After the Poetry Wars
1. Introduction
In this essay, I want to ask a deceptively simple question: is the poetry of this century different from the last? After twenty-five years, we ought to be able to make some rough guesses about where we are and where we’re going. I say that the question is deceptively simple because I don’t think it yields a simple answer. If anything, the poetry of the past thirty-odd years, beginning in the early 1990s, has been engaged in a prolonged negotiation with the legacies of the twentieth century, revaluating its conceptual categories and repurposing its major innovations. If we have arrived, at the end of that process, some place new, if we have travelled beyond the boundaries of possibility that twentieth century poetry offered to us, that arrival has happened only through an intensive and ongoing engagement with the past that it supplants.
The first task of this essay, then, is simply to describe the changes that have occurred in poetry over the past thirty years. But that task too is deceptively simple. One of the telling patterns in the poetic discourse of the period is a struggle to name the changes that scholars and poets see happening around them. In her 2009 introduction to American Hybrid, for instance, Cole Swenson writes, “American poetry finds itself at a moment when idiosyncrasy rules to such a degree and differences are so numerous that distinct factions are hard, even impossible, to pin down.” [1] That struggle to find language adequate to the poetry of the present is symptomatic; it reflects a deeper problem. The tools we have for organizing poetic production, for making sense of literary history, are twentieth century tools. They were forged in the great conflicts of that period—above all, in the poetry wars. [2] While twentieth century traditions remain active in the present, twentieth century methods for organizing the field no longer suffice. It is time to forge new tools, tools which will allow us to engage with the poetry of our time on its own terms, rather than those of an increasingly distant century.
In telling the history of poetry over the past thirty years, I want to make four interconnected arguments. First, although there was a concerted attempt in the 1990s and early 2000s to reconcile the differences between the lyric and the avant-garde, that attempt failed. It did so for complicated reasons. In part, it proved difficult to fully jettison the logic of the poetry wars. More importantly—and this is my second contention—the locus of confrontation between the lyric and the avant-garde shifted. As poets were working to deescalate the aesthetic conflict of the poetry wars, some leaders of the avant-garde, such as Marjorie Perloff, redefined their antagonism as political resistance to identity politics, which they treated as synonymous with the lyric. That transformation was never total; there were voices within the avant-garde at the time calling for a more nuanced relationship to both identity and lyric. But, in the stridency with which the position was proclaimed and through the prestige of those who proclaimed it, the critique of identitarian poetics became a leading—if not the—leading controversy of its time.
That time is passed. For poets writing today, there is no reason not to write about identity, if they so choose, and no reason not to use historically avant-garde techniques to do so. [3] Hence my third and fourth claims: the opposition between the avant-garde and the poetics of identity has been superseded and no new antagonism has emerged to take its place—that is, no new antagonism between the avant-garde and the lyric. The poetry wars are truly, finally, over. What has sprung up in its place? How does the poetry of the present organize itself as a field of aesthetic and political possibility? What drives the field forward? These questions have yet to be answered in a systematic way because they have yet to be posed. The transition has happened quietly, without much handwringing or public comment.
I should pause to admit that this history excites a more than scholarly interest for me. I arrived (better: washed up) in the poetry world in the early 2010s; over the past fifteen years, I have witnessed a profound transformation in the culture of poetry in the United States—so much so that the questions and concerns I had as a young poet now seem unintelligible to me. This essay, then, is attempt to explain to myself (if no one else) the history that I lived through. In the past ten years, I have watched with fascination and delight as the poets I admire most have invented something new: a model of poetic production that exceeds the binary framework of the poetry wars, with its enforced division between lyric and avant-garde. If it has been difficult to recognize this poetry as a movement, that’s because it isn’t. If you are looking for a manifesto, a school, a period style, you are asking the wrong questions. You are asking twentieth century questions. Instead, contemporary poetry is motivated by a shared set of political commitments which express themselves in a heterogenous mixture of historically antagonistic poetic practices—what I will call the poetics of solidarity. If this essay ventures an initial description of the poetic practices that have emerged after the poetry wars, it does so not to provide a definitive description of the field, but to make the question urgent: how is the poetry of this century different from that of the last?
2. Decadence and Solidarity
By now, it is something of a critical cliché to declare the end of the poetry wars, a pronouncement which is usually made in a melancholy tone. For a certain kind of avant-gardist, the end of the poetry wars marks the end of an antagonism that gave poetry its impetus to innovate, politically and aesthetically. David Lau, for instance, has recently bemoaned the state of American poetry in these terms:
Wole Soyinka identifies a snitchy, denunciatory atmosphere at work in American poetics and criticism today. Couple this with an expanded, normalizing mainstream literary culture, and any airspace for an avant-garde outside or beyond the cultural centers is strictly limited, as our century’s capitalist social totality closes in on itself and becomes uncontradictable. [4]
The implication is clear: the poetry wars are over, and, as Jennifer Ashton puts it, “…the lyric has won.” [5] In the absence of a meaningful opposition between the lyric and the avant-garde, the dialectic that drove the twentieth century turns inward, becomes the “snitchy, denunciatory” politics of cancel culture. After observing that the “the contemporary is ‘post-conceptual,’ ‘project-based,’ with an inlay of identity,” Lau concludes, “these are the sad passions of decadence”—a biting indictment of a poetry which has become, in its milquetoast liberal politics, complicit with the imperialism it proposes to critique. [6] In a sense, Lau’s argument is the obverse of my own: we agree that there is an emerging consensus around the compatibility of avant-garde poetics and identity politics and, further, that, in the process, modernist imperatives have been largely abandoned. But I am not convinced that, in contesting “our century’s capitalist totality”—and the urgent crises of survival that it has created—the poets of the present should, as Lau argues, “return to the asubjective dimension of modernism, its locus classicus of formal novelty, stylistic singularity.” [8]
Nor do I share Lau’s sense that we are living through a period of literary decadence. Against this cultural pessimism, we might marshal an article by Cathy Park Hong, “There’s a New Movement in American Poetry and It’s Not Kenneth Goldsmith,” published in The New Republic in 2015. [8] This article has been obscured by her more famous polemic, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant Gade,” where she levies a blistering critique of the avant-garde’s history of racism, before announcing, “Fuck the avant-garde. We must hew our own path.” [9] In her article for The New Republic, Hong argues that poets have already begun to forge that alternate path. There is, she argues, a “new movement in American poetry”:
a movement galvanized by the activism of Black Lives Matter, spearheaded by writers of color…[S]ome poets are redefining the avant-garde while others are fueling a raw politics into the personal lyric. Their aesthetic may be divergent, but they share a common belief that as poets, they must engage in social practice… [10]
The pressing question for a poet of social engagement is not: are you lyric or avant-garde? Rather, it is: does your aesthetic practice serve the political needs of the moment? The generation of poets who Hong describes are motivated by a shared sense of political urgency—and a desire to stand in solidarity with other poets, regardless of their aesthetic affiliation. She concludes that a rupture has occurred in the culture of poetry in the United States: “…[W]e have entered a new era, the poetry of social engagement.” [11]
The recent history of poetry looks different if we take Hong’s position seriously. Instead of a slow decline into decadence, we witness the emergence of a new poetics. We could quibble about how new this new era really is. As Timothy Yu notes, “The question of American poetry’s political engagement in the twenty-first-century looks very different—and, indeed, more continuous with the work of the twentieth century—when white poets are decentered from the discussion.” [12] One imagines the author of Minor Feelings would agree. [13] But Hong’s article in The New Republic nonetheless articulates an important shift in the governing logic of poetry—the emergence of a poetics which is not organized by or limited to the dichotomy between the lyric and the avant-garde. In the context of the poetry wars, the traditions of politically engaged poetry that Yu describes were relegated to the margins, treated as exceptions to a governing principle. In discarding that logic, the poets of the present have made space for those traditions to take their rightful place at center stage.
3. The Poetry Wars Are Over (Long Live the Poetry Wars)
I began by asking an apparently simple question: is the poetry of this century different from the last? To that question, we can add another. When did the poetry wars actually end? If we want to understand the poetry of the present—if, that is, we want to mark its independence from the logic of the poetry wars—we will need to begin by mapping the complex and slow process that brought the poetry wars to an end. In this section and the next, I will outline that history, before turning in the final section to the “new era” that has emerged in the past ten years. Before I do so, however, it will be necessary to answer a question which has haunted this essay thus far, which I have deferred addressing directly, and which, in an essay of this length, I can only answer very schematically. Before we can understand how the poetry wars ended, in other words, we need to know what the poetry wars were. If, that is, the poetry wars even existed. From this distance, the conflict looks increasingly like an ideological fiction, a way of imposing organization on the fractious poetry of the post war period. We could date the death of the poetry wars to the fateful moment in 1960 when Robert Lowell, accepting the National Book Award, proclaimed: “two poetries are now competing, a cooked and a raw.” [14] No sooner had he proclaimed the distinction, then it started to come apart under the weight of its own abstraction.
Following Lowell’s gesture, however, we might think of the poetry wars as an interpretive project, a way of organizing the field. It is, in this sense, a defensive project. To create such a binary—and then to insist on its centrality to the field for a half century—is to limit the variety and kinds of poetry that can be central to the field, that can matter. Against the chaotic field of mid-century poetics, the poetry wars create a pocket of order: bounded, defensible, and walled off from the world beyond it. In this fortified space, a small set of aesthetic traditions and poetic practices acquire an almost religious importance; they become canonized (a word I use advisedly) as the aesthetically good and politically righteous practices available, the only such aesthetic and political gestures one is permitted to use.
If the poetry wars begin with an interpretive act, they remained, for their duration, an interpretative project. Acts of reading, practices of interpretation, were strikingly central to constituting the collective identities—the generations and movements—that characterized the poetry wars. The Language poets, for instance, may be said to have constituted themselves as a movement through their interpretation of the modernist tradition. As Natalia Cecire observes, “Experimentalism is rooted in the early twentieth century as reinterpreted by the late twentieth century, produced by the overlaying of what was present in the early twentieth century with what certain writer-critics of the later twentieth century were ready to see.” [15] The Language writers created the modernism on which they drew—created it as experimental. They did so, Cecire argues, out of a sense of political necessity; they were searching for poetic forms adequate to the political, epistemological, and, above all, linguistic crises of their moment:
Experimental writers of the 1980s…rightly saw themselves embedded in a society in which the production of knowledge…and state violence were deeply mutually implicated, and they saw language as the medium within which both occurred. Moreover, experimental writers saw this mutual implication occurring primarily by way of language-games…and they sought to implement different and oppositional language-games that were…simultaneously epistemological and political in scope. [16]
The poets who became Language writers came of age during the Vietnam War, the Free Speech Movement, and the Civil Rights Movement; they witnessed how, as a matter of political strategy, the state degraded the meaningfulness of public language. In response, they invented poetic strategies to restore political agency and meaning to language.
Seen in this light, Language poetry is a project of canon formation, which identifies a set of aesthetically and politically good antecedents and traditions, poetic resources adequate to the crises of the late cold war. To form such a canon, however, the Language poets found it necessary to specify a set of aesthetically and politically bad antecedents and traditions against which they defined the virtue of their own work. As Marjorie Perloff has written, in response what she characterizes as the “ethos…of such mainstream post-Romantic poets as Charles Wright or Mark Strand or Louise Gluck”: “It was, of course, the opposition to this Romantic paradigm that prompted the theoretical discourse of Language manifestos in the first place.” [17] In other words, if the Language poets constituted themselves through a generational rereading of modernism, they also constituted themselves against the post-Romantic lyric of the mid-to-late twentieth century. These two projects tend to collapse into each other, producing a politicized rejection of the lyric. Fairly or not, the stable speakers and epiphanic narratives of the stereotypical lyric are treated as epiphenomena, which reflect a deeper complicity with the linguistic practices of the Cold War state.
The strength of such a generational interpretive project is evident: whatever their failings, the Language poets did produce a body of politically and aesthetically vibrant poetry, which continues to invigorate poets writing today. (I recall my own first encounters with texts such as My Life as transformative and epiphanic; to emphasize the limits of Language writing is not dismiss its accomplishments). The weakness of such a project is also evident. The poetic movements of the poetry wars tended to become sclerotic: once a Language poet, always a Language poet. Their critiques, their interpretative practices, and their poetic devices became fixed, stuck, even as the political crises in which they were framed faded.
Something to that effect seems to have occurred in the 1990s. The generation of poets who came of age during that decade did not share the foundational political experiences of the Language poets. Many were children when the last U.S. troops left Saigon; they came to prominence during a period of go-go multiculturalism when it seemed that the grand conflicts of the twentieth century had been resolved. It is perhaps unsurprising that they pursued a similarly permissive and ideologically plural poetic practice. Instead of isolating themselves in the lyric or the avant-garde, they began to cross the borders between those traditions—and to identify themselves through their capacity to cross such borders. As Mark Wallace noted in 1996:
Whereas many poets of earlier parts of the twentieth century are identified with one particular tradition or form, even when those forms involve radical changes from earlier poetic forms, contemporary poets are increasingly likely to be identified as working with a multiplicity of forms and traditions. [18]
On its face, this development seems anodyne (don’t all poets work with a multiplicity of forms and traditions?). But look closer and you will see a significant, even epochal, break from the logic of the poetry wars. Writing in the same period, for instance, Stephanie Burt notes that, “Language writing has become for many younger writers less phalanx than resource, revealing a ‘Stein tradition’ of dissolve and fracture less radical work can use.” [19] But this way of using Language poetry deprives it of the logic through which it defined itself. For the Language poets, something like parataxis is not just a literary device; it emerges from an elaborate set of theoretical and political commitments. To treat it as a device, as just a device, severs poetics from politics. Instead of embodying, say, an oppositional to global capital, parataxis becomes one device among many—different in kind but not in principal from N+7 or, for that matter, iambic pentameter.
In the wake of such a severance between poetics and politics, the Language poets’ opposition to the lyric comes to seem idiosyncratic, even peculiar. If there is no ideological reason to oppose the lyric, why not treat it in the same way—as a poetic resource, one among many? The new freedom that poets of the 1990s felt to move across lyric and avant-garde traditions is thus more than a stylistic shift. It represents a collective rejection of the assumptions that organized poetry prior to 1990s, a rereading of the tradition to open new possibilities, possibilities that answered to the political circumstances of the moment. In that respect, the poetics of the 1990s is also an interpretive project. But unlike the interpretive projects that defined prior generations, the reading practices that emerged in the 1990s were defiantly individual. As Elizabeth Willis observes of her generation,
…we emerged as writers in a time when the canon was being actively destabilized in various ways. Given that instability, we had to read widely and develop our own critical opinions about poetry on both ends of the tradition & innovation continuum. [20]
Willis depicts her peers working to reach personal settlements with lyric and avant-garde traditions, rather than developing a collective project, a generational canon. Indeed, they seem to be resisting that most basic gesture of the poetry wars: the formation of a coherent poetic movement with a shared ideology and a common set of poetic practices.
Like so many other redoubtable twentieth-century institutions (communism, history), the poetry wars thus seem to have died in the early 1990s. But the binary logic of the poetry wars was more stubborn than critics and poets at the time seem to have realized. After the novelty of hybridizing the lyric and the avant-garde had worn off, critics like Reginald Shephered began to recognize that the logic of the poetry wars had survived the conflict that created it. Against proclamations like Wallace’s (quoted above) we might compare Shepherd’s 2008 attempt to characterize the work of “post-avant” writers:
…They are interested in exploring, interrogating, and sometimes exploding language, identity, and society, without giving up on the pleasures, challenges, and resources of the traditional lyric. Their work combines the lyric’s creative impulse with the critical project of Language poetry…[21]
Like Wallace, Shepherd calls our attention to the way that the poets of the 1990s and early 2000s work across forms and traditions. But Wallace is concerned with distinguishing these poets from earlier generations. Shepherd works to fit them into an existing schema of literary traditions, observing that they borrow from lyric and language without fundamentally challenging the integrity of either category. Shepherd is not wrong to do so. As Ron Silliman notes (using his preferred term for turn of the millennium poetry), “The Third Way has always struck me as predicated upon the existence of the other two.” [22] The poetry wars are dead. Long live the poetry wars.
4. Identity and the Avant-Garde
When did the poetry wars actually end? Perhaps the antagonism that animated the poetry wars died out in the early 1990s, as poets began to move fluidly across the boundary between the lyric and the avant-garde, drawing on the resources of both traditions. But the underlying logic of the poetry wars persisted, the way that it framed the field within a binary between the lyric and the avant-garde. Before the poetry wars could truly end, it would be necessary to step outside of this binary, to recognize and reckon with all the poetic practices that exceed the terms of that dichotomy. In the final section of this essay, I will argue that the poets of the past decade have begun to take that step. They not only move across the binary between the lyric and the avant-garde; they disregard it as a pertinent principle for organizing their poetics.
It is a sudden and surprising transition. The dichotomy between the lyric and the avant-garde carried so much weight—and, as we have seen, it has been remarkably tenacious, surviving a generational attempt to throw off its constraint. How did this transition happen? To answer that question—and to understand how poetry in the United States has transformed over the past ten years—we need to trace a little bit more history. Unfortunately, there is more history to be traced. At the same time as the third-way post-avant poets of the 1990s were overcoming the aesthetic antagonism between the lyric and the avant-garde, the ideological opposition between the two traditions was mutating, acquiring a new object for its antagonism: identity politics.
We encounter an early version of this argument in Steve Evans’ 1993 introduction to a special issue of o•blēk, Writing from the New Coast. Evans identifies a “hatred” which “animate[s] the present generation” of avant-garde writers: “…the hatred of identity.” [23] For Evans, the “hatred of identity” emerges, partially, from a Marxist critique in which the realization of capitalist totality requires the abolition of difference; the avant-garde writer must oppose identity politics because it represents the realization of capitalist domination. [24] But the “hatred of identity” is also the hatred of identity politics. As he writes, “[i]t has become a commonplace to say that we have now witnessed the reification of liberation politics, that this politics has been reduced to yet another sign that reads ‘for sale’ under the rubric of ‘identity politics.’” [25] Let us say that critics like Evans were working in good faith—that, in articulating a “hatred of identity,” they did not intend to create a new, racialized binary in poetic discourse. Yet, as Dorothy Wang observes, identity politics is “almost always regarded, explicitly, or not as the provenance of minorities with grievances.” [26] By identifying identity politics as their antagonist, the leaders of the avant-garde transformed the binary that had structured the poetry wars into a racialized binary: the white avant-garde versus the non-white lyric of identity.
There were voices at the time who protested this logic of racial exclusion. In a famous essay from 1996, Harryette Mullen objected to “the assumption…that ‘avant-garde’ poetry is not ‘black’ and that ‘black’ poetry, however singular its ‘voice,’ is not ‘formally innovative.’” [27] In response to such critiques, attempts were made to expand the canon of experimental writing, folding in aesthetically sympathetic writers of color from previous generations. Such efforts were not convincing; Cecire describes them as an attempt to “retcon in writers of color with whom [experimental writers] had previously engaged little.” [28] Further, as Dorothy Wang argues, the inclusion of writers of color did not change the aesthetic canon or the interpretive practices of the avant-garde:
…not only do the few minority writers included in experimental anthologies and conferences tend to function as tokens…but also…certain modes of experimentality, such as jazz poetics, are excluded from definitions of the avant-garde and ‘experimental.’ The criteria of what counts as avant-garde, even in the twenty-first century, is judged according to High Modernism’s purely formalist repertoire: disruption of syntax, fragmentation of the line, and so on. [29]
No doubt there were more writers of color at the table after the 1990s. But, Wang argues, the avant-garde insulated itself against their influence. Instead of breaking free from the framework of the poetry wars, the avant-garde remained stuck within its antagonisms. Instead of opening itself to poetry written outside the lyric/avant-garde binary, it renewed its commitment to a closed set of approved formal devices and antecedents. And instead of attending to the rich and innovative ways in which twentieth century writers of color had been negotiating identity, aesthetics, and politics, the avant-garde reduced their work to a set of derisive and dismissive cliches: identity politics, lyric narrative, official verse culture, etc.
The result was an increasingly ossified avant-garde, rigid in its antagonism to identitarian poetics, yet curiously detached from the reality of the writing that it attacked. For instance, in a notorious 2012 essay, Marjorie Perloff complains
[w]hatever the poet’s ostensible subject—and here identity politics has produced a degree of variation, so that we have Latina poetry, Asian American poetry, queer poetry, the poetry of the disabled, and so on—the poems…will, with rare exceptions, exhibit the following characteristics: 1) irregular lines of free verse, with little or no emphasis on the construction of the line itself or on what the Russian Formalists called “the word as such”; 2) prose syntax with lots of prepositional and parenthetical phrases, laced with graphic imagery or even extravagant metaphor (the sign of “poeticity”); 3) the expression of a profound thought or small epiphany, usually based on a particular memory, designating the lyric speaker as a particularly sensitive person…[30]
Identity, Perloff argues, makes no difference: whatever the identity of the poet in question. the result is the same middling lyric, the same clichés, the same epiphanic structure, the same inattention to language and line. The argument is highly stereotyped; Perloff does not name any Latina, Asian American, queer, or disabled writers. [31] She doesn’t need to. She is constructing a strawman to frame the virtues of her preferred avant-garde writers. [32] This is a far cry from Evans’ principled (if problematic) Marxist critique. Perloff’s argument seems capricious and personal, one critic’s particularly virulent taste.
Sometime in the nearly twenty years that separates Evans and Perloff’s arguments, the avant-garde antagonism toward identity lost its substance, its direct connection to the political context that gave it meaning. Evans writes in a moment when the radical force of the Civil Rights Movement was being subsumed into the myth of American exceptionalism. Perloff writes at the tail end of that period, when the fantasy of a “post-racial” America was giving way to the reality of a fascist America. If Perloff’s argument feels detached from the reality it attacks, that’s because it is. At some point in the 2010s, even poets who were raised in the avant-garde began to feel that its habitual poetic devices and strategies had lost touch with the political crises of the present. Ben Lerner describes this sense of disenchantment in a recent poem:
I am trying to remember what it felt like to believe
disjunction, non sequitur, injection
between sentences might constitute
meaningful struggle against empire
typing away in my dorm. [33]
These aesthetic strategies were meaningful in their moment. They represented an attempt to invent poetic strategies that could restore political meaning to a language in crisis, a language that had been drained of its meaning. That is not our crisis. In the past decade, it has not been necessary to engage in complicated hermeneutic activity to demystify the violence of political language. Nor has avant-garde poetry been necessary to restore materiality to the deracinated language of neoliberalism. As The New Yorker recognized as early as 2016, part of Donald Trump’s seduction lies in the fact that he uses language in an unusually meaningful way for a politician. The language of the present is all too material, punishingly so. [34] For communities in the path of capitalist and imperial destruction, the question is survival; for those who are not yet in the path of such destruction, the charge is solidarity.
5. The Poetics of Solidarity
The poets who came of age in the early 2010s and the poets who came of age in the early 1990s thus had oddly similar encounters with the avant-garde. Both generations encountered avant-garde devices and arguments that were forged in response to specific historical crises—after those crises had passed. The poets of the 1990s responded by working to overcome the aesthetic barriers between the lyric and the avant-garde. The poets of the 2010s responded by working to overcome the political barriers between the avant-garde and the lyric. In my brief history of the poetic debates of the 1990s, I tried to show that the poets of that generation accomplished something monumental: they crossed the boundaries between the lyric and the avant-garde, two traditions which derived their identities from their opposition to each other. The poets of the past decade have engaged in a project of similar scale and accomplishment, a project which has reorganized and, indeed, expanded the formal political possibilities of poetry: they have overcome the entrenched opposition between the poetics of identity and the avant-garde.
Fittingly enough, this transition has happened quietly. If the binary between the lyric and the avant-garde or the poetics of identity and the poetics of experimentation no longer defines the field within which poets work, then it will be unsurprising that poets have not spent a lot of ink wrestling over their position in relation to it. But if we look to the poets themselves, we will see that they have been—persistently and thoroughly—inventing a new poetic culture. Here, I will focus on two texts, Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel. [35] I turn to these texts not because they are representative of the new poetics, but because they are particular—indissociable from the specific political struggles that produced them. Engaging with that particularity will not only help us recognize the specificity of the new poetic culture that has emerged in the past decade, its difference from that of the poetry wars. It may also help us expand the critical practices we inherited from the poetry wars, the techniques we use to render the field of poetic production legible.
While it is true that Whereas and We Want It All draw on twentieth century poetics, the binary opposition between the avant-garde and the lyric no longer organize the space in which these poets and editors work. One of the disadvantages of twentieth-century poetic movements is their inflexibility. If, for instance, you constitute your literary movement through a generational rereading of modernism, it becomes difficult to relax or repurpose that reading when political circumstances change. Whether they were raised in lyric or avant-garde traditions, the poets at work today resist establishing a fixed canon of politically righteous poetic practices. Instead, they engage in acts of solidarity. Working within the context of specific political struggles, they imagine how their work might, in its specificity, support collective liberation.
On the surface, the poetics of the present can resemble—deceptively so—the hybrid poetics of the 1990s. Whereas is instructive in this regard. If you go to it looking for the avant-garde and the lyric, you will find them. But if you only look for the lyric and the avant-garde, you will miss much of what makes the text innovative. Let’s start traditionally, weighing the influence of twentieth century traditions on Long Soldier’s practice, if only to demonstrate the shortcomings of that way of reading. As you move through the Whereas, you encounter an extraordinary array of formal possibilities, and some of these possibilities are experimental in origin, such as the erasure poems and concrete poetry that appear throughout. Likewise, elaborate formal constraint: the title poem, “Whereas” was written in response to the 2009 Congressional Apology to Native Peoples and adopts the document’s structure. If these are experimental devices, Long Soldier uses them to achieve experimental effects. Take a poem from the second section of “Whereas” (“Resolutions”) which appropriates the language from the corresponding section of the Apology and sculpts it into the shape of a hammer:
from Whereas (93)
It is hard to imagine a poem which does more to, for instance, make language material; likewise, it is hard to imagine a poetry which is more clear-eyed about the complicity of language and imperialism.
But, if you look elsewhere in the sequence, you will find vivid personal narratives—which produce moments of clarity and epiphany—such as the poem which responds to the sixth “Whereas” clause of the Congressional Apology:
WHEREAS my eyes land on the shoreline of “the arrival of Europeans in North America
opened a new chapter in the history of Native Peoples.” Because in others, I hate the act
of laughing when hurt injured on in cases of danger. That bitter hiding. My daughter picks up
new habits from friends. She’d been running, tripped, slid on knees and palms onto asphalt.
They carried her into the kitchen, she just fell, she’s bleeding! Deep red streams
down her arms and legs, trails on white tile. I looked at her face. A smile
quivered her. A laugh, a nervous. Doing as her friends do, she braved new behavior, feigned
a grin—I couldn’t name it but I could spot it. Stop, my girl. If you’re hurting, cry.
Like that. She let it out, a flood from living room to bathroom. Then a soft water pour
I washed carefully light touch clean cotton to bandage. I faced her I reminded,
In our home in our family we are ourselves, real feelings. Be true. Yet I’m serious
when I say I laugh reading the phrase, “opened a new chapter.” I can’t help my body.
I shake. The realization that it took this phrase to show. My daughter’s quiver isn’t new—
but a deep practice very old she’s watching me; (66)
The poem is both heartbreaking and, strangely, funny. Long Soldier invites us to laugh with her at the absurd cliché, “the arrival of Europeans in North America opened a new chapter in the history of Native Peoples”—a phrase so expansively meaningless that it can contain within it five hundred years of genocide. But she also asks us to weigh the cost of that history at the scale of an individual life, the way that it shapes a child’s experience of suffering. How can you survive while carrying the legacy of so much violence with you, the poem asks? The word “identity” as it is used in neoliberal identity politics is too small to capture the full scope of the poem’s inquiry. If this poem involves identity, it is more fully about the way that identity is a political category, the product of historical violence, of trauma which travels from generation to generation; it is also about resilience, practices of survival in the face of that violence, practices which are likewise passed down from generation to generation—poetry among them.
Whereas thus does not employ a singular strategy, lyric or avant-garde, for coordinating form, content, and history. The text conducts a searching inquiry into the history of poetry, its full range of formal and political capacities. Long Soldier asks what different kinds of poems can do—how lineation, voice, and narrative structure interact with history, violence, and identity. Each poetics offers what it can to the larger political task of her text; she offers each as a tactical response to a specific facet of the historical legacy and contemporary reality of U.S. colonialism. Long Soldier is well-aware of the discrepancies between these poetic lineages, but she does not stage their interaction as an antagonism. Indeed, the historical opposition between them does not seem to weigh on her. She is not making a polemic claim about her ability to transgress the barriers between the avant-garde and the lyric, as a poet of the 1990s might. She’s simply doing it.
Indeed, the divide between lyric and avant-garde is not her frame of reference. Instead, throughout Whereas, Long Soldier encourages us to see her poetics as an expression of a political tradition of Indigenous resistance. She does so most explicitly in “38,” a documentary poem [36] that tells the history 1862 Dakota uprising. The poem recounts the depredations that led to the rebellion—fraudulent treaties, withheld payments, abusive government traders—all of which brought the Dakota to the verge of starvation. One such government trader receives special attention:
One trader named Andrew Myrick is famous for his refusal to provide credit
to Dakota people by saying, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”
There are variations of Myrick’s words, but they are all something to that
effect.
When settlers and traders were killed during the Sioux Uprising, one of the
first to be executed by the Dakota was Andrew Myrick.
When Myrick’s body was found,
his mouth was stuffed with grass.
I am inclined to call this act by the Dakota warriors a poem. (53)
One hundred- and fifty-years separate Myrick’s words from the Congressional Apology. But the language that the U.S. government and its representatives address to Indigenous peoples has not meaningfully changed in the interval: Myrick’s murderous disregard for Dakota life has become anodyne cliché (“…a new chapter…”). It is softer, more polite—but it is no less ruthless. The same interval separates Long Soldier from the Dakota warriors. Likewise, their poem is not so different from Whereas. Long Soldier and the Dakota warriors both work within the language that colonialism offers to them, discovering within its violence and banality spaces to articulate and perform liberation, justice, healing, and resistance. Coming as it does just before Long Soldier launches into her long-form engagement with the rhetoric of the Congressional Apology, “38”—and the Dakota warriors’ poem—teaches us to recognize the tradition in which Long Soldier would place her own poetics: not the conflicts of the poetry wars, but the larger, ongoing project of Indigenous resistance.
Whereas is thus a deeply specific text; it cannot be abstracted from the history it addresses; nor can its poetic strategies be separated from the Indigenous political traditions from which it emerges. It does not ask to be framed in the limited terms of the largely white debates that occupied the poetry wars. Where in the binary between the lyric and the avant-garde would you put the Dakota warrior’s poem? Where in the binary between identity and the avant-garde would you place Long Soldier’s poems? Such questions are not worth asking. Orienting itself around Indigenous political creativity,Whereas encourages us to ask other, better questions: what would healing and reconciliation look like for Indigenous peoples? How can settler populations stand in solidarity with Indigenous communities? Which poetic practices support these political projects?
Whereas embodies a new poetics, a poetry that articulates a new set of principles to orient its poetic practice. The lyric and the avant-garde are not the limits of Long Soldier’s poetics. Instead, Whereas emerges from practices and traditions that would’ve been excluded from the binary world of the poetry wars, which are neither lyric nor avant-garde, which emerge from the specific history of Indigenous political creativity in which she participates. Whereas is a deeply specific text, and its specificity is what makes it exemplary: the poetics of solidarity, like the practice of solidarity, must be precise in its attention to the communities it hopes to support.
Given that specificity, can we describe the poetics of solidarity as a collective practice? Isn’t this just a radicalization of the scattershot, individual poetics of the 1990s? These questions point toward a more fundamental problem which poets and readers have been reckoning with over the past decade: how do you organize a collective poetic practice after the poetry wars have ceased to provide a ready set of standards to make such collectivities legible? Indeed, one of the striking features of recent poetry is the absence of such traditional collectivities—when was the last time you met someone who identified themselves as part of a poetic movement? [37] The collectivities of the present are much more flexible and contingent; they gather around a shared political project and marshal poetic practices that meet the moment. We Want It All is perhaps exemplary in this regard—and thus instructive if we want to understand how the collectivities of the present operate. We Want It All does not try to create a canon or a movement; it does not reinvent the past in the image of the present or attempt to delineate a closed set of aesthetically and political righteous practices. It tries to do something much stranger and more innovative, something for which we do not yet have a name—unless, that is, we call it solidarity.
Like Whereas, We Want It All is no stranger to the categories that organized the poetry wars. But it brings those categories together in ways that defy the logic of the poetry wars. Even its subtitle, An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, does so. For a poetry warrior like Perloff, “radical” poetics and the poetics of identity were mutually exclusive; their exclusion created the grid of intelligibility within which it became possible to think and judge contemporary poetry. We Want It All scrambles that grid and gives new life to both categories, “radical” aesthetics and the poetics of identity. Let’s start with the word “radical.” Applied to poetics, it calls to mind the canon of “radical modernism,” as defined by the Language poets. Abi-Karam and Gabriel have something much more fluid in mind. After announcing that their anthology compiles “a series of formal and linguistic experiments with political stakes,” they clarify:
By ‘experiments’ we mean projects that attempt a continual and creative rediscovery of their own arrangement, language, composition, and collaboration in order to stage a confrontation with a determinate moment. These experiments also disclose both senses of radical we mean to draw on, political and aesthetic. [38]
This is far from the closed—and static—set of formal devices the Language poets assembled. The poetics that Abi-Karam and Gabriel champion emerge in confrontation with specific political moments; it changes as the needs of the moment change. What unites these poems, then, is not a shared aesthetic, but a shared orientation toward political struggle—and a shared openness and flexibility in forging a poetics adequate to political struggles. If the poetry wars were a defensive interpretive project, dedicated to determining in advance what constitutes a politically and aesthetically righteous poetics, what if…we didn’t do that? Abi-Karam and Gabriel suggest a different set of logistics for managing the relationship between politics and poetics: a practice of suspending judgment, refusing totalize the field, finding alignments between a particular kind of poem and a particular kind of politics when the moment calls for it, then moving on to other orientations and possibilities.
We Want It All thus reimagines what it means for a poetics to be radical—reorienting the term away from the canon of radical modernism and toward the street, toward the radical politics of the present. Further, if We Want It All is grounded in identity (one imagines Marjorie Perloff adding “trans poetry” to the list of categories that she has to not read), it is not an identity politics that Perloff would recognize. Perloff (Evans too) understands the end of an identarian poetics as achieving recognition, representation, and literary prestige within liberal democratic politics/poetics. Abi-Karam and Gabriel reject this framework:
Against the trap of representation and against the conception of trans literature as a self-interested discourse narrowly focused on securing the rights and recognitions of the state, we aim in this volume to assemble a trans poetics that both addresses and articulates itself beyond the confines of our own lives” [39]
They are asking, in other words, for the poetry of identity to become the poetry of solidarity. Better: they are insisting that trans poetry already is a poetry of solidarity—insofar as the struggle for trans liberation is an expression of a global struggle for “ecological and climate justice, for a world without prisons and borders, for a liberatory reworking of gender and sexual relations, and for universal access to housing and health care.” As they conclude, “trans people have a particular stake in a fight that, properly speaking, belongs to everyone.” [40] It may be surprising to encounter such bracing political rhetoric in what is, ostensibly, a statement of poetics. But this is precisely the point the editors want to make: they define their poetics through political practice, a practice of solidarity in which the struggle for trans liberation, in all its intimate specificity, advances global liberation.
The result is a new kind of identitarian poetics. For Perloff, identitarian poetics produces a series of discreet and interchangeable canons (“Latina poetry, Asian American poetry, queer poetry, the poetry of the disabled, and so on)”—that is, identitarian difference produces poetic homogeneity. Abi-Karam and Gabriel may be said to propose the opposite: in We Want It All, the politics of solidarity requires a poetics of solidarity, in which poetic difference is cultivated, sustained, expanded. The poetics that appear in We Want It All are heterogenous, riotous; flip through the anthology and you will be astonished by the sheer variety of different kinds of poems that come together under the umbrella of a “radical trans poetics.” The poets represented in the anthology bring as much poetic possibility to bear on the political crises of the present as they can; they work through aesthetic difference, rather than against it.
At its best, then, the poetics of solidarity affords poets a much greater sense of aesthetic freedom than they would’ve enjoyed thirty years ago, or fifty. Any aesthetic is, potentially, welcome. Indeed, part of the pleasure of such a poetics is the way that it brings into conversation poets who share a sense of political urgency—and little else. We Want It All thus offers a model for how to organize a group poetics after the poetry wars. The grouping that Abi-Karam and Gabriel assemble is contingent and open; the poets who appear in their pages remain free to transform themselves and their poetics, to align with other struggles and poetic practices, as the moment requires. We Want It All does not represent a movement, but a matrix of possibility, from which new alignments of political and aesthetic practice can emerge; not a canon but an act of permission for future acts of dissident reading and writing.
We are, of course, not the first generation to demand a political meaning for our poetics. (M. H. Abrams notes that Keats is “the first great poet to exhibit that peculiarly modern malady—a conscious and persistent conflict between the requirements of social responsibility and aesthetic detachment).” [41] But after the poetry wars, it has once again become possible to address the conflict between “the requirements of social responsibility and aesthetic detachment” in rigorous and expansive ways. Indeed, if there is anything that distinguishes the poetry wars from the broader history of politically engaged post-romantic poetries, it is its insistence on formulating closed canons of politically and aesthetically righteous poetic practices—that is, its insistence on creating a binary between the lyric and the avant-garde. Instead of working within (or against) that binary, the poets of the present engage with all the poetry being written now—and judge it by its political creativity, its capacity to address the crises of the present. This is not an abstract judgment, whose criteria can be defined in advance. It is a judgement that must be made in political community, in response to political crisis and conflict. The poetics of solidarity is also the practice of solidarity.
6. Very Brief Coda
Before I close, I would like to address two potential objections. First, while it is true that this essay begins in opposition to the rhetoric of cultural pessimism, the opposite of cultural pessimism is not pollyannish optimism. The articulation of a poetics of solidarity in an anthology such as We Want It All is framed by the all-too-evident circumstance under which we write: most poetry being written today is not engaging in meaningful solidarity. Most poetry being written today is all too ready to make peace with capital and empire in exchange for prestige, prize money, and stable employment. (That includes, by the way, a lot of poetry that claims to be doing righteous political work). We can say that this poetry is bad; indeed, this essay hopes to give you some language with which you might do so.
Second, I do not wish to suggest that, in the absence of the antagonism that animated the poetry wars, the poetry world has slid into an anodyne universalism, the empty equality of neoliberalism, in which all poetries are welcome, because all conflicts have been resolved, in advance, on behalf of capital. Anyone who has lived through the past ten years in poetry knows that it has not been a period of quietude and complacency. If anything defines the decade, it is conflict: the valiant and urgent efforts that poets have made on behalf of each other to make their institutions more open, equitable, and responsive. The decade that begins with the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo ends with Writers Against the War on Gaza. The notable thing about these political conflicts is that they are political conflicts: conflicts over the distribution of resources and access, of violence and precarity. As it should be. If we’re going to fight, why not fight about things that actually matter? Why not fight on behalf of each other?
See here for a complete list of notes and sources.
