A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism

Jahan Ramazani

Although the foreign form–local content model may seem to have taken “dominion everywhere” in studies of literary globalization, it looks, like Stevens’s jar, “gray and bare” when held up against the richly chromatic prism of individual poems.

Imagine, if you will, rewritings of Wallace Stevens’s first line of “Anecdote of the Jar,” recasting it in a global register as an allegory of the migration of form: not “I placed a jar in Tennessee” but “I placed a sonnet in India,” or “I placed a film in Iran,” or “I placed MTV in China,” or “I placed a novel in Africa.”¹ Or perhaps “I placed haiku in America,” or “I placed Safavid architecture in India,” or “I placed African masks in Paris.” Forms—shaping aesthetic patterns, structures, configurations—travel from one part of the world to another. “Precisely because they are abstract organizing principles,” observes Caroline Levine, “shapes and patterns are iterable—portable. They can be picked up and moved to new contexts.”² As modernity has sped up and intensified such movement, an insistent question for globalist cultural scholarship is how to understand this movement and its effects. Stevens’s amusing allegory may help conceptualize the encounter between foreign form and local environment. In the case of the jar, the introduction of an alien form is transformative:

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

The internal rhyme of “Surround” with “around,” “round,” and “ground” sonically dramatizes the jar’s in-forming mastery of the once wild native environment. It’s almost as if native peoples were worshipping a newly arrived god (“rose up to it”). In a largely unrhymed poem, the final stanza’s triple end rhyme with “air” emphasizes and mocks the new form’s assumption of “dominion everywhere. / The jar was gray and bare.” In keeping with longstanding representations of the American South as exotic, its lushness and wildness continuous with the global South’s (Greeson, Our South), this environment is untamed and unruly (a “slovenly wilderness”) until the ordering principle of the jar arrives and takes control. The intruder’s unnaturalness (“gray and bare”) may result in sterility (“did not give of bird or bush”) but is also the source of its power over the local environment. In a poem that represents an alien form’s imperial takeover of a wilderness, the poem’s own form—quatrains in tetrameter, comically simple diction, encircling phonemes—bears some resemblance to the jar’s. But the poem also marks its difference in the sonic and imagistic ironies it directs at the jar’s inflated sense of its significance.

One of the most pervasive models for “world” and “global” literature has been the formula foreign form and local content. New literature issues, we are told, from the introduction of a jarlike foreign form into a local environment. Franco Moretti, who frequently makes use of this paradigm in his studies of the novel, cogently distills it in “Conjectures on World Literature” and other essays collected in Distant Reading (2013). Building on Fredric Jameson’s reading of the Japanese novel and on Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, Moretti proposes what he calls “a law of literary evolution: in cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary system (which means: almost all cultures, inside and outside Europe), the modern novel first arises not as an autonomous development but as a compromise between a western formal influence (usually French or English) and local materials” (50). Borrowing from various critical studies to track “the wave of diffusion of the modern novel” on four continents over two hundred years, Moretti asserts that “when a culture starts moving towards the modern novel, it’s always as a compromise between foreign form and local materials,” “west European patterns and local reality” (52, 57). He modulates Jameson’s binary law as “more of a triangle: foreign form, local material—and local form. Simplifying somewhat: foreign plot; local characters; and then, local narrative voice” (57). Even so, as he discusses further examples, the abstractive formal dimensions of a text are almost entirely associated with the Western metropole and raw materials with the peripheries. If you are interested in the history of world, not national, literature, you are going to see Western waves, their “uniformity engulfing an initial diversity: Hollywood films conquering one market after another (or English swallowing language after language)” (60). Engulfing, conquering, swallowing—like Stevens’s jar, the foreign form takes dominion over the local wilderness.

Moretti is preoccupied with the novel, but what happens to the foreign form–local content paradigm when put to the test with other genres, such as poetry? In response to previous critics who have raised this question, Moretti cites the spread of Petrarchanism (110), and in my view, modern and contemporary poetry offers some further confirmation.3 As the model would predict, poetic forms sometimes travel one way to new environments and are loaded with local materials, if “local” is used in Jameson and Moretti’s elastic sense, which includes the subnational, national, and regional as opposed to the “foreign” or “global.” A number of anglophone poets from around the world could be ventriloquized thus: “I placed the sonnet in Jamaica” (Claude McKay), “I placed epic in Barbados” (Kamau Brathwaite), “I placed terza rima in Saint Lucia” (Derek Walcott), “I placed dramatic monologue in Uganda” (Okot p’Bitek), “I placed projectivism in Oceania” (Craig Santos Perez), and so forth. Caribbean, African, and Indian poets, I’ve argued elsewhere, adapted modernist syncretism, fragmentation, heteroglossia, and other formal principles to their local environments: witness the diverse Caribbean and Kashmiri uses that Kamau Brathwaite and Agha Shahid Ali make of T. S. Eliot’s modernist strategies.⁴ Nor is this pattern exclusive to anglophone works. To cite examples culled from The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (2012), three critics show that Algerian, Palestinian, and Turkish poets access the oral, older modern, and Islamic aesthetics of their own traditions through the symbolist poetics of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé (Talbayev, “Berber Poetry,” 82; Lazarus, “Modernism and African Literature,” 240–241; Ertürk, “Modernism Disfigured,” 531). Following colonial patterns of cultural influence, francophone and anglophone modernist poetic forms were exported from the West to the so-called peripheries. Although Pascale Casanova, criticizing Moretti, proposes the terms “dominant and dominated” instead of center and periphery and “structure” instead of system, she, too, advances diffusionism (“Literature as a World,” 80n14, 80). In her account of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s modernismo as a variant of symbolism, for example, she sees him as having performed “the deliberate Frenchification of Spanish poetry, down to the phonemes and syntactic forms” (88). Wielding symbolic power entails the transfer of literary forms from the site of greatest cultural capital to disempowered “local” sites, such as Latin America. Thus far, it would seem the foreign form–local content model has much to show for itself in theorizing world, planetary, or global literature.

But poetry also reveals the paradigm’s one-sidedness and other inadequacies. First, the jar’s “dominion” over the slovenly local wilderness is in part a methodologically produced illusion. The model of the Eurocentric wave doesn’t merely reveal monolithic diffusion from the West; it occludes countercurrents. Consider Moretti’s view that “after 1750 the novel arises just about everywhere as a compromise between west European patterns and local reality” (Distant Reading, 57). Doesn’t the rest of the world have any “patterns” of its own? Moretti quotes Jameson as discussing the fit between “the raw material of Japanese social experience and the abstract formal patterns of Western novel construction” (49). But this literary-critical paradigm is in danger of “re-inscribing a hegemonic cultural centre” despite the aspiration to globalize literary studies (Beecroft, “World Literature Without a Hyphen,” 88); that is, it risks reinforcing an imperial episteme in which the West is associated with control and conceptual order and the east with “raw material,” as if local content resembled the land, sugar, labor, and spices expropriated under colonialism. Even Moretti’s more nuanced triangle assigns technique to the West and consigns the rest to voice. Whether the novel, which writers such as Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, and Marjane Satrapi meld with long-lived local narrative and pictorial traditions, or poetry, which has local and often ancient forms in many different parts of the world, the “peripheral” culture brings more to the table than local content and voice. In the creation of cubism, African and Oceanic art contributed not just raw materials but abstractive forms that were generative for modernist pictorial and sculptural styles. At the same moment, Kandinsky’s study of Muslim Arab art, ornament, and calligraphy in Tunisia helped propel his turn to abstraction. Through imagism and subsequent literary movements, Chinese and Japanese formal principles became integral to the juxtapositional and compressed structure of modernist poetry. South Asian culture plays a crucial role in modernist perspectivism, as in works such as E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Eliot’s Waste Land. “Forms are the abstract of social relationships,” Moretti claims, “so, formal analysis is in its own modest way an analysis of power” (59). If so, then to represent Western forms as “engulfing” and “swallowing” local sites and agents is to grant those “peripheries” little power, either symbolic or conceptual. “The West, for Moretti,” as Susan Stanford Friedman writes, “is the site of discursive creation, while the non-West is ‘local materials,’ a center/periphery binary that ignores the often long histories of aesthetic production among the colonized” (“World Modernisms,” 502). Casanova grants more agency to writers from “dominated” cultures in seizing cultural capital, but she, too, assumes that form typically travels from the European center outward.

Perhaps more surprisingly, the foreign form–local content paradigm plays a major role in loco-centric statements that may seem to contradict it. The so-called bolekaja critics (“Come down let’s fight!” in Yoruba), for example, argued that some African poets, in anticipation of Moretti’s wave metaphor, “trim their sails to the modernist squalls from the West” (Chinweizu et al., “Towards the Decolonization of African Literature,” 37). Unduly influenced by the “wild and purposeless experimentation of some decadent Western poets,” these African poets such as Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka are said to import an “obscurantist cesspool” of difficult forms—arcane diction, contorted syntax, writerly instead of oral structures, privatist instead of communal language—into an environment where they did not belong (Chinweizu et al., 30). Even as the bolekaja critics argue African poetry should be based in indigenous oral traditions, thus recognizing the prior existence of forms outside the West, they dichotomize foreign form and local content, seeing them as incompatible.

But such dichotomizing of foreign form and local content oversimplifies. As if in retort to Brathwaite’s lecture, Walcott’s frightening and tumultuous “Hurucan,” a poem that uses the local Taino (Arawak) root of the English word, begins:

Once branching light startles the hair of the coconuts,

and on the villas’ asphalt roofs, rain

resonates like pebbles in a pan.

(423)

If it does not roar, this hurricane at the very least rumbles in the pentametric variations of these lines. And elsewhere, in Walcott’s Omeros, the hurricane roars in terza rima, a form forged in Dante’s fourteenth-century Tuscany. Or rather the hurricane sighs, zithers, rattles, winds, thuds, and lurches:

all the village could do was listen to the gods in session,

playing any instruments that came into their craniums,

the harp-sighing ripple of a hither-and-zithering sea,

the knucklebone pebbles, the abrupt Shango drums

made Neptune rock in the caves. Fête start! Erzulie

rattling her ra-ra; Ogun, the blacksmith, feeling

No Pain; Damballa winding like a zandoli

lizard, as their huge feet thudded on the ceiling,

as the sea-god, drunk, lurched from wall to wall, saying:

“Mama, this music so loud, I going in seine,”

then throwing up at his pun. People were praying.

(52)

This hurricane, propulsively riding the momentum of Dante’s interlinked rhyme, also rages in the outrageousness of Walcott’s puns (“hither-and-zithering” as well as “in seine”), the onomatopoeic effects of alliteration (“rattling her ra-ra”), strong rhythms (“made Neptune rock in the caves”), hard enjambments (“zandoli // lizard”), abrupt shifts in syntax, and rolling hexameters. With other postcolonial poets, Walcott has adapted, remade, and refreshed terza rima, pentameter, hexameter, and other such “alien” forms. After all, if the hurricane could not roar in pentameter, then presumably neither could Western poets bespeak their experience in haiku, tanka, ghazal, pantoum, and other such imported forms. Tell that to Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and Paul Muldoon. Despite the diffusionist wave, formal currents cross.

When Moretti and other theorists argue for the one-way global spread of the Western novel, their distantly read examples don’t always support the terms of their argument. In one footnote, Moretti quotes the critic Ken Frieden as saying that “Yiddish writers parodied—appropriated, incorporated, and modified—diverse elements from European novels and stories” (51n13). If so, then far from being engulfed by the European novel, Yiddish writers actively remade it in accordance with their own narrative traditions and techniques. In another footnote, he quotes Jale Parla as saying that “the early Turkish novelists combined the traditional narrative forms with the examples of the western novel,” so Turkish writers, it turns out, themselves have form, not only local content or voice, and their inherited narrative forms transform the European novel (52n15). Yet another quotation embedded in a footnote raises questions about the model it ostensibly validates: the first Dahomean novel, according to Abiola Irele, “is interesting as an experiment in recasting the oral literature of Africa within the form of a French novel,” but here again, two discrepant forms are being fused, not a form and a content, and the result is a change in both (52n17). Moretti makes some allowance for “diversification,” but he sees “convergence” and “diffusion” as paramount from the eighteenth century onward (129–131). Although postcolonial “hybridity” is often criticized, it and related ideas of creolization, vernacularization, indigenization, and interculturation are more capable of registering the intricate meldings of transnational forms than is the foreign form–local content model of diffusion.

“Distant reading” has the advantage that it can survey developments across not just a handful of canonical novels but an enormous corpus, “the other 99.5 per cent” (66). Moretti is right that literary scholars base their claims about a genre’s evolution on a small number of examples. But consider what made this small subset of canonical works distinctive in the first place. When largely forgotten works are compared with critically favored examples in the same genre, in many cases the less-well-known works more passively replicate the formal codes and conventions than their better-known counterparts. More aggressively remaking genres, poems by Stevens, Moore, Yeats, and Eliot stand out against the bulk of poetry published in early twentieth-century literary journals. Little wonder that foreign-form diffusionism finds itself confirmed in panoramic surveys. The governing tropes of Moretti’s scientific model aren’t neutral but skewed toward normativity and therefore are ill suited to close contact with works that actively trouble and twist inherited forms.

What further limitations does the particularly form-intensive genre of poetry reveal, and what alternatives might it suggest? For one thing, the principle of “distant reading” is especially incongruous with the study of poetry: if you’re reading poetry at a distance, you’re not reading it as poetry. Poetry has been associated more than any other genre with close reading partly because of the small-scale intricacies and textures that help constitute poems and that disappear when works are viewed at a remove. Besides, the assumption that form can be extracted from content is anathema to poetry, in which form and content are more thoroughly melded than in perhaps any other genre. For many poets, as Robert Creeley declared, “Form is never more than an extension of content” (in Olson, “Projective Verse,” 240). How a poem says what it says is no less essential to its identity as a poem than what it says. Indeed, in many a poem the main idea—I love you, I mourn my loss, I am in awe of nature—isn’t especially original: it’s the linguistic, formal, and imaginative freshness and vividness that make many a poem.

Further, the multifacetedness of form in poetry calls for nuanced analysis. As we’ve seen, Jameson refers to the novel’s “abstract formal patterns,” and Moretti substitutes “foreign plot” for “foreign form,” but if the equation of “form” with “plot” simplifies the novel—which has other vital elements down to the level of syntax and sentence—it tells us even less about poetry.5 A survey of the plot or argument of thousands of poems says little about them as poems. One way of salvaging distant reading for poetry is to consider poetic genre the macro-level equivalent to novelistic plot. Mapping the global migration of the sonnet, ballad, haiku, sestina, ghazal, and other such forms has long been an aspect of literary history (“form is precisely the repeatable element of literature,” Moretti states [86]), and much more such mapping remains to be done. But as we track these migrations at the macro level, we need to keep in mind that a poem’s fixed form is often only a part—not necessarily determinative—of what is going on in the work’s multiple layers. “Epic in adapted terza rima” could be said to be the “form” of Walcott’s Omeros, but as we’ve seen, this scarcely begins to suggest the array of formal elements mobilized in the poem, from the mixing of discursive registers between creolized English, French-based patois, and Standard English to paronomasia, chiasmus, and personification of a hurricane in the guise of Afro-Caribbean and classical gods. The same goes for works in “open forms.” The “form” of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” is to be found not only in its macro-level open structure but also in its insistent use of anaphora (“who . . .”), ellipsis (“Zen New Jersey”), mixed registers of diction (“who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross” and “Let themselves be fucked in the ass”), asyndeton (“yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts”) and polysyndeton (“facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars”), oxymoron (“hydrogen jukebox”), zeugma (“waving genitals and manuscripts”), allegory (“Moloch!”), metonymy (“unshaven rooms”), personification (“negro streets”), long, cascading, rhythmically loaded lines (indebted to Whitman and the Bible), syntactic parallelism and compression, and a whole array of sonic devices such as alliteration and assonance (49–51, 54). The form of a poem is no less its figurative language, rhythm, tone, syntax, registers of diction, and so forth than it is its overall structure. The evolutionary tracking of a single “device” such as the detective clue, albeit a smaller-scale unit than genre, hardly seems adequate to this multitudinous formal array (Moretti, Distant Reading, 77). Form needs to be pluralized and disaggregated in the analysis of its migratory patterns.

Another way of breaking up the monolithic foreign form–local content paradigm, or FFLC, would be to consider alternative configurations. There may also be works of foreign form and foreign content, or FFFC, such as Eliot’s Waste Land, Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli,” Pound’s Cantos, Olson’s Maximus Poems, and Walcott’s Omeros—poems that draw on formal resources from various parts of the world and that reach for a planetary scope. In addition, there may be local form and foreign content, or LFFC, as exemplified by Louise Bennett’s poems in orally performative Jamaican Creole but addressing midcentury news of the Nazi invasion of Europe. Perhaps Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazals are also “local” in form, insofar as they are written in a monorhymed structure widespread in the Muslim Indian subcontinent in which he was born, and “foreign” in content, insofar as they take in war, imperialism, and so forth on a worldwide scale. There may even be local form and local content, or LFLC, as in Bennett’s patois poems about local emigration, poverty, politicians, race relations, and so forth, or in Brathwaite’s “Rites,” a tour de force in West Indian Creole about a 1948 cricket match at Kensington Oval in Bridgetown, Barbados.

But as we trace such local-foreign configurations, we must acknowledge that poetry’s complex tessellation often makes it difficult to distinguish FFLC from FFFC in any hard and fast way, and each from LFFC or LFLC. Let’s not forget that all FFFC poems have “local” bearings, such as the Whitmanian models behind Pound and Olson or the Saint Lucian code switching in Walcott; that Bennett’s poems, if seemingly LFLC and LFFC because strongly Jamaican in orality and language, are still organized by British ballad stanzas while their foreign news is always screened through local preoccupations and their local experience impinged on by distant pressures; that the local form in Ali’s LFFC ghazals looks back not only to Urdu but to Persian and Arabic sources, welded to Eliotic modernist disjunctiveness and syncretism, and their foreign content bears traces of a localizable Kashmiri Shia background; and that the use of Caribbean vernacular in Brathwaite’s LFLC “Rites” and other poems is indebted to Anglo-modernism and their local content transatlantically striated by the Middle Passage. If Brathwaite’s LFLC can be flipped around into FFLC or LFFC, Ali’s LFFC to FFLC, Bennett’s LFFC and LFLC into their mirror opposites, and if even Walcott’s FFFC can be seen as its chiastic obverse, then these mirror-image initialisms point up the slipperiness of “foreign form and local content” and its variants. A pluralized, four-part tracking structure is surely more promising than the monolithic FFLC schema, representing a first step toward a more flexible and multidimensional model for charting global aesthetic flows. But even as we deploy it, we must bear in mind that, given the complexities of poetic form and of local-global enmeshments, most poems will fit into several of these slots at once, and no amount of long-distance squinting can accurately reduce them to one or the other.

I’ve mentioned many poems in passing, but now let’s look closely at two works, one modernist, the other contemporary, one American, the other postcolonial British, to see how these questions of local and foreign, form and content, play out in specific examples. As suggested by its title, Marianne Moore’s “England” (1920) is a poem that slyly poses as monolocational in subject but quickly turns out otherwise. After two and a half lines about England, a coordinating conjunction abruptly swivels elsewhere:

and Italy with its equal

shores—contriving an epicureanism from which the

grossness has been

extracted: and Greece with its goats and its gourds, the nest of

modified illusions:

and France. . . .

Of this poem that deploys and subverts cultural stereotypes, we might say its syntactic form is American—paratactic, even egalitarian in straddling one culture and another—that its metrical structure (unrhymed quatrains of twenty, fifteen, twenty-two, and eighteen syllables) Americanizes classical syllabics, that its occasional use of a colloquial register “in plain American which cats and dogs can read” is American, albeit mixed with words and phrases like “epicureanism,” “continents of misapprehension,” and “cataclysmic torrent,” all spilling forward in the headlong rush of heavily enjambed lines. So what at first seemed to be “local content” may instead look “foreign” on further reading, in a poem of localized form, or LFFC. But the jump from the national to the regional or hemispheric calls into question the kinds of cultural groupings that the poem, like taxonomic criticism, makes use of:

and the East with its snails, its emotional

shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and

its imperturbability,

all of museum quality. . . .

We are asked to recognize the familiar East Asian animals and objects that might be housed in a museum, but as for the putative psychological characteristics of “the East”—“emotional // shorthand” and “imperturbability”—how are these “of museum quality”? Clearly something has gone awry in the poem’s syntactic straddling of discrepant cultures and locations. America is affectionately yet wryly described in skewed stereotypes: supposedly “there are no proof readers” and “no digressions,” and no language even (a “language-less country”), but this presumably “American” poem, which we thought was going to be about “England” but turns out to be globally comparative and closes with a meditation on America in its global relationality, vigorously demonstrates both digression and precision in language. If responding defensively to views of America as culturally deficient, Moore bespeaks a nationalism that shades into transnationalism. By poem’s end, she may have convinced some readers that she is making a case for American exceptionalism—America as the only place where the best qualities of China, Egypt, Palestine, and elsewhere are to be found. But she pulls the rug out when she says of such “superi-/ority,” not accidentally one of only two words split violently in the poem by an enjambment (the other, no less wittily, “con-//clusions”): “It has never been confined to one locality.” Although Moore speaks from America (local content), she reveals that her national culture can only be con ceptualized comparatively (foreign content). Indeed, given that enjambment, syllabics, and zeugma go back to the ancients, we could also see the form as having global bearings. Like many a modernist poem, Moore’s can be seen as FFLC, LFFC, LFLC, or FFFC but is more accurately understood as a complex amalgam of all at once.

What if we looked at a poem that represents itself as steadfastly joined to one specific locale instead of peregrinating across the world like Moore’s trickily named “England”? “The Punjab” (2011), a poem by the Indian British poet Daljit Nagra, concerns the poet’s familial homeland:

Not ‘The’—just ‘Púnjab’!

Was there once upon before partition a Púnjab

whole? A Pan-jab of Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, anything?

In the assertive first line, the speaker-as-native-informant demands omission of the British definite article. But his Indian British pronunciation places him at a diasporic remove from the homeland he claims: the Punjabi stress, as the poem later emphasizes, is on the second syllable (“Punjaaab”). Further eroding the appearance of locally anchored authority, the assured tone dissolves in questions and uncertainties about Punjabi history and identity. An integral facet of its form, the quick tonal modulations position the poem’s voice both within (the) Punjab and outside it, both locally and extrinsically. As in Eliot’s relation to Prufrock, Nagra’s to his speaker is one of both proximity and ironic distance. Although the talismanic place-name Punjab seems to confer local authenticity, it spirals beyond the local in interlingual wordplay, extravagant punning (and jabbing)—“Pan-jab,” “Punjamentalist,” “Punjaaab,” “Punglanders”—that recalls Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The poem is built around the pun on “pun” and “Punjab,” as if the very place-name invited such verbal acrobatics. When the speaker’s questions about Punjabi identity twist into a Peter Piper–like alliterative tongue-twister, the poem ridicules claims to authentic representativeness and at the same time stereotypes of Punjabis as lascivious and fanatical:

To play the pipes of a Punjamentalist—

must I pin a badge, must I drop my pants—

must I join a junta and jab-jab-jab for my Púnjab!?

Where is the poem’s form-content amalgam now? It’s in (the) Punjab, in an Asian British account of it, and in a field of translingual puns and sonic play that includes Spanish. The poem is both locally fixed on (the) Punjab and self-mockingly hyperbolic and extrinsic in its performance of that locality.

The toponym fastens the poem to a specific location with five rivers (“If it’s five for the ‘punj’ and it’s ‘jaaab’ for a river,” in a cross-cultural riff on Elvis’s “Blue Suede Shoes”), but a language of homage to rivers is hardly exclusive to this site, as emphasized by the refrain:

That old man river calls you loud and long

from a land that you loved in a lullaby

The refrain both bespeaks nativist longing and mocks it in a pseudo–negro spiritual. The love of the land is displaced into a song that, echoing an African American source, shows that nostalgia to be stranded in foreign forms that mediate the speaker’s relation to his homeland (so too the references to the English nursery rhyme “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and the American minstrel song “Swannee River”). In subsequent iterations of the refrain, the land is rosily idealized (“the rainbow glows”) yet sternly withheld (“but you’ll never know the land or the song”). Through its insider knowledge, place-names, Punjabi words, and comic persona, which implicitly voices South Asian robustness over against English restraint (even while sending up such stereotypes), the poem lays claim to Punjabi rootedness in form, tone, language, and content. At the same time, its interlingual punning, its alliteration and internal rhyme, its code switching among Standard English and Punglish and Punjabi, its intergeneric melding of African American spiritual with literary poem, and its riotous allusions to Western literary texts (“jump aboard / for your unplucked jut-land, your bee-glade Indusfree!”) situate even this regionally focused poem within a global matrix of forms, words, sounds, and places. To say that its humor is “Punjabi” or “Anglo-Punjabi,” that its hetero- and polyglot mixing of discourses or its ironized speaker is “modernist,” either to localize or to globalize it exclusively, would be to oversimplify the complexly translocal intermixing of language, place, and identity that drives the poem. Poems such as Nagra’s and Moore’s, outstripping “foreign form and local content,” demand a more supple and nuanced critical vocabulary for the relations of foreign to local and form to content.

We may well be unable to forsake entirely the foreign form–local content paradigm in mapping the transnational migrations of literary techniques and strategies amid the intensified globalization of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But in tracing literary flows, we should at least decenter it by mul tiplying the configurations of local and foreign, form and content. To reduce world literary transmission to this single structure is to occlude the mutually transformative nature of intercultural literary dialogue. It is also to limit “form” to one scale, when it ranges from the minute adjustments of enjambment and tone to the larger patterns of genre and argument. Although the foreign form–local content model may seem to have taken “dominion everywhere” in studies of literary globalization, it looks, like Stevens’s jar, “gray and bare” when held up against the richly chromatic prism of individual poems. As we turn a poem over and over, it is likely to reveal a kaleidoscopic range of local-foreign configurations no matter how firmly situated within the local or how foreign its form or content may at first appear. In their intricacy and complexity, poems vividly illustrate the inextricability of form from content and of local from foreign. Instead of abstracting world literary evolution as a one-dimensional and one-directional model or scientific law, our form-content analysis should—taking its cues from poems—aspire to be polyphonic and multilayered, moving nimbly back and forth between micro and macro, local and global. Another way to enrich our vocabulary for exploring global literary migration is to reenergize the formal discourse of poetics: it can help make visible the many-sidedness of imaginative works—a multiplicity that may disappear if viewed from too great a distance yet that helps poems live in and beyond their moment and their places of origin. As Pound showed in adapting an ancient Chinese inscription for the modernist imperative, sometimes an especially old vocabulary serves to “make it new.”

Notes

1. See Kenneth Koch’s famous poem “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams.”

2. According to Levine, all historical uses of the term “share a common definition: ‘form’ always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping” (Forms, 3). My use of the term is largely consonant with Levine’s, though I see “form” and “genre” as intertwined rather than sharply distinct in their portability (13). Form is the subject of much new scholarship; in addition to Levine, recent overviews and discussions include Wolfson, “Form”; Attridge, Moving Words; Theile, “New Formalism(s)”; and Bogel, New Formalist Criticism.

3. Moretti cites and responds to previous critics in “More Conjectures,” in Distant Reading (107–119).

4. Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, chap. 5. “Traveling poetry” is the subject of chap. 3.

5. Recent work by Moretti’s Stanford Literary Lab has been applying computational methods to the smaller-scale aspects of novels, such as the syntax and verbs of sentences, insofar as they can be correlated with an overarching genre or style; see, e.g., Sarah Allison et al., Style at the Scale of the Sentence.

Works Cited

Allison, Sarah, et al. Style at the Scale of the Sentence. Pamphlets of the Stanford Literary Lab. June 2013. http://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet5.pdf.

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