind of poetry, the argument goes, is pandering and moralizing. However, it is not only poetry like Stevens’s metaphysical “supreme fictions” that invests in complication but poems such as Harrison’s, made as they are from a poetic language invented in part from the everyday speech of a specific locale. In Terry Eagleton’s terms (which parallel Heaney’s), Harrison’s poems produce at once “the dominant ideological forms of modern class-society” and an “alternative” to them (Ideology 3). Eagleton has observed that “all language,” which of course would include both Stevens’s imaginative mystifications and Harrison’s hard-boiled dialect, “is conceptual, and making it seem otherwise is just a kind of poetic sleight of hand” (How to Read 61). If, as Eagleton has it, “no word … is more concrete or abstract than any other” (142), then Stevens’s metaphysical fictions are as concrete as Harrison’s dialectical linguistic arrangements, which are also as abstract as Stevens’s metaphysical worlds. Further, a formal construction like a sentence, as Eagleton claims, is shaped not just by individual imagination but also by social forces (9).1 In relation to aesthetics, in other words, the imaginative and the political are not mutually exclusive; they both exert their own significant pressures on a poem. Unabashedly political precisely in ways often thought inimical to poetry, Harrison’s poems have taken unyielding moral stances against political and social institutions and have sharply condemned Western classism and imperialism. They’ve excoriated British colonialism and racism (“The White Queen”), decried the American and British invasions of Iraq in the first Gulf War (“A Cold Coming”; “Initial Illumination”), imagined the abdication of the monarchy (“A Celebratory Ode on the Abdication of King Charles III”), and rejected the very notion of Harrison’s own national laureateship (“Laureate’s Block”). That Harrison often presents

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his critiques in the formal tradition of neoclassical poets like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift might reinforce a sense that his work is more didactic than lyric. And yet Harrison’s work dispenses with the conservative decorum of neoclassicism, embracing instead the capacity to “speak of the human and the concrete” (Eagleton, Ideology 2). Unlike Pope’s and Swift’s, Harrison’s meters and rhymes comprise a welter of speech registers, often the working-class northern English dialect that he grew up speaking in Leeds, an unlikely lexicon for poetry harkening to eighteenth-­ century neoclassical poetics. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Harrison’s readers tend to perceive in his poems discrepancies between that lexicon and traditional poetics. Harrison’s work, however, belies the notion that explicit political dissent in poetry inherently opposes inherited poetic forms. His arrangements of different forms of speech in received Anglo verse forms rebuke prescriptions about the kinds of speech deemed suitable for poetry, demonstrating how diverse speech registers can themselves represent the complicating forces that make poetry aesthetically and politically powerful: by stacking forms of speech against each other, the poems produce aesthetic and sociopolitical tensions, at once creating linguistic turbulence and countering that turbulence with iambic pentameter, rhyme schemes, and stanza breaks.2 In other words, as the poems scrutinize social hierarchies, their conflicting speech registers suggest animosities that arise when people are cordoned into hierarchical socioeconomic structures. As Tony Crowley points out, linguistic theory has long conceived of language as a battlefield: “Within any particular sign-community there will be different classes who use more or less one and the same language. Yet given the conflictual nature of social relationships those classes will accentuate the signs of the language in different ways and thus the signs become multiaccentual and sites of conflicts in themselves” (4).3 For Crowley, such understandings of conflict occurring within a language correspond to Michel Foucault’s assertion that language itself is often what spurs conflict in the first place, and remains its subject: Foucault writes, “Speech is no mere verbalisation of conflicts of domination, but … is the very object of … conflicts” (216). In putting linguistic registers into conflict, Harrison’s poems pose a direct challenge to the linguistic prescriptivism that elevates some forms of language over others. That is, his marshaling of various forms of speech, including his own local vernacular and more general colloquial English, into traditional patterns of poetry disputes

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classist devaluations of local speech in relation to that tradition while evincing the disturbances caused by social stratification. And yet it bears repeating that Harrison’s poems are not in themselves divisive. Even when his readers acknowledge his inclination to traditional poetic forms, they tend to assume that those forms must be in conflict with his working-class local speech that, for instance, his poem’s diction, as Neil Roberts has it, “manipulates” and “disrupts” iambic pentameter subversively to undermine supposedly high cultural forms such as iambic pentameter (218).4 However, rather than pitting inherited verse forms against forms of speech, Harrison mobilizes those poetic forms to orchestrate different versions of speech with and against each other. Such arrangements produce rhythmic, tonal, and aural effects that locate working-­class vernacular squarely in poetic tradition, all the while putting different kinds of speech into working relationships that enact disruptions stirred by class division. Traditional forms, then, both generate and manage his poems’ disruptive effects. In what follows, I focus first on Harrison’s ongoing sequence of over seventy sixteen-line “sonnets,” The School of Eloquence (1978), chiefly “The Rhubarbarians” and “On Not Being Milton,” to demonstrate how Harrison’s scenes of verbal turbulence created by northern English working-­class dialect function as allegories of social division, while the traditional forms of poetry order that turbulence, effectively redressing the deleterious conditions portrayed.5 I then turn to earlier poems from Harrison’s first collection, The Loiners (1970), specifically his poem “The White Queen,” to examine Harrison’s employment of a colloquial version of English—not explicitly dialectic like the Eloquence poems but informal, conversational speech—at the beginning of his career that conveys ironically in a casual, relaxed parlance the distortions caused by colonialism and racism, and that portrays human characters both enduring, reinforcing, and executing those distortions. Finally, I’ll turn to Harrison’s most well-­ known poem, “v.,” from 1985, which generates its 112 iambic pentameter rhyming quatrains with a convolving mixture of standard English, Leeds dialect, and an assortment of repelling epithets and obscenities. I show how the poem confronts classism and racism by depicting in traditional poetic form the linguistic degradations caused by those intersecting forces, while the poem’s speaker argues with himself about what kind of language his poetry should employ. I examine, that is, the essentially sociopolitical reverberations generated in these poems when degraded or even just informal registers of speech collaborate with poetic form.

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Harrison’s Eloquence In Harrison’s archive is a typed draft of “The Rhubarbarians” with a handwritten note at the bottom of the page, a transcription of remarks made by Louis Althusser about the political dimensions of speech. The typed poem coupled with the comment in Harrison’s own hand serves as a kind of visual figure for Harrison’s central aesthetic method (see Fig. 4.1). The transcribed notation states, “In political, ideological, and philosophical struggle words are also either weapons and explosives or tranquillizers and poisons. The whole class struggle can, at times, be encapsulated in the battle for one word against another. Certain words fight like enemies” (“Typescript Draft”; Althusser 8).6 Indeed, in The School of Eloquence, a broad variety of speech forms stacked against each other creates a disorderly linguistic environment. The first part of “The Rhubarbarians” (the second numbered poem in the Eloquence sequence) pits a mob of workers against a clothing mill owner and his minions, while in the second part the poet ruminates on his work as a translator and his uneasy relationship with his father. The poem begins by addressing a royal debt collector, a “remembrancer,” during an early nineteenth-century workers’ uprising in north England. It describes for the remembrancer the workers’ collective language, their “rebarbative” guttural shouts or “glottals” that transform into a “tribune’s speech,” gaining defiant coherence and purpose (123–24). The rhymes mostly alternate throughout, with some variance, as in the last stanza of the first section, composed of two couplets that consider whether the material in the stanzas before it—namely, the apparently indecipherable language of a mob of workers, the guttural tribune’s speech in those previous four stanzas—is appropriate for poetry: It wasn’t poetry though. Nay, wiseowl Leeds pro rege et lege schools, nobody needs your drills and chanting to parrot right the tusky-tusky of the pikes that night. (CP 123)7

This last stanza reveals that in school the speaker was taught that the material in the earlier stanzas cannot, in fact, make poetry. The “Nay” in the first line of the fourth stanza may sound like this negative interjection is affirming the assertion it follows—as if the line were saying, “It wasn’t poetry. No, wise official schools, it wasn’t”—however, we are in fact hearing not a “disaffected heckler crying out against the mystification of art”

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Fig. 4.1  Tony Harrison’s Notebooks in the Tony Harrison Archive (1953–2009), University of Leeds

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but, rather, a poet who is crying out against rigid precepts. Harrison’s resounding “Nay” signifies not compliance with the sentiment in the preceding sentence but resistance to a view of poetry propagated by the “wiseowl Leeds pro rege et lege schools.” Leeds, Harrison’s hometown, has as the Latin motto of its coat of arms (which includes three owls) pro rege et lege, meaning “For King and Law,” and “Nay” is addressed directly to the very entity—the Leeds school system—that enforces such dubious lessons in poetic suitability. The material in the previous stanzas is poetry, the poet tells the wiseowl Leeds schools, and further, to make poetry, “nobody needs/your drills and chanting.” In fact, the sanctioned conventions of poems presumably taught during “drills and chanting” (how they should sound, their subject matter, their diction) can themselves be insufficient to render the histories of those who have been maligned and dispossessed, who have been pushed to the edges of society—like the rhubarbarians. For Harrison, marginalized histories call for the very language of the marginalized, operating either in the traditional or free forms of poetry. In “The Rhubarbarians,” the appropriate poetic word to “parrot right” is “tusky”—a north England colloquialism for rhubarb, a plant that proliferates in northern English working-class regions like Leeds and is distributed from there to the rest of the United Kingdom, just as the repeated colloquialism is distributed from Leeds via the poem.8 The word, then, both “parrots” the sound of steel pikes clashing against each other (or being sharpened) during the workers’ uprising the poem depicts and signifies the regional speech of the embattled mob. Sounding out the battle, describing and reproducing local speech, and connecting that speech explicitly to the poem’s positioning of workers against business owners, the line “the tusky-tusky of the pikes that night,” this poem insists, is “poetry.” To do all this with the poetic conventions of alliteration (“Nay,” “nobody,” “needs,” “night”), enjambment (“Leeds//pro rege et lege schools,” “nobody needs//your drills”), and full rhymes (“Leeds” and “needs,” “right” and “night”) indicates that what the poem questions is not the formal methods it relies on but conventional prescripts about the diction expected to constitute those forms. A regional word like “tusky” for a crop that flourishes in a working-class region is reframed as a poetic word with the capacity to communicate a region’s history. In this way, what was conventionally considered barbaric emerges as “rhubarbaric,” the regional language of the rhubarbarians proliferating poetry out of the supposedly unpoetic.9 Even before the poet targets the Leeds education system explicitly, the previous stanzas have already made the argument about what poetry might be. The rhyming, rhythmic quatrains evoke the obscure history of a

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calamitous, early nineteenth-century working-class resistance by workers known as Luddites, who violently protested the use of new industrial machinery that would replace people in jobs. The language of the poem is likewise calamitous, the stanzas dense and disorienting with their glugging and popping utterances, blazing fires, obscure regional vocabulary and figures (“gaffers’ blackleg Boswells,” “Horsfall of Ottiwells”), and a mob—“t’mob,” in the poet’s Leeds accent—that shouts “silence.” And this density appears all but decontextualized, prepared for only by some lines from the previous poem, “On Not Being Milton,” likening the regional Leeds accent to a Luddite destroying a stocking frame: the accent’s stresses produce “a forged music on the frames of Art,/the looms of owned language smashed apart!” (122). Language in “The Rhubarbarians” thus itself seems “smashed apart,” meaning appearing to have been subordinated to pure sound. What we hear in “The Rhubarbarians” is a disruption of sound and sense. This occurs because different forms of language are operating at the same time. But while in “The Rhubarbarians” Harrison arranges different forms of language in ways that unsettle a customary relation between sound and sense, that relation nonetheless persists in, for example, the poem’s reliance on onomatopoeia: “glottals glugged like poured pop” in the first stanza refers to the mob’s voluble but incomprehensible utterances; the alliterative cr in “crossing the crackle as the hayricks blaze” mimics the crackling of fire; the sibilance generated in the fourth stanza by the lines “What t’mob …/shouted to soldier, scab and sentinel/‘s silence, parries and hush on whistling hills” evokes the sound of wind. Regionalisms arise from the natural world as shifting shadows and moonlight play “knurr and spell,” an old English game. And colloquial registers align the poet’s language with the language of the people in the poem: “if the bugger could/‘d’ve liked to”; “what t’mob said. …/‘s silence.” At the same time, mixing registers produces a linguistic disturbance, a field of tumultuous linguistic activity akin to that produced by class divisions. Like language, the poetic structure of “The Rhubarbarians” stirs tumult. It also orders it. Quatrains, pentameter lines, rhymes, and half rhymes constitute an organizing scaffold, the first quatrain presenting the mob’s speech, the second Horsfall’s quoted language, and the third pitting them against each other. While the third stanza stages a confrontation, its rhymes bind things, both in the rhymes of alternate lines (“mills”/“hills,” “sentinel”/“spell”) and in the near rhymes of consecutive lines (“mills”/“sentinel,” “hills”/“spell”). Moreover, the poem is

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framed by compound locutions coined by doubling colloquial terms: “rhubarb-rhubarb” and “tusky-tusky.” As we have seen, “tusky” is a regional term for a Leeds plant, the proper name of which is “rhubarb,” and the local term here locates the poet within his local community, especially linking him to his father, who in the poem’s second section uses local idioms. But “rhubarb” has other important functions in the poem. Uttered in the theater by extras when they want to simulate background conversations, the word suggests the social class of the mob (they are merely extras) and the devaluing of their language (their simulated speech making sound without sense). At the same time, “rhubarb” in the poem signifies more than “indescribable crowd noises.” After all, each “rebarbative syllable” of the “mob rhubarb-rhubarb” is raised “to a tribune’s speech” in resistance to the poem’s two oppressive presences, a “remembrancer,” or royal debt collector, and Horsfall of Ottiwells. In fact, the poem pits the “mob rhubarb-­ rhubarb” and “tusky-tusky”—signifying those “indescribable crowd noises,” the rhubarbarians’ clashing pikes, and the Leeds plant— against the only quoted speech in the poem, Horsfall of Ottiwells’s boast that he wished to “ride/up to my saddle-girths in Luddite blood.”10 It is Horsfall’s language in the second stanza, not the mob’s, that is barbaric. Harrison, then, employs inherited verse forms to put different kinds of speech in working but disruptive relationships. In his own understanding of that process the tension in his poems derives not from poetic form conflicting with local speech but from the interplay of what Basil Bernstein calls “restricted” and “elaborate” speech codes: “I’m building … potential division into the actual writing,” Harrison says, “conscious as I am of what are called the ‘restricted’ and the ‘elaborate’ codes. I play one form of articulation off against the other” (Haffenden 232). Such codes, as Bernstein describes them, are socially determined: they “are generated by particular forms of social relationships. They do not necessarily develop as a result of the speaker’s innate intelligence. The level at which a speaker operates a particular code may well be a function of … native ability, but the orientation is entirely a matter of the sociological constraints acting upon the speaker” (58). For Bernstein, “restrictive codes” apply to tight-­ knit, relegated communities, where, because the language code there is closely shared, it is at once more predictable and less redundant than “elaborated codes”; since the listener shares the code, the language functions with fewer words and syntactic variation. In contrast, “elaborated codes” require “the speaker to elaborate verbally and to make explicit” a “discrete intent” because the code is “person rather than status oriented”

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(63). In other words, speaking in “elaborated codes” implies a higher social status, communication directed by individual intent rather than by one’s location in the social structure. Operating within “restricted codes,” the speaker’s individual intent is limited by a language that “shares … general social characteristics” (62). For Harrison, though, the “restricted” forms of speech, what he calls “the mother tongue, the early speech,” represent “the most formative linguistic part of your life” while verse form is for him a “life-support system,” “associated with the heartbeat, with the sexual instinct, with all those physical rhythms” (Haffenden 232; 236). Poetic form and regional speech in Harrison are thus related intrinsically, not ironically. Still, it’s not entirely surprising that poetic form in The School of Eloquence could be construed as representative of oppressive culture. “On Not Being Milton,” the first numbered poem in the series, suggests as much. Linguistic activity there is as unsettling as it is in the first few stanzas of “The Rhubarbarians.” This poem describes releasing what it calls “The stutter of the scold”—that last word denoting “a person (esp. a woman) of ribald speech” but also suggesting “skald,” an archaic Scandinavian word for poet—from the “branks” (“iron framework” used to muzzle scolds as punishment) of upper-class “condescension” in a “lumpen” huddle of “glottals” and “morphemes” (suggesting “lumpy” and an abbreviation of lumpenproletariat, a term to deride the working classes as “boorish, stupid, [and] unenlightened”) (122). Those loosened syllables of regional speech function as an iron hammer pounding on “the frames of Art, the looms of owned language.” “The central tension” of this sixteen-line sonnet, Luke Spencer writes, “is that between the ‘Ludding’ impulse to smash the ‘frames of Art’ and the fact—so blatantly foregrounded—that the ‘looms of … language’ are now ‘owned’ as much by Harrison himself as by the ruling class,” an ownership evinced by the poem’s form (68). Harrison’s “dizzying display of [linguistic] ingenuity,” Spencer says, collides with the smashing of “Art” the poem envisions. By making art of traditional form, that is, Harrison is making the very kind of machine the poem wants to dismantle. However, working-class dialect in the poem doesn’t necessarily disassemble the poem’s own structure, nor does the poem definitively equate “looms of owned language” with form itself. If, as Cécile Marshall suggests, writing in traditional forms was Harrison’s “way of proving that a poet from working-class origins can excel as much as anybody else in an art form that was presented as the exclusive ‘speech of kings’ when he was at

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the elitist Leeds Grammar School” (136), we might also see how his traditional verse form explores how working-class speech makes its own music within those forms, and that it is such music that, like a hammer, smashes frames of “Art” with a capital A, art that has been sanctioned by “the grandees of aesthetics.”11 In that sense, “On Not Being Milton” doesn’t dispute its own sonnet-like form but, rather, works by means of that form to reveal how dictates about the proper diction for poetry are exclusionary and oppressive. Likewise, its title doesn’t correlate Milton and the English poetic tradition with oppression but, rather, conjures what Thomas Gray in “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” calls the “mute inglorious Milton”—a talented poet without the opportunities that Milton had (64). The poem may be indicating its own destruction in the first quatrain, proclaiming that “these sixteen lines” have been “read and committed to the flames,” but, as Sandie Byrne notes, by its ongoing existence, the poem itself “belies” this opening claim (H, v. & O 56). Where Spencer sees the poem as “self-defeating,” we might thus see its traditional poetic form as a way to compare vernacular accents in poetry to the impact of a “cast iron Enoch” (a “sledgehammer used by the Luddites,” Harrison’s note tells us), to question the very concept of “owned language” (and owned poetic form) and to draw out the linguistic divisions inherent in classist ideas about ownership and art (Spencer 68). In the second part of “The Rhubarbarians,” Harrison continues to refute standard notions about “owned language,” mobilizing the meanings of “rhubarb” that signified speech in the first section as background noises, nonsense, and heated argument. In the second section, local language is used for more refined purposes; it takes us from the Luddite revolt and Harrison’s grammar school to—as the poem’s parenthetical subtitle, “On translating Smetana’s Prodaná Nevesta for the Metropolitan Opera, New  York,” indicates—his career as a professional librettist. Harrison despairs that the difficult work of retaining clarity when translating languages for operas has the effect of making his production as incomprehensible as the “rhubarb-rhubarb” that extras mutter during performances. Harrison admits that despite his efforts to retain “the least nuance” in the “Finale of ACT II,” the “syllables run to rhubarb just the same” (124). In other words, all language has  the capacity to elude clarity: local speech, standard English, translations for operas; it can all “run to rhubarb.” The poet’s job is to “resist/blurring the clarity,” to save nuances from being “missed.” That nuance that Harrison stumbles on here is, the

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poem tells us, the word “hanba,” Czech for shame. The next stanza reveals the poet-speaker’s own shame that the preceding stanza’s obscure references to opera, the Czech  word, perhaps even the use of “rhubarb” to represent jumbled speech would in fact “blur the clarity” for an uneducated, working-class reader like his father, whom Harrison apologizes to for the previous stanza’s abstruseness: “Sorry, dad, you won’t get that quatrain,” he says, and then exclaims in a parenthetical aside that he’d “like to be the poet my father reads!” He also designates his father as a chief poetic influence, marking the time his father told him that “most of England’s rhubarb came from Leeds” as elemental in his development as a poet. In a sense, “The Rhubarbarians,” and The School of Eloquence sequence as a whole, is “all from” Harrison’s father. For his father’s remarks on the train about rhubarb and Leeds do more to activate his poetic imagination than the “drills and chanting” he learned at Leeds pro rege et lege schools. In fact, the Eloquence series charts the development of the poet from a young student learning his place in British society to the adult, erudite poet who sets his home speech in traditional verse forms in part to reconcile his relationship with his father. That relationship requires resolution because it has been fractured by class distinctions: the son’s education and his artistic vocation and successes threaten to divide father and son because they lift the son out of their formerly shared social sphere. And setting local speech to traditional verse forms does not bring the son back into that strata but enacts the disarray that social division creates and ultimately implies the erasure of such social divides. Harrison apostrophizes his father because he wants to honor him for elucidating the connection between his communal origins and poetry. It is not incidental that the task of translating the word hanba into English facilitates this address. The poet-speaker acknowledges not just that his father is a source for his poetry but that it is precisely issues of clarity that prevent his father from reading his poetry. Clarity is what the poet struggles to achieve; he doesn’t want to lose any subtleties in his translation but perceives his English words losing their original linguistic sense. The central anxiety in “The Rhubarbarians,” then, is not between poetic form and language but how to make art distinct enough to enact the disturbances caused by hierarchical social organization and honor one’s community when that community is relegated to the lower rungs of class structure. Harrison wants a poetry that will challenge oppressive systems of stratification and that will address those located at the bottom of those hierarchies.

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The word “rhubarb” in the poem’s second section furnishes the poet with an instrument both to illustrate the disruptions of economic disparity and to ennoble his disparaged community. Again, the transformed word in the poem’s first section is “tusky,” the colloquialism for the Leeds vegetable. Its repetition “parrot[s]” a local history that the poet has been taught is improper material for poetry. In other words, the poem makes poetry out of supposedly unpoetic events by putting local language to rhythm, rhyme, and meter. Similarly, the second part of “The Rhubarbarians” transforms the word “rhubarb” by infusing it with a multitude of complex semantic and sonic functions (consider, for instance, the alliteration in “each/rebarbative syllable, remembrancer, raise/‘mob’ rhubarb-rhubarb/ to a tribune’s speech”). The word at once denotes the vegetable and communicates by way of its theatrical use to mime background conversations that all language risks evading its own subtleties: all language “runs to rhubarb.” The poet believes it is his job to preserve the nuances of language in the face of obfuscation, and the word “rhubarb” is a tool for upholding the nuanced connection between location and poetry. Indeed, the word for the local vegetable that also indicates the collective speech of the “rhubarbarians,” the poet’s local community, becomes by the end of the poem an adjective to modify the various elements of an opera that he has translated and conducted: Crotchets and quavers, rhubarb silhouettes, dark-shy sea-horse heads through waves of dung! Rhubarb arias, duets, quartets soar to precision from our common tongue. (124)

To use Harrison’s terms, one “form of articulation” here is musical art and its technical language: “crotchets and quavers” refer to the varying lengths of notes that comprise the songs—the “arias, duets, quartets”—of opera. Another form of articulation in the stanza is local speech: the word “rhubarb” designates the poet’s Leeds background by denoting its main crop and connoting the language of his working-class community, the “mob rhubarb-rhubarb” of the first section that crossed “the crackle as the hayricks blaze[d]” in revolt. The word “Rhubarb” has gone from indicating the incomprehensible sounds of a mob’s outcries during a workers’ revolution to conveying the sonic and visual activity that occurs on an opera stage during a performance: the “silhouettes” are “rhubarb silhouettes”; the “arias, duets, and quartets” are “Rhubarb arias, duets, and quartets.”

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Rhubarb, with its large leaves and long stalks that grow in dense fields, renders the shadows of performers on a dimly lit stage, the shapely aural contours of the music, and even the rows of audience members in the darkened theater (“dark-shy sea-horse heads through waves of dung!” the poet exclaims as if surprised by his own comparison of the crowded auditorium to a ground of manure). While “Rhubarb” and “barbarian” combine to create the term “rhubarbarian,” thus equating the local vegetable with the primitive in the first section, the second section’s play on that Harrisonian term, “Rhubarb arias,” equates the local not with the uncivilized but, on the contrary, with art that is soaring, precise, and generated from a “common tongue.” Harrison puts the word for the common vegetable to uncommon use to play what Bernstein calls the restrictive and elaborated codes of language against each other. If restrictive codes are the linguistic outcome of social constraints, as Bernstein tells us they are, then the poet releases that code from its shackles by utilizing what would be categorized as elements of a restrictive language in a particularly unrestrictive fashion: the particular meaning of “tusky” is restricted to Leeds, but the repetition of t and k that sounds out the clashing pikes in a battle creates an effect available to any ear. Likewise, that vegetable’s standard referent “rhubarb” is both employed to mimic indecipherable guttural chatter and to describe an opera. According to Bernstein, syntax, not vocabulary, determines whether or not a code is restricted or elaborated: These speech systems or linguistic codes are not defined in terms of vocabulary. If it is difficult to predict the syntactic options or alternatives a speaker uses to organize his meanings over a representative range of speech, this system of speech will be called an elaborated code. In the case of an elaborated code, the speaker will select from a wide range of syntactic alternatives and so it will not be easy to make an accurate assessment of the organizing elements he uses at any one time. However, with a restricted code, the range of alternatives, syntactic alternatives, is considerably reduced and so it is much more likely that prediction is possible. In the case of a restricted code, the vocabulary will be drawn from a narrow range but this in itself is no indication that the code is a restricted code. (57)

Words by themselves, then, do not govern which category classifies a particular form of speech. That depends on how the words are used in sentences. “Tusky” is an idiomatic alternative for “rhubarb” used by Harrison’s working-class community: in the context of their speech, it

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would be a syntactical element of a restricted code (in fact, it’s so “restricted” that Harrison includes at the bottom of the poem a note explaining what it means in Leeds). In the poem, however, the word is used syntactically “to parrot right … the pikes that night.” It is employed, in other words, unpredictably and “elaborately” to sound out the battle between the workers and their employers even though restricted codes are meant to be “more predictable and less redundant” than elaborated codes. Similar to this elaborated use of “tusky” is the use of the word “rhubarb” in the poem’s second section. At the beginning of the poem’s first section, the word signifies the speech of a mob—a speech that would fall into Bernstein’s restricted code because it is not immediately available to those outside of the social group that speaks it. And yet by the end of the poem, the word for the vegetable pertains to an opera. Its use in the poem’s last stanzas is entirely unpredictable—“rhubarb” conveys notes, movements on a stage, songs, and a crowd’s applause—and the word is repeated (again, not a facet of a restricted code because restricted codes are not “redundant,” Bernstein says) seven times throughout the poem. Harrison makes these uses of “tusky” and “rhubarb,” as Bernstein has it, “person rather than status-oriented” (63). “Rhubarb” connects not just the poet to his father but to the poet’s working-class upbringing to poetry: the son’s poems come “all from [his father] once saying … /how … rhubarb came from Leeds.” Little wonder, then, that the “uke” that Harrison inherits from his father in the concluding stanza metamorphoses into a rhubarb stalk, what Harrison calls “mi little stick of Leeds” that he employs symbolically to conduct his orchestra during the opera. The uke and “mi little stick” refer back to the second section’s epigraph, lyrics from a George Formby song, a popular comic singer-­ songwriter in England who entertained viewers and listeners with snappy rhymes set to ukulele music and who epitomizes the kind of “poet” Harrison’s father would have paid attention to.12 But the figure of Formby doesn’t stand between the poet and his father; rather, the poet utilizes Formby’s ditty to connect himself to his father. The epigraph tells of how a “Band Conductor” “lost his baton” and how Formby “jumped in his place and conducted the band/With mi little stick of Blackpool Rock.” Blackpool is a seaside town traditionally frequented by the mostly working-class residents of northern England. Harrison associates Formby’s ukulele, his “little stick of Blackpool rock,” with his father’s own ukulele and then connects it to himself: the “uke” in the attic that “once” belonged to his father has been passed on to Harrison. Further, just as Formby’s “little

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stick” was made from local material, so is Harrison’s: “mi little stick of Leeds grown tusky,” he says about his instrument, a transformation that produces applause or “galas of rhubarbs” from the crowd at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Instilled, then, in Harrison’s conducting of the opera (and his conducting of the poem) are his own local influences, anxieties, and attachments, and he wishes his father could hear the “mob” sound of “rhubarb” in the response of the affluent audience at the Metropolitan Opera house. The clapping of their “palms” correlates figuratively to the poet’s “little stick”: they join their literal “palms,” but the word “palm” also suggests a “tusky,” earthen quality. The poem not only employs local language to enact the disarray of social divisions and to twist restricted and elaborated linguistic codes but to depict the “MET-set” honoring a “Loiner,” a term for residents of Leeds (“Loiner” OED).13 In this moment, familial relations have been reconciled, and class divisions have been figuratively dissolved.

Harrison’s Colloquial Loiners, Miltons, and Satyrs Along with “rhubarb” and “tusky,” “Loiner” is another important local word for Harrison. He used it to title his first book-length collection of poems, The Loiners (1970).14 The word refers to people from Harrison’s hometown and signifies, according to him, not just “citizens of Leeds, [but] citizens who bear their loins through the terrors of life, ‘loners’” (“Dr. Agrippa” 34). For instance, the opening poem elegizes Thomas Campey, an impoverished bookseller afflicted with tabes dorsalis, a degenerative spinal condition caused by untreated syphilis that is exacerbated by Campey lugging heavy books around Leeds to sell (15–16). The poem connects Campey’s deterioration not to the activity that would have led to the contraction of a sexually transmitted disease but to a life in which “huge, black tome[s]” are both a source of survival and deprivation. These large books cause pain to Campey because they place additional strain on his already compromised “back,/Squeezed lungs and damaged heart.” But they are not just physically debilitating; they represent the formal education to which a Loiner like Campey hasn’t had sufficient access. Further, as Carol Rutter explains, they indicate societal collapse: “The books on his handcart are histories of civilisation’s terminal decline [Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Mommsen’s The History of Rome, and Spengler’s The Decline of the West]. Their gilt spines are straight, but they’re breaking Campey’s spine: he too is in terminal decline” (126). The spines of the books may or may not be “straight,” but they are gilded and

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cherished by Campey, and as such they stand in contrast to what the poem observes as the dilapidated houses of Leeds and Campey’s ratty clothing, secondhand bibles, and damaged pottery. And yet even as Campey reveres his books, there is a tacit indifference about them: that they Latinize the name of the disorder they contribute to implies a certain impersonal disconnection between the content of the volumes and Campey. The poem suggests that what eventually kills Campey is not simply the poor bookseller’s physical condition but the tomes he sells to make a living and the restricted opportunities they represent in a world of “demolished” homes, “old clothing,” “used Lectern bibles,” and “cracked Copeland Spode.”15 The Loiners does not reproduce Leeds dialect as bluntly or extensively as the Eloquence series even though the bulk of the poems portray characters from that city such as Campey who are buckling under the weight of class oppression.16 Still, his earlier poems connect directly to his later concerns with local language in that speech is, like sexuality and bodily health, an elemental, visceral factor of human experience and of Harrison’s raw material. Indeed, Harrison was always probing the effects of social division on the most basic levels of personhood. In The Loiners’ longest poem, “The White Queen,” a distinctly colloquial mode combined with more formal pitches of speech was already emerging for Harrison as a strategy for depicting the consequences of social division on his characters. Although a Loiner is a person from Leeds, “The White Queen” is not set in England.17 Rather, the sequence’s characters are expats from northern England who reside in colonial Africa at the moment Britain is releasing its imperial grip there.18 Harrison, who moved to Nigeria in 1962 to be a lecturer at Ahmadu Bello University, has spoken about how living in Africa allowed him to gain an especially clear view of class inequalities back home and, more specifically, to focus on those disparities as they unfolded within the British education system: “What Africa did for me was literally to put in perspective my own education: it’s one of the reasons why The School of Eloquence begins with a poem to Africans. I found the drama of my own education dramatically posed in black and white: people coming from illiterate backgrounds and reading about Wordsworth’s daffodils because it was set in their exam papers, when they didn’t know what a fucking daffodil was” (Interview with Haffenden 236). Harrison here isn’t objecting to Wordsworth’s daffodils per se but to assumptions that daffodils are universal images that everyone would be familiar with. His time in Africa revealed to him the inadequacy of such assumptions: racism and colonialism have the effect of making discrepancies that might be

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inconspicuous to some within the borders of England particularly salient. Loiners might be more familiar with daffodils than Africans would be, but rhubarb and tusky would more aptly convey the experience of a Loiner than daffodils would just as Nigeria would have its own poetic corollaries. The School of Eloquence poem for Africans that Harrison cites above is “On Not Being Milton” referred to earlier in this chapter. Its epigraph explains that it is “for Sergio Vieira & Armando Guebuza,” poets and leaders of FRELIMO, the Marxist party in Mozambique where Harrison lived for four months in 1971 (Rylance 120). The poem’s first stanza announces the poetic objective of the entire sequence as a return to origins: Read and committed to the flames, I call these sixteen lines that go back to my roots my Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, my growing black enough to fit my boots. (122)

These lines allude to another political figure from a colonized land, Martinican poet, activist, and parliamentarian Aimé Césaire. The French phrase in the third line is the title of Césaire’s landmark 1947 book-length poem, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. In that poem, Césaire put forth his famous concept of Négritude, which evolved into a formidable Marxist-influenced literary movement of Black French-speaking writers who rejected European colonialism and sought to reconnect with Africa.19 In Harrison’s poem, he declares himself “Read and committed to the flames” of the Luddite-like linguistic battle in the next stanza where his local accent—“Each. … Leeds stress”—makes a new poetic music to counter prescriptions that dictate what “Art” should sound like. He acclaims the “mute” voices of the uneducated and the low-paid: “Three cheers for mute ingloriousness!//Articulation is the tongue-tide’s fighting,” announcing defiantly that he has become metaphorically “black” enough in the sense of Negritude—self-identified with his coal-mining community, connected to his working-class ancestry—to fit his boots before proceeding to smash “the frames of Art/the looms of owned language.”20 Harrison perceives in racism and colonialism a magnification of other forms of oppression. He is inspired by Négritude, particularly its conviction that origins and heritage can resist oppressive forces: when he aligns himself with the Luddites, he is also reaching back to his historical

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roots to fight the organizational structures that demean his community. “Articulation” of the supposedly inarticulate is Harrison’s weapon in this fight; it means to him “the power over words,” and its “supreme form …, the highest eloquence” is “poetry” (“Facing Up” 437). He makes a point of identifying with Gray’s imagined “mute inglorious Milton” rather than with the real Milton because his is a literary tradition that speaks on behalf of the tongue-tied. In fact, the colonial situation in Africa provoked Harrison to examine his own literary education against the deprecation of his community: There was an almost surrealistic perversity about ‘O’ Level questions, which were set by a board in England for African students. That kind of dichotomy [in Africa] made me think about my own education and dramatise it, and find some of the polarities through that dramatization. [Twentieth-Century British writer] Harold Acton talked about external and internal colonialism, and I found in the history of colonial Africa a very broad, dramatic portrayal of some of the things that had happened to me. (Interview with Haffenden 236)

In other words, Harrison observed in colonial Africa a paradigm of social inequality that revealed similar kinds of inequalities back in England that he had been personally subjected to. In The Loiners, the British colonies serve as the ground upon which to demonstrate the distortions on internal experience that constraining external structures cause. That imperialized ground and the racism it brings to the surface also turn expat Loiners into grotesque versions of themselves—“Satyrae,” as the first poem in “The White Queen” series is titled—all too willing to rehearse their own tastes for power and domination. The ground for “The White Queen” is not the “internal colony” of Leeds but an “external colony” in Africa. It is less, as Robert Pinsky says about poetry in general, “the ground where the centaur walks” but the ground where the satyr walks. Pinsky borrows from Ezra Pound here to communicate the “bodily and conceptual” qualities of poems (422). Pound compared poetry to a centaur in order to illustrate its engagement with both mental and physical instincts: “Poetry is a centaur. The thinking word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties” (52).21 The satyr figure is, like the centaur, a composite of human and animal. But whereas the centaur suggests a stark division between reason and instinct (the figure is split in half: man from the waist up, horse from the waist down), the satyr is a conflation of

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wildness and refinement (a human body with horse- or goat-like ears, tail, and, often, phallus): it is, as Marianne McDonald explains, “a type of mediating figure between the citizen and one who lives outside the city’s limits, man and monster” (472).22 Harrison presents his own versions of satyrs in “The White Queen” (23–40).23 Its first part, “Satyrae,” is a sequence of five rhyming iambic pentameter poems in verse paragraphs of varying lengths (23–29). The first three poems are dramatic monologues spoken by the white queen, a middle-aged, British gay man living in colonial Africa who drinks too much and spends much of his time soliciting young African males for sex, while the last two poems portray other troubled expatriates in the third person. The relocation of these Loiners from Leeds to Africa has the effect of transforming them into “Satyrae,” distorted versions of themselves. They adapt and act on a kind of paradoxical power that their status as white Britons affords them. In the external colony, non-normative sexual impulses that are suppressed in the internal colony may seem freer for exploration than they are at home, but they are also especially damaging, isolating, and dangerous.24 For instance, punishment for homosexuality in England, the white queen explains, is to be “locked away or trussed/Like a squealing piglet”; in contrast, when decolonization begins in Africa, a loudspeaker announces “all in the same breath” a “proclamation” that the punishment for “Homosexuality” is the same as it is for “murder, looting,” and “rape”—“death, death!” (26). And yet even as Harrison’s “Satyrae” are exaggeratedly infatuated with sex and drink excessively in this centrifugal environment that at once invites and condemns deviation from societal norms, they are not only bestial caricatures: they have characteristics we might deem animalistic because they mostly incline toward instinct and appetite, but they are human. In other words, he emphasizes their ambiguity. This emphasis is achieved by colloquial, conversational English, a more generalized version of the local Leeds dialect found in the Eloquence series. These colloquial registers present these grotesque satyr-like characters as Loiners displaced in the colonies where their own racism is on full display in their direct, natural, uncomplicated speech even as they suffer indignities toward their own identities. “The White Queen” opens with a declamatory tone that introduces its speaker as a somewhat unlikely satyr. He is, he exclaims in the opening line, a “Professor! Poet! Provincial Dadaist!” These are not exactly the “culturally outcast” identifications we would expect from a satyr, but in the rest of the first stanza the portrait becomes more routinely satyr-like;

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he is also “Pathic, pathetic, half-blind and half-pissed,” “A Corydon,/Past fifty, fat,” with “sallow cheek” whose “young Novello sheen” is now “matt and puffed,” a “radiant white queen” who buys his “courtiers.” If this English “queen” in colonial Africa suggests the colonizing Queen of England’s “court” and “courtiers,” it is an especially debased royalty.25 And yet the white queen is not only a hideous representation of English colonialism but a conflicted, anxious individual. He is a professor and poet, and also “pathetic” and “Pathic.” Not only horrific and cartoonish, he is a person who views himself with a mixture of lofty allusions, exasperated acknowledgment that his best years are behind him, and self-disgust. That the white queen labels himself “Pathic,” the “passive partner in homosexual anal intercourse,” and describes his usual state of mind as “half-pissed” indicate that he has internalized society’s classification of homosexuality as a pathology and that he seeks anesthetization from this crippling view of himself in the oblivion of alcohol. But he also describes himself with cultivated terms, and often with a dash of sardonic self-­ deprecation. He is a Corydon, the shepherd in Virgil’s Eclogues who is in love with a young enslaved boy; he used to resemble Ivor Novello, the Welsh composer and actor popular for his handsomeness; and he refers to himself as “a radiant white queen” because he regards himself with mordant disdain (his radiance does not come from his beauty but his ruddy complexion; he holds court drunkenly in gay bars). Indeed, this Corydon is “Past fifty” and “fat”; his former “Novello” face is bloated from excessive drinking; and he dons an undignified “sub-Saharan scrub” in his court of barrooms where he pays “courtiers” for sex. This is a psychological portrait of a man whose distortions (a Corydon, but fat and old; a puffed Novello; a radiant queen in a scrub) reveal a shattered self-perception resulting from social conventions that categorize homosexuality as a committable mental illness if not a capital offense. He fends off this sanctioned assault on his personhood with prostitution, booze, erudition, and wit, and with racist fetishizations of other persons. Indeed, rather than simply a caricature, the white queen is a grotesque and ambiguous character. Social norms about sexuality render him damaged and disfigured, “half-blind” and “matt and puffed,” but he is also repugnantly defiant. In fact, he is initially unapologetic about his sexual desires even as they have warped into obsessions for the young African males he pays to have sex with. He appears in the conversational ease of his language to be not at all disturbed by what that fetish might reveal about his racism or his internalized homophobia:

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  early all year round I go to town And grub about for love. I sometimes cruise For boys the blackness of a two-day bruise, …................................................................................... I hang about The Moonshine and West End, Begging for pure sex, one unembarrassed friend To share my boredom and my bed—one masta want One boy—one boy for bed. (23)

This “queen” may be lonely and desperate, but he is also unabashed in his penchant for playing out racist power roles in bed. He wants “unembarrassed” sex partners who will be equally uninhibited in enacting his fantasies in which he will assume the role of the older white “masta” dominating a younger Black “boy” whose Blackness he compares to “a two-day bruise.” That flagrant racism leads inevitably to awkward, pathetic drunken encounters:              like an elephant That bungles with its trunk about its cage, I make my half-sloshed entrances and rage Like any ‘normal’ lover when I come Before I’ve managed it. Then his thin bum That did seem beautiful will seem obscene; I’m conscious of the void, the Vaseline, Pour shillings in his hands and send him back With the driver, ugly, frightened, black, Black, black. (23–24)

The scene he describes is not an isolated incident but a pattern of behavior: he makes not one but many “half-sloshed entrances,” and he speaks in the future tense because habitual experience allows him to anticipate the consequences of his behavior. But his obsession prohibits him from putting an end to the satyric sexual performances in which his phallus is an encaged elephant’s trunk he “bungles” with, and the whole sexual exchange is reduced to “the void,” “Vaseline,” and “shillings.” Indeed, the white queen’s behavior is a monstrous display of drunkenness, racism, and psychological conflict in the cadences of a moderate, informal colloquial English. After sex, he is repulsed by what he so assertively sought: the male body seems to him “beautiful” before the act but is “obscene” after it; when his young partners leave, they are no longer

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“unembarrassed” but “ugly” and “frightened.” Finally, when he acknowledges his fixation on race, the line break emphasizes his compulsiveness: “black,/Black, black,” he says, the repetition across lines accentuating his preoccupation not just with sex but with the race of those he wants to have sex with and dominate. The white queen understands that his “natural” desires are misshaped by an ensnaring social structure in which power is distributed discriminately. He has social power over the Black boys he solicits (he is “fat”; they are “ill-fed”), but it is a power enervated by society’s denunciation of his homosexuality; his response is to project it in its diminished form onto sexual relationships with the Black boys who are below him in the racist hierarchy of the colony. He reduces himself to “some fat queen” and can’t separate the young males he’s attracted to from their race: “some … blackboy,” he labels his conquests. But he also understands the social system’s operations and is aware of his location within that system. He acknowledges that he is caught in a structure that acculturates acts of violence like rape as “natural,” even when they are legally “wrong,” while homosexuality is perpetually maligned as “unclean,” and especially so when it is between an “ill-fed blackboy and fat [white] queen.” In other words, his is a world in which racism and sexual violence are condoned while love between same-sex partners is condemned. That contradictory amalgamation of social approval and social condemnation, exacerbated in the external colony, draws out the individual contradictions in the pathic, pathetic poet-professor. These contradictions constitute the white queen’s satyric features, but they don’t make him an entirely exaggerated satire of himself. Indeed, certain aspects of him are presented as satyr-like—his racist sexual obsessions, his immoderate drinking, his campy references to himself and his homosexuality. But for all of these satyric qualities, he is depicted realistically: an expat Loiner who finds refuge in the colonies from the more delimited and patrolled sexual conventions back in England and who is observing, increasingly, the imminent threat of new, alarming social injunctions as the colony approaches independence. Along with reprieve from constraining sexual mores, he also gleans racist social power as a white Englishman in an African colony and then transposes that power onto homosexual relations that he has been conditioned to abhor. He is, in other words, a fraught, conflicted character—at once pretentious (“Provincial Dadaist!”), self-deprecating (a “matt and puffed” “radiant white queen”), confident (he sits “Bolt upright” when cruising for sex),

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bold (“I flush with defiant lust,” he says when he relays the death proclamation to his friends at the bar), and repulsed by himself (even though he knows it’s “foul,” he can’t “escape” the “conditioning” that tells him he’s “unclean”). Harrison does not create an embellished diction to match the exaggerations of a satyr but mobilizes a combination of linguistic registers to depict the white queen’s ambiguity and psychological complexity: the poem is, as we have seen, demonstrative, sardonic, erudite, and defiant, all while portraying a disturbed psyche. And yet the tone throughout is conversational, the diction particularly demotic at certain instances, marking a counterpoint to the white queen’s more affected moments. In fact, it is when he speaks colloquially that he communicates most clearly his internal anguish, anguish caused by society’s brutal proscriptions on an instinct as personal and natural as sexuality. The poem demonstrates how public conceptions distort individual experience. But it also depicts the individual pressing back against some of those conceptions and reinforcing others. If society makes of this human a satyr, the satyr’s colloquial language makes him human, all while expressing this human’s own penchant for racial supremacy. Still, scholars tend to focus on the professorial rather than the colloquial qualities of the white queen’s language. For instance, Spencer and Byrne each focus on the allusion to Sir Thomas Wyatt’s famous poem “They flee from me.”26 Directly after the white queen ponders his typically humiliating sexual episodes, he remembers “at least” one encounter that was not marred by drunkenness and remorse: Things can be so much better. Once at least A million per cent. Policeman! Priest! You’ll call it filthy, but to me it’s love, And to him it was. It was. O he could move Like an oiled (slow-motion) racehorse at its peak, Outrageous, and not gentle, tame, or meek. (24)

Wyatt’s poem also relays clandestine sexual exploits in rhyming iambic pentameter: I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek That now are wild and do not remember That sometime they put themselves in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range, Busily seeking with a continual change. (599)

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The poems are similar in several ways: both recall dalliances that occur in a context of danger, both speakers objectify the people they are sexually interested in (the white queen’s boy is a “racehorse”; Wyatt’s women are ranging deer), and both distinguish one of their sexual partners from the rest. Wyatt’s speaker, like the white queen, fixates on a particular person whom he finds especially alluring: Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise Twenty times better; but once in special, In thin array, after a pleasant guise, When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, And she me caught in her arms long and small, Therewithal sweetly did me kiss And softly said, “Dear Heart, how like you this?”

Wyatt’s speaker is incredulous at the woman’s sexual frankness and, even more, at how taken he is with her: “It was no dream,” he begins the next stanza, “I lay broad waking.” When she moves on to other lovers, he is left with a wounded ego and the sense that he has been duped by a woman whom he believes he treated with special kindness: “But since that I so kindely am served,/I fain would know what she hath deserved,” the poem concludes. And yet it is not so much the specific allusion that supplies emotional weight to Harrison’s poem but the colloquial language in that stanza. True, the white queen’s language there is as precise, literate, and witty as anywhere in the poem. He begins his homage to the one prostitute he falls in love with by playing on Wyatt’s avowal that for all the betrayals he has suffered, “once in special” was “Twenty times better.” For the white queen, “Things” have also been “so much better” despite the prevailing patterns; in fact, “once” it was “a million” times better for every “cent” spent on his prostitute-lover. He then addresses his adversaries in the same oratorical style with which he announced himself at the poem’s opening: “Policeman! Priest!” he exclaims, the alliterating p resonating with the poem’s first lines (“Professor! Poet! Provincial Dadaist!/Pathic, pathetic, … half-pissed”). However, the allusive, declamatory language here quickly gives way to informal, less mannered diction as the white queen explains that what is being classified as “filthy” is “love”: “You’ll call it filthy, but to me it’s love,/And to him it was. It was.” The tone here—direct, sincere, conversational—communicates through repetition, plainspoken diction, and

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italicization the white queen’s earnestness. He emphasizes the simplicity and straightforwardness of the natural feelings that have developed between another man and him. He identifies in his lover’s appearance and gait the qualities he is captivated by, namely his audaciousness and his physical grace: his young lover saunters magnificently, acclaiming the denigration “queer/As a clockwork orange” (a cockney phrase indicating an unnatural bizarreness) with pride (Burgess). The lines move with similar agility, reflecting the young man’s alluring nimbleness: exact rhymes punctuate end-stops while the repetition of hard g and c sounds and sibilant s and sh sounds create a varied, intricate rhythm: “magnificently,” “gear,” “God,” “grateful”; “flunkied,” “queer,” clockwork,” “scared”; “magnificently,” “shameless,” “sauntered,” “restaurant,” “scared,” “nights,” “shared.” This elaborate music builds to the blunt admission, “God, I was grateful for the nights we shared”; the line’s colloquial directness is emphasized by its contrast to the grander lines before it. The same effect closes the stanza: My boredom melted like small cubes of ice In warm sundowner whiskies. Call it vice; Call it obscenity; it’s love; so there; Call it what you want. I just don’t care. (24)

The younger man’s self-assurance is an antidote to the white queen’s afflictions: observing his confidence dissipates the monotony of life in the colony and the closet and dilutes the alcohol he medicates himself with. In fact, the white queen acquires something of his magnificent saunterer’s tenacity. But rather than flying in the face of homophobic conditioning with “Outrageous,” “shameless,” “oiled” sauntering, the white queen defies societal constraints on his sexuality with repetition, colloquial language, and rhyme: “Call it,” he repeats three times as if issuing a challenge, the demeaning names used to degrade homosexuality. He then repudiates those classifications by defining homosexuality as love—not filth, vice, or obscenity. And yet his rebuke is not, as we might expect from the disdainful, defiant, racist, educated, self-deprecating white queen, particularly denunciatory. It is instead pitched in the demotic: “so there,” he rebuffs his castigators, linking by rhyme the next line’s final colloquial declaration: I just don’t care. The poem acquires strength less from its allusions to poetic tradition and more from its arrangement of living speech in that tradition’s verse forms.

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Harrison v. Harrison Harrison’s most famous poem, “v.,” also sets different versions of colloquial speech in traditional poetic form and employs allusions to situate that language in literary tradition (263–79). The poem’s iambic pentameter quatrains depict a middle-aged man visiting the cemetery in Leeds where his parents are buried and where he may be as well. Like Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Harrison’s poem associates poetry with the dead when its speaker finds himself standing between graves marked Byron and Wordsworth.27 But these are not the graves of the Romantic poets. Rather, they are the graves of local “inglorious mutes” with those surnames who held modest occupations; this Wordsworth made organs for churches and this Byron transformed cowhide into luggage (264). The speaker relates himself to the graves not just because they signify famous poets but because those “distinguished” names are here “owned” by the unattested “rabblement” of the working class, whose fate is to be “thrown together” in a “pit” beneath the graveyard, a blasted coal mine into which the cemetery is slowly subsiding, creating an abyss of bodily remains, coal, rock, and the destroyed beams of the former mine. It is a realm of disarray and obscurity representing the fate of the working-­ class masses, and terrifying the poet more than death: he remarks toward the poem’s end that he’s never been afraid of the grave itself but instead the hollow “under mine,” meaning under his grave, the space beneath the cemetery where an old coalmine used to be (274). Linking himself, what is “mine,” to the blasted-out coal mine, the poet fears sinking into the “black hollow” of anonymity, being forgotten by history. But he is afraid less for himself (a poet and dramatist, he’s already seen his name on the cover of books and Broadway marquees” [269]) than for his local community, whose destiny is to sink into the “great worked-out black hollow” under the graveyard. Attempting to counter the conception that working-­ class people are irrelevant to history and tradition, Harrison turns to arranging working-class local speech, including defiling and nihilistic forms of that speech, in traditional verse. The ground above the “worked-out pit” is as turbulent as the pit itself, not with the corroding and demolished materials of bone, slack, shale, and prop but with written language: The language of this graveyard ranges from a bit of Latin for a former Mayor

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or those who laid their lives down at the Somme, the hymnal fragments and the gilded prayer, how people ‘fell asleep in the Good Lord’, brief chisellable bits from the good book and rhymes whatever length they could afford, to CUNT, PISS, SHIT and (mostly) FUCK! (265)

Polite, refined, and banal, the headstones bear typical epitaphs, earnest sentiments, and biblical quotations: a “bit of Latin” for someone who gave his life in war, “fragments” of hymns and prayers, hackneyed phrases that compare death to sleep, “bits” selected because they are “chisellable,” rhymes short enough to purchase. Set against the engraved language are the profanities spray-painted on the graves by “some peeved supporter who was pissed,” a drunken skinhead, the poet imagines, returning from a Leeds United football match, agitated and dismayed by yet another loss. Capitalization and an exclamation point highlight the spray-painted language, and while the “chisellable” “rhymes” etched on the stone remain unquoted, the words “FUCK!” and “book” are both quoted and arranged to rhyme. Cheaper than engraving, scrawling can nonetheless form the kinds of aural patterns in conventional epitaphs. The speaker does, however, identify an insidious element in the spray-painted words: “blunt four-­ letter curses” directed not just toward opponents in sports but toward the “race that makes the sprayer vexed.” Defacing monuments for the dead, the skinhead’s working-class language is also the language of racism, specifically the n-word and a term to disparage Pakistani people, both spray-­ painted in all capital letters (269). If the engraved epitaphs are banal, conventional bits and fragments that working-class families can afford, the skinhead’s “aerosol vocab” is hate speech, released in a paroxysm of obscenities and racist derogations. The speaker is appalled by the defacements, and he sees such bigotry as a corrosive symptom of a stratified social system itself structured on the intersections of racism, classism, and other forms of oppression, a system underpinned entirely by oppositions: These Vs are all the versuses of life from LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White and (as I’ve known to my cost) man v. wife, Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right,

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class v. class as bitter as before, the unending violence of US and THEM, personified in 1984 by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM, Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind, East/West, male/female, and the ground these fixtures are fought out on ’s Man, resigned to hope from his future what his past never found. (266)

The letter “v” stands for opposition itself, involving categories ranging from race, gender, politics, and religion to abstractions like the soul and body and the heart and mind. But the poet is most specific about divisions imposed by class distinctions of the sort he saw manifested in a particularly violent, year-long coal miner strike in Northern England in 1984, provoked by “Coal Board [Ian] MacGregor,” the head of the National Coal Board responsible for a series of pit closures that the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) protested by striking.28 In considering “v” an emblem of antinomy, the poem thus seeks historical context for the vandal’s rage and locates its source at least partly in the degradation of unemployment. Even as the poem brings the skinhead’s language into question, it also cross-examines the language of the speaker-poet himself. For example, after finding “UNITED” spray-painted on his own parent’s grave, he ruminates on “what … these crude words are revealing” and “what … this aggro act implies,” imagining that the skinhead vandalizes to relinquish to “the dead [his] xenophobic feeling,” and wonders whether the graffiti might amount to an unconventional “cri-de-coeur because man dies” (269). These elevated rationalizations of vandalism are then swiftly undercut by the vandal himself, who returns the focus to speech, that is, to the poem’s matters at hand, in effect offering a check to the speaker-poet’s glorifications of the downtrodden, and berating him harshly for what he hears as the poet’s contrived, pretentious language: “what’s a cri-de-coeur, cunt?” the skinhead asks the poet, challenging him to “speak the language that yer mam spoke” instead of “fucking Greek” (269). The poet’s language, the skinhead believes, is not only grandiose and pompous but also foreign and thus unintelligible to the poet’s own community (“cri-de-­ coeur,” “fucking Greek”), and it betrays the poet’s background (“Think of ‘er,” the skinhead demands, referring not just to the poet’s mother but to his mother tongue). Beyond French and Greek, the skinhead admonishes

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the poet for writing in a version of English that forsakes his working-class upbringing. The exchange initiates a contentious dialogue, lying at the heart of the poem, between the poet and the skinhead, the latter refusing the lofty justifications to which the former keeps appealing in order to locate a higher meaning in the skinhead’s lowly behavior: ‘The only reason why I write this poem at all on yobs like you who do the dirt on death ’s to give some higher meaning to your scrawl.’ Don’t fucking bother, cunt! Don’t waste your breath! (271)

This argument between the educated and the uneducated is also between the poet and himself. When the speaker cajoles the vandal, “If you’re so proud … then sign your name,” the skinhead duly responds: He took the can, contemptuous, unhurried and cleared the nozzle and prepared to sign the UNITED sprayed where mam and dad were buried. He aerosolled his name. And it was mine. (273)

The poet’s argument with a member of his community who resents his education is also thus an argument with himself about whether the so-­ called elevated language in his poems acts as an unintended repudiation of “the language that [his] mam spoke.” That poet and skinhead merge suggests that the skinhead is the kind of destructive, xenophobic angry young man the poet may have become if he hadn’t had the opportunities of formal education, but the skinhead is also the kind of angry young poet he would have become. In fact, regardless of social advantage, their particularly raw brand of local language is roughly the same. By the time the speaker realizes that he himself is the skinhead, he has  already demonstrated his own inclination for invective: ‘You piss-artist skinhead cunt, you wouldn’t know and it doesn’t fucking matter if you do, the skin and poet united fucking Rimbaud but the autre and je est is fucking you.’ (271)

The speaker acknowledges that the skinhead, a facet of himself, is also a kind of artist, a “piss-artist,” so that, sharing working-class identity, the

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two also share an impulse to lash back at their adversaries with hostile language. As for Rimbaud, here rebellious art is achieved by bringing even the most repulsive aspects of self into poetry; while poet and skinhead might seem to present a stark contrast, the “autre” in “je est”—Rimbaud’s formulation of the self as an “other” joined to the “I” that society constructs—is in fact the skinhead and the artist both. Throughout the poem, then, the speaker casts the skinhead’s language—which he is at turns suspicious of, repelled by, and fluent in—as a rejoinder to social constraints.29 When Leeds United loses a match, the vandals “lose their sense of selfesteem” and spray “words on tombstones” in order to “reassert the glory of their team” (264), but likewise the destruction of local billboards and city signs is described as the only way for Leeds “kids” to redress a system that situates them on the lowest economic rung:          kids use aerosols, use giant signs to let the people know who’s forged their fetters like PRI CE O WALES above West Yorkshire mines (no prizes for who nicked the missing letters!).30 (268)

The skinhead bitterly remarks, “It’s not poetry we need in this class war,” but he perceives his own scrawled words as weapons of resistance and considers his graffiti his “work,” contrasting it to the more elevated writing that does win prizes:               Who needs yer fucking poufy words. Ah write mi own. Ah’ve got mi work on show all over Leeds like this UNITED ’ere on some sod’s stone. (273)

Here, vernacular Leeds speech is the raw material of rhymed and metered formal poetry that is also political—poetry made not from “poufy words,” meaningless to the skinhead, but from his very language. Indeed, the speaker-poet has himself always been suspicious of poufy words and high culture. “I’ve done my bits of mindless aggro too,” he tells the skinhead and then recounts an incident at an operetta in which he turned a fire hose on a “wobbly soprano warbling” (271–72), an enraged response to what he perceived to be a disjuncture between art and politics:

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It wasn’t just the singing angered me. At the same time half a crowd was jeering as the smooth Hugh Gaitskell, our MP, made promises the other half were cheering. What I hated in those high soprano ranges was uplift beyond all reason and control and in a world where you say nothing changes it seemed a sort of prick-tease of the soul. I tell you when I heard high notes that rose above Hugh Gaitskell’s cool electioneering straight from the warbling throat right up my nose I had all your aggro in my jeering. (272)

If young Harrison found “those high soprano ranges” exhilarating, the jeering and cheering remind him that the “uplift” is disconnected from his social reality. Likewise, the singer’s voice, though alluring, is ultimately empty, a “prick-tease of the soul,” lifting up “beyond all reason and control,” beyond the real-life experiences of the people it’s addressing. The clash of the “high notes” and Labour Party MP Hugh Gaitskell’s “electioneering” (his “smooth,” “cool” “promises” as alluring and empty as the soprano’s “uplift”) goes “right up [his] nose,” provoking the speaker to become a “damned vandal” with a rage similar to the skinhead’s. Both inclined to respond to conditions that oppress and anger them, the speaker and the skinhead each represent an aspect of the artist whose individual concerns are also social concerns. The skinhead is “the sort of person I probably would have ended up being,” Harrison told John Tusa, “had I not had the opportunities I had … going to Leeds Grammar School and so on,” explaining that he would likely have become an unemployed, racist vandal not just because of lack of opportunity but because of the constraints in an environment where “I couldn’t express myself.” Aesthetic deprivation, that is, is part of the larger social impoverishments that debilitate maligned communities. If graffiti in the poem is desecrating and offensive, designed “to shock the living” (269), then it is also the skinhead’s only form of expression. In “v.,” the skinhead’s brand of repugnant, illegal speech functions to suggest the estrangement, shame, self-hatred, alcoholism, joblessness, racism, and misogyny caused by debilitating intersecting social conditions. In other words, Harrison puts art and vandalism, expression and desecration, forms of speech and traditional poetic form into what he calls in “v.” a “working marriage” (273). As he

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explains to Maya Jaggi, in “v.” he wanted to “take on my own instinct to vandalise my own art. There’s always that voice—‘what’s the point, who the hell wants a poem?’ I have to outstrip that dark, negative force to write anything.” Local speech thus becomes for Harrison a method for outstripping negative forces, a poetic for making poetry personally and politically significant. If for Harrison poetry has always been a form of social defiance, it is also a personal inheritance. As we’ve seen in “v.,” political poetry emerges out of an argument with himself about what speech to make his poems with, and The School of Eloquence charts his development from a student learning his place in British society to the erudite poet setting his home speech in traditional verse forms in part to reconcile a relationship with his family that has been fractured by class distinctions. But The School of Eloquence also elucidates how Harrison’s familial origins and his sense of poetry as a political art are in fact connected. The series opens with “Heredity,” an epigraphic poem that traces Harrison’s poetic abilities to his “uncles, Joe and Harry—/one … a stammerer/the other dumb” (121). Neil Roberts suggests that Harrison’s “stuttering uncle represents the historical silencing of the working class” that the poems seek to fill (216). But it is also the case that Harrison’s uncles are important figures for him not just because he wants to speak for those who can’t but because he understands their constrained determination to be heard and the methods they use to communicate despite their speech difficulties as metaphors for political poetry. Indeed, his uncles do not need their nephew to speak for them, having discovered their own methods to circumvent their speech challenges. In “Wordlists,” for example, Uncle Harry uses his “Funk & Wagnalls” dictionary “to confute” “Tory errors” (128). A “most eloquent deaf-mute,” he communicates by pointing to words in a dictionary to express his dissatisfaction with reactionary politics. Likewise, in “Study,” the speaker sees in his Uncle Joe’s communication difficulty a powerful artistry:               His gaping jaws once plugged in to the power of his stammer patterned the stuck plosive without pause like a d-d-damascener’s hammer. (125)

His uncle’s persistence in speaking produces a “patterned” sound similar to the speaker’s description of the “stammer”: the p of “plugged,” “power,” “patterned,” “plosive,” and “pause” alliterates just as his uncle

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does when he says the word “damascener.” Rhyming Joe’s “stammer” with “hammer” suggests that what obstructs Joe is precisely what impels him both to shape his words with great effort (to “damascene” is to adorn metal) and to batter back against incapacitating forces. Later, in “Self-­ Justification,” we learn that Joe has dedicated his life’s work to remedying his speech difficulty, which pushed him to go into the printing business where He handset type much faster than he spoke. Those cruel consonants, ms, ps, and bs on which his jaws and spirit almost broke flicked into order with sadistic ease. (186)

That Joe’s nephew makes his first attempts at poetry in a writing pad given to him by Joe, and that he describes those attempts as stammering, links his uncle’s communication difficulty to his own artistic efforts: “Uncle Joe. …/… supplied those scribble pads/on which I stammered my first poetry.” Writing poetry is thus as onerous an undertaking for the speaker as speaking is for his uncle, and because theirs is a working-class speech thought inconducive to poetic eloquence, arranging it in poetic form is akin to articulating through a “stammer.” Such difficulty, the poem has it, enhances rather than impedes eloquence: “aggression, struggle, loss, blank printer’s ems” are, the speaker tells us, the interferences in life “by which all   eloquence   gets justified,” the extra blank space visually comparing Joe’s work as a typesetter (“justifying” type is a printer’s term) to the poet’s work arranging diction, and perhaps to the silence through which printer and poet speak. Eloquence thus here proceeds from countervailing oppositional forces. The speaker and his uncles have all found resources for eloquence in spite of conditions that would silence them: Joe has his type, Harry his lexis, and Harrison his traditional forms of verse. If these forms represent for Harrison a way to manage the verbal turbulence his attempt to speak necessarily unleashes, they thus function to mend severed elements: though “I had a very loving upbringing,” Harrison has said, because “education and poetry came in to disrupt that loving group I’ve been trying to create new wholes out of that disruption ever since” (Interview with Haffenden 246)—partly by uniting vernacular (the language of his “loving upbringing”) and the traditional language of “Education and poetry.”31 His work, that is, aims to connect individual experience and social reality, and to enact the disruptions produced by

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hierarchical class divisions. We might see the vernacular language involved in such an attempt as itself producing such disruption when a televised broadcast of “v.” in 1987 by the BBC was met with a fury of condemnation for its use of profanity.32 But Harrison’s defense of his language here is telling: I certainly didn’t put in four-letter words in order to make a scandal—they were an essential part of the poem; it’s a poem which ranges from the graveyard’s use of Latin for epitaphs down to the “fuck” and the “shit” that are inscribed on the graves. And these are examples of modes of language— both of which have their own kinds of power, and the poem really is about power and the power over language. (Interview with Wilmer 101)

Failing to hear what the “crude words” in the poem “were revealing,” Harrison’s critics heard only the vulgarity itself (and not, it appears, the racism). Perhaps, as he saw it, it was the poem’s debunking of aesthetic categories that so offended those critics: bringing vandalism “into high art was what caused the offence. It was like I’d done the graffiti on the classical form” (Jaggi 2007). In these incensed reactions we can clearly see the political potency of poetry that addresses itself to the masses with local language.

Notes 1. Terry Eagleton here borrows Fredric Jameson’s language in Marxism and Form (see Jameson). Discussing the close-reading practices of F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards, Jameson notes that both were concerned with social history while honoring an “obligation to come to terms with the shape of the individual sentences themselves” (qtd. in Eagleton, How to Read 9). 2. For a recent discussion of Harrison and the vernacular in poetry, see Dentith 247. 3. Crowley here is summarizing Valentin Voloshinov’s classic work, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1930). 4. Almost every examination of Harrison’s poems contends at some level that working-class diction and syntax are at odds with received verse forms. For example, Jonathan Barker perceives the poems as distinguishing the “languages of ‘Poetry’ and of demotic speech” from each other and as employing traditional forms “conscious[ly] and deliberate[ly]” to draw out an ironic, contentious relationship between inherited poetic form and colloquial language: “There is perhaps an irony in the fact that he chooses the

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highly artificial extended sonnet form … to outmaneuver the enemy” (51). For Cécile Marshall, Harrison’s poems ask whether or not “poetry can escape its elitist status,” and she regards traditional verse form as opposing the charged speech of social protest: “Harrison relishes the contrast between traditional poetic forms and the language of indignation and sometimes outrage that his poetry can convey” (118; 131). Douglas Dunn apprehends the relationship between Harrison’s subject matter and what he believes to be the basest verse forms as ironic; their “sub-classical,” “hurtfully lucid narrative outlines” emphasize the alleged lowness of their raw material, and Harrison’s “ironies are drawn from pentametric metricality and full rhymes—the philistine standard of verse—to subjects that otherwise subvert or denounce the mistaken political, social and literary expectations that those who uphold that standard tend to invest in it” (“Formal Strategies” 130). Harrison’s “metre,” Dunn claims, “is vigorous in playing off its classicism against a demotic Leeds background” (“Importantly Live” 255). 5. The School of Eloquence was first published in 1978 as seventeen sixteen-line poems. The first part contains poems linking Harrison’s education to the history of his working-class community; the second portrays life with his parents; and the final is concerned with “the place of art in a class-bound culture” (Rylance 120). Harrison published a second version of the sequence, containing thirty-three more poems, in Continuous: 50 Sonnets from “The School of Eloquence” (1981). In his Selected Poems (1984; 2013) and Collected Poems (2007; 2016), Harrison added still more poems to the series (hence, his sense of the sequence as “continuous”). He modeled the structure of his “sonnets” on George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862), a sequence of sixteen-line poems, explaining to John Haffenden that he found in Meredith’s form “narrative possibilities” and that he was drawn to that particular length because he could, for instance, divide sixteen lines into two octaves rather than employing the traditional Petrarchan octavesestet structure (232). Dunn argues that the poems are “not Meredithian sonnets” but “really four quatrains subjected to variations” (“Formal Strategies” 130–31). 6. The quote Harrison jots down is from an interview Althusser gave to Maria Antonietta Macciocchi in 1968. It first appeared in English in the New Left Review in 1971 and is included in Althusser’s Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. 7. I quote from Harrison’s Collected Poems. For short poems, I indicate the inclusive page numbers the first time a poem is referred to or quoted and then quote without citations. For long poems, I cite the inclusive page numbers initially and continue to provide page numbers as I quote.

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8. “Tusky” is also, Harrison tells us, a Leeds colloquialism for rhubarb (Haffenden 39). 9. I borrow the term unpoetic from Robert Pinsky’s essay, “Responsibilities of the Poet” (425), which Heaney references in elaborating his conception of poetic redress. 10. Harrison gets his history of the Luddites and the title of his sequence from E. P. Thompson’s famous The Making of the English Working Class published in 1966 (560). Thompson was a professor at the University of Leeds where Harrison pursued undergraduate and graduate studies in classics. Harrison’s sequence begins with an epigraph taken from Thompson’s book that includes the phrase “Admit for the Season to the School of Eloquence” (109). Later, Thompson quotes “William Horsfall, of Ottiwells,” a stocking-frame owner, announcing “that he wished to ‘ride up to his saddle-girths’ in Luddite blood, and his hatred was … obsessional” (560). 11. Harrison does explain his earliest attempts to master traditional verse form as an effort to prove himself: “Originally I was drawn to metrical verse because I wanted to ‘occupy’ literature, as I said in ‘Them and [uz].’ … I’ve occupied it in the sense that I can do it—I learned it as skillfully as I could in order that people would have to pay attention” (Haffenden 1991: 236). In another interview, he claims that mastering inherited forms was his way “to show off to them” (Interview with Alexander 84). But this inclination to flaunt his skills seems to reflect less his status as a working-class poet than as a young poet: “I did that when I was very young.” In any case, writing in form seems to have been a way less of proving than of fulfilling himself. He “instinctively” “associated” meter with “the heartbeat” (Haffenden 236), he explained, and “was always drawn to metre” (Alexander 84). Byrne has written recently about Harrison as not just a traditional poet but a “bard,” a “special kind of poet” with origins in classical epic poetry who “speaks for, perhaps stands for, is the advocate of, a place” (“Metre” 54). The very fact that almost all of Harrison’s poetry rhymes and scans suggests that writing in traditional form was more than simply a way for him to gain respect as a working-class poet but that he was predisposed to inherited verse forms as a poet, working-class or not. 12. Huk explains that the comedian is an important figure for Harrison: “One of the more unconventional literary influences on Harrison’ poetry … was the method, patter, timing and delivery of the English stand-up comedian: this was a tradition he grew up with, experienced both from the music halls of Leeds and the comedy shows on the wireless” (77). Harrison tells

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Haffenden that “the stand-up comedian … knows how to relate to his audience” (243) and that his School of Eloquence sonnets were influenced by “the technique of the stand-up comedian[s]” he saw at music halls: “I went to the music-hall at the time when I was a kid, and always admired that technique of setting something up and then taking it away, structuring the lines and being almost aggressively aware of line-ending and the rhythmical entity of each line” (237). 13. The BBC says there are three competing theories as to how Loiner came to mean a person from Leeds: “Loiner could derive from the name Loidis (in use by the eighth century for the district around modern-day Leeds)”; “[a]nother explanation says that in the nineteenth century there were many yards and closes around Briggate whose back entrances were known as Low Ins or Loins, hence Loiner”; and “[y]et a third theory is that there were a number of lanes in the Briggate area pronounced loins in the local accent. People who gathered in these loins to gossip were therefore called Loiners” (“Loiners of the world”). 14. Harrison’s first publication is the chapbook Earthworks published in 1964. It includes nine poems in traditional verse forms. 15. Thomas Campey is an especially important figure for Harrison: “The first poem in The Loiners is about a man named Thomas Campey, who—without partaking of this culture—dragged books to market with his bad back, and enabled me to equip myself with a ‘gentleman’s’ library. In all my books I now have a bookplate with a drawing of this man” (Interview with Haffenden 233). 16. The only explicitly autobiographical poem in The Loiners is the book’s last poem, “Ghosts: Some Words Before Breakfast.” That poem is a harrowing recount of Harrison waiting for his young daughter to regain c­ onsciousness after an accident in which she “had both legs crushed under a 10 ton lorry on the Great North Road” (qtd. in Rowland n30, 129). 17. Harrison’s poems are presented in slightly different fashions across his publications. For example, the same poems from The Loiners are presented in the Selected and Collected Poems but not grouped in sections as they are in the five-part individual collection. Further, several poems from the initial book do not appear in the Collected Poems at all: “A Proper Caution,” the second and third parts of the “Travesties” section of The White Queen, “The Chopin Express,” “The Excursion,” “Sentences,” and the five Curtain Sonnets. A poem entitled “Doodlebugs” is presented with the Loiners poems in the Selected and Collected Poems but is not in the first book.  Harrison explained how he was grouping his early poems in an unpublished letter to a London Magazine editor a few years before The Loiners was published: “In a letter to Alan Ross (28 January 1967), Harrison writes that ‘The White Queen’ ‘is one of a group of 10–12 poems about

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Europeans in Africa called A Place in the Sun, and Thomas Campey belongs to another group under the general title of The Leeds Quatrains’” (qtd. in Rowland n49, 84). Only four of the poems set in Africa made it into the book: “The White Queen,” “The Heart of Darkness,” “The Songs of the PWD Man,” and “The Death of the PWD Man.” The “PWD” poems are dramatic monologues in Leeds dialect set to the rhythms of a ballad. Like “The White Queen,” the PWD man’s neocolonial racism is manifest in his sexual compulsions for Africans. Also like “The White Queen,” his local language presents him as a repulsive but also sympathetic character. He expresses repugnant views about African women but also vulnerability, loneliness, and an awareness of his destructive behavior:        I want a voice with that soft tone, Disembodied Yorkshire like my mother’s on the phone, As the cook puts down some flowers and the smallboy scrapes the spade, To speak as my epitaph: Look at the hole he’s made. (44) 18. All of Nigeria officially became a British colony in 1900: “British missionaries arrived in Nigeria in the 1840s and in 1853 Lagos [the capitol of Nigeria] was annexed as a British colony as part of the campaign to halt the West African slave trade. When the activities of legitimate British traders in the Niger delta region were threatened by French rivals, the British government took responsibility for the conquest of the interior in 1900.” Nigeria gained its independence from Britain in 1960 (“Nigeria”). 19. Rachel Bower has written recently about Harrison’s experiences in Nigeria. Rick Rylance explains that what attracted Harrison to Césaire were the similarities in the troubled relationships that existed between both poets’ formal educations and their local spheres:  There is plenty … to appeal to Harrison in Césaire. Cahier was written, in 1938, on the eve of Césaire’s return to Martinique after seven years of education abroad. Like much of Harrison’s work, it is preoccupied with the social context of language, and dual feelings of sympathy with, and separation from, a native culture. ‘On Not Being Milton’, therefore, describes ‘growing black enough’ to return to his roots—a phrase with a distinctively black resonance after Alex Haley’s Roots of 1976. (123) For Rylance, the word “black” equates Harrison’s own experiences with the experience of enslaved Africans. He also hears hinted at in that last line the colloquialism “too big for your boots.” The idiom indicates to Rylance that Harrison is questioning his correlation of African history and his own situation growing up in working-class England; Harrison, Rylance believes, employs 

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his verbal dexterity to gain a distance on the idea even as it is advanced. For behind the identification with (even appropriation of) this black experience, lurks a northern phrase … : growing too big for your boots— becoming conceited, having grand ideas. The poet sees himself through the eyes of his family (he now has cultural pretensions), but he also implies he is too assuming in aligning himself with Césaire’s black predicament. The uniting idea is found in the blackness of coal. Harrison’s family worked in the mining industry which forms so much of Yorkshire working-class culture. … One meaning for the initially-puzzling opening … is therefore: I have read (been educated) and committed this older culture, like coal, to the flames, but am now returning. (123)  Négritude had “both a cultural and a political dimension” (“Negritude,” PPP). It was influenced by Harlem Renaissance writers like James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes, who sought to reinvigorate African American culture, and was “mixed with an undercurrent of Marxist ideals” (“Brief Guide to Négritude”). Négritude writers “took a militant stand against black cultural assimilation by actively seeking to explore the singularity of the black cultural experience” (“Negritude” PPP). 20. Madden also reads the fourth line of “On Not Being Milton”—“my growing black enough to fit my boots” (112)—as connecting Harrison’s coalmining working-class community and Négritude: there, Madden argues, “Harrison links race and class, rethinking working-class culture through the cultural politics of negritude and the history of coal mining, and suggesting that he is ‘growing black enough’ through coal-dust or recovered history ‘to fit my boots’” (136). 21. Pound employs the figure also to compare the poet’s skill with a prose writer’s: “It is precisely the difficulty of this amphibious existence that keeps down the census record of good poets. The accomplished prose author will tell you that he ‘can only write poetry when he has a bellyache’ and thence he will argue that poetry just isn’t an art. I dare say there are very good marksmen who just can’t shoot from a horse” (52). But Pound castigates the centaur in The Cantos: the “Pull down thy vanity” passage of “Canto LXXXI” begins, “The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world,” an insect in a “casque” of “vanity” that believes it creates out of “man/Made courage, or made order, or made grace” rather than from “a live tradition/ or from a fine old eye” (384). 22. In ancient Greek festivals, satyr plays would send up the sweeping tragedies that were staged just before them with bawdy, drunken characters. But the satyr play is more than just a raucous parody; it “also provides psychological relief after the high anguish of tragedy” (McDonald 472). In 1986, Harrison wrote The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, which translated and modernized the surviving fragment of Sophocles’s satyr play, Ichneutae. Harrison

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was, Rosemary Burton tells us, exposed to satyr plays long before then; as a boy, he read Euripides’s Cyclops in school and was “[a]lways fascinated” by satyrs, which would come to represent for him “cultural outcasts deprived of opportunities to rise from the lowly situation to which others had condemned them” (25). 23. The White Queen is a five-part poem in a variety of traditional and free verse forms. The first two parts comprise a series of dramatic monologues in heroic couplets; the third is a prophetic terza rima poem inspired by Italian Renaissance poet and physician Hieronymi Fracastorii’s 1530 epic Syphilis; the fourth presents three iambic monologues (ranging from trimeter to pentameter) with alternating rhymes; and the fifth is a sequence of concise, free-verse “postcard” notes from the White Queen to his young lover. The Collected Poems omits two poems that were originally in the third section: one is composed of two envelope quatrains and a sestet rhyming ABAABA (“The Ancestor”), the other is made of three ballad-like quatrains with alternating rhymes (“Rumba”). 24. Aldrich explains that “[c]ertain colonies gained fame as sites of homosexual licence”: “[t]he colonies provided many possibilities of homoeroticism, homosociality and homosexuality—a variety of perspectives and experiences by which men expressed attraction to other men (or male youths)” (1–3). Aldrich also points up the racism inherent in those sexual relations:  Almost all [colonial] men … to much varying degrees, accepted ideas current in the colonial age about ‘natives.’ Racialist and racist stereotypes abounded. Romanticisation and idealization of foreign cultures—or, conversely, denigration of them—were common, along with wild fantasies about the luxuriance of the hammam, Africans’ generous genital endowments, Asians’ passivity and the beauty and virility of half-naked ‘savages.’ (9)  In fact, white homosexual colonialists were typically indifferent to the racist subjugation that their non-white sexual and romantic partners suffered under British imperialism: “few made real attempts to understand the cultures of men they bedded; some remained blithely unconcerned about the political disenfranchisement, economic exploitation and cultural alienation to which colonialism had reduced subject populations” (9). The white queen expresses such insensitivity not just in his racist objectification of young Black males but toward the very man he has fallen in love with. The poem closes with a final postcard note to his imprisoned lover: “Mon égal!/Let me be the Gambia/in your Senegal” (37). That the poem ends with the white queen joking to a Black prisoner about the phallic shape of Gambia suggests that he doesn’t in fact regard his lover as “Mon égal” (my equal) but merely as a sexual object.

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25. For Romana Huk, the white queen is a caricature, at once stripped and overblown, of colonial British domination: “Queen Victoria … is undressed and exposed as the White Queen, whose figurative demonstrations of imperialistic hunger are as horrific as only cartoon can stand” (“Leeds Renaissance” 82). 26. For both Spencer and Byrne, Harrison’s references to “They flee from me” anchor the poem. Spencer claims that Harrison’s poem draws emotional energy from Wyatt’s and that Wyatt’s poem lends fortitude to Harrison’s speaker: “Here the carefully deployed echoes of […] ‘They flee from me …’ help to give the Queen’s self-advocacy considerable emotional weight. This is language that above all insists on mitigating nothing and apologizing for nothing. From bungled buggery to the highbrow chatter of a literary party [that takes place in the second poem of ‘Satyrae’], the Queen tells it all with lethal precision” (29). Likewise, Byrne claims that the Wyatt allusion does more than evoke the connotative associations of a typical literary allusion: “The technique used here is neither straightforward imitation nor adaptation. The narrative voices of the canonical poem of conventional heterosexual courtly love and of the modern (and at the time) little-known poem of homosexual rented sex in one sense could hardly be more different, but their tones—salivating reminiscence, bitter protest, and self-pity—are the same, as their relationship to the beloved is the same” (H. v. & O 11). Byrne apprehends the poems as different in that she considers Wyatt’s to be conventional and Harrison’s unconventional, but she hears a similar tone in each: “Harrison handles our sympathies as skillfully as Wyatt. When the Queen shouts, ‘And to him it was. It was’ he protests too much—almost—just as when Wyatt’s narrator insists: ‘It was no dream. I lay broad waking,’ though he is clearly convincing himself: we do believe him, or at least believe that he believes it” (Loiner 21). The allusion, Byrne argues, underpins the poem’s portraiture of the White Queen because Harrison heard in the Renaissance poem how tone could communicate complex psychology. 27. For a recent discussion of “v.” as an elegy in the tradition of Gray, see Kennedy. Other critics have also examined the elegiac aspects of “v.” See Byrne’s H, v. & O, Haberkamm, Madden, Rowland, and Spencer. Blake Morrison writes more generally about Harrison as an elegist (“Harrison as Elegist”). 28. The epigraph to “v.” is a quote taken from the January 10, 1982, issue of The Sunday Times by Arthur Scargill (Harrison  263), a member of the Labour Party and the president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) during the 1984–85 miner strike that the poem refers to: the epigraph states, “My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.” Scargill led the charge

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against Margaret Thatcher’s pit closures and anti-union legislation. One of the strike’s main failures is that it split the Labour Party and the NUM. Madden discusses extensively the strike in relation to “v.”  Eagleton sees the miner strike as a minor element of “v.”: “The actual Miners’ Strike impinges on [the poem] hardly at all, other than in a moving epigraph taken from Arthur Scargill, which might have been spoken with Tony Harrison specially in mind” (“Antagonisms” 350). Madden, on the other hand, argues that “the attribution of the quotation … foregrounds the historical context central to the poem” (127). For Madden, “the strikes provide a significant political context within which to stage the poet’s desire for political alliance with the working class, and the skinhead’s consistent destabilization of any such alliance—an alliance formulated as poetic transcendence of the political and resisted through a polemic and crude emphasis on the materiality of the social, an alliance further indicated and indicted in a number of key puns, such as ‘gob,’ ‘flying visits,’ and ‘enemies within’” (127–28). Madden explains the double meanings of these terms: “gob” in Leeds vernacular refers to the mouth (“shut yer gob a while,” the speaker in “v.” says to the skinhead) and to worked-out coal mines (128); the “flying visits” the speaker takes to his parents’ graves evokes Scargill’s “flying pickets,” which forced the closure of the Saltley coal depot, “the final showdown of the strike” (131); and the “enemies within” that the poem’s speaker ruminates on—the conflicting aspects of himself—alludes to “Margaret Thatcher’s characterization of the striking miners as ‘the enemies within’ Great Britain, thus inextricably linking the skinhead … to the striking miners as a figure of social division and class resentment” (129). Madden helps us understand that the poem’s diction positions “v.” squarely in the context of Harrison’s local history, a history of working-class resistance that took on national proportions. 29. For an analysis of “v.” in relation to Rimbaud, see Regan. 30. Madden connects the missing “N” and “F” from “PRINCE OF WALES” to the “National Front” graffiti that the poem’s speaker observes earlier in the poem: “When skinheads steal the ‘N’ and ‘F’ from a sign over Yorkshire mines, ‘PRINCE OF WALES’ suddenly becomes ‘PRI CE O WALES.’ … The ‘price’ of Wales (its mines or its language) is linked through an act of vandalism (against the Empire?) to the racist politics of the National Front (NF)” (141). Indeed, in the film that Harrison made with Richard Eyre of himself reading the poem, an image of the spray-painted letters “NF” flashes on the screen as Harrison reads the lines about the defaced sign. 31. Byrne locates division within the poems’ speakers, in “oppositional voices [that] do not exceed a discrete and encompassing single voice, of the narra-

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tive I,” but she also perceives the “wholes” in poetry that Harrison creates out of the holes of his experiences in working-class Leeds (H, v. & O 4). For her, the poems provide “meaningful utterance” and “ligature and organization” (1). 32. In his acceptance speech for the 2009 PEN/Pinter Prize, Harrison (“Inky Digit” 80) recounted the controversy and read out a litany of responses to the film by conservative politicians: “a cascade of obscenities” (Teddy Taylor, MP); “another probably Bolshie poet seeking to impose his frustration on the rest of us” (Gerald Howarth, MP); “the riff-raff takes over” (Sir Gilbert Longden, MP). The British news sensationalized the event before the airing even occurred as “The Four-Letter TV Poem Fury” (quoted in Harrison v., 1991, 40), and a debate ensued about whether it should be allowed to air. A number of writers spoke out in support of the film and the poem, including Peter Levi, Harold Pinter, and Melvin Bragg. After it aired, the Independent Broadcasting Authority found that “the level of public response to the transmission of v. was relatively low. The flood of public protest expected was not realized” (73).

CHAPTER 5

Mortal Tongues: Lucille Clifton’s Local-­Speech Admonitions

In 2017, an anthology of poems set in variations of a new poetic form appeared that underscores the persistence and potency of local tongues in poetry that this book has been tracing. That anthology is titled The Golden Shovel, taking its name from a two-part 2010 poem by Terrance Hayes. Hayes in turn took the title from Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” that famous enactment of young boys talking in a pool hall, discussed in the third chapter of this book, whose subtitle is “The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel” (Blacks 331). Hayes’s poem uses Brooks’s entire poem in both sections as what he calls its “spine” (Hayes xxvii).1 The last word of each line constitutes, in its entirety, “We Real Cool.” There are other similarities. Like “We Real Cool,” Hayes’s “The Golden Shovel” portrays the precariousness of reaching adulthood for young African American boys in an amalgamation of speech registers: the reflective voice of a man recounting childhood experience in solemn, lofty language is punctuated by subtle notes of informal everyday speech from that childhood.2 That an anthology of several hundred “golden shovel” poems by some of the most accomplished contemporary English-language poets was published seven years after Hayes wrote “The Golden Shovel” attests to the adaptability of his Brooksian formal invention, the continued endurance of Brooks’s most famous local-speech poem, and the capacity for such speech to be employed in poetry as a means for societal examination and critique.3

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. Fogarty, The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07889-7_5

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Almost five decades before Hayes’s golden-shovel poem, Lucille Clifton published her own kind of “golden-shovel” poem. Her untitled poem about “those boys that ran together/at tillman’s/and the poolroom” was published in her first book, Good Times (1969).4 The poem functions on a compressed formal field similar to “We Real Cool” but at a markedly different verbal pitch even as both poems are rooted in Black vernacular. As we saw in Chap. 3, the elaborate, reverberating diction of “We Real Cool” arranged in an exceptionally stringent structure animates youthful vivacity and determination against the intersecting forces of racism and classism. It’s a phrasal portrait of Black boyhood in America, where prospects are dim and temptations high to skirt the institutions of a social structure that operates on race and class oppression. The poem distinguishes youthful vibrancy from a dismal future in its transformation of everyday local speech into a succession of alliterating, ornate phrases (“Lurk late,” “Sing sin,” “Jazz June”). The persistent, mechanistic pattern of intricate sounds in four scrupulously ordered, rhetorically consistent couplets sets liveliness against demise. Similarly, Clifton’s poem—a free-verse composite of a five-line stanza, a couplet, and two isolated lines—weighs vitality against forces that would thwart it. Yet it does so in colloquial language so unassuming that it sounds like the opposite of the lavish idiolect Brooks devised to depict determined self-awareness and brio: those boys that ran together at tillman’s and the poolroom everybody see them now think it’s a shame. (48)

The monologue’s everyday speech identifies its speaker as a member of a local community who has been observing, along with “everybody” else in the neighborhood, the boys “at tillman’s/and the poolroom” over the years. The unaffected diction in Clifton’s story of the boys’ fate generates a subdued tone unlike the exuberance that embellished speech produces in “We Real Cool.” In fact, we might surmise that “[those boys that ran together]” sounds the way “We Real Cool” would have sounded if it had continued in everyday speech5: Clifton’s poem is not an elaborate mounting of coinciding sounds but a direct assertion that never shifts verbal pitch, maintaining a steady colloquial register that articulates the

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uncertain prospects of Black men with both disarming bluntness and the intimate earnestness of casual conversation. Blank space between that blunt, intimate language loads it with weighty pauses: everybody see them now remember they was fine boys we have some fine black boys don’t it make you want to cry? (48)

Witnessing the boys as they become men doesn’t just provoke regret about the dispiriting situations they’ve grown into (“everybody see them now/think it’s a shame”) but also jogs the neighborhood’s memory of the boys’ unforgettable impressiveness: “everybody see them now/remember they was fine boys.” Seeing the young men triggers thoughts of better times, and unambiguous local speech articulates a realization that such vitality still exists in the “fine black boys” that “we have” now, the tragic recognition, in other words, that history repeats itself. The neighborhood’s current boys are as “fine” as the boys that used to run together, and they are also as vulnerable to conditions that would destroy them, a reality that lingers in the poem’s blank spaces leading to the terse question, “don’t it make you want to cry?” Clear-cut, everyday speech here depicts a complex thought process that comes to discern the near past as a cautionary tale. Indeed, for all its apparently uncomplicated singularity of expression, Clifton’s poem proceeds on its own complex movements: it advances from an offhand memory about some neighborhood children, to voicing a community’s collective assessment about who those children are now, to recollecting the tragedy of their growing up, to declaring their importance and potential, to imploring the community to recognize the peril of their young men. The poem’s three blank spaces can be taken as three distinct lines of silence, each suggesting the unsaid, the neglected, the unacknowledged that facilitates a troubled passage from Black boyhood to Black manhood that the poem inconspicuously orchestrates. What’s more, while its employment of Black vernacular confers upon it the authority to speak from the location of an African American neighborhood, the poem’s subtle combinations of nonstandard and standard grammar suggest all at once informal conversation in the neighborhood, a representative voice speaking more broadly to the community as a whole, and an individual voice having a conversation in her head with herself.

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Clifton’s poolroom poem is an early example of how her poems in general tend to make sudden movements across linguistic registers that are so smooth and continuous we hardly know what hit us. Her early poems’ mixture of Black vernacular and highly oratorical phrases and syntax in both grammatically standard and nonstandard constructions amplifies a personal voice to a public level, relating individual experience in domestic settings to common experience in larger contexts. This chapter begins by examining how Black vernacular in an early sequence of poems about race riots in the late 1960s foregrounds the vulnerability of Black childhood against the dangers caused by racism. It then turns to another early poem whose alterations of standard and nonstandard grammar in compressed poetic arrangements has the effect of both conveying individual utterance and giving it communal broadcast. This public sounding of the personal voice acquires spiritual dimensions when Clifton retells stories from the New Testament in Black speech, portraying African American historical moments as archetypal spiritual occurrences. Such early scriptural innovations anticipate Clifton’s many later depictions of speakers enduring troubling spiritual experiences in versions of everyday speech that are at once African American and otherworldly. I call this Clifton’s vernacular for the oracular not strictly to denote the predictive function of an oracle but to evoke the authoritative quality attained in utterances that are inspired, ambiguous, and mysterious. It is a speech that sounds both everyday in its colloquial valences and extraordinary in its enigmatic inflections, a socio-­ spiritual mode of poetic writing that culminates in Clifton’s corpus in a late sequence titled “the message from The Ones  (received in the late 70s).” That late Clifton poem from 2001 reconstructs into poetic form the voices Clifton heard and took dictation from in the late 1970s. They speak to Clifton because they require her local-speech poetry for the prophetic warnings they seek to deliver to the world.

Clifton’s Black Speech Clifton’s poems do not speak with, as she calls it in the poem “for the mute,” “one mortal tongue” but with plural tongues (237). One of her mortal tongues is Black vernacular, not surprising for an African American poet who began publishing her work in the late 1960s, the same time the Black Arts Movement emerged, a collection of Black artists in the US during the 1960s and 1970s whose free-verse poems, almost always cast at least in part in African American Language (AAL), manifested

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aesthetically the ideals of Black nationalism.6 Black Arts Movement (BAM) poetry was revolutionary poetry deployed to “expose the enemy, praise the people, and support the revolution” and to convey the ferocity of its speakers (Karenga 33–34). BAM poets repudiated received Anglo-­ European literary forms as white forms and sought more extreme poetic arrangements and diction: as Karen Jackson Ford explains, “Black Arts excesses—obscenity, thematic and formal violence, repetition, unorthodox spelling and syntax, typographical tricks, nonverbal noise, signifying, cacophony, and polyrhythms—registered a complete rejection of white American culture and of previous ‘Negro writing’ that had been submissive to Anglo-European literary values” (Ford, Excess 174–75). Amiri Baraka’s 1966 poem “Black Art” epitomized the aesthetic and called on African American poets to attune their own work to it. There, Baraka demanded from Black poets “‘poems that kill’/Assassin poems, Poems that shoot” and “wrestle” and burn “whities ass” with threats and slurs against Irish, Italian, and Jewish Americans involved in racist policing, drug-dealing, and hypocritical politics. He sought poems that were experimental formally, that could, for example, make lines with an eruption of vocables to mimic the deafening roar of engines and machine guns, creating a typographical manifestation of Black virulence and rage: “rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr … tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh” (149–50). In other words, Black poems should employ combative linguistic, sonic, and visual innovations as the necessary poetic corollary to a consolidating, intensifying Black nationalist consciousness that refused the prevailing, violently racist social structures of white America. In many ways, Clifton’s early work met the criteria of Black Arts poetry. Haki R. Madhubuti, a central BAM figure, acknowledged her work’s Black aesthetic when he described Clifton’s work with the same terms Stephen Henderson used to delineate attributes of Black Arts poetry in the landmark study and anthology Understanding the New Black Poetry (1973). Madhubuti connected what he perceived to be Clifton’s aesthetic “wholeness,” her merging of self-exploration and Black unity, to Henderson’s concept of “saturation”: “One way toward [Clifton’s] wholeness is what Stephen Henderson calls ‘saturation,’ the giving and defining of Blackness through proclaiming such experiences as legitimate and necessary, whereas the Black poetic experience used often enough becomes natural and expected. Clifton ‘saturates’ us in a way that forces us to look at ourselves in a different and more profound way” (153). In Henderson’s influential description, Black poetry has three essential components:

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themes relaying aspects of Black history, inventive structures designed from Black speech and Black music, and, finally, a general “saturation” of “Blackness” through “tone” and “perspective” (10).7 Clifton’s expressly unadorned early poems often present Black history, inventive structures, and Black speech in a manner that acquires potency from plainspoken forthrightness. Such poems assert themselves with commanding, succinct directness. For example, local Black vernacular in a series of dramatic monologues for two boys named Tyrone and Willie B from Good Times locates the characters in an African American community and articulates their varying senses of identity in relation to that community. The sequence is composed of eight free-verse poems that range in length from seven to fifteen lines, all except one—“willie b. (2)”—containing no stanza breaks. The poems alternate; Tyrone speaks followed by Willie, the successive pairs numbered from “1” to “4.” In each poem, Tyrone and Willie recount circumstances during a local riot. That they are minors—Willie is twelve, and Tyrone’s adolescent zeal indicates he is just a bit older than that—suggests that they are merely playing war, imitating the violent circumstances they witness around them. But while the sequence intimates that its speakers are turning war into fun because of their age—at once both “disaffected black youths playing at the battles adults fight in earnest” and “spirited children at play” (Holladay 17; Lupton 29)—the sequence depicts its speakers in the throes of an actual riot. In fact, the monologues relay a specific historical event that occurred in Clifton’s childhood hometown: the Buffalo, New York riots of 1967 in which teenage boys set fires, overturned cars, and looted stores in response to racist housing and employment conditions. The boys’ language is emphatically not playful but in earnest: Tyrone and Willie disclose in Black vernacular their divergent self-perceptions as well as their dispositions toward and impulses to communal action. Communal action was a crucial imperative of Black Arts poetry, and the fact that the “tyrone” and “willie b” sequence presents the different perspectives of two African American boys in local speech during an historic riot provoked by institutionalized racism in the late 1960s situates the poems in the Black Arts Movement. Further, they are in free verse, they identify the white man as the enemy, and they include an expletive and even a gesture toward the anti-Semitism that some Black Arts poems notoriously expressed.8 And yet the “tyrone” and “willie b” poems reveal Clifton’s independence from the Black Arts Movement in equal measure.9 The poems don’t embrace a “militantly engaged political stance” (Thomas

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144), nor do they “assault white culture and bring down its oppressive authority” (Ford, “African American Poetry” 389). In fact, Clifton is not included in the anthology section of Henderson’s volume even though by the time his book came out she had published two collections of poetry, the first of which, Good Times, includes the “tyrone” and “willie b” series.10 Clifton confirmed her early separation from the Black Arts Movement in a 2002 conversation with Sonia Sanchez, a poet who did write the kind of “assassin poems” that Baraka called for (among many other kinds of poems across her long career): “Now I must say this to you. I must say this. People, I think, sometimes are surprised that Sonia and I are such good friends because we don’t write alike. Particularly when I was first writing, African-American writers … didn’t validate what I did because it did not seem to be political, forgetting what Gwendolyn Brooks said—that when she walked out of her door, it was a political decision” (1066).11 Brooks and Clifton occupied similar positions in relation to the Black Arts Movement: both were influenced by the movement but questioned precepts about what constitutes political Black poetry. For example, the younger BAM poets that Brooks took under her wing prompted her to seek alternatives to the traditional forms she had mastered and innovated because they were thought incompatible with the revolution. But Brooks declared that her new, free-verse attempts would be extensions of her own “G. B. voice” rather than “an imitation of the contemporary young black voice,” and she maintained throughout her career that all of her work, traditional and free verse, was politically aware Black poetry (Report One 183). Likewise, Clifton’s “tyrone” and “willie b” poems were “contemporary young black” poems but not categorically Black Arts poems: they are not, for instance, rhetorical and typographical eruptions of Black vernacular. Rather, they present the composed, measured local speech of a community’s “fine black boys” who view a local disturbance as an opportunity to assert their individuality. Clifton’s depiction of a civil rights riot doesn’t set linguistic rage against the brutal tyranny of racism but portrays two individual boys in their own language as they struggle for recognition in the volatile context of a protest. In the sequence, Tyrone’s vernacular descriptions of a germinating riot reveal a youthful, enthusiastic personality reveling in resistance: the spirit of the buffalo soldiers is beautiful how we fight on down to main street

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laughing and shouting we happy together oh we turning each other on in this damn war. (60)

The invigorating energy of activism emboldens Tyrone: the rioter’s vitality is “beautiful”; they are “laughing and shouting,” “happy,” and “turning each other on” in a “war” that is empowering, the modifier “damn” indicating colloquially the speaker’s excitement. Marching with his fellow “buffalo soldiers” instills in Tyrone a sense of defiance and strength in numbers. He refers to himself not as “I” but “we,” the name “buffalo soldiers” connecting the demonstrators to each other, to the city of Buffalo, and to previous armies of African American men, namely the Black regiments referred to as “buffalo soldiers” by Native Americans during the Indian Wars and by white Union soldiers during the Civil War. These affirmative declarations expressing the exhilarations of group dissent during the beginning of a riot counter historical characterizations of the young agitators as downtrodden and despondent. When the leaders of a local education center in Buffalo interviewed the youths involved in the 1967 riots “to determine why they were engaged in violence and looting,” they concluded that the boys had a “general negative attitude” toward the police and “society in general, which they felt kept them from getting ahead educationally, vocationally or socially” (Besage 20). The youths felt betrayed by ineffective welfare programs and demeaned by hopeless employment prospects that resulted in, at best, “menial” jobs that would only lead to “dead end[s].” In Clifton’s poem, the prospect of rioting has the opposite effect on Tyrone: uniting with others to defy aggressively the social systems that inhibit him elicits bravura and elation. And yet the “tyrone” and “willie b” poems register ambivalence about rioting too, despite the positive rendering of the “fight on down to main street.” We hear something of this uncertainty in Tyrone’s delivery of the group’s proclamation, the first poem in the series, which announces “on this day” the young buffalo soldiers’ aims for taking “position” at the “corner of jefferson and sycamore”: we will sack the city    will sink the city        seek the city. (58)

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This sounds like a straightforward declaration. However, the presentation suggests ambiguity. The first claim is “we will sack the city,” a stately announcement alluding to the sackings of Rome and Troy. But in the next two lines, Tyrone adds “sink” and “seek” to his list of declarations indicating that no singular objective for the riot has been established. That the words “we” and “we will” drop off in the next two lines make it sound as if Tyrone is playing with words to formulate his sense of the riot’s purpose. The intentions proliferate: “sack” leads to “sink” which becomes “seek,” that final verb emphasizing Tyrone’s optimism. It is as if the first syllable of “sycamore” in the fourth line generates the column of alliterating, one-­ syllable intentions in the next three lines (“sack,” “sink,” “seek”) rather than any definitive idea of what the riot should accomplish. In other words, these young “buffalo soldiers” are still trying to work out the purpose of their protest up to the very last minute, and their language itself seems generative for this working out. Ending on the phrase “seek the city” suggests that they are not just out to cause destruction but that they are searching for something more. Tyrone’s pronouncement of the boys’ goals is both definitive and undetermined. He announces their geographic location and their aims in annunciatory language evocative of a battle cry. But the fact that he experiments with different expressions to describe their mission suggests that these “buffalo soldiers” aren’t entirely sure about what they want to achieve. The sequence’s other speaker, Willie, is surer than Tyrone in that he identifies precisely what he wants to get out of rioting, and yet for all his certainty, Willie’s local speech is obviously not that of a political militant but a child: “I ain’t but twelve,” he says, explaining that his mother has told him he has “no business out here/in the army” not only because of his age but because his father “was/a white man” (59). This last fact troubles Willie; we hear him reflecting bitterly his mother’s sentiments about his father when he refers to him as “the mother fucker.” And yet despite his mother’s discouragement and his conflicted feelings toward his father, Willie is especially precise about his involvement in the riot: why i would bring a wagon into battle is a wagon is a help to a soldier with his bricks and when he want to rest also

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today is mama’s birthday and i’m gone get her that tv out of old steinhart’s store. (61)

Willie here is answering a question that goes unheard in the poem: why would someone bring a wagon into battle? His response amplifies the fact that Willie is just a child in this incendiary setting. The poem’s meticulous arrangement of his speech renders a child assembling a reply: the first line repeats the question; the second is just “is” by itself to communicate the boy’s slow and careful effort to respond distinctly or perhaps his hesitation as he thinks up an answer; the next few lines lay out clearly the pragmatic uses of a wagon in a battle; and the sixth is another one-word line— “also”—indicating that Willie is about to reveal his real reason for having a wagon. What we are hearing is the sincerity, naiveté, eagerness, and reluctance audible in a child’s voice: it doesn’t occur to Willie that a child’s wagon is a rather out-of-place piece of equipment for a riot. In Willie’s young mind, a wagon is perfectly suitable because it can carry heavy bricks and can cart “a soldier” and his loot around when he’s tired or hurt. It is childlike practicality, rather than inspiring solidarity, that motivates Willie: the riot could make getting his mother a birthday gift possible. Tyrone seeks affinity with the other rioters while Willie seeks to provide his mother with an item she wants (it’s “that tv” at “steinhart’s store”) but can’t afford. By arranging Willie’s local speech to point up his age and guilelessness, the poem asks, why are children involved in a riot? Indeed, each boy discloses what he seeks from participating in a local disturbance. Tyrone expresses desire for connection to his peers with a teenager’s exuberance and uncertainty. Willie, younger than Tyrone, hasn’t developed that adolescent admixture of idealism and unsureness: he refers to himself, his mother, his father, and his involvement in the riot in language that conveys an innocent certainty. Despite their differences, we come to find by the end of the series that Tyrone and Willie both perceive in the riot an opportunity for self-assertion and recognition. In the last of Tyrone’s poems, he continues to speak optimistically even as he anticipates violence: we made it through the swamps and we’ll make it through the dogs leaving our white man’s names and white man’s traditions

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and making some history and they see the tear gas burn my buffalo soldiers eyes they got to say Look yonder Tyrone Is. (64)

Tyrone identifies in the riot not just coherent, uplifting coalition but the potential to proclaim his individuality by standing up to the incoherence of racism, to, for instance, tear gas that will “burn my buffalo soldiers eyes.” The poem’s ending arrives at an accentuating point that acclaims Tyrone’s individuality, capitalizing the first letter of his name in the penultimate line and emphasizing in the last his existence with the present-tense form of “to be.”12 That the final “Is” also echoes back to Tyrone’s burning, tear-gassed “eyes” further conveys that racist social conditions provoke communal rioting and make violence the only resource for young boys to express themselves. Willie also finds in the riot a platform for assertion, but his situation is even more delicate than Tyrone’s. He begins clearly enough, admitting conclusively his responsibility for setting fire to a local bar in an arrangement of local speech that implies he is again answering an interrogation we don’t explicitly hear: “i’m the one/what burned down the dew drop inn,” he boldly confesses (65). In this final monologue, however, Willie is not as articulate as he was when he discussed his wagon, even though one-word lines and blunt end-stops render again his drive to make himself clear. Directly after divulging his crime in the lines above, Willie says, yes the jew do exploit us in his bar but also my mama one time in the dew drop inn tried for a white man and if he is on a newspaper or something look I am the one what burned down the dew drop inn everybody say I’m a big boy for my age me willie b son.

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Willie’s and Tyrone’s identities are similarly wrapped up in how the community perceives them: Willie’s words in his final poem, “everybody say” and “look,” echo words in Tyrone’s final poem, “they got to say/Look yonder.” Both are fundamentally concerned with how they look to others.13 And yet although Tyrone and Willie have both identified in the act of rioting potential for individual recognition by others, their motivations and methods are entirely different. Tyrone finds himself by exhibiting bravely his support for the revolution: he’ll suffer tear gas to “make some history” for his people who have made it through the “swamps” and “dogs” of slavery and segregation. The younger Willie is not, in the end, as clear about his actions as he was about hauling his wagon to the riot. He implies that he burned down the bar because its Jewish owner was exploitative, but the lines “yes/the jew do exploit us in his bar” sound more like Willie repeating some older person’s sentiment and putting lilting sounds together (“jew” and “do”) rather than him positing his own thought-out reason. In fact, we hear traces of his real incentive when he refers again to his mother and “a white man.” He halts a bit as he can’t quite articulate the connection between them and his actions: “but also/my mamma/ … tried for a white man/and if he on a newspaper/or something/look I am the one.” The lower-case “i” becomes a capital “I” here, indicating momentarily that Willie has realized an identity in the act of arson. Still, what we hear in the end is not a self-realized individual but a child, the personal pronouns and proper names reverted back to the lower case: “everybody say i’m a big boy for my age/me/willie b/son.” The poem doesn’t uphold communality over individuality (or, for that matter, the reverse). Rather, it portrays tragically the susceptibility of an angry, confused child to lashing out against circumstances invariably positioned against him.

Clifton’s Admonitions Clifton’s poems are always more invested in relating or connecting ideas or concepts that are thought to be divergent or oppositional than separating them or arranging them hierarchically. She melds linguistic registers. Her poems move seamlessly along subtly shifting rhetorical modes. We find this when Tyrone’s colloquial announcement in his first poem takes the form of three consonantal announcements, the phrase “we will” diminishing with each line and stressing that standard construction (as opposed to the vernacular “we happy together” and “we turning each

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other on” in Tyrone’s second poem). In other words, Clifton unifies forms of speech just as she unifies concepts like communality and individuality and public and private. For example, “admonitions,” the last poem of Good Times, sustains, like the first “tyrone” poem, an overall colloquial tone even when the speaker delivers a pair of hortatory declarations to the publicly condemned young men of her community and instructs her fellow Black women about responding to recurrent racial and sexual menace. Each of the poem’s three stanzas address, in order, “boys,” “girls,” and “children.” Typical of Clifton’s poetry, there is no punctuation, not a single word is capitalized, and the poem’s speaker is figured as the poet herself. It looks almost like a list, or a note or memo jotted down quickly, as in the final stanza where the speaker addresses both her boys and girls: “when they ask you/why is your mama so funny,” Clifton instructs her “children” to “say/she is a poet/she don’t have no sense” (71). Such conversational humor advances a composed, sturdy imperviousness. It is droll in the face of danger and pointedly instructive about managing that danger. When the mother tells her children how to answer their inquisitors, the emphasis is not on whether poets make or don’t make conventional sense but on what the children should “say,” the stanza’s only one-word line. The speaker directs her children to utilize language for self-protection—indeed not just to use language but to invoke the language of poetry: they are to “say” the word “poet” when their mother’s competence and credibility are doubted. Recognizing poetry’s assumed nonsense as beguilement, they are protected by its confounding and inscrutable powers. That last vernacular line referring to nonsense seems to acquire multiple meanings in spite of its colloquial directness: she’s a poet therefore she doesn’t make sense, or because she’s a poet she does not have “no sense” but is all sense. The poem itself is a nuanced linguistic strategy: it presents the colloquial language of an individual speaker simultaneously addressing her children in a domestic setting and speaking collectively to and for an entire community. This memo to an African American mother’s “boys,” “girls,” and “children” skirts the line between personal communiqué and public pronouncement. Here is the mother-poet’s message to her sons: boys i don’t promise you nothing but this what you pawn

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i will redeem what you steal i will conceal my private silence to your public guilt is all i got. (71)

The stanza appears to diminish the speaker’s “private silence” in the face of her boys’ “public guilt,” but rather than separating private and public experience, it unites them. On the one hand, the enveloping vernacular expressions “i don’t promise you nothing/but this” and “is all i got” signify that a particular person is talking to her sons. On the other hand, this individual speaker’s private commitment to her boys when they are judged publicly is amplified as a communal pronouncement: between the stanza’s explicitly vernacular lines, the speaker rhythmically incants “what you pawn/i will redeem/what you steal/i will conceal.” The oratorical repetitions and standard syntax set beside the contraction and double negative of “don’t promise you nothing” and the informal “is all i got” produce at once two different modes: one with the intimacy of the colloquial and another that conveys a more distanced authority that anticipates the oracular utterances that Clifton will voice in later poems. The vernacular expressions (and multiple references to “i”) are those of an individual speaking to her sons while the formalized, incantatory proclamations convey that this specific, lower-case “i” is speaking enigmatically for and to a larger public about protection and survival. This poet is both advising her own children and advising all African American children. The poem’s language is at once private and public, the language of a domestic speaker in a particular place amplified as the voice of all the mothers from that place speaking to all the sons of that place. The speaker vows to deploy the little she has—she can promise “nothing but this”—to protect her sons from a society that denounces them, while the promises she makes—redemption, concealment, silence—are vastly substantial, issued not just to individuals but to a whole community. She gains the authority to render private consultation as public admonition by setting vernacular to the cadences of a formal declaration, weaving those registers across the stanza with assonance, consonance, and alliteration: boys and but; promise and pawn; redeem, steal, and conceal; steal and silence; private and public; guilt and got. The stanza conveys individual and communal connection: the speaker is linked to her sons and to other African American mothers and their sons through this language and these sounds.

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However, the poem does not just unify the individual and the communal; it also differentiates itself from the white male supremacy that indicts and judges Black boys and threatens its girls. The second stanza offers counsel to Black girls who must fend off the persistent racial and sexual threat that white men impose, advising both “girls” and all “black women” to “just laugh/laugh real loud” when for the “first time a white man/ opens his fly/like a good thing.” The tone in this stanza is even more thoroughly conversational than the previous one as the speaker adds laugher to her arsenal. There is no drift across colloquial phrases toward noncolloquial inflections. Rather, the linguistic register is fixed, the admonition articulated with terse, straightforward certitude. And yet despite the concise, direct, and casual delivery, the situation referred to is decidedly perilous. That the speaker addresses her girls about a white man opening his fly the “first time” implies both the inevitability of that intrusion and an inevitable next time. Of course, that the white man believes his advances are “a good thing” communicates precisely the opposite. The laconic, intimate elocution of the stanza opposes its precarious, distressing context. The tone of “admonitions” conveys the unflappability of its African American female speaker in the face of racist and sexual danger. In colloquial, succinct language, she proclaims solidarity with younger generations of African Americans while admonishing the mainstream racist and sexist society that imperils them. Her singular voice—she is a particular “i” addressing her daughters and sons—is also communal. The second stanza begins with the mother directing her daughters to safeguard themselves against the unbidden, treacherous sexual gestures of white men. By the stanza’s end, the speaker and her daughters are subsumed in a larger whole: the first person “i” becomes “we,” and the “girls” become “my/ black women.” The instruction is straightforward and abrupt, the repetition of the word “laugh,” its reverberating volume (they’ll laugh loud), the proliferating consonantal “l” sounds, and the enjambment across “my/black women” create a fluid, continuous movement as the stanza sharply concludes. The poem’s frank, steadfast collectiveness is blunt and, more than amusing, bemusing. Black vernacular in these early Clifton poems executes a criticism of society. Local speech in the “tyrone” and “willie b” series expresses the adolescent ebullience and boyish innocence of young participants in a riot. As the boys relate the events of a violent uprising, their speech characterizes them: Tyrone is a spirited, impressionable teenager eager to display

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his bravery and loyalty, and Willie is a vulnerable young boy who talks mostly about his mother even when explaining his involvement in an act of arson. In other words, Clifton presents local speech here to foreground specific children against a perilous social context. Racism, the Tyrone and Willie B poems argue, turns childhood into a hazardous stage of life. Likewise, local language in “admonitions” conveys a particular voice speaking about treacherous social conditions. The poem’s speaker is a Black mother addressing her children about the risk those forces present. The poem, though, extends beyond the speaker’s domestic sphere: noncolloquial grammatical structures in oratorical patterns project her colloquial voice to all African Americans. Her amplified, pithy language conveys a cool imperturbability that counters the dangers she warns of. The mother’s admonitions to her boys and girls admonish a racist society that condemns and jeopardizes young Black people.

Clifton’s Local-Speech Testaments Clifton’s oratorical voice, emerging in “admonitions” by attuning colloquial speech with noncolloquial elements, is one of her poems’ predominant features. She generates it in different ways at different times, but it is consistent across the span of her career, whether her poems concern family members, historical events, news stories, pop culture, or classical myths. That voice acquires ethereal dimensions when the poems portray unsettling spiritual and prophetic encounters. In fact, almost all of her books, from her second, good news about the earth (1972), to her last, Voices (2008), include poems that depict speakers, usually biblical characters or the poet herself, undergoing potent otherworldly experiences. These poems occupy crucial positions in the books: they are typically arranged in sequences, and seven of Clifton’s eleven poetry collections conclude with whole sections about such occurrences. The poems are surrounded by or follow poems about family, social and historical realities, and contemporary American life.14 The first biblical sequence Clifton published, “some jesus,” is the last section of good news about the earth, a collection alert to the racial and sexual politics of its time, to American history in general, and to Clifton’s autobiography. There are poems about Kent State, abortion, the Black Power movement, women’s liberation, and slavery, as well as poems for her father, sisters, and husband. The concluding “some jesus” section departs from these real-world contexts even though its language is

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real-­world local speech. It comprises sixteen short free-verse poems spoken by various figures from the Old and New Testaments: Adam and Eve, Cain, Moses, Solomon, Job, Daniel, Jonah, John the Baptist, Mary, Joseph, an apostle, and Jesus speak in taut lines composed of African American vernacular.15 The speakers sound, by turns, astonished, forlorn, apprehensive, celebratory, enigmatic, self-assured, cautionary, deferential, ecstatic, bewildered, and hopeful. In other words, they sound like real people, for Black vernacular portrays these quintessential figures as real humans, not just as representations of spiritual dilemmas or concepts. In other words, the poem’s local speech correlates the bible’s symbolic narratives and the experiences of Black people. Clifton herself has described her biblical poems as attempts to envision mythical stories as human stories: in 1999 she told Charles Rowell, “My take … on Biblical people— because I write about that a lot—my take on them is that they were human. Not myth, not mythological creatures, but human beings. What they wondered is what all humans wonder. They had all of the insecurities and uncertainties that humans have” (63).16 Black speech provided Clifton with the resource for humanizing these representational figures. Clifton’s depictions of biblical figures as African Americans speaking in Black vernacular are revolutionizing: as Akasha Gloria Hull explains, her scriptural revisions transform “the Bible from a patriarchal to an Afrocentric, feminist, sexual, and broadly mystical text” (“Images” 293). These linguistic portraits conceive biblical tales as chronicles of Black experience. For example, “moses” is a formerly enslaved person who portends in the poem’s final idiomatic line an encounter with God: i walk on bones snakes twisting in my hand locusts breaking my mouth an old man leaving slavery home is burning in me like a bush God got his eye on. (113)

Moses here is a prescient Black man who releases his people from bondage and who will receive the Ten Commandments from God. The poem’s depiction of Moses as a Black person communicates that Black history is

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as extraordinary as biblical tales: it is partly a history, after all, of annihilated ancestors (the bones Moses walks on), resistance to oppression (the snakes twisting in his hand), and epidemic suppression (the plague of locusts). The fact that Moses speaks in Black vernacular despite the locusts “breaking” his mouth depicts Black experience as a paragon of human endurance. It is not an uncomplicated or unequivocally triumphant perseverance: Moses conflates his “burning” desire to go home after being freed and his uneasy anticipation of God’s plans for him. The idea of his own home after captivity thrills him, but he also anxiously prefigures the burning bush that God will speak to him through. That “God got his eye on” him unnerves this weathered, liberated old Black man. The “some jesus” poems present the speech of characters such as Moses in Black speech because to do so is to present him as a human and to make of Black experience a paradigm of humanness. To give another example, Clifton’s “cain” is a portrait of a grief-stricken Black man exiled from the world: the land of nod is a desert on my head     i plant tears every morning my brother don’t rise up. (112)

The set-apart “i” here visually depicts Cain’s banishment and loneliness. He “plants tears/every morning” not just because of his solitary expulsion in “the land of nod” but because each day is a reminder that his “brother/ don’t rise up.” His language conveys his individuality: he’s a particular Black man who has killed his brother and who lives in isolation and anguish because of it. Cain’s predicament—his desertedness, his dead brother, his guilt—is contrasted later in the sequence to those of two other condemned Black men, John the Baptist and Jesus. These men are wrongfully criminalized and so have none of Cain’s desolation. John anticipates avidly and reverentially the arrival of a “brother” whose afro is not like a desert on his head but like the bush God speaks to Moses through: somebody coming in blackness like a star

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and the world be a great bush on his head and his eyes be fire in the city and his mouth be true as time he be calling the people brother even in the prison even in the jail. (118)

John is talking about Jesus, a fellow Black preacher who impresses John with his capacity to call people “brother” even when imprisoned and who, we learn in the sequence’s later “easter sunday” poem, has come down from the heavens “like a great dipper of stars” in order “to lift men up” (125).17 Jesus is a messianic Black man whose lower-case “i” in that poem becomes a capital I the instant he recognizes the unjust racial orders of the world that will incite him to lift men up: “while i was in the middle of the night/I saw red stars and black stars/pushed out of the sky by white ones.” Presented as a man speaking in a local tongue, Jesus in these poems is an inspiriting human force against racism who promises that, even in a world where white pushes out red and black, “the future is possible” (“spring song” 126). Clifton’s use of Black speech to portray Cain, John, and Jesus as real men depicts the degradation Black people face and the racism they must resist as human and spiritual catastrophes that will be overcome. What we are hearing in these early poems is Clifton’s rendering of spiritual experiences as linguistic experiences. For example, Joseph speaks in his “some jesus” poem of the bemusing effect his remarkable son has on his speech: “something about this boy/has spelled my tongue” (120). Even when his “fingers tremble/on mary” his “mouth cries only/Jesus Jesus Jesus.” The spell is both constraining (“Jesus” is the only word his “spelled” tongue can say) and releasing (Joseph repeats the word during sex). Language here is the outcome of a bewildering ecstasy that is at once spiritual (the word he repeats is “Jesus”) and physical (Jesus is a human boy; Joseph is touching Mary when he exclaims the words). Similarly, when the first humans speak in the very first “some jesus” poem, their utterances suggest a link between linguistic creation and procreation. Adam produces words—“the names/of the things/bloom in my mouth”—and Eve gives birth—“my body opens/into brothers” (111).

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For Clifton, to be human is to be generative of other humans and of language, and both Adam and Eve—and Lucifer—would become for her symbols of finding such language.

Clifton’s Oracular Vernacular Clifton typically depicts Adam as, like Joseph in the “some jesus” sequence, generating language in something of a spellbound state. In fact, searching for language is a predominant theme in Clifton’s poetry. This is especially true when biblical characters and otherworldly voices speak in her poems. In “the birth of language,” for instance, a poem published almost two decades after the “some jesus” series, Adam realizes with trepidation his own speechlessness as he takes his first steps in Eden (438). For Adam, speaking is impossible because language doesn’t yet exist. Rather than acquiring it, he must invent it. Being “without words” makes him “fearful” because he can’t name the world he’s discovering and charged by God with naming, and so can’t begin to make sense of it. But he must name it and make sense of it in Clifton’s mythology because Adam is also one of Clifton’s figures for the poet, and she associates writing poetry with his agonizing struggle to devise language. In other words, her poems relate his challenges to her own challenges as a poet. She connects those challenges to corporeal experience. The narrator of “the birth of language” surmises that Adam begins to make language when the “blades” “draw blood,” suggesting that it is also human duress, not just spiritual confoundment, that results in linguistic creation. Similarly, Clifton’s dead mother in another poem advises her living daughter to “turn the blood that clots your tongue/into poems,” adding personal inheritance to the mix (296). In other words, poetry is a language made from difficult experiences and disturbing conditions that range from the physical to the spiritual to the autobiographical. Clifton makes poetry out of her own conflict about poetry’s adequacy to construe those experiences and conditions. In “the making of poems,” for instance, she goes so far as to call the results of her poetic work “failures,” comparing her “job” as a poet to Adam’s strained attempts at naming and to being a mother: the poet explains that “the reason” she writes poems despite failing repeatedly to give “true names” is “i am adam and his mother/and these failures are my job” (216). The poet here isn’t reprimanding herself because her abilities are limited; to identify oneself as “adam and his mother” is hardly a rebuke— Adam’s “mother,” after all, would be God.18 Rather, she is describing an

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artist’s persistence (she makes poems again and again) to undertake the exacting task of giving “true names.” Her poems are “failures” because the raw material for poetry is language and language may only get so close to “giving … true names” when circumstances and emotions seem ineffable. Local speech is one resource for locating true names and for expressing the inexpressible. We have seen that Black vernacular in Clifton’s work sets individuality against perilous social contexts and presents Black experience as paradigmatic of human experience. Black speech, in other words, illuminates in Clifton’s poems the individual humanness that hierarchical social systems attempt to obscure. And yet as Clifton’s investment in inscrutable spiritual situations deepens over her career, and as she searches for language commensurate to those enigmas, explicit African American vernacular extends to broader evocations of speech. For example, her sequence about the Annunciation, in which the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will give birth to Jesus, is arranged in language that at times suggests Caribbean dialect but mostly mixes standard English and nonstandard constructions that are colloquial but not as specifically locatable as the American Black speech of the “some jesus” sequence. The “astrologer” who “predicts at mary’s birth” delivers the first of these poems in nonstandard English that feels at once local and not of this world: this one lie down on grass. this one old men will follow calling mother  mother. she womb will blossom then die. this one she hide from evening. at a certain time when she hear something it will burn her ear. at a certain place when she see something it will break her eye. (226)

The enigmatic phrases—“she hear something,” “she see something,” “this one lie down on grass,” “she womb will blossom then die” “this one she hide from evening”—amplify the extraordinariness of the astrologer’s diction and syntax. We hear a colloquial speech we can’t quite locate. After all, the poem is a prediction about a young girl who will be told by an angel that she’ll give birth even though she’s a virgin, a girl whose ear will burn and whose eye will break. The oracle who predicts Mary’s troubled

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future speaks in unusual speech that matches the unusual events it foretells. It is a nonstandard language for a nonstandard occurrence, local in texture but situated in a biblical rather than an earthly local world. Likewise, in the next poem, Mary’s mother, Anna, speaks in standard and nonstandard structures, indicating again a human speaking about non-earthly phenomena: “we rise up early and/we work,” she says, before referring to her own unsettling, predictive dreams about her daughter’s imminent visitation: “that dream/i am having again;/she washed in light/ … she on a hill looking up/ … shall i give her up/ … we scrubbing” (227). The poem’s mixture of standard English (“work is the medicine for dreams,” “that dream/i am having again” “shall i give her up/to dreaming then”) and nonstandard English (“she washed in light,” “she on a hill,” “we scrubbing”) conveys the prognostications in her dreams both formally and colloquially. Mary speaks in similarly layered grammatical formulations, producing a tone that sounds both conversational and spellbound: “winged women was saying/‘full of grace’ and like,” “joseph, i afraid of stars,” “i hands keep moving toward i breasts,” “i watching my mother,” “could i have fought these thing?” (228–232). For Hull, the form of speech in these poems is not explicitly African American but North American nevertheless: “Mary, Anna, and the astrologer all speak a form of Caribbean dialect. He says ‘she womb will blossom,’ a grammatical usage that is still current in Jamaica among other places” (“Images” 285). The Jamaican dialect points up for Hull the characters’ marginalized social status: “Clifton implies a comparison between the early Christians and present-day Rastafarians,” two “sects” with a history of battling adversity.19 But, too, the poems also explicitly depict humans amid extraordinary spiritual occurrences. Their uncommon human language correlates to the nonhuman ordeals they communicate. The poems translate experiences that are beyond human into human language by blending the standard and the nonstandard, by creating, in other words, a local poetic speech that is not definitively locatable. To portray humans undergoing disorienting, disturbing spiritual encounters in language, Clifton’s linguistic intermix produces a vernacular for the oracular. Clifton creates the oracular tone in her Annunciation poems by devising speech that manages to be both ordinary and extraordinary. Anna, for instance, sounds like a real-world Black woman speaking about her and Mary’s daily work. Her demotic tongue, however, is as surreal as the prophetic dreams she relays: she speaks about her daughter’s unsettling future in expressly standard grammatical structures (“shall i give her up”),

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nonstandard phrases (“all day we scrubbing”), and unusual formulations that are colloquial but not determinately located (“face all long tears”). The Annunciation poems indicate that the astrologer, Anna, and Mary are Black people, but their vernacular is not as overtly African American as Cain’s, Moses’s, and John’s in the “some jesus” sequence. There, Clifton employs Black speech to foreground humanness in biblical contexts while referring to afros, slavery, “black/skin” (“solomon” 114), the Middle Passage (“jonah” 117), Africa (“the raising of lazarus” 122), African American food (“palm sunday” 123), and Jesus’s “coming in blackness” (“john” 118). In the Annunciation sequence, Clifton also evokes Black speech at different times, but she doesn’t reference Black culture or history explicitly, and the poems present the utterances of humans during prophetic, otherworldly encounters in a host of linguistic registers that include especially formal standard phrases and nonstandard configurations. The poems accentuate unsettling astonishment in the astrologer’s, Anna’s, and Mary’s prophesying demotic tongues. In other words, their real-world local speech is inflected with non-locatable elements to convey the supernatural as natural.

Lucifer’s Local Speech in Lucille’s Eden Clifton’s vernacular for the oracular renders speech creation as an elemental facet of the nonmaterial world. This is the case in her poems about both Old and New Testament characters such as Moses, Jesus, Adam and Eve, Mary, and Anna, and it comes to a kind of culmination in Clifton’s poem’s spoken by Lucifer, the figure she most directly links to creation, to herself, to poetry, and to poetry’s capacity to make sense of the world. For example, the “tree of life” sequence that ends quilting (1991) includes ten poems that link procreation and linguistic creation: Lucifer encourages Adam and Eve to have sex and to produce language. What they produce is a local speech for Eden that Lucifer helps them develop.20 In “brothers,” the final sequence of eight poems in The Book of Light (1992), Lucifer speaks directly to God in that Edenic local speech in part to admonish God’s silence during the turmoil and suffering of human history. In both sets of poems, Lucifer is cast as a generator of language and, like Adam and Eve, a figure for the poet whose speech is at once colloquial, unusual, standard, and nonstandard. Indeed, Lucifer the “light-bringer” is a figure for, not just a poet, but Clifton herself: the names “Lucifer” and “Lucille” are derivations of the word “light,” and light is one of Clifton’s most prominent symbols.

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In the “tree of life” poems, Lucifer encourages the creation of language along with the procreative act of sex; the sequence shows a local Edenic speech in formation. Lucifer in “eve’s version,” the third poem in the sequence, is a wily, whispering “smooth talker” who, Eve says, slides into my dreams and fills them with apple apple snug as my breast in the palm of my hand apple sleek apple sweet and bright in my mouth. (396)

Eve is encouraged here to make language. Lucifer drops into her “dreams” the image of an “apple,” John Milton’s literary version of the forbidden fruit in Paradise Lost. The nonstandard grammatical structures create the impression that the words she speaks are in the process of forming as she utters them: “fills them with apple” rather than apples; “apple sleek apple sweet.” Indeed, Eve assigns to the image of the forbidden fruit of knowledge the word “apple” and then devises other words to describe the image: she invents a simile to convey the way the apple feels in her palm, “apple snug as my breast,” and produces a string of alliterating adjectives for “apple”: it is first “snug” then “sleek” and “sweet,” echoing perhaps Lucifer’s whispery, serpentine sibilance. Its shape is similar to her breast and the words are “bright” in her mouth. Lucifer tempts Eve into making language because the fallen angel has detected in speech the power that God has prohibited. Lucifer encourages linguistic creation because language is knowledge and knowledge is forbidden. However, that “lucifer speaks in his own voice” only in the sequence’s final poem suggests his own hesitation to use language—religion and the bible having always spoken for him. We find finally that Lucifer’s speech is remarkably similar to that of the other “tree of life” speakers, for Lucifer also employs a confluence of standard and nonstandard English: sure as i am of the seraphim folding wing so am i certain of a graceful bed ……………………………

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   it was to be i who was called son if only of the morning saw that some must walk or all will crawl so slithered into earth ……………………………       i became the lord of snake.... (402)

Lucifer presents his fall from son of the morning to “lord of snake” as a kind of promotion—he goes from son to lord (if also from angel to snake)—and as a strategy to ensure humanity’s distinction—he’ll crawl, so Adam and Eve can walk; he’ll drop “apple” into Eve’s dreams, so she can speak and, in turn, whisper names into Adam’s mouth.21 What sets humans apart from the animals that crawl is their ability to speak. That Lucifer’s language is similar to Adam and Eve’s indicates that he is instructing them toward language and also that he himself has adopted the vernacular of Eden to speak like a human. He announces his declarative certainty in a subtly demotic register (“sure as i am,” the poem opens) that is also nonstandard (“of the seraphim/folding wing”). Line breaks emphasize his hortatory annunciations—“it was/to be/i who was called son/if only of the morning/saw that...”—while nonstandard syntax gives the impression of colloquiality. Indeed, the linguistic mode in the “tree of life” poems is all of a piece; their diction and grammatical variations are as consistent as their free-verse forms, minimal punctuation, and lack of capitalized letters. In other words, the speakers of the “tree of life” poems share a form of local speech. Clifton has invented for these biblical poems a vernacular, a prelapsarian “local” language for the Garden of Eden with a distinct social function. In Clifton’s next Lucifer series, “brothers,” the sequence spoken entirely by Lucifer that rounds out The Book of Light, the Lucifer character deploys this vernacular not just to instruct Adam and Eve but to execute a critique of God (466–70). In these eight poems, Lucifer invites God to rest with him and to reflect on the now-expunged world (section 1), attempts to explain God to God (2), claims to possess a “serpent’s understanding” that God seems to lack (3), defends his own actions in Eden (4), contemplates the corporeal life of humans (5), and questions God about why he

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“watched the excommunication of/that world and … said nothing” (6). His speech is not, however, an unambiguous denunciation: he also recognizes God’s “mercy” and “grace” in the penultimate poem before he admits in the last poem that he has “said too much” and concedes somewhat to “the silence.” That penultimate poem provides a description of Lucifer’s speech in the image of a forked “tongue”: “the two roads/of this tongue/converge into a single/certitude” (469). We might conceive of those two converging “roads” as the standard and nonstandard expressions in the local language “Lucille” invents for Lucifer (and the other Eden speakers) that produce a singular tone.22 For Lucifer speaks in a lofty manner that imparts a certain authoritative formality. For example, the poem’s opening invitation sounds ceremonious rather than one brother casually asking another to talk: “come coil with me/here in creation’s bed/among the twigs and ribbons/of the past. i have grown old/remembering this garden” (466). In another instance, as Lucifer contemplates his own existence, his inverted syntax and declamatory phrases reveal an archaic rhetorical style: “how come i to this/serpent’s understanding?” he asks before declaring that “from/a hood of leaves/i have foreseen the evening/of the world” (467). His language renders, fittingly, a commanding composure but also tenseness: he is, after all, interrogating God. However, the emphatically standard constructions in “brothers” that connote Lucifer’s self-possession represent only one part of his forked tongue. The rigidly standard formulations are coupled with looser grammatical structures that convey a colloquial strain. For instance, when Lucifer attempts to explain God to God in the sequence’s second poem, he begins, “listen, You are beyond/even Your own understanding” before explaining to God that God shares attributes with the very humans he has created: their “pride,” “dominion,” “ambition,” Lucifer says to God, “is You. all You, all You” (466–67). That directive to “listen” and the repetitions of the idiomatic “all You” render a conversational speaking voice. Indeed, standard grammatical structures in the poem are often counterbalanced with phrases and colloquialisms that are not particularly standard. For example, when Lucifer contemplates the human world that Adam and Eve are sent to, his language is at once standard and nonstandard, ordinary and unordinary. He describes that world’s “delights,” including “the tinny newborn cry of calf/and cormorant and humankind” and contrasts them with the “pain” of human experience. He then declares his right to ponder God’s silence:

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   forbid me not my meditation on the outer world before the rest of it, before the bruising of his heel, my head, and so forth. (468)

Lucifer here speaks in especially sonorous language, the consonantal k sounds in “cry of calf,/and cormorant, and humankind” creating a mellifluous continuity. His is a poetic language made of unusual constructions that create rhythm and express both formality and informality. For instance, “cry of calf” is not a grammatically standard phrase, and “forbid me not” is another inverted archaism that evokes prayer (“Lead me not into temptation”). They are nonstandard phrases that communicate, along with consonance, Lucifer’s stately eloquence. However, at the same time, the poem’s other lines are more prosaic than stately: “and pain, of course, always there was some bleeding,” Lucifer says flatly about the difficulties outside of Eden. Likewise, Lucifer brusquely glosses over his conflict with the archangel Michael in a register that has a formulaic quality: “the bruising of his heel, my head, and so forth.” “So forth” is Lucifer’s indication that we’ve all heard the story before. His language is at once exalted and plainspoken. We hear, as Lucifer says of himself in “as for myself,” the third poem of the series, “less snake than angel” but also “less angel than man.” Lucifer employs a mortal tongue to speak for and about humanity in general and to criticize God long after humanity has passed away. The standard and nonstandard, formal and colloquial, archaic and contemporary convergences portray him speaking like a human and as speaking for humans in general. He is, of course, an angel, a particularly authoritative one who takes it upon himself to explain God’s unfathomableness to God (“You are beyond/… Your own understanding./that rib and rain and clay. … /is not what You believed/You were,/but it is what You are” [466–67]) and to grill his “brother” relentlessly: tell me, tell us why in the confusion of a mountain of babies stacked like cordwood, of limbs walking away from each other, of tongues bitten through by the language of assault,

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tell me, tell us why You neither raised Your hand nor turned away, tell us why You watched the excommunication of that world and You said nothing. (469)

In this climactic poem, Lucifer speaks on behalf of himself (“me”) and on behalf of humanity (“us”). That the refrain—“tell me, tell us”—becomes just “tell us” in its final iteration stresses his concern with collecting all human beings in that pronoun. Indeed, Lucifer doesn’t particularize human atrocities when he demands that God account for his silence during the horrific course of human history but embodies all human suffering in a vivid, complex, apocalyptic image: an immense pile of stacked babies, severed limbs, and lacerated tongues. His language is specific—it is Lucifer speaking in his arrangements of standard and nonstandard constructions—and extensive, he asks God to explain his silence to all of “us” and generalizes human catastrophe with that comprehensive image. And yet Lucifer’s criticism of God’s silence in such a representative voice is not unequivocal. We learn by the end of the sequence that a more accurate conception of God is that God is silence itself rather than an indifferent being who “said nothing” during the calamity that was human history: “before the word/You were,” Lucifer says, a variation of New Testament logos, “In the beginning was the Word … and the word was God” (King James Bible, John 1.1). In fact, the title of the poem in which Lucifer asks God to “tell us” why he said nothing is “the silence of God is God.”23 The title of the last poem then repeats a modified version of that phrase, visualizing with blank space and ellipses “the silence of God” that confounds Lucifer: now Clifton writes only “…………  is God.” Lucifer comes to an understanding in “brothers” that he can’t assail God’s silence because God is silence; in fact, it is Lucifer and “us” who have been given by God the capacity to speak. Because God had “no need to speak,” and because language is necessary for coexistence, he created other entities to perform that task: he “sent” his “tongue/splintered into angels,” and he created Adam and Eve, beings set apart from animals by their ability to devise language (470). Lucifer, speaking in “brothers” to God on behalf of all of us, is one of the splintered parts of God’s silent tongue, the one who, in “tree of life,” encourages Eve to produce the language that she eventually gives to Adam. That Lucifer’s last line in the last poem, “the rest is silence,” reiterates Hamlet’s last words, perhaps the most famous

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literary characterization of human error and ambivalence in English, suggests that Lucifer has realized something about human limits rather than about God’s disregard for humanity. After all, Lucifer, like “us,” has the ability to speak but not necessarily the ability to comprehend the immortal or the nonmaterial. Less than a critique of God, “brothers” is an examination of the relationship between language and that which is beyond words, a language that perhaps says “too much” when it tries categorically to explain God: “even i/with my little piece of it,” Lucifer says of his own tongue in the last poem, “have said too much.”

Clifton’s “Messages” Clifton’s “brothers” contemplates the efficacy of language to explain the inexplicable. The sequence hints at these linguistic hindrances in its second poem when Lucifer refers to the traditional conception that God made humans in his own image as merely what “some/lexicographer supposed” (467). In the end, the series portrays its speaker realizing that God cannot be delineated, for Lucifer recognizes in the final poem that to ask God to explain is to “deny You” because doing so denies God’s fundamental essence: silence. For Clifton, language has always been more than mere words, words that might risk saying “too much.” Her sense of the inadequacy of words is not confined only to immortal realms, for she ponders their ability to render the human world, too, a world just as inconceivable as immortality. After all, Lucifer implies that God didn’t call Adam and Eve back to Eden just because he “is silence” but because their human “names” are “ineffable”: “only You,” Lucifer says to God, “could have called/their ineffable names,/only in their fever/could they have failed to hear” (468). In “Grief,” published eight years after “brothers,” Clifton worries even more explicitly about the effectiveness of poetic language. There, she directs us first to consider Adam and Eve’s “original bleeding,” “moaning,” and “the lamentation of grass” that “bore the weight” of the first humans before “pausing” in grief for “the myth of america” and then, referring to herself, for       the girl with twelve fingers who never learned to cry enough for anything that mattered,

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not enough for the fear, not enough for the loss, not enough for the history, not enough for the disregarded planet. not enough for the grass. (562–63)

As Mary J. Lupton explains, “an exceptional fact about Lucille’s birth is that she was born with twelve fingers, six on one hand and six on the other, as were her mother and one of her daughters.” Clifton “associates this congenital difference with European witchcraft and with Egyptian royalty” (Lupton 10). Clifton also presents her twelve fingers in her poems as a sign of a poetic inheritance. Despite her oracular authority, she worries in the lines above about finding a poetic language adequate to social encumbrances that are at once personal, political, and spiritual. As she searches for language to “cry enough” and to give “true names,” she invents new local tongues with broad human colloquiality that once again includes Black vernacular and expands it. And yet in her late sequence of poems about her own inexplicable, disconcerting spiritual experiences, “the message from The Ones (received in the late 70s),” the final section of her 2004 book Mercy, Clifton doesn’t depict a poet’s search for language to render inconceivable experiences but rather metaphorically gives her poems over to the nonhuman voices that she hears (609–33). “The Ones” is the name Clifton gave to voices she began hearing and transcribing in a large body of unpublished work known as her “Spirit Writing”: “Those were poems that came to me in the ‘70s,—there isn’t another way to say it—that came to me in the ‘70s, and I did not call them; they came and I wrote them down. It was like taking dictations” (qtd. in Lupton  94). In “The Ones,” it is those nonhuman voices that search for language—for, more specifically, a poet’s mortal tongue. Clifton had first written about these voices in the 1980 poem “the light that came to lucille clifton” and the sequence of nine poems with the same title that follows that poem and concludes the book two-headed woman.24 In that sequence about disembodied voices, Clifton testifies to hearing them, describes them as “strangers/peopling this light,” frets that she has gone mad, detects her dead mother’s presence in the voices, searches for ways to render them accurately, defends their existence against friends who question them, imagines the visions of Joan of Arc as voices, confides in her dead father that she is “not equal to the faith required” by them and that she wants to run from them, and, finally, deduces that they

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are ancestral (243–51). The series doesn’t reveal what the voices actually say other than, in the second poem, when they remark, “lucille/we are/ the Light” (244). Rather, the poems convey “lucille’s” anxiety about hearing them at all. In 2004, however, “the message from The Ones,” which documents this same auditory experience from the late 1970s but wasn’t published until over twenty years after two-headed woman, is presented as a transcription of the voices themselves. The speaker of all twenty-three “messages” is “The Ones.” Before they were poems, the messages were quite literally dictations, raw material that doesn’t look or sound much like the poetic forms Clifton would eventually craft out of them. The transcriptions are in the style of automatic writing. They are set in long, rapidly moving lines with no spaces that flow off the margins. They are sometimes entirely illegible, like codes checking frequencies to establish communication (see Fig. 5.1). And yet most of the messages are decipherable, marked with vertical lines to separate words. In fact, the transcriptions are pitched in a remarkably accessible, distinctive linguistic style: they are polite, usually opening a session with “may we say” as if asking permission to begin.25 They speak in complete, simple sentences and standard, elemental syntax: “May we say, you are … beginning a new phase now of this writing, You will begin to receive messages”; “You should be like us because we are ones who know, we are aware of you, we are going to help you” (Spirit Writing [2 of 2], Folder 1; see Fig. 5.2). They are befuddling and unsettling but also straightforward and encouraging: “Many people will be welcomed here soon in a flood”; “We are not interested in proving anything to you, we are interested in giving these ones say”; “May we say that we are all open, we are all people who have been aware of the truths”; “May we say that you are facing your responsibilities”; “May we say that you are a good channel.” They speak in a calm, measured tone with confidence and clarity. When Clifton becomes impatient with them because she doesn’t quite know what she is supposed to do with their messages, they announce: “you should believe us because we are ones who know, we are aware of you, we are going to help you, we do not wish you to worry, we do not wish you to go down.” And they retain their measured tone with confidence and clarity. When Clifton becomes impatient with them because she doesn’t quite know what she is supposed to do with their messages, they announce: “you should believe us because we are ones who know, we are aware of

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Fig. 5.1  Spirit Writing in the Lucille Clifton Papers at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library of Emory University

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Fig. 5.2  Spirit Writing in the Lucille Clifton Papers at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library of Emory University

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you, we are going to help you, we do not wish you to worry, we do not wish you to go down.” And they retain their affability even when they express their own agitation: when Clifton once again becomes impatient with them, they respond, “May we say that your attitude is not the best.” They even refer to pop culture in a message about one of Clifton’s daughters: “May we say that this is a very happy day, we see for her a full and useful life, she will be used to one called John Travolta who is now appearing on a screen type device” (Spirit Writing [circa 1978], Folder 7). Their personable manner makes them sound like persons. And yet as the dictations proceed through hundreds of pages, The Ones become less interested in Clifton personally: “We are not going to tell you of your own life” (Folder 1). Rather, their overarching aims are prophetic, public, and general: When Clifton asks, “What is your mission?” They reply, “We are to be the ones who save the world from itself” (“Message Origins,” Folder 2). Indeed, The Ones mostly tell stories of the destruction of worlds from millions of years ago whose own inhabitants in their arrogance came to “believe themselves more than creatures of spirit and flesh but less than also” (“Message: Assyria,” Folder 4). A disconnection, in other words, has occurred between those inhabitants and their purpose, between them and their creator that results ultimately in annihilation. The message from The Ones is a warning, an admonition, that Clifton’s world—our world—is in a similar state of confusion and therefore on the same fatal track: “one can by hearing of [these extinguished worlds], understand the patterns that repeat themselves in the histories of worlds.” The poems Clifton eventually invents out of these voices make clear that their primary determination is to issue their admonitions in Clifton’s mortal tongue about a world perilously off course. In the poems published decades later, Clifton sets the transcriptions into her distinctive linguistic arrangements, her mortal, everyday tongue. In his study about prophetic poetry, Nick Halpern claims that “the prophetic poet has no easy or conventional access to or use for everyday language” (12). And yet for Halpern prophecy in poems is intrinsically linked to the quotidian: “prophetic poetry,” he says, “is … chiefly about its relationship to the everyday. The everyday is what the prophetic poets focus on, that is what fills them with rage, that is what they want to transform” (5). Clifton presents the prophetic “Ones” speaking in the first-­person plural from a disembodied spiritual realm in a language that sounds at once dislocated and located, a simultaneously discorporate and demotic

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register. The Ones are not angels just as they are not Clifton’s mother— they speak of angels in the third person rather than in the second-person plural that they employ to refer to themselves. They are never entirely clear about their own origin: in one poem, they insist that they are not human— “we are ones/who have not rolled/selves into bone and flesh,” and yet in another they imply that they were once human, “flesh is the coat we unfasten/and throw off” even as they maintain that they don’t “wander bone yards” as ghosts (614; 617). What is certain is that The Ones speak to Clifton in her own words. The sequence is, like “brothers,” a one-sided conversation, this time not a tongued being speaking to silence itself but a collective of “tongueless” entities speaking to a human in that human’s voice (624). They address Clifton the poet directly: “one eye,” they call her, referring to the poor eyesight in Clifton’s left eye that became for her a symbol (along with her twelve fingers) of her poetic gifts (614).26 They say they “come/to languages/not lives,” and their language is Clifton’s standard and nonstandard arrangements in her minimalist forms (613). It is as if The Ones answer a request that Clifton posed to angels in an earlier spiritual poem: “i … ask the seraphim/to speak to me in my own words” in order “to lean on understanding./not my own.   theirs” (517). “The Ones,” then, is the direct address of a collective of “tongueless” entities speaking to a human in that human’s own tongue (624). They communicate to Clifton in Clifton’s own abstract yet plainspoken manner that bridges spiritual occurrences and social crises. To hear them is to hear Clifton: in the saying of you we will sometime be general and sometime particular. (615)

The Ones refer to their own ways of “saying” in terms that describe Clifton’s own poetic style: general and particular. Further, they speak in Clifton’s standard and nonstandard constructions: they say “we will” and not the less formal “we’ll” while also utilizing unusual phrasing, “we will sometime/be” rather than “we will sometimes be.” Indeed, throughout the sequence, the language of The Ones renders Clifton’s human speech in an oracular context. For example, when they explain that they are not

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Clifton’s deceased mother, they announce with formal decorum “we are not she” rather than the more common “we are not her” (611); their invitation to Clifton to meet them daily at her table is “come to here/each morning” rather than “come here” (612); they describe their own existence as “in the saying of we/we are we” (615); and they explain that paying attention to “what sits inside” oneself and “watches” is a way to “sometime discover/which when/which which” (619). Their idiosyncratic language is unadorned and minimal and yet sphinxlike; it is oracular and riddling but has the ease and naturalness of everyday speech. The Ones emphasize their uncomplicatedness in a demotic tone: “we are just here/ where you are” (616). And their exchange with Clifton is decidedly casual: meet us here each morning  yes why you why not. (612)

They employ what comes to sound like their own local tongue. Indeed, The Ones come to “lucille” because they seek the local language that she has created both to speak to and for her communities and to speak to and for “more than” her communities (“perhaps” 246).27 They suggest in the third poem that Clifton is “not chosen” because she is special—“any stone/can sing”—and her “tongue is [just] useful” rather than “unique” (613). But they disclose in the very next poem that they “will make use” of her particular “one eye/field of feeling/singing ear/ quick hand” (614). They have in fact chosen her precisely because her ability to “sing” makes her “unique.” The Ones recognize her “unique” way of seeing and speaking; they recognize that she has been “blessed/or cursed/to see beyond” herself because she is a poet (618). The Ones select Clifton because they want her mortal tongue. They come to her for the same kind of trade-off that she had earlier described asking the “seraphim” for: understanding in exchange for language. The Ones explain, you who feel yourself drowning in the bodys need what can you know clearly of fleshlessness ……………………………

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you who lie awake holding your mouth open receive us as best you can and we enter you as we must tongueless as best we can. (624)

The poet, The Ones sense, desires a clear knowledge of the inexplicable, the world beyond the human world, “fleshlessness.” They have witnessed her lying awake and holding her mouth open for it, and yet they can supply that knowledge only if they have her mortal tongue because they are tongueless. Despite their claim that “lucille” isn’t “chosen,” they do want her particular language, a language that doesn’t just “speak of/black and white” (625).28 The Ones are in touch with Clifton because she, like them, “remembers” that “every human comes/to every color.” Further, hers is a voice that knows that “god” is beyond language, that “god” can’t be defined by words like “love” and “light” and so can’t be given a name: place here the name you give to god is love is light is here the name you give to yes. (622)

God is silence, the space after “to” conveys. The Ones want the mortal tongue of a poet who knows this—and who knows also that God is “yes,” an affirmation. The Ones speak through Clifton’s mortal tongue because it is a local tongue, a human tongue, and a poetic tongue, and they require all these to issue their admonitions. They claim that they don’t seek Clifton’s tongue to offer “the same old/almanac” of traditional New Testament axioms as common as the months of the year: “january/love one another/ february/whatever you sow/you will reap” (620). Their message does

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evoke the Christian message about loving your neighbors and reaping what you sow. However, their charge is not to be your brother’s keeper but to recognize that you are your brother: you are not your brothers keeper you are your brother the one hiding in the bush is you the one lying on the grate is you. (626)

The message from The Ones is that human beings are each other. They speak through Clifton to warn humans that unless they understand this wholeness, unless they realize “that balance is the law//balance or be balanced/whether in body/or out of body/we don’t know” (629), our world will continue to be “in grave danger” (628), stuck in an apocalyptic cycle: the air you have polluted you will breathe the waters you have poisoned you will drink when you come again and you will come again the air you have polluted you will breathe the waters you have poisoned you will drink. (630)

Indifference and abuse threaten to erode “the patience/of the universe,” which “might .../slowly/turn its back” on us (631). The Ones hope to

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issue their exhortations in a poetic language that can effect “balance” so that humans will not “be balanced” by another force. Clifton’s language manages to be at once local and general, individual and communal, standard and nonstandard—balanced, in other words, by unifying these supposed oppositions. That she published “the message from The Ones” two decades after they spoke to her indicates that she wasn’t quite sure how or when to deliver their prophecy. When she did publish them, she placed them directly after “september song,” a sequence of seven poems about 9/11 (601–07). In the first “september song,” she compares the unprecedented violence on American soil that day to the bloodshed that occurs in “otherwheres,” in, for example, “israel ireland palestine” (601). The poem presents 9/11 as an abominable version of “the message from The Ones”: “God has blessed America/to learn that no one is exempt/the world is one all fear//is one all life all death/all one” (601). But 9/11 is also what The Ones warn against, for it is a horrid instantiation of “the law [of]/balance/or be balanced” (629). To heed “the message from The Ones”—that everything is required to exist and that everything is not just connected to everything else but is everything else—is to remake a world of suffering and conflict. Clifton’s “Ones” ends with an allusion to Yeats’s apocalypse poem “The Second Coming.” But whereas Yeats prophesizes a “rough beast” who “Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born,” The Ones leave more room for hope in Clifton’s tongue: there is a star more distant than eden something there is even now preparing. (633)

The Ones have been saying all along that it is up to us whether the “something there” is preparing to make or unmake our world. Clifton provides the means for conveying their admonitions by wielding a local tongue that speaks to and for specific humans and communities, that speaks to and for humans in general, and that could collect us all in what Clifton calls “the single love/of the many tongued God” (602). Her language is indeed local and “more than” local: it is a poetic language built from a confluence of oppositions that transfigures local speech into the language of social prophecy, a multivalent language Clifton spent her long career developing and perfecting.

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Notes 1. Hayes’s poem is published in The Golden Shovel Anthology (xliii–xlv) and in his 2010 book Lighthead (6–8). 2. Hayes traces the impetus for his poem to the persistent rhythm of Brooks’s: “One night, even as I began digging for my own words, Brooks kept playing in my head. I decided to string the whole poem down the page and write into it” (xxix). Hayes had been at the time helping his five-year-old son memorize, “We Real Cool,” wondering “What kind of subliminal impression might it make on my boy?” He and his son had spent a night “practicing Brooks’s exquisite twenty-four words at various speeds and volumes” (xxviii–xxix). What Hayes is conveying here with his attention to words and assorted degrees of velocity and amplification underscores part of this book’s argument: that it is the patterning of diction of “We Real Cool”—its orchestration of diction symphonized by enjambment, an interfusion of sound effects, and sudden shifts in linguistic register—that account for its lasting resonance. 3. Among the very well-known poets who included their own golden-shovel poems in the anthology are Kim Addonizio, Jericho Brown, John Burnside, Marilyn Chin, Michael Collier, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Stephen Dunn, Nikki Giovanni, Kimiko Hahn, Joy Harjo, Honor Moore, Andrew Motion, Philip Levine, Maxine Kumin, Gail Mazur, Paula Meehan, Sharon Olds, Alicia Ostriker, Molly Peacock, Linda Pastan, Gregory Pardlo, Evie Shockley, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Jean Valentine, and many more. 4. Clifton’s poetry is gathered in The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 (2012). I cite from that book, providing the page number the first time a poem is mentioned and then proceeding without citations for short poems and with citations for sequences. 5. Many of Clifton’s poems are untitled. I refer to untitled poems by their first lines set in quotes and brackets. 6. For a concise overview of the Black Arts Movement, see Ford’s chapter “The Black Arts Movement” in Gender and the Poetics of Excess. Ford relays that “the movement took shape in response to the assassination of Malcolm X on February 21, 1965” (168).  Amiri Baraka moved from Greenwich Village to Harlem a few days after the murder. Ford connects the Movement’s overarching goal, which Baraka summarized in his Autobiography as “to help raise the race” (qtd. in Ford 168), to the goals of the Harlem Renaissance. She also notes that “Larry Neal dates the origin of the movement a year earlier,” to the previous spring when LeRoi Jones  (Amiri Baraka), Charles Patterson, William Patterson, Clarence Reed, Johnny Moore, and others started the Black Arts Repertoire Theatre School (248n1).

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7. During a November 2000 panel entitled “What’s African American about African American Poetry,” transcribed for Fence magazine, Harryette Mullen provided a succinct overview of Henderson’s conception of “saturation” in Black poetry: it is “‘(a) the communication of Blackness in a given situation, and (b) a sense of fidelity to the absurd and intuitive truth of the Black experience.’ [Henderson] also demonstrates saturation with what he calls ‘mascon’ words, meaning terms or images embodying a mass concentration of historical and cultural significance. Such words—like ‘blue,’ ‘cool,’ ‘funk,’ or ‘soul’—are frequently used to evoke collective black experience and historical consciousness.” 8. Ford connects the anti-Semitism (and the homophobia and misogyny) in some Black Arts poetry to its “dependence on the trope of masculinity. Black Arts poems tended to present an exclusively masculine persona who thematized homophobia, anti-Semitism, and misogyny. The ideal black revolutionary, and therefore the quintessential black revolutionary poet, was defined in contrast to homosexual men, Jewish men, and women— that is, in contrast to people whose ‘masculinity’ was viewed by the persona as inadequate” (Gender 176). 9. Holladay also identifies salient BAM elements in Clifton’s work. According to her, Clifton “epitomizes several of the ideals that the movement symbolized” (26). Some of the attributes that Holladay locates in Clifton that she believes aligns her with the Black Arts poets are accessibility, topicality, and “the clarity of her vocabulary, symbolism, and themes.” 10. Clifton’s second book, good news about the earth, also had poems about Black nationalism: in “the way it was,” Clifton laments a “nice girl … trying to be white” (79); in an “apology” poem to “the panthers,” she apologizes for her “whiteful ways” (82); the “heroes” section contains poems about Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Seale (100–02). In its first poem, “after kent state,” the speaker implores, “oh/people/white ways are/the way of death/come into the/black/and live” (77). And yet in typical Cliftonian fashion, and in opposition to Black Arts tenets, Clifton doesn’t invite only Black people into the black to live but all or any “people.” 11. Sonia Sanchez was a central BAM figure, but, Ford tells us, she had an uneasy relationship with the Movement: she eventually “rejected” its “masculinist vision” (Gender 208). 12. Adrienne McCormick explains that Tyrone’s concluding poem reveals in the end that his “understanding of himself relies upon how others perceive him” (76). This self-understanding, McCormick argues, is only available to him through his relationship to his community: “‘Tyrone’ and ‘Is’ are both capitalized in a rare showing of typographical authority, yet the name is always lower case in the poem titles. This sense of self comes from the

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speaker’s perception that others (‘they got to say’) must recognize his bravery and survival” (76). For McCormick, this endorsement of communalism discredits individualism, and the poem’s structure bears out this demotion: even though, she argues, the line breaks emphasize Tyrone’s identity by isolating “Tyrone” and “Is,” the poem “tapers to a point, in a manner that undercuts the surety of the statement. Tyrone needs his community to validate his sense of himself; Clifton creates for him a presence, and its authority (if we can call it that) is not individual but communal. His being is contingent upon community recognition and support” (76). According to McCormick, the sequence exemplifies Clifton’s characteristic prioritizing of “constructed, contingent” communality over authoritative, coherent individualism. And yet individualism in Clifton doesn’t preclude communality but constitutes it. Nor does community in her poems eradicate individualism—it preserves and protects individuals. 13. McCormick argues that Clifton’s “i” represents a “multidirectional communal mode of articulation rooted in the both/and thinking that typifies feminist and African American ways of knowing” (69). For McCormick, Clifton’s “i” is “multilayered and communal,” both “feminist” and “rooted in her African American articulations.” Both McCormick and ­Thyreen-­Mizingou claim that Clifton’s communal “I” “question[s] the limitations of American individualism at the turn of the 21st century” (McCormick 71). McCormick locates that questioning in Clifton’s multiple selves while Thyreen-Mizingou detects it in what she perceives to be Clifton’s Christian “responsibility for the other, as opposed to typical American individualization” (68). I claim instead that Clifton speaks broadly to her specific communities and to “more than” her communities while also conveying individualism. 14. The sequences of spiritual poems that end Clifton’s books are “some jesus” in good news about the earth, “the light that came to lucille clifton” in twoheaded woman, “tree of life” in quilting, “splendor” (which ends with “brothers”) in The Book of Light, “From the Book of David” in The Terrible Stories (1996), “the message from The Ones” in Mercy, and “ten oxherding pictures” in Voices. Her books that don’t end with spiritual or biblical sections also contain sequences of spiritual poems: an ordinary woman (1974) includes a series of poems about Kali, the powerful Hindu goddess associated with death (“Kali,” OED); Next (1987) includes several “message” poems in which Clifton’s dead mother, husband, and friend speak; the “new poems” section of Blessing the Boats (2000), her selected poems, includes a sequence of three poems about Lazarus as well as a poem in the voice of Lucifer, and her late poems published after her death in 2010 include poems about angels, Lucifer, God, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Armageddon.

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15. Holladay draws a distinct line between these biblical monologues and the book’s earlier poems about race: The volume’s first two sections, “about the earth” and “heroes,” contain race-centered poems, whereas the last part, “some jesus,” is a series of biblical portraits. This progression places topical poems such as “after kent state,” “Malcolm,” and “apology (to the panthers)” in a continuum with “adam and eve,” “the calling of the disciples,” and “good friday.” The juxtaposition enables Clifton to create her own typology, in which contemporary matters and biblical stories inform and illuminate one another. (23) To instantiate this connection between the book’s contemporary concerns and its biblical figures, Holladay compares the depiction of Moses in the “some jesus” section and the earlier tributes to Black leaders in the “heroes” section: “Clifton’s Moses clearly provides a model for twentieth-­ century black leaders,” Holladay argues, because “[l]ike Moses and the nineteenth-century slaves who found inspiration in him, modern-day black leaders have faced significant obstacles in their pursuit of a collective spiritual freedom” (26). Like Holladay, Akasha Gloria Hull regards the “some jesus” poems as political Black poetry. She distinguishes Black vernacular as the sequence’s preeminent political feature: “perhaps the most heterodox (for some readers) of Clifton’s stratagems is that she further ‘levels’ these biblical figures by making them racially black. This is apparent throughout their language, for they speak an African American folk dialect of ‘be’s,’ third-­ person subject-verb ‘disagreements,’ and colorful metaphor” (“Images”  280). For Hull, Clifton’s biblical poems in general challenge prevailing hierarchies by revealing “the ordinary in the extraordinary,” bringing “heaven ‘down’ to earth” and making “‘men’ of gods” (279). In other words, situating Black vernacular in archetypal settings is inherently political because it implies the dismantling of established orders: “it must be said that transforming biblical figures into plain black folks is a move that simultaneously levels and elevates. It brings the Bible’s inhabitants down to earth, while it imparts to black people some of the status of universal heroes and heroines” (281). 16. In a discussion with Hull, Clifton explains that she read the entire bible but not “as a literal book” (qtd. in Hull, “Images” 277). In fact, although Clifton wrote poems about religious figures across her career, she always maintained—“in almost all of her interviews,” Lupton tells us—that she wasn’t religious (88). Her concerns even in poems where Mary, Joseph, and Jesus speak are not with Christianity per se but with language. 17. Holladay concludes that in “john,” the “somebody coming” is Christ and Martin Luther King, Jr.: “That savior may be either Jesus Christ or Martin

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Luther King, Jr. Once we begin thinking about King, the persona’s witty description of himself as ‘a baptist preacher’ alludes to King’s own religious denomination, and ‘blackness’ in the first and last lines signifies King’s race, not just nighttime or the spiritual void that the savior is entering” (106). Holladay reminds us that Clifton’s earlier poem, “the meeting after the savior gone” (51), also links King and Christ. 18. For Alice Ostriker, to evoke Adam’s “mother” is to suggest a number of possibilities: “The mother could be Eve, or a nameless pre-monotheistic goddess, or just any mother doing her homely work—and that conflation of myth and modernity is part of the joke. Making the poet double gendered is another part” (81). 19. Other readers also hear Caribbean dialect in the Annunciation poems: Andrea Benton Rushing remarks, “Clifton uses a lower-class Caribbean accent rather than the African-American idiom in which she usually writes” (220), and Ostriker comments that the “dialect” in the Annunciation poems “thickens toward Caribbean, [and] implies a braiding of Christianity and Rastafarianism” (89). Hull implies that Clifton corroborates these detections of Caribbean speech by quoting Clifton as calling both Rastafarians and Christians “small, somewhat despised” sects with “who knows what promise” (qtd. in Hull, “Images” 285). 20. The titles of the sections of quilting refer to traditional quilt designs: “log cabin,” “catalpa flower,” “eight-pointed star,” and “tree of life” (Holladay 48). Hull explains that there are two “tree of life” quilt patterns, one “is made up solely of trees” and the other “has a serpent coiled around the tree” (“Images”  293). Holladay draws attention to Harryette Mullen’s essay, “African Signs and Spirit Writing,” in which Mullen discusses quilt making as one of the means by which illiterate African American artists created a substantial body of Black folk art (623–42). 21. Mandolin Brassaw identifies in Lucifer’s intentions redemptive creativity: “That Lucifer saw that ‘some must walk or all will crawl’ indicates a particular insight on his part: he understands the need to instruct Adam and Eve, lest they remain ignorant about the nature of God. This knowledge, though it means expulsion from the Garden, is what makes Adam and Eve human—set apart from the animals that merely ‘crawl’” (50). For Brassaw, Lucifer is cast as “a savior of humanity” because he arouses in them their desire for knowledge, an innate desire that makes them human. 22. Clifton scholars have paid less attention to the linguistic procedures of “brothers” and focused more on its socio-religious qualities just as they have more rigorously examined sexuality in “tree of life” than language. For instance, Holladay regards “brothers” as a “theodicy—a defense of God’s enigmatic silence” (127), while Brassaw perceives Clifton’s equalizing of Lucifer and God as a deconstruction of “the myth of the omni-

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scient patriarch of the Judeo-Christian tradition” (52). When they do consider the poem’s language, Clifton’s readers focus on its relation to Black speech. Lupton denies any implication of Black culture in “brothers,” and Holladay mines the sequence for veiled references to that culture. The title alone suggests to Holladay Black vernacular: “We may … recognize colloquial African American speech in the sequence’s title, which raises the intriguing possibility that God and Lucifer are true soul brothers.” Lupton, on the other hand, disputes Holladay’s detections of Black culture, recognizing a “noticeable absence of black grammatical structures” in “brothers” and “tree of life” and contending that when “Holladay suggests that the title ‘brothers’ might indicate the ‘possibility that God and Lucifer are true soul brothers,’ she seems to overlook both the formality of Lucifer’s speech patterns and his echoing of the Protestant hymnals. … The epithet ‘soul brother,’ with its roots in black music, jazz, and black culture, pertains to younger, hipper, funkier men than the two wornout apocalyptic antagonists of The Book of Light” (90). 23. The title is a quote from Carolyn Forché’s poem, “The Angel of History.” Forché borrowed the phrase from Elie Wiesel (Brassaw 68n7). 24. Hull summarizes the origins of Clifton’s supernatural experiences: in 1975, Clifton and two of her daughters were playing with a Ouija board when it spelled out “THELMA,” Clifton’s mother’s first name (“Channeling” 330). This marked the beginning of a number of phenomenal occurrences in which Clifton heard voices, and so “incorporated the nonvisible into [her] scheme for what is real” (qtd. in Hull, “Channeling” 340). Clifton eventually began writing down the “automatic messages” she received. She has a number of poems about these experiences, most notably the sequence “the light that came to lucille clifton” and “the message from The Ones.” There are significant differences between these two sequences: “the light” poems suggest that the voices include Clifton’s mother, entities that were once people, and ancestral beings; “The Ones,” on the other hand, insist that they are none of those, although they are ambivalent about whether or not they were ever human. Another difference is that the earlier sequence focuses on Clifton’s anxieties about hearing voices while “The Ones” depicts the voices delivering their prophetic message. They employ, I argue, Clifton’s oracular vernacular language to transmit that message. 25. All of the quotations from Clifton’s Spirit Writing are from the Lucille Clifton Papers at Emory University’s Rose Library. Everything I’ve quoted here is from Box 30. I indicate the folder number the first time a reference from that folder appears, then proceed without reference until I quote from a new folder. For recent studies that examine different aspects of the Spirit Writing, see Chakraborty and Judd. Chakraborty explains that even if we apprehend the “Spirit Writing” as voices from beyond, “it is reason-

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able to contend that her representations of their voices are at least partial products of her voice, because we do only have their words through her hand, her language, and her texts” (236). Judd provides an overview of the “Spirit Writing” in a chapter arguing that understanding the spirit—or automatic—writing in part by being open to it enhances overall understanding of the profound spiritual dimensions of Clifton’s poetic writing (133–34). 26. Along with regarding her extra fingers as symbols of her “unique” artistic power, Clifton perceived her poor eyesight in a similar vein: “Another congenital distinction that Clifton addresses throughout her poetry is her one bad eye; she had poor vision in her left eye from birth. Over the years her right eye has compensated for the left eye’s weakness” (Lupton 10). In Clifton’s poem “lucy one-eye” that congenital “weakness” results in a “crooked look” that actually gives her insight and perseverance: “lucy one-­ eye/she see the world sideways./word foolish/she say what she don’t want/to say, she don’t say/what she want to.//lucy one-eye/she won’t walk away/from it” (169). The vernacular Clifton invents, her standard and unusual constructions, expresses her way of seeing “the world sideways” and her commitment to saying what she doesn’t want to—even saying what she doesn’t want to instead of what she does want to—when it is imperative to do so. 27. “More than” is an important concept for Clifton. Many of her poems use the phrase. For example, “the thirty eighth year” repeats at the beginning and end of the poem “i had expected/more than this” (182–83); Clifton refers to her daughters in another poem as “my more than me” (148); in “leanna’s poem,” the speaker claims, “one/is never enough” and so “i wish for you/what i wish for myself—/more than one/more than one/ more than one” (137). In an interview with Rowell, Clifton uses the phrase to describe poetry: “Poetry is about more than logic,” she says, it’s “a way of not just accepting the taught, passed-on information, but trying to get more than that” (61, 64). 28. The Ones want a language that doesn’t just speak of black and white in a world that seems willing only “to hear of/black and white.”

CHAPTER 6

Coda. Lashing Tongues: Twenty-First-­ Century Local-Speech Poems

English-language poetry in the twenty-first century attests to the fact that local speech continues to be a major poetic resource for putting poetry to the task of examining social and political realities. This concluding chapter moves more or less backward through the previous chapters, discussing briefly the late work of the four poets that constitute those chapters and connecting each to a twenty-first-century poet to demonstrate that such speech in all its variations remains a prevailing element in contemporary poetry and a powerful means for advancing a poem as sociopolitical critique. The following pages directly link Lucille Clifton to Danez Smith, Gwendolyn Brooks to Terrance Hayes, Tony Harrison to Don Paterson, and Seamus Heaney to Tracy K.  Smith, examining along the way the diverse operations of local speech in the poems of these twenty-first-­ century successors and illuminating the profound influence of twentieth-­ century local-speech poetics on twenty-first-century poetry. In Lucille Clifton’s poems written in the years before her death in 2010, she continued to speak with “mortal tongues” from disembodied realms. In a sequence of twenty-three poems titled “Book of Days,” written in 2006 but not published in Clifton’s lifetime, linguistic location shifts from “godspeak” to “lucifer” to “man-kind” to “angelspeak” to “mother-­ tongue.”1 The poems seem to be searching for a common vernacular for these different entities. In the series, figures other than those examined in

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. Fogarty, The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07889-7_6

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the previous chapter—angels, Lucifer, Adam, Eve, Mary—also speak: we hear a personified rainbow, a narrator revising Old Testament tales, the prodigal son of the New Testament skeptically contemplating the concept of free will (689–711). The poems ponder not just “the difficult light” of human experience but both “mortal and immortal worlds” (693). Kevin Young, one of the editors of Clifton’s Collected Poems (2012) that includes “Book of Days,” explains that this “start of a manuscript” was found with other papers that Clifton had thrown out: “The typescript … was among … discards, complete it seems, without any editorial markings or even her name” (746). It is unclear whether Clifton considered these pieces to be finished poems before disposing of them. What is clear is that she continued devising local tongues in minimalist free-verse forms for spiritual spheres in a style that gains authority from its conversationality. In the “Book of Days” poems, “godspeak,” “angelspeak,” the language of Lucifer and “man-kind,” and a “mother-tongue” are all composed in the same parlance, the vernacular that Clifton had invented for speakers in otherworldly locations. Clifton’s influence is distinctly audible and visible in the poems of Danez Smith, an American poet and spoken-word performer who has on several occasions identified Clifton as a definitive precursor, referring to Clifton’s Collected Poems as “my bible” (“Danez Smith recommends”). Smith has described balancing writing about anti-Black violence with expressions of Black joy in terms that echo Clifton’s inclination to critique racism and to exalt Black experience as emblematic of human experience: I want to write just about the way water falls from my grandma’s lip when she smiles and drinks at the same time or all the things my homeboy looks like with his lookin’ ass—but again and again, we are called to the pulpit of poetry to eulogize and galvanize, to pen sermon after sermon, poem after poem about the murder of our people at the hands of police and vigilantes, at our own hands, at their own hands. I want to be fierce in my pursuit of black joy, to forget what wicked things lurk behind joy’s shoulder. (“a plea”)

Smith connects this impulse to acclaim Black existence, while also eulogizing and galvanizing in the face of racism, directly to Clifton: “Maybe that’s what makes Lucille Clifton’s ‘won’t you celebrate with me’ as anthemic as it is. … To be black and joyous means to understand something about survival.” Smith draws a direct line from Blackness to joyousness to survival, and from Clifton to their own work.

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The Clifton poem Smith refers to that opens with the invitation “won’t you celebrate with me” is now a classic expression of Black survival. It is also a poem that demands a space for itself in literary history, for Clifton’s poem asks her listener to “celebrate” the “kind of life” she has “shaped” on “this bridge between/starshine and clay,” alluding both to Whitman’s “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” and to Hughes’s “I, too, sing America” (427).2 Clifton situates her celebratory poem with those classic poems of American identity, but she also distinguishes herself from the looming male figures who wrote them. She sings as Whitman and Hughes did before her, but, as a Black American female, she also perceives herself as having “no model.” She must invent her own language (“I made it up,” she says) because Black women haven’t been represented adequately in the national literature. To compensate for having no model, Clifton becomes the model herself: “i had no model” and so, she reasons, “what did i see to be except myself?” The language Clifton devises to be her own model expresses her individuality and her connection to others, and it extends personal experience to encompass larger, collective spheres. A particular “nonwhite” female “i” insists in conversational, evocative diction on being herself despite a selferadicating social context while referring to that context in emblematic terms: “babylon” signifies a racist and sexist mainstream society that marginalizes women of color; “starshine” indicates the otherworldly or the spiritual; “clay” symbolizes earthly life; and “this bridge between starshine and clay” is the poetry “shaped” to correlate the endurances of a specific Black female speaker to larger human ordeals and forbearance. Rhythm reinforces the poem’s unifying capacities: the b and w sounds in “born,” “babylon,” “both,” “be,” “nonwhite,” “woman,” “white,” and “what” and both slant rhymes (“white” and “life”) and exact rhymes (“see” and “be”) create a cohesive music. The poem welcomes its listener to celebrate a Black female poetry born out of Black female independence (she stands alone and resolute, “my one hand holding tight/my other hand”) and perseverance (“everyday/something has tried to kill me/and has failed”), a poetry that, with its straightforward, general diction, the symbolic force of some of its words, and its minimalist form, claims the authority to uphold specific Black female endurance as a paradigm of human experience. Smith’s “summer, somewhere” is a sequence of twenty poems from their second full-length book, Don’t Call Us Dead (2017), that both alludes directly to Clifton’s “celebrate with me” poem and adapts Clifton’s method of inventing local tongues for realms at once extracted from day-­ to-­day reality and profoundly linked to it (3–22). Smith has explained that

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in “summer, somewhere” they were “trying to create this mythical land” that would be “an imagined afterlife or paradise for Black men who have been murdered.” From that imaginative sphere Smith executes a critique that “reference[s] the real world” and that comments on “American racism and colonial Western racism in some real ways” (“Imagining”). Those real ways include the sequence’s allusions to Clifton and the language invented for its “somewhere” locale that draws directly from Clifton’s as it describes its otherworldly location as a place where “sometimes a boy is born/right out the sky, dropped from//a bridge between starshine & clay” (Don’t 5). Dropped, in other words, from the very poetry Smith creates out of a blend of earthly and unearthly elements, a local language for this “somewhere” characterized by italicized speech to indicate shifts in tone or approach; decapitalizations of the “i” and of letters at the beginning of sentences; compound words and neologisms (“trapgod,” “bonefleshed” [4],  “unfuneral”  [12], “mountainboy”  [20]); emphatic and authoritative declarations and instructions (“grab a boy! spin him around!//if he asks for a kiss, kiss him./if he asks where he is, say gone”  [5]); biblical and mythical references (Cain  [11], Eden  [12], Olympia  [21]); apostrophes to nonhuman entities (“dear air,” “dear empty Chucks” [6], “dear ghost i made” [18]); and a blend of rhetorical questions and direct addresses that create intimacy (“what did i do wrong?/ be born? be black?”  [19]; “listen/i’ve accepted what i was given”  [16]). Smith’s is a poetic language that contends with the devastations and exuberances of Black life in part by appealing to Clifton as a poetic model of Black determination, celebration, authority, and innovation. Smith’s poetic language is, like Clifton’s, a mixture of distinctly African American English and standard and nonstandard grammatical constructions. Here is the fifteenth poem that describes the humming local language of the “somewhere” the poem envisions, exemplifying the sequence’s linguistic style and once again alluding to Clifton: if you press your ear to the dirt you can hear it hum, not like it’s filled with beetles & other low gods but like a tongue rot with gospel & other glories. listen to the dirt crescendo a kid back.

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come. celebrate. this is everyday. everyday holy. everyday high holiday. everyday new year. every year, days get longer. time clogged with boys. the boys O the boys. they still come in droves. the old world keeps choking them. our new one can’t stop spitting them out. (17)

This is a local tongue for a nonmaterial realm made from the glories of Black American culture such as gospel and Lucille Clifton, one that can articulate a vision by turning “crescendo” into a verb to resurrect boys and young men murdered in the real world for being Black such as Trayvon Martin and Sean Bell. It is a commanding language—“come,” the poem implores, “celebrate,” just like Clifton’s—that is both “everyday” and “holy,” of the world and beyond it. Smith’s poem builds itself on what Clifton has made on the bridge between starshine and clay: poems that create a local tongue for the local worlds they envision, not just the real-­ world locales they represent, reflect, or critique. In that envisioning is immense possibility, such as, in Smith’s poem, a “new world” that supports and loves Black children rather than threatens them. Clifton found something like the kind of language Gwendolyn Brooks seemed to be searching for when Brooks began to write free verse in the late 1960s. Brooks wanted to create poetry that preserved the elaborate, recondite aesthetic examined in Chap. 3 while communicating immediately to Black people: “My aim … is to write poems that will somehow successfully ‘call’ … all black people, black people in taverns, black people in alleys, black people in gutters, schools, offices, factories, prisons, the consulate; I wish to reach black people in pulpits, black people in mines, on farms, on thrones” (Report Part One 183). She wanted her poems to be cast in a language that could encapsulate the range of life in her locale, from the “gutters” to the “thrones” of Black Chicago. At times, her poetry employed specifically located versions of Black speech, but Brooks more often devised for her local speakers an idiosyncratic, polysyllabic language that one wouldn’t hear in taverns or on streets. After her 1967 radicalization spurred in part by the new Black poetry she heard by young Black

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Arts poets, she became increasingly concerned with “reach[ing] all manner of black people” (Conversations 68). She wanted, in other words, to write poetry that was more readily available than “The Sundays of Satin-­ Legs Smith” or “The Anniad,” poems that would be, as she said in 1973, “simple-looking” but not simple (69). This change to the “simple-looking” would not come easily to Brooks. Even when her local characters speak aloud in the post-67 free-verse poems, they tend to do so not with the “ordinariness of … language” that she was eventually after but with extraordinary diction similar to that in “The Sundays” and “The Anniad” (86). For example, the characters of “In the Mecca,” Brooks’s long poem published in 1968 about the inhabitants of a large tenement apartment building in which a young girl has gone missing, do not speak throughout most of the poem in everyday language (Blacks 407–33). The poem’s central question is presented as Black speech: “WHERE PEPITA BE?” asks Mrs. Sallie when she notices her daughter’s absence (415). The answers she gets from her neighbors are summed up in a repetition of that speech: Ain seen er is presented six times, both italicized and not, across two lines (416). But the rest of the quotations in the poem are mostly in Brooks’s idiolect, her distinct and highly individualized language. “Great-great Gram,” for instance, speaks in a language that sounds as idiolectic as it does idiomatic: she starts out saying that she “ain seen no Pepita” but then swiftly shifts to articulating a memory of a cabin with a dirt floor in especially uncommon sounding language. Gram is too preoccupied with the roaches of her childhood to help Mrs. Sallie locate Pepita. Her speech is local (“ain seen”) but not entirely colloquial: “‘twas,” “creebled,” the alliterating “we wee ones” (417). In another instance, “old St. Julia Jones” reveals in Gwendolynian language a religious fervor that borders on fanaticism, declaring “our Lord” to be “wonderfulwonderful.” St. Julia’s language is not at all everyday but strikingly unusual: “wonderfulwonderful,” “I lie late/past the still pastures,” “piccalilli  for my soul,” “hunts me up […] coffee for my cup” (407–08). The speech Brooks devises for her is not local speech like “WHERE PEPITA BE?” and “ain seen er” but enigmatic and anomalous. The language she invents for her characters in free verse after 1967 is as idiosyncratic as the language she set in iambic pentameter and rhyme royal before that transformative year. By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, she was still struggling to fulfill her own charge to write a poem “accessible to all manner of life” but also “significant for the unique word” (Conversations 86). In 1983, she told Claudia Tate, “This is what I’m fighting for now in my work, for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks” (107). Indeed, “unique words” and

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expressions were always integral components of Brooks’s aesthetic: her post-1967 free-verse poems were as replete with them as her early verse. Further, the later poems were neither simple-looking nor simple. If Brooks was looking for a poetic language to communicate to people in taverns and on streets immediately, her recondite, esoteric idiolect was apparently not it. And yet a Terrance Hayes poem from 2010 called “The Golden Shovel” referred to at the beginning of Chap. 5 that takes its title from Brooks’s classic “We Real Cool” makes plain that it is precisely Brooks’s idiolectic local tongue that has spoken most clearly to her readers. For that short, sharp poem, as we saw in Chap. 3, epitomizes the way a Gwendolynian idiolect emerges from dialect. Hayes’s twenty-first-century poem is based entirely on “We Real Cool” and has inspired a whole anthology of similar poems based on various Brooks poems. “The Golden Shovel” is in two parts: the first a narrative account of a boy at a pool hall with his father and the second a more abstract first-person-plural declaration of entering a “tented city” at night ten years after the first part (Lighthead 6–8). Each line’s last word forms Brooks’s “We Real Cool” in a column, what Hayes calls its “spine” (Foreword  xxvii). The resulting language possesses the meticulousness of an apprenticeship as it marshals from Brooks’s form its own form. Hayes traces the impetus for his poem to the persistent rhythm of Brooks’s: “One night, even as I began digging for my own words, Brooks kept playing in my head. I decided to string the whole poem down the page and write into it” (xxix). Hayes had been at the time helping his five-yearold son memorize “We Real Cool,” wondering “What kind of subliminal impression might it make on my boy?” He and his son had spent a night “practicing Brooks’s exquisite twenty-four words at various speeds and volumes” (xxviii-xxix). What Hayes is conveying here with his attention to words and assorted degrees of velocity and amplification is that it is the patterning of diction in “We Real Cool”—its orchestration of words symphonized by enjambment, an interfusion of sound effects, and sudden shifts in linguistic styles—that account for its persistence and lasting resonance. Brooks’s poem is, then, a local-speech poem that has engendered other local-speech poems in the twenty-first century. The “golden shovel” form, Hayes says, is “first and foremost” a tribute, “a way of maintaining, or making material, a link to one of our great poets” (xxvii). The form Hayes learns from Brooks also makes a poem about learning lessons. The first part of “The Golden Shovel” builds narratively to the moment a father imparts the knowledge to both his son and a young neighbor that

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“sometimes a tune is born of outrage.” Brooks’s poem is itself a tune outraged by racism’s capacity to turn childhood for Black boys into a perilous phase of life in which learning in school is replaced by learning in pool halls. When Hayes writes “into” the words of “We Real Cool,” as he puts it, he creates his own tune of outrage that operates like Brooks’s poem, for Hayes’s “The Golden Shovel” also portrays the precariousness of reaching adulthood for young Black boys in a subtle amalgamation of lingual registers while figuring a pool-hall environment as its own kind of school (Lighthead 6–8). The intimate narrative of the first part produces an austere tone to correlate to its statuesque images: the poem describes a bar as a place where “real men” are “translucent with cool,” a father’s smile is “a gold-plated incantation,” and women who have “nothing left” are marked by “approachlessness.” The language is at once conversational and formal. “This is a school//I do not know yet,” it declares with the full form “do not” rather than its contraction, while at the end of the first part, the speaker’s father responds to his son’s standard prayer about dying before waking with another formal phrase that is equal parts idiom and prognostication, “it will be too soon.” Meanwhile, the poem’s setting and some of its language are decidedly colloquial: the memory involves a bar and a residential street; parents are referred to as “Da” and “his ma”; and the full-form verbal phrases referred to above are balanced by an equal number of more relaxed contractions: “He’d been caught lying”; “He’d been defending his ma, trying to be a man.” The poem presents simultaneously the reflective voice of an adult recounting childhood experience in solemn, pensive language punctuated with subtle notes of the less-formal everyday language from that childhood. In other words, this poem that recalls learning to be a man in a world of cool posturing, guarded women, domestic violence, pistols, Bibles, sin, gin, jazz, and jail is also a poem that learns to makes itself—to create its emotional tones—by building a poetic language from both the polished contours of lyric reflection and the more spontaneous sounding constructions of spoken speech. The adult remembers the hard lessons of manhood doled out by his father while the poem learns to make its own tune from Brooks. The second section is pitched differently from the first: the lines are a beat or two shorter, the situation more abstract, enjambment interrupting not just grammatical phrases but individual words, the jarring breaks across them making doubles and even triples: “we-/akened” creates we, weakened, and wakened; “school-/ed” makes schooled out of school; “sin-/ged” turns sin into sing and singed; “we-eping” has the we

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of the poem weeping; “die−/t” is both “die” and “diet.” The multidirectional lexical shifts convey movement and vigor. Meanwhile, the ten years between the two sections—the first is titled “1981” and the second “1991”—has yielded an apocalyptic aspect, for part II is set in something of an ominous world with its references to “the tented city,” “the fire’s ethereal/afterglow,” the “late-/night chant[s],” a “God” who “licks his kin” while the “we/sing until our blood is jazz.” It is a language that corresponds to Brooks’s noncolloquial flourishes: here, like in “We Real Cool,” soaring expressions of youthhood shuttle dangerously toward the stony “we end too soon.” The poems Brooks wrote in the 1980s and 1990s do not corroborate that she found the immediacy she was looking for. For example, “Winnie” is a long free-verse portrait of Winnie Mandela, the anti-apartheid South African activist and politician (and wife of Nelson) whom Brooks describes in the poem as “the She of our vision, the Code” and “the founding mother” (Winnie 7). In “Song of Winnie,” Winnie is depicted as calling not for simple-looking poems but “Big Poems” from “sleaze,” “ice,” “vomit,” and “tainted blood,” poems that are “stiff or viscous” (15). In another poem set in South Africa, “The Near-Johannesburg Boy,” the young speaker’s speech is anything but the language of a young boy in the street: he describes himself and his playmates walking at night as moving “a-pulse across earth that is our earth,” “their exulting, there Exactly” and as “redeeming” and “Roaring Up.” He expresses his wish to merge “the Fist-and-the Fury” and to “flail in the Hot Time” (Blacks 507–09). The poem was written in response to images of apartheid that Brooks saw on television. But it was the speech of young children in that country that moved her most: “what specifically inspired the poem is what I heard the children were saying to each other: ‘Have you been detained yet?’” (Conversations 123). The direct speech of local South African children compelled her to provide a poetic language for them, and to do so with her characteristic Gwendolynian tongue. Brooks’s late poems about South Africa exemplify her concerns with world events. Indeed, she refers to herself in a late interview as “a reporter” (Conversations 153). In 1971, she was commissioned by Ebony magazine to visit Montgomery, Alabama, with the photographer Moneta Sleet Jr. to write poetry based on the images he captured there (In Montgomery ix). She refers to that long poem, her biographer tells us, as “verse journalism, claiming the category as her original contribution to genres” (Kent 241).

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Apparently, Brooks did not regard journalism to be “the opposite of literature,” as Seamus Heaney and his Northern Irish contemporaries did during the Troubles (Suhr-Sytsma 163), but instead understood poetry as a form for reportage. Some of Tony Harrison’s poetry might also be called verse journalism. Like “v.,” his poems “Initial Illumination” and “A Cold Coming” were first published together in a popular newspaper, London’s The Guardian, rather than in a literary journal or book.3 Alan Rusbridger, the Features Editor at The Guardian who commissioned Harrison to write poems about events like the Persian Gulf war and the Bosnian war, explains that he called on Harrison for pieces about the Gulf because he wanted to present “new things to say about this war, or ways of saying them,” a war he describes as “long-drawn-out, distant, anaesthetized” (134). In “Initial Illumination,” the poet is not initially sure if the illuminated language of poetry can respond adequately to war; he is “doubtful, in these dark days, what poems can do” (311–12). As he takes a train though the English countryside, he contemplates in elevated, erudite diction the cormorants he sees flying above Lindisfarne, an island off the coast of Northumberland famous for illuminated manuscripts that were created in a monastery there in the eighth century. The poet connects the birds he sees from the train to the images of cormorants that “Eadfrith the Saxon scribe/illuminator/ incorporated … /into the In principio’s initial I.” The poem also compares Viking raiders who stole one of the lavishly bound books (bound by an “anchorite” named “Billfrith”) to British and American imperial forces in Iraq and relates televised images and rhetoric of war to illuminated script in language that is itself baroque and labyrinthine: the Vikings who stole books are like the soldiers “still recruited/to do today’s dictators’ dirty work”; the gospels “so beautifully scripted by Eadfrith and Billfrith the anchorite” are compared to “Pentagon conners [who] have […] conscripted/to gloss the cross on the precision sight”; “Eadfrith had to beautify” the same “word of God […] bandied by George Bush” whose own words are bombs that “illuminated midnight sky/and confused the Baghdad cock who was betrayed/[…] into believing day was dawning.” The poem’s language seems “scripted” like ancient religious manuscripts, or like sound bites on television news programs. If the contrived language of politicians and media outlets anaesthetizes the war, does ornate poetic diction, the poem asks, merely aestheticize it? The poet is doubtful if such dense, intricate language can have any effect at all if it doesn’t convey the scent of “dunghill at” the “claws” of the tyrants who start wars.

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It is not illuminated language but the visceral, demotic language of “A Cold Coming” that provided for Rusbridger the “new ways of saying” he was searching for: “it managed to say more than scores of conventional commentaries, whether by Jew, Arab, strategic observer, or armchair wing commander. It cut through all the phony euphemisms and cold, strange unreality of this war-by-video, and forced the reader starkly face-to-­ incinerated face with the unsmiling soldiers of Saddam who were at the receiving end of the most awesome array of military hardware the world has ever seen” (135).4 Harrison demonstrated for Rusbridger that poetry was capable of not just reporting reality but cutting through it. The incinerated face that Rusbridger refers to in his assessment of “A Cold Coming” is that of an Iraqi soldier who was photographed after being burned to death when his jeep was struck by American bombs. The photograph is infamous. Rusbridger says it’s “one of the most shocking images of war I have ever seen” (134).5 In a 2014 article about the photograph in The Atlantic, Torie Rose DeGhett details its origins: On February 28, 1991, Kenneth Jarecke stood in front of the charred man, parked amid the carbonized bodies of his fellow soldiers, and photographed him. At one point, before he died this dramatic mid-retreat death, the soldier had had a name. He’d fought in Saddam Hussein’s army and had a rank and an assignment and a unit. He might have been devoted to the dictator who sent him to occupy Kuwait and fight the Americans. Or he might have been an unlucky young man with no prospects, recruited off the streets of Baghdad.

DeGhett clarifies that it was not “military obstruction but editorial choices” that kept the photograph from the general public. The photo was too visceral and “sanitized images of warfare” rather than brutal images allow one to more easily, as DeGhett’s Atlantic colleague Conor Friedersdorf says, “accept bloodless language” such as widely used clinical-­ sounding references in news stories to “surgical strikes” and “kinetic warfare.” Harrison, in “A Cold Coming,” invents for that same photographed soldier an alternative to “sanitized,” “bloodless language.” He provides the charred Iraqi soldier with a local tongue that is demotic, sarcastic, humorous, coarse, tender, and angry. The poem imagines the soldier as a poet himself: the windscreen wiper on his jeep is figured as a pen and a quill (313–20). The poem depicts the dead soldier telling the narrator that

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he’s picked him to speak to because the “poet’s task” is “to find words for this frightening mask” and because he wants “to reach/the warring nations with my speech.” This speech for the frightening masks of war doesn’t describe the physical suffering of war but refers to “a small item [Harrison] read in the news about American soldiers freezing their sperm before they left for the Gulf” (“Rear Window”). The soldier asks about his enemies: Did No. 1 say: God be thanked I’ve got my precious semen banked. And No. 2: O praise the Lord my last best shot is safely stored. And No. 3: Praise be to God I left my wife my frozen wad? (314)

The tragedy communicated here is not just that the man has been burned alive but that he was a real man from a real place who won’t see his wife again and won’t have children. The poem imagines him saying he “never wanted life to stop” and asserting while “burning” a “yearning” to “stay in life” and to be beside his “wife in bed” (316). The language is direct and colloquial. The soldier speaks with unsettling demotic forthrightness, a language that refuses to “Lie” with sentimentalities about the Iraqi soldier wanting “my foe to be my friend.” When the soldier envisions the Marines back home with their families, he imagines them convincing themselves that casualties are simply one of war’s necessities, and he dismisses those justifications: Lie and pretend that I excuse my bombing by B52s, pretend I pardon and forgive that they still do and I don’t live. (318)

The soldier’s speech is candid and sardonic, not contrived. The poem ends with the narrator playing the “recording” of the soldier’s monologue back, “I pressed REWIND and PLAY / and I heard the charred man say:   ”(320). In the final line, the colon gives way not to words but blank space, the cold fact of the dead man’s silence.

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Like Harrison, Don Paterson employs poetic form to consider the calamity of war through the language used to describe it. His poem “The Foot” is an unrhymed sonnet composed of the requisite fourteen lines but in loose, conversational free verse rather than the rhyming iambic pentameter of a traditional sonnet. The poem pits its casual language against the terrible scene it depicts, making of the poem a kind of extended corollary of its subtitle, “‘Mowing the Grass,’ Gaza 2014,” a crude phrase used by Israeli military for random strikes against Hamas: “Israelis describe their counterterrorism policy as ‘mowing the grass’— the idea is that Hamas’s leadership and military facilities must regularly be hit in order to keep them weak” (Byman). “Mowing the Grass,” Paterson’s poem reminds us, also results in the death of children as their parents are forced to stand by and witness helplessly. The poem begins by announcing that it will reflect on the violence directed at the people of Gaza with inevitable inadequacy: “I have no words,” it opens, “so here are the no words” (21). The so-­ called no words that constitute the poem tell the story of an eleven-year-­ old Palestinian boy who is hit with a shell while playing on a beach during a “mowing of the grass.” The poem’s focal point is its own words as it sets off certain phrases in single quotation marks that portray the boy’s father and the doctor attending to the boy: “the medic ‘frantically works away’” while the father “‘playfully’ pinches his toes” as he raises and drops his foot in anxious anticipation of his son’s death. While toying with his foot, the father also “‘weeps quietly’/and ‘smiles as he recalls some happier time,’” and then finally breaks down when “‘seeing the doctor shake his head’ [he] grips the foot/with both hands and ‘starts to howl like an animal’” (21). The poem emphasizes the discordance between a language that tries to convey such a scene and the scene itself, which it meagerly summarizes as, again in single quotes, “‘the full horror of the situation […]’.” The sonnet’s strategy of calling out its own deficient language, even well-intentioned language, marks its attempt not to sanitize the horror. Meanwhile, around the polite and refined quoted language is the father not speaking, nervously fondling his foot, his own language apparently vacated. The absence of the father’s language, his speech dissolved into weeping, smiling, gripping, and howling in unbearable shock and grief, comes to represent the “no words” that communicate the terrible scenario. Paterson is Harrison’s twenty-first-century descendent. Profiles of him often begin by noting that his first encounter with Harrison’s poetry

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sparked his own poetic endeavors. Here, for example, is the opening of such a piece from The Independent in 2004: Don Paterson was watching telly in a bedsit in Tottenham when he had an experience that changed his life. Suddenly, a pale face loomed out at him. The poet Tony Harrison was reading his work in a resonant, Yorkshire voice. Paterson was transfixed. “I thought ‘I’m having some of this,’” he confesses, “so I spent a year reading poetry. I was just mad for it and had a growing sense that this is what I want to do.” (Patterson, Christina)

Like Harrison, Paterson creates traditional forms—and nontraditional renderings of such forms—with different versions of speech, including nonstandard working-class speech. His book 40 Sonnets (2015) that includes “The Foot” contains sonnets that achieve their most innovative renderings when they are built from that speech. “At the Perty,” for instance, depicts a son realizing that his mother is aging in fourteen one-­ word lines of Scots dialect (15).6 The gutted sonnet hinges on the Scots word “grat,” which the poem’s note translates as “sobbed.” The sequence of one-word lines builds to that sob: the speaker recalls his Ma “clapped” on “t’/ma/back” as they dance around “left” and “richt” before they are “stapped” (stopped) with a “grat” because he feels how frail she is. The arrangement of dialect creates the sudden cry, the “grat” that sticks in the throat, and suddenly this poem about dancing is a poem about imminent death and grief. Another sonnet, “An Incarnation,” is also made from colloquial regional speech as it presents Paterson talking on the phone to a surveyor. The interviewer is collecting information about Paterson’s “identity” while the poem’s local speech is itself the only real marker of that identity: “Speaking speaking this is me” the poem ends after a litany of unrevealing, frustrated replies to the surveyor’s stock questions (29). The most experimental poem in the collection, a sonnet titled “Séance” also presents local speech as a kind of incarnation and an assertion of identity. All of the poem’s fourteen lines are presented in similarly turbulent clusters of letters as the first three: S p e k e . –  s e e  s s k s e e k i e i k s e s s e - .  - e s k k s e – s s k p p p p p i -   …  i  –  – i i i  ´ – s k. (41)

This strange alphabetical assortment conjures a voice into being. The poem begins with the old Scots word for “speak.” The rest of the poem

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scatters the letters that constitute that word within its fourteen lines. A few coherent terms materialize along the way such as see, seek, spike, kip, and pike. The poem, however, mostly produces incoherence. And yet within that incoherence is another manifestation, for the poem is not only made from the letters of “Speke” but also includes, and repeats, the letter “i.” In this “Séance,” an individual voice, an “i” from beyond the grave and from deep in the past, is struggling to announce itself in the present and in the sonnet form through the welter of letters that makes the Scots word “Speke.” The message the poem conducts is “i speke,” and it is at pains to declare it because to do so is to exist. These poems by Clifton, Smith, Brooks, Hayes, Harrison, and Paterson demonstrate that the question of poetry’s political viability is a question of rhetoric and aesthetics: what formal strategies, what linguistic registers, what species of diction could maintain a poem’s aesthetic commitment when that poem’s subject matter is the sociopolitical world? Tracy K. Smith, a student of Heaney’s as an undergraduate at Harvard, wrote in a New York Times article about politics and poetry that she was taught in graduate school during the mid-1990s to avoid writing poetry about political matters: “It was too dangerous an undertaking, one likely to result in didacticism and slackened craft.” Smith wonders if an American inclination toward the supposed privacy of the lyric mode accounted for what she views as a general dearth of political poetry in the modern American tradition: “Perhaps America’s individualism predisposed its poets toward the lyric poem, with its insistence on the primacy of a single speaker whose politics were intimate, internal, invisible.” For Smith, very recent political poetry written in a “poetic language of embodied experience”—a language, say, that creates disorientation with words in nonstandard spellings—has fared better than previous poetic efforts to address injustice because it connects a linguistic enactment to particular sociopolitical oppressions. They are poems with lashing tongues rather than poems that simply deliver, as Smith says, a “tongue-lashing.”7 Smith’s resistance to tongue-lashing is evident in her poems. They tend to be in a conversational standard English that attains a lyrical finish. To borrow terms Heaney used to describe one of his own poems, they typically operate with a “slight formality,” delivering their reflections and insights in casual language whose patterns generate subtle rhythms, underscoring their building intensities. Smith has discussed Heaney’s formative influence on her; she says of his early poem “Digging”: “this is the poem that I remember very clearly reading and feeling like it was inviting me to

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start writing poetry and thinking about ways that my own stories could live in language” (“Tracy K. Smith”). In another interview in The Iowa Review, Smith remarks, “He was the person who really made me want to start writing, so his books were like bibles to me.” Smith singles out as especially important to her the last sonnet in Heaney’s sequence “Clearances,” an elegy to Heaney’s mother that describes the aftermath of death as “a space … utterly empty” but where memory emerges in the silence that can be felt: loss leaves a hole, but also a “bright nowhere” populated by “A soul ramifying and forever/Silent, beyond silence listened for” (The Haw Lantern 32). We can hear something of this play between space, light, silence, and sound in an early Smith poem, “Brief Touristic Account” (Body’s Question 13–18) that narrates a youthful love affair: There was the room devoid of light. The room so dark it disappeared From around us, The dark a tall space Around the shallow space Our breathing filled. There were the neighbors’ voices Singing to God, and the delicate Violence of our bodies renouncing speech, Heat making the room still, Amplifying each sound. (17)

As in Heaney’s poem, Smith’s communicates in a refined standard English the sense of memory as a space containing a confluence of sound and silence, where speech has fled and yet silence has somehow been amplified. More recently, Smith has produced her own explicitly political poetry by adapting Heaney’s method of making such poetry from the speech of real-life victims of political violence, a strategy analyzed in Chap. 2. In Smith’s 2018 book Wade in the Water, a sequence titled “I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It” is constructed entirely from the letters of African Americans during the Civil War (24–37). Smith refers to this “found poem” as “the core of the book” (Washington Square). She explains its origins in the book’s “Notes”: “The text … is composed entirely of letters and statements of African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and those of their wives, widows, parents, and children. While the primary documents in question have been abridged, the poem

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preserves the original spellings and punctuation to the extent possible throughout” (77). Indeed, the “original spellings and punctuation” are precisely the elements that provide the piece with its power: the unadulterated, uncorrected language of human beings describing, imploring, beseeching, requesting, and declaring in their own language during abysmal human rights atrocities. Here is one, presumably transcribed in its original form by dictation and then arranged by Smith to make a stanza (the italics indicate that the poem this excerpt is in also includes excerpts from other letters): I cannot read nor write, and I do not know how my name was spelled when I enlisted nor do I know how it is spelled now I always signed my name while in the army by making my mark I know my name by sound—. (36)

As with the other poems here, this poem presents speech as an indicator of identity. The author declares illiteracy in language that is eloquent, forthright, and expressive. The arrangement creates one rhythmic sweep that shuttles toward the slant rhyme of “now” and “sound,” a rhyme that punctuates the stanza’s declarative final line. There is no other vessel but this person’s language, which he can’t write but can speak, to bear the weight of what he knows: the sound of his own name. Smith describes her intention with this poem as letting the original language speak for itself. The sequence is so direct, matter of fact, coherent, and fluent, it practically eludes anything that can be said about it: Once I began reading these texts, it became clear to me that the voices in question should command all of the space within my poem. I hope that they have been arranged in such a way as to highlight certain of the main factors affecting blacks during the Civil War, chiefly: the compound effects of slavery and war upon the African American family; the injustices to which black soldiers were often subject; the difficulty black soldiers and their widows faced in attempting to claim pensions after the war; and the persistence, good faith, dignity, and commitment to the ideals of democracy that ran through the many appeals to President Lincoln, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and other authorities to whom petitions were routinely addressed during and after the war. (77–78)

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Smith describes elsewhere her role with these found poems as “curating rather than composing,” and that she wanted the language “to be unmitigated” (Washington Square). Her arrangements, though, perform their own functions. The lines create a slow pace and measured tempo, and stanza breaks provide organizational apparatuses that lend uncomplicated clarity to the devastating circumstances they convey. For example, in the third poem a soldier at Camp Nelson in Kentucky tells the story of his son’s death when he is forced to withstand the “bitter” and “freezing hard” cold after the man’s wife and children are ejected from the officers’ camp (26–27). The poem is divided into five sestets and a couplet, each section creating a narrative that leads finally to the man burying his child and leaving the rest of his family in a meeting house “where they still remain.” The tragedy of the boy’s death is compounded by the vulnerability of the rest of the family at the end, that last line reverberating across time into the current moment where Black people remain in conditions where their children and they are still at risk. This book began with Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break” to show how local speech communicates the painful reality of loss and the hard fact that sometimes “all you can do the morning after the funeral is … keep going and get on with it” (“One” 10). The poem thematizes sound, employs colloquial language, and creates sound effects in iambic pentameter to render with vocal authenticity a rural community’s emotional disposition. It seems fitting to end, then, with “The Blackbird of Glanmore,” the final poem in District and Circle (2006), because that poem contemplates the same circumstances that generated the earlier one but toward the end of Heaney’s career. The poem harkens to “Mid-Term Break,” written over forty years before “The Blackbird of Glanmore,” which told the story of Heaney’s return home from college to attend the wake of his four-year old brother who was killed in a car crash. The later poem also shows Heaney merging his local and spiritual concerns much as Clifton did. In his poems after 1990, Heaney writes about what Helen Vendler calls “non-­ phenomenal” realms, worlds beyond human life and after death (Heaney 136). “Squarings,” for instance, a sequence of forty-eight twelve-line poems each with five beats (they form the shapes of squares), contemplates at different points spiritual spheres, “Shifting brilliancies” (Seeing Things 55), “squint[ing]” through “a skylight of the world” (57), a mysterious ship that appears to monks (62), a world without “Fathomableness, ultimate/Stony up-againstness” (64).

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In “The Blackbird,” the world beyond life and after death is made fathomable, brought down to earth. Here, as in “Mid-Term Break,” the speaker arrives at his childhood  home. He also spots a blackbird in the grass (77–78). The blackbird evokes life for the speaker and, subsequently, reminds him of lines he once translated that expressed a desire to return to “the house of death, to my father.” These lines about home and death then bring to mind the young brother he lost so many years ago: Haunter-son, lost brother— Cavorting through the yard, So glad to see me home, My homesick first term over.

The bird reminds Heaney of poetry, and poetry reminds Heaney of people who have died because he spent so much of his career elegizing them. The bird also reminds Heaney of his local speech. After he ruminates on his young brother dancing in the yard to welcome him home, he recalls a neighbor’s ominous words, “Long after the accident” described in “Mid-Term Break”: ‘Yon bird on the shed roof, Up on the ridge for weeks— I said nothing at the time But I never liked yon bird.’

The neighbor doesn’t like “yon bird” because for her it was an omen; she implies she knew because of its presence that something terrible was going to happen on Heaney’s childhood farm. And yet despite its terrible news, Heaney doesn’t feel the same way about the bird. In fact, he feels the opposite: “It’s you, blackbird, I love,” he says. Heaney loves the blackbird because it symbolizes poetry: its “ready talkback,” “stand-offish comeback,” its pickiness and nerviness. It endures, too: poetry is there “when I arrive” and there “when I leave.” And Heaney loves as well his neighbor’s language, the local tongue that communicates to him the horrific portent of the bird, the living speech that provides yon bird with a song made by crossing that form of speech and the forms of poetry to harmonize, repudiate, question, and critique reality.

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Notes 1. Clifton passed on February 13, 2010. The “Book of Days” poems were included in the “Uncollected Poems (2006–2010)” section of her Collected Poems (2012). 2. Cheryl Wall also connects Clifton to Whitman and Hughes: about her poem “study the masters,” Wall says, “As she posits a democratic ideal that revises our understanding of the heroic and the beautiful, Clifton pays homage to past masters of American vernacular poetry, such as Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes” (541). Lupton says that Clifton sent poems to Hughes before her first book was published and that at “St. Mary’s College she taught a creative writing class called I Too Sing, America, based on Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” and Langston Hughes’s [“I, Too,” which begins,] “I, too, sing America” (27; 63). Ostriker adds Dickinson to the comparison: “Walt Whitman’s transcendental expansiveness and Emily Dickinson’s verbal compression feel uniquely wedded in Clifton. Epigraphs from Whitman mark the sections of [Clifton’s prose memoir] Generations, and the elliptical Emily might well consider the intensely playful Lucille one of her daughters” (82). In an obituary for Clifton in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Alexander also links Clifton to Dickinson: “Of great poets whose poems are kin to Clifton’s, I think of Emily Dickinson; to Dickinson’s intense compression Clifton adds explicit historical consciousness.” 3. “v.” was published in the March 5, 1991 issue of The Guardian and “Initial Illumination” and “A Cold Coming” were both published in the March 18, 1991 issue (Bryne, Loiner 208n87). For examinations of Harrison’s relationship with The Guardian, see Rusbridger and Armitstead. 4. Rusbridger explains that the editorial staff at The Guardian wanted Harrison’s poems presented as news: “We carried the poems on the main editorial page since it seemed to us important that they be seen as a commentary upon current events and not as a piece of contemporary Eng. Lit., which would undoubtedly have been the case had they been consigned to the arts or features pages” (134). 5. At the time, only one newspaper in England, The Observer, would publish the photo, and all American media outlets refused to run it. DeGhett explains what initially became of the photo: “The image was not entirely lost. The Observer in the United Kingdom and Libération in France both published it after the American media refused. Many months later, the photo also appeared in American Photo where it stoked some controversy, but came too late to have a significant impact.” 6. Christopher Spaide explains that the poem is “a Scots version of an untitled tanka by the exclamatory Japanese poet Takuboku Ishikawa.” According to Spaide, “Ishikawa’s original registers quick impressions and a quiet lament,

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as the poet jokingly carries his mother on his back, takes three steps, and weeps at her lightness.” Spaide explains that a tanka is “a classic form in Japanese poetry … almost always rendered in English as five unrhymed lines with varying syllable counts—five, seven, five, seven, seven.” Sarah Crown, in her review of 40 Sonnets in The Guardian, identifies another formal source for the poem: she says it’s “written in the form of a fishbone diagram designed to illustrate cause and effect (something I only know because the poem is dedicated to the diagram’s inventor, Kaoru Ishikawa).” 7. Smith examines briefly some American poets who have been writing recent political poetry to great effect: Danez Smith, Jos Charles, Justin Phillip Reed, CAConrad, and Evie Shockley.

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Index1

A African American Language (AAL), 73, 74, 158 Aldrich, Robert, 151n24 Alexander, Elizabeth, 220n2 Alexander, Pope, 113, 147n11 Alford, Lucy, 25n8 Ali, Agha Shahid, 5 Alighieri, Dante, 53–56, 60, 65n20, 65n22, 66n25, 67n27, 67n28 Allison, Jonathan, 64n17 Althusser, Louis, 115, 146n6 Angle, Paul, 70, 102 The Atlantic, 211 Auden group, 26n10 Auden, W. H., 4–6, 10, 11, 25n7, 25n10 works; In Memory of W. B. Yeats, 4; Spain, 1937, 11

B Baker, Houston A., Jr., 107n19 Ballad, 95, 103n3, 108–109n22 Baraka, Amiri, 159, 161, 194n6 Black Art, 159 Barfield, Owen, 26n12 Barker, Jonathan, 145n4 Barnett, William, 15 Belfast, 27, 30, 36, 46–48, 61, 65n18 Bell, Sean, 205 Bennett, Chad, 25n8 Bennett, Louise, 26n11 Benson, Larry, 15 Bernstein, Basil, 119, 124, 125 Bishop, Elizabeth, 26n11 Black Arts Movement (BAM), 71, 72, 104n8, 108n21, 158–161, 194n6, 195n9, 195n11 Black Arts poetry, 71, 159, 160, 195n8

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. Fogarty, The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07889-7

239

240 

INDEX

Black vernacular, 13, 17, 20, 104n9 Blazon, 44, 45, 64n16 Bloom, Harold, 108n22 Bogan, Lucille, 26n11 The Bog People, 44 Brassaw, Mandolin, 198n21, 198n22, 199n23 Brearton, Fran, 29, 31 Broagh, 42 Bronzeville, 16 Brooks, David A., 72 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 69–102, 104n9, 155, 156, 161, 194n2, 201, 205–210, 215 and the Black Arts Movement, 71, 72, 104n8, 108n21 and Black vernacular, 70, 71, 73, 74, 88, 107n19, 107–108n20, 108n21 We Real Cool, 155, 156, 194n2 works; The Anniad, 78, 91–95, 98, 100, 106n14, 107n18, 107n19, 108n20, 108n21, 108–109n22; Annie Allen, 69, 78, 90, 91, 101; The Bean Eaters, 69–70, 77; the birth in a narrow room, 90; The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock, 77; of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery, 101; do not be afraid of no, 90; In Montgomery, and Other Poems, 104n7, 209; In the Mecca, 70, 206; Maxie Allen, 90; The Near-Johannesburg Boy, 209; old relative, 91; Song of Winnie, 209; A Street in Bronzeville, 69, 78, 79, 101; The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith, 78, 81, 89, 90, 100, 101, 106n14, 107n19; We Real

Cool, 73–76, 104n6; Winnie, 209; Young Poets Primer, 69 Brown V. Board of Education, 77 Brown, Fahamisha Patricia, 74 Bryant, Marsha, 105n13 Buffalo, New York, riots 1967, 18, 160 Burns, Robert, 14, 15 Burt, Stephanie, 104n6 Buxton, Rachel, 40 Byrne, Sandie, 121, 134, 147n11, 152n26, 153n31 C Carleton, William, 65n20 Cavanagh, Michael, 56, 63n8, 66n25, 67n27 Césaire, Aimé, 128, 149–150n19 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 128 Chakraborty, Sumita, 199n25 Chapman, Danielle, 105n11 Charles, Jos, 221n7 Chaucer, 15 Clare, John, 15 Clifton, Lucille, 155–193, 201–205, 215, 218, 220n1, 220n2 and the Black Arts Movement, 158–161, 194n6, 195n9, 195n11 and Gwendolyn Brooks, 161 Spirit Writing, 184–188, 199–200n25 works; adam and eve, 197n15; admonitions, 167, 169, 170; after kent state, 195n10, 197n15; anna speaks of the childhood of mary her daughter, 176; apology, 195n10, 197n15; the astrologer predicts at mary’s birth, 175; the birth of

 INDEX 

language, 174; Blessing the Boats, 196n14; Book of Days, 201, 202, 220n1; brothers, 177, 179, 180, 182, 183, 189, 196n14, 198–199n22; cain, 172; easter sunday, 173; eve’s version, 178; Generations, 220n2; good news about the earth, 170, 195n10, 196n14; Good Times, 156, 160, 161, 167; Grief, 183; heroes, 195n10, 197n15; holy night, 176; island mary, 176; john, 197n17; jonah, 177; joseph, 176; leanna’s poem, 200n27; the light that came to lucille clifton, 184, 196n14, 199n24; “lucy one-eye,” 200n26; the making of poems, 174; mary’s dream, 176; the meeting after the savior gone, 198n17; Mercy, 184, 196n14; the message from The Ones, 158, 184, 185, 188, 192, 193, 196n14, 199n24; moses, 171; for the mute, 158; “my sanctified grandmother”, 189; Next, 196n14; palm sunday, 177; quilting, 177, 196n14, 198n20; the raising of lazarus, 177; solomon, 177; some jesus, 170, 172–175, 177, 196n14, 197n15; a song of mary, 176; spring song, 173; study the masters, 220n2; The Terrible Stories, 196n14; the thirty eight year, 200n27; those boys that ran together, 156; the tree of life, 177–179, 182, 196n14, 198n20, 198–199n22; two-headed woman, 184, 185, 196n14; tyrone (1), 161, 162, 167; tyrone (2), 161, 167;

241

tyrone (4), 164, 166; Voices, 170, 196n14; the way it was, 195n10; willie b (1), 161, 163; willie b (2), 160, 163; willie b (4), 165, 166; “won’t you celebrate with me,” 202, 203 Cole, Henri, 32 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 14 Collins, Floyd, 56 Conrad, CA, 221n7 Cook, Jon, 15 Corcoran, Neil, 55, 62n8, 65n20, 66n26 Coughlan, Patricia, 64n15 Craig, William, 27 Crawford, Robert, 14, 18 Crowley, Tony, 113, 145n3 Crown, Sarah, 221n6 Culler, Jonathan, 8, 24n3 D Davie, Donald, 26n12 Day-Lewis, Cecil, 25n10 de Souza, Eunice, 26n11 DeGhett, Torie Rose, 211, 220n5 Deibidhe, 40, 63n13 Dennison, John, 63n8 Dentith, Simon, 145n2 Derry, 27, 57, 61, 61n1 Diamant, Gili, 2 Dickinson, Emily, 26n11, 220n2 Diction, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 23, 26n12 Dinnshenchas, 39 Divine Comedy, 55, 56, 65n20, 65n22 Don Paterson, works 40 Sonnets, 23 Donoghue, Dennis, 7 Dowdy, Michael, 25n7 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 12, 13, 72 Dunn, Douglas, 35, 146n4, 146n5

242 

INDEX

E Eagleton, Terry, 16, 112, 113, 145n1, 153n28 Ebony magazine, 209 Eliot, T. S., “Little Gidding,” 66n25, 67n28 Empson, William, 25n10 Epic, 93, 94, 106n17, 107n18, 107–108n20 Epstein, Andrew, 25n8 Ezekiel, Nissim, 26n11 F The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse, 15 Finneran, Richard J., 23n1 Forché, Carolyn, 199n23 Ford, Karen Jackson, 71, 103n4, 105n10, 105n12, 108–109n22, 159, 161, 194n6, 195n8, 195n11 Form, 4–23 Formby, George, 125 Foucault, Michel, 113 Friedersdorf, Conor, 211 Frost, Robert, “the sound of sense,” 10–12, 25n9 Fumagalli, Maria Cristina, 66n25 G Gabbin, Joanne V., 105n11 Gaelic, 39 Gaitskell, Hugh, 142 Gilmour, Rachael, 25n8 Glob, P. V., 44, 64n15 The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, 155, 207 Golding, Alan, 10 Gonne, Maud, 3 Goodison, Lorna, 5 Goodman, Jenny, 93 Gray, Thomas, 121, 129, 137, 152n27

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 121, 137 The Guardian, 210, 220n3, 220n4 H Hall, Jason David, 35, 63n8 Halpern, Nick, 188 Hardy, Thomas, 15 Harrison, Tony, 111–145, 201, 210–215, 220n3, 220n4 in Nigeria, 127, 149n19 works; 239, 112; A Cold Coming, 112, 210, 211, 220n3; Continuous: 50 Sonnets from The School of Eloquence, 146n5; The Death of the PWD Man, 149n17; Earthworks, 148n14; Ghosts: Some Words Before Breakfast, 148n16; The Heart of Darkness, 149n17; Initial Illumination, 112, 210, 220n3; Laureate’s Block, 112; The Loiners, 114, 126, 127, 129, 148n15, 148n16, 148n17, 152n26; On Not Being Milton, 114, 118, 120, 121, 128, 149n19, 150n20; The Rhubarbarians, 111, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120–123; The School of Eloquence, 114, 115, 120, 122, 127, 128, 143, 146n5, 148n12; The Songs of the PWD Man, 149n17; Thomas Campey and the Copernican System, 126; The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, 150n22; v., 114, 137, 139, 142, 143, 145, 152n27, 152–153n28, 153n29, 210, 220n3; The White Queen, 112, 114, 127, 129, 130, 148–149n17, 151n23, 151n24, 152n25, 152n26

 INDEX 

Hart, Henry, 40 Hart, Matthew, 12, 104n9 Hayden, Robert, 104n9 Hayes, Terrance, 22, 23, 155, 156, 194n2, 201, 207, 208, 215 on Gwendolyn Brooks and “We Real Cool,” 207–209 works; The Golden Shovel, 22, 155, 207, 208 Heaney, Seamus, 27–61, 111, 112, 147n9, 201, 210, 215, 216, 218, 219 works; Act of Union, 36; An Afterwards, 62n7; Anahorish, 63n11; The Blackbird of Glanmore, 218; Bogland, 34; Broagh, 40–43, 61, 63n11, 63–64n14; Casualty, 33; Clearances, 216; Death of a Naturalist, 33, 35, 36, 57, 61n1; Digging, 35, 37, 63n10; District and Circle, 218; Door into the Dark, 33, 35, 38; The Early Purges, 36, 37; Field Work, 35, 36, 51; The Forge, 39; Fosterage, 45–47; Fosterage, drafts, 45–47, 64n17; Gifts of Rain, 63n11; Glanmore Sonnets, 36, 62n7; A Lough Neagh Sequence, 39; Mid-Term Break, 218, 219; Mycenae Lookout, 33; North, 33, 36, 44–47, 51, 65n18; Opened Ground, 36, 65n19; The Outlaw, 38; Oysters, 62n7; Personal Helicon, 57; Preoccupations, 35, 39; Punishment, 44–46, 54; The Redress of Poetry, 53; Requiem for the Croppies, 33; Seeing Things, 218; The Singer’s

243

House, 62n7; Singing School, 45, 47; Song, 62n7; Squarings, 218; Station Island, 36, 53–56, 60, 65n20; Station Island VII, 33, 53, 55–57, 66n25, 66n26; Station Island VIII, 33, 53, 54, 60; The Strand at Lough Beg, 33, 51, 53–55; Sweeney Astray, 63n13; Toome, 63n11; Whatever You Say Say Nothing, 36, 47, 48, 51, 64n18, 65n19; The Wife’s Tale, 39; Wintering Out, 39, 41, 44, 47, 63n11 Heininger, Joseph, 66n25 Henderson, Stephen E., 108n21, 159, 161, 195n7 Understanding the New Black Poetry, 159 Henry, Alison, 48 Higginbotham, James, 70 Holladay, Hilary, 160, 195n9, 197n15, 197–198n17, 198n20, 198–199n22 Homer, The Iliad, 93 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 15, 47 Hughes, Eamonn, 48 Hughes, Langston, 10, 13, 14, 203, 220n2 I, Too, 203, 220n2 Huk, Romana, 147n12, 152n25 Hull, Gloria Akasha, 171, 176, 197n15, 197n16, 198n19, 198n20, 199n24 Hussein, Saddam, 211 I Idiolect, 18, 20, 21, 70–72, 74, 76, 78, 79, 81, 83, 88, 90, 94, 95, 97, 100, 102

244 

INDEX

Inferno, 60, 67n27 Iraqi soldier, photograph, 211, 212 Ireland, 28, 29, 34, 36, 61n1, 64n15 partition, 46, 61n1 Irish, 29, 33, 34, 39, 40, 42–44, 48, 51, 61n1, 63n12, 63n13, 64n16, 64n18, 65n20 Irish English, 29 Ishikawa, Kaoru, 221n6 Ishikawa, Takuboku, 220n6 Israel-Palestine conflict, 213 J Jackaman, Rob, 26n12, 63n13 Jackson, Bessie, 26n11 Jackson, Virginia, 103n5 Jarecke, Kenneth, 211 Jimoh, A. Yemisi, 93, 107n18 Johnson, James Weldon, 13, 14 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 5 Jonathan, Swift, 113 Joyce, James, 65n20 Judd, Bettina, 200n25 K Karenga, Ron, 71 Kavanagh, Patrick, “the parochial imagination,” 10, 12, 60, 61 Kay, Magdalena, 63n8 Keating-Miller, Jennifer, 24n4, 48 Keats, John, 90 Keats, John, “negative capability,” 90 Kennedy, David, 152n27 Kent, George, 209 King James Bible, 182 King Jr., Martin Luther, 18 L Lavan, Rosie, 48, 63n8, 63n11, 65n18 Leeds, 17, 21

Leighton, Angela, 7 Lennon, Peter, 29, 33 Leonard, Keith, 107n18 Levine, Caroline, 8 Levinson, Marjorie, 8 Little Rock Nine, 77 Loiner, 126–136, 148n13 Longenbach, James, 7 Longley, Michael, 30–33, 62n3, 62n5 Lough Derg, 60 Lowell, Robert, “Epilogue,” 66n24, 67n29 Loy, Mina, 11 Luddites, 118, 119, 121, 128, 147n10 Lupton, Mary J, 160, 184, 197n16, 199n22, 200n26, 220n2 Lyrical Ballads, 14 M MacDiarmid, Hugh, 10, 12 MacGregor, Ian, 139 MacLeish, Archibald, 24n6, 25n6 MacNeice, Louis, 25–26n10, 62n3 Madden, Ed, 150n20, 153n28, 153n30 Madhubuti, Haki R., 102, 108n21, 159 Mahon, Derek, 28, 31, 33 Mann, Thomas, 2, 23n2, 24n6 Mansfield, Katherine, 47 Marshall, Cécile, 120, 146n4 Martin, Trayvon, 205 McAuliffe, John, 12 McCafferty, Kevin, 29, 57 McCartney, Column, 51, 54, 60, 67n29 McCormick, Adrienne, 195n12, 196n12, 196n13 McCrea, Barry, 14, 24n4 McDonald, Marianne, 130, 150n22 McKay, Claude, 5, 10 McLaverty, Michael, 45, 46

 INDEX 

Melhem, D. H, 91, 106n17, 107n18, 108n22 Meredith, George, 146n5 Meredithian sonnet, 146n5 Merrill, James, 24n3 Mid-Term Break, 36 Miller, Karl, 14, 33, 56, 57, 59, 60 Milton, John, 121, 126–136, 178 Paradise Lost, 178 Miner strike, 139, 152–153n28 Ministry of Fear, 46 Mock-epic, 93, 107n18 Modernism, 10, 14, 69, 104n9 Moore, Natalie Y., 102n2 Mootry, Maria K., 104n9 Morrison, Blake, 62n8 Mowing the Grass, phrase, 213 Muldoon, Paul, 5 Mullen, Bill V., 105n13, 106n14, 109n24 Mullen, Harryette, 195n7, 198n20 Müller, Timo, 104n9 Murphy, Andrew, 40

245

O’Driscoll, Dennis, 31 Orr, David, 24n3, 77 Ostriker, Alicia, 194n3, 198n18, 198n19, 220n2

N National Coal Board, 139 National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), 139, 152–153n28 Négritude, 128, 150n19, 150n20 North, Michael, 26n12 Northern Ireland, 28–32, 39, 42–45, 49, 57, 61n1 Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement, 31, 62n4 Northern Ireland Troubles, 18, 27

P Paterson, Don, 23, 201, 213–215 on Tony Harrison, 201, 213–215 works; At the Perty, 214; The Foot, 213, 214; 40 Sonnets, 214, 221n6; An Incarnation, 214; Séance, 214, 215 Paulin, Tom, 15, 26n11 Perkins, David, 10, 11, 25n10 Persian Gulf war, 210 Pinsky, Robert, 129, 147n9 Plato, 24n3 Poetry African American, 13, 14 American, 11, 13 English, 11 Irish, 2, 12 and the news, 220n4 and politics, 1–23 and speech, 1–23 and transnationalism, 5 twentieth-century, 1–23 Pope, Alexander, “Essay on Criticism,” 25n9 Pound, Ezra, 10, 11, 129, 150n21 The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 16 Prins, Yopie, 103n5 Purgatorio, 53–55, 65n20

O O’Brien, Eugene, 63n8, 66n25 Observer, The, 220n5 O’Donoghue, Bernard, 56, 60, 62n8, 63n13, 66n26

R Ramazani, Jahan, 4–6, 19, 34 Rambsy, Howard, 73 Redlining, 102n2 Reed, Justin Phillip, 221n7

246 

INDEX

The Reeve’s Tale, 15 Rich, Adrienne, “the location of the poet,” 9 Rimbaud, 140, 141, 153n29 Roberts, Neil, 114, 143 Ross, Daniel W., 66n25 Ross, David A., 23n1 Rossetti, Christina, 15 Rowell, Charles, 171, 200n27 Rowland, Antony, 148n16, 149n17 Rusbridger, Alan, 210, 211, 220n4 Russell, Richard, 43, 55, 63n8, 63–64n14, 65n21, 66n23, 66n25, 66n26, 67n28 Rutter, Carol, 126 Rylance, Richard, 128 S Said, Edward, 2 St Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg, 65n20 Sanchez, Sonia, 161, 195n11 Scargill, Arthur, 152n28, 153n28 Scots, 12, 14, 15, 23, 39 Share, Don, 103n6 Shockley, Evie, 77, 93, 103n4, 104n8, 107n18, 107–108n20, 108n21, 109n23, 194n3, 221n7 Sims, Barbara B., 103n6 Smethurst, James, 13, 14 Smith, Danez, 23, 194n3, 201, 202 on Lucille Clifton, 201, 202 works; Don’t Call Us Dead, 23, 203; summer, somewhere, 23, 203, 204 Smith, Tracy K., 22, 24n3, 194n3, 201, 215, 216 on Heaney, 201, 215 on poetry and politics, 215

works; Brief Touristic Account, 216; I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It, 22, 216; Wade in the Water, 22, 216 Song of Myself, 203 Sonnet, 46, 47 Soyinka, Wole, 5 Spaide, Christopher, 220n6, 221n6 Spencer, Luke, 120, 121, 134, 152n26 Spender, Stephen, 25n10 Spillers, Hortense J., 103n6, 106n17, 107n18, 107n19 Stanford, Ann Folwell, 107n18 Stavros, George, 75, 102n3 Stein, Gertrude, 10 Stevens, Wallace, 45, 106n15 Description Without Place, 45 The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words, 106n15 Strathearn, William, 60, 65n21, 67n27 Suhr-Sytsma, Nathan, 33, 47, 62n5, 65n18, 210 T Tanka, 221n6 Tate, Claudia, 93, 101, 107n18 Taylor, Henry, 106n14 Terza rima, 55, 58, 65n22, 66n23, 66n25, 67n28 “The thirties poets,” 26n10 Thomas, Dylan, 25n10 Thomas, Lorenzo, 160 Thompson, E. P., 147n10 The Making of the English Working Class, 147n10 Thyreen-Mizingou, Jeannine, 196n13 Tolson B., Melvin, 104n9

 INDEX 

The Troubles, 18, 19, 28–36, 43–51, 54, 57, 59, 61n1, 62n3, 62n5, 65n18 V Vendler, Helen, 37, 62n8, 64n16, 103n6, 218 Virgil, 53, 93, 131 The Aeneid, 93 Eclogues, 131 Voloshinov, V. N., 145n3 W Walcott, Derek, 5, 26n11, 66n25 Wall, Cheryl, 220n2 Walters, Tracey, 107n18, 107n20 Welch, Robert, 63n12 Welch, Robert Anthony, 40 Western Wind, 3, 25n6 Whiteside, Briana, 73

247

Whitman, Walt, 15, 203, 220n2 Song of Myself, 203 Williams, William Carlos, 10, 11 Wolfson, Susan, 7 Wordsworth, William, 14, 127, 137 Wright, Richard, 79 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 15, 134, 135, 152n26 They flee from me, 134, 152n26 Y Yeats, W. B., 1–4, 6, 9, 10, 23n1, 24n5, 24n6, 34, 45, 62n6, 193 The Second Coming, 193 works; Easter 1916, 2; An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, 2; A Meditation in Time of War, 2; On a Political Prisoner,” 2; Politics, 1, 2 Young, Kevin, 202