School of Critical Studies

Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University)

'Planting Poems in Deep Silence': Sounding out the Lyric in Lorine Niedecker's Poetry.

Lorine Niedecker’s repeated refusal to read her poetry aloud in public attests to her resistance to the poem as spoken word. When he visited her in her cabin on Black Hawk Island, Cid Corman managed to persuade her to read a few poems aloud so that he could record her for posterity but she found the whole business disconcerting. Writing about this experience to her friend Gail Roub she described how she ‘fell over an entire stanza as tho it was a sandbag to keep the flood out.’ (Faranda, p. 16). Yet at the same time, Niedecker was a poet of sound as many critics have suggested. Perhaps because of her experience of caring for her mother who, with her ‘blind ears,’ lived in a soundless world and/or because Niedecker herself suffered from poor eyesight and was thus more attuned to the sounds around her, her poetry echoes and reverberates with non-human noise. This paper will move beyond these personal circumstances as a way of explaining Niedecker’s poetry and will suggest that Niedecker’s work anticipates much of the poetic experiments of later Language poets writing in the wake of Deconstruction. What Niedecker was resisting when she refused to read her work aloud was not only the public role of the poet but also the idea of the lyric voice. This paper will suggest that, well before Michael Harper’s refusal of what he describes as a ‘speech centred model of composition’, Niedecker was experimenting with a lyric form that revolved around a silence that might be understood in terms of a listening rather than a speaking subject.

Fabienne Collignon (University of Glasgow)

Anxiety Economy

This paper proposes to analyse Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’ (1966) in the context of the convergence between farming and bombing, the affiliations of interests between agricultural and military objectives. As such, the argument begins by looking at the Plains region, its absorption into a ‘vortex of hatred’, as Ginsberg writes, in order to address the correlations between agriculture and war, the correspondences between their respective architectural constructions and the subtle chains of thought that bind them together. Key issues, then, arising in the course of this study, are the practices of industrialised agriculture and the movement toward totally controlled and technologised  environments, also looked at through the writings of Wendell Berry, the overlapping of food and weapons and the utilisation of food as a weapon, the stockpiling of provisions and the compulsions for storage.  

Ian Davidson (Bangor University)

Radical Spaces of Poetry

I will examine the ways that experimental poetic forms employed by mid-century American poets can provide spaces for the representation of marginalised or radical positions. Using three examples, Langston Hughes' Montage of a Dream Deferred, Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead and Charles Reznikoffs' Testimon y, I will demonstrate that the positions these complex poetic forms adopt are not simply oppositional, but often also contain within themselves a critique of their own perspectives. They are explicitly polyvocal, giving voice to those who are often written out of more normative discourses. 

The paper will use close textual readings to build up examples of poetic practice before moving to make some more general comments about relationships between poetry and the society from which it comes. All of the works locate themselves in broader cultural contexts. Two of the poems, by Rukeyser and Reznikoff, use source material drawn from non-poetic registers, while Hughes draws on Harlem street language and sets his poem in the context of Black American music culture. All three poets use the idea of the 'sequence', a number of short sections or poems that are combined to make a longer work, giving them the opportunity to change perspective and voice and introduce material from different sources. The paper will provide information on the ways that the material out of which poetry is made, and the forms it employs, can provide ways of representing and discussing a radical politics. 

Aaron Deveson (National Taiwan Normal University)

Open Like a Day: Edwin Denby and the Temporality of Affluence. 

Despite the appearance of important essays by Ron Padgett and Mary Maxwell and general acknowledgement of the fact that his work was a major influence on many of the Cold War era poets (including Schuyler, O’Hara, Berrigan and Mayer), the poetry of Edwin Denby (1903-83) has not received the level of critical attention it deserves. This paper undertakes historical and prosodic readings of some of Denby’s variously dislocated poems in order to explore the extent to which his work helped to establish poetic practices in response to the affluence and anxieties of post-war America.  

Gay Morris has written that, as one of the most important American dance critics of the 1940s and 1950s, Denby supported modernist elements in ballet in a way that enabled him to “position American high-art dance within an international vanguard […] when the US was emerging as a world leader with an eye to dominating art as well as other spheres of influence”. This paper suggests that Denby’s poetry, in concert with his more publicized cultural activities, can be seen to contribute at a crucial stage to a distinctively American and ambivalently anti-bourgeois modernism based on “corporeal intelligence” (Morris).  

A sense of this wider context is discernable in O’Hara’s praising Denby for having developed “a specifically American spoken diction” and in the attention he gives to Denby’s handling of the European thematics of temporality. Relating Denby’s always partly foreignized (French, Russian, Daoist Chinese) poetics of the “moment” to work by the photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt, I draw on Clive Scott’s readings of street photography to reflect on the instructive commingling, in Denby’s poetry, of liberal and more radically utopian inclinations.    

Doaa Abdel-Hafez Hamada (University of Leicester)

Technology, Consumerism, and Moral Deterioration: The Twentieth Century America in Margaret Walker’s Poetry.      

Ben Hickman (University of Kent)

Reagan, Wordsworth and John Ashbery’s ‘A Wave.’

This paper will analyse ‘A Wave’, the watershed poem of Ashbery’s later career, as a Wordsworthian response, in the medium of the romantic crisis poem, to the rise and rise of Reagan, neo-liberalism and rearmament in the US at the beginning of the 1980s.       

By the time of 1984’s ‘A Wave’ the Pulitzer Prize-winning John Ashbery, Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College, writer of poems for the US Department of the Interior, has ceased to be the marginal poet of the American avant-garde, just as the real politics of America have ceased to be marginal to him. Composition of ‘A Wave’ begins in November 1982, nearly two years into Ronald Reagan’s first presidential term, and is worked on for the next year amidst drastic changes to US domestic and foreign policy (its genesis can in fact be placed back to the Reagan-Carter election campaigns). Reagan’s ‘supply-side economics’, with its accompanying massive increases in inequality and unemployment, combined with the new White House administration’s notoriously aggressive foreign policy and heightening of Cold War tensions, aggravated the necessity for a change in poetic stance from the newly ‘central’ American poet Ashbery had become. In the context of Ashbery’s response to such socio-economic realities, I will set out to explore the relationship of ‘A Wave’ with a poet similarly engaged in articulating crises of social and artistic conscience as part of a more specific development of poetic personality. ‘A Wave’, I will argue, because of both Ashbery’s changing relationship with the avant-garde and the situation of the poem’s production, is forced to move away from the more liberated romantic poets of Ashbery’s early career, such as John Clare, to engage with the ‘social’ poet par excellence, Wordsworth. The paper, then, will read ‘A Wave’ as a reading of Wordsworth’s Prelude. In this, the particular stylistic issue of Ashberyan metaphor is raised, and I will attempt to view ‘A Wave’ as unique in Ashbery’s career as it begins, for the first time within Ashbery’s reading of romanticism, to position romantic irony at the centre of romantic metaphor. Finally, I will conclude that the result of Ashbery’s wavering crisis poem is a positioning of style as the ultimate determinant of social self-identity.

Gary Leising (Utica College)

"Trying to Feel":  A Sense of Consequence in Suburban and Rural Post-World War II America in the Poetry of James Dickey       

In his essay “The Energized Man,” James Dickey describes a figure standing against the “sluggish forces of habit, mechanization and mental torpor,” resisting a society rife with a “inconsequence and fruitless drift.”  This figure, I will argue, appears throughout Dickey’s poetry in response to his own experiences in World War II and to the Cold War culture.  Christopher Dickey, the poet’s son, describes Dickey’s experiences as part of an airplane’s crew in the Pacific as “different from what the Marines saw at Iwo Jima….  [M]y father never actually saw a man killed.”        

Dickey’s war experience appears in “The Firebombing,” as the speaker, in his suburban home, recalls a Japanese city’s annihilation.  Death or—to use the language of Dickey’s above-cited essay—consequence remain distant.  As Joyce Carol Oates wrote of this work, “the poet cannot even experience his own deeds, for he has acted as a machine inside a machine.”  In response to the feeling of being an automaton, Dickey creates a persona throughout this and other poems that resist the inconsequence of Cold War America.  While this speaker struggles with meaninglessness, other poetic personae (as do the suburbanites in Dickey’s novel Deliverance) seek meaning in the unruliness of the wilderness, of the rural areas where—as in “Springer Mountain”—moments of the visionary reappear that might point the speaker toward a meaningful life, one outside of and away from the machine age that places humans in the situation of “The Firebombing” or in the corollary fear of nuclear war. 

Will Montgomery (Royal Holloway)

Robert Creeley’s Refusals. 

This paper describes the the effects of compression in Robert Creeley’s poetry of the 1950s and 1960s. Creeley made his name during this period with short and short-lined poems that place great pressure on the linebreak and on small swerves and feints of syntax. Rather like William Carlos Williams, whose writing he admired, Creeley thinks with his poems: ‘I believe in a poetry determined by the language of which it is made,’ he writes in 1960. Yet this does not mean that his poetry is hermetic or self-enclosed. It is clear that, as for Olson, the central issue of space has implications beyond the printed page. In 1965, he writes: ‘The American condition has much to do with place, an active spatial term which differs in that way from what has been assumed its European equivalent. Space, as physical ground, not sky, I feel to be once again politically active.’ This dynamic version of space implies both the space of the page and a wider geopolitical imperative. Yet, rather than the expansive Westward push of Olson’s writing on Melville, Creeley is interested in effects of spatial contraction. He looks for a new, and implicitly politicised, articulation of American space in an extremely impacted version of poetic form. In a poetry of breath, hesitancy and condensation, Creeley’s anti-narratives display a thoroughgoing scepticism that cuts across ideas of nation and territory in the Cold War period. As Ben Friedlander, the editor of Creeley’s Selected Poems, has observed, ‘his refusals are often as important as what he embraced’. 

Mick Mooney (University of Glasgow)

St. Francis in a Road Movie, in a City, in a Quandary: Surviving the Cold War in Frank O'Hara.

In O’Hara’s poetry of the passions, what might be a Romantic, almost Blakean sensibility is transformed by a Dadaesque evisceration of subjective consciousness. 

This complexity and variability generates his ‘formal stance’ in a comic and pseudo-masterly splitting of the self that relates to Breton’s relishing of freedom. This split is just what O’Hara in his ‘Statement on Poetics’ describes as the ‘crossroads where what I know and can’t get meets what is left of that I know and can bear without hatred’. If such statements are at once an early generic form of a ‘mission statement’ solicited by the capitalist and consumerist ethic of American culture, there is also the cinematic trace of St Francis in a road movie, in a city, in a quandary. O’Hara’s Catholic beginnings still permeate his consciousness; there is a spiritual élan to the fragments of images in his poetry, serving as an inestimable, supra-market resource. 

I will argue O’Hara’s pleasure in poetry is about keeping a sense of sacrifice in play, when the contractual nature of American capitalism meant uncertainty and sacrifice was ideally no longer necessary (the contract is the sacrifice of sacrifice, and dramatises a religious-secular polarity, still plaguing America). I will describe how building and then sacrificing knowledge of art, and people, becomes O’Hara’s ideal of poetry and a form of 'modernist friendship'. As a self-sacrificing hysteric professionally elevating chosen others, O’Hara’s poetry and art criticism complemented and yet delimited the neuroses of Cold War militarism, consumerism, and Abstract Expressionism, and kept the fun going.

Conway Lloyd Morgan and Don Parker (Newport School of Art media & Design, University of Wales)

In what sense is Cold War an adjective? 

Does the description of design as “Cold War” illuminate by analogy the description of poetry as Cold War? Are there other metrical forms that are closely associated with the public experience of the Cold War (such as advertising) which have influenced the poetry of the period? 

This unusual approach can perhaps be used as a methodology for a specific narrower set of data. We intend in this paper to look at material contents and presentation methods of the exhibits at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959.  -

The two main buildings counterpointed a cornucopia of everyday consumer goods in a static form with the seven-screen film show created by Charles and Ray Eames and entitled “Glimpses of America.”  The multi-screen film (the largest the designers had created to date and since considered a landmark in American design history) was intended to show how the plethora of consumer goods were integrated into the daily life of Americans. The Eames film can therefore be seen as a narrative or more precisely lyrical commentary on the vision of America presented in the exhibition. 

The increasing sophistication of American television advertising through the 1950s not only created new visual patterns but aural ones as well (in turn borrowing from the rich legacy of radio advertising.) An analysis of the structures of both radio and television advertising relating to Cold War issues (Civil Defense, anti-Communism, etc) should provide a similar lyrical map of Cold War forms of expression, in parallel to those discernable in the Moscow exhibition. These two matrices can then be applied to selected poetry beyond the Beat poets into an examination of visual syntax and its relationship with the poetic new forms, arising from the collision of emerging Cold War themes and the subsequent assault on poetry.    

Diederik Oostdijk (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) 

“Aftersight and Foresight”: The Middle Generation and the War in Vietnam.

Many prominent American poets of World War II – Hayden Carruth, John Ciardi, Anthony Hecht, John Meredith, Karl Shapiro, and Richard Wilbur – were alive to witness the War in Vietnam albeit in front of a television set and from a safe distance this time. They all wrote poems about the War in Vietnam in which they positioned themselves unambiguously against the American occupation as it dragged on and escalated in the mid-sixties and early seventies. A number of these Vietnam War poems differ from their World War II poems because they are more satirical and more overtly political. The more successful Vietnam War poems, as I will argue, resemble their earlier war poems since they espouse more ambiguous emotions. They lament the war, but also reflect the poets’ own sense of political helplessness and impotence. Their poems are faint and sometimes reluctant protests by a generation of poets who had experienced enough to know that their poems would not change the world. They felt compelled to write their protests, even though they were convinced that their messages would probably not be heard or taken seriously by their countrymen. 

Richard Parker (University of Sussex)

Cold War Objectivists: Louis Zukofsky and Whittaker Chambers 

During Louis Zukofsky’s student days at Columbia through the late 1920s Whittaker Chambers and his brother Richard would be close friends to Zukofsky, their friendship providing material for the early movements of “A” and Zukofsky’s short poems from this period, while the political milieu Chambers as Communist organiser introduced Zukofsky to remained key to “A” until its completion in 1974.  Chambers’s work would also feature in Zukofsky’s An “Objectivists” Anthology in 1932, the year he left his editorship at New Masses and joined the Communist underground, making this unlikely figure officially a part of the Objectivist movement.       

Chambers would not resurface until after his break with the Party in the late 1930s, which would be followed, in 1948, by Chambers’s turning state witness and precipitating the Alger Hiss case, a moment that would signal a divisive intensification of American cold-war paranoia.  After 1932 Zukofsky would disappear from public view, writing on in obscurity until his own, less controversial, reappearance during the mid 1950s.  From this point on neither writer would publicly comment upon the other, exhibiting an ambivalent taciturnity typical of Zukofsky’s late poetry which I will attempt to analyse in the light of his complex, often suppressed or camouflaged, relation to the left as shaped by the cold-war politics Chambers was such an important part of.  I shall also attempt a reading of Chambers as an Objectivist, dealing with the political implications of this categorisation for both Chambers and that movement.  The Communist politics exhibited by both Chambers and Zukofsky during the 1930s would not survive into maturity, and I will argue that the motivations and results of their political realignments were quite different and reveal a fundamental division that was to split American politics and letters during the 1950s.

Susan Porterfield (Rockford College)

Allowed to Live:  WWII Veteran Poets, Lucien Stryk       

For that initial generation of American poets, those writing after WWII, the Cold War period gave them their first real chance to develop as artists.  Because they grew up during the Depression and came of age during the War, they hadn’t had the freedom to consider how they wanted to live, what was crucial and what not.  They understood nevertheless that the world of their parents—Victorian-tinged-- no longer existed, not for them.  The Cold War period may indeed have been a time when the United States aspired to “normalcy,” but how you gonna keep them down on the farm?        

Lucien Stryk exemplifies the receptivity of this initial generation of poets. In his poem about the dropping of the atomic bomb, Stryk, stationed on Okinawa at the time, writes candidly about how the news affected him and his fellow soldiers.  “Perhaps nine out of ten of them,” they’d been told, would die during the invasion of mainland Japan. “Now, we might live.”  That sentiment defines the ethos of the early Cold War period.   For Stryk, it led him to embrace what he’d previously been taught to fear, Japan.  And that, in turn, profoundly affected him as a poet.

Stephen Ross (University of Oxford)

“Mad-Eyed from Stating the Obvious”: The Cold War Symmetries of Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur 

Nicola Scholes (University of Queensland)

Politics of Madness: The Political Maternal Body in Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry

It is not unusual in Western culture for people to refer to their country of birth as their Mother Country, or, in some cases, their Father Country.  In his poem, ‘Stotras to Kali Destroyer of Illusions,’ the American Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, refers to America as a mother, and embodies this Mother America in the figure of Kali, a Hindu goddess of death and destruction.  Kali is by no means a straightforward mother goddess, as her association with death might suggest.  Kali’s unconventional characteristics as a mother goddess, I shall argue, make her a choice embodiment of Ginsberg’s America, in spite of the apparent contradiction of his using an Eastern figure to illuminate and critique a Western superpower.  Ginsberg’s ‘Stotras to Kali’ is an appropriation of the Hymn to Kālī: Karpūrādi-Stotra, originally published in Sanskrit.  Since, in Hinduism, a stotra is a hymn of praise, Ginsberg’s ‘Stotras,’ by its title, appears to worship America/ Kali.  On the contrary, a grim portrait of America and her ‘worshippers,’ during the Cold War, is drawn in the poem.  In this paper, I examine the ways in which Ginsberg’s ‘Stotras to Kali,’ converges and diverges with the Karpūrādi-Stotra.

Yasmine Shamma (Oxford University)

"And if she is clumsy in places, those are clumsy places": Places in New York City Poems

In the 1980s in Downtown, New York City, talking the talk became a kind of poetry. Some have called them “Second Generation New York School,” others, “Avante-Garde,” and others still “Downtown Poets.” Influenced by Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and, earlier William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman, poets of St. Mark’s Place’s Poetry Project implicitly poeticize talk, and employ manners of speech as poetic device. Specifically, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Ron Padgett and their contemporaries have, in response to the “mainstream poetic tradition” (Notley), talked back.      

My paper focuses Alice Notley’s talking poetry, and the 20th century city it talks to. “I’m not being clear,” writes Notley in her “Flowers,” “We had inappropriate emotions / The American poetry vacant lot’s small and overgrown.” She so directly alludes not only to city life, but to the syntax of a poetry movement: In the poetry of the New York Schools we have, most often, long unbroken stanzas, little punctuation, the sense that characters are proliferating and time is unmarked and rapidly slipping, along with the sheer exhausting undeniable length of poems, hinting at an inescapable density. And the same is true of New York, just in a more physical or actual sense. So when Kenneth Koch writes “The Boiling Water,” and Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” all in chunks of rarely or awkwardly broken up stanzas, or seemingly haphazard form, I would argue that they are answering to the architecture of their situations, situating the new urban condition on the page.

Katie Stewart (University of Glasgow)

Although America’s identity in relation to international culture and politics has been read as insular during the mid-twentieth century, certain American poets looked outward to Asian culture. In an ironic reversal, the San Francisco-based poet Joanne Kyger (b. 1934), looked ‘inward’, mining the West Coast, Pacific Rim culture’s latent links with Asia to study the history of Buddhism and practice Zen meditation. Noting how this trend developed in the post-Beat literary terrain Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write that: ‘America reversed the directions: it put its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came full circle; its West is the edge of the East.’ But when she boarded the cargo ship that would take her west to Japan in 1960, Kyger was one of few pioneers such as her soon-to-be husband poet Gary Snyder, her friend poet Philip Whalen, and the Zen scholar Alan Watts, thus remapping America’s cultural and poetic terrain. Writing in her journal, later published as Strange Big Moon: The Japan and India Journals (1981), Kyger stages the precarious position that Buddhist study posed for the fledgling poet:: ‘“Don’t you want to study Zen and lose your ego?” [she recalls being asked.] I was utterly shocked: “What! After all this struggle to attain one?”       

The proposed paper will explore themes such the loss of ‘ego’ or ‘self’ and the resultant merging with present moment in the quotidian, natural world through close readings of Kyger’s journal writing and poetry volumes such as The Tapestry and The Web (1965). I will explore how Kyger develops the teachings of her poetic mentors such as W.C. Williams and Charles Olson to represent the meditative mind and breath on the page. The paper will be of relevance to conference panels which foreground gender, experimentation and international concerns in relation to poetry.

Ernesto Suárez-Toste (University of Castilla-La Mancha)

Painter of Words: John Ashbery and the European Avant-garde

Isabelle Travis (University of Reading)

'The 20th Century flies insanely on': John Berryman's MAD World.

John Berryman’s poetry frequently articulates intense personal distress. This, along with the fact that some situations in the poems mirror Berryman’s life, have led to the poet being included in the ‘confessional’ group with Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, amongst others. This much contested label has meant that many of the midcentury poets are read through a biographical and/or psychoanalytical perspective. There is some interesting recent criticism, notably on Sylvia Plath, which aims to recontextualize the poetry in its contemporary cultural and political climate.  This paper hopes to begin the process for John Berryman.

During the Cold War, an uneasy political stalemate was maintained by the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Both East and West had sufficiently impressive nuclear arsenals to deter a full-scale strike by their opponent. The nuclear threat was a potent force not only in Cold War political culture, but also in the media and the artistic imagination. This paper will explore the ways in which John Berryman’s work portrays the apparent senselessness of the Cold War political climate through the trope of madness. The Dream Songs’ speaker, Henry, feels that he is ‘at odds wif de world and its god’; however, in many ways, Berryman’s oeuvre suggests that Cold War society reflects and exacerbates his suicidal malaise.

William Wright (Mesa State College)

Fear and Humor: Frank O’Hara’s Cold War Poetry. 

In a Los Angeles Times essay from 2000 on Nikita Khrushchev’s famous banging of a shoe at the United Nations in October 1960, Nina Khrushcheva, Khrushchev’s grand daughter, writes: 

The shoe incident became a real symbol of the Cold War, probably the only war in which fear and humor peacefully coexisted. 

Today it is old hat--or old shoe. The old U.N. stage has new leaders and new wars and fears. But I find it comforting to know that at times, history gives us a chance to replace a horrifying reality with a funny anecdote. 

Frank O’Hara’s poetry serves a similar purpose in our thinking about poetry and the cold war. Fear and humor peacefully or frantically coexist in poems that celebrate the small joys of an urban and artful life, that document the importance of friends, celebrities, the Chinese New Year, samovar and the Urals, and that find humor in our public and private fears and in the ways we choose to have those fears. This paper will make the case that O’Hara provides a kind of cold war comfort in joining the horrifying reality of potential annihilation with the humor of experience that he presents in the book Lunch Poems.  He does this in particular poems such as “Poem” which uses Khrushchev’s presence in the city to celebrate buildings and the wind:

Khrushchev is coming on the right day!                  

the cool graced light

is pushed off the enormous glass piers by hard wind

and everything is tossing, hurrying on up

In the book as a whole, O’Hara joins Khrushchev with Lana Turner, Jackson Pollack, Ginger Rogers, and others. Fear and humor allow O’Hara, and his readers, to avoid choosing sides in the cold war, either between the two super powers or, as with Ginsberg, as the angry dissenter to their absurd and bellicose discourse. Instead, what O’Hara provides is a charmed catalog of the city he loves so, and which could disappear in an instant, along an affectionate invitation to the see the political moments as on par with the everyday and the offhand.